Du Bois saw his use of settlement sociology in The Philadelphia Negro as an extension of the structure of interracial friendship constructed by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), the country’s first abolitionist organization. Unlike the Massachusetts Abolition Society, which tended to rely on sentimental narratives to generate interracial fellow-feeling, the PAS hoped to cultivate within citizens what it described as a “feeling mind” by gathering and disseminating factual information about the nation’s black inhabitants. When, for instance, a group of Pennsylvanians mounted a movement to disenfranchise the state’s black citizens at the 1838 constitutional convention, the PAS of Philadelphia responded by appointing a committee to gather “such statistical and other information as will show the present condition of the colored population of this city and districts.” This PAS committee calculated the social value of Philadelphia’s black residents by examining them from a “pecuniary point of view” and considering the integral role they played in the local economy. Based on the information gathered during its house-to-house survey of the city, the committee found that, although “some portion of them may live in idleness,” a much more significant “proportion of them are usefully and industriously employed.” The PAS sought to undermine the “false estimate which still prevails amongst the mass of our citizens, as to the value of the colored people as a component part of the community.”40 Rather than engender fellow-feelings among white Philadelphians for their black neighbors by primarily portraying the latter as fellow mothers and fathers, the PAS encouraged city dwellers to think of their neighbors as “fellow-laborers in the Society.” Members of the PAS conceived of themselves as “fast friends” with their black neighbors, literally working alongside them in the public world of work rather than as philanthropists bestowing gifts from afar.41 The PAS wanted to route the intellectual and emotional response to its statistical findings away from private affect and toward a more public form of interpersonal feeling—toward the very kind of public sympathy that Du Bois described in Philadelphia Negro.
When rank-and-file settlement residents talked about their experiences while living and working in settlement houses, they echoed the urbanist discourse of sympathy established by more prominent settlement voices. When the Church Social Union surveyed dozens of ordinary settlement workers, asking if their “attitude toward social and industrial questions” had changed during their settlement residence, one worker responded that she “saw so much and heard so much that was entirely new” that her “feeling toward the poor has changed from pity to a sense of honest comradeship.” Another resident answered that she had “gained a more sympathetic knowledge of the laboring-man in general, and of trades unions in particular.” Although neither resident talked in explicit terms about how she came to acquire a new sense of fellow-feeling for her urban neighbors, their answers suggest that their altered sympathy for those in their community had been fed principally by two channels: daily contact and sociological research. Seeing and hearing the urban poor regularly transformed the first respondent’s affective connection to them from “pity” to “comradeship.” And the second respondent’s use of the phrase “sympathetic knowledge” implies that her fellow-feeling for the “laboring-man” had been cultivated through sociological data. Both had acquired what another respondent described as a “new sympathy with workingmen as a class, a new discontent with our present industrial system.”42 It would be easy to interpret the “new sympathy” that this resident claimed to have obtained simply as additional fellow-feelings—a quantitative increase in sympathy. But it might be more accurate to think of this “new sympathy” as a distinctly different range of affections than those that the resident had experienced prior to her engagement in settlement work.
Building Places of Exchange
The settlement movement’s commitment to a particular style of sympathy inspired its participants to remake the industrial city’s landscape. They worked to create spaces in the industrial city that, as Addams explained, “clothed in brick and mortar and made visible to the world that which we were trying to do.” Settlement residents joined a throng of other urbanists at the turn of the century in redeveloping and regulating the industrial city’s built environment in attempts to improve the quality of urban life.43 As the White City at the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 and Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago demonstrated, many of these progressive urbanists sought to reshape the industrial city on a monumental scale—they reimagined the entire organization of the city and developed the building techniques and political strategies in order to transform it. While settlement residents played an important role in securing the zoning regulations, tenement codes, and sanitation laws that made the large-scale transformation of urban space possible, they were perhaps even more invested in constructing the smaller-scale and more localized spaces in which urbanites could directly engage with one another and participate together in the production and dissemination of sociological knowledge. Settlement residents were deeply committed to creating spaces that gave city dwellers access to what one of Hull-House’s young residents called a “place of exchange.”44
Although settlement workers believed that urbanites could experience some measure of public sympathy for one another on the industrial city’s congested streets and in its run-down tenement neighborhoods, they shared Olmsted’s conviction that its inhabitants were more likely to achieve fellow-feelings for one another when interacting in spaces at some remove from the city’s purely public places. But if Olmsted’s particular understanding of the sympathetic process inspired him to design urban spaces that “completely shut out the city” and removed urbanites from the “bustle and jar of the streets,” the discourse of sympathy that settlement intellectuals had cultivated motivated them to create spaces that harnessed rather than repelled the social energy that coursed through the industrial city’s streets.45 Settlement residents wanted to create places in which they and their neighbors could actualize and, to some degree, manage the cross-class and cross-cultural social opportunities made possible by the new demographics of the industrial city—opportunities that the city’s built environment had increasingly foreclosed. To facilitate the type of sympathetic exchanges among city dwellers that pulsed at the heart of the settlement movement’s urban vision, residents worked with their neighbors to cobble together spaces out of the industrial city’s built environment that blurred the boundaries between public and private. They strove to infuse their neighborhoods with “semi-public” locales that were, in Addams’s words, “easily accessible” to those who bustled and jarred against one another on the city’s streets.46
No place better illuminates the complexion of the semi-public spaces that settlement residents assembled at the turn of the century than the settlement house itself. Given the nature of the settlement enterprise, the settlement house continued to serve many of the private functions of the traditional home—its residents had to sleep, eat, and bathe there. But settlement residents learned not only how to transform what had originally served as private space within the nineteenth-century home into public space but also how to continually shift the functionality of those spaces between private and public. That is to say, a single room in the settlement home might function as a private space in the morning and as a public space in the evening.47 The activation of the public identity of conventionally private spaces such as dining rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, or stairways was frequently instigated by residents’ desires to provide themselves and their neighbors with opportunities to participate in the social processes that would generate a cosmopolitan affection among them. Dorothea Moore recalled that, in the evening, the Hull-House dining room served as a “meeting ground” between residents and neighbors where the “generalizations of the over young are discouraged with kindness and qualifying facts” and where more experienced individuals could be “induced to reconsider and admit another fact of the great truth.” As the “free play of the individual” at the dinner table met with the “friction”