Vivia Divers entered the \u201cBlack Hole\u201d on a September evening in 1890. Even though the city was already dark when her train pulled into the Polk Street station, Vivia was aware of what she would find. She knew the half-mile square area to be \u201cthe most disreputable locality in Chicago,\u201d and home to saloons, brothels, gambling dens and opium joints. Approximately 20 years old, Vivia was a young woman when she left her hometown of Warrensburg, Kansas, to be a missionary in Chicago.<\/p>\n Not much is known about Vivia Divers save the fact that she was a student at The Baptist Missionary Training School from 1891-1892, located at 2144 Indiana Avenue. A charitable institution it competed in its mission with the nearby Hull House. The school trained students for missionary work overseas as well as locally. For fieldwork experience it sent them to evangelize in missions in the Near West neighborhood. \u00a0Vivia\u2019s assigned district was on Clark Street, between Polk and Harrison, an area \u201cnoted for all manner of wickedness: no part of this little strip of one side of a block could be mentioned in which it did not abound.\u201d She describes the ethnic make-up of the district with \u201cAmericans, Africans, Italians, Spanish, French, Germans, Swedes, Jews, Arabians and Syrians, \u2013 all coming and going, some not staying more than a week or two till they were gone and new ones would come.\u201d<\/p>\n Vivia\u2019s recollections were precise on street names and street addresses. Carrying her Bible and Sunday school papers, she canvassed her assigned area, knocking on doors and looking for \u201clost souls.\u201d Much of\u00a0her\u00a0focus was on the children who \u201c[ran] along the street, with dirty faces, uncombed hair, and clothes almost torn off of them.”<\/p>\n Vivia often reeled at the sights and stenches within the tenement housing. Her descriptions of neighborhood homes were detailed, noting everything from the curtains to the flooring (or lack of) together with particularly bad odors wafting about the people and rooms. Piles of trash, pots of cooking pasta and bad teeth–little escaped her graphic attention. She recounted lengthy dialogues and specific encounters with a variety people ranging from a young Jewish agnostic to a burly saloon keeper. A woman\u2019s murder was vividly described and used as a moral object lesson: \u201cTurn from this life while you have the chance and prepare for the life hereafter,\u201d she plead with the victim\u2019s friend.<\/p>\n Vivia also struggled with the customs and beliefs of various ethnic groups. Frequently the residents would offer her beer or wine as a gesture of welcome or thanks. In response she would decline and reciprocate with a Sunday School temperance lesson.<\/p>\n At one point, Vivia described the process of photographing an Italian family. Mothers believed the camera casting an “evil eye” would harm their innocent children. In this first instance of the use of a Kodak on the streets of \u00a0the district, Vivia addressed the fears, overcame the resistance, and convinced local residents to permit her to take the photographs, the devil be damned.<\/p>\n The Black Hole is a rare volume. No publisher\u2019s name appears on the title page, not even the name of the author. Almost certainly it was a Baptist religious publication. Its value to the historian rests in the graphically described visitations, both on the streets and inside apartments, often above saloons and whore houses, and Divers’s vivid accounts of the people and their souls in need of her ministry. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n In 1894, Carrol D. Wright, the first U.S. Commissioner of Labor (1885-1905), in charge of the 11th census in 1890, published a special report, The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.\u00a0<\/em>Drawn largely from statistical census information, ti was a six hundred page tome of charts, tables, and numbers. A seminal publication on the topic, it characterized the pathological and dysfunctional behaviors in \u201cslum\u201d areas on selected inner-city streets.<\/p>\n Wright\u2019s relatively unknown classic represented a new critical approach to the definition of an urban \u201cslum.\u201d Addressed to a science educated and enlightened audience, the volume presenting the findings of an investigation by means of statistical patterns and abstracted social categories. The contrast was stark between Wright’s academic approach and the familiar and popular darkly sensual Victorian criminal underworld \u201cslum\u201d of horror, murder and mayhem, a predatory Jack the Ripper and a penny dreadful Sweeney Todd.<\/p>\n Statistics was a relatively new disciplinary language and Wright now led with the \u201cfacts\u201d and relatively little analysis. He presumed the numbers patterned in demographic snapshots and averages were now sufficiently riveting, revealing, and instructive without requiring imaginative and melodramatic embellishment.<\/p>\n In the study, Chicago was the only new American city with no eighteenth century venerable east coast origin and location. With the appointment of Florence Kelley, Hull-House actively participated in defining the boundaries of the West-Side slum by canvassing “a square mile extending from Hull-House on the west to State Street on the east, and several long blocks south,”\u00a0starting from Polk and Halsted, along Taylor to Newberry Avenue to Twelfth to State to Polk and back to Halsted. “In this area we encountered people of eighteen nationalities.” The substance of Kelley’s canvassing for Wright’s statistical volume made possible the innovative graphic presentation of color-coded\u00a0nationality and wage maps in Hull-House Maps and Papers<\/em> (1895)<\/p>\n Predetermined streets on Chicago\u2019s West Side now emerged as the mid-western paradigm of a blighted American slum in contrast to more “normal” neighborhoods. On average in the West-Side slum, nearly double the proportion of liquor saloons, double the number of arrests, a large foreign-born and alien speaking population not gainfully employed, males in excess of females with more than twice the number of divorces, laboring children not in school, and dense crowding in deteriorating housing stock. These numbered among the retrograde behaviors and effects documented.<\/p>\n The conservative political economist Wright held out some optimism for the future based upon\u00a0two positive findings. First, earnings in the representative slum matched other parts of the city, and second no greater sickness prevailed. \u201cThe conditions of slum life are not so appalling as they are often painted.\u201d \u00a0Wright, a critic of the strenuous opponents who stressed only bad consequences from foreign immigration especially from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, focused his prospective hopes on workers who could be enlightened to the benefits of invention.\u00a0 By which he meant employed workers with skilled trade and literacy skills .\u00a0 They would guide their lives by the \u00a0“character” values of western civilization.<\/p>\n Wright either ignored the unemployed or expressed disdain.\u00a0 He assumed their plight was caused by their own deficiencies.\u00a0 Despite contemporary labor violence and radical calls for socialist and anarchist action, Wright\u2019s general optimism regarding the economy expressed itself in two essays published the following year in 1895, \u00a0\u201cThe Chicago Strike\u201d and\u00a0\u201cHave we Equality of Opportunity?\u201d\u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n When Carroll D. Wright received funds from Congress to investigate slum conditions in four cities, he turned to the women and residents at Hull-House for the Chicago canvas. Following the example\u00a0of Booth\u2019s maps of London, the original feature in the Chicago survey became the production of innovative\u00a0color-coded mappings of polyglot nationalities and impoverished family wages. Displayed in the Hull-House presentation were the canvassing schedules used by the investigators in the congested one-third of a square mile spatial area around Hull-House on Halsted.<\/p>\n Dramatized for public viewing were the intimate details of slum family wages (coded in gold and black), population crowding, and the diversity of eighteen nationalities. \u00a0The color-coded maps were beyond anything Wright was able to convey in his tome of linear tables, charts, and graphs. Strenuous advocates for a woman\u2019s \u201chelping\u201d profession, the Hull-House social workers did not reach for quantitative purity. Indeed, their mission was to influence public opinion regarding policy prescriptions and legislation to improve standards of living in the “slum” and eliminate the prevalence of sweatshop exploitation and child labor in the district.<\/p>\n \u201cThis district was … selected as a slum,\u201d wrote Julia A. Lathrop, \u201cand is that portion of the city containing on its western side the least adaptable of the foreign populations, and reaching over on the east to a territory where the destructive distillation of modern life leaves waste products to be cared for inevitably by some agency from the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n An original reason for the founding of Hull-House was to serve as a saving mission for alien peoples. Noblesse oblige to act with high-minded honor and generosity towards less fortunate ranks was a prevailing sentiment. Driven by an elite philanthropic benevolence towards alien peoples, the Hull-House reformers targeted for their good works simple \u201cpeasants\u201d with no agency of their own, \u201chelpless dependents\u201d and \u201cwards of charity.\u201d A dose of condescension, at moments contempt, was present.<\/p>\n Foreign populations were perceived as living \u201cin every sort of mal-adjustment\u201d\u2013peasants without means to organize and cooperate. \u201cRural Italians in shambling wooden tenements; Russian Jews, whose two main resources are tailoring and peddling, quite incapable in general of applying themselves to severe manual labor or skilled trades, and hopelessly unemployed in hard times; here are Germans and Irish, largely of that type which is reduced by drink to a squalor it is otherwise far above. Here amongst all, save the Italians, flourishes the masculine expedient of temporary disappearance in the face of non-employment or domestic complexity, or both.\u201d \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n INTRODUCTION<\/strong><\/p>\n NATIONALITY & WAGE MAPS (1893-1895)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/files\/2016\/01\/4638.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nPREFACE-TABLE OF CONTENTS<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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PART 1<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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PART 2<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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SLUMS OF CHICAGO by Carroll D. Wright (1894)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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HULL-HOUSE MAPS AND PAPERS: A PRESENTATION OF NATIONALITIES AND WAGES IN A CONGESTED DISTRICT OF CHICAGO (1895)<\/h3>\n
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SCHEDULES FOR SPECIAL AGENTS (1893-1895)<\/span><\/h4>\n