The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 22 (2011)

How the Other Half Was Made:
Perceptions of Poverty in Progressive Era Chicago

Kotaro NAKANO*INTRODUCTION: INVENTING THE “OTHER HALF” AND THE DISCOVERY OF POVERTY
Jacob Riis’s 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, was the manifesto of
the discovery of poverty. It expressed the arrival of a new perception of poverty that was not only a personal moral issue but also a social problem that
middle-class Americans should concern themselves with. The opening sentences of this influential book read: “Long ago it was said that ‘one half of
the world does not know how the other half lives.’ . . . There came a time
when the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent
upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then theupper half fell to inquiring what was the matter.”1 These powerful words revealed two important attitudes toward poverty. The first was the tendency totreat poverty as a social vice that was preventable by adequate public reforms. The second was the emerging ethos of separating the “lower” people
from healthful civil society. Calling the poor “the other half” was a great
leap from Bible-based attitudes that proclaimed: “The poor ye have always
with you” (Matthew 26:11).
Importantly, Riis was not the only observer who lamented the bifurcationof American society. Hull House’s founder, Jane Addams, critically wrote in1892, “[There is] a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle whichmakes up the life of at least half the race. To shut one’s self away from that
Copyright © 2011 Kotaro Nakano. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be
distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission fromthe author.
*Associate Professor, Osaka University

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half of the race life is to shut one’s self away from the most vital part of it.”2
Of course, the lifework of this heroine of the settlement movement was toplant the spirit of East London’s Toynbee Hall, one of the world’s first settlement houses, on American soil to “bridge the gulf that industrialism had created between rich and poor, to reduce the mutual suspicion and ignorance of
one class for the other.”3 But, even there, the assumption was that there wasa cleavage that divided “half of the race” from the rest. Social scientist Simon Patten joined in the choir. His well-known 1896 remarks resonatedloudly: “Each class or section of the nation is becoming conscious of an opposition between its standards and the activities and tendencies of some lessdeveloped class. The South has its negro, the city has its slums. . . . Everyone is beginning to differentiate those with proper qualifications for citizenship from some class or classes which he wishes to restrain or to exclude
from society.”4 Serious anxiety about widening social divisions and a desire
to build an organically integrated national life was shared by a wide range ofAmerican intellectuals.
When historian Robert H. Wiebe used the postcolonial term “ideology ofdifference” and the Marxist phrase “sinking the lower class” to refer to these“economic, legal, and physical forces of separation,” he insisted that “thediscovery of poverty between the 1890s and the First World War was fundamentally the spreading perception of social distances so vast that middleclass Americans saw no prospect of bridging them.”5 These perceptions are,as Michael Katz has argued in The Undeserving Poor (1989), revealed when
one examines period discourses of poverty: “Because the language of poverty is a vocabulary of invidious distinction, poverty discourse highlights thesocial construction of difference.”6 Indeed, reviewing the historical discourses on poverty provides us with one of the best outlooks from which toconsider divided nationhood in the Unites States.
Intriguingly, this “social distance” was assumed by contemporaries of Riis
to be ascribable to cultural differences that divided the poor from “us.” Despite the Progressives always stressing measurable criteria of physical insufficiency such as decent housing conditions or a poor standard of living, theyoften attributed “otherness” to ethnoracial belonging. For instance, Jacob
Riis himself commented that “the boundary line of the Other Half lies
through the tenements,” the poor people’s housing that “had ceased to be
sufficiently separate, decent, and desirable to afford what are regarded asordinary wholesome influences of home and family.” At the same time, one
notices that most of The Other Half is an examination of ethnic populations
such as “the sweaters of Jewtown” or “Bohemian cigar-makers” in Manhat-

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tan7. The middle-class American imagination of poverty issues consisted not
only of concern about economic destitution but also dread of ethnoracial
subcultures. We must remember that Jane Addams interpreted Toynbee
Hall’s before-mentioned enthusiasm for immigration as a solution to classproblems in the American context as significant for “build[ing] a bridge between European and American experiences . . . to give them both moremeaning and a sense of relation.”8
Needless to say, chauvinistic elements were even harsher. Many natives
were intolerant even of the poor people’s self-supporting benevolent systems, which they saw as having been “built up out of racial, religious, industrial affiliations; out of blood kinship.” For them, these ethnic safety nets
were an insidious sign of “the other half.”9This aspect of poverty history leads us to reconsider the character of social stigma and class stratification in twentieth-century America. If the problem of poverty discourse in American sociopolitical culture is that it“slipped easily, unreflectively, into a language of family, race and culture
rather than inequality, power, and exploitation,” as Michael Katz writes,
criticizing current “culture of poverty” discourses, the “discovery” of poverty at the turn of twentieth century will not be historically insignificant.10
What we need to do here is to contextualize these issues on poverty
within contemporary historical developments, including mass immigration,
the formation of the color line, and Americanization, that is, the movement
for cultural assimilation of ethnic minorities. Examining how Americans
created “the other half” and made it a subject of social control as they “discovered poverty” helps us to reconsider the character of nation building thatwent on in the years around World War I as a unique process of stratificationand stigmatization. To explore these historical processes, I will review thesurveys and discourses of a generation of intellectuals and social workers
who were dedicated to the study of poverty problems in the urban North.
I. THE MAKING OF THE PERCEPTION OF POVERTY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Robert Bremner’s From the Depths (1956), which was published in the
midst of the unprecedented prosperity after World War II, was the first comprehensive historiography on the “discovery” of poverty in the previous half
century. In his epochal book, Bremner argued that for intellectuals at theturn of century “insufficiency and insecurity had come to be regarded aseven more disturbing issues than dependency.” In those days, “the industrial
causes of misery were recognized as more important than the moral; and so-

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cial rather than individual reform was being urged as the appropriate remedy
for want.” He suggested that this birth of a new perception of poverty, particularly after the nationwide economic depression in 1893 led to the declineof the Charities Organizations Society (COS), whose morally oriented philanthropic “friendly visitors” gave way to more environmentally inclined reformers.11 This generalization still seems to work in the cases of many settlement workers and liberal social scientists. When Edward T. Devine, editorof The Charities (later The Survey), criticized the former generation’s charities, his opinion represented a shared sensibility among a wide range of reformers. In 1900 he wrote: “It is possible that in the analysis of the causes ofpoverty emphasis has been placed unduly upon personal causes, such as intemperance, shiftlessness, and inefficiency, as compared with causes that lie
in the environment such as accident, disease resulting from insanitary surroundings, and death of bread-winner due to undermined vitality.” Devine
believed that because poverty was socially originated, it could and should becorrected and prevented: “Poverty is certainly in part a social product. We
have no choice but to treat it with a due sense of social responsibility. Someof us have the inspiration of a profound conviction that it may virtually beabolished.”12This new view of poverty was never free from social stigma. Robert
Hunter’s influential book, The Poverty stressed the distinction between thepoor in general and pauperism when he redefined poverty as a standard ofliving lacking in “those necessities which will permit them to maintain astate of physical efficiency.” Hunter differentiated two classes: “A pauper is
one who depends upon public or private charity for sustenance. A man may
be in utter destitution and may even die of starvation, but he may not becalled a pauper unless he applies for and receives charitable relief.” Significantly, he argued that “paupers are not, as a rule, unhappy. They are notashamed; they are not keen to become independent; they are not bitter ordiscontented. They have passed over the line which separates poverty frompauperism.” On the other hand, the “the essence of poverty” is defined ashaving “the dread of hunger.” Hunter wrote: “Poverty is not the lack ofthings” but “the fear and the dread of want.”13
Apparently, Hunter’s version of the “sinking the lower class” is not quite
new. Classification of the poor is deeply embedded in American politicalculture.14 Even a handbook for friendly visitors distributed by the New YorkCOS in 1883 distinguished the worthy and unworthy applicant for relief byidentifying the latter as “need[ing] to be treated with wise and firm severity.
Wherever liquor, or thieving, or imposture, or any form of vice has got hold

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of a family, reform must be the main thing to aim at.” The manual also described paupers as follows: “The poorest poor are those who have no wholesome contact with society or with each other. They are those who havefallen into a sordid, isolated, and indifferent life, which is more animal thanhuman.” However, taking care of the dependent was another purpose of visiting. The handbook articulated that a significant goal for these wealthy philanthropists was to “awaken and cherish [the poor’s] home affections,”
among them “to cultivate courtesy of speech and manner, and to prompt thelittle mutual sacrifices which make life gracious.”15
This kind of optimism toward the correction of pauperism still could beseen among the “forerunner[s] of progressivism,” such as social scientist
Richard T. Ely.16 Ely’s article in The North American Review in 1891 asserted that pauperism was “a curable disease.” Referring to Charles Booth’s
analysis of English poverty, Ely insisted that “the dependent” should be focused among the “submerged tenth.”17 In terms of the causes of dependency,
Ely was not completely an environmental determinist. He actually agreed
with Amos G. Warner, a secretary of the Baltimore COS, who assumed thatpauperism was partly caused by heredity and partly by environment. Ely
was, however, an advocate of social reform and wrote that “pauperism as
now known may be considered a needless evil; in other words, in modern
society there are sufficient resources to cure it if men would but apply
them.” At the same time, he never concealed the fact that his reformist mind
was motivated by faith. Ely, who was a leading figure of the Social Gospel
movement in the late nineteenth century, incisively criticized his fellow
Christians’ empty repetition of the Bible’s “The poor ye have with you always,” by asserting, “We have the scribes and Pharisees always with us,
those who pervert Scripture and make it an excuse for their own shortcomings.”18
However, more social-engineer type experts of the 1910s did not share theoptimistic perspective of the early Progressives. Stigmatization of the poorest of the poor was accelerated in the discourse of Jacob H. Hollander, aneconomist at Johns Hopkins University. In his The Abolition of Poverty,
published in 1914 nine years after Robert Hunter’s The Poverty, Hollander
concentrated his analysis more on “economic insufficiency” as a conditionof poverty, by which he meant “midway between the modestly circumstanced and the outright dependent . . . in the sense of [being] inadequately
fed, clad, and sheltered.” Hollander asserted, on the other hand, that paupers
were “those who are in chronic need of public aid or private relief to maintain physical existence.” Pauperism represented “the pathological disorder

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KOTARO NAKANOof the social body.” When he explained the relation between the two, Hollander followed Hunter’s dread of pauperism to delineate a devastating image of pauperism that contrasted with poverty as defined by wants: “Not
only is the interval between insufficiency and dependence at all times narrow, but the inability to provide against mishap or calamity, indeed, the very
conditions of body and mind which grow out of under-nourishment andovercrowding make fatally easy the transition from self-support to dependence. Poverty has thus been linked to a treacherous footpath encircling thehopeless morass of pauperism.”19
The shift of interest from dependency to a general economic insufficiency
marked the arrival of more expansive perceptions of poverty, defining it byphysical wants apart from the morals and characters of the poor was logically sustained by cutting off and sinking the poorest “half.” Abandoning“the other half” was a serious matter, given that the legal system in thosedays savagely deprived them of citizenship. According to political historian
Alexander Keyssar, “a dozen states . . . barred from the franchise any man
who received public aid,” and “four states excluded inmates of poorhouses
or charitable institutions, and many more throughout the country prohibited
such inmates from gaining legal residence.”20 Immigration laws were also
designed to keep out paupers. The Immigration Act of 1907 prescribed theexclusion of “idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded persons . . . [and] paupers,” aswell as “persons likely to become public charge; professional beggar[s].” Italso enabled the government to deport “any alien[s] . . . such as become
public charges from causes existing prior to landing.” Anybody who could
not “earn a living” for physical or mental reasons was unfit and undesirable
and subject to deportation. These provisions corresponded to domestic pauper exclusions.21
These facts highlight another feature of poverty discourse, that is to say, it
has so frequently contextualized the poor in reference to the stranger. The
Poverty by Robert Hunter is not an exception. In spite of its liberal approachwith a focus on the environment rather than morals, its last chapter, titled“Immigration,” is full of naive stereotypes of immigrants. Here, Hunter arbitrarily equates foreignness with poverty, writing that “the poor are almost
entirely foreign born.” He, furthermore, hypothesized that the social separation caused by immigrant subcultures, which differed from “Americangroups on national or racial lines,” was the distinguishing character ofAmerican poverty: “In the largest cities of America there are many otherthings which separate the rich and the poor. Language, institutions, customs,
and even religion separate the native and the foreigner. It is this separation

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which makes the problem of poverty in America more difficult of solution
than that of any other nation.”22This pessimism about resolution to the problem of poverty was based
partly on the assumption that recent immigrants were racially inferior:“These immigrants, largely of Slavonic race, come from a lower stratum ofcivilization.” Hunter used James Bryce’s American Commonwealth to implicate these immigrants’ social proximity to pauperism. New immigrants“were less quickly amenable to American influences, and probably altogether less improvable,” and they “may retain their own low standard of decency and comfort.” Additionally, Hunter put forward the idea that aliens
were a menace who impoverished “American” workers: “The coming ofthese strange peoples from all parts of the world” must “[increase] the poverty among the native as well as among the more or less Americanizedworking classes. The poverty of the Irish, and the degeneration which has
resulted from it, is an excellent example.” Thus Hunter enthusiastically supported more restrictive federal immigration legislation as a major solution topoverty.23
When Hunter wrote, “We must speak of immigration in its relation topoverty and therefore mainly in its economic aspects,” he was expressing
what his contemporaries believed. In the same year, 1904, the Chicago Daily
Tribune published a long interview with William Williams, an immigrationcommissioner at Ellis Island outside New York City. Williams first points tourban crowding as caused by immigration: “The congestion of foreigners in
our large cities is probably the most serious feature of the immigration problem . . . a serious question for us to decide whether we can afford to havesuch vast additions of an admittedly undesirable population.” He then makes
the association between undesirable immigration and pauperism: “[The] difficulty is that we are getting thousands upon thousands of the worst elements
among the south Italians, the Slavs, and the Russian Jews . . . who must inevitably degrade and debase our standards . . . and merely add to the numbers of the hopeless paupers and pitifully poor of the great cities.”24
We should note that even the more cosmopolitan reformers accepted theassumption that the foreign born, “clannish” subculture constituted some essential elements of urban poverty. The Co-operation, published by the Chicago Bureau of Charities, characterized Italian poverty as “uncleanliness;strong clannishness which allows falsehoods.”25 When Hull House made anelementary social survey in its neighborhood in Chicago’s West Side, Jane
Addams and her fellow social workers found that the vices of the sweatshop
and child labor were inseparable from the patriarchal and patronage systems

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KOTARO NAKANOof Jewish, Bohemian, and Italian community traditions.26 The alienation of
paupers and the isolation of immigrants intriguingly coincided and intertwined to create a new social stigma of the twentieth century.
II.

DISCOVERING POVERTY IN CHICAGO

If we want to choose a specific locality in order to contextualize the discovery of poverty more historically, we should observe the situation in Chicago, where the ethnoracial boundaries of poverty were dramatically drawn.
Chicago shared a lot of slum problems with other Northern cities. First ofall, its poverty was, almost from the beginning, identified with its foreign
population, particularly immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Oneof the earliest analyses was written by Joseph Kirkland, the literary editor of
the Chicago Daily Tribune, and published in Scribner’s Magazine in July
1892. Quoting Rev. Barnett Warden of Toynbee Hall, “ ‘How the other half
lives,’ in Chicago, is ‘pretty much as it chooses,’ ” Kirkland still gave a traditional morally defined vision of poverty, which saw living in the misery of
pauperism or the joy of sobriety as a choice up to the individual. However,
he also incorporated a racialist perspective: “For depth of shadow in Chicago low life one must look to the foreign elements, the persons who are not
only of alien birth but of unrelated blood—the Mongolian, the African, theSclav [sic], the semitropic Latin. Among them may be found a certain degree of isolation, therefore of clannish crowding.”27 This empirical understanding that related poverty and “low life” to foreign stock was followed byfurther poverty studies in Chicago in the period before World War I.
Chicago’s poverty was also encapsulated by its housing conditions. Jacob
Riis’s How the Other Half Lives was widely read in Chicago and aroused
considerable interest in issues of housing for the poor. For six weeks in
March and April 1900, Riis contributed a series called “The Story of theSlum” to the Chicago Daily Tribune for their Sunday edition. These were
specially written long articles about tenements in New York and Chicago.
Comparing seven-story New York tenements with three-to-four story Chicago buildings, Riis had some optimism about Chicago’s situation. He wrotethat “for Chicago, with room to build and grow in, it is by comparison easy.
For that the problem of making city life tolerable to the masses can besolved there is no doubt.” But Riis also wrote: “Listen to this! City of theWest . . . forget not the responsibilities that tread in its steps: The tenementhouse is the offspring of municipal neglect, as well as its primary causes—
overpopulation and destitution.” He continued by warning that as the city

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grew bigger “it is at this stage of a community’s growth in that proper regulations and restrictions are of paramount necessity.”28 The total population ofChicago in fact increased from 1.1 million in 1890 to 1.7 million in 1900
and then 2.7 million in 1920. The foreign born and their children in 1900 accounted for 77 percent of it.29
As if in quick response to Riis’ articles, Robert Hunter, who chaired theChicago Homes Association, a nongovernmental organization that was engaged in municipal reform, in 1901 launched a large-scale investigation into
Chicago’s tenement houses. In the association’s report he wrote, “Extraordinary sickness, death, pauperism, intemperance, and crime are universally
associated with bad housing conditions.” He remained a believer in the environment as a cause of poverty. He continued: “The overcrowding, foul air,dark rooms, and insanitary housing conditions . . . are the handicaps in thecompetitive struggle which drag many families into a condition of painful
and degrading dependence upon public charity.” In addition: “Insanitary
housing conditions reduce industrial efficiency, promote exhaustion andweariness, and are potent causes in the growth of a large, dependent class.”
In short, “the tenement produces paupers. It destroys the spirit of independence.” Obviously, in this report, he treated pauperism as something like anincurable disease, warning that living “in tenements broken, dilapidated, anddevoid of almost everything wholesome, with dirt and evident overcrowding” creates “conditions [that] make paupers and beggars. . . . For the pauperattitudes and customs are contagious.”30 Although Hunter maintained thatpauperism had an environmentally acquired character, his selection of three
distinctive neighborhoods worthy of being investigated was revealing. These
areas were: the “Jewish and Italian district, in the Ninth and Nineteenth
wards,” the “Polish district in the Sixteenth Ward,” and the “Bohemian district in the Tenth Ward.” Thus, the poverty of the forty-five thousand people
that Hunter examined was reflexively ascribed to ethnic communities. In any
case, Hunter’s investigation contributed directly to the enactment of the1902 Tenement House Ordinance of Chicago, which regulated newly built
apartments in terms of their space and sanitation. This was three years before the publication of his book The Poverty.31
These social surveys and the diverse community of reformers who supported them were a distinctive feature of Chicago’s war on poverty. Exceptionally, the traditional charity bodies of the COS lineage did not have a serious conflict with social settlements and other reform forces, including
social reform-minded academics at the University of Chicago. It is likelythat this harmony can be ascribed to individuals who were members of more

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than one of these organizations at once. For example, a Hull House resident,
Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, was a leading figure in the United Charities ofChicago (UCC), a federated charity organization of the city, and was also a
faculty member of the School of Civics and Philanthropy at the Universityof Chicago. From 1909 through 1915, Breckinridge and her colleague Edith
Abbott organized a series of citywide housing investigations sponsored by
the school. She articulated it as succeeding Hunter’s study. Once again, theinvestigation identified the problem areas as not only geographic but also
ethnoracial, using terminology such as the “Polish district in the Back of theYards,” “Slovaks in the Twentieth Ward,” “Two Italian Districts,” “Lithuanians in the Fourth Ward,” and “The Problem of Negro.”32
These housing investigations in Chicago were a part of nationwide socialsurvey movement that reached its apex in Pittsburgh in 1907–08. As sociologist Martin Bulmer has pointed out, these poverty surveys in Chicago andother industrial cities were politically motivated and teleological, and theyshould be strictly separated from the more methodical academic surveys.33
Retrospectively, however, the most distinctive aspect of Chicago’s surveys
was that the prevention and correction of poverty involved such a wide
range of patrons. The array of approaches represented by Chicago’s surveys
ranged from the self-help ethos of the “friendly visitors” to the communitarian perspectives of the settlement houses to the experimentalism of the social scientists, which all together had a powerful impact.
In these circumstances, the settlement movement was not only the stronghold of middle-class reformers, but also served as a vantage point for moreradical and more ethnic entities active in poverty issues. The intriguing thing
was that during the Stock Yards strike in 1904, Mary E. McDowell, the headresident of the University of Chicago Settlement—whose neighborhood waslargely made up of eastern European laborers working in the meatpacking
industry—publicly supported the labor union. Significantly, she did this not
only because she believed the union was a democratic institution in which
her Slavic neighbors could learn how to participate in American self-government, but also because she was convinced the union would provide theeconomical security that would guarantee an English-speaking men’s standard of living for immigrants.34
If the essential idea of the settlement movement was to construct social
solidarity among the urban masses who were atomized and isolated by modern industry, new ties to make neighborhood communities were maintainedby fighting against physical insufficiency or material wants. In this sense,
McDowell shared much with poverty thinkers such as Robert Hunter andHOW THE OTHER HALF WAS MADE

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Jacob Hollander. Furthermore, McDowell thought attaining this economic
security embodied the process of Americanization: “It is the un-American
foreigner who swells the mass of surplus labor, who can live on wages of 15
cents an hour, working on an average of three days a week.” About “a decent American standard of living,” McDowell was always concrete. A young
couple with no children needed “four rooms, a bath and a parlor, in a part ofthe city that was cleaner and sweeter than where they were born [the Back of
the Yards].”35
McDowell’s Americanization also had a more cultural aspect. In the earlytwentieth century she advocated building “a new kind of nation of many
peoples” based on “a trans-nationalism” and “include[d] Germans, Slavs,
Latins, Celts, as well as Anglo Saxons.” It is easy to see here the influence ofRandolph Bourne’s school of cultural pluralism, which maintained “transnational America.” She tried to be tolerant of immigrant subcultures while
conducting a struggle against urban poverty in general. This practical approach enabled her to maintain peaceful relations with homeland nationalists
among immigrants.36 Not surprisingly, the Polish National Alliance, the secular Polish nationalist body in the United States, supported middle-class reformers’ drive for welfare legislation. In November 1911, the PNA came out
in support of the Mothers’ Pension Bill in the Illinois state legislature. Chicago’s Polish language press Dziennik Zwiazkowy reported that “in Chicago,
deaths from starvation and suicides caused by poverty occur frequently” andthat in the land “where poverty reigns supreme” a welfare law that would
benefit the “poor widow with many children . . . is humane, deserving of
support, and even worthy of being broadened.” Also, in the next month, thePNA backed the federal Workmen’s Compensation Bill of 1911, which people in the settlement movement were also enthusiastically lobbying for. The
Polish paper insisted the measure would protect their people “from poverty”
because “hundreds of them are killed yearly or become cripples [by industrial accidents], condemned with their families to begging and poverty.”37
The poor were, however, not always mobilized by middle-class charities,
nor did they help them as junior partners. They had their own causes independent from the UCC and the settlement houses. The most important institution was the Catholic Church and its diocesan charities. The Guardian Angel Nursery and Home for Working Women, a Polish Catholic settlement in
the Back of the Yards was just opposite the University of Chicago Settlement. It was built by Reverend Louis Grudzinski and his parish, St. John ofGod, in 1915 out of fear that Protestant reformers like Mary McDowellwould culturally rob Poles of their American-born children.38 Although they

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had been seen as the recipients of welfare throughout most of the nineteenth
century, by the early twentieth century, Catholics in America began extending the reach of their own charities, particularly into the field of child care.
These charities flourished under the strong leadership of Cardinal George
Mundelein, who was installed as archbishop of Chicago in 1915. Many ofthe diocesan agencies survived into the 1920s, at which time public municipal welfare came into force, and in the 1930s they began to work as local
agents for the New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration. As theGuardian Angel Nursery case shows, Catholic charities were potentially incompetition with “American” Protestant charities and settlements for thesame clients, the eastern European poor. However, the city’s cultural pluralism enabled them to coexist. Moreover, even within the Catholic charities,
according to historians Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, many ofthe diocesan orphanages that were managed by Polish and Czech communities were virtually independent of the diocese. Their activities remind us that
Catholic belief traditionally did not distinguish needs and rights—“needs
create rights”—and that Catholic ethnic charities never made paupers “theother half.”39
So, what’s the matter with the subculture of poverty? As late as 1917
Grace Abbott, former Hull House resident and vigorous activist of the Immigrant Protective League, was pessimistic about abolishing the social
stigma derived from immigrants’ foreignness and economic destitution. She
stressed in her 1917 book, The Immigrant and the Community, that “suchdependency as exists among the foreign-born is not due to race or nationality,” so “it is to these causes [of poverty and dependency], and not to thebirthplace of the victims, that the public must give its attention before real
improvement can be expected.” However, she recognized that “the fear that
immigration increases poverty and pauperism,” in other words, the idea that“the United States is being used as ‘the dumping ground for the known
criminals and paupers of Europe’ ” was a longstanding American popularbelief. She demonstrated that this intolerance was derived from an obsolete
mid-nineteenth-century poor law’s “doctrine that each community shouldcare for its own poor” and this time “internationally.” Abbott provided many
examples of actual life experiences of immigrants to show how wrong it wasto put the label of “public charge” on foreign-born dependents and to deport
them.40
At the same time, Abbott recognized that the public image of immigrant
dependency was indivisible from distinct family cultures. She wrote, “Thecharity organization worker asks in what ways the ‘treatment given the de-HOW THE OTHER HALF WAS MADE

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pendent family’ should be modified when those families are recently arrived
immigrants.” She asked, Is “the problem of ‘family rehabilitation’ different
when the father and mother have come from Russia, let us say, or Italy, or
Hungary?” and concluded that the “charity worker discovers that she cannot
proceed as she does when the family is native-born . . . their racial characteristics and the social traditions that govern the family and community relationships must be understood.”41 The cultural pluralism of liberal Chicagoans functioned here to keep a polite distance from “the other half.”
III.

DISCOVERING THE COLOR LINE

It is true that a xenophobic image of poverty remained in the years around
World War I. Even as late as 1920, the Chicago Daily Tribune repeated theclichéd view that “cases of pauperism, idiocy, and imbecility in the steadily
growing flood of immigrants . . . emphasizes the peril to the UnitedStates.”42 However, the representation of poverty was gradually shifting toward the alleged pauperism of newly arrived African Americans from theSouth. Significantly, it corresponded to the middle-class intellectual’s discovery of the special needs of black people, typically seen in their housing
situation that was worsened by racial prejudice and large-scale migrations.
We may call this discovery of the color line another aspect of the ideology
of difference. There were charity institutions for African Americans in Chicago as early as the 1890s. These were mostly the so-called black churches,
black women’s clubs, and a few old-age homes for “Colored people.” After
Celia Parker Woolley opened her Frederick Douglass Center in 1904 in theso-called Black Belt on the South Side, white and black reformers enthusiastically launched settlement houses in these African American neighborhoods, which numbered eight by the end of World War I.43
By 1910 the interest of mainstream charities in black poverty had gradually deepened. In 1912 Alzada P. Comstock published a report, “Chicago
Housing Conditions, VI: The Problem of the Negro,” in The American Journal of Sociology. It was an analysis of the Black Belt and the West Side aspart of series of surveys that Sophonisba Breckinridge and the School of
Civics and Philanthropy organized. Although they treated black neighborhoods among a variety of Chicago’s ethnic enclaves, including Polish, Slovak, Italian, and Greek communities, Comstock listed several problems
unique to African American poverty. One was the unrepaired and unsanitarycondition of tenements because of the intentional negligence of landlords.
Another was the “disproportionately high rent.” The report pointed out that

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KOTARO NAKANO“the rent paid by Negroes is appreciably higher than that paid by people ofany other nationality,” that is to say, “while half of the people in the Bohemian, Polish, and Stockyards districts were paying not more than $8.50 amonth for their four-room apartments, half the tenants on the South Side
were paying at least $12.” This high rent frequently forced African American tenants to take in lodgers. The existence of lodgers in apartments caused
the problem of overcrowding. However, the author was unwilling to conclude that the situation was objectively worse than that of immigrants: “Thiscrowding would be unnecessary if the colored people were willing to follow
the custom of other nationalities . . . [for] unlike the immigrant, even thepoor Colored people like to keep a kitchen and ‘parlor’ and occasionally adining-room, distinctly as such and not crowded with beds.”44
With an interest more than purely academic, a group of social control–oriented reformers, the Juvenile Protective Association, made an investigation in 1913 that exclusively focused on African American poverty. Its
widely distributed final report, The Colored People of Chicago, written by
Louise de Koven Bowen, the president of the association and Hull House
treasurer, examined crime in the Black Belt and the background to it. Concretely, the report publicized “the lack of congenial and remunerative employment” and the denial of union membership due to racial prejudice, as
well as frequent family breakups caused by the need for black mothers towork outside the home.45
Intriguingly, nearly one third of the report was made up of concerns about“a better class” of African Americans, especially with regards to their housing. Bowen and other probation officers drew attention to the proximity ofurban vice by reprinting the following from The Social Evil in Chicago: A
Study of Existing Conditions (1911), the report of the Vice Commission ofChicago: “The history of the social evil in Chicago is intimately connectedwith the colored population. Invariably the larger vice districts have beencreated within or near the settlements of colored people.” The black middleclass wanted to be apart from “these blocks . . . in the poorer section” of theBlack Belt. Furthermore, the report of the Juvenile Protective Associationstressed that it was unfair that wealthy, educated, African Americans wereunable to buy property in a good (white) neighborhood to “live respectably.”
The report described “protest meetings among the white people in the vicinity” and small “riots” that actually happened in the West Side and Wilmette,a typical Chicago suburb.46 Frequent reference to the needs of its middleclass became one of the prime characteristics of black poverty analysis,
which is quite different from the writings on poverty concerning European

HOW THE OTHER HALF WAS MADE

77

immigrants. If black charities in those days were obsessed with Booker T.
Washington–type self-help ideology and loudly insisted on the recognitionof “worthy” Colored people’s citizenship, this middle-class representation in
the poverty reports corresponded with it.47
In any case, poverty among “Colored people” increasingly came to attract
the attention of Chicago’s Progressives. In the same year as Bowen’s report,
Breckinridge contributed an impressively titled essay, “The Color Line in
the Housing Problem” in The Survey, a widely read charity journal. For themost part this article was based on the more statistical Comstock report, but
it put it in more stark terms: “The man who is poor as well as black must
face the special evil of dilapidated insanitary dwellings and the lodger evil in
its worst form. But for every man who is black, whether rich or poor, there isalso the problem of extortionate rents and of dangerous proximity to segregated vice.”48 These statements by the author of surveys on eastern European housing in the Back of the Yards, South Chicago, and the West Side
could be recognized as the visible arrival of the discovery of the color line inpoverty issues.
The tide of black charities in Chicago culminated in 1916, when the Chicago Urban League (CUL) was established with the cooperation of Booker
T. Washington’s Tuskegee personnel, such as George C. Hall and Robert E.
Park, and Chicago’s leading settlement workers, including Sophonisba
Breckinridge, Jane Addams and Celia P. Woolley. According to its first annual report, written in 1917 by Park, the first president, the CUL’s “ultimate
aim should be . . . to bring about the complete assimilation of the [African
American] race into the industrial life of the nation.”49 Park, formerly
Booker T. Washington’s secretary and research advisor, taught urban sociology at the University of Chicago from 1914 onward. Like other Chicago intellectuals who “discovered the problems of blacks through studies of urban
poverty and because of their alertness to differences among ethnic groups,”
he contextualized the “problem of the Negro” within the experiences of European immigrants.50 He wrote, “It will make the situation of the Negro in
Chicago more intelligible if we think of him in the same category with theother immigrants—the Jew, the Italian and the Slav.”51
At the same time, the CUL report pointed out a peculiar “disadvantages”
to which African American migrants were subjected. It was “the fixed andpermanent form of caste.” Park maintained that “a certain amount of prejudice against the ‘ignorant foreigner’ no doubt exists,” but “every occupationand profession is open to the sons and daughters of the European immigrant,” while “this is not true of the Negro.” In addition to these general po-

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sitions, the report warned of imminent new problems: “The first and mostpressing problem of the last eight months has been created by the sudden
influx of Negro immigration from the Southern states.”52 This great migration was mainly caused by the wartime labor shortage in the Northern industries, and the total number of Chicago’s African Americans increased from44,103 in 1910 to 109,458 in 1920. The CUL articulated its emergent task as
the “adjustment or assimilation” of the the newcomers.53
Although the CUL’s annual report has no tangible analysis of African
American housing, in October of the same year, the CUL’s executive secretary, T. Arnold Hill, presented a paper at the Sixth National Conference on
Housing. Hill’s paper, titled “Housing for the Negro Wage Earner,” argued
that “here in Chicago, where we negroes must do without light and sanitation, without air, where one-family houses are converted into houses for twoand sometimes three families, it is certainly an abuse that should not much
longer be tolerated.” This depiction of overcrowding is shocking, considering that the School of Civics and Philanthropy survey made five years earlier had concluded that African American migrants kept the minimum standard of American life in comparison with the congested housing of new
immigrants. But T. Arnold Hill’s recommended solution was oriented toward the middle-class, as had been the case with previous reports. Extending
sincere sympathy toward “a family [that] desires a little better quarters andwants to move into a better house . . . to raise the children in better circumstances” where they were not so proximate to “houses of prostitution andvice,” Hill recommended “a duplication here in Chicago of the [middleclass] Schmidlapp houses in Cincinnati or the City and Suburbban Home
property in New York.”54
In the next year, 1918, African American housing conditions in Chicago
worsened. The Second Annual Report of the CUL could not conceal its irritation: “The question of housing [is], particularly urgent in the case of the
Negro.” Marry McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement recollected the situation in the mid 1920s: “On some days five and six trainscame into Chicago from Alabama,” and “these newcomers crowded into the‘Black Belt’ and the congestion already existing in this area became a menace to health and morals.” She stressed the overcrowding of the postwar
Black Belt by citing a 1920s city investigation: “The study . . . reported
twenty-three persons living in a one-family dwelling on Wabash Avenue. In
one house were seven families, aggregating seventeen persons. In another
there were thirty-two persons using one bath-room.”55
If housing conditions were the popular criteria for defining the poverty

HOW THE OTHER HALF WAS MADE

79

line, as Riis and Hunter argued, and if twentieth-century social thought allowed for the separation of economical wants from pauperism, which represented pathological disorders, the overcrowding indicated above would
mean many African American migrants were already sinking into the “hopeless morass of pauperism” in the words of Jacob Hollander.56 Additionally,
the middle-class “Old Settlers,” African Americans who had lived in Chicago for generations, as many documents show, were anxious to keep a distance from the “the other half” of their own race so as not to slip down into
the “hopeless morass” of the Black Belt. In the winter of 1918, Robert E.
Park was captivated by a dark premonition: “The war, which has shaken thefoundations of the world, has disturbed the equilibrium of the races.” Hewarned in the CUL’s second annual report, “The great migration from theSouthern plantations, which followed close upon the outbreak of the war,
created in our Northern cities a situation which was fraught with grave dangers.”57 Park’s foreboding was not groundless. A series of race riots was
spreading up to northern cities, apparently corresponding with the northwardmigration of African Americans. The riots had reached East St. Louis by thesummer of 1917. By the spring of 1918, home owners’ associations began
conducting bombing campaigns targeting African American families who
had moved into white communities and the houses of realtors whose transactions had enabled their moving.
In late July 1919, unprecedented race riots broke out in Chicago. Thirtyeight persons were killed, 520 were injured, and 948 had their houses
burned to the ground. Sociologist Morris Janowitz called the riots “communal” violence over residential space.58 Street fights were recorded mostly on
the unofficial boundaries of white and black neighborhoods where ambitious
black middle-class families were attempting to escape. Retrospectively, theviolence drew the geographical color line more rigidly to create the socalled black ghetto in the city. What we need to review here are the Chicago
intellectuals’ perceptions of the causes of conflict and of the way to makepeace. Right after the outbreak of the violence, the Urban League liberals
and settlement workers, including Mary McDowell and Graham Taylor, held
large-scale petition meetings to have the Illinois governor launch the research on the background of the conflict. In response, Governor Frank
Lowden established the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The
CCRR’s actual research process was directed by Charles S. Johnson, an African American graduate student of Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago who was also on the CUL’s research stuff. After the year-long investigation, the CCRR published a 672page final report, The Negro in Chicago,

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KOTARO NAKANO

which included a long list of reform recommendations.59
As written in the report, the CCRR assumed that poverty among African
Americans was one of the key causes of the riots. The chapters “The Negro
Housing Problem” and “Crime and Vicious Environment” were two of six
research fields the commission’s subcommittees worked on. The former
chapter featured the history of migration and the living standards of black
people. The latter concerned “the relation between poverty and crime” in thecontext of “Probation and Parole.”60
Intriguingly, all through The Negro in Chicago, European immigrant poverty was almost completely out of sight. Although it identified white gangsters from “mostly Irish-American . . . [and] the second generation of manynationalities” as “hoodlums” who were most responsible for the eruptions ofviolence, the CCRR report never referred to the “tenement vices” of foreigners that was so frequently cited by urban reformers ten years earlier. In
this report poverty was a black problem.61
However, among the fifty-nine recommendations at the conclusion of thebook, there were no direct solutions for the revelation that 43 percent of
black Chicagoans lived in “extreme poverty” with miserable housing conditions: “the least habitable of all, . . . usually dilapidated, and in many cases
extremely so,” and “most of these dwellings were frail, flimsy, tottering, unkempt, and some of them literally falling apart.” Instead of poor relief, we
can see another kind of housing policy in the CCRR recommendations. Recommendation number 33, titled “Better Negro Housing without Segregation,” insisted “there must be more and better housing to accommodate thegreat increase in Negro population” because the “situation will be madeworse by methods tending toward forcible segregation or exclusion of Negroes.”62
These words should be understood in the context of three related background issues. The first is the expectation of developers to construct decent
middle-class apartments in the Black Belt. The Chicago Real Estate Board
had introduced the plan for the first time during the war.63
The second is the continuous discourse about nonenforced segregation,referred to as “voluntary segregation,” “segregation by agreement,” or “intelligent segregation.” The Black Belt redevelopment plan was indivisible
from the assumption that wealthy African Americans would keep living
within the black community. Moreover, segregation would be effective toprevent further violence. After the riots, in November 1919 the following
remarks appeared in the Coroner’s official report: “If the movement of thecolored people to white neighborhoods was an invasion, it was a necessary

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81

invasion because of the deplorable living conditions. The correction of theevil by enlarging the living quarters and placing them in a better sanitarystate would in part solve the difficulty. We believe voluntary segregation
would follow and to a considerable extent remove one cause of unrest.”64
The Negro in Chicago was written under the terror of the next riot. Anotherthirty four bombings were reported while the CCRR was in existence.
The third issue is the great desire of the wealthy “big Negroes” for an“American” standard of living. As historian Will Cooley points out, there
were “class and respectability distinctions,” or “stratification,” “within theblack community,” and “higher-status blacks attempted to put some room
between themselves and lower-class blacks,” thus leading to “the incessantsearch for ‘a better neighborhood’ . . . within the Black Belt.”65 In The Chicago Defender of February 7, 1920, a black alderman, L. B. Anderson,
spoke for those “Old Settlers” and successful migrants when he said, “I will
admit that the Colored man is desirous of bettering his condition in life. . . .
Colored families who desire to live in decent sanitary flats are compelled torent in so-called ‘white neighborhoods’,” however, they “prefer to live in a
district exclusively inhabited by people of their own Race. The Colored man
has no desire to mix indiscriminately with the whites, but he must have aroof over his head.”66
Significantly, as has been seen, this kind of feeling could arouse Chicago
intellectuals’ sympathy. The Americanization of “worthy” black migrants
through the adjustment to urban circumstances would not necessarily be incompatible with “voluntary segregation” of themselves and alienation of“the other half” of their race, if only the American standard of living could
be attainable within the Black Belt. Indeed, as sociologist Steven J. Dinerhas pointed out, even black settlement houses, other than the short-lived Ida
B. Wells Settlement, mainly fought to conbat discrimination against “educated colored people . . . whose tastes and habits are the same [as whites]”
and were indifferent to the black poor.67 In this context of pluralistic Americanism, which was sensible to “the problem of the Negro,” struggle against
poverty would not work effectively as an agent of integration. The liberal
cultural pluralists like Mary McDowell were sincerely sympathetic to thepredicaments of poor African Americans, but they were quite incompetent
before the newly established urban color line.
CONCLUSION: DIVIDED WE UNITE?
“[The modern nation] therefore has to isolate within its bosom . . . the82

KOTARO NAKANO‘false’, ‘exogenous’, ‘cross-bred’, ‘cosmopolitan’ elements.” The French
philosopher Etienne Balibar wrote. “This is an obsessional imperative which
is directly responsible for the racialization of social groups whose collectivizing features will set up as stigmata of exteriority and impurity, whether
these relate to style of life, beliefs or ethnic origins.”68 Balibar was, ofcourse, referring to Jews as the ‘exogenous’ elements within the French nation. However, Balibar’s rhetoric and logic remind us of similar phenomenain the United States during the same period, with the invention of “the otherhalf.” In the American case as well, the “ideology of difference” grew handin hand with nationalism. If Robert Hunter’s The Poverty represented xenophobic poverty theory, Mary McDowell’s cultural pluralism was a practicalversion of Americanization, and Robert E. Park, who advocated African
Americans’ adjustment to northern cities, is most famous for his assimilation-cycle theory that targeted the newly arrived foreign born.69
The powerful pairing of nation making and “the other half” discourse was
not limited to the field of cultural identity. If the American nation is embedded with a unique “racial institutional orders,” as political scientists Desmond King and Roger Smith argue, the CCRR and its final report in 1921
was partially responsible for it.70 As a result, The Negro in Chicago virtually
ratified the color line that had been drawn by violence: in the late 1920s, atleast three-quarters of Chicago residences were strictly segregated by “voluntary” restrictive covenants on real estate. Historically, Chicago’s experience was not an isolated exception. The race riot there was only one of eighteen major racial clashes that broke out in the United States between 1915
and 1919. Furthermore, the CCRR is now considered to as a prototype ofroutinized inaction for succeeding riot commissions down to the KernerCommission in 1968.71 As I have shown here, the CCRR and its report were
the direct descendants of a generation of poverty surveys. From a very practical perspective, the poverty studies were the only academic instrumentsthat Chicago liberals had for understanding the unprecedented disturbance,
and it was the only political tool that Chicagoans had for making peace andtrying to build some sort of permanent “order.” Significantly, however, itmeans that this order has been, from the beginning, maintained through social stigma propagated through the language of poverty.
The point is that poverty always clings to other social dividers—religion,
ethnicity, race, and gender. In other words, typical representations of poverty
have metamorphosed significantly over the long run. In the mid-nineteenth
century, it was Irish Catholics in the almshouse. At the turn of the twentiethcentury, it was unskilled laborers from eastern Europe. After World War I, itHOW THE OTHER HALF WAS MADE83

was the African American underclass in the urban North. Chicago, in fact,
exemplified that many Progressives originally participated in the field of social services sympathetic with the struggles of Charles Booth and Toynbee
Hall as they fought against poverty among the English working class.
Through working on the problems of urban dependents and the working
poor, they were attracted to the cultural and economic issues caused by mass
immigration. Finally, some of them went on to fight alongside African
American people, especially after the great wartime migrations. Whether aperson was a reformer of good will or for some more self-serving reason,
one’s perception of poverty acted as catalysts to imagine “the other half” inAmerican life.
In the historical context of the 1910s and 1920s, recent immigrants fromsouthern and eastern Europe were gradually getting themselves out of a poverty image. It is true that some of the foreign born and their children began
to leave the slums for “white” suburbia after the war. However, as historian
Lizabeth Cohen has vividly delineated, ethnic communities survived in Chicago through the 1920s and most of the immigrants remained economicallyfragile. Nevertheless, their “clannish” lifestyle and support systems were nolonger so closely identified with “the culture of poverty” as they had been in
1900s. People knew that “every occupation and profession is open to thesons and daughters of the European immigrant.” And, again, “this is not trueof the Negro.”72 The cultural difference defined by the language of poverty
came to be monopolized by the African Americans in the newly built blackghetto.
In addition to these cultural elements, because the historical “discovery ofpoverty” meant opening a socialization process of the poverty, the sociallyconstructed cleavage of the poor and the “stigma” of racialized pauperism
got deeply embedded in governmental policy, while public welfare enlarged
its sphere between the 1920s and 1960s. Not only did the New Deal’s welfare state alienate recipients of public relief, many of them nonwhites andwomen, but it anointed the middle-class with the conception of “entitlement” or economic security. Even after the 1960s civil rights movement
shook up the existing “racial institutional orders,” “culture of poverty” discourses persisted. In other words, “the other half” was continuously remade
as political and social contexts changed throughout history.73 In this sense,“The poor ye have always with you.”

84

KOTARO NAKANONOTES1Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (NewYork: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890), 1.
2
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes (New York:McMillan, 1910), 116–17.
3
Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive
Movement, 1890–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 6.
4
Simon N. Patten, “The Theory of Social Forces,” Annals of the American Association ofSocial and Political Science 7, Supp. (January 1896): 143.
5
Robert H. Wiebe, Self Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 127.
6
Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare(New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 5.
7
Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 2, 120, 139.
8
Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, 235–36.
9Nathan I. Huggins, Protestant against Poverty: Boston’s Charities, 1870–1900 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1971), 178.
10Katz, Undeserving Poor, 8.
11
Robert H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (NewYork: New York University Press, 1956), xii.
12
Edward T. Devine, editorial in The Charities 4, no. 13 (February 24, 1900): 3–4; “Social
Forces,” The Survey 23, no. 21 (February 19, 1910): 753.
13
Robert Hunter, Poverty (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904), 1–3, 5–6.
14Katz, Undeserving Poor, 5.
15Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, Hand-Book for Friendly Visitors
among the Poor (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 5, 8.
16
Sidney Fine, “Richard T. Ely: Forerunner of Progressivism, 1880–1901,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 37, no. 4 (March 1951): 599–624.
17
According to Ely, Booth called “the most unfortunate class in the community . . . the ‘submerged tenth.’ ” He divided this class into “the defective, the delinquent, and the dependent.”
Richard T. Ely, “Pauperism in the United States,” North American Review, (April 1891): 395,
399.
18
Ibid., 400, 402, 403–6; For more about Warner’s formulations, see Amos G. Warner,
American Charities: A Study in Philanthropy and Economics (New York: T. Y. Crowell,1894).
19
Jacob H. Hollander, The Abolition of Poverty (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1914),
2–3, 5–6.
20
Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the UnitedStates (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 134.
21
Immigration Act of February 20, 1907 (34 Statutes-at-Large 898); See also Amy L.
Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 32–33.
22
Hunter, The Poverty, 261, 264.
23
Ibid., 268, 270, 281; See also James Bryce, The American Commonweal vol. II (NewYork: Macmillan, 1889), 710.
24
Hunter, The Poverty, 270; “Expert’s Views on Immigration,” Chicago Daily Tribune,
January 25, 1904.
25
Co-operation (February 9, 1907): 45, cited in Steven J. Diner, “Chicago Social Workers
and Blacks in the Progressive Era,” Social Service Review 44, no. 4 (December 1970): 396.

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85

26
Residents of Hull-House, a Social Settlement, 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 (Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell& Co., 1895).
27
Joseph Kirkland, “Among the Poor of Chicago,” Scribner’s Magazine 12, no 1 (July
1892): 3, 5.
28Jacob A. Riis, “The Story of the Slum, part 1,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 11, 1900.
29
City of Chicago, Department of Development and Planning, The People of Chicago: Who
We Are and Who We Have Been, Census Data on Foreign Born, Foreign Stock and Race,
1837–1970 (1976), 21–32, 54–56.
30
Robert Hunter, Tenement Conditions in Chicago: Report by the Investigating Committeeof the City Homes Association (Chicago: City Homes Association, 1901), 144, 146–47.
31
Ibid., 12, 14.
32
Sophonisba P. Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, “Housing Conditions in Chicago III: Backof the Yards,” American Journal of Sociology (hereafter AJS), 16, no. 4 (January 1911): 433–
68; Helen L. Wilson and Eunice W. Smith, “Chicago Housing Conditions, VIII: Among the
Slovaks in the Twentieth Ward,” AJS 20, no. 2 (September 1914): 145–69; Grace P. Norton,“Chicago Housing Conditions, VII: Two Italian Districts,” AJS 18 no. 4 (January 1913):
509–542; Elizabeth Hughes, “Chicago Housing Conditions, IX: Lithuanians in the Fourth
Ward,” AJS 20, no. 3 (November 1914): 289–312; Alzada P. Comstock, “Chicago Housing
Conditions, VI: The Problem of Negro,” AJS 18, no. 2 (September 1912): 241–57.
33
Martin Bulmer, “The Social Survey Movement and Early Twentieth Century Sociological
Methodology,” in Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century, edited by Maurine W. Greenwald and Margo Anderson (Pittsburgh: Universityof Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 15–34.
34
Mary McDowell, “Live on Higher Plane: Union a Peace Factor,” Chicago Daily News,
July 29, 1904; See also, James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s
Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 143–45.
35
Mary McDowell, “Live on Higher Plane”; Mary McDowell, “Here Is the Real American
Girl,” The Independent (October 4, 1919): 31.
36
Mary McDowell, “The Immigrant-American,” ca. July 1916, Mary McDowell Papers,
box2, folder 12, Chicago History Museum; Mary McDowell, “Foreign Press and Its Influeuces on Foreign Population,” Mary McDowell Papers, box 2, folder 12, Chicago History
Museum; Kotaro Nakano, “Preserving Distinctiveness: Language Loyalty and Americanization in Early Twentieth Century Chicago,” Proceedings of the Kyoto American Studies Summer Seminar, 2000 (2001): 113–24; Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic
Monthly 118 (July 1916): 86–97.
37
Dziennik Zwiazkowy, November 24, 1911, Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey(CFLPS), Federal Work Agency, Work Projects Administration, 1936–1941, compiled by the
Chicago Public Library Project, 1942; Dziennik Zwiazkowy, December 21, 1911 (CFLPS).
38
St. John of God Church, Golden Jubilee, 1907–1957, 37–38; Dominic A. Pacyga, Polish
Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 167.
39
Dorothy M. Brown and Elizabeth McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities
and American Welfare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1–5, 11, 58–59; Edward
R. Kantowicz, Corporate Sole: Cardinal Mundelein and Chicago Catholicism (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1983) 131–49.
40
Grace Abbott, The Immigrant and the Community (New York: The Century, 1917), 166,
174, 177, 193.
41
Ibid., 194.

86
42

KOTARO NAKANO“Dangers of Immigration,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 6, 1920.
Diner, “Chicago Social Workers and Blacks”; Philip Jackson, “Black Charity in Progressive Era Chicago,” Social Service Review 52, no. 3 (September 1978): 400–417.
44
Alzada P. Comstock, “Chicago Housing Conditions, VI: The Problem of Negro,” AJS 18,
no. 2 (September 1912): 250, 253–54, 257.
45
Juvenile Protective Association, The Colored People of Chicago (1913), 5.
46
Ibid., 11–12; Vice Commission of Chicago, The Social Evil in Chicago: A Study of Existing Conditions with Recommendations (Chicago: Gunthorp-Warren, 1911), 38; Comstock,“Problem of Negro,” 243.
47
Diner, “Chicago Social Workers and Blacks”; Jackson, “Black Charity.”
48
Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, “The Color Line in the Housing Problem,” The Survey 29(February 1, 1913): 575.
49
First Annual Report of the Chicago League on Urban Conditions among Negroes (1917), 3.
50
Diner, “Chicago Social Workers and Blacks,” 400; First Annual Report of the CUL, 3.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 3–4.
53
U. S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census, Vol. 2 (1920), 51; First Annual Report of
the CUL, 9.
54
T. Arnold Hill, “Housing for the Negro Wage Earner,” in National Conference on Housing, Housing Problems in America: Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Housing, Chicago, October 15, 16, and 17, 1917 (New York: National Housing Association,1917), 309–13.
55
Second Annual Report of the Chicago League on Urban Conditions among Negroes(1918), 4; Mary McDowell, “Prejudice,” in Mary McDowell and Municipal Housekeeping: A
Symposium, edited by Caroline Miles Hill (Chicago: Millar Publishing Co., 1938), 29–30.
56
Hollander, Abolition of Poverty, 6.
57
Second Annual Report of the CUL, 3.
58
Morris Janowitz, “Patterns of Collective Racial Violence,” in Violence in America: Historical And Comparative Perspectives (A Report to the National Commission on the Causes
and Prevention of Violence), edited by Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 319.
59
Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In, 1919 and the 1960s: A Study in the Connections between Conflict and Violence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 60–71; Chicago
Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and A
Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).
60
The six research fields were “Racial Clashes,” “Racial Contacts,” “Housing,” “Industry,”“Crime,” and “Public Opinion.” Ibid., xx, 331, 335–356.
61
Ibid., 55.
62
Ibid., 191–92, 645.
63
Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and MiddleClass Reform, Chicago, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), chaps.7 and 8.
64
Chicago Daily Tribune, November 5, 1919, 12; Chicago Daily News, February 25, 1920,
3; “Coroner’s Official Report of Race Riot, July and August, 1919,” 5, Graham Taylor Papers, box 36, folder 1980, Newberry Library.
65
Will Cooley, “Moving On Out: Black Pioneering in Chicago, 1915–1950,” Journal of
Urban History, 36, no. 4 (July 2010): 487.
66
Alderman L. B. Anderson, “Facts to Show We Came Here First and Are Here to Stay,”
Chicago Defender, February 7, 1920, 20.
67
Diner, “Chicago Social Workers and Blacks,” 403; See also, Jackson, “Black Charity.”
68
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities
43

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(New York: Verso, 1991), 60.
69
Robert E. Park and Herbert H. Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1921).
70
Desmond S. King and Roger M. Smith, “Racial Orders in American Political Development,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (February 2005): 75–92.
71
It is a well-known fact that civil rights activist Kenneth B. Clark testified before the hearing of the Kerner Commission: “I read that report . . . of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as
if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of 1935 . . . on
the Harlem riot of 1943 . . . of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot . . . it is a kind of
Alice in Wonderland with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same
analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.” Report of the National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968),
265.
72
David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became
White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial
Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); First Annual Report of the CUL, 3.
73
Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (NewYork: Macmillan, 1994), chap. 10; James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle against Poverty,
1900–1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), chap. 7.