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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2015
George Herbert Mead's advocacy of innovative social reform was not a distinct endeavor unrelated to his pragmatist social philosophy. In fact, the convergence of social philosophy and social reform is discernable in Mead's analysis of social settlements: an analysis that led him to conclude that settlements were indispensable social organizations for promoting cooperative living and civic progress within America's emerging industrial municipalities. For Mead, the settlement was the only social organization capable of understanding the immigrant's world and explaining that world to the nonimmigrant. In 1908, Mead wrote a letter to the Chicago Record Herald endorsing the work of social settlements. He composed the letter during an era when the violent actions of some political extremists (i.e., anarchists) seemed to encourage many native-born citizens to regard all immigrants as nascent terrorists and to treat organizations created to assist immigrants, such as settlements, with distrust and hostility.
Most unfortunately, the Chicago Record Herald refused to publish Mead's letter. This article describes the historical circumstances that prompted Mead to write a letter in defense of settlements; it then reprints the original letter in its entirety, with annotations; and, it concludes by briefly noting the letter's significance in relation to Mead's other writings about social settlements.
1 Among the more influential proponents of “propaganda by the deed” was Luigi Galleani (1861–1931), an Italian anarchist active in the United States from 1901 until his deportation in 1919. Galleani was described as “[a] revolutionary zealot” who “preached a militant form of anarchism that advocated the overthrow of capitalism and government by violent means, dynamite and assassination not excluded”; Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, 1988), 169Google Scholar. Moreover, “[f]rom the moment of his arrival in the United States, Galleani openly espoused revolutionary warfare, calling for dynamite, nitroglycerin, knives, gunpowder, blasting gelatin, and pistols as means to working-class liberation”; Gage, Beverly, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (New York, 2009), 209Google Scholar.
2 Thomas Pegram has effectively noted the significance of the social settlement movement: “After Jane Addams founded Hull-House in 1889, Chicago became the center of a national settlement house movement that pioneered a new approach to democracy by integrating social, economic, and political reform”; Pegram, Thomas, Partisans and Progressives: Private Interest and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870–1922 (Urbana, 1992), 3–4Google Scholar.
3 Feffer, Andrew, “Sociability and Social Conflict in George Herbert Mead's Interactionism, 1900–1919,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (Apr.–June 1990): 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Similarly, Dmitri Shalin has emphasized Mead's commitment to social activism: “Mead was at the forefront of the contemporary movement for social reform and at some point seriously contemplated a career as professional reformer . . . . Mead's life can be seen as an attempt to prove in both theory and practice that revolutionary objectives can be achieved by essentially conservative means”; Shalin, Dmitri N., “G. H. Mead, Socialism, and the Progressive Agenda,” American Journal of Sociology 93 (Jan. 1988): 913–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Initially presented as a public address at the University of Chicago on October 27, 1907, “The Social Settlement: Its Basis and Function” was later published in January of 1908; Mead, G. H., “The Social Settlement: Its Basis and Function,” University of Chicago Record 12 (Jan. 1908): 108–10Google Scholar. What we identify as “Sympathy, Science, and Social Settlements” is the original, untitled twelve-page document filed in folder 24, box 13 of the George Herbert Mead Papers archived at the University of Chicago Library. Mary J. Deegan published a version of the same document using the title “The Function and Role of the Social Settlement”; Mead, G. H., “The Function and Role of the Social Settlement” in Play, School, and Society, ed. Deegan, Mary (New York, 1999), 64–75Google Scholar. According to Deegan, “The Function and Role of the Social Settlement” was a “pre-conference” address to the 1910 meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections; Deegan, , “Play from the Perspective of George Herbert Mead” in Play, School, and Society, ed. Deegan, Mary (New York, 1999), lxxxivGoogle Scholar.
5 See Campbell, James, “George Herbert Mead on Intelligent Reconstruction,” Symbolic Interaction 4 (Fall 1981): 191–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Campbell, , The Community Reconstructed: The Meaning of Pragmatic Social Thought (Urbana, 1992)Google Scholar. Pragmatists such as Mead treated social reconstruction as an intelligent mode of transformative social action. Fischer identified reconstruction as “a central theme for classical American pragmatists”; Fischer, Marilyn, “Interpretation's Contrapuntal Pathways: Addams and the Averbuch Affair,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47 (Fall 2011): 490CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As elaborated by Campbell, the “process of conceptual reconstruction is placed by Pragmatic social thinkers within the context of a larger, many-phased process of social reconstruction. They believe that to solve a social problem it is necessary for us not only to act differently but to think differently”; Campbell, The Community Reconstructed, 62.
6 Daniel R. Huebner, “The Construction of Mind, Self, and Society: The Social Process Mead, Behind G. H.'s Social Psychology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 48 (Spring 2012): 151Google Scholar.
7 Detailed accounts of the pervasive tension that characterized Chicago in 1908 can be found in Addams, Jane, “The Chicago Settlements and Social Unrest,” Charities and the Common 20 (May 1908): 155–66Google Scholar; Goldstein, Robert J., “The Anarchist Scare of 1908: A Sign of Tensions in the Progressive Era,” American Studies 15 (Fall 1974): 55–78Google Scholar; and, Roth, Walter and Kraus, Joe, An Accidental Anarchist (San Francisco, 1998), 1–12Google Scholar. Addams's 1908 essay and Mead's 1908 letter can be read as companion pieces. Both documents narrate the events surrounding Averbuch's controversial death; both attempt to “interpret” or explain immigrant communities to nonimmigrant readers; and, both extol the salutary work of social settlements.
8 Green, James, Death in the Haymarket (New York, 2007), 174–91Google Scholar.
9 New York Times, Feb. 24, 1908. Alia was tried and convicted in March, and executed on July 16, 1908; Goldstein, “The Anarchist Scare,” 66, 74.
10 England's Toynbee Hall, the first social settlement, was established in 1884; Davis, Allan F., Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1984[1967]), 3–8Google Scholar. Mead delineated several “types of activities that are almost uniformly found in all settlements” established in the United States: “evening classes, the extension of charitable assistance to those in need, [a] club for boys, and opportunities for neighborhood social gatherings”; G. H. Mead, “Sympathy, Science, and Social Settlements,” folder 24, box 13, George Herbert Mead Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, 2.
11 Mead characterized the residential aspect of a social settlement as its most distinctive feature: “The corner stone of settlement theory has been that the residents have identified themselves with the immediate portion of the community where their work is found by making their home there”; Mead, “The Social Settlement,” 108. Moreover, as noted by Feffer: “It was the settlement's unique role as a home for intelligent and inspired people, rather than a mission for God or a scientific outpost, that Mead considered its unrivaled strength. The settlement enables its residents to become an understanding part of city life, self-conscious intelligence in the midst of the incomprehensible urban landscape”; Feffer, Andrew, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 114Google Scholar.
12 Deegan, Mary J., Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988), 40Google Scholar, 87. Other early settlements located in the Chicago area were the Northwestern University Settlement organized by Charles Zueblin in 1891, and Chicago Commons organized by Graham Taylor in 1892; Davis, Spearheads for Reform, 170, 13.
13 Lengermann, Patricia M. and Niebrugge-Brantley, Jill, “Back to the Future: Settlement Sociology, 1885–1930,” The American Sociologist 33 (Fall 2002): 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 See Feuer, Lewis S., “John Dewey and the Back to the People Movement in American Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (Oct.–Dec. 1959): 557CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hamilton, Alice, Exploring the Dangerous Trades: The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton (Boston, 1943), 86Google Scholar.
15 Chicago Tribune, March 3, 1908.
16 Quoted in Chicago Tribune, March 8, 1908. An editorial appearing in the Chicago Inter Ocean on March 4, 1908 claimed that Averbuch had learned his politics at the settlement houses, which were described as “schools especially established … for teaching anarchy.”
17 Dr. Alice Hamilton was a resident at Hull-House during this tumultuous period. In her autobiography, she described the general distrust and fear of reporters “shared by all the residents of Hull House.” Particularly distressing was the ability of reporters to “turn the most innocent answer into a ridiculous or a damaging statement.” She pointedly recalled a comment one reporter made to Addams during this time: “I may as well tell you, Miss Addams, that I have orders from my paper to link Averbuch up with Hull House and that is what I'm going to do”; Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades, 77–78.
18 Lissak noted that Mead and other professors from the University of Chicago actively supported Hull-House's policies regarding “the education and sociocultural assimilation of ‘new immigrants’ from eastern and southern Europe”; Lissak, Rivka S., Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (Chicago, 1989), 7Google Scholar. As additional evidence of Mead's commitment to the cause of “new immigrants,” Gary Cook noted, “in 1908 … Mead helped to found the Immigrant's Protective League, and from 1909 to 1919 he served along with Addams as a vice-president for this private philanthropic agency”; Cook, Gary A., George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (Urbana, 1993), 104Google Scholar.
19 As Crunden noted: “[Mead] was continuously involved with Jane Addams and Hull-House”; Crunden, Robert M., Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (Urbana, 1984), 38Google Scholar.
20 Roth and Kraus, Accidental Anarchist, 76. The chairman of the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago, Albion W. Small, notified Addams on March 19, 1908, that he had written to the Chicago Tribune protesting the anti-immigrant polemics generated by the “Averbuch affair”; Deegan, Jane Addams, 82, 101 n.45. By 2013, social media played as important a role as the print media in telling the story of the “terrorist bombings” at the Boston Marathon and in identifying, often incorrectly, potential suspects: “On sites like Facebook, Twitter and reddit, social media users, relying on snippets of police scanner traffic and photos of the finish line, turned to crowd-sourcing to isolate and identify potential suspects. These online vigilantes may have been driven by good intentions, but they would, over the course of Marathon Week, finger the wrong young men, in some cases to damaging effect”; Helman, Scott and Russell, Jenna, Long Mile Home (New York, 2014), 132Google Scholar.
21 G. H. Mead to the Editor of the Chicago Record Herald, March 22, 1908, folder 1, James Keeley Papers, Chicago History Museum.
22 Roth and Kraus, Accidental Anarchist, 21.
23 Roth and Kraus, Accidental Anarchist, 46. Mead and Post were possibly acquainted because both were active members of the Chicago City Club and the Chicago Literary Club; Huebner, Daniel R., Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge (Chicago, 2014), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition, Mead had previously published a speech regarding Chicago's public schools in Post's weekly; George H. Mead, “Our Public Schools,” The Public, June 22, 1907, 281–85. Louis F. Post (1849–1928) was one of America's more vivid progressive reformers. During Reconstruction, Post secured “a position as stenographer and law clerk to Major David T. Corbin, a Carpetbagger member of the South Carolina State Senate”; Candeloro, Dominic, “Louis Post as a Carpetbagger in South Carolina: Reconstruction as a Forerunner of the Progressive Movement,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 34 (Oct. 1975): 424CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In 1913, Post's level of public service improved considerably when he became Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Wilson administration. An avid supporter of Henry George's Single Tax Movement, Post was instrumental in converting that single-issue movement into a more wide-ranging form of progressivism after George's death. As a journalist, Post's acerbic style was frequently displayed in editorials and features that appeared in The Public; Candeloro, Dominic, “From the Narrow Single Tax to Broad Progressivism: The Intellectual Biography of Louis F. Post, 1898–1913,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 37 (July 1978): 325–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 G. H. Mead, “Social Settlements and Anarchy,” The Public, April 17, 1908, 55–57.
25 G. H. Mead, “Social Settlements and Anarchy,” 55.
26 See Fisher, “Interpretation's Contrapuntal Pathways,” 491.
27 Throughout his letter, Mead alluded to ideas that were more fully developed in other texts, namely, “The Working Hypothesis in Social Reform” and “The Social Settlement: Its Basis and Function”; Mead, G. H., “The Working Hypothesis in Social Reform,” American Journal of Sociology 5 (Nov. 1899): 367–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar and G. H. Mead, “The Social Settlement,” 108–10.
28 According to Mina Carson, settlement residents often viewed themselves as “interpreters:” “As spokesmen for the interests of immigrants, workers, and the poor, the settlers called themselves ‘mediators’ and ‘interpreters,’ and they styled the settlement house a ‘listening post’”; Carson, Mina, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930 (Chicago, 1990), 150Google Scholar. Settlement workers were able to “interpret” the immigrant community for others because residents had developed a “neighborly relation” with that community. The neighborly relation was a distinguishing feature of settlement philosophy: “The neighborly relation is predicated on the belief that in certain fundamental ways people are alike”; Lengermann and Neibrugge-Brantley, “Back to the Future,” 16.
29 As Mead explained: “It is the privilege of the social settlement to be part of its own immediate community, to approach its conditions with no preconceptions, to be the exponents of no dogma or fixed rules of conduct, but to find out what the problems of the community are and as part of it to help toward their solution”; Mead, “The Social Settlement,” 109.
30 Mead's letter, a typescript with holographic corrections, is four pages in length. Our corrections are enclosed in square brackets. Also, at the beginning of paragraph four, we have inserted our words in parentheses where we felt it might help the reader to follow Mead's narrative flow – the flow is stymied because of omitted words and awkward syntax, not by the intricacies of the argument. While only cosmetic differences distinguish the “essay” published in The Public from the original letter sent to the Chicago Record Herald, we thought it was appropriate to reproduce the version of the letter rejected by the Record Herald. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Chicago History Museum for permission to reprint George Herbert Mead's unpublished letter in its entirety.
31 When Mead composed his letter, the editor of the Chicago Record Herald was Frank B. Noyes; James Keeley, general manager of the Chicago Tribune, purchased the paper on May 7, 1914; New York Times, March 8, 1914.
32 Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was an Italian philosopher, theologian, and freethinker. He repudiated the authority of the Catholic Church and was immolated as a heretic in 1600. As quoted in the Chicago Record Herald, March 1, 1908, Addams characterized the Giordano Bruno Club as an anticlerical organization, not as an anarchist group: “Although the club is avowedly an anti-clerical organization, it removed its meeting from Hull House solely on the ground that it was a partisan political organization and should have a meeting room of its own . . . It was not at all because Hull House considered it an anarchist organization.” For additional commentary from Addams regarding the Giordano Bruno Club and its relationship to Hull- House, see Addams, Jane, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York, 1910), 412–25Google Scholar.
33 Mead was referring to a French law that was passed by the Chamber of Deputies on December 9, 1905. This law, which established secularism in France, was known as the “Law on the Separation of the Churches and State”; Guerlac, Othon, “The Separation of Church and State in France,” Political Science Quarterly 23 (June 1908): 273–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. From 1835 to 1837, a set of decrees known as “The Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizabal” resulted in the seizure of monastic properties in Spain; Harrison, Joseph, An Economic History of Modern Spain (Manchester, UK, 1978), 26–30Google Scholar.
34 The Catholic hierarchy in Chicago suggested that the teachings of Chicago's Girodano Bruno Club directly inspired assassin Guiseppe Alia; Goldstein, “The Anarchist Scare,” 61.
35 The source of Mead's information regarding incidents against the Russian-Jewish community was Jane Addams; Roth and Kraus, Accidental Anarchist, 101.
36 On February 20, 1907, Congress had passed legislation that excluded “anarchists” from immigrating to the United States. In addition, anyone facilitating the illegal entry of anarchists into the United States was subject to a substantial fine and prison term. Between March 2 and March 24, 1908, Congress addressed and debated the issue of more restrictive immigration legislation on seven different occasions; Roth and Kraus, Accidental Anarchist, 129, 133.
37 Addams noted the exploitation of immigrants throughout their passage to America, beginning with the dubious solicitations issued by representatives of steamship companies; Addams, Jane, “Recent Immigration: A Field Neglected by the Scholar,” University of Chicago Record 9 (Jan. 1905): 276Google Scholar. See also Deegan, Jane Addams, 278–79.
38 Robert Hunter provided empirical evidence of how immigrants were “ill-used” in terms of housing in a 1901 report on the tenement conditions in Chicago. To support his assertion that the tenement population was “oppressively” crowded, Hunter maintained that “[t]he density of population per acre in the Polish quarter in Chicago is three times that of the most crowded portions of Tokio [sic], Calcutta, and many other Asiatic cities”; Hunter, Robert, Tenement Conditions in Chicago (Chicago, 1901), 52Google Scholar.
39 Starting in the summer quarter of 1903, the University of Chicago formally acknowledged and honored the accomplishments of social settlements by scheduling public addresses regarding settlements during some portion of its academic year; Goodspeed, Thomas W., A History of the University of Chicago: The First Quarter-Century (Chicago, 1916), 399Google Scholar, 448. The first such occasion was designated “Settlement Day” in 1903 and featured public addresses by Jane Addams, cofounder of Hull-House, by Charles Zeublin, founder of the Northwestern University Settlement; and by Mary E. McDowell, head resident of the University of Chicago Settlement; University of Chicago, Annual Register (Chicago, 1904), 197Google Scholar. Mead was a featured speaker for two “Settlement Sundays,” one on October 27, 1907, and another on October 16, 1910; University of Chicago, Annual Register (Chicago, 1908), 198Google Scholar; University of Chicago, Annual Register (Chicago, 1911), 200Google Scholar.
40 Mead, “The Social Settlement,” 108. Cook provides one of the few discussions of Mead's 1907 statement, George Herbert Mead, 99–104.
41 Addams, “The Chicago Settlements,” 155.
42 Mead suggested the forum of this public address when he noted “The time and place of this meeting is sufficient evidence of the close relation between the settlements and organized charity”; Mead, “Sympathy, Science, and Social Settlements,” folder 24, box 13, George Herbert Mead Papers, 1. In terms of dating Mead's address, it could not have occurred earlier than 1909 because Mead cited a study by Addams titled The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets that was first published in that year; Mead, “Sympathy, Science, and Social Settlements,” folder 24, box 13, George Herbert Mead Papers, 11.
43 A critical assessment of Mead's expanded view of social settlements can be found in Da Silva, Filipe, Mead and Modernity: Science, Selfhood, and Democratic Politics (Lanham, MD, 2008), 170–71Google Scholar.
44 Mead, “Sympathy, Science, and Social Settlements,” folder 24, box 13, George Herbert Mead Papers, 2, 4–5.
45 Mead, “Working Hypothesis,” 371.
46 Mead, “Sympathy, Science, and Social Settlements,” folder 24, box 13, George Herbert Mead Papers, 12.
47 Mead, George Herbert, “The Child and Learning to Take the Role of the Other” in Play, School, and Society, ed. Deegan, Mary (New York, 1999), 83–84Google Scholar. As elaborated by Laura Westhoff, a primary consequence of Mead's linking sympathy to role-taking was “[c]ollapsing the divide between self and others, sympathy . . . offered a basis for understanding, inquiry, and knowledge.” Furthermore, sympathy provided “a starting point from which to mobilize political action to bring about material changes in the circumstances of others”; Westoff, Laura, A Fatal Drifting Apart: Democratic Social Knowledge and Chicago Reform (Columbus, 2007), 17Google Scholar.
48 Wilson, David and Dixon, William, “The Irreducibly Social Self in Classical Economy: Adam Smith and Thomas Chalmers meet G. H. Mead,” History of Economics Review 40 (2004): 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Dewey, John, “What Does Pragmatism Mean by Practical?,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 5 (Feb. 1908): 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 Katz, Bruce and Bradley, Jennifer, The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy (Washington, DC, 2013), 91Google Scholar.