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© 2001 American Public Health Association
VOICE FROM THE PAST |
From: Exploring the Dangerous Trades: The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton M.D. Boston Mass: Little Brown & Co 1943.
MISS ADDAMS HAS GIVEN... fully the history of Hull-House, of the birth of an idea and of its fulfillment. ... As one reads her earlier writings one sees that she was moved not only by the greater inequalities and injustices of society but perhaps even more by less evident, more intangible and rarely voiced evils from which men and women suffer but which sociologists often miss. She knew, because she understood people, that political equality meant little in comparison with social equality; she knew that the social exclusiveness of the well-to-do, the social ostra-cism of the "Dago," "Polack," "Hunky," "Greaser," Negro, was harder to bear than political corruption and rotten city government. Bad government led to wretched conditions, but it did not degrade the poor man in his eyes; on the contrary, the clever political boss flattered the voter's self-respect, made him feel himself of importance. Contempt, she said, is the greatest crime against one's fellow man.
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So she looked upon Hull-House as a bridge between the classes, and she always held that this bridge was as much of a help to the well-to-do as to the poor. We talk much nowadays of the frustrated idealism of our young people, of their longing for leadership, for a dedication of themselves to a great cause, for cour-age and hardship.... Miss Addams felt that need strongly and she made an inspiration of a life among the city poor, the bewildered and exploited immigrants. She offered young people of education and culture and gentle ways a place where they could live as neighbors and give as much as they could of what they had....
Hull-House in 1893 was a very attractive place.... My part in it was humble enough. At that time there were few of the social services which now we take as a matter of course. Hull-House had to have its own day nursery, kindergarten, public baths, playground, as well as all the other activities which settlements still carry on. There were no baby clinics, and, though I did not feel at all competent to treat sick babies, I did venture to open a well-baby clinic which very soon was taking in all the older brothers and sisters, up to eight years of age. Miss Addams let me use the shower-bath room in the basement of the gymnasium and provided a dozen little bathtubs, with soap and bathing towels, for most of the work of the "clinic" was bathing the children. Some of them came all sewed into their clothes for the winter, but I found I could get past Italian mothers' dread of water if I followed the bath with an alcohol rub and anointing with olive oil. Then I gave what I had been taught was the best advice about feeding babies—nothing but milk till their teeth came. When I see the varied diet modern mothers give their babies, anything apparently from bacon to bananas, I realize that those Italian women knew what a baby needed far better than my Ann Arbor professor did. I cannot feel I did any harm, however, for my teachings had no effect. I remember a young mother who had brought her baby to me, showing me her fine specimen of a three-year-old son, and telling me of his difficulties when he was a baby. "I gave him the breast and there was plenty of milk, but he cried all the time. Then one day I was frying eggs and just to make him stop I gave him one and it went fine. The next day I was making cup cakes and as soon as they were cool I gave him one, and after that I gave him just whatever we had and he got fat and didn't cry any more."
So now when I see an Italian baby sucking a slice of salami I feel quite serene. Garlic, we are told, is full of most valuable vitamins and salami is full of garlic. Evidently long before vitamins were discovered men decided that garlic was endowed with peculiarly beneficent properties....
In settlement life it is impossible not to see how deep and fundamental are the inequalities in our democratic country. That belief, so dear to Americans, that opportunity is open to all, that the exceptional child can rise to the highest position in the community if he will, may be true in politics, in business, even in the learned professions, but certainly not in the arts. One of the saddest things in the lot of the poor is the crushing down of artistic talent. My sister Norah, who had art classes in Hull-House for several years, used to suffer again and again the grief of seeing some promising young artist, Italian or Mexican, or Bohemian, leave school for the barren monotony of factory work, too tired after hours of it to do anything creative, his gift wasted. Yet no one can deny the need in our country for those gifts which the immigrants from countries with a more highly developed artistic life could bring us....
At the time [1910]... Professor Charles Henderson was teaching sociology in the University of Chicago. He had been much in Germany and had made a study of German sickness insurance for the working class (the Krankenkassen), a system which aroused his admiration and made him eager to have some such provisions made in behalf of American workmen. The first step must be, of course, an inquiry into the extent of our industrial sickness, and he determined to have such an inquiry made in Illinois. Governor Deneen was then in office and Henderson persuaded him to appoint an Occupational Disease Commission, the first time a state had ever undertaken such a survey. Dr. Henderson had some influence in selecting the members and, as he knew of my great interest in the subject, he included me in the group of five physicians who, together with himself, an employer, and two members of the State Labor Department, made up the commission. We had one year only for our work, the year 1910.
We were staggered by the complexity of the problem we faced and we soon decided to limit our field almost entirely to the occupational poisons, for at least we knew what their action was, while the action of the various kinds of dust, and of temperature extremes and heavy exertion, was only vaguely known at that time. Then we looked for an expert to guide and supervise the study, but none was to be found and so I was asked to do what I could as a managing director of the survey, with the help of twenty young assistants, doctors, medical students, and social workers....
While we were visiting plants, we set our young assistants to reading hospital records, interviewing labor leaders and doctors and apothecaries in working-class quarters, for we must unearth actual instances of poisoning if our study was to be of any value. Thus I was put on the trail of the new lead trades, some of which I had never thought of—for instance, making freight-car seals, coffin "trim," and decalcomania papers for pottery decoration; polishing cut glass; brass founding; wrapping cigars in so-called tinfoil, which is really lead. Hospital records yielded cases from these and from many other jobs which were not mentioned in foreign textbooks.
One case, of colic and double wristdrop, which was discovered in the Alexian Brothers' Hospital, took me on a pretty chase. The man, a Pole, said he had worked in a sanitary-ware factory, putting enamel on bathtubs. I had not come across this work in the English or the German authorities on lead poisoning, and had no idea it was a lead trade, but the factory was easy to reach on the near West Side and I stopped in to ask about the man's work. The management assured me that no lead was used in the coatings and invited me to inspect the workroom, where I found six Polish painters applying enamel paint to metal bathtubs. So ignorant was I that I accepted this as the work of enameling sanitary ware, and did not even notice that all the men were painting the outsides of the tubs. I did note the name of the paint and went to the factory which produced it, but there I was told that enamel paint is free from lead. Completely puzzled, I made a journey to the Polish quarter to see the palsied man and heard from him that I had not even been in the enameling works, only the one for final touching up. The real one was far out on the Northwest Side. I found it and discovered that enameling means sprinkling a finely ground enamel over a red-hot tub where it melts and flows over the surface. I learned that the air is thick with enamel dust and that this may be rich in oxide of lead. A specimen of it which I secured from a workman... proved to contain as much as 20 percent soluble lead—that is, lead that will pass into solution in the human stomach. Thus I nailed down the fact that sanitary-ware enameling was a dangerous lead trade in the United States, whatever was true of England and Germany....
Life at Hull-House had accustomed me to going straight to the homes of people about whom I wished to learn something and talking to them in their own surroundings, where they have courage to speak out what is in their minds. They were almost always foreigners, Bulgarians, Serbs, Poles, Italians, Hungarians, who had come to this country in the search for a better life for themselves and their children. Sometimes they thought they had found it, then when sickness struck down the father things grew very black and there were no old friends and neighbors and cousins to fall back on as there had been in the old country. Often it was an agent of a steam-ship company who had coaxed them over with promises of a land flowing with jobs and high wages. Six hundred Bulgarians had been induced to leave their villages by these super-salesmen, and to come to Chicago. Of course they took the first job they could find and if it proved to be one that weakened and crippled them—well, that was their bad luck!
It sometimes seemed to me that industry was exploiting the finest and best in these men—their love of their children, their sense of responsibility. I think of an enameler of bathtubs whom I traced to his squalid little cottage. He was a young Slav who used to be so strong he could run up the hill on which his cottage stood and spend all evening digging in his garden. Now, he told me, he climbed up like an old man and sank exhausted in a chair, he was so weary, and if he tried to hoe or rake he had to give it up. His digestion had failed, he had a foul mouth, he couldn't eat, he had lost much weight. He had had many attacks of colic and the doctor told him if he did not quit he would soon be a wreck. "Why did you keep on," I asked, "when you knew the lead was getting to you?" "Well, there were the payments on the house," he said, "and the two kids." The house was a bare, ugly, frame shack, the children were little, underfed things, badly in need of a handkerchief, but for them a man had sacrificed his health and his joy in life. When employers tell me they prefer married men, and encourage their men to have homes of their own, because it makes them so much steadier, I wonder if they have any idea of all that that implies.
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