SOURCE: "Social Workers, Reformers, and the City, Jane Addams and Jacob Riis," in From Main Street to State Street; Town, City, and Community in America, Kennikat Press, 1977, pp. 80-93.

[In the following excerpt, Goist compares and contrasts Riis's formative experiences with those of another social reformer, Jane Addams.]

The emphasis of the urban novels written by Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry Blake Fuller was essentially on the consequences of city living for individuals. In Garland there is some notice taken of a limited social network in which Rose Dutcher attempts to find her place. In Fuller's novel the Marshall family, though badly weakened by events, still plays some role. But the real concern of these novelists is with the individual. This is even more noticeable, of course, in Dreiser's work. Here the focal point is entirely on the unattached individual; no sustained social group ties or family bonds are enjoyed by the lonely characters in Sister Carrie. The perspective of the early urban novelists focused, then, on the impact upon the indivudal of the urban milieu.

Contemporaneous with this emphasis on the individual was a growing consciousness among middle class reformers of the important role played in cities by groups. Theodore Brower's proposed justice center for the poor, the settlement work of Isabel Herrick's university friends, even Jane Marshall's lunchroom for working girls and Mrs. Granger Bates's camp for needy children, were fictional counterparts of efforts actually being made by social workers to understand and cope with changing urban conditions in terms of group needs. In Chicago the work of Jane Addams (1860-1935) at Hull-House is the best-known of such endeavors. In her work one notices a shift from individual to group concerns in dealing with the industrial city. Also, her life provides an opportunity to trace the relationship between a particular kind of nonurban upbringing and the social work approach to urban society. A similar perspective, which also offers some interesting contrasts to Addams, can be seen in the work of the famous New York newspaperman and reformer Jacob Riis (1849-1914). An immigrant himself, Riis personally experienced the awful poverty and lonely isolation which was the fate of many in late nineteenth-century American cities. But he was fortunate enough to survive and eventually achieve success as a police reporter in New York. These experiences shaped his view of the city which he tried so hard to change. Addams and Riis were two of the outstanding reform figures of their day, and they provide an insight into an important middle class response to the rapidly changing turn-of-the-century American city.

Jane Addams was born in the northern Illinois village of Cedarville. This settlement (founded in the 1830s) is just south of the Wisconsin border, and a few miles north of the small city of Freeport. Addams's parents had settled here on the Cedar River in 1844. By the time of Jane's birth her father, John, who had previously been a miller in Pennsylvania, was the most prominent man in the area. He owned a flour mill and a sawmill, was president of an insurance company and of a Freeport bank, which he had helped organize, and had invested money in railroads and land. A self-made man, he was also a community builder. He helped organize the first school, the first church, and the first library in Cedarville, and was instrumental in bringing a railroad into the Cedar River region. John Addams was also an Illinois state senator for sixteen years (1854-70) and one of the organizers of the Republican Party, to which he remained loyal throughout his life. He died in 1881 at the age of fifty-nine, leaving an estate worth a quarter of a million dollars.¹

Jane was two years old when her mother died at the age of forty-nine. Sarah Addams had given birth to nine children, five of whom lived. Jane was the youngest; she had three sisters and a brother. She was eight when her father married Anna Haldeman, the attractive widow of a prominent Freeport man. Anna brought a son with her to live in the Addams household, and he became a close companion and playmate of his stepsister Jane. The second Mrs. Addams had intellectual and cultural aspirations, and was a talented musician. She provided her new home not only with a piano but also with an insistence upon the daily use of linen table cloths, good china, and silver. The emphasis upon culture and taste meant for young Jane drawing and music lessons in Freeport, stylish clothes, and, following college, a grand tour of Europe. It also meant the lectures, concerts, and fashionable parties of Baltimore, where Mrs. Addams moved after her second husband's death.

Jane Addams's recent biographer Allen Davis points out that, despite her rather complex family structure and early illnesses (the most serious of which left her with a slight curvature of the spine), she had a happy childhood. Davis also maintains that in spite of her father's prominent position and the cultural aspirations her second mother had for Jane, she attended the one-room village school and played with the children of millhands. These were not the sons and daughters of immigrants, however, and nearly all were Protestants. Davis finds further evidence of the "natural equality" of the small town in the fact that the Addamses' "hired girls" were not treated as servants. They agreed to work for a year or two in order to learn to cook and sew, and were included in the Addams family circle. Davis's point here is that the rather aristocratic tendencies of her stepmother conflicted with the easy equality of village life, thus producing some of the ambivalence and contradictions in Addams's character.

At seventeen Jane entered Rockford Female Seminary, where she was an undergraduate from 1877 to 1881. Although nearby Rockford did not yet haveofficial college ranking, those attending were self-conscious of being college women. They were in fact among the first generation of full-fledged college educated women. The purpose of this "Mount Holyoke of the West" was to combine domestic training with religious and cultural instruction. Addams was somewhat formal and aloof as a student, but entered fully into the life of the school. She was president of the literary society and an editor of the school magazine, she read widely and debated, struggled with religious questions, became interested in science, did well in class work, and developed the habits of a writer. In her essays she broke with Rockford tradition and argued for the special role of women in world affairs. Upon graduation she planned to go on to Smith College for a Bachelor of Arts.

But for the next eight years, until the opening of Hull-House, Addams was buffeted by family tragedy and responsibility, physical disability, and severe mental depression. For convenience, this time in her life can be divided into four periods. During the two years following graduation from Rockford, Addams was generally ill and despondent. She gave up hopes of going to Smith for a B.A., was forced to leave the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia because of her health, spent a good deal of time as an invalid, and had major surgery on her back. She also faced family tragedy, including the sudden death of her adored father and the mental breakdown of her brother. With other members of the family scattered, Jane took on the burden of managing family business affairs. Between August, 1883, and June, 1885, she and her stepmother and a small party of friends lived and traveled in Europe. Returning to the United States in the summer of 1885, for the next two and a half years she spent the winters with her stepmother in Baltimore, the rest of the time in Cedarville. It was during the winter months of 1885 and 1886 in Baltimore when, according to her recollections some twenty-five years later, "I seemed to have reached the nadir of my nervous depression and sense of maladjustment."² In December, 1887, she departed again for Europe, in a party which included her close friend Ellen Starr. During this trip the scheme which resulted in the founding of Hull-House apparently took shape. Addams and Starr returned to America in October, 1888, moved to a Chicago boarding house in January of the next year, raised money for their scheme, and took up residence in the old Charles Hull mansion the following September.

The question remains: Why did Jane Addams turn to social work and become a leader of the social settlement movement at the turn of the century? The two most interesting recent efforts to answer this question have been put forward by Christopher Lasch in 1965, and Allen Davis in 1973.

Lasch discusses Jane Addams and the founding of Hull-House within the framework of his analysis of The New Radicalism in America (1889-1963): The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965). Indeed, the key date in locating this phenomenon is the very year Addams and Starr moved to the house on Halsted Street. According to Lasch, the growth of a new radicalism coincides with the emergence of intellectuals as a "status group" alienated from the general life of society. This, in turn, is an aspect of a more general cultural fragmentation, characteristic of industrial and postindustrial societies.

The decline of a sense of community, the tendency of the mass society to break down into its component parts, each having its own autonomous culture and maintaining only the most tenuous connections with the general life of the society—which as a consequence has almost ceased to exist. . . . (Introduction, p. x)

The new radicals, in rebelling against culture, conventional family standards, and values of the middle class, acquired a "radical reversal of perspective." They identified with what Jacob Riis called the "other half of humanity, thus seeing society from the bottom up.

Within this context Addams's involvement in the settlement is seen as a resolution of certain debilitating personal tensions caused by the effect of those general cultural and domestic crises. In the first place, the social settlement was an outlet for the combined moral piety and intellectual energies which she could not satisfy by religious missionary work or by a purely secularcareer like medicine. According to Lasch, tension was created by the persistence of the old moral urge in face of the failure of religious theology to provide an adequate medium for intellectual speculation. Jane Addams needed an outlet for both urges. Social work was a successful resolution because "it combined good works with the analysis not only of the conditions underlying urban poverty but also of one's own relation to the poor" (p. 12). The settlement combined good works and intellectual excitement.

Equally important for Lasch's understanding of Addams is the tension caused by her resistance to and final rejection of "the life her [step] mother was trying to get her to lead" (p. 35). She came to realize that the educational and cultural advantages of the first generation of college women often acted as a barrier to understanding and responding to the "real," changing world around them. In comparing her generation to that of her grandmother's, she wondered during the first European trip if the younger women "had taken their learning too quickly" and "departed too suddenly from the active emotional life led by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers." Education for her generation had been all taking and no giving, merely "acquiring knowledge" and "receiving impressions." Thus, she remarked in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), " . .. somewhere in the process of "being educated,' they had lost that simple and almost automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful reaction resulting in activity from the mere presence of suffering or of helplessness ...' (p. 64). Addams and many of her intellectual and cultivated friends, ironically like plodding and inarticulate Hugh McVey, had great difficulty "making real connection with the life about them." The smothering advantages enforced "the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all about her" (p. 65).

But reality can break through the cultural barrier. In Addams's case that breakthrough was symbolized in her own mind by an experience at a Madrid bullfight during the second European trip in April, 1888. She was initially fascinated by the spectacle, "rendered in the most magnificent Spanish style," during which five bulls and a number of horses were killed. Seeing the scene through historic Christian imagery, where the ring became an amphitheater, the riders knights, and the matador a gladiator, she outlasted the rest of her party as an enthralled witness of the bullfight. That evening revulsion at her endurance set in, and she generalized the scene to include "the entire moral situation which it revealed." Prior to this event Addams claims she had begun to think about the plan which eventually led to the establishment of Hull-House.

It may have been even before I went to Europe for the second time, but I generally became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself. .. . (p. 72)

Then, with the bullfight scene freshly in mind, she realized that her "dreamer's scheme" was a mere paper reform which "had become a defense for continued idleness" and a rationale for indefinitely continued study and travel. The moral reaction to the bullfight experience revealed that she had become "the dupe of a deferred purpose," that she was caught in "the snare of preparation." But no longer: she soon revealed her plan to Ellen Starr, visited Toynbee Hall (a university settlement in East London) in June, and six months later moved to Chicago to carry out her plan.

Lasch accepts the importance which Addams attached to the bullfight. But he interprets it within the context of his discussion of the new radicalism:

The bullfight was more than a reminder of her self-deception, her endlessly deferred plans and projects. It was the embodiment of the aesthetic principle toward which she was appalled to find herself so strongly drawn. Nothing could have made more clear to her what was wrong with a life devoted to beauty alone, the kind of life represented by her stepmother; for here was beauty intertwined with and depending upon the most outrageous cruelty—beauty boughtwith blood. . . . Henceforth not only the pursuit of beauty for its own sake but all those intellectual pursuits which had so long confused and misled her, those tangled theological speculations which she could neither resolve nor put aside, were to give way before her conviction that the only god she could worship was a god of love—a god, that is, of doing rather than of knowing. (pp. 27-29)

In his recent study American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (1973), Allen Davis rejects Lasch's interpretation. Davis dismisses the importance of the bullfight scene and places less emphasis than Lasch on Addams's rebellion against an upper class Victorian family. Instead, he argues for a more multifaceted explanation of motivation. Davis stresses the influence of various reform movements which Addams came across in London, and the warm support of Ellen Starr. Davis asserts that in letters written at the time of the event there is no indication that the bullfight experience caused any change in Addams's plans or thinking. But she did respond to the reform spirit and new awareness of the poor which was widespread in London during the late 1880s. She found Toynbee Hall "so free from "professional doing good,' so unaffectedly sincere and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries . . . that it seems perfectly ideal."³ During those June weeks in London Addams visited the People's Palace, a philanthropic institute for workers. She also read the settlement-oriented novels of Walter Besant. "The mission side of London is the most interesting side it has," she wrote to her sister. From such evidence Davis concludes it was probably during these two weeks in London that she decided to move to a working class neighborhood in Chicago.

Her decision to establish a settlement in a poor section of Chicago was essentially a religious commitment, but the kind of Christianity she witnessed at Toynbee Hall and the People's Palace was a religion of social action, a version of religion that solved her doctrinal difficulties and doubts, which demanded also a desire to serve. (p. 51)

Ellen Starr's enthusiasm and her eager willingness to aid in every way possible are seen by Davis as the needed incentive for Addams's pursuit of the project.

When one turns to Jane Addams's own reflections on the motives behind social settlements, the combination of elements emphasized by both Lasch and Davis is striking. Less than three years after moving into Hull-House, she gave a lecture entitled "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," at a summer school sponsored by the Ethical Cultural Societies. Reflecting in Twenty Years at Hull-House on the group of settlement workers who attended that summer session, she remarked that they seemed convinced that in the settlement "they had found a clue by which the conditions in crowded cities might be understood and the agencies for social betterment developed" (p. 91). She noted further that those who were most enthusiastic about the movement in the early 1890s had continued active for some twenty years because they had found "the Settlement was too valuable as a method, as a way of approach to the social question to be abandoned . . ." (p. 91). Thus, as a method for understanding cities the settlement satisfied her intellectual needs, and as an agency for social betterment it answered her desire for action.

In her 1892 speech Addams posited three trends which she felt had led to the founding of Hull-House. She defined them as (1) an urge to socialize democracy, (2) the progressive thrust to better the conditions of mankind, and (3) a regenerated Christian humanitarian impulse to share the lives of the poor. Taken together, these felt needs constituted the subjective necessity behind the settlement movement. In light of her own experience, it follows that she found a growing desire on the part of educated young people to overcome the burden of their cultural backgrounds which had shut them "off from the common labor by which they live." Such young people, she argued, sought to socialize democracy and develop a fuller civic life by making universal the cultural advantages they enjoyed. Addams was sure that more and more people like herself had a strong desire to make contact with those who were engaged in "the starvation struggle." The settlement was a means of achieving this contact. It provided communication where alienation had existed previously, the kind of alienation which shedescribed in the following passage:

You may remember the forlorn feeling which occasionally seizes you when you arrive early in the morning a stranger in a great city: the stream of laboring people goes past you as you gaze through the plate-glass window of your hotel; you see hard workingmen lifting great burdens; you hear the driving and jostling of huge carts and your heart sinks with a sudden sense of futility. The door opens behind you and you turn to the man who brings you in your breakfast with a quick sense of human fellowship. . . . You turn helplessly to the waiter and feel that it would be grotesque to claim from him the sympathy you crave because civilization has placed you apart, but you resent your position with a sudden sense of snobbery. (P. 93)

In this striking passage Addams has connected her own class sense of guilt to the feeling of an entire generation of educated upper and upper middle class men and women.

The settlement, continued Addams, provides these young people an opportunity to break away from "elaborate preparation" and to satisfy their need for action and involvement in life. Now the young girl returning from college who wants to fulfill her feeling of social obligation to the "submerged tenth" need not let the family claim be so strenuously asserted. No longer need educated and informed young people suffer, as Addams herself had, from a "sense of uselessness" and inaction, for the settlement offers them something definite to do. "Our young people feel nervously the need of putting theory into action, and respond quickly to the Settlement form of activity" (p. 95). Addams felt the settlement was also related to a "renaissance of the early Christian humanitarianism" which saw Christ's ideas best expressed in the social life of the community. Thus, the settlement aims "to develop whatever of social life its neighborhood may afford, to focus and give form to that life, to bring to bear upon it the results of cultivation and training . . ." (p. 97). The function of the settlement, then, was to focus on the neighborhood as a basis for urban community, and as a basis for bridging the gap between social classes in the city.

Addams concluded her essay by asserting that the settlement sought to relieve destitution at one end of society and the sense of uselessness at the other. "The Settlement, then, is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city" (p. 98). The key figure in this effort was the settlement resident. She/he must be flexible, tolerant, hospitable, patient, committed to the idea of the solidarity of the human race, humble, and respectful of the differences of neighborhood residents. The settlement resident must be ready to arouse and interpret neighborhood opinion, to understand the needs of neighbors, and to furnish data for needed legislation. "In short [settlement] residents are pledged to devote themselves to the duties of good citizenship and to the arousing of the social energies which too largely lie dormant in every neighborhood given over to industrialization" (p. 100).

The work of Jane Addams was aimed at creating an atmosphere conducive to community in the urban environment. In the first place, she hoped the settlement would be a place where the growing disparity between classes could be checked, and where greater harmony between upper class natives and lower class immigrants could be achieved. In other words, she sought to encourage and maintain social interaction among immigrants and native Americans. Second, she envisioned the settlement house as a bridge between European peasant patterns and the urban industrial environment of America. It was a difficult task, but she sought to encourage pride in certain ethnic practices while also instilling respect for American values and institutions. Among the various groups she worked with at Hull-House, Addams tried to foster a sense of sharing both in ethnic accomplishments and in the advantages of local life in Chicago. The locale in which she sought to facilitate interaction and sharing was the city neighborhood. To a large extent, then, the social settlement efforts of Jane Addams were aimed at creating and sustaining community in the same sense that recent sociologists have defined that phenomenon.

Jacob Riis, journalist and reformer, was among those many people from nonurban backgrounds who sought to come to terms with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American city. Unlike any of the other figures looked at so far in this study, Riis was an immigrant who had also to adjust to a new culture. Born in the small Danish town of Ribe (population 3,000), he migrated to this country at the age of twenty-one in 1870. After years of struggle and privation he became a nationally known newspaper reporter and writer, active campaigner for numerous reform movements, and close personal advisor to President Theodore Roosevelt.

Hamlin Garland started his literary career as a spokesman for the downtrodden middle western farmer but lived the majority of his life in cities. Jacob Riis became a publicist for the city tenement dweller, but like Garland always felt deep ambiguity toward the city. He lived in New York City until about a year before his death. Of his move to a farm in Massachusetts, Riis's biographer has remarked, "Riis's personal move to Pine Brook Farm and his continuing interest in urban reform represented in microcosm his ambivalence about the city." Indeed, one of the main themes in James Lane's biography of Jacob Riis is the interesting dynamic between Riis's rural background and inclinations on the one hand, and his involvement in city life and reform on the other.4

Riis experienced hard times and near-starvation upon his arrival in the United States. He knocked about the country from one job to another until he landed a position with the New York Tribune in 1877. But he was from a well-placed and educated, though not wealthy, family (his father was a schoolmaster). Thus, even when reduced to accepting handouts from understanding cooks and bakers he "did not consider himself of the lower class." On the contrary, he "considered himself a young man of culture rather than a common laborer."⁵ His background and his experience in America thus confirmed Riis in a belief that coincided perfectly with one of his adopted land's major credos, individualism. He firmly believed that "nothing is more certain, humanly speaking, than this, that what a man wills himself to be, that he will be." While some immigrants and native radicals were socialists critical of capitalism, Riis was an avid advocate of individualism and privatism. When he wrote his autobiography, he portrayed himself as a prime example of the fulfillment of the American dream of success—an individual who by hard work and will power had risen from humble origins to the position of counselor to presidents.

6

Riis established his reputation as a police reporter, first for the Tribune and then with the Evening Sun. He wrote articles about people in the slum areas of New York's East Side. Here he set up shop on Mulberry Street, across from police headquarters. He gathered much of his information by accompanying inspectors from the city's health department on their nightly rounds in the area of Mulberry Bend. As a result of this work, his social consciousness was raised. Using a new flash lighting technique which allowed cameras to photograph dark interiors, he started to record in graphic pictures the slum living conditions in the Bend area. In 1888 he began presenting illustrated lectures on conditions in the tenements and writing magazine articles about what he saw. Two years later, encouraged by the fascinated response of audiences to his vivid portrayal of urban misery, he turned his work into a book.

How the Other Half Lives (1890) is a classic of American reform journalism. It was an exposé of urban conditions largely unfamiliar to the middle class reading public. In this sense it was in the same genre as such earlier books as Charles Loring Brace's The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years among Them (1872) and Benjamin O. Flower's contemporaneous Civilization's Inferno, or, Studies in the Social Cellar (1893). Brace argued for the need of greater organization among charitable institutions devoted to the poor, supplemented by state aid, in order to prevent "an explosion from this class which might leave this city in ashes and blood" (p. 29). Flower, who found "deplorable conditions existing at our very door which are a crying reproach to the Republic" (p. 99), was both fascinated and shocked by what he discovered. Causes and cures, however, escaped him.

Riis's perspective was somewhat different from that of Brace or Flower. To some extent Riis was attempting to make sense of his own experiences, first as a threadbare drifter and then as a police reporter. In this important sense, he "had been there," the others hadn't. It should be emphasized that such experiences do not automatically guarantee greater understanding, but in Riis's case they did provide an alternative perspective for viewing "the other half in the city. What Riis concluded about the other half is that they were largely a product of the conditions under which they lived, and those conditions were summed up in one word, "tenements." Thus, beyond providing vivid descriptions of slum life, the focal point of his inquiry was the impact that living in New York's 37,316 tenements had on their estimated 1,230,000 occupants in 1890. The impact was potentially explosive, and Riis concluded How the Other Half Lives by expressing a fear similar to that of his friend Charles Brace: "The sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters, heaves uneasily in the tenements. .. . If it rise .. . no human power may avail to check it" (p. 226). But he was generally optimistic that the challenge could be met, and met within the boundaries of the American system of free enterprise.

Riis's suggestions for improving the condition of the tenement districts included providing more open space by replacing the worst tenements with parks and playgrounds; encouraging neighborhood clubs, settlement houses, and better schools; establishing clean municipal lodging houses; building model tenements under the aegis of limited-dividend companies; enacting and enforcing tenement house laws (including state-enforced ceilings on rents); and the remodeling of certain tenements. While Riis had progressed beyond the emphasis on the organized charity and Christian voluntarism of a Josiah Strong (in The Challenge of the City, 1907) to solve the problem of urban poverty, he remained committed to the principles of private enterprise as the best way of providing improved housing for the city's poor immigrants.

Riis argued that while it is easy to convince a man that he should not harbor a thief, it is more difficult to make the same man understand that he has no right to kill tenants by allowing his property to become a death trap. It is, he continued, a matter of education, and there were "men and women who have mended and built with an eye to the real welfare of their tenants as well as to their own pockets" (p. 205). He was insistent that these two, the general welfare and individual profit, were inseparable. Workingmen had a just claim to a decent home—"at a reasonable price." "The business of housing the poor, if it is to amount to anything, must be business, as it was business with our fathers to put them where they are" (p. 205). In listing the three effective ways of dealing with the tenements in New York—housing laws, remodeling older tenements, and building model tenements—Riis was sure that "private enterprise—conscience, to put it in the category of duties where it belongs—must do the lion's share under the last two heads" (p. 216).

In writing of Riis such students of urban history as Sam Bass Warner, Jr., James Lane, and Roy Lubove have noted the close connection between his reform proposals and his commitment to nature, family, the local neighborhood, and individualism. ⁷ Lubove maintains of Riis that "he could not literally recreate New York in the image of Ribe, but he wanted an environment compatible with stable family life, neighborhood cohesiveness, and not least, the rejuvenating contact with nature he had known as a youth."⁸ According to Lane, Riis "sought to apply to his urban surroundings the values which he had acquired in a traditional rural environment" (p. 4). Thus, the values of individual effort and hard work, love of nature, and a concept of community based on family, local place, and religion were translated under urban conditions into an advocacy of improved housing, neighborhood social centers, settlement houses, and better schools, parks, and playgrounds. Riis did not advocate a radical alteration of the economic system, but rather a gradual change in the environment to be brought about by educating the public to the needs of the other half.

What the slum and tenement were doing, Riis told his largely middle class audience, was destroying individual initiative and undermining the traditional family and primary group foundations of community. Housing and neighborhoods must be improved because they make up the environment in which community either flourishes or decays. "Where home goes, go family, manhood, citizenship, patriotism."⁹ Essentially the slum was a ruinous environment because it destroyed family life and the home.

The neighborhood was of equal importance with the family. Lane quotes Riis as saying his main purpose in urban reconstruction was "to arouse neighborhood interest and neighborhood pride, to link the neighbors to one spot that will hold them long enough to take root and stop them from moving" (p. 91). For Riis, then, an important element in community was the rooted continuity over time which he had known as a child in the Danish village of his birth. In a book entitled The Old Town (1909), written three years before his death, Riis paid tribute to the continuity and community which Ribe and villages like it always symbolized for him. In his ambivalence toward American culture, Hamlin Garland had sought stability and continuity in Europe; in his devotion to American values Riis sought social stability and control in improved housing and neighborhood conditions.

Riis's response to the city is interesting because in it we are provided an example of a certain kind of ambiguity. He sought to meet the challenge of changing urban conditions primarily on the basis of values frequently equated with nonurban areas. His passionate conviction regarding individual worth and responsibility led him to condemn the tramp (whose rootlessness undermined the stability of society). It also led him to speak out against those landlords whose greed was seen as the cause of the slum tenement. If individual landlord greed and immigrant ignorance produced dangerous tenements, then the education of the individual toward fair play and giving the other guy an even break was essential. But the hand of the law would also have to be asserted on occasion. Thus, the need for certain restrictive, minimum-standard housing legislation. More frequently, however, he looked to limited-dividend model tenements, and the "fair-play between tenant and landlord" exhibited by a handful of paternalistic managers and owners.

Both Jane Addams and Jacob Riis were moderate, middle class reformers. They were committed to the idea of the importance of the localized community as a basis for individual worth. In their emphasis upon the urban neighborhood, both assumed that a specific geographic place was essential as an arena for the social interaction and sharing of common ties which are today taken to be basic characteristics of community life. In this sense, they were the early twentieth-century antecedents of those in the 1960s and 1970s who are advocates of the "resurgent neighborhood," and participants in neighborhood improvement organizations.¹⁰ On this issue they were thus closer to recent neighborhood organizers than to such of their own contemporaries as Theodore Dreiser and Henry Blake Fuller, who held out little or no hope for community in the city.

The significant point of difference between a Dreiser and an Addams on the issue of the possibilities of community in the urban setting was that Addams assumed that there had to be a group basis for the realization of individual significance. Groups that fulfilled that function in the city included families, ethnic clusters, and settlement houses. Such groups operated within a given locale, the neighborhood. Dreiser, on the other hand, saw the city individual as bereft of any meaningful family or group ties, alone and adrift amidst forces over which he/she had no control. The impact of the city upon the individual was, then, to impose its own kind of lonely isolation. The isolation that Addams perceived was an isolation of groups. Her efforts were aimed at using ethnic group solidarity first as a means of encouraging individual worth, and then at employing the settlement as a cultural bridge between ethnic group isolation and the larger system of the city. Her assumption and that of Riis was, in contrast to Dreiser and Fuller, that community based on locale, interaction, and sharing was as natural in the city as in the small town.

NOTES

¹ Except where indicated, biographical material on Addams is based on Allen F. Davis, American Heroine.

² Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, p. 67. All page references are to theNew American Library edition.

³ Letter cited by Davis, p. 40.

⁴ James Lane, Jacob Riis and the American City p. 216. Except where indicated, the biographical material on Riis in this chapter is based on Lane.

⁵ Ibid., p. 20.

⁶ Jacob Riis, The Making of an American (New York, 1901).

⁷ Sam Bass Warner, Jr., introduction, Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890-1917; Lane.

⁸ Roy Lubove, introduction, Jacob Riis, The Making of an American, pp. xi-xii.

⁹ Cited by Lane, p. 205.

¹⁰ For example, James V. Cunningham, The Resurgent Neighborhood, and Marshall Kaplan, Urban Planning in the 1960s.