American Academy of Political and Social ScienceA Function of the Social Settlement
Author(s): Jane Addams
Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 13 (May, 1899),
pp. 33-55
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social
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A FUNCTION OF THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT.
The word ” settlement,” which we have borrowed from
London, is apt to grate a little upon American ears. It is
not, after all, so long ago that Americans who settled were
those who had adventured into a new country, where they
were pioneers in the midst of difficult surroundings. The
word still implies migrating from one condition of life to
another totally unlike it, and against this implication the
resident of an American settlement takes alarm.
We do not like to acknowledge that Americans are divided
into ” two nations,” as her prime minister once admitted of
England. We are not willing, openly and professedly, to
assume that American citizens are broken up into classes,
even if we make that assumption the preface to a plea that
the superior class has duties to the inferior. Our democracy
is still our most precious possession, and we do well to
resent any inroads upon it, even although they may be
made in the name of philanthropy.
And yet because of this very democracy, superior privileges carry with them a certain sense of embarrassment,
founded on the suspicion that intellectual and moral superiority too often rest upon economic props which are, after all,
matters of accident, and that for an increasing number of
young people the only possible way to be comfortable in the
possession of those privileges, which result from educational
advantages, is in an effort to make common that which was
special and aristocratic. Added to this altruistic compunction one may easily discover a selfish suspicion that advantages thus held apart slowly crumble in their napkins, and
are not worth having.
The American settlement, perhaps, has represented not
so much a sense of duty of the privileged toward the unprivileged, of the ” haves ” to the ” have nots,” to borrow
Canon Barnett’s phrase, as a desire to equalize through
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social effort those results which superior opportunity may
have given the possessor.
The settlement, however, certainly represents more than
compunctions. Otherwise it would be but ” the monastery
of the nineteenth century,” as it is indeed sometimes called,
substituting the anodyne of work for that of contemplation,
but still the old attempt to seek individual escape from the
common misery through the solace of healing.
If this were the basis of the settlement, there would no
longer be need of it when society had become reconstructed
to the point of affording equal opportunity for all, and it
would still be at the bottom a philanthropy, although
expressed in social and democratic terms. There is, however, a sterner and more enduring aspect of the settlement
which this paper would attempt to present.
It is frequently stated that the most pressing problem of
modern life is that of a reconstruction and a reorganization
of the knowledge which we possess; that we are at last
struggling to realize in terms of life all that has been discovered and absorbed, to make it over into healthy and direct
expressions of free living. Dr. John Dewey, of the University of Chicago, has written: ” Knowledge is no longer its
own justification, the interest in it has at last transferred
itself from accumulation and verification to its application
to life.” And he adds: “When a theory of knowledge
forgets that its value rests in solving the problem out of
which it has arisen, that of securing a method of action,
knowledge begins to cumber the ground. It is a luxury,
and becomes a social nuisance and disturber.”
We may quote further from Professor James, of Harvard
University, who recently said in an address before
the Philosophical Union of the University of California:
“Beliefs, in short, are really rules of action, and the whole
function of thinking is but one step in the production of
habits of action,” or “the ultimate test for us of what a
truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires.”
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35
Having thus the support of two philosophers, let us
assume that the dominating interest in knowledge has
become its use, the conditions under which, and ways in
which it may be most effectively employed in human conduct; and that at last certain people have consciously formed
themselves into groups for the express purpose of effective
application. These groups which are called settlements have
naturally sought the spots where the dearth of this applied
knowledge was most obvious, the depressed quarters of great
cities. They gravitate to these spots, not with the object
of finding clinical material, not to found “sociological
laboratories,” not, indeed, with the analytical motive at all,
but rather in a reaction from that motive, with a desire to
use synthetically and directly whatever knowledge they,
as a group, may possess, to test its validity and to discover
the conditions under which this knowledge may be employed.
That, just as groups of men, for hundreds of years, have
organized themselves into colleges, for the purpose of handing on and disseminating knowledge already accumulated,
and as other groups have been organized into seminars and
universities, for the purpose of research and the extension
of the bounds of knowledge, so at last groups have been
consciously formed for the purpose of the application of
knowledge to life. This third attempt also would claim for
itself the enthusiasm and advantage of collective living. It
has come to be a group of people who share their methods,
and who mean to make experience continuous beyond the
individual. It may be urged that this function of application has always been undertaken by individuals and unconscious groups. This is doubtless true, just as much classic
learning has always been disseminated outside of the colleges, and just as some of the most notable discoveries of
pure science have been made outside of the universities.
Still both these institutions do in the main accomplish the
bulk of the disseminating, and the discovering; and it is upon
the same basis that the third group may establish its value.
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The ideal and developed settlement would attempt to test
the value of human knowledge by action, and realization,
quite as the complete and ideal university would concern
itself with the discovery of knowledge in all branches.
The settlement stands for application as opposed to research;
for emotion as opposed to abstraction, for universal interest as opposed to specialization. This certainly claims too
much, absurdly too much, for a settlement, in the light of
its achievements, but perhaps not in the light of its possibilities.
This, then, will be my definition of the settlement: that
it is an attempt to express the meaning of life in terms of
life itself, in forms of activity. There is no doubt that the
deed often reveals when the idea does not, just as art makes
us understand and feel what might be incomprehensible and
inexpressible in the form of an argument. And as the artist
tests the success of his art when the recipient feels that he
knew the thing before, but had not been able to express
it, so the settlement, when it attempts to reveal and apply
knowledge, deems its results practicable, when it has made
knowledge available which before was abstract, when through
use, it has made common that knowledge which was partial
before, because it could only be apprehended by the intellect.
The chief characteristic of art lies in freeing the individual
from a sense of separation and isolation in his emotional experience, and has usually been accomplished through painting, writing and singing; but this does not make it in the
least impossible that it is now being tried, self-consciously
and most bunglingly we will all admit, in terms of life
itself.
A settlement brings to its aid all possible methods to
reveal and make common its conception of life. All those
arts and devices which express kindly relation from man to
man, from charitable effort to the most specialized social
intercourse, are constantly tried. There is the historic
statement, the literary presentation, the fellowship which
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comes when great questions are studied with the hope of
modifying actual conditions, the putting forward of the
essential that the trivial may appear unimportant, as it is,
the attempt to select the more typical and enduring forms of
social life, and to eliminate, as far as possible, the irrelevant things which crowd into actual living. There are socalled art exhibits, concerts, dramatic representations, every
possible device to make operative on the life around it, the
conception of life which the settlement group holds. The
demonstration is made not by reason, but by life itself.
There must, of course, be a certain talent for conduct and
unremitting care lest there grow to be a divergence between
theory and living, for however embarrassing this divergence
may prove in other situations, in a settlement the artist
throws away his tools as soon as this thing happens. He
is constantly transmitting by means of his human activity,
his notion of life to others. He hopes to produce a sense
of infection which may ultimately result in identity of
interest.
Merely to produce a sense of infection would be art, but to
carrywith it a consciousness of participation and responsibility
would be the moralizing and application of art. We may
illustrate this with that form of art which is most general and
prevalent among us, the art of novel writing. No one who
has ever read Zangwill’s “Children of the Ghetto ” can afterwards walk through the Jewish quarter of any great city
without a quickening of the blood as he passes. He must
feel a momentary touch of the poetry and fidelity which are
fostered there, the power of an elaborate ceremonial and
carefully preserved customs. Let us add to this revelation
of literature a personal acquaintance with a young man
whose affection and loyalty, whose tenderest human ties and
domestic training are pulling one way against the taste and
desires of a personality which constantly draws him into pursuits and interests outside of the family life. We may see,
day after day, his attempts to attend ceremonies for which
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he no longer cares, his efforts to interest his father in other
questions, and to transfer his religious zeal to social problems.
We have added to Zangwill’s art by our personal acquaintance, a dramatic force which even he could not portray.
We may easily know a daughter who might earn much
more money as a stenographer, could she work from Monday morning to Saturday night, but who quietly and docilely
makes neckties for low wages because she can thus abstain
from work Saturdays, to please her father. She goes without the clothes she otherwise might have, she identifies herself with girls whom she does not care for, in order to avoid
the break which would be so desperate. Without Zangwill’s
illumination we would have to accumulate much more
experience, but it is no compliment to the artist, if, having
read him, we feel no desire for experience itself.
After all, the only world we know is that of Appreciation,
but we grow more and more discontented with a mere
intellectual apprehension, and wish to move forward from a
limited and therefore obscure understanding of life to a
larger and more embracing one, not only with our minds,
but with all our powers of life. Our craving for art is a
desire to appreciate emotionally, our craving for life is a desire to move forward organically.
I know little Italian boys who joyfully drop their English
the moment they are outside the school-room door; and
others of them who are teaching the entire family and forming a connection between them and the outside world, interpreting political speeches and newspapers and eagerly
transforming Italian customs into American ones. One
watches the individual boy with great interest, to see whether
he will faithfully make himself a transmitter and helper, or
whether he will be stupidly pleased with his achievements,
and consider his examinations the aim of his life. I sometimes find myself nervously watching a young man or woman
in a university in much the same way, and applying essentially the same test. I wonder whether his knowledge will
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in the end exercise supreme sway over him, so that he will
come to consider it “a self-sufficing purveyor of reality,”
and care for nothing further, whether he will become, in the
end, “school bound” with his faculties well trained for
acquisition, but quite useless in other directions. To test a
student’s knowledge of Italian history by a series of examinations is possible; to test his genuine interest in that great
boot thrust into the Mediterranean is to know whether or
not he conquers a comparatively easy language, whether he
traces in the large Italian colony of his city the hero-worship
and higher aims evoked by Garibaldi as they are gradually
seized upon by the ward politician and converted to ignoble
ends; whether he feels a certain shame that, although
Mazzini dedicated to the working men of Italy his highest
ethical and philosophical appeal so that a desire for a republic had much to do with their coming to America, no great
teacher of either ethics or politics has ever devoted himself to
the Italians in America. Just as we do not know a fact until
we can play with it, so we do not possess knowledge until
we have an impulse to bring it into use; not the didactic
impulse, not the propagandist impulse, but that which would
throw into the stream of common human experience one bit
of important or historic knowledge, however small, which
before belonged to a few.
The phrase ” applied knowledge ” or science has so long
been used in connection with polytechnic schools that it may
be well to explain that I am using it in a broader sense. These
schools have applied science primarily for professional ends.
They are not so commercial, but they may easily become
quite as specialized in their departments as the chemical
laboratories attached to certain large manufacturing concerns. In the early days of Johns Hopkins University, one of
the men in the biological department invented a contrivance
which produced a very great improvement in the oyster raft
at that time in use in the Chesapeake Bay. For months
afterward, in all the commencement orations and other
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occasions when ” prominent citizens ” were invited to speak,
this oyster raft was held up as the great contribution of the
University to the commercial interest of the city, and as a
justification of the University’s existence, much to the mortification of the poor inventor. This, also, is an excellent
example of what I do not mean.
The application which I have in mind is one which cannot be measured by its money-making value. I have in
mind an application to a given neighborhood of the solace
of literature, of the uplift of the imagination, and of the
historic consciousness which gives its possessor a sense of
connection with the men of the past who have thought and
acted, an application of the stern mandates of science, not
only to the conditions of sewers and the care of alleys, but
to the methods of life and thought; the application of the
metaphysic not only to the speculations of the philosopher,
but to the events of the passing moment; the application of
the moral code to the material life, the transforming of the
economic relation into an ethical relation until the sense
that religion itself embraces all relations, including the
ungodly industrial relation, has become common property.
An ideal settlement would have no more regard for the
“commercial ” than would the most scientific of German
seminars. The word application must be taken quite aside
from its commercial or professional sense.
In this business of application, however, a settlement finds
itself tending not only to make common those good things
which before were partial and remote, but it finds itself
challenging and testing by standards of moral democracy
those things which it before regarded as good, if they could
but be universal, and it sometimes finds that the so-called
good things will not endure this test of being universalized.
This may be illustrated by various good things. We may
take first the so-called fine arts.
Let us consider the experience of a resident of a settlement who cares a great deal for that aspect and history of
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life, which has been portrayed in the fine arts. For years
she has had classes studying through photographs and
lectures the marbles of Greece, the paintings, the renaissance
of Italy and the Gothic architecture of mediaeval Europe.
She has brought into the lives of scores of people a quality
of enjoyment, a revelation of experience which they never
knew before. Some of them buy photographs to hang
in their own houses, a public school art society is started,
schoolroom walls are tinted and hung with copies of the best
masters; so that in the end hundreds of people have grown
familiar with the names of artists, and with conceptions of
life which were hidden from them before. Some of these
young women were they students of a fresh-water college
could successfully pass an examination in the ” History of
Art.'” The studio of Hull House is well filled with young
men and women who successfully copy casts and paint accurately what they see around them, and several of them
have been admitted to the Chicago Art Institute upon
competitive scholarships. Now, the first of these achievements would certainly satisfy the average college teacher
whose business it is faithfully to transmit the accumulations of knowledge upon a given subject, and, of course,
if possible, to add to the sum total of that knowledge in the
matter of arrangement or discovery. The second achievement would certainly satisfy the ordinary philanthropic
intent, which is to give to others the good which it possesses.
But a settlement would have little vitality if it were satisfied
with either of these achievements, and would at once limit
its scope to that of the school on the one hand, or that of
philanthropy on the other. And a settlement is neither a
school nor a philanthropy, nor yet a philanthropic school
or a scholarly philanthropy.
A settlement looks about among its neighbors and finds a
complete absence of art. It sees people working laboriously without that natural solace of labor which art gives;
they have no opportunity of expressing their own thoughts to
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their fellows by means of that labor. It finds the ambitious
members of the neighborhood over-anxious and hurried.
Wrapping up bars of soap in pieces of paper might at least
give the pleasure of accuracy and repetition if it could be
done at leisure but, when paid for by the piece, speed is the
sole requirement, and the last suggestion of human interest
has been taken away. The settlement soon discovers how
impossible it is to put a fringe of art on the end of a day
thus spent. It is not only bad pedagogics, but it is an
impossible undertaking, to appeal to a sense of beauty and
order which has been crushed by years of ugly and disorderly
work. May I relate an experience of a friend of Hull
House, who took a party of visitors to the Art Institute of
Chicago ? In a prominent place upon that excellent building there have been carved in good stone, and with some
degree of skill, several fine, large skulls of oxen. The bulk
of the settlement party had no armor of erudition with
which to protect themselves against such hideousness, and
the leader of the party carefully explained that in Greece,
after a sacrifice was made, skulls of the animals were hung
upon the temples. But when he came to tell why they
were upon the Art Institute of Chicago, he found his discourse going lame. That they were once religious symbols
charged with meaning, was hardly a sufficient defence. They
struck no response, certainly gave no delight nor sense of
infection to the bewildered group who stood in front of them.
It may be well to say in passing that this group were too
unsophisticated to take great pride in the mere fact that they
knew what this meant, as a club in search of culture would
certainly have done. In his chagrin the Hull House friend
found himself reflecting that the sacrifices, after all, did
represent brotherhood and he made an attempt to compare
them with the present symbols of brotherhood which are
found upon the engraved charters hanging upon those
walls which shelter the meetings of labor organizations.
These charters make a sincere attempt to express the
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conviction of brotherhood, yet they have but the crudest
symbolic representation, two hands clasping each other. It
is not only that the print is cheap, but the hands are badly
drawn and badly modeled; they express no tenderness
nor firmness, and are done without any interpretive skill.
The hands upon the old-fashioned tombstones which indicated a ghostly farewell might be interchanged with this
pair of hands which indicate vital standing together, and no
one would detect the difference. It occurred to this Hull
House friend, with a sense of shame and chagrin, that the
artists of Chicago had been recreant to their trust, that
they had been so caught by a spirit of imitation that they
slavishly represented the symbols of animal sacrifice which
no longer existed, and kept away from a great human movement, which in America at least, has not yet found artistic
expression. If the skulls had been merely an obsolete symbol of the brotherhood which had survived and developed
its own artistic symbols, they might easily have been made
intelligible and full of meaning. The experience of the
resident who teaches the history of art, of the good friend
who is ashamed of the lack of democracy and interpretive
power among moder artists, added to many other bits of
experience and emotion has resulted in the establishment
of a Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, which was founded
at Hull House more than a year ago. This society has
developed an amazing vitality of its own. And perhaps a
quotation from its constitution will show its trend:
“To consider the present state of the factories and the
workmen therein, and to devise lines of development which
shall retain the machine in so far as it relieves the workmen
from drudgery, and tends to perfect his product but which
shall insist that the machine be no longer allowed to dominate the workman and reduce his production into a mechanical distortion.”
The Chicago Arts and Crafts Society has challenged the
present condition and motive of art. Its protest is certainly
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feeble and may be ineffective, but it is at least genuine and
vital. Under the direction of several of its enthusiastic
members a shop has been opened at Hull House where
articles are designed and made. It is not merely a school
where people are taught and then sent forth to use their
teaching in art according to their individual initiative and
opportunity, but where those who have been carefully
trained and taught may remain, to express the best they
may in wood or metal. A settlement would avoid the
always getting ready for life which seems to dog the school,
and would begin with however small a group to really
accomplish and to live.*
This may indeed bring us quite naturally to the attitude
of the settlement toward the organized education with
which it is brought in contact, the two forms of organization being naturally the public school and university extension lectures.
The resident finds the use of the public school constantly
limited because it occupies such an isolated place in the
community. The school board and the teachers have
insensibly assumed that they have to do exclusively with
children, or a few adult evening classes, only in certain
settled directions. The newly arrived South Italian peasants
who come to the night schools are thoroughly ill-adjusted to
all their surroundings. To change suddenly from picking
olives to sewer extension is certainly a bewildering experience. They have not yet obtained control of their powers
for the performance of even the humblest social service, and
have no chance to realize within themselves the social relation of that service which they are performing. Feeling
* All of us who have been through the old-fashioned school and college can
remember the tedium and confusion of always getting ready for something, of
preparing for the life which was to follow school. We may remember how it
affected our moral natures as well. We were in a hurry now, but we would be
more leisurely and kindly when we finished school. We came to have a firm
belief that a new and strong moral nature would be given to us at the time we
received our diplomas; and this attitude of preparation is easily carried over into
life beyond the school.
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this vaguely perhaps, but very strongly as only a dull
peasant mind can feel, they go to the night schools in search
of education. They are taught to read and write concerning small natural objects, on the assumption that the undeveloped intellect works best with insects and tiny animals,
and they patiently accept this uninteresting information
because they expect “education” to be dull and hard.
Never for an instant are their own problems of living in
the midst of unfamiliar surroundings even touched upon.
There seems to be a belief among educators that it is not
possible for the mass of mankind to have experiences which
are of themselves worth anything, and that accordingly, if
a neighborhood is to receive valuable ideas at all, they must
be brought in from the outside, and almost exclusively in
the form of books. Such scepticism regarding the possibilities of human nature as has often been pointed out results
in equipping even the youngest children with the tools of
reading and writing, but gives them no real participation
in the industrial and social life with which they come in
contact.
The residents in a settlement know that for most of their
small neighbors life will be spent in handling material things
either in manufacturing or commercial processes, and yet
little is done to unfold the fascinating history of industrial
evolution or to illuminate for them the materials among
which they will live. The settlement sees boys constantly
leave school to enter the factory at fourteen or fifteen without either of the requirements involved in a social life, on
the one hand ” without a sense of the resources already
accumulated,” and on the other “without the individual
ability to respond to those resources.”
If it is one function of a settlement to hold a clue as to
what to select and what to eliminate in the business of living,
it would bring the same charge of overwrought detail
against the university extension lectures. A course of
lectures in astronomy, illustrated by “stereopticon slides,”
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will attract a large audience the first week who hope to hear
of the wonders of the heavens, and the relation of our earth
thereto, but instead of that they are treated to spectrum
analyses of star dust, or the latest theories concerning the
milky way. The habit of research and the desire to say
the latest word upon any subject overcoming any sympathetic understanding of his audience which the lecturer
might otherwise develop.
The teachers in the night schools near Hull House
struggle with Greeks and Armenians, with Bohemians and
Italians, and many another nationality. I once suggested
to a professor of anthropology in a neighboring university that
he deliver a lecture to these bewildered teachers upon simple
race characteristics and, if possible, give them some interest
in their pupils, and some other attitude than that all persons
who do not speak English are ignorant. The professor
kindly consented to do this, but when the time came frankly
acknowledged that he could not do it-that he had no
information available for such a talk. I was disappointed,
of course, and a little chagrined when, during the winter,
three of his pupils came to me at different times, anxiously
inquiring if I could not put them on the track of people who
had six toes, or whose relatives had been possessed of six
toes. It was inevitable that the old charge should occur
to me, that the best trained scientists are inclined to give
themselves over to an idle thirst for knowledge which lacks
any relation to human life, and leave to the charlatans the
task of teaching those things which deeply concern the
welfare of mankind.
Tolstoy points out that the mass of men get their intellectual food from the abortive outcasts of science, who provide
millions of books, pictures and shows, not to instruct and
guide, but for the sake of their own profit and gain,
while the real student too often stays in a laboratory, occupied in a mysterious activity called science. He does not
even know what is required by the workingmen. He has
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quite forgotten their mode of life, their views of things and
their language. Tolstoy claims that the student has lost
sight of the fact that it is his duty, not to study and depict,
but to serve. This is asking a great deal from one man, or
even from one institution. It may be necessary that the
university be supplemented by the settlement, or something
answering thereto; but let the settlement people recognize the
value of their own calling, and see to it that the university
does not swallow the settlement, and turn it into one more
laboratory: another place in which to analyze and depict, to
observe and record. A settlement which performs but this
function is merely an imitative and unendowed university,
as a settlement which gives all its energies to classes and
lectures and athletics is merely an imitative college. We
ourselves may have given over attending classes and may
be bored by lectures, but to still insist that working people
shall have them is to take the priggish attitude we sometimes allow ourselves toward children, when we hold up
rigid moral standards to them, although permitting ourselves
a greater latitude. If without really testing the value of
mental pabulum, we may assume it is nutritious and good
for working people, because some one once assumed that it
was good for us, we throw away the prerogative of a settlement, and fall into the rigidity of the conventional teacher.
The most popular lectures we ever had at Hull House
were a series of twelve upon organic evolution, but we
caught the man when he was but a university instructor,
and his mind was still eager over the marvel of it all.
Encouraged by this success we followed the course with
other lectures in science, only to find our audience annihilated by men who spoke with dryness of manner and with
the same terminology which they used in the class room.
A settlement might bring the same charge against university extension as against the public schools, that it is
bookish and remote. Simple people want the large and
vital- they are still in the tribal stage of knowledge, so to
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48
ANNAIS
OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY.
speak. It is not that simple people like to hear about little
things; they want to hear about great things, simply told.
We remember that the early nomads did not study the blades
of grass at their feet, but the stars above their headsalthough commercially considered, the study of grass would
have been much more profitable.
These experiences would seem to testify that there is too
much analysis in our thought, as there is too much anarchy
in our action. Perhaps no one is following up this clue so
energetically as Professor Patrick Geddes in Edinburgh, who
is attempting, not only to graphically visualize a synthesis,
an encyclopedia of orderly knowledge, but in his own
words-is
endeavoring ” to outline a correspondingly
detailed synergy of orderly actions.”
The “regional
of
which
”
he
takes
from
his outlook
survey
knowledge
tower would thus pass into ” regional activity.”
So far as my experience goes a settlement finds itself curiously more companionable with the state and national
bureaus in their efforts in collecting information and
analyzing the situation, than it does with university efforts.
This may possibly be traced to the fact that the data is
accumulated by the bureaus on the assumption that it will
finally become the basis for legislation, and is thus in the
line of applicability. The settlements from the first have
done more or less work under the direction of the bureaus.
The head of a federal department quite recently begged a
settlement to transform into readable matter a certain mass
of material which had been carefully collected into tables
and statistics. He hoped to make a connection between the
information concerning diet and sanitary conditions, and the
tenement house people who sadly needed this information.
The head of the bureau said quite simply that he hoped
that the settlements could accomplish this, not realizing that
to put information into readable form is not nearly enough.
It is to confuse a simple statement of knowledge with its
application.
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A FUNCTION OF THE SOCIAL SETTILMENT.
49
Permit me to illustrate from a group of Italian women
who bring their underdeveloped children several times a
week to Hull House for sanitary treatment, under the direction of a physician. It has been possible to teach some of these
women to feed their children oatmeal instead of tea-soaked
bread, but it has been done, not by statement at all but by
a series of gay little Sunday morning breakfasts given to a
group of them in the Hull House nursery. A nutritious
diet was thus substituted for an inferior one by a social
method. At the same time it was found that certain of the
women hung bags of salt about their children’s necks, to
keep off the evil eye, which was supposed to give the
children crooked legs at first, and in the end to cause them
to waste away. The salt bags gradually disappeared under
the influence of baths and cod liver oil. In short, rachitis
was skillfully arrested, and without mention that disease
was caused not by evil eye but by lack of cleanliness and
nutrition, and without passing through the intermediate
belief that disease was sent by Providence, the women form
a little centre for the intelligent care of children, which is
making itself felt in the Italian colony. Knowledge was
applied in both cases, but scarcely as the statistician would
have applied it.
We recall that the first colleges of the Anglo-Saxon race
were established to educate religious teachers. For a long
time it was considered the mission of the educated to prepare
the mass of the people for the life beyond the grave.
Knowledge dealt largely in theology, but it was ultimately
to be applied, and the test of the successful graduate, after
all, was not his learning, but his power to save souls.
As the college changed from teaching theology to teaching
secular knowledge the test of its success should have shifted
from the power to save men’s souls to the power to adjust
them in healthful relations to nature and their fellow men.
But the college failed to do this, and made the test of its
success the mere collecting and disseminating of knowledge,
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50
ANNALS
OF THE AMERICAN
ACADEMY.
elevating the means into an end and falling in love with its
own achievement. The application of secular knowledge
need be no more commercial and so-called practical than
was the minister’s when he applied his theology to the
delicate problems of the human soul. This attempt at
application on the part of the settlements may be, in fact,
an apprehension of the situation.
It would be a curious result if this word “applied science,’
which the scholar has always been afraid of, lest it lead him
into commercial influences, should have in it the salt of
saving power, to rescue scholarship from the function of
accumulating and transmitting to the higher and freer one
of directing human life.
Recognizing the full risk of making an absurd, and as yet
totally unsubstantiated claim, I would still express the
belief that the settlement has made a genuine contribution
in this direction by its effort to apply knowledge to life, to
express life itself in terms of life.
In line with this conception are the efforts the settlement
makes to mitigate the harshness of industry by this legal
enactment. The residents are actuated, not by a vague
desire to do good which may distinguish the philanthropist,
nor by that thirst for data and analysis of the situation
which so often distinguishes the “sociologist,” but by the
more intimate and human desire that the working man,
quite aside from the question of the unemployed or the
minimum wage, shall have secured to him powers of life and
enjoyment, after he has painstakingly earned his subsistence;
that he shall have an opportunity to develop those higher
moral and intellectual qualities upon which depend the free
aspects and values of living. Thus a settlement finds itself
more and more working toward legal enactment, not only
on behalf of working people, and not only in co-operation
with them, but with every member of the community who
is susceptible to the moral appeal. Labor legislation has
always been difficult in America, largely owing to our
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A
FUNCTION OF THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT.
51
optimism, and the comparative ease of passing from class to
class. The sweater’s victim, who hopes soon to be a contractor himself, will not take an interest in the law which
may momentarily protect him but which may later operate
against him. A man who is a bricklayer ambitious to
become a master builder is not too eager that building regulations be made more stringent. In order to get a law, even
to protect a small class of citizens, an appeal has to be made
to the moral sense of the entire community, for one is barred
from the very nature of the case from making a class appeal.
Hundreds of girls are constantly impaired in health and
vitality by long hours of factory work, yet each one of these
girls is so confident of marrying out of her trade,-each one
regards her factory work as so provisional, that it is almost
impossible to secure among them a concerted movement for
improvement. To make a sensational appeal on their behalf
or on behalf of the sweater’s victims is undemocratic and often
accentuates the consciousness of class difference. When the
newspapers tell us of the horrors of the sweat shop, painting
one shop with the various shades of blackness, found only in
a dozen, until no human being however wretched could possibly work in such a shop, it becomes all the more difficult to
set before the public mind what a reasonable workshop
demands. Orderliness and cleanliness do not seem necessary
to the mind sated with the horrors of contagious diseases.
To impress upon such a mind that sweaters’ employes live
out but half the days of even the short life of the working
man cannot arouse it to concern. When, in brder to excite
pity for one family a newspaper will degrade all humanity
in the minds of the benevolent of the community, so that
the statement that the poor lose fifty per cent of their children,
does not seem startling if they die quietly in their beds and
are not frozen and starved, is to increase the gulf beyond
what actually exists.
The sensational writer of short
stories, who recklessly overstates and holds the exceptional
as the habitual, does much to destroy the conception of
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52
ANNALS
OF THE AMERICAN
ACADEMY.
human life, which experience has been slowly building up
in the minds of the community. A reckless appeal to
primitive pity may change conditions of a given case, but it
sacrifices too much for the result.
A settlement in its attempt to apply the larger knowledge
of life to industrial problems makes its appeal upon the
assumption that the industrial problem is a social one, and
the effort of a settlement in securing labor legislation is
valuable largely in proportion as it can make both the
working men and the rest of the community conscious of
solidarity, and insists upon similarities rather than differences. A settlement constantly endeavors to make its
neighborhood realize that it belongs to the city as a whole,
and can only improve as the city improves. We, at Hull
House, have undertaken to pave the streets of our ward only
to find that we must agitate for an ordinance, that repaving
shall be done from a general fund before we can hope to have
our streets properly paved. We have attempted to compel by
law, that the manufacturer provide proper work rooms for his
sweater’s victims, and were surprised to find ourselves holding a mass meeting in order to urge a federal measure upon
Congress.
One of the residents at Hull House for three years faithfully inspected the alleys of our ward, but all her faithful
service was set at naught because civil service has been but
a farce in Chicago and to insist upon its administration,
and the abolition of the contract system is the shortest
method of cleaning the alleys.
The settlement was startled during October and November
of last year by the occurrence of seven murders within a
radius of ten blocks from Hull House, in a neighborhood
of which we had always boasted that it was not criminal.
A little investigation of details and motives, the accident
of a personal acquaintance with two of the criminals, made
it not in the least difficult to trace the murders back to the
influence of the late war between Spain and the United
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A FUNCTION OF THB SOCIAL SETTLEMENT.
53
States. The predatory instinct is not far back of most
of us. Simple people who read of carnage and bloodshed easily receive a suggestion.
Habits of self-control
which have been but slowly and imperfectly acquired quickly
break down. Some psychologists intimate that action germinates not only in the habitual thought, but may be traced
to the selection of the subject upon which the attention is
fixed and that it is by this decision of what shall hold the
attention that the trend of action is determined. The
newspapers, the posters, the street conversation for weeks
had to do with war and threatening of war.
The little children in the street played at war day after
day, although they did not play they were freeing Cubans,
but on the contrary that they were killing Spaniards. For
years the settlement had held that the life of each little child
should be regarded as valuable, that the humane instinct
should keep in abeyance any tendency to cruelty, that law
and order should be observed, not only in letter, but in
spirit, and it suddenly finds that a national event has thrown
back all this effort.
There is no doubt that we grow more or less accustomed
to faults and follies which we constantly see, and that a
resident leaving one quarter of the city for another does get
a fresher point of view. She comes in to an industrial
neighborhood to find that the workingmen living there see
those of their own numbers who have gradually yielded to
a love of drink and have become drunkards, with a certain
amount of indifference and leniency of judgment. Many
of these wretched men have been kindly good natured
fellows, and possessed of weak wills rather than vicious
ones. The resident is shocked by this leniency, but in
course of time she finds herself viewing business circles
from a new point of view. A business man constantly sees
men around him who have gradually yielded to a love of
money until many of them have become perjurers, in order to
avoid the payment of full taxes; some of them have lent
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54
ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY.
themselves to debauching city councils and state legislatures
in order to protect vested interests by ” necessary legislation;”
yet a business man finds himself tending to judge such conduct leniently because it is a temptation which he can
understand, one to which he himself has more or less
yielded at least by connivance, if not by participation. To
habitually drink too much alcohol and neglect one’s wife and
children, or to annually perjure one’s soul and neglect one’s
duty to the state, are not really so unlike in motive and consequence, to anyone who looks at them freely and from an
equidistant standpoint.
Our attention has so long been called to the sins of the
appetite and to the neglect of family obligations, that we fail
to see these other equally great sins of cupidity and failure
to respond to the social duty. To fail to see social dereliction in one class and point out moral failure in the drunkard shows a singular lack of understanding of the ethical
problems which are now pressing upon us. Books have
been written on the poverty and wretchedness which are the
result of alcoholism, and it has indeed been overworked rather
than underworked as a cause of social deterioration. Social
disorders arising from conscienceless citizenship have yet to
be made clear.
There are doubtless two dangers to which the settlement
is easily susceptible. The first is the danger that it shall
approach too nearly the spirit of the mission which, as Canon
Barnett has recently pointed out, in the Nineteenth Century
Review, will always exist, will always be needed, but which
from its very nature can not be a settlement. Those who join
it believe in some doctrines or methods which they wish to
extend, it may be those of church, of socialists, of teetotallers, of political party; but followers are enlisted and organized and a vast amount of machinery created for a given
aim. They will always be able to tell how many they have
“reached,” and how many believe as they do. As Canon
Barnett says there are moments when definiteness of doctrine
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A FUNCTION OF THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT.
55
and the measuring of men’s motives must seem the most essential thing and at such times the settlement must appear
ineffective; but so far as a settlement group is committed to
one philosophy which it cares for above the meanings which
life may teach, so far as definiteness precludes perception,
so far as their minds are not free to rise and fall with their
neighbor’s minds, which are occupied with hundreds of cares
and hopes, so far a settlement has failed.
The second danger is the tendency to lay stress upon
what we might call “geographical salvation.” All over
the world from Russia west to Japan people are moving from
country to town, with the conviction that they are finding
more fullness of life. An advance guard may be said to be
moving back from the town to the country, from the sprinkling of the very rich to the little colonies, found in England
and America, who are protesting against the industrial system by getting out of it so far as possible. But within the
limits of the city itself, also can be found this belief in geographical salvation. When a given neighborhood becomes
shabby, or filled with foreigners, whose habits are unlike
those of their neighbors, the best people in the neighborhood
begin to move out, taking with them their initiative and
natural leadership, as their parents had previously taken it
from their native villages. A settlement deliberately selects
such a neighborhood, and moves into it, but must not lay
too much stress upon that fact in and of itself. Its social
relations are successful as it touches to life the dreary and
isolated, and brings them into a fuller participation of the
common inheritance. Its teaching is successful as it makes
easy and available that which was difficult and remote. Its
most valuable function as yet, lies along the line of interpretation and synthesis.
Hull House, Chicago.
JANE ADDAMS.
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American Academy of Political and Social Science
Race Relations in the United States
Author(s): W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 140, The
American Negro (Nov., 1928), pp. 6-10
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social
Science
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1016826 .
Accessed: 02/07/2013 23:43
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Race Relations in the United States
Du Bois
By W. E. BURGHARDT
Editor of The Crisis
INour present discussion of the rela-
hypocrites: fools, who in the presence
of plain facts, cannot think straight;
and hypocrites, who in the face of clear
duty, refuse to do the right thing and
yet pretend to do it.
tions between the white and black
races in the United States, we are facing
an astonishing paradox. In the first
place, the increasingly certain dictum
of science is that there are no “races,”
in any exact scientific sense; that no
measurements of human beings, of
bodily development, of head form, of
color and hair, of psychological reactions, have succeeded in dividing mankind into different, recognizable groups:
that so-called “pure ” races seldom, if
ever, exist and that all present mankind, the world over, are “mixed ” so
far as the so-called racial characteristics are concerned.
Notwithstanding these facts, and indeed, in the very face of them, we have
serious discussions of race in the United
States and of race relations; scientific
investigations, based on race measurements; and widespread assumption
among intelligent people that there are
between certain large groups of men ineradicable, and, for all practicable purposes, unchangeable racial differences;
and that the limitations of race can, to
some extent, be measured; and that the
question of the relations between these
groups is the greatest of social problems.
When, now, a nation of reasonable human beings faces such a contradiction
and paradox, the danger to their development and culture is great. The
greatest danger lies not in the so-called
“problems'” of race, but rather in the
integrity of national thinking and in the
ethics of national conduct. Such a nation, if it persists in its logical contradictions, is bound to develop fools and
PROBLEMS
OF LOGIC AND ETHICS
It is, of course, clear as to what most
people mean by races and race problems in the United States; they refer to
national groups who are not of English
descent; religious groups like Jews;
“colored ” people like the Japanese and
Chinese; or, more especially, they have
in mind the group of twelve million
Americans who are descended from
former Negro slaves. This group has a
certain historical unity, a large percentage of common blood and the average
level of their intelligence, efficiency and
income, is below that of the average of
the nation. But with this broad general unity, goes great diversity: these
“Negroes” represent a wide intermixture of blood; they have produced
individuals of unusual intelligence and
efficiency, and they have accumulated
large amounts of property. Neither
their blood nor their condition constitute them a closed racial group, and
yet we treat them as such, in flat
contradiction of well-known facts and
scientific proof.
This paradox in the United States
has given rise to a series of subtle reactions which we loosely denominate
“race problems,” but which are in
truth problems of logic and ethics.
Take the matter of lynching: we have
in the last forty-three years allowed
mobs to murder over 4,000 persons
accused of crime. Public opinion has
6
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RACE RELATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES
largely condoned this because most of
these victims were of Negro descent.
Men have refused to take into account
the fact that slavery, ignorance and
poverty are a sufficient explanation of
crime among American freedmen, without any additional subtle and immeasurable racial characteristics; and
that “racial” crime is no different and
calls for no other remedies than any
other kind of crime.
On account of the “Negro problem”
we are making democratic government
increasingly impossible in the United
States. When the two old parties become corrupt and inefficient, no Third
Party can hope to win because the minority party is too strong to disappear.
This arises because we have let the
Democratic party establish itself in perpetuity by permitting it to use the political power of the black men and white
men which it has illegally disfranchised.
And we excuse this because of arguments of race inferiority. Yet it is
clear that the political corruption of
the Negro is a result of inexperience,
ignorance and poverty and not of the
color of his skin. This has been proven
by numberless Negro officials of ability
and honor from Reconstruction times
down to our own day.
We have submitted in the United
States to widespread customs, sometimes written into law, and sometimes
enforced by mob violence, which insult the manhood and sense of decency
of self-respecting human beings. In
various parts of the United States a
traveler may be compelled to pay
first-class fare for third-class accommodations, may be publicly stigmatized
and affronted despite his dress, character and attainment, and simply because
he has or is suspected of having a Negro
ancestor; families may be ousted from
their homes and made to lose their
property without due process of law;
children may be deprived of their
7
proper education; youth kept from an
opportunity to work and age from the
public enjoyment of wealth which it
has helped create, not for any individual fault or failing, but because the
majority of the group, thus singled out
for public insult, are descendants of
slaves, and, therefore, as a class, less
well-clothed, less well-educated, with
smaller incomes and with more difficulties to encounter than other people.
We have submitted to corrupt political conditions in great cities, like
Philadelphia, Chicago and Memphis,
because we would rather have corruption than recognize the manhood of the
best class of Negro citizens. Classifying all persons of Negro descent in
one conglomerate heap, we make it impossible for them to achieve even a
semblance of municipal freedom except by submission to political bosses
of the lowest type. Negroes get colored school teachers and policemen in
New York by serving Tammany; they
get representation in the Civil Service
and in the city council in Philadelphia
by following Vare; they get to the legislature and to Congress by supporting
Thompson in Chicago. Much as Southerners, Quakers and Illinoisians may
want decent government, numbers of
them prefer government by bootleggers
and scoundrels rather than by the
highest type of colored voters and
officials.
We treat crime in the United States,
not as a curable social phenomenon,
but as a chance for the exhibition of
class and racial hatred. And in large
areas of the country we deliberately
buy and sell colored criminals like
slaves; bad as our jails are for whites,
the chain-gangs and prisons for Negroes are inhuman breeding grounds for
crime and disease.
Education was once the foundation
stone of our democracy. But because
we long hesitated and still hesitate to
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8
THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
admit the descendants of slaves into
the body politic, we have not only
made the education of Negro children
a half-hearted, incomplete enterprise,
but have begun to hesitate over giving
the white poor a chance for high school
and college. After a half century of
Negro public schools in the South there
are states where the expenditures for
Negro schools are less than a fifth of
those for whites and yet the white
schools are not good. A large group of
public school officials and intelligent
white folk, in the South, still believe
that so far as black folk are concerned,
ignorance is a more profitable investment than intelligence.
Hand in hand with all this, this
country professes loudly and blatantly
a religion of mercy, humanity and sacrifice; we profess to regard all men as
brothers, and teach that we should
turn the other cheek to evil; and that
all human distinctions, not based on
individual character and desert, are
false and wrong. Yet, at the mere
presence of a colored face, again and
again our whole moral fabric falls, fails
and collapses, in simple matters of
human intercourse, in larger matters of
social service and in the very pews
of the church itself.
What is going to become of a country
which allows itself to fall into such an
astonishing intellectual and ethical
paradox? Nothing but disaster. Intellectual and ethical disaster in some
form must result unless immediately we
compel the thought and conscience of
America to face the facts in this socalled racial problem.
SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION
Nor are the facts hidden or difficult
to find: black slaves were imported into
the United States in the seventeenth,
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because their labor was profitable for the
white inhabitants. On slave labor the
economic foundations of the United
States were laid. As industry developed, slave labor remained profitable,
only in agriculture, and chiefly in the
raising of cotton, sugar, rice and such
semi-tropical crops. Here for a long
time it was immensely profitable and
the whole country, north and south
and west, shared in this prosperity
built on slavery. The nineteenth century, however, brought changes-the
factory system, a labor movement
and democratic humanitarianism. The
impoverishment of Southern land, on
the other hand, meant that slavery
could only survive by means of a new
slave trade and imperial aggression in
the tropics which should annex new
rich land to the United States. But
imperialism and slave labor meant severe competition with white labor and
the new industries of the North. The
result was a Civil War which emancipated the slaves.
These emancipated slaves were victims who had been bred deliberately
in sloth, ignorance, poverty and crime.
Their emancipation meant that they
must either be killed off, gotten rid of
by compulsory migration, or that they
must be educated and trained.
The United States was forced to
adopt the last course to insure its victory over the rebellious states and to
justify the war in the eyes of the civilized world. The country was encouraged in its course by the Abolitionists, the Christian churches and the
humanitarians; but particularly by the
sincere and almost desperate cooperation of the freedmen. The result has
been astonishing. It has repeatedly
been said that never before in a similar
period of history has so large a group
of people made the social, intellectual
and economic advance that American
Negroes have made. It is not a question as to whom credit for this belongs.
That a part of it belongs to the white
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RACE
RELATIONS
IN THE UNITED
South is true. That a larger part of it
belongs to the Abolition North is also
true. But by far the largest part of
the credit surely belongs to the struggling Negroes themselves.
FUTURE
RACE
PROBLEMS
But the question is not one of credit
and praise. It is a question as to what
place these emancipated and advancing
people are going eventually to occupy
in the United States of America.
Some people have long hoped that the
country would not have to face this
question, and that according to timehonored tradition, the emancipated
black man would be unable to withstand civilization and would die out.
The American Negro has firmly refused this invitation. Others have
acted as though they hoped to goad the
Negro into open revolt and then kill
him, by police, mobs and machine guns.
Much as these methods have been tried
in the last half century, they have not
been wholly successful. They have
doubtless cowed black men; they have
made hereditary cowards of large numbers of them; they have given Negroes
a widespread inferiority complex; but,
notwithstanding all this, Negroes as a
mass are still surging forward, and
pushing upward, determined, ambitious and rising masses of humanity.
Now the real problem of race relations in the United States which the majority of Americans are seldom willing
to face frankly, is this: Must such people be recognized as full-fledged Americans or must they be compelled to occupy a caste position of inferiority
until such time as they die out, migrate
or commit suicide by voluntary revolt?
There is no doubt that Negroes are
today and in the mass, poorer, less
intelligent and less efficient than whites.
It takes no elaborate “intelligence”
tests to prove what would be a miracle
if it were not true. But there is also
STATES
9
not the slightest doubt but that there
are Negroes and increasing numbers
of them, who are equal to, and above
the average of the white nation by
any standard of measurement. There
is no reason to believe that the possibility of improvement among blacks is
not just as great as among whites.
How then, is the black group to be
treated, especially those of them who
are by any measurement the equal of
the whites?
This is the real problem which we do
not like to face, and we do not like to
face it because we believe that its
solution involves miscegenation.
MISCEGENATION
If groups of people live together
there is going to be more or less intermingling of blood. This was true in
the slave South. It is true today in
caste-ridden United States. It will be
true tomorrow whether the American
Negro becomes really free or sinks to
greater serfdom. Will this intermingling of races be hastened if the American Negro reaches the economic and intellectual average of the American
white man? Or if numbers of Negroes
become superior in training and ability
to the average of white Americans?
This question no man can answer offhand. If the greatest ambition of the
Negro is to become white, then certainly his advance would bring him
greater opportunities for intermarriage
with the whites. But why should he
want to be white if there is no reason
because of treatment or opportunity?
Because of political freedom or social
contact? It is quite conceivable that
the advance of the American Negro
might mean not more but less intermingling of blood.
This again brings us face to face
with facts, perfectly well known, but
continually ignored. A foreigner
might go over the literature of the
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10
THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
Negro problem and come to believe
that there are in the United States facing each other today, two absolutely
unmixed groups of whites and blacks.
Yet nothing is further from the truth.
The so-called American Negro is probably less than 95 per cent of pure African
descent. There is reason to believe
that over 70 per cent of these so-called
Negroes are descendants of American
whites and that 40 per cent of them
have as much white blood as Negro.
Such intermingling of blood took place,
moreover, mainly during slavery and
mainly at the demand of white folk.
Assuming that there is today no such
demand from whites, it is difficult to
see how in the future there could come
from self-respecting, educated persons
of Negro descent, any demand for this
mingling of blood which would bring as
much miscegenation in the near future
as in the past.
In the far future miscegenation is
going to be widely practised in the
world and that despite the likes and
dislikes of present living beings. We
today can at least determine whether
such race mixture shall be between intelligent, self-respecting and self-determining people, or between masters
and slaves. Any attempt to stop miscegenation today by forcing millions of
men into pauperism and ignorance and
by making their women prostitutes and
concubines is too nasty and barbaric to
be faced even by hypocritical America.
SEGREGATION
Moreover, those persons who are
determined at any cost: at the cost of
religious hypocrisy, political disarrangement, and intellectual clarity,’ to
keep American Negroes from becoming
men, must remember this will prevent
an intermingling of blood only in case
it is followed up by actual physical
segregation. This means the forceable removal of millions of human beings from this country to some other
and the setting aside of lands and territories claimed and in part occupied
by whites. Such forceable migration
since the slave trade is a chimaera
which no civilized people has contemplated; neither Kenya nor the Union
of South Africa with all their color
hatred and Negro degradation have
been able to assign separate lands.
And why is this? Because the industrial organization of the modern
world and the incomes of white folk demand today as never before a world
with the “Open Door” and unsegregated and free contact of all races and
peoples. Here the paradox of race appears in its world guise as demanding,
on the one hand, no race equality, and,
on the other, complete racial contact
and the paradox persists because it
rests based on the pious hope that by
low wage and little education “lower”
races will remain lower and satisfied.
What has the United States to contribute to this world problem? Darkness rather than light-paradox rather
than logic. “Lower” races can be
educated. We have proven this.
What shall the world do-prevent
their education and exploit them as
ignorant slaves, or let them struggle up
and then beat them back? How fine
an alternative and how brilliant a
program of World Peace for the land
which the World War placed at the
head of the nations!
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American Economic Association
The Economic Future of the Negro
Author(s): W. E. B. Dubois
Source: Publications of the American Economic Association, 3rd Series, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Feb.,
1906), pp. 219-242
Published by: American Economic Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2999974 .
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THE
ECONOMIC
FUTURE
W. E.
OF
THE
NEGRO
B. DUBOIS
The object of this paper is to note the historic rise of
economic classes among Negro Americans and to seek
by a study of presentconditions to forecastthe economic
futureof this class of American citizens. As has been
many times pointed out the slaves consisted of a mass
of fieldhands and a smaller number of selected servants
and a few artisans. When this mass of labor was
suddenly transmutedinto a body of laborers more or
less free there ensued a struggle for economic independence which is still going on. When now we discuss the economic futureof this group of ten millions
we must firstof all not fall into the prevalent errorof
speaking of these persons as though they formed one
essentially homogeneous group. This was not true
even in slavery times, and it is so false today that any
theoriesbuilt on such a conception are false fromthe
start.
The Negro American afterslavery made four distinct
and differenteffortsto reach economic safety. The first
effortwas through the prefermentof the selected house
servant class; the second was by means of competitive
industry; the thirdwas by means of landholding and the
fourthby means of what I am going to call the group
economy-a phrase which I shall later explain.
of the house servant.
i. The effort
The one person who under the slavery regime came
nearest escaping fromthe toils of the system and disabilities of the caste was the favorite house servant.
This arose fromfour reasons:
2I9
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220
Amzerican Economdc Associalion
(a) The house servant was brought into closest contact with the culture of the master’s family.
(b) He had more often the advantages of town and
city life.
(c) He was able to gain at least some smattering of
an education.
(d) He was usually a blood relative of the master
class.
For this reason the natural leadership of the emancipated race fell to this class, the brunt of the burden of
reconstruction fell on their shoulders and when the
historyof this period is writtenaccording to truth and
not according to our prejudices it will be clear that no
group of men ever made a more tremendous fight
against more overwhelming odds.
It seemed natural at this time that this leading class
of upper servants would step into the economic life of
the nation fromthis vantage ground and play a leading
role. This they did in several instances: the most
conspicuous being the barber, the caterer, and the
steward. For the most part however economic society
refusedto admit the black applicant oil his merits to
any place of authorityor advantage; lhe held his own
work of barber until he met the
in the semni-servile
charge of color discrimination from his own folk and
the strong competitionof Germans and Italians; while
the caterer was displaced by the palatial hotel in which
he could gain no foothold. On the whole then the
mass of house servants found the doors of advancement
closed in their faces ; the better tenth both themselves
and through their better trained children escaped into
the professionsand thus found economic independence.
The mass of servants remained servants or turned
toward industry.
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Eco-noynic
Futlure of MizeNegro
22I
2. In lines ofindustrial cooperation the second attempt
of the freedmen was made. It was a less ambitious
attemptthan that of the house servants and comprehended larger numbers; it was characterized by a large
migrationto cities and towns and entrance into work
as teanisters,railway sections hands, miners, saw-mill
employees, porters,hostlers, etc.
This class met and joined in the towns the older class
of artisans,most of them connected with the building
trades and together this class attempted economic advance. Outside the farmers it is this class that has
attracted most attention, that has met all the
brunt of the economic battle, and that are usually
referred to in studies of this sort. What the outcome of this second attempt at economic freedom
will be can only be divined by calling attention to the
third method by which the Negro has sought the Way
of Life.
3. Meantime, however, the freed had hands started
forwardby a third way that of land ownership. Most
of those who got any start became share-telnantsand a
fourth of these succeeded in buying land. Those who
bought land approximated economic independence,
forming the closed plantation economy of the olden
times but with colored owner, colored laborers, and
colored tenants. In an increasing numberof cases the
colored store came in to help them and we have a complete system of what I have called the group economy.
4. The Group Economy. This fourth method is of
striking importance but outside the country districtsis
little understood. It consists of such a cooperative arrangementof industries and services within the Negro
group that the group tends to become a closed economic
circle largely independent of the surrounding white
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222
American Economic Association
world. The recognitionof this fact explains many of
the anomalies which puzzle the student of the Negro
American-pardon me, I should not say puzzle; nothing
ever puzzles a student of the Negro-but that which
makes our conclusions so curiously incoherent.
You used to see numbers of colored barbers ; you are
tempted to think they are all gone-yet today there are
more Negro barbers in the United States than ever before,but at the same titne a larger number than ever
beforecater solely to colored trade where they have a
monopoly. Because the Negro lawyer, physician, and
teacher serve almost exclusively a colored clientage,
their very existence is half forgotten. The new Negro
business men are not successors of the old ; there used
to be Negro business men in New York, Philadelphia,
and Baltimore catering to white trade. The new Negro
business man caters to colored trade. So far has this
gone that today in every city of the United States with
a considerable Negro population, the colored group
is serving itself with religions ministration, medical
care, legal advice, and education of children: to a
growing degree with food, houses, books, and newspapers. So extraordinary has been this development
that it formsa large and growing part in the economy
in the case of fully one-half of the Negroes of the
United States and in the case of something between
5o,ooo and IOO,ooo town and city Negroes, representing
at least 300,000 persons the group economy approaches
a complete system. To these may be added the bulk
of the 2oo,ooo Negro farmers who own their farms.
They forma natural group economy and are increasing
the score of it in every practical way. This then is the
fourthway in which the Negro has sought economic
salvation.
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Economic Future of hle Negro
223
Having reviewed now historically these four sets of
effortslet us ask next: What are the questions in the
present problem of economic status ? they may be
summed up in four groups:
i. The relation of the Negro to city and country.
2. The relation of the Negro to group and national
economy.
3. The influenceof race prejudice.
4. The question of efficiency.
i. City and country. A fact of great importance in
regard to the economic condition of the Negro is his
rush city-ward so that today nearly a fourth of the
colored population lives in cities and towns. This
means an intensifyingof the urban economic problem.
The group of over two million town Negroes represents
preeminentlyall of the economic problems outside of
those connected with land-holding and agriculture.
Moreover the city Negroes contain probably a third
of the intelligent Negroes, and have a rate of illiteracy
of probably less than 33 7o. Here it is then in the city
that the more intricate problems of economic life and
race contact are going to be fought out. On the other
hand the very presence of seven million Negroes in the
countrydistricts makes the economic problem there
though simpler ill quality of tremendous proportionsin
quantity and of added significancewhen we see how the
countryis feeding the city problems.
2. The group and national economy. Present conditions show that while the force of competition from
without is of tremendous economic importance in the
economic development of the Negro, it is not by any
means final; ill an isolated country the industry of the
inhabitants could be supported and developed by means
of a protective tariff,until the country was able to
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224
American Economic Association
enter into international trade with fully developed resources; that a similar kind of thing could be accomplished in a group not isolated but living scattered
among more numerous and richer neighbors is often
forgotten. There is thereforea double question in regard to the Negroes’ economic advance; the first question is: How far is the Negro likely to gain a foothold
as one of the economic factors ill the nation’s industrial
organization? The second is, How far can the Negro
develop a group economy which will break the force of
race prejudice until his right and ability to enter the
national economy are assured ?
3. The influenceof race prejudice. This brings us
to a consideration of the kind of retarding prejudice
which the Negro meets in the economic world. This,
may be stated brieflyas follows: outside of all question
of ability an American of Negro descent will find more
or less concerted effort oln the part of his white
neighbors:
(a.) To keep him fromall positions of authority.
(b.) To prevent his promotion to higher grades.
(c.) To exclude him entirely fromcertain lines of industry.
(d.) To preventhim fromcompeting upon equal terms
with white workimigmen.
(e.) To prevent his buying land.
(f.) To prevent his defence of his economic rightsand
status by the ballot.
These effortshave had varyingsuccess and have been
pressed with varying degrees of emphasis. Yet they
must all be taken into account; strikes have repeatedly
occurred against Negro foremen,of whose ability there
was no complaint; the white office boy, errand-boy,,
section hand, locomotive firemen,all have before them
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Economic Future of the Negro
225
the chalice to become clerk or manager or to rise in the
railway service. The Negro has few such openings.
Fully half of the trade unions of the United States,
counted by numerical strength, exclude Negroes from
membershipand thus usually prevent them fromworking at the trade. Another fourth of the unions while
admittinga few black men here and there practically
exclude most of them. Otily in a few unions, mostly
unskilled, is the Negro welcomed as in the case of the
miners; in a few others the economic foothold of the
Negro was good enough to prevent his expulsion as in
some of the building trades. Agitation to prevent the
selling- of land to Negroes has always been spread over
large districtsin the south and is spreading, and in a
recent campaign in Atlanta the most telling cartoon for
the influencing of white voters was one which represented the house of the candidate being built by black
meln. The black vote was of course disfranchised in
this contest.
4. The last element in the economic condition of the
Negro is the great question: How efficienta laborer is
the Negro, and how efficientcan lie become with intelligence, technical training, and encouragement?
That theaverage Negro laborer today is less efficientthan
the average European laborer is certain. When, however,
you take into account the Negro’s ignorance,his past industrial training,and the social atmosphere in which he
works it is not so easy to say off-handwhat his possible
worthis. Certailnlyincreasing intelligence has made him
increasingly discontented with his conditions of work;
the determinedwithdrawing of responsibility from the
Negro has not increased his sense of responsibilitythe systematicexploiting of black labor has hurt its
I5
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226
American Economic Association
steadiness and reliability; notwithstandingall this there
never were beforein the world’s historyso many black
men steadily engaged in comllmonand skilled labor as
in the case of the American Negro; nor is there a
laboring force which judiciously guided seems capable
of more remarkabledevelopment.
Having now glanced at the historic development and
the presentelements of the problem, let us take each
economic group of Negroes and consider its present
condition and probable future.
i. The 250,000 independents. This group includes
2oo,ooo farmers, 2o,ooo teachers, I 5,000 clergymen,
IO,ooo merchants,and numbers of professional men of
various sorts. They are separated sharply into a rural
group of farmers and an urban group. They are
characterized by the fact that with few exceptions they
live by an economic service done their own people.
This is least true in regard to the farmers but even in
their case it is approximately true ; they, more than
any other group of Negro farmers,raise their own supplies, and use their cotton as a surplus crop; through
this alone usually do they come into the national
economy. This group is the one that feels the force of
outward competitionand prejudice least in its economic
life and most in the spiritual life. It is the head and
frontof the group economy movement, comprehends
the spiritual as well as economic leaders and is bound
in the futureto have a large amid important developnient, limited only by the ability of the race to support
it. In some respects it is of course vulnerable. Many
of the teachers for instance, depend upon. educational
boards elected by white voters, and upon philanthropy.
There has been concerted action in the rural districts
of the south to drive out the best Negro teachers and
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Economic Fture of MleNegro
227
even in the cities the’ way of the independent black
teacher who dares think his own thought is made difficult, the teachers too in the great philanthropic
foundations are being continually warned that their
bread and butter depend on their agreeing with present
public opinion in regard to the Negro. There is growing up however silently almost unnoticed a distinct
Negro private school system officered,taught, attended,’
Such private schools
and supported by Negroes.
have today at least 25,000 pupils and are growing
rapdly.
If we regard now the city group exclusively we find
this is true
The best class of this group is fully abreast in educationand morality with the great middle class of Amerigreat life
cans, their physical record in the thirty-four
insurance companies is far better than the record of the
Irish and as good as that of German Americans. They
have furnishednotable names in literature,art, business,
and professionallife and have repeatedlyin Boston, New
York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, and in
other great centers proved their right to be treated as
American citizens on a plane of perfect equality with
other citizens. Despite this, and despite the fact that
this group is numerically small and without much inherited wealth, it has been struggling under two overwhelming burdens: firstupon this group has been laid
the duty and responsibility of the care, guidance, and
reformationof the great stream of immigrants fromthe
rural south simply because they are of the same race
there is no claim or vestige of a claim that this small
city group of risen Negroes is responsible for the
degradation of the plantation, yet the whole communitypartly by thoughtless transferenceof ideas and
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228
AmericanEconomicAssociation
largely by deliberate intention has said, for instance,
that when between i840 and I900, 50,000 strangers,
ignorant, mistrained,careless, and sometimes viciousthat when this group precipitated itself ou a city like
Philadelphia that practically the whole responsibility
of their training and uplifting be placed not upon the
half million Philadelphians but upon a sinall group of
IO,ooo persons in that city who were related to them
by ties of blood. This was a hard thing to ask and an
unfairrequirement,and yet if it is asked that Irish see to
poor Irish immigrants,and Jews to poor Jews, at least
this is always done: the helpers are given all aid and sympathy in their undertakings and their hands are upheld.
In the case of the Negro however, everydisability, every
legal, social, and economic bar placed before the new immiigrant must be endured by the city group on whom
theywere dumped. And that group must be judged continually and repeatedly by the worst class of those very
immigrantswhose uplift was calmly shifted to their
shoulders by the city at large. What could be the result of this? It could only be the submerging of the
talented tenth under the wave of immigration. ‘This
has happened repeatedlyin great cities; New York had
in the fortiesas intelligent a group of well-to-dothrifty
and skilled Negroes as the nation has ever seen. Forty
thousand strangersdropped on them. The city stimulated by white southerners formed a cordon around
them and not onlv cut off every avenue of economic
and social escape, but narrowed, beat, and crowded
back the betterclass out of their vantage ground which
men like my grandfather helped them gain by work
and diligence and desert, and this group was literally
drowned and suffocatedbeneath the deluge of immigrants and has ever wholly recovered itself to this
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Economic Fuluzre of /heNegro
229
day. In Philadelphia this rise and choking to death
has taken place three distinct times within a single
century. In Chicago today a silent battle of this sort
to the death is taking place ; there is a city where in
law, medicine, and dentistrymen of Negro blood have
repeatedly stood in. the foremost ranks of their profession, where Negroes have risen in economic cooperation
to positions of authority and preferment,today when
25,ooo strangers trained partially in the Mississippi
delta of which my good friend,Mr. Stone, will tell you,
when these mnen.
have been precipitated on Chicago a
desperate effortis being made to level every Negro in
the city by treatment and discrimination down to the
disabilities and limitations of the least deserving of the
group.
In the south the beating back of the leading group
has not awaited the excuse of immigration. On the
general ground of impudence or indolence this class
of economic and social leaders have been repeatedly
driven out of the smaller towns, while in the larger
cities every possible combination and tool fromthe Jim
Crow laws to the secret society and the boycott have
been made time and tine again to curtail the economic
advantages of this class and to inake their daily life
so intolerable that they would either leave or sink into
listless aquiescence. I know a Negro business man
worth $5o,ooo in a southern city. He has a white
clientele and he tells me that he dare not buy a horse
and buggy lest the white people may think lie’s getting
rich and boycott him ; a barber in another city built a
finehouse on a corner lot and in a single year his white
trade was gone. A black business man in a country
town of Alabama where I made some studies preparatoryto this paper underbid his white fellow merchant
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230
American Economic Associalion
in buying cotton seed and was shot down for his
shrewdness.
What then can this town group do in self defence?
It can organize the Negroes about it into a self-supplying group. This organization is going on. So far has
it gone that in cities like Washington, Richmond,
and Atlanta a colored family which does not employ a
colored physician is in danger of social ostracism ; ill the
north this is extending to grocery stores; in Atlanta
when I went thereeight years ago the whole business
of insurance for sickness and accident was in the hands
of white companies. Today fully one-half of it has
passed to black companies. This year I saw organized
cash capital and this
such a company with $I2,ooo
company today is taking $7oo a week in dues.
There are personswho see nothingbut the advantages
of this course. But it has its disadvantages. It intelnsifies prejudice and bitterness. The white collectors of
Atlanta insurance companies forfear of white opinion
would not take offtheir hats when they entered Negro
homes. The black companies have harped on this,
published it, called attention to it, and actually capitalized it into cold cash. Then too this movement
narrows the activity of the best class of Negroes, withdraws them frommuch helpful competitionand contact,
pervertsand cheapens theirideals-in fact provincializes
them in thought and deed. Yet it is today the only
path of economic escape for the most gifted class of
black men and the development in this line which you
and I will live to see is going to be enormous.
Turning now to the rural group of this independent
class we come to the Negro land owners. Here first
we run flatagainst one of those traditional statements
which pass for truth because unchallenged: namely,
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Economic Fu/nre of I/keNegro
23 1
that it is easy for the southern Negro to buy land.
The letterof this statement is true, but the spirit of it
is false. There are vast tracts of land in the south that
anybodyblack or whitecan buy for little or nothing
forthe simple reason that theyare worth little or nothing.
Eventually these lands will become valuable. But they
are nearly valueless today. For the Negro, land to be
of any value must have present value-he is too poor
to wait. Moreover it must be
I. Land which he knows how to cultivate.
2. Land accessible to a market.
3. Land so situated as to affordthe owner protection.
There
are certain
crops which
the Negro
farmer
knows how to cultivate: to these can be added certain
food supplies. Gradually intensive cultivation can be
taught but this takes a long time. It is idle to compare the south with Belgium or France. The agricultural economy of their lands is the resultof centuries
of training aided by a rising market and by law and
order. The present agricultural economy of the south
is but a generation removed from the land-murderof a
slave regime. No graduate of that school knows how
to make the desert bloom and the process of teaching
must be long and tedious. Meantime he must live on
such crops as he knows how to cultivate. Moreover
bad roads, comparatively few railroads, and few
navigable riversthrow much of this land out of usefulness. But even more important than all this : the
black farmer must seek the protection of some communitylife with his own people and he finds that in
the black belt. But it is precisely in this black belt
that it is most difficultto buy land; here it is that the
capitalistic culture of cotton with a system of labor
peonage is so profitablethat land is high; more over in
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232
American Economic Association
many of these regions it is considered bad policy to sell
Negroes land because a fever of land owning ” demoralizes ” the labor system so that in the densest black belt
of the south the percentage of land holding is often
least among Negroes-a fact that has led to curious
moralizingi on the shiftlessness of black men. The
country does not yet realize that the cutting up of
southern plantations has ceased, and that under the
new slavery of Negro labor there has begun an astounding and dangerous concentration of landholding in the
south ; this is shown not simply by the increase of the
average size of farmsin. the central south from I44 to
155 acres in the last decade but these figures must be
modifiedenormously by the fact that these farms do
not belong to single owners but are owned in groups of
as high as 40 or 50 by great landed proprietors. In the
south there are 185,ooo owners who hold from two to
50 farins each and there are 5000 owners who have
over 20 farmsapiece.
Ill the South Central states alone
8oo mien own. a tract of land larger than Massachusetts,
Rhode Island, and Connecticut combined, and but
a few days ago I stood on the larid of a white Alabama
laud-ownerwho held 50 square miles and would not sell a
single acre to a black man. This land is the best land
of these regions. There are still other-regions in the
south, andllarge regions, where black men can buy land
at reasonable termsbut it is usually land poorly situated
as regards market, or unhealthful in climate, or so
placed as to afford the owner poor schools and lawless
and overbearing white neighbors.
Now add to this fact the realization of the training
and character of the Negro American farmer. We contintuallydiscuss and criticise these farmers as though
they were responsible trained men who carelessly or
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Economic Future of the Negro
233
viciously neglect their economic opportunity. They
are on the contraryunlettered men, trained consciously
and carefullyto irresponsibility,to whom all concepts
of modern propertyand saving are new and who need
benevolent guardianship in their upward striving.
Such guardianship they have in some cases received
fromformermasters and in this way a considerable
number of the present landowners firstgot their land.
In the great majority of cases however, this guardianship has consisted in deliberately taking the earning
of the Negro farmerand appropriating them to the use
of the landlord. The argument was this “These
Negroes do not need this inoney-if I give it to them
they’ll squander it or leave the plantation; therefore
give them just enough to be happy and keep theum
with me. In any case their labor rightfullybelongs to
me and my fathers and was illegally taken fromus.”
On the strengthof this argument and by such practices
fourthof
it is a conservative estimate to say that three-f
the stipulated wages and shares of crops which the
Negro has earned olnthe farm since emancipation has
been illegally withheld from him by the white landlords, either onlthe plea that this was for his own good
or without any plea.
Would this wealth have been wasted if given the
laborer? I waive the mere question of the right of any
take the purely
employer to withhold wages-and
economic question: Is the cominuuity Yicher by such
practices? It is not. The south is poorer. The best
Negroes would have squandered much at first and
most would have squandered all, but this would have
been.more than offsetby the increased responsibility
and efficiencyof the resulting Negro landholders…