One of the basic premises of the settlement movement was that the best way to attain fellow-feelings for another individual was to place oneself, quite literally, as close to another’s physical situation as possible. The insistence on the social value of continual personal contact among urbanites instigated the movement’s commitment to the idea and act of settling. By choosing to settle permanently (or semipermanently) in working-class industrial neighborhoods, settlement residents committed themselves to repeatedly negotiating their cultural, political, and personal values with individuals from other classes and cultures. Samuel A. Barnett, one of the British intellectuals credited with launching the settlement movement in London’s East End in the 1880s, explained that, as settlement residents “daily walk through mean streets,” “feel the depression of the smoke-laden air,” “see what is the work and what are the pleasures of the people,” “go to local meetings,” “meet for casual talks,” and “hear of the wrongs, of the sorrows, of the anger, and of the ignorance which are in the minds of workmen,” they learn to “look at life from another standpoint.” Walking, feeling, seeing, and talking with other urbanites would not necessarily lead settlement residents to experience “any change of opinion,” Barnett reasoned, but the resulting “sympathy makes them express the old opinion in a different spirit.”22 Alternatively, this affective process might lead settlement residents to change their opinion but not necessarily take up the exact opinion of their neighbors. Seeing the world from “another standpoint” might not always mean adopting another’s exact point of view. For settlement intellectuals, sympathizing with another individual did not require city dwellers to overcome all personal and cultural differences to arrive at an identical and shared emotion; instead, it required them to stand close enough to one another so that their repeated contact could lead them to modify their own ideas or feelings in some way. Experiencing this internal transformation and recognizing this change as the result of having come into direct contact with another human being—of having settled with that person—generated fellow-feelings for others. The kind of fellowship that Barnett described, according to Addams, exerted a “rectifying influence” on its participants that gave them the “power of recognizing good” in one another.23 This act of recognition is what settlement writers often referred to as sympathy.
Du Bois’s account of his life in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward illuminates the affective and relational nuances that often accompanied the type of personal contact privileged within settlement discourse. Shortly after moving to Philadelphia with his new bride in August 1896 and settling in a room above a cafeteria run by the College Settlement of Philadelphia, Du Bois immersed himself in the daily life of the neighborhood. At the settlement house, he taught American history to neighborhood boys on Wednesday evenings, regularly lectured at local meetings, attended the lectures of others, and helped organize and run neighborhood clubs. In addition to being deeply involved in the work of the settlement house, Du Bois became fully invested in the life of the Seventh Ward’s black community, frequenting formal and informal gatherings at the neighborhood’s churches, schools, businesses, and other institutions. On top of these activities, Du Bois “visited and talked with 5,000 persons” in the Seventh Ward “personally and not by proxy” while conducting sociological research. These one-on-one visits and conversations were not without a degree of social awkwardness and discomfort. He later recalled that the “colored people of Philadelphia received me with no open arms” and often “set me to groping”—experiences that led him to conclude he “did not know so much as I might about my own people.”24
Interacting directly with his neighbors day after day forced Du Bois to acknowledge the inability of conventional cultural narratives to connect him emotionally to those he had been confident he knew and to search for an alternative narrative through which he could experience fellow-feelings for them. Realizing that he could not identify with those he had assumed were his own people, he discovered the inadequacies of his culture’s myth of consanguinity. The “groping” that followed the failure of a standard sympathetic paradigm to connect him to his neighbors prompted him to take up an alternative one. Du Bois recounted that, during the “ten minutes to an hour” he spent in each home, conversation often veered off the official questionnaire into “general discussions” about the “condition of the Negroes, which were instructive.”25 Much of the enlightening information that emerged during these conversations could not be recorded on the official sociological schedules, but Du Bois nevertheless stored this new knowledge in his memory and wrote it out as memoranda so that it would inform his future interactions with his neighbors and shape the narrative of his study. Through the process of living among and talking with thousands of black urbanites, Du Bois claimed to have learned “far more from Philadelphia Negroes than I had taught them concerning the Negro Problem.”26 In his retelling, personal contact with his neighbors had exerted the kind of rectifying influence on his ideas and emotions that other settlement intellectuals had described as an essential part of the sympathetic process. Only after settling both physically and socially with other black Philadelphians did Du Bois claim to have attained a sense of fellow-feeling for them.
Settlement writing was not the only turn-of-the-century genre to articulate the social value and satisfaction of cross-cultural contact in the industrial city. Its similarities to these other urban discourses illuminate the ways in which interactions among individuals from different classes or cultures might generate a rectifying influence that disciplined rather than liberated the urban poor. The urban realism of writers such as William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Edith Wharton oft en featured narratives that hinged on cross-class contact among characters and that ultimately functioned to reify social hierarchies. And the broader practices of slumming to which urban realism sometimes contributed tended to hide the ways perceptions of class, racial, and sexual difference were changing during this period by inscribing them into the city’s built environment. Historians of the settlement movement have been quick to call attention to the ways in which settlement residents and their rhetoric of cross-class and cross-cultural contact often served the same purposes as these other urban discourses—to impose some degree of control on the city’s migrant and immigrant communities. While reading settlement studies and memoirs such as Du Bois’s Philadelphia Negro and Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House, it is easy to see how the promotion and practice of a form of sociality intended to bring about social equality and political transformation may have instead (or perhaps simultaneously) subjected the urban poor to what scholar Christopher Castiglia calls a “sympathetic discipline.”27
Settlement residents were often aware of the thin line they walked between “doing good ‘to’ people rather than ‘with’ them,” as Addams put it, which is why they imported into their discourse of sympathy the discipline of sociology. According to settlement writers, public sympathy was a more likely relational outcome when city dwellers understood one another’s lives within larger sociological and historical contexts. Although personal interactions with other urbanites helped remind the upper-class city dweller, according to Addams, “how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards” were and how dangerous it would be to “insist” that others take up the “conventions of her own class,” settlement discourse incorporated the language and logic of the social sciences to expose more fully and rectify the social standards and class conventions that infused every urban interaction with some dimension of inequality or injustice. Addams once quipped that people “sometimes say that our charity is too scientific”; but she insisted that it would be “much more correct in our estimate if we said that it is not scientific enough.”28 Herman F. Hegner, a resident at Chicago Commons in the 1890s, initially perceived the saloonkeeper in his settlement’s neighborhood to be the “agent of immorality and crime” and wanted “nothing to do with him.” However, after gathering a “fuller knowledge of facts” about saloonkeepers through social scientific research,