Читать книгу The Sociable City - Jamin Creed Rowan - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

The Settlement Movement’s Push for Public Sympathy

When Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr moved to the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago in 1889 and founded the Hull-House Settlement, they encountered a very different kind of city from the one Frederick Law Olmsted had responded to just twenty years earlier. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks, Italians, Jews, and other immigrants, along with significant economic transformations and technological advancements, had radically altered the city’s social landscape and built environment. Addams described the consequences of these explosive changes to the U.S. city after having lived in Chicago’s West Side for a few years. She was quick to point out the wear and tear on the city’s infrastructure caused by dramatic population growth, noting that the “streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools inadequate, factory legislation unenforced, the street-lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables defy all laws of sanitation.” Addams also drew her readers’ attention to the fundamental shifts in how people lived and made a living in the city. Many of her West Side neighbors resided in the wooden homes that were “originally built for one family and are now occupied by several,” while others lived in the type of “brick tenement buildings” that had been springing up in the city since the late 1870s. Most of the city’s new residents worked in the factories and sweatshops that had recently taken root in the outskirts of Chicago, especially its southern and western edges. Because of these physical and social changes within the city, Addams noted, many of the neighborhood’s “older and richer inhabitants seem anxious to move away as rapidly as they can afford it”—a move made possible by new modes of mass transit that allowed these upper-class urbanites to live in new suburban communities and affordably commute downtown.¹

The most concerning byproduct of the urban transformations Addams described was an intensified spatial stratification and subsequent emotional disconnection among city dwellers. In what would become a foundational document of the settlement movement, “A New Impulse to an Old Gospel,” Addams explained in 1892 that the city’s entire “social organism” had “broken down” into distinct classes and races, and that this breakdown was most visible in the “large districts of our great cities.”² Segregation had always been part of city life, but new lines of class and ethnic separation had emerged in the Gilded Age city. This new style of segregation was manufactured not only by emerging residential patterns initiated by a changing industrial geography and new forms of mass transit, but also by significant spatial transformations during the previous two decades that channeled urbanites away from public and toward private spaces. The late nineteenth-century city—with its apartment houses, large department stores, and houses of public amusement—became a place in which individuals could circumvent more easily than they could before the city’s civic spaces.³ Addams was quick to point out that cities such as Chicago also began to sidestep working-class neighborhoods such as the Nineteenth Ward and its inhabitants. She observed that the “club-houses, libraries, galleries, and semi-public conveniences for social life” were located just a few too many “blocks away” for her neighbors to access them and thus to interact with many of their fellow Chicagoans.⁴

Unlike Olmsted, who worried that the early industrial city’s claustrophobic scale negated the possibility of fellow-feeling by forcing urbanites to encounter one another in tight spaces, Addams agonized over the ways in which the industrial city “deadens the sympathies” of its inhabitants by spatially separating them from one another. Despite her society’s supposed commitment to advancing democracy in the political realm—its willingness to “give the franchise to the immigrant from a sense of justice”—she found the blatant “lack of democracy in social affairs” very disturbing. She lamented the fact that city dwellers “live for the moment side by side” but do so “without knowledge of each other, without fellowship.”⁵ The established citizens in Chicago’s West Side, she observed, felt no obligation to invite any of the recently arrived Italian, German, Bohemian, Russian, Polish, or Greek immigrants to their homes to forge fellow-feelings with them. W. E. B. Du Bois observed an even more pronounced lack of fellowship among black and white city dwellers while living in the College Settlement of Philadelphia in the mid-1890s. While conducting sociological research among the thousands of black residents living in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, he learned firsthand that the segregation of urban blacks was “more conspicuous” and “more patent to the eye” than the segregation experienced by “Jews, Italians, and even Americans.” Black Philadelphians constituted a “large group of people—perhaps forty-five thousand, a city within a city—who do not form an integral part of the large social group.” Black urbanites fell outside what Du Bois would describe in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as the “pale of sympathy,” by which he meant the bonds of a familial fellow-feeling that so easily united white citizens.⁶

Addams, Starr, Du Bois, and their settlement colleagues in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other U.S. cities hoped that settlement houses might provide the kind of semi-public space that could, to borrow Addams’s phrase, “socialize their democracy” by keeping sympathies alive among city dwellers.⁷ But when settlement intellectuals talked about “sympathy,” they often intended to signify a different set of affective processes and relational forms than their sentimental predecessors had signaled through their use of the term. Participants in the Progressive Era settlement movement stretched the urban discourse of sympathy beyond the boundaries established by Olmsted and other nineteenth-century urbanists to account for and validate fellow-feelings among city dwellers that did not fit neatly within the categories of affection and sociality typically associated with the domestic realm. Addams argued that her increasingly urban society must be willing to rethink the social ideals that had arisen and taken root in much less urban times and places. And by expanding the discourse of sympathy to legitimize some of the interpersonal feelings and relationships experienced by urbanites, Addams and other settlement intellectuals encouraged the city dweller to “make new channels through which his sympathy may flow.” The settlement discourse of urban sympathy both acknowledged and promoted “sympathy in a larger measure and of a quality better adapted to the contemporaneous situation”—a type of fellow-feeling Addams characterized as “cosmopolitan affection.”⁸ Du Bois and other settlement writers joined Addams in extending the nineteenth-century urban discourse of sympathy. In advocating for “public sympathy” among Philadelphia’s black and white residents, Du Bois hoped both to make visible and to instigate interracial urban relationships that produced more emotionally satisfying, socially just, and economically rewarding relationships than those that grew out of the “mere altruistic interest in an alien people.”⁹

Like the urban discourse of sympathy that preceded it, settlement sympathy suggested that the cultivation of fellow-feeling among individuals depended on face-to-face interactions. Although settlement leaders sought to enlarge the range of affections that might be considered to connect city dwellers to one another, they still privileged personal contact as the source of socially and emotionally legitimate relationships. The belief in the value of frequent interactions with one’s neighbors served as perhaps the principal tenet of the settlement movement’s social philosophy. By moving to the city’s dense immigrant neighborhoods and living “side by side with their neighbors”—those whom the industrial city had physically and emotionally segregated from them—settlement residents would, Addams believed, “grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests” with their neighbors.¹⁰ While settlement workers occasionally experienced these social bonds as familial bonds, they tended to characterize their relationships with their neighbors in terms of friendship and citizenship. It is true that settlement residents visited their neighbors in their homes, but they more often encountered one another in the city’s public and semi-public spaces. Settlement workers claimed that city dwellers could solidify their fellow-feelings for other urbanites as friends through their sociological investigations of urban life. As they worked to situate themselves and their neighbors in the context of the larger historical, economic, political, and cultural forces that shaped the lives and identities of city dwellers, settlement residents felt that urbanites could carve out more distinctly public avenues along which their sympathy for one another might travel. The settlement movement’s discourse of sympathy, then, both called attention to the legitimacy of relationships formed in the city’s public and semi-public spaces and sought to enhance the ability of city dwellers to experience a sense of connection to one another by providing them with new social and intellectual strategies.

The settlement movement’s account of the kinds of interpersonal feelings and relationships that mattered most inspired settlement workers to modify the industrial city’s built environment in order to facilitate the processes of a more distinctly urban sympathy and the kinds of fellow-feelings that these processes produced. Unlike Olmsted, settlement residents did not seek to remove city dwellers as far from the city as possible, but instead attempted to create much smaller scale public and semi-public spaces in the city’s dense immigrant neighborhoods. Their most recognizable and significant spatial innovation was the settlement house itself. According to Addams, the decision to establish Hull-House Settlement grew out of the “belief that the mere foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago.”¹¹ Originally built as a private home by a wealthy Chicagoan, its spaces were modified by Addams and Starr so that it would function as a welcoming space—the type of semi-public space Addams claimed was hard to find in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward. While the settlement house performed at times as a domestic space for its residents, they and their neighbors more often experienced it as a public one. Its dining room hosted drawing classes, while its parlor supported kindergarten classes and its bedrooms accommodated neighborhood labor meetings. But the settlement house was just one of the many spatial innovations that settlement workers brought to the industrial city. The Hull-House campus, for instance, eventually included an additional thirteen buildings, which housed a gymnasium, coffeehouse, playground, museum, and branch of the city’s public library. Not all settlement houses were as spatially expansive and diverse as Hull-House, but it was not unique in its ability to morph private spaces into public ones and to expand beyond the boundaries of the house itself to provide spaces in which the city’s increasingly diverse inhabitants could come into direct contact with one another and acquire the kinds of fellow-feelings for one another that settlement residents felt would create a more democratic society.¹²

Despite the settlement movement’s efforts to stretch the urbanist discourse of sympathy to legitimate the interpersonal affections and relational forms that urbanites experienced in the city’s public and semi-public spaces, its insistence on the value of direct contact and the friendships that they sustained failed to reckon adequately with the structures of economic and political power that shaped the industrial city and the lives of those it sheltered. When Du Bois addressed a group of settlement workers, volunteers, and neighbors at Brooklyn’s Lincoln Settlement in 1910, he claimed to know of “no more effective way to work for the social uplift, not simply of the Negro people but the city of Brooklyn and the state of New York and indeed of the United States, than through efficient aid to an institution like the Lincoln Settlement.” His faith in the ability of public sympathy to move black urbanites beyond the line of discrimination that prevented them from realizing their social, economic, and cultural aspirations clearly underestimated the persistence of discrimination throughout the twentieth century.¹³ The type of personal contact privileged and promoted within settlement discourse as the source of fellow-feeling became increasingly difficult to experience in cities that, over the course of the twentieth century, found new ways to segregate black and other marginalized urbanites from privileged metropolitan residents. Du Bois and other settlement intellectuals also underestimated, as they would soon find out, the tendency of an urban discourse of sympathy to backslide conceptually toward the types of emotional intimacies that the language and logic of sympathy had conjured for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the familial feelings that bound individuals together in relationships that approximated those forged within the domestic sphere. Sympathy thus proved to be less capable than settlement residents had initially hoped of doing the social, cultural, and material work they wanted it to do.

“New Channels” of Sympathy

As settlement writers worked toward establishing their movement’s own distinct discourse of sympathy, they often drew on the domestic rhetoric that had enveloped the concept in the nineteenth century. Settlement residents were especially attracted to the notion of a universal brotherhood. Writing for the College Settlement News in 1896, Isabel Eaton explained that everything the settlement movement “stands for can be put into one word, Brotherhood.” By projecting the affective quality of domestic relationships onto the public relationships forged within the city, settlement workers hoped to overcome what Clarence Meily described in Charities and the Commons in 1905 as the “horizontal stratification of the sympathetic impulse” fostered by the city’s industrial geography.¹⁴ When put into practice, the kinship model of sympathy would bring settlement residents into relationships of equality with the urban poor. In relating to their neighbors as if they were siblings, settlement workers hoped to overcome the vast social and physical distance that paternalistic charity work had perpetuated. One settlement resident explained that being involved in a settlement’s clubs, which brought together settlement workers and their neighbors on a regular basis, inevitably led her to the realization that the “people amongst whom she works are of one blood with her.”¹⁵ The early settlement movement’s parlance of brotherhood also tapped into the rhetorical resources of what Addams referred to in 1892 as a “certain renaissance going forward in Christianity.” The Social Gospel movement’s conviction of the spiritual nature of the interrelationships among members of the human family gave the language of brotherhood in settlement writing an even sharper edge with which to cut through the social and economic inequalities among urbanites.¹⁶ To the extent that brotherhood continued to operate within settlement literature as way to explain the nature of the relationships that connected urbanites to one another, a relatively conventional discourse of sympathy persisted within this Progressive Era movement.

Not all settlement residents, though, felt that the concept of brotherhood—and the domestic and Christian style of sympathy it signaled—adequately expressed the settlement movement’s investment in a less intimate but equally valuable style of urban sociality. Brotherhood may have characterized the type of democratic equality that settlement workers aspired to achieve in their relationships with their neighbors, but it also implied an interpersonal intimacy that some felt they could not or did not want to sustain. Brotherhood, as a relational model, did not fully account for the affective variability of the social interactions that settlement workers experienced as they navigated the city. Vida Scudder, one of the movement’s most eloquent spokeswomen, recalled that many of the earliest settlement volunteers had reasoned that “since bad air, over-crowding, and hard manual labor were obviously the lot of great numbers of our brethren,” settlement residents should also “accept these things” as their “lot” in life. After living at Boston’s Dennison House for several years, however, Scudder admitted that thinking of the urban poor as “brethren” was a little too “sentimental” and a bit misguided. As she came to see it, the initial desire of settlement volunteers to achieve a complete “self-identification with the life and conditions of the poor”—to become one blood with them—had, by the turn of the century, “shrunk to a vanishing point.”¹⁷ As the movement matured, many settlement residents had enough experience to realize that this conventional sympathetic rhetoric did not sufficiently capture the nature of their relationships with their neighbors. Scudder may have overstated the degree to which the concept of brotherhood diminished as a structure of fellow-feeling that informed the behavior and affections of settlement residents, but she and many others became increasingly convinced that this sentimental discourse of sympathy too oft en overlooked the social inequalities that settlement workers had to acknowledge and negotiate in their encounters with city dwellers. Settlement workers realized that capturing the type of affections that grew out of their interactions with others in the industrial city could only be described with a vocabulary capable of communicating much more than social and emotional solidarity.

When Addams wrote about “longing for a wider union than that of family or class” in the Atlantic Monthly in 1899, a decade after she had settled at Hull-House with Starr, she was longing to experience not just a union that included individuals whose lives fell outside the boundaries of her own family and class but also a new affect—one that would be qualitatively different than that which held families and classes together. Addams and other settlement writers expressed dissatisfaction with the type of urban philanthropy that utilized the language and logic of charity to articulate the union between the classes. The problem with speaking about urban relationships in terms of charity, Addams reasoned, was that it established an “unconscious division of the world into the philanthropists and those to be helped.” Addams insisted that the industrial city, with its crowded and diverse immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, had created the physical and social conditions within which an “affection” that was “large and real enough” to leave behind social distinctions had already begun to emerge. She pointed readers to urban neighborhoods like Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward where, because the “economic condition of all” was equally “precarious,” the “outflow of sympathy and material assistance” could readily traverse family, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. Addams would later describe the larger affections that allowed her immigrant neighbors to achieve a wider union as a “cosmopolitan affection.”¹⁸ It was this cosmopolitan affection that she and others hoped a settlement discourse of sympathy could legitimize by making its operations in the lives of urbanites more visible.

Du Bois developed perhaps an even more precise articulation of the type of binding affection that Addams and other settlement writers had been trying to express during the settlement movement’s first decade. In his landmark settlement study of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Du Bois described a “public sympathy” capable of connecting white Philadelphians to their black neighbors. For Du Bois, public sympathy captured an affective process and fellow-feeling that connected city dwellers to one another as they interfaced with one another’s public identities. More specifically, he suggested that, as urbanites approached one another through the identities they performed in the public world of work, rather than the racial identities socially constructed for them, they were connected to each other through a public sympathy that ensured each participant in the relationship opportunities to take up various positions within the city’s economic, social, cultural, and political grid. The city dweller who operated under the affective structure of “charitable interest” might “contribute handsomely to relieve Negroes in poverty and distress” while simultaneously refusing to “let a Negro work in his store or mill,” thus compromising their philanthropic intentions. But those who pursued the fellow-feelings Du Bois referred to as public sympathy entered into relationships in which both individuals viewed one another as “fellow-laborers” in the city’s industrial economy.¹⁹

Du Bois and other settlement writers increasingly relied on a new set of terms to differentiate cosmopolitan affection and public sympathy from the type of sympathy signified by the terminology of brotherhood. John P. Gavit, a resident at Chicago Commons, made it clear near the end of the nineteenth century that settlement workers were “not so much teachers, preachers or benefactors as friends, neighbors, fellow-citizens, fellow-sufferers, [and] fellow-men.”²⁰ Among the words Gavit used to distinguish the types of urban relationships forged by settlement residents from those fashioned by philanthropists, missionaries, and charitable agents, friend became the most frequently invoked by both residents and their neighbors. The president of the Woman’s Club at Chicago Commons, a recent immigrant to the neighborhood, recalled that, when she and her neighbors first arrived in Chicago, they found themselves “shut up in our homes, as if they were jails.” When they visited the settlement house, they felt that they were “among friends, friends that were interested in us and in our daily lives. Its doors were open to us at any and all times, with a sympathizing friend always ready to listen to us.”²¹ The type of sympathy she experienced at Chicago Commons was qualitatively different from what she experienced in her home, and she used friend to signal this difference. The term accounted for relationships that were less intimate and private than those among family members. Friend was capacious enough to indicate a wide range of relationships formed within the public sphere. The terms that follow friend in Gavit’s list—neighbor, citizen, and fellow-men—offer just a brief glimpse of the affective scope signified by this word. Friend could be used to describe a relationship that involved relatively intimate feelings, such as those expressed by the president of the Chicago Commons Woman’s Club, just as accurately as it could be used to denote relationships that entailed the less intimate, but no less valid, emotional attachments between citizens. Regardless of the affective register on which a friendship between settlement residents and their urban neighbors operated, the concept of friend captured both the mutuality and continuity of the kinds of urban relationships that settlement workers advocated.

The “Rectifying Influence” of Personal Contact and Social Science

The urbanist discourse of sympathy that settlement intellectuals refined during the Progressive Era emphasized two particular avenues through which city dwellers connected emotionally with one another. First, settlement intellectuals stressed that public sympathy grew out of frequent personal contact among urbanites. Settlement residents avowed that mixing with urbanites in public and semi-public spaces was essential to the development of cosmopolitan fellow-feelings. Second, settlement writers argued that a social scientific understanding of urban processes and lives played a critical role in facilitating public sympathy among city dwellers. Their writings showcased the ways that approaching interpersonal interactions with a sociological understanding of the larger structures within which all urbanites lived and worked generated emotionally and socially valuable relationships. Although city dwellers might pursue a number of other social practices in their efforts to acquire a cosmopolitan affection for their neighbors, Addams, Du Bois, and other leading settlement intellectuals championed personal contact and sociological research as significant elements of a more distinctly urban style of sympathy.

One of the basic premises of the settlement movement was that the best way to attain fellow-feelings for another individual was to place oneself, quite literally, as close to another’s physical situation as possible. The insistence on the social value of continual personal contact among urbanites instigated the movement’s commitment to the idea and act of settling. By choosing to settle permanently (or semipermanently) in working-class industrial neighborhoods, settlement residents committed themselves to repeatedly negotiating their cultural, political, and personal values with individuals from other classes and cultures. Samuel A. Barnett, one of the British intellectuals credited with launching the settlement movement in London’s East End in the 1880s, explained that, as settlement residents “daily walk through mean streets,” “feel the depression of the smoke-laden air,” “see what is the work and what are the pleasures of the people,” “go to local meetings,” “meet for casual talks,” and “hear of the wrongs, of the sorrows, of the anger, and of the ignorance which are in the minds of workmen,” they learn to “look at life from another standpoint.” Walking, feeling, seeing, and talking with other urbanites would not necessarily lead settlement residents to experience “any change of opinion,” Barnett reasoned, but the resulting “sympathy makes them express the old opinion in a different spirit.”²² Alternatively, this affective process might lead settlement residents to change their opinion but not necessarily take up the exact opinion of their neighbors. Seeing the world from “another standpoint” might not always mean adopting another’s exact point of view. For settlement intellectuals, sympathizing with another individual did not require city dwellers to overcome all personal and cultural differences to arrive at an identical and shared emotion; instead, it required them to stand close enough to one another so that their repeated contact could lead them to modify their own ideas or feelings in some way. Experiencing this internal transformation and recognizing this change as the result of having come into direct contact with another human being—of having settled with that person—generated fellow-feelings for others. The kind of fellowship that Barnett described, according to Addams, exerted a “rectifying influence” on its participants that gave them the “power of recognizing good” in one another.²³ This act of recognition is what settlement writers often referred to as sympathy.

Du Bois’s account of his life in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward illuminates the affective and relational nuances that often accompanied the type of personal contact privileged within settlement discourse. Shortly after moving to Philadelphia with his new bride in August 1896 and settling in a room above a cafeteria run by the College Settlement of Philadelphia, Du Bois immersed himself in the daily life of the neighborhood. At the settlement house, he taught American history to neighborhood boys on Wednesday evenings, regularly lectured at local meetings, attended the lectures of others, and helped organize and run neighborhood clubs. In addition to being deeply involved in the work of the settlement house, Du Bois became fully invested in the life of the Seventh Ward’s black community, frequenting formal and informal gatherings at the neighborhood’s churches, schools, businesses, and other institutions. On top of these activities, Du Bois “visited and talked with 5,000 persons” in the Seventh Ward “personally and not by proxy” while conducting sociological research. These one-on-one visits and conversations were not without a degree of social awkwardness and discomfort. He later recalled that the “colored people of Philadelphia received me with no open arms” and often “set me to groping”—experiences that led him to conclude he “did not know so much as I might about my own people.”²⁴

Interacting directly with his neighbors day after day forced Du Bois to acknowledge the inability of conventional cultural narratives to connect him emotionally to those he had been confident he knew and to search for an alternative narrative through which he could experience fellow-feelings for them. Realizing that he could not identify with those he had assumed were his own people, he discovered the inadequacies of his culture’s myth of consanguinity. The “groping” that followed the failure of a standard sympathetic paradigm to connect him to his neighbors prompted him to take up an alternative one. Du Bois recounted that, during the “ten minutes to an hour” he spent in each home, conversation often veered off the official questionnaire into “general discussions” about the “condition of the Negroes, which were instructive.”²⁵ Much of the enlightening information that emerged during these conversations could not be recorded on the official sociological schedules, but Du Bois nevertheless stored this new knowledge in his memory and wrote it out as memoranda so that it would inform his future interactions with his neighbors and shape the narrative of his study. Through the process of living among and talking with thousands of black urbanites, Du Bois claimed to have learned “far more from Philadelphia Negroes than I had taught them concerning the Negro Problem.”²⁶ In his retelling, personal contact with his neighbors had exerted the kind of rectifying influence on his ideas and emotions that other settlement intellectuals had described as an essential part of the sympathetic process. Only after settling both physically and socially with other black Philadelphians did Du Bois claim to have attained a sense of fellow-feeling for them.

Settlement writing was not the only turn-of-the-century genre to articulate the social value and satisfaction of cross-cultural contact in the industrial city. Its similarities to these other urban discourses illuminate the ways in which interactions among individuals from different classes or cultures might generate a rectifying influence that disciplined rather than liberated the urban poor. The urban realism of writers such as William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Edith Wharton oft en featured narratives that hinged on cross-class contact among characters and that ultimately functioned to reify social hierarchies. And the broader practices of slumming to which urban realism sometimes contributed tended to hide the ways perceptions of class, racial, and sexual difference were changing during this period by inscribing them into the city’s built environment. Historians of the settlement movement have been quick to call attention to the ways in which settlement residents and their rhetoric of cross-class and cross-cultural contact often served the same purposes as these other urban discourses—to impose some degree of control on the city’s migrant and immigrant communities. While reading settlement studies and memoirs such as Du Bois’s Philadelphia Negro and Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House, it is easy to see how the promotion and practice of a form of sociality intended to bring about social equality and political transformation may have instead (or perhaps simultaneously) subjected the urban poor to what scholar Christopher Castiglia calls a “sympathetic discipline.”²⁷

Settlement residents were often aware of the thin line they walked between “doing good ‘to’ people rather than ‘with’ them,” as Addams put it, which is why they imported into their discourse of sympathy the discipline of sociology. According to settlement writers, public sympathy was a more likely relational outcome when city dwellers understood one another’s lives within larger sociological and historical contexts. Although personal interactions with other urbanites helped remind the upper-class city dweller, according to Addams, “how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards” were and how dangerous it would be to “insist” that others take up the “conventions of her own class,” settlement discourse incorporated the language and logic of the social sciences to expose more fully and rectify the social standards and class conventions that infused every urban interaction with some dimension of inequality or injustice. Addams once quipped that people “sometimes say that our charity is too scientific”; but she insisted that it would be “much more correct in our estimate if we said that it is not scientific enough.”²⁸ Herman F. Hegner, a resident at Chicago Commons in the 1890s, initially perceived the saloonkeeper in his settlement’s neighborhood to be the “agent of immorality and crime” and wanted “nothing to do with him.” However, after gathering a “fuller knowledge of facts” about saloonkeepers through social scientific research, Hegner and his settlement colleagues “modified [their] ideas of the ethics” of the saloonkeeper and were thus able to nourish a fellow-feeling 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, but the greater “social environment” in which these interactions occurred. As readers encountered Philadelphia’s black citizens in the context of the city’s physical and social environment, Du Bois hoped that their public sympathy for individuals like C—, G—, and H—would express itself in working alongside them to widen the “narrow opportunities afforded Negroes for earning a decent living” and expand other realms in which they could exercise their own agency. Only when there existed a “social sympathy” and “proper co-operation” between both races, Du Bois reasoned, could Philadelphia “successfully cope with many phases of the Negro problems.”³⁹

Du Bois saw his use of settlement sociology in The Philadelphia Negro as an extension of the structure of interracial friendship constructed by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), the country’s first abolitionist organization. Unlike the Massachusetts Abolition Society, which tended to rely on sentimental narratives to generate interracial fellow-feeling, the PAS hoped to cultivate within citizens what it described as a “feeling mind” by gathering and disseminating factual information about the nation’s black inhabitants. When, for instance, a group of Pennsylvanians mounted a movement to disenfranchise the state’s black citizens at the 1838 constitutional convention, the PAS of Philadelphia responded by appointing a committee to gather “such statistical and other information as will show the present condition of the colored population of this city and districts.” This PAS committee calculated the social value of Philadelphia’s black residents by examining them from a “pecuniary point of view” and considering the integral role they played in the local economy. Based on the information gathered during its house-to-house survey of the city, the committee found that, although “some portion of them may live in idleness,” a much more significant “proportion of them are usefully and industriously employed.” The PAS sought to undermine the “false estimate which still prevails amongst the mass of our citizens, as to the value of the colored people as a component part of the community.”⁴⁰ Rather than engender fellow-feelings among white Philadelphians for their black neighbors by primarily portraying the latter as fellow mothers and fathers, the PAS encouraged city dwellers to think of their neighbors as “fellow-laborers in the Society.” Members of the PAS conceived of themselves as “fast friends” with their black neighbors, literally working alongside them in the public world of work rather than as philanthropists bestowing gifts from afar.⁴¹ The PAS wanted to route the intellectual and emotional response to its statistical findings away from private affect and toward a more public form of interpersonal feeling—toward the very kind of public sympathy that Du Bois described in Philadelphia Negro.

When rank-and-file settlement residents talked about their experiences while living and working in settlement houses, they echoed the urbanist discourse of sympathy established by more prominent settlement voices. When the Church Social Union surveyed dozens of ordinary settlement workers, asking if their “attitude toward social and industrial questions” had changed during their settlement residence, one worker responded that she “saw so much and heard so much that was entirely new” that her “feeling toward the poor has changed from pity to a sense of honest comradeship.” Another resident answered that she had “gained a more sympathetic knowledge of the laboring-man in general, and of trades unions in particular.” Although neither resident talked in explicit terms about how she came to acquire a new sense of fellow-feeling for her urban neighbors, their answers suggest that their altered sympathy for those in their community had been fed principally by two channels: daily contact and sociological research. Seeing and hearing the urban poor regularly transformed the first respondent’s affective connection to them from “pity” to “comradeship.” And the second respondent’s use of the phrase “sympathetic knowledge” implies that her fellow-feeling for the “laboring-man” had been cultivated through sociological data. Both had acquired what another respondent described as a “new sympathy with workingmen as a class, a new discontent with our present industrial system.”⁴² It would be easy to interpret the “new sympathy” that this resident claimed to have obtained simply as additional fellow-feelings—a quantitative increase in sympathy. But it might be more accurate to think of this “new sympathy” as a distinctly different range of affections than those that the resident had experienced prior to her engagement in settlement work.

Building Places of Exchange

The settlement movement’s commitment to a particular style of sympathy inspired its participants to remake the industrial city’s landscape. They worked to create spaces in the industrial city that, as Addams explained, “clothed in brick and mortar and made visible to the world that which we were trying to do.” Settlement residents joined a throng of other urbanists at the turn of the century in redeveloping and regulating the industrial city’s built environment in attempts to improve the quality of urban life.⁴³ As the White City at the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 and Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago demonstrated, many of these progressive urbanists sought to reshape the industrial city on a monumental scale—they reimagined the entire organization of the city and developed the building techniques and political strategies in order to transform it. While settlement residents played an important role in securing the zoning regulations, tenement codes, and sanitation laws that made the large-scale transformation of urban space possible, they were perhaps even more invested in constructing the smaller-scale and more localized spaces in which urbanites could directly engage with one another and participate together in the production and dissemination of sociological knowledge. Settlement residents were deeply committed to creating spaces that gave city dwellers access to what one of Hull-House’s young residents called a “place of exchange.”⁴⁴

Although settlement workers believed that urbanites could experience some measure of public sympathy for one another on the industrial city’s congested streets and in its run-down tenement neighborhoods, they shared Olmsted’s conviction that its inhabitants were more likely to achieve fellow-feelings for one another when interacting in spaces at some remove from the city’s purely public places. But if Olmsted’s particular understanding of the sympathetic process inspired him to design urban spaces that “completely shut out the city” and removed urbanites from the “bustle and jar of the streets,” the discourse of sympathy that settlement intellectuals had cultivated motivated them to create spaces that harnessed rather than repelled the social energy that coursed through the industrial city’s streets.⁴⁵ Settlement residents wanted to create places in which they and their neighbors could actualize and, to some degree, manage the cross-class and cross-cultural social opportunities made possible by the new demographics of the industrial city—opportunities that the city’s built environment had increasingly foreclosed. To facilitate the type of sympathetic exchanges among city dwellers that pulsed at the heart of the settlement movement’s urban vision, residents worked with their neighbors to cobble together spaces out of the industrial city’s built environment that blurred the boundaries between public and private. They strove to infuse their neighborhoods with “semi-public” locales that were, in Addams’s words, “easily accessible” to those who bustled and jarred against one another on the city’s streets.⁴⁶

No place better illuminates the complexion of the semi-public spaces that settlement residents assembled at the turn of the century than the settlement house itself. Given the nature of the settlement enterprise, the settlement house continued to serve many of the private functions of the traditional home—its residents had to sleep, eat, and bathe there. But settlement residents learned not only how to transform what had originally served as private space within the nineteenth-century home into public space but also how to continually shift the functionality of those spaces between private and public. That is to say, a single room in the settlement home might function as a private space in the morning and as a public space in the evening.⁴⁷ The activation of the public identity of conventionally private spaces such as dining rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, or stairways was frequently instigated by residents’ desires to provide themselves and their neighbors with opportunities to participate in the social processes that would generate a cosmopolitan affection among them. Dorothea Moore recalled that, in the evening, the Hull-House dining room served as a “meeting ground” between residents and neighbors where the “generalizations of the over young are discouraged with kindness and qualifying facts” and where more experienced individuals could be “induced to reconsider and admit another fact of the great truth.” As the “free play of the individual” at the dinner table met with the “friction” and “juice of humor” provided by urbanites of different ages, classes, and cultures, city dwellers together expanded what Moore called the “social consciousness of the living house.”⁴⁸ The enclosed space of the dining room put urbanites in a position to experience the rectifying influence fabricated through close-range personal contact and the exchange of sociological facts. As residents, older immigrants, scholars, factory workers, and children participated in the continuous feedback loop of interacting with one another, reconsidering opinions, and qualifying assertions, they acquired fellow-feelings for one another because of, not in spite of, the friction their interactions produced.

When settlement residents saw opportunities to provide additional meeting grounds that would appeal to different cross-sections of the city’s inhabitants, they oft en expanded beyond the walls of the house itself. But their core spatial strategy of constructing places in which urbanites could engage in direct personal exchanges remained constant. Over the course of Hull-House’s two-decade expansion, the settlement complex dedicated portions of its city-block footprint to a coffeehouse, dining hall, art gallery, and auditorium so that city dwellers could continue to have access to places of exchange. Other segments of the settlement’s expanded facilities provided meeting grounds for the rapidly growing number of social clubs hosted by the settlement. Clubs such as the Working People’s Social Science Club and Hull-House Woman’s Club initially met in the drawing room, parlor, and bedrooms of Hull-House but later relocated to spaces in adjacent buildings that replicated in slightly enlarged dimensions the spatial and social dynamics of the original settlement home. The semi-public spaces in which the settlement’s social clubs met invited city dwellers to enter into what Addams characterizes as “friendly relations” with one another. In these spaces, urbanites came in “contact, many of them for the first time, with the industrial and social problems challenging the moral resources of our contemporary life.” As club members encountered new understandings of the industrial city’s problems through lectures and discussions at their club meetings, Addams claimed that they were “led from a sense of isolation to one of civic responsibility.” Engaging in the production and dissemination of sociological information helped members of a club know how best to express “sympathy and kindliness at the same time in concrete form.” The small, semi-public spaces of the settlement put city dwellers in a position to extend the movement’s brand of sociality beyond its physical boundaries by helping them imagine themselves not only as friends to one another but as citizens of a much larger world. The many different places of exchange crammed together within the settlement cultivated “citizens who are conversant with adverse social conditions” and who, along with similarly informed urbanites in other cities, “may in time remove the reproach of social neglect and indifference which has so long rested upon the citizens of the new world.”⁴⁹ Addams and other settlement intellectuals argued that the movement’s spatial innovations had the potential to transform not only the industrial city’s social landscape but also the larger modern world of which it was a part.

Figure 3. Hull-House Dining Room. JAMC 0000 0162 1007, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.

The spatial logic of the mature settlement complex’s layout underscored the model of relationality that the settlement movement’s discourse of sympathy privileged. Although the settlement’s spaces became slightly less flexible as its different services, activities, and organizations acquired their own discrete locations, settlement residents continued to use single spaces for multiple purposes and to repurpose spaces that had been earmarked for uses that were no longer necessary. The settlement movement’s mixed-use and improvisational approach to urban space frustrated architects such as Allen B. Pond, who designed the Hull-House complex and five additional settlements. He found it irritating that Hull-House was an “aggregation of partially related units” rather than a “logical organism.” In his desire for an architecture that was “made up of parts having special functions but still interrelated and severally interdependent,” Pond articulated the reasoning of single-use zoning that was emerging in the early 1900s and that would exert a stranglehold on city planning for much of the remainder of the twentieth century. While he lamented that Hull-House had “grown by a long series of wholly unforeseeable accretions,” the ways in which the settlement house layered multiple uses on single spaces and placed its many activities and services in close proximity to one another echoed in physical form the settlement’s social philosophy of contact and friction.⁵⁰ But, even more important, the settlement’s accretive style of urbanism perpetuated and extended the fellow-feelings that may have originated within a particular club or at a specific lecture beyond the spatial confines of that club. The settlement’s mixture and overlap of uses within its finite number of rooms drew urbanites into and through its various spaces, where they would have opportunities to follow-up on their initial encounters with one another and pursue both more personal and cerebral relationships. In many ways, the comprehensive spatial logic and organization of settlements such as Hull-House helped city dwellers learn how to extend the fellow-feelings they forged within the discrete spaces that accommodated a club meeting or a meal to the urbanites they would encounter outside those specific spaces.

Du Bois expressed the same kind of confidence in the settlement movement’s spatial strategies to solve the city’s social problems—particularly its racial problems—that Addams and other settlement intellectuals had expressed. Although Du Bois would not live in a settlement again after leaving Philadelphia in 1897, he continued to draw on the movement’s discourse of sympathy and its spatial techniques in offering solutions to race relations. While discussing the “means of bettering the condition of the Negroes” of New York City at a small, mixed-race conference at Mount Olivet Baptist Church on January 4, 1903, Du Bois proposed the “establishment of a kind of social settlement for Negroes.”⁵¹ He envisioned a settlement house that would serve as a “clearing house for the local race problem, acting as a directory and adviser in matters of almsgiving, education, religion, and work.” By establishing a “physical center for movements affecting the betterment of the Negro, for the gathering of careful information concerning his needs and condition, and for furthering effective cooperation among all established agencies which seek his good,” this settlement would create a space in which an “adjustment between the life of the segregated Negro group and that of the larger city” could be worked out. The successful implementation of these social services and the urban Negro’s social “adjustment,” though, ultimately hinged on the type of personal contact that the settlement house was designed to initiate. Du Bois counseled the meeting’s participants that “personal friendship” is ultimately the “main-spring of social help” and the means by which the proposed settlement would be best able to “help the weak and unfortunate” and “find enlarged opportunity for Negroes of ability and desert.”⁵² These interracial friendships and the public sympathy upon which they were built would, Du Bois professed, lead to increased social and economic opportunities for the black city dweller.

Although the group that gathered at Mount Olivet opted not to act on Du Bois’s suggestion to build a settlement house for New York’s black community, other individuals active in the city’s settlement scene heard of his proposal and attempted to translate his ideas into social practice and physical form. After learning about Du Bois’s recommendation from Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, founder of Greenwich House in Greenwich Village, Mary White Ovington wrote him in the fall of 1904 to inform him that she hoped to undertake the “work first spoken of in those resolutions” by doing “some work among the Negroes.”⁵³ Using The Philadelphia Negro as her guide and frequently consulting its author—who, in her estimation, knew the “situation in the city pretty well” and was very familiar with “settlements and their forms of work”—Ovington commenced her own settlement work with an exhausting research routine. By early 1905, she began to visualize the social and physical forms that would best materialize and perpetuate the types of interracial relationships that would lead to individual and collective growth. Ovington did not aspire to meet all the needs Du Bois had enumerated at Mount Olivet, but she did agree with him that the work had to be “carried on by colored and white alike”: “Every month I feel that the two races must work together in any philanthropic work in the city. It must be isolation that creates much of the difficulty in the South, and why should we try to produce unnecessary difficulties for ourselves in the North?”⁵⁴

Recognizing that the public would disapprove of lodging white and black settlement workers together in a single domestic space, Ovington sought an alternative to the standard settlement house model. Rather than occupy a Victorian mansion as if it were a “big boarding house,” Ovington hoped to “get a model tenement built in one of the crowded Negro quarters, preferably the Sixties, and to have room in it for settlement work.” She envisioned that she and her fellow black and white settlement workers would occupy separate self-contained flats in the tenement and that together they would conduct settlement work among the building’s tenants and neighbors in the tenement’s basement. She planned to have the partition between the front two rooms of her three-room apartment removed to allow more space for settlement workers and neighbors to congregate.⁵⁵ Ovington persuaded philanthropist Henry Phipps to build a model tenement, but he insisted that she not carry out settlement work there. After several delays in construction, Ovington moved into the Tuskegee Apartments at 233 West Sixty-Third Street in the predominantly black San Juan Hill neighborhood in February 1908. She lived there for eight months and did what little settlement work she could, allowing children and mothers to use her rooms during the day and hosting conversations among black and white men and women about the city’s and nation’s racial problems during the evenings.⁵⁶ When the social barriers to the kind of interracial contact on which her vision of settlement work rested proved too great to allow her fully to actualize that vision, Ovington left the Tuskegee Apartments to establish the Lincoln Settlement House in one of Brooklyn’s black neighborhoods with Dr. Verina Morton Jones, an accomplished middle-class black woman. Although Lincoln Settlement served as an important place of exchange for its black neighbors, it did not provide the opportunities for interracial social exchange that had been so important to Ovington and Du Bois. The real condition of the industrial city—its physical and social environments—made it very difficult for black and white urbanites to participate in the processes of public sympathy that would lead to the friendships that Du Bois claimed were capable of solving many of the city’s social problems.

Ovington’s failure to establish Du Bois’s vision of an interracial settlement house calls attention to some of the blind spots and inadequacies of the settlement movement’s discourse of sympathy. Its confidence in the ability of personal contact to generate fellow-feeling rested, to some degree, on a naïveté about the possibility of bringing urbanites into personal contact with one another. Settlement intellectuals could not have anticipated that the political and economic forces that would drive patterns of urban growth throughout the twentieth century would only make it increasingly difficult to experience the kind of cross-class and interracial exchanges on which the sympathetic process they described depended. Intense suburbanization, the restructuring of the urban core, and the unequal distribution of home loans would harden the color line that separated urban blacks from other urbanites and suburbanites. But settlement residents seemed unaware, on some level, of the ways in which the real conditions of the industrial city interfered with the sympathetic process in which they had become so invested. They occasionally underestimated the power of the physical and social environments of their own cities to prevent urbanites from interacting with one another on terms that would allow them to obtain the kinds of fellow-feelings privileged in settlement discourse. The settlement movement’s passionate investment in personal contact as the foundation of valuable urban relationships also failed to account adequately for the dramatic growth of the urban population that was already well underway in the Progressive Era. At a certain point, the industrial city’s demographics did not match up with the settlement’s discourse of urban sympathy. Although many settlements would continue operating for decades, their small semi-public spaces lacked the ability to bring a considerable fraction of an increasingly large number of city dwellers into direct contact with one another. As city populations grew, the settlement movement’s discourse of sympathy provided a less and less satisfying account of the many different ways urbanites experienced being in the city with and attaining fellow-feelings for others.

The ability of an urbanist discourse of sympathy to make sense of the wide range of social experiences and relational forms among city dwellers would only become more insufficient as sympathy once again became a term used primarily to signify the kinds of emotional intimacies that Olmsted and others had privileged. Despite the efforts of settlement intellectuals to stretch the language and logic of sympathy beyond its nineteenth-century boundaries in order to legitimate the relationships formed among urbanites in public and semi-public spaces, the conceptual work performed by the term retracted over the course of the first few decades of the twentieth century. New Deal urbanists reclaimed sympathy from the settlement movement to pursue a discourse of sympathy that accentuated the singular importance of relationships founded on emotional intimacy. New Deal political ideologies and cultural narratives calcified the conceptual possibilities of sympathy in such a way that an urbanist discourse that revolved around sympathy became nearly incapable of signifying and privileging anything other than emotionally intimate fellow-feelings and relationships. Settlement residents may have carved new channels through which sympathy could flow among urbanites in public and semi-public spaces, but many of those channels collapsed in the 1930s, forcing urbanists to turn elsewhere to discover a discourse that could more satisfactorily account for and validate interactions among urbanites in public spaces that did not necessarily engender intimacy but that nevertheless generated fellow-feelings.