The Sociable City. Jamin Creed Rowan

for him.²⁹ Hegner had originally situated the saloonkeeper in a nineteenth-century Protestant narrative that defined him as a moral failure, but sociological research allowed Hegner to liberate this urban figure from that narrative and place him instead in a broader reality that he and the saloonkeeper shared—one shaped by the industrial city’s larger economic, political, and cultural forces. Sociological research put urbanites in a position to encounter one another on more common social and material ground than they might have otherwise encountered one another.

      The settlement movement’s sociological studies became particularly important channels through which urbanites could expand the discourse of sympathy to account for the increasingly large number of black city dwellers with whom they shared the industrial city. Between 1880 and 1910, the black population in Chicago increased almost sevenfold, more than tripled in Manhattan, and nearly tripled in Philadelphia (making it home to the largest black community in the United States). As black citizens sought opportunities in the nation’s growing cities in the wake of Emancipation and Reconstruction, their fellow urbanites struggled to know how to interact and connect with their new neighbors. Early settlement residents found it difficult to make room for black migrants under the canopy of public sympathy. They tended to shy away from establishing settlement houses in black urban neighborhoods, which made it difficult to be in personal contact with black urbanites. Furthermore, settlement workers often failed to use sociology to gain an understanding of the larger structural conditions underpinning the black urban community; for instance, none of the essays in Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), one of the earliest and most important sociological studies completed by early settlement workers, addresses the lives of black Chicagoans in any substantial way. When settlement workers did make an effort to understand the condition of urban blacks, they often attributed the social and economic problems their black neighbors faced to the system of slavery—an explanation that was more humane than those offered by popular theories of racial determinism, but not attentive enough to the conditions of the industrial city.³⁰

      Du Bois attempted to address this racial flaw in settlement discourse by drawing on and adjusting its sociological narrative strategies. Social science could, he felt, make the settlement movement’s “cosmopolitan humanitarianism” more cosmopolitan. Like Addams, Du Bois claimed that most efforts to improve the lives of city dwellers were not scientific enough. He informed the students of Atlanta University’s sociological club in 1897 that, when people understood the “value and meaning of statistics” gathered by the urban sociologist, they would be able to replace “sentiment and theory” with scientific facts as the foundation of a more effective and compassionate style of sociality.³¹ City dwellers could only feel right toward and do right with their black neighbors by understanding the larger forces that restricted their opportunities and informed their choices. To understand the “real condition” of Philadelphia’s black inhabitants, Du Bois explained in The Philadelphia Negro, one had to situate their urban lives in the context of a reality that had been shaped by both the “physical environment of [the] city” and the “far mightier social environment—the surrounding world of custom, wish, whim, and thought.”³²

      To help readers grasp this urban reality, Du Bois thoroughly plotted in words, graphs, diagrams, and maps the built environment and social landscape of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward—a neighborhood that ran between South and Lombard Streets from Seventh to Twenty-Fifth Streets. Du Bois went through great pains to document the physical conditions of the tightly packed row houses, lodging houses, and tenements that sheltered the Seventh Ward’s 15,000 black residents. A large number of the families who resided in the Seventh Ward rented single bedrooms and had limited access to a common kitchen. Only 13.7 percent of these families had access to bathrooms and water closets—and many of those who did had to share the use of that bathroom with at least one other family. Du Bois estimated that “over 20 per cent and possibly 30 per cent of the Negro families of this ward lack some of the very elementary accommodations necessary to health and decency,” even though they paid “comparatively high rents.” Despite the Seventh Ward’s inadequate housing conditions, black city dwellers made their way to the neighborhood for its proximity to employment and its dynamic social life. Black life had, for several decades, been centered in the Seventh Ward’s churches, secret and beneficial societies, loan associations, political clubs, unions, and schools.³³

      When Du Bois hit the streets of the city’s Seventh Ward with a valise full of blank sociological schedules on which to record the data that would form the foundation of The Philadelphia Negro, he had to expand the footprint of the settlement movement’s sociological structure of inquiry to allow the customs, wishes, whims, and thoughts of the city’s black residents to inform his urban narrative. He did this, in part, by modifying the questions settlement workers typically asked of their neighbors while gathering information for their sociological studies. Because of discrimination’s elusive nature and the settlement movement’s focus on collecting empirical data, settlement workers often overlooked the role social prejudices played in the lives of their subjects. Du Bois altered the questions on the standard schedule in an attempt to capture the “somewhat indefinite term” of prejudice and translate it into “something tangible.”³⁴ The settlement workers who gathered sociological data for the studies published in Hull-House Maps and Papers asked their subjects the following sequence of questions: “Weeks employed at any other profession, trade, or occupation during the year?” and “Name of such other profession, trade, or occupation?”³⁵ Such questions assumed that those being interviewed had little difficulty finding employment and did not encourage subjects to talk about the challenges they might have encountered in their search for work. Du Bois adjusted these and other questions to allow black urbanites the opportunity to talk about the ways in which prejudice had impeded their ability to secure employment and shelter.³⁶ Rather than inquiring matter-of-factly how many weeks his neighbors had been employed, he asked questions such as: “Have you had any difficulty in getting work?” and “Have you had any difficulty in renting houses?”³⁷ By slightly altering the questions that appeared on the standard sociological schedule, Du Bois began to build a more nuanced picture of the “real condition” in which his Seventh Ward neighbors operated—a picture that enabled him to deepen and rectify the fellow-feelings he had acquired through his one-on-one conversations with them.

      Figure 2. A section of the map of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward that documents Du Bois’s sociological findings about the distribution and socioeconomic condition of the ward’s black residents. From W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1899). University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center, Publications of the University of Pennsylvania.

      Du Bois translated the sociological data he acquired through his rigorous survey of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward into a narrative that staged an encounter between readers and the neighborhood’s black residents in the larger context of their urban conditions. Settlement writers often tried to recreate for their readers the affect produced through daily urban contact by inundating them with brief, successive, and jarring vignettes of individual city dwellers. Encountering one urbanite after another that could not be understood through the culture’s standard explanatory narratives forced readers to become aware, at the very least, of the inadequacies of their own habits of feeling. Throughout The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois reanimated the boiled-down sociological data found in the maps, charts, and tables he included in his study by providing brief, consecutive snapshots of individual urbanites: “C—is a shoemaker; he tried to get work in some of the large department stores. They ‘had no place’ for him”; “G—is an iron puddler, who belonged to a Pittsburg union. Here he was not recognized as a union man and could not get work except as a stevedore”; “H—was a cooper, but could get no work after repeated trials, and is now a common laborer.”³⁸ In describing the interactions of these anonymous individuals with the gatekeepers of the city’s industrial economy, Du Bois drew attention to the personal level on which racism’s economic consequences were felt while simultaneously pointing out the structural nature of racism in Philadelphia. The problem was not the individual employers who refused black urbanites work, per se,