Like the urban discourse of sympathy that preceded it, settlement sympathy suggested that the cultivation of fellow-feeling among individuals depended on face-to-face interactions. Although settlement leaders sought to enlarge the range of affections that might be considered to connect city dwellers to one another, they still privileged personal contact as the source of socially and emotionally legitimate relationships. The belief in the value of frequent interactions with one’s neighbors served as perhaps the principal tenet of the settlement movement’s social philosophy. By moving to the city’s dense immigrant neighborhoods and living “side by side with their neighbors”—those whom the industrial city had physically and emotionally segregated from them—settlement residents would, Addams believed, “grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests” with their neighbors.10 While settlement workers occasionally experienced these social bonds as familial bonds, they tended to characterize their relationships with their neighbors in terms of friendship and citizenship. It is true that settlement residents visited their neighbors in their homes, but they more often encountered one another in the city’s public and semi-public spaces. Settlement workers claimed that city dwellers could solidify their fellow-feelings for other urbanites as friends through their sociological investigations of urban life. As they worked to situate themselves and their neighbors in the context of the larger historical, economic, political, and cultural forces that shaped the lives and identities of city dwellers, settlement residents felt that urbanites could carve out more distinctly public avenues along which their sympathy for one another might travel. The settlement movement’s discourse of sympathy, then, both called attention to the legitimacy of relationships formed in the city’s public and semi-public spaces and sought to enhance the ability of city dwellers to experience a sense of connection to one another by providing them with new social and intellectual strategies.
The settlement movement’s account of the kinds of interpersonal feelings and relationships that mattered most inspired settlement workers to modify the industrial city’s built environment in order to facilitate the processes of a more distinctly urban sympathy and the kinds of fellow-feelings that these processes produced. Unlike Olmsted, settlement residents did not seek to remove city dwellers as far from the city as possible, but instead attempted to create much smaller scale public and semi-public spaces in the city’s dense immigrant neighborhoods. Their most recognizable and significant spatial innovation was the settlement house itself. According to Addams, the decision to establish Hull-House Settlement grew out of the “belief that the mere foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago.”11 Originally built as a private home by a wealthy Chicagoan, its spaces were modified by Addams and Starr so that it would function as a welcoming space—the type of semi-public space Addams claimed was hard to find in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward. While the settlement house performed at times as a domestic space for its residents, they and their neighbors more often experienced it as a public one. Its dining room hosted drawing classes, while its parlor supported kindergarten classes and its bedrooms accommodated neighborhood labor meetings. But the settlement house was just one of the many spatial innovations that settlement workers brought to the industrial city. The Hull-House campus, for instance, eventually included an additional thirteen buildings, which housed a gymnasium, coffeehouse, playground, museum, and branch of the city’s public library. Not all settlement houses were as spatially expansive and diverse as Hull-House, but it was not unique in its ability to morph private spaces into public ones and to expand beyond the boundaries of the house itself to provide spaces in which the city’s increasingly diverse inhabitants could come into direct contact with one another and acquire the kinds of fellow-feelings for one another that settlement residents felt would create a more democratic society.12
Despite the settlement movement’s efforts to stretch the urbanist discourse of sympathy to legitimate the interpersonal affections and relational forms that urbanites experienced in the city’s public and semi-public spaces, its insistence on the value of direct contact and the friendships that they sustained failed to reckon adequately with the structures of economic and political power that shaped the industrial city and the lives of those it sheltered. When Du Bois addressed a group of settlement workers, volunteers, and neighbors at Brooklyn’s Lincoln Settlement in 1910, he claimed to know of “no more effective way to work for the social uplift, not simply of the Negro people but the city of Brooklyn and the state of New York and indeed of the United States, than through efficient aid to an institution like the Lincoln Settlement.” His faith in the ability of public sympathy to move black urbanites beyond the line of discrimination that prevented them from realizing their social, economic, and cultural aspirations clearly underestimated the persistence of discrimination throughout the twentieth century.13 The type of personal contact privileged and promoted within settlement discourse as the source of fellow-feeling became increasingly difficult to experience in cities that, over the course of the twentieth century, found new ways to segregate black and other marginalized urbanites from privileged metropolitan residents. Du Bois and other settlement intellectuals also underestimated, as they would soon find out, the tendency of an urban discourse of sympathy to backslide conceptually toward the types of emotional intimacies that the language and logic of sympathy had conjured for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the familial feelings that bound individuals together in relationships that approximated those forged within the domestic sphere. Sympathy thus proved to be less capable than settlement residents had initially hoped of doing the social, cultural, and material work they wanted it to do.
“New Channels” of Sympathy
As settlement writers worked toward establishing their movement’s own distinct discourse of sympathy, they often drew on the domestic rhetoric that had enveloped the concept in the nineteenth century. Settlement residents were especially attracted to the notion of a universal brotherhood. Writing for the College Settlement News in 1896, Isabel Eaton explained that everything the settlement movement “stands for can be put into one word, Brotherhood.” By projecting the affective quality of domestic relationships onto the public relationships forged within the city, settlement workers hoped to overcome what Clarence Meily described in Charities and the Commons in 1905 as the “horizontal stratification of the sympathetic impulse” fostered by the city’s industrial geography.14 When put into practice, the kinship model of sympathy would bring settlement residents into relationships of equality with the urban poor. In relating to their neighbors as if they were siblings, settlement workers hoped to overcome the vast social and physical distance that paternalistic charity work had perpetuated. One settlement resident explained