Not all settlement residents, though, felt that the concept of brotherhood—and the domestic and Christian style of sympathy it signaled—adequately expressed the settlement movement’s investment in a less intimate but equally valuable style of urban sociality. Brotherhood may have characterized the type of democratic equality that settlement workers aspired to achieve in their relationships with their neighbors, but it also implied an interpersonal intimacy that some felt they could not or did not want to sustain. Brotherhood, as a relational model, did not fully account for the affective variability of the social interactions that settlement workers experienced as they navigated the city. Vida Scudder, one of the movement’s most eloquent spokeswomen, recalled that many of the earliest settlement volunteers had reasoned that “since bad air, over-crowding, and hard manual labor were obviously the lot of great numbers of our brethren,” settlement residents should also “accept these things” as their “lot” in life. After living at Boston’s Dennison House for several years, however, Scudder admitted that thinking of the urban poor as “brethren” was a little too “sentimental” and a bit misguided. As she came to see it, the initial desire of settlement volunteers to achieve a complete “self-identification with the life and conditions of the poor”—to become one blood with them—had, by the turn of the century, “shrunk to a vanishing point.”17 As the movement matured, many settlement residents had enough experience to realize that this conventional sympathetic rhetoric did not sufficiently capture the nature of their relationships with their neighbors. Scudder may have overstated the degree to which the concept of brotherhood diminished as a structure of fellow-feeling that informed the behavior and affections of settlement residents, but she and many others became increasingly convinced that this sentimental discourse of sympathy too oft en overlooked the social inequalities that settlement workers had to acknowledge and negotiate in their encounters with city dwellers. Settlement workers realized that capturing the type of affections that grew out of their interactions with others in the industrial city could only be described with a vocabulary capable of communicating much more than social and emotional solidarity.
When Addams wrote about “longing for a wider union than that of family or class” in the Atlantic Monthly in 1899, a decade after she had settled at Hull-House with Starr, she was longing to experience not just a union that included individuals whose lives fell outside the boundaries of her own family and class but also a new affect—one that would be qualitatively different than that which held families and classes together. Addams and other settlement writers expressed dissatisfaction with the type of urban philanthropy that utilized the language and logic of charity to articulate the union between the classes. The problem with speaking about urban relationships in terms of charity, Addams reasoned, was that it established an “unconscious division of the world into the philanthropists and those to be helped.” Addams insisted that the industrial city, with its crowded and diverse immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, had created the physical and social conditions within which an “affection” that was “large and real enough” to leave behind social distinctions had already begun to emerge. She pointed readers to urban neighborhoods like Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward where, because the “economic condition of all” was equally “precarious,” the “outflow of sympathy and material assistance” could readily traverse family, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. Addams would later describe the larger affections that allowed her immigrant neighbors to achieve a wider union as a “cosmopolitan affection.”18 It was this cosmopolitan affection that she and others hoped a settlement discourse of sympathy could legitimize by making its operations in the lives of urbanites more visible.
Du Bois developed perhaps an even more precise articulation of the type of binding affection that Addams and other settlement writers had been trying to express during the settlement movement’s first decade. In his landmark settlement study of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Du Bois described a “public sympathy” capable of connecting white Philadelphians to their black neighbors. For Du Bois, public sympathy captured an affective process and fellow-feeling that connected city dwellers to one another as they interfaced with one another’s public identities. More specifically, he suggested that, as urbanites approached one another through the identities they performed in the public world of work, rather than the racial identities socially constructed for them, they were connected to each other through a public sympathy that ensured each participant in the relationship opportunities to take up various positions within the city’s economic, social, cultural, and political grid. The city dweller who operated under the affective structure of “charitable interest” might “contribute handsomely to relieve Negroes in poverty and distress” while simultaneously refusing to “let a Negro work in his store or mill,” thus compromising their philanthropic intentions. But those who pursued the fellow-feelings Du Bois referred to as public sympathy entered into relationships in which both individuals viewed one another as “fellow-laborers” in the city’s industrial economy.19
Du Bois and other settlement writers increasingly relied on a new set of terms to differentiate cosmopolitan affection and public sympathy from the type of sympathy signified by the terminology of brotherhood. John P. Gavit, a resident at Chicago Commons, made it clear near the end of the nineteenth century that settlement workers were “not so much teachers, preachers or benefactors as friends, neighbors, fellow-citizens, fellow-sufferers, [and] fellow-men.”20 Among the words Gavit used to distinguish the types of urban relationships forged by settlement residents from those fashioned by philanthropists, missionaries, and charitable agents, friend became the most frequently invoked by both residents and their neighbors. The president of the Woman’s Club at Chicago Commons, a recent immigrant to the neighborhood, recalled that, when she and her neighbors first arrived in Chicago, they found themselves “shut up in our homes, as if they were jails.” When they visited the settlement house, they felt that they were “among friends, friends that were interested in us and in our daily lives. Its doors were open to us at any and all times, with a sympathizing friend always ready to listen to us.”21 The type of sympathy she experienced at Chicago Commons was qualitatively different from what she experienced in her home, and she used friend to signal this difference. The term accounted for relationships that were less intimate and private than those among family members. Friend was capacious enough to indicate a wide range of relationships formed within the public sphere. The terms that follow friend in Gavit’s list—neighbor, citizen, and fellow-men—offer just a brief glimpse of the affective scope signified by this word. Friend could be used to describe a relationship that involved relatively intimate feelings, such as those expressed by the president of the Chicago Commons Woman’s Club, just as accurately as it could be used to denote relationships that entailed the less intimate, but no less valid, emotional attachments between citizens. Regardless of the affective register on which a friendship between settlement residents and their urban neighbors operated, the concept of friend captured both the mutuality and continuity of the kinds of urban relationships that settlement workers advocated.
The “Rectifying Influence” of Personal Contact and Social Science
The urbanist discourse of sympathy that settlement intellectuals refined during the Progressive Era emphasized two particular avenues through which city dwellers connected emotionally with one another. First, settlement intellectuals stressed that public sympathy grew out of frequent personal contact among urbanites. Settlement residents avowed that mixing with urbanites in public and semi-public spaces was essential to the development of cosmopolitan fellow-feelings. Second, settlement