Hull-House Maps & Papers, 125 Years Later: Part 1

In the early 1890s, South Prairie Avenue was one of the most fashionable addresses in Chicago, home to the mansions of prominent citizens such as department store founder Marshall Field, sleeping car inventor George Pullman, meatpacking magnate Philip Armour, and piano manufacturer W. W. Kimball. Most of the mansions that once graced “Millionaire’s Row” have been demolished, but you can still see an example of their splendor in the 17,000-square-foot Glessner House, now a museum.*

Less than two miles away from Marshall Field’s two-million-dollar mansion (about $50,000,000 in 2020 dollars), other Chicagoans lived in overcrowded tenements and worked — if they had employment at all — for long hours and often low wages in sweatshops, factories, meatpacking plants, and domestic service. The “City of the Big Shoulders” also had a large underbelly.

Chicago was not unique among cities during the Gilded Age in having a juxtaposition of opulence and poverty. But it was unique in having Hull House, the settlement house established by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889 “to provide a center for higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.” Hull House attracted a remarkable collection of social-reform-minded residents, mostly women, who “settled” (hence the name “settlement house”) in the area of the city they served.

In 1895, the residents of Hull House published Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together With Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions. The key feature of the book — the feature that made it a landmark in the history of statistics — was the set of eight maps displaying the nationalities and weekly wages of Chicagoans living in an area** just east of Hull House (Figures 1 and 2; I encourage you to visit the online archive at Northwestern University to obtain high-resolution downloadable pdf files of these maps).

Figure 1. Nationalities Maps from Hull House Maps and Papers.

Figure 1. Nationalities Maps from Hull House Maps and Papers.

Figure 2. Wage Maps from Hull House Maps and Papers.

Figure 2. Wage Maps from Hull House Maps and Papers.

The data had been collected between April and July 1893 by Florence Kelley and by men working for U.S. Commissioner of Labor Carroll D. Wright,*** and had been tabulated in a 620-page report to Congress (Wright, 1894). But the graphs created by the residents of Hull House brought the data alive by color-coding each nationality (in Figure 1) and wage level (in Figure 2). By looking at just eight pages, the reader could easily see the clustering of nationalities**** and the distribution of families’ weekly wages. Moreover, by comparing the sets of maps, the reader could explore relationships between wages and nationality.

The maps conveyed the statistical information with a high data density; they also were, and are, works of art. The remainder of this series of posts will explore:

Next: The women — one the subject of hundreds of books and articles, the other largely forgotten today — behind the Hull House Maps.

Copyright (c) 2020 Sharon L. Lohr

Footnotes

*The Glessner House Museum is closed through June 30, 2020 because of COVID-19, but the website has a marvelous virtual tour of the building and grounds. Also check out the museum’s “Ask Henry” blog, which tells the story of how General John A. Logan, who lived just south of Glessner House, issued a proclamation in 1868 calling for May 30 to be Decoration Day as a remembrance for soldiers who died in the Civil War. In 1968, legislation changed the day to the last Monday in May, and designated the national holiday as Memorial Day.

**The area was bounded by Polk Street on the north and 12th Street, now Roosevelt Road, on the south (approximately 0.3 miles); Halsted Street on the west and State Street on the east (approximately 1 mile). Wright (1894) documented that the area contained 19,748 persons in 1893.

For those interested in Chicago history, the second map from the left in Figures 1 and 2 contains the block at the intersection of DeKoven and Jefferson Streets where the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 had originated. The block is now home to a Chicago Fire Department Training Academy.

***Carroll Wright, one of the leading statisticians of the day, was appointed by President Chester Arthur to be the first U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1885, a position he held until his retirement in 1905. He served as president of the American Statistical Association from 1897 to 1909. Wright also played a major role in Edith Abbott’s statistical work during the first decade of the 20th century.

****The hundreds of pages of tables in Wright (1894) gave more detailed breakdowns for some of the statistics — for example, Table 1 for Chicago on pages 106-108 categorized area residents by race, nativity, age group, gender, and marital status — but provided no information on geographic location. The Hull House map on nationality in Figure 1 clearly displayed the residences of each race/nativity group. Thus, for example, the segregation of African Americans (indicated by the black color in the rightmost graph of Figure 1) is immediately apparent to the map viewer, but cannot be discovered in the statistics tabulated in Wright (1894).

References

References are found at the end of the last part of this series.


Sharon Lohr