166 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
The intense antagonism toward the Chinese in
San Francisco was one response to the massive
urbanization of the late nineteenth century. Across
the nation, cities struggled to assimilate immigrants,
newly emancipated slaves, and desperate farmers
seeking work. In Chicago, the social reformer Jane
Addams found her calling by building a settlement
house in the Nineteenth Ward, the city’s poorest and
most densely populated neighborhood. Working with
Ellen Gates Starr, Addams attracted several talented
women to Hull House, including Florence Kelley, a
highly educated single mother of three from New
York. Addams helped Kelley find work with the Illinois
Bureau of Labor Statistics, where the latter quickly
honed skills of data collection and analysis that would
serve her well on the south side of Chicago.
Along with her fellow settlement house workers,
Kelley focused on the conditions of the Nineteenth
Ward in order to understand urban poverty more
generally. She turned to maps in order to publicize
the conditions of a slum that more fortunate
Chicagoans would never see firsthand. Armed
with extensive data gathered by the women of
Hull House, she adapted existing survey maps
provided by Samuel Greeley to profile the wages
and ethnic backgrounds of its residents. Through a
kaleidoscope of color, Kelley presented an inventory
of the conditions in this diverse and struggling
neighborhood.
The report that accompanied these maps reads
like a trenchant indictment of late nineteenth-century
capitalism. From their study of wages, the reformers
concluded that poverty was not an individual failing
but rather the outgrowth of a system where pay
was persistently lowered by new waves of labor.
Immigrants, blacks, women, and children were all
used to drive down wages. In an era when union
representation remained limited to a few white male
artisans, the poor had little choice but to accept
available jobs. This fueled the rise of sweatshops
THE HUMAN LANDSCAPE OF CHICAGO
Agnes Sinclair Holbrook and Florence
Kelley, “Nationalities Map No.1,” 1895
and child labor, both of which Kelley sought to
regulate through the Illinois legislature.
But beyond basic workplace safety measures, the
authors of the Hull House maps did not advocate
specific solutions. Immersed in the neighborhood,
they focused more on publicizing poverty than on
engineering social policy. At the time, the country as
a whole was engrossed in a debate over inequality
and its remedies. In the 1870s the Yale scholar
William Graham Sumner forcefully argued that
any effort to ameliorate the conditions of the poor
would only perpetuate harm. His brand of social
Darwinism raised the question of the moment:
What—if anything—did the nation owe to its most
vulnerable citizens? Hull House reformers answered
the question in a very different way through their
maps. While they did not endorse a specific remedy,
their decision to map wages and ethnicity reflected
their belief that one could, through systematic
investigation, determine both the sources of poverty
and its remedies.
The female researchers at Hull House were
committed, educated, and determined to make
a difference long before they were permitted
to vote, run for office, or occupy positions in
universities. But their work in the settlement house
movement also reflected contemporary attitudes.
Along the right edge of the map they categorize
Irish immigrants apart from “English-residents,”
reasoning that the former were “so distinct” in
character as to necessitate a separation. African
Americans were similarly separated out as distinct
from “English-speaking” residents, underscoring
the more pervasive discrimination that they faced.
Moreover, the maps conceal as much as they reveal.
Though they identify the ethnic identity of individual
residences, little indication is given as to the density
of the population, a crucial point in light of the grave
concerns about slum congestion.
In both San Francisco and Chicago, city leaders
and reformers mapped immigrant neighborhoods
as a way of exposing their plight. But while the map
on the previous page was designed to blame the
Chinese, this map frames immigrants as victims of
a much larger capitalist system.