Hull-House Jubilee

Down Chicago's unsavory South Halsted Street one afternoon last week went citizens of high and low degree: clumpy immigrant folk, soiled and happy children, dowagers in their motors. They were all going to Hull-House to celebrate what Founder Jane Addams called the institution's "twice twentieth anniversary" (actually the 41st) and also to signalize Founder Addams' 70th year.

Although nominally a gala occasion, the business of Hull-House continued uninterrupted. Before an audience of social-workers and socialites in Bowen Hall, Mary E. McDowell, director of the University of Chicago Settlement, was telling of old days at Hull-House, showering the founder with graceful praise which was received with terse, straight-faced nods of the head.

Of the settlement's 41 years, matronly, active Miss Addams is too busy to say much. The idea of taking care of a great city's poor came to her in 1883 when she watched an auctioneer in London's East Side selling a consignment of badly spoiled meat. She and her longtime friend, Julia C. Lathrop, went back to Chicago a few years later and started their charitarian operations in the home of one Charles J. Hull, at Halsted near Polk Street. It was a lively neighborhood. On one side stood a mortuary, on the other a saloon. Hull-House grew, expanded building by building until now it occupies the entire block, is one of the biggest, one of the oldest, certainly the most famed of U. S. settlement houses. As the neighborhood changed, so did racial predominance among Hull-House beneficiaries. Originally used by French and Irish immigrants, it later had more Russian and Syrian proteges, followed by Mexicans in the 1920's. Since 1924 there has been a noticeable influx of Negroes.

Proud is Founder Addams of the distinguished roll of people who have served in residence at the institution, among them: Prime Minister William. Lyon MacKenzie King of Canada; President Gerard Swope of General Electric Co., who met his wife (Mary Dayton Hill) at Hull-House; Vice President B. E. Hutchinson of Chrysler Corp.; President Walter Gifford of American Telephone & Telegraph Co.; Editor Paul Underwood Kellogg of The Survey; Editor William Ludlow Chenery of Cottier's Weekly; Julia Clifford Lathrop, first chief of the U. S. Children's Bureau; Editor Harriet Monroe of Poetry.

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