Charlotte Carr--Settlement Lady

I

A FEW months ago a ‘fat Irishwoman’ (as she describes herself) decided she’d seen enough front-line service for a while. For twenty years she had manned the barricades, as a policewoman under Brooklyn Bridge, as Secretary of Labor of war-torn Pennsylvania, and as director of relief in New York City. Now she was tired and forty-seven (though she looked neither) and she wanted a furlough. What she got was one of the toughest assignments in America.

When Charlotte Carr hit town to succeed Jane Addams as head of Hull House, Chicago could n’t quite make her out. For the new boss of the world’s most famous settlement did not resemble the old in any superficial respect except total displacement. Charlotte Carr is probably the only graduate of boarding school and Vassar who ever walked a beat. To-night she dominates a drawingroom with native grace; to-morrow she dominates a relief demonstration with native persuasion. Her long service in behalf of the hard-bitten underprivileged has awakened in this well-born woman the traits of her ancestors. They, seven or eight generations back, were meat-and-potatoes Irish.

Chicago was a little afraid of the rugged successor of the ‘angel of Hull House.’ That was partly because Chicago did n’t know Charlotte Carr, and partly because it had forgotten that it once called Jane Addams all the dirty names it could think of. But Charlotte Carr was n’t worried. She knew Chicago; she had seen Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and New York fighting and stumbling and afraid, and the picture was the same everywhere. At the moment Chicago happened to be stumbling worst.

The settlement house as an institution, as Jane Addams knew it and made it great, was as dead as Austria. It had fulfilled its early purposes, outlived its original usefulness. The settlements may not have been aware of their unhappy state — few corpses are. But Charlotte Carr has a facility for sizing things up. The result, at Hull House, has been audit and upheaval, to the end that the glorious landmark of an old era may be a living agency for a new.

For many years Hull House had a community doll that the children of the neighboring tenements came and played with. ‘ What Hull House is interested in doing now,’ says the new Head Resident, ‘is making the homes of those children fit to have a doll in, and enabling their parents to buy them one.’

The first heresy was the de-emphasis of such Hull House prides as pottery and weaving. Work in the arts and crafts was shifted from a production basis to an educational one. Hull House got out of the bric-a-brac business. ‘Why should working people weave rugs in 1938?’ Charlotte Carr wanted to know. ‘Let’s ship these looms to a mental hospital and send the weavers down to City Hall in a nice, orderly committee to tell the Mayor what their neighborhood needs.’

Charlotte Carr put carpenters to work inside the ancient buildings of Hull House, and classrooms took shape in such holy relics as the Jane Club. Founded by Miss Addams as a coöperative home for working women who were dispossessed when they went out on strike, the Jane Club had become just a good cheap place to live.

When Jane Addams moved into it, forty-eight years ago, Chicago’s nineteenth ward was one of the plague spots of America—an unrelieved slum, rotting and stinking within and eating its way into the rest of the careless city. In the square mile between Hull House and the river there was one bathtub. There were no parks or playgrounds. For every pickpocket clubbed by the police there were twenty maturing in every poolroom. The children of the immigrants earned four cents an hour at piecework on garments.

Hull House had two jobs, from the first. One was to make the poor less miserable in their poverty. The other was to make them less poor. The first had the blessings of Chicago’s Heading citizens’; the second did not. Jane Addams and Hull House fought the city. They forced Chicago to establish a juvenile court, to build small parks and playgrounds where the children of the poor could get at them. They forced Illinois to pass factory inspection laws, the eight-hour day for women, and a workmen’s compensation act. By their example, they carried these reforms to many another city and state.

Hull House was the haven of every unpopular movement of its time. Its halls were open to every new idea, its heart to every losing cause. Young mavericks of every shade took refuge under its wings. The early residents of Hull House included Ellen Gates Starr, Walter S. Gilford, Sidney Hillman, Dr. Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, Gerard Swope, Robert Morss Lovett, Florence Kelley, Frances Perkins, John Dewey — yes, and Benny Goodman. Young Crown Prince Leopold was there, looking out from his window on to Polk Street and observing that in all of Belgium there was no street quite so wretched.

The battles of the early years were ultimately won. The sweatshop was shamed. Trade-unions were accepted. Bathtubs and forums were no longer oddities. The University of Chicago, which had spurned Jane Addams in the early days, was only one of the respectable institutions which fell over themselves trying to honor her. At seventy she was still known, in some quaint circles, as ‘the most dangerous woman in America,’ but John D. Rockefeller, Jr., echoed the sentiment of the world when he called her ‘the most Christlike of all living human beings.’

II

Its battles won, Hull House, like the rest of the settlements, rested on its oars. The result was that it came to a standstill. When Charlotte Carr took over, the place was a museum, a shrine to Jane Addams. The thousands who still poured through its doors came to see not what Hull House was doing but what it had done. The bloody battleground had become a ‘must’ item for out-of-town tourists. Tinted memories overlay the scenes of Jane Addams’s struggles. The crusaders were gone. Pottery, weaving, and dramatics attracted bored young matrons from other sections of the city. Hull House had become Chicago’s toy.

There stood $800,000 worth of property, occupying a city block, in the centre of a neighborhood that had begun to forget it was there. Its usefulness as a refuge and rallying ground for the immigrant had disappeared as the foreignborn got the feel of the new country and learned its language and its ways. Immigration had dried up. Hull House was a place for ‘foreigners,’ and the foreigners were no longer foreign.

The wealthy trustees of the institution dumped their problem child in the lap of a spinster who had never been a social worker. They asked her to come to Chicago and find the place of the settlement house in a new age. Charlotte Carr gave them fair warning. She told them she was considering accepting an executive job with the CIO. She told them that in certain circles she was known as ‘Scarlet’ Carr.

They did n’t bat an eye. Their chairman, Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen, had abandoned her patrician rôle in Chicago society half a century before to follow the thorny path of Jane Addams. Seventynine-year-old Mrs. Bowen had gone to the trustees and asked them if ‘Hull House was going to stand still and go on making tarns, taffies, and tidies.’ Only one of them answered yes, and he resigned. Then the board told Charlotte Carr to pitch in. The place was hers.

The biggest obstacle in the way of the ‘Irish policewoman’ was the dead hand of her predecessor. In Charlotte Carr, Chicago wanted another Jane Addams — not the Jane Addams who was misunderstood, despised, and even hated while she lived, but the ‘Saint Jane’ of blessed memory. One look at the newcomer, who offers her guests a drink and can cuss in a crisis, and Chicago whistled with mixed amazement and respect.

But to those who know the No. 1 Settlement Lady of 1938 and the life of the No. 1 Settlement Lady of fifty years ago, their differences are superficial. Jane Addams was ‘no lady’ in her day. She organized trade-unions, lobbied for social legislation, defied the railroad barons, and sheltered the ‘anarchists’ — in an era when decent women rustled modestly between kitchen and drawingroom and never, never read the newspapers. Beneath her mantle of serenity was the spirit of a fierce fighter, defying the thunder of the mobs and the millionaires alike.

Miss Addams is remembered widely but inaccurately for the last ten years of her life, which, painfully ill as she was, she devoted to frantic efforts to save the world from another war. As a peace worker she assumed a relatively harmless aspect in the eyes of solid citizens. But in the last year of her life the enfeebled founder of Hull House took to the battlements again to fight for a system of old-age pensions and government-subsidized housing. Ten days before she died she appeared before the Cook County Commissioners and demanded public relief for the jobless and suffering.

Jane Addams was a Quaker and a product of the nineteenth century. Charlotte Carr is Irish, and a product of the twentieth. The new head of Hull House is an enveloping personality, a strong executive, an eager, adventurous nature. If her thinking falls short of profundity, it abounds in facility. Between action and contemplation her choice of action is invariable. Externally, and in the little, she is politic and canny; in the large she is imprudent and uncalculating, an emotionalist with an incidental knack for administration. She was meant to be the hard-headed, soft-hearted mother of about fourteen unmanageable kids.

She looks her duality, too. Like Hull House, she finds it equally natural to be stately and informal. Her dominating height reduces her heft to dignified, yet potentially genial, proportion. Her eyes are at once jovial and belligerent. And while her nose and mouth are small and unobtrusively businesslike, her heap of black hair, slightly graying, rides off in a dozen directions and gives her big Irish face an Ossa-on-Pelion look. Jane Addams hated to be called ‘sweet’; no one will make the same mistake with the laughing, scrapping woman who has taken her place.

Miss Carr’s lifelong struggle for the betterment of industrial conditions is her qualification for the backbreaking job of restoring life to an institution which was established to improve the lot of the ‘lower third.’ The nation that was still handicraft and pioneer fifty years ago is to-day industrialized. Charlotte Carr’s career has convinced her — and this may be a clue to the future of Hull House — that enlightened organization among industrial workers is a modern bulwark of the democracy to which she is wholly devoted. But first, she insists, workers must be educated in democracy if they are to save their organizations from exploitation. And that may be another clue to the future of Hull House.

As Jane Addams saw the danger signals of democracy in the squalid back streets of Freeport, Illinois, and became a social worker, so Charlotte Carr saw them, as a girl, in the mills and factories of Dayton. The half century that separated these two girlhoods saw the national economy expand so rapidly that it had no time to solve the problems it created. Charlotte Carr was still in her teens when she decided to go into industrial work; to bridge, if she could, the widening gap between honest labor and honest capital in an assembly-line age. Her father owned a collection agency, and she learned what hard times did to the poor who bought luxuries on the installment plan. She saw the breakdown of paternalism when the unorganized workers of a Dayton factory walked out because a genuinely benevolent employer, who happened to be ‘bugs’ on health, refused them salt and pepper in the company dining room.

Her parents had refused to send her to college. She was (she says) unpopular, and they wanted to assure her of social success by ‘ bringing her out ’ as soon as she left boarding school. So she ran away and got a job in Pittsburgh. Mama and papa relented and let her go to Vassar. There, she recalls, she learned very little, but as the fat girl of the dramatic association she starred in the roles of Falstaff, President Taft, and Friar Tuck.

Out of Vassar, she became the $18-amonth matron of an orphan asylum; then a ‘kidnapper’ for a child placement agency in New York, delegated to bring back children who got into the wrong homes; then a policewoman in New York during the war, patrolling Brooklyn Bridge and Sand Street from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M.; then the personnel manager successively of a printing plant in New York, a hat factory in Brooklyn, and a textile mill in New Hampshire.

It was in these years, in the world of lower conflicts, that Charlotte Carr got her higher education. She already had the superficial equipment for Park Avenue dinner parties — dignity (which she turns on and off, mostly off, at will), ease of bearing, and the social and conversational graces befitting a daughter of Vassar. But it was in ‘ bumming around,’ as she puts it, that she picked up a stone here and a stone there for the foundation of what is now a full-blown social philosophy.

‘Charity,’ she says, ‘costs more than unions.’ Again: ‘Child labor is cheap — until you have to build penitentiaries and county hospitals.’ These Carrisms fall casually from her lips, but they are grounded in long experience. Behind them lie more than theories. As a personnel manager she discovered that 85 per cent of the factory workers to whom charity had to minister were nonunionists. A few years later, when she worked under Al Smith and Frances Perkins in the New York woman’s bureau, she made a survey revealing that more than 50 per cent of the children under seventeen working in factories had physical afflictions that were being aggravated by the kind of work they were doing.

It was Governor Gifford Pinchot who called her to Pennsylvania to start a woman’s bureau. The state had never known civil service, but heard about it from Charlotte Carr. Pinchot’s successor fired her because she refused to contribute to a campaign fund, and Pinchot then made Charlotte Carr a campaign issue. He promised to bring her back to Pennsylvania, and the people elected him. She was appointed Secretary of Labor.

While Pinchot was out of office, Miss Carr was industrial consultant for the Charity Organization Society of New York, headed by that old Hull House boy, President Walter S. Gifford of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Representing organized philanthropy’s efforts to cope with depression, she added another stone or two to the foundation of her philosophy. Private charity was still bearing the relief load, and Miss Carr made a survey which demonstrated the impossibility of absorbing the growing numbers of ablebodied men and women thrown out of work. She learned too that when private charity releases its clients to employers at substandard wages it is simply creating more charity cases.

III

Pennsylvania’s industrial headaches completed Charlotte Carr’s education. Her first discovery was that some people still believe — gallantly but naïvely — that this is a man’s world. The patrolwoman of Sand Street knew it was n’t, and proved it. Many times in her career an ‘assistant’ to some male official, she has invariably succeeded the boss and done the job better. Of one of her fallen superiors she once said sympathetically, ‘A nice guy; never did anybody any harm. A regular Alice in Wonderland.’

The Secretary’s he-man assistants tried to keep her out of trouble. Settling labor disputes was, they told her, man’s work. One night Steve Raushenbush, her labor mediator, was setting out for the scene of an impending battle between two groups of miners. The Secretary went along, over her mediator’s protest. They reached a state highway police station shortly after midnight. Steve conferred with the local officers, and returned to the car and told the Secretary that the clash would probably occur in one of two directions; he and the police would go one way, and she and her chauffeur would go the other. They’d meet at Pittsburgh at eight the next morning.

The Secretary knew her assistant was simply getting her out of the way. But she decided not to kick up a fuss; she would take her licking like a man. As she drove along to nowhere, the headlights of her car discovered a mass of marching men. Pulling ahead of them, she saw their objective — the entrance of a large mine, guarded by two lonely state policemen. The police saw the state car. Reënforcements at last! Then they looked inside and saw a stout lady and a thin chauffeur. They asked where the troops were, and the Secretary jerked her thumb in the opposite direction. The policemen explained that the day shift of miners would arrive at 6 A.M. and the marching insurgents were determined to keep them from entering the mine.

Driving back to the head of the insurgents’ ranks, Miss Carr got out of her automobile and asked the men to stop. Not a little surprised,—it was about, four in the morning, — they did. She asked to speak to their committee. Five grim and grimy miners stepped forward. They talked for two hours, and the Secretary persuaded them that she had a great mediator, a veritable Solomon, waiting for them in Pittsburgh. Then with the help of the two policemen she rounded up the enemy’s committee. Two more hours of heated arguing, and both sides agreed to hold their fire and send their committees to Pittsburgh. As she drove away with the ten leaders, the miners hollered, ‘So long, Miss Perkins!’ They had heard there was a woman named Perkins in the government.

At 8 A.M. the Secretary of Labor and her ten miners arrived at the Pittsburgh hotel where Steve Raushenbush had agreed to meet her. There sat Steve — and his state police. They had n’t been able to find the impending Armageddon. Raushenbush negotiated the peace between the two factions, and from that time on nobody told Charlotte Carr anything about ‘man’s work.’ The Secretary ran the Labor Department. With the power of the Governor and the state militia behind her, she succeeded in breaking the terror of many of Pennsylvania’s ‘company towns.’

When Pinchot’s second term expired, his Secretary of Labor went back to home base — New York — to look for a job. Governor Lehman immediately appointed her to his unemployment commission. A few months later she was hired by Mayor La Guardia — whom she had never seen or talked to — as assistant director of home relief for New York City. It was n’t long before the director, a member of the stronger sex, had retired, and Charlotte Carr was feeding New York’s million hungry with a staff of 18,000 and a budget of $9,000,000 a month.

Guided by all her past experience, she ran the big town’s relief administration not on the basis of ‘humane’ treatment of the individual but with the single aim of doing nothing that would make worse the kind of conditions she was trying to cure. Typical of her clashes with the social workers was her insistence upon deducting the earnings of children from a family’s relief allotment, though her colleagues pointed out that children whose wages were taken by their families to run the household sometimes ran away from home. Agreeing heartily that this was unfortunate, Director Carr pointed out that unless children’s wages were deducted from the relief allotment, parents would keep their children at work and stay home themselves, thus getting a full allotment and the children’s wages besides. Her job was to spend available funds intelligently, not ‘ humanely.’

Back in Pennsylvania, Miss Carr had tangled with General Hugh Johnson, whom she accused of enforcing the NRA indifferently. Now, as director of relief in New York, she found the saddle-sore soldier right across the street as director of WPA. He asked her to furnish him 75,000 unemployed within a week for WPA jobs. Knowing he could n’t put so many to work in that short time, she refused. The General then announced to the world that the unemployed did n’t want work. Charlotte Carr was Irish and mad. She rounded up a few thousand relief clients overnight and massed them — just a sample — in front of the General’s headquarters. The corridors, the sidewalk in front of the building, the street, and the park across the street were jammed solid. Johnson telephoned and begged her to call them off.

It was General Johnson’s successor who dubbed her ‘Scarlet’ Carr. What makes New York cosmopolitan is its ability to digest extremes. Charlotte Carr, like any good New Yorker, knows her Communists. She knows that Communists have the same equity in the First Amendment as anyone else. She knows also that Communists love to be arrested. She would n’t arrest them. ‘Starvation makes a few Reds,’ she says, ‘but martyrdom makes a lot of them.’ Her job in New York was to fight starvation, not to dramatize the Reds by letting them annoy her.

Back in her Pennsylvania days, the Communists wanted to show a film in Harrisburg. When they finally got a hall — after making capital of their difficulty in getting one — they brought their movie projector to town. It was an ancient type, long since forbidden by law. Foreseeing more howls from the Communists — and more Communists as the result — the Secretary lent them the Labor Department’s projector. Then she attended the meeting. ‘The audience consisted of twenty-five or thirty dreary people,’ she recalls, ‘and the picture consisted of miles and miles of wheatfields and a Charlie Chaplin comedy.’

Giving the Communists that projector raised an awful row among panting patriots, but Charlotte Carr thinks it was the most conservative thing she ever did. Out of the past rises the picture of Jane Addams turning Hull House over to radical meetings while the cry of ‘anarchist’ beat about her ears. Miss Carr’s theory is that the only good Communists are fed Communists. When they picketed her office denouncing New York’s relief standards — ‘and Lord knows,’ she says, ‘relief rations are no bed of roses’ — they received the same pleasant, ‘hi-ya’ as anyone else, and the Director listened to their protests.

The biggest relief job in the country ‘was the easiest job I ever tackled,’ she says. ‘That’s because I was working for a fellow who understood the problem.’ Fiorello La Guardia is her idea of the man the country needs. ‘Hiring me without ever having seen me was Fiorello’s way of running a city,’ she says. ‘He knew my record. He did n’t want to know my politics. Pressure? Plenty — eighteen hours a day of it. But it was n’t political pressure. It was pressure to get things done.’

Confidentially, she’ll tell you, Fiorello La Guardia is the most fantastic administrator she’s ever known. When he gets an anonymous letter accusing some petty official of incompetence or graft, he may drop everything and investigate personally. When he smells something bad in some far corner of the city, off he goes. He fights with everybody in his official family at least once a day. But he’s the best mayor New York has ever had. Why?

‘That’s easy,’ says Charlotte Carr. ‘He has the energy of twenty men, to begin with. He can “waste” his time jumping into everybody’s business and still get his work done. And, precisely because he’s always poking around, he knows more about actually running a city than any man I ever knew.

‘But more important is the fact that people who work for him — and fight him — all love him. I’ll make the prediction that no matter where he goes in his career he will never have a subordinate fail him. He’s the kind of fellow you don’t let down.’

Once in all the time she knew him she saw him break a law. Stern as he is in regard to his own citizenship, even down to traffic regulations, he once telephoned Police Commissioner Valentine and ordered him to let Arturo Toscanini park his automobile on Broadway. She recalls how he would come out of a meeting with an antagonistic Board of Estimate, purple and perspiring with fury. He’d see her and grin suddenly and say, ‘Well, they’re not going to hear the Philharmonic to-night, and I am. To hell with them! ’

IV

Breaking away from New York and La Guardia was n’t easy. The Little Flower stormed and pounded and told her he’d never speak to her again. But she just laughed — and so did he. She wanted to see how the other half lives — not the other half of the people, but the other half of those who represent the people. For twenty years Charlotte Carr had been a public official. Now she was going to be one of those who go to the public officials and try to get things done. She was going to be — horror of horrors — a social worker.

When she told her friends why she was resigning as New York’s relief director, they suggested she get ready to write her memoirs — only, instead of Twenty Years at Hull House, the title would be Twenty Days. She would n’t last a month, they told her. Settlement houses and social work were not for the likes of Charlotte Carr. She was n’t ready, they said, for the old lady’s home. But she went. And she’s still there. And it’s a fair guess that she’ll be there a long time.

The settlement house is dead. That’s as it should be. ‘The very job of the settlement,’ says Charlotte Carr, ‘is to keep putting itself out of business. It can’t cure the ills of society, but it can point the way. As the public awakens to the settlement’s example, public agencies absorb its functions. Then the settlement writes the past off the books and moves on to new frontiers.'

The new frontiers of Hull House are two, and Charlotte Carr is formulating her plans to cross them.

The first, she believes, is adult education, and something more than the kind of adult education that consists of instruction in English and that nebulous something called citizenship. The new classrooms at Hull House are filled with workers of the lowest wage groups, and they are studying labor law and collective bargaining. As long as workers are going to organize — and England, France, and Sweden convince her that they are — Miss Carr thinks they might as well know how to organize intelligently and democratically. In addition to the workers’ education programme, the famous Hull House forum, dormant for several years, has been revived, and it is packing ’em in.

The second frontier that Charlotte Carr wants to put behind her is the elimination of nationalistic barriers and racial lines that serve the machine politicians of a big city and perpetuate irrational antagonisms that divide groups which have common interests. When she arrived at Hull House, Miss Carr found that there wasn’t a Negro in residence — in a heavily Negro neighborhood. She persuaded Dewey and Faith Jones, distinguished Negro social workers, to move in and set up an education programme. To stimulate the thinking of Negroes, Mexicans, Italians, Poles, along neighborhood instead of national and racial lines, she has begun opening community centres in an ever-widening radius from Hull House.

This woman who has made so many surveys in her time has a consuming contempt for talk and a consuming faith in facts. She has established a research staff, putting her own investigative ability and the man power of Hull House to work on such foggy problems as public health service and city planning for blighted areas. She wants Hull House to be once more what it was in the old days — a sounding board for Chicago’s needs, a centre for educating not only its neighbors but its city.

Strangely enough, she is n’t raising the roof. Defying her own impetuous Irish nature, she has begun scientifically on the foundations. She knows what she wants, she thinks she knows what the settlement house needs, but, like any good builder, she gets the lay of the land before she turns a shovel. The months she’s been at Hull House have been devoted, for the most part, to some arduous listening. She is new at the settlement game; she knows she is new; and she insists that experts, including people who don’t like her, tell her what they think of her notions.

Chicago is beginning to cotton to this Jane-Addams-geared-to-a-new-age. She speaks its language. She listens to its troubles. She is n’t ‘high-hat.’ She is, as she says herself, a ‘sentimental Irishman,’ and the boys in the City Hall will listen to her where they laugh at the professional reformers. Already she’s been called in on Chicago’s tangled relief situation as chairman of an emergency committee appointed by the mayor. She keeps a fire going under the committee and makes the mayor like it.

The settlement house is n’t going to turn twentieth-century overnight. It’s a long pull, and Charlotte Carr knows it. That’s why she’s taking her time. But one of these days you’ll hear the eggs being broken for the new omelette on Halsted Street. Mossy memories are going to be shattered and a few old hats crushed. There will be plenty of squawks from the tenders of the sacred shrine.

Well, Jane Addams could take it, as they did n’t say in those days, and Charlotte Carr is not what you’d call a violet. She’s forgotten all about that vacation she had to have. It’s heavy duty from here on in.