Tender Toughness
Perkins knew she wanted some sort of heroic life, but she struggled after graduation to find a specific role. She was too inexperienced to be a social worker; the agencies would not hire her. She tried teaching at an upscale school for girls in Lake Forest, Illinois, but it was uninspiring. Eventually she also commuted in to Chicago and became involved with Hull House.
Hull House was a settlement house cofounded by Jane Addams, the leading American social reformer of her day. The idea was to give women a new range of service careers, to link the affluent with the poor, and to re-create the sense of community that had been destroyed by the disruptions of industrialization. It was modeled after Toynbee Hall in London, in which affluent university men organized social gatherings with the poor in the same manner in which they would organize them with one another.
At Hull House, affluent women lived among the poor and working classes, serving as counselors, assistants, and advisers and taking on projects to make their lives better. They offered job training, child care, a savings bank, English lessons, even art classes.
Today, community service is sometimes used as a patch to cover over inarticulateness about the inner life. Not long ago, I asked the head of a prestigious prep school how her institution teaches its students about character. She answered by telling me how many hours of community service the students do. That is to say, when I asked her about something internal, she answered by talking about something external. Her assumption seemed to be that if you go off and tutor poor children, that makes you a good person yourself.
And so it goes. Many people today have deep moral and altruistic yearnings, but, lacking a moral vocabulary, they tend to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I have impact? Or, worst of alclass="underline" How can I use my beautiful self to help out those less fortunate than I?
The atmosphere at Hull House was quite different. The people who organized the place had a specific theory about how to build character, equally for those serving the poor and for the poor themselves. Addams, like many of her contemporaries, dedicated her life to serving the needy, while being deeply suspicious of compassion. She was suspicious of its shapelessness, the way compassionate people tended to ooze out sentiment on the poor to no practical effect. She also rejected the self-regarding taint of the emotion, which allowed the rich to feel good about themselves because they were doing community service. “Benevolence is the twin of pride,” Nathaniel Hawthorne had written. Addams had no tolerance for any pose that might put the server above those being served.
As with all successful aid organizations, she wanted her workers to enjoy their work, to love their service. At the same time, she wanted them to hold their sentiments in check and to struggle relentlessly against any feelings of superiority. At Hull House, social workers were commanded to make themselves small. They were commanded to check their sympathies and exercise scientific patience as they investigated the true needs of each individual. The social worker was to be a practical adviser, almost in the manner of today’s management consultant—to investigate options, offer friendship and counsel, but never let her own opinions prevail over the decisions of the beneficiaries. The idea was to let the poor determine their own lives rather than becoming dependent upon others.
Addams observed a phenomenon one still sees frequently today: Many people graduate from college energetic, lively, and impressive, but by age thirty they have become duller and more cynical versions of themselves. Their ambitions have shrunk. At school, Addams wrote in her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House, students are taught to be self-sacrificial and self-forgetting, to put the good of society above the good of their ego. But when they graduate they are told to look out for themselves, to settle down into marriage and, perhaps, career. The young women are effectively asked to repress their desire to right wrongs and alleviate suffering. “The girl loses something vital out of her life to which she is entitled,” Addams wrote. “She is restricted and unhappy; her elders, meanwhile, are unconscious of the situation and we have all the elements of tragedy.”25 Addams saw Hull House not only as a place to help the poor; it was a place where the affluent could surrender to an ennobling vocation. “The final return of the deed is upon the head of the doer,” Addams wrote.26
Perkins spent as much time at Hull House as possible, first staying over for weekends, then longer stretches. When she left, she had more of a scientific mentality—data must be gathered. She knew how to navigate the landscape of poverty. She also had more courage. Her next job was with an organization in Philadelphia founded by a Hull House alumna. Bogus employment agencies were luring immigrant women into boardinghouses, sometimes drugging them and forcing them into prostitution. Perkins exposed 111 of these places by applying for such jobs herself, confronting the pimps face-to-face. Then, in 1909, with some experience under her belt, she joined Florence Kelley in New York at the National Consumers League. Kelley was a hero and inspiration to Perkins. “Explosive, hot-tempered, determined, she was no gentle saint,” Perkins would later write. “She lived and worked like a missionary, no sacrifice too great, no effort too much. She was a deeply emotional and profoundly religious woman, although the expression was often unconventional.”27 While at the Consumers’ League, Perkins lobbied against child labor and other atrocities.
In New York, she also fell in with the bohemian Greenwich Village crowd: Jack Reed, who later became involved in the Russian Revolution; Sinclair Lewis, who once proposed marriage to her, at least semiseriously; and Robert Moses, who was part of the counterculture then but who would go on to become the domineering uber-engineer of New York City.
Reticence
Perkins was getting a bit tougher at every step along the way—at Mount Holyoke, at Hull House—and yet she was also getting more idealistic, more fervent about her cause. The Triangle Factory fire was the moment when those two processes took a definitive leap.
The United States ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, perceptively observes that some people put themselves “at stake” when they get involved in a cause. That is to say, they feel that their own reputation and their own identity are at stake when decisions are made. They are active in the cause in part because of what it says about them, and they want their emotions and their identity and their pride to be validated along the way. Perkins was not “at stake” after the fire. She went to work in Albany, lobbying the state legislature for worker safety legislation. She left behind the prejudices of her upscale New York social set. She left behind the gentility of progressive politics. She would compromise ruthlessly if it meant making progress. Her mentor, Al Smith, a rising figure in New York politics, told Perkins that before long, the genteel progressives would lose interest in any cause. If you want to usher real change, he told her, you have to work with the sleazy legislators and the rough party pols. You have to be practical, subordinate your personal purity to the cause. Perkins learned that in a fallen world it is often the “tainted” people who help you do the most good. In Albany she began to work closely with the denizens of the Tammany Hall political machine, who were regarded with horror in the polite circles in which she had previously traveled.