ROBYN MUNCY Associate Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park. JANE ADDAMS and HULL HOUSE

QUESTION: How did the Settlement Movement begin?

ROBYN MUNCY: The Settlement Movement began in England with Toynbee Hall, which was a place in England's slum area where a bunch of university men went to live in this working class neighborhood. They were going to share the benefits of their [education] and privileges with the working class around them.

A lot of American women went to Toynbee Hall and brought the idea back to the U.S. And in the U.S., there were hundreds and hundreds of social settlements by the 1910s. Some of them had ten or twelve people living in them; some of them had seventy or eighty people living in them. And they were places where middle class people went to live in working class, usually overwhelmingly immigrant, neighborhoods. The idea among the women who lived in the settlements [was] that they would not only share the privileges of their middle-class upbringings and [education] with the working class neighborhood, but that they would also benefit from learning from their working class neighbors. So, it was to be a mutual relationship.

QUESTION: Can you trace the development of Hull House in Chicago?

ROBYN MUNCY: Hull House was founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. [These two women] were both a part of the first generation of women who went to college in the 1870s and 1880s with a great deal of fanfare, with a great deal of ambition. [But] they would come out of college and have very few options available to them. They could either teach or go back to their families and serve tea and await marriage.

[Jane Addams] went to a small college, Rockford College in Illinois. She met Ellen Gates Starr there. Jane Addams herself had ambitions to be a doctor, but that didn't work out. She was really depressed for about a decade. She did a lot of traveling in Europe during that time, and spending time with her family. And it was during that time that she visited Toynbee Hall with her friend Ellen Gates Starr. And so the story goes, they decided that this was their mission, that they would go now back to Chicago and found a social settlement.

And so, sure enough, in 1889, they opened Hull House, which was to become the most renowned social settlement in the U.S., on the southwest side of Chicago. The neighborhood was [a] working-class, largely immigrant neighborhood. There were people from all over the place living in that neighborhood.

And you can imagine when Ellen Gates Starr and Jane Addams, these very proper middle class women, decided to move into this neighborhood, what a stir that caused. Because, of course, middle-class women had gone into working-class neighborhoods before as sort of charitable ladies, but they would leave - they didn't move there. And so here were two women who proposed to go into a neighborhood and actually stay there, take up residence there. It caused quite a stir. But it appealed to other women who were in a situation like theirs - that is [women] who had these wonderful educations, who had developed ambitions to have a larger life while they were in college, but had very few options open to them.

So, the settlement, Hull House, was inundated with applications from other young women who wanted to come and live with. They had like eighty applications right off the bat, and couldn't possibly accommodate all the women who were applying. Gradually, they occupied more and more space in this sort of dilapidated building on the southwest side and they began to renovate that. And they eventually were able to house about seventy people by the 'teens.

In the late 1880s and early 1990s, when they were just starting out, they would have ten or fifteen people - maybe as many as twenty by the end of the decade - living with them in Hull House. And they began to get to know what the neighbors' needs were, and to try to find ways to meet the needs of their neighbors. And so, for instance, they founded after-school clubs for children, they created a daycare center. They eventually opened a library and a museum. They opened space for adults to have all kinds of meetings and classes. They has parties for the neighborhood, classes for the neighborhood that included especially English language classes and citizenship classes for people who wanted to become citizens. And, then, eventually, they began to advocate legislation that would improve the conditions of the neighborhood more broadly.

QUESTION: How were ideas about race at the turn of the century different than they are now?

ROBYN MUNCY: Ideas about race at the turn of the century were very different from ideas about race now. [I]mmigrants from Southern Europe and from Eastern Europe were considered to be of a different race from Anglo-Americans. Many native born Americans thought that this meant that people from southern Europe and from eastern Europe couldn't be assimilated. And [so they posed] a threat to American institutions, especially to the American republic. Many Americans thought that Catholics and Jews - especially Orthodox Jews - would never be able to assimilate to this democratic culture. And so, many advocated immigration restriction. Their solution to what was called the immigrant problem was simply to stop immigration. That put them on one extreme, one end of the spectrum of Americanizers.

Then there were sort of people, I guess you might say, who were in the middle, who welcomed immigration, but wanted to strip away all evidence of an immigrant's culture. And so they wanted to strip the clothing, the language, the food [preferences] of immigrants as they came in.

[The] women at Hull House [represented] the other extreme of Americanizers. They claimed, at least, to value many aspects of immigrant cultures. They believed that America was enriched by various cultures converging here, that was a really good thing for America.

In the end, however, they really did have a kind of arrogance about their culture. They were very clear in their own minds that American institutions and American values - which included democracy and representative government, and the English language - were the best that civilization had to offer. And so, of course, all immigrants would aspire to those values in the end. So that we can see that there were limits to the ways that they valued immigrant culture.

QUESTION: Why did the women at Hull House object to the ways in which immigrant women cared for their children?

ROBYN MUNCY: [The] women at Hull House thought that laboring for wages interfered with a [woman's] ability to be a good mother. And, of course, [in some] ways that it did. If a woman had to leave her house to earn wages, for instance - and could not afford child care of any kind, and couldn't find a neighbor or a relative who would be willing to take care of her children - sometimes [she would have to leave her children] alone to fend for themselves for hours at a time. And so there were ways in which, of course, wage earning did interfere with the ability to care properly for children.

But [even] the kinds of things that immigrant mothers often did like taking in piece work in their own homes where they could at least watch their children while they worked for wages, those kinds of strategies were [also] frowned [upon] by women at Hull House, though with great compassion.

The position of Hull House women was that the larger community should provide funding that would allow those mothers to stay home with their children. They did not believe that the answer could include more and more day nurseries that would make it possible for mothers to go out and work for a living while their children were being well cared for. So their solutions tended toward trying to make it possible for immigrant women and all women to stay home with their children rather than to make a larger life possible.

QUESTION: Why was Hull House Maps and Papers important as a sociological work?

ROBYN MUNCY: Hull House Maps and Papers was a sociological study of the nineteenth ward, the neighborhood in which Hull House was situated. And it was based on a social survey that Florence Kelly oversaw. Florence Kelly was one of the early residents of Hull House. She was, herself a social scientist, a graduate of Cornell [University]. She was commissioned by the Commissioner of Labor to oversee a study of the nineteenth ward that would include a study of wages, [and of] nationalities. The Commissioner of Labor sent three or four agents to help Florence Kelly do this social survey of the neighborhood. They compiled all these statistics, all this information, [which] they sent back to Washington.

But before they did that, the women of Hull House took down some of the information for their own use. They took down all the information on nationalities, and all the information about wages, and then they transformed that information into two great big maps. One was the map of nationalities in the nineteenth ward, and the other was the map of wages in the nineteenth ward.

[T]he map showed the wages of the residents in [any given] building, and then another map showed you the nationalities of the people in that building. So you could look and see block by block - even building by building - where wages were falling out, and which nationalities were stacked next to each other in this ward.

And then the women who had made those maps and taken down this, wrote a series of essays which [they called] Hull House Maps and Papers. They focused on various social problems, as well as different nationalities. So, for instance, there's an essay on sweatshops, there's an essay on child labor, and there's also an essay on bohemians in this neighborhood.

Hull House Maps and Papers is probably the signal achievement of women social scientists in the nineteenth century. It represents a set of values that were [an integral] part of social science as it was developing in the 1860s and 1870s, [for both men and women]. But, as the new century grew nearer, men and women in social science were splitting apart. Men were increasingly going into academic social science departments, founding those departments and creating various social sciences as academic disciplines centered in universities. And women, [largely] because of discrimination against them, were not able to go that route in anything like the numbers that men were.

And so women social scientists were continuing a tradition of sociology, of economics, of political science, of social science in general, outside of universities. And that stream of social science thought, that stream of social science practice, continued to marry moral imperatives to the collection of data.

QUESTION: To what extent did the women at Hull House rely on statistics?

ROBYN MUNCY: The women at Hull House did not rely on statistics alone. This is another way in which they veered off from the ways [in which male] social scientists used social science and/or statistics in an academic setting. They didn't try to publish tables upon tables of statistics. [Instead,] they tried to find ways to make that information graphic. And so the maps were the way that they made tables upon tables of information graphic. And they thought that [the maps] would reach a much larger audience than those tables would.

In addition, they wanted to put a human face with those statistics. So they didn't just put out the numbers of child laborers in various industries, for instance. They would put out those numbers, and then tell you the story of a particular child in a particular industry, and show how that particular child was affected by serving in this industry.

So [it was the] human element that they put with the statistics that made them incredibly successful popularizers of statistics. They used the statistics to reach a large audience, not just an academic audience, or even just a bureaucratic audience in a government agency.

QUESTION: How did the women at Hull House attempt to push reform?

ROBYN MUNCY: From the early 1890s, and especially under the tutelage of Florence Kelly, this very dynamic personality at Hull House, the residents of Hull House, and other women reformers developed a very clear method of reform. They would begin by identifying a problem. Then they would do the gathering of data, and that became a crucial piece of their strategy. And then they would gather that data together, analyze it, and publicize it along with proposed solutions to the problem, which increasingly were legislative solutions. They were sometimes public programs that the women advocated for the municipal government, sometimes it was the state level government; eventually those solutions would include the federal government.

In the 1890s, and immediately thereafter, they were especially advocating solutions that would come out of local and state governments. So social science, or the gathering of data, became a key component of their research strategy. This is a way in which, of course, they differed dramatically from academic social [scientists], because increasingly through the 1890s and especially early into the twentieth century, academics began to claim that objectivity was a crucial component of their legitimacy as scientists.

Hull House Maps and Papers foreshadowed the path that women reformers would take, and many women social scientists would take in the early twentieth century: that they would always own the political agenda of their science. They didn't think it was valuable to do science if it wasn't going to improve the lives of the people that they studied. This made them very different. And it meant that they couldn't claim objectivity, they couldn't find a place in academic social science to the degree that men could.

QUESTION: What were some of the specific goals of the women at Hull House?

ROBYN MUNCY: The women who were involved in transcribing information from [Florence Kelly's] social survey were very keen on showing the extreme poverty of various immigrant groups. One of the reasons they were so eager to demonstrate this poverty - and the conditions in which this poverty occurred - was that they were fighting a dominant notion of why people were poor. The dominant notion of the charitable ladies and gentlemen at the time was that people were poor because of vice, because they were sinful.

And one of the things that the women at Hull House were very anxious to demonstrate was that the people in their neighborhood were not vicious - that they were not drunken, lazy bums - but were impoverished because of low wages, because of the conditions in which they worked. And they were able to show that there were correlations between various nationalities and the wages they earned, and between various nationalities and the kinds of industries that they could get into. And so throughout, as you read the essays, one of the recurring themes is this attempt to put to rest a notion that people were poor because of their own fault, not because of economic conditions.

And, of course this is a battle that goes on still today, among policymakers. There are still those who claim that moral reform would be the way to end poverty: "Get those lazy welfare mothers off of welfare and out of crack dens," that that's the way that you end poverty. "It's their own fault, right? Poverty is their own fault." And then there are those that claim, "Look, it's economic conditions, you've got an economy in which not everybody can be employed, and when everybody is employed, they get lousy wages and have no benefits, and there's nobody to take care of the kids." So that same battle continues. It's a theme for the twentieth century.

QUESTION: Eventually the Settlement Movement came to focus on women's and children's issues. Tell me how the Children's Bureau came into being.

ROBYN MUNCY: Most historians attribute the idea for the Children's Bureau to Lillian Wald, who was another settlement head resident. She was the founder and head resident of the Henry Street Settlement in New York. It was a nurses' settlement. She herself was a nurse, and all of her residents were nurses, and they served the Lower East Side, especially as nurses - but eventually as reformers on a broader scale.

In the early twentieth century, [about 1903], she is said to have been having a conversation with Florence Kelly, who had then moved into Henry Street, and to have said, in a fit of exasperation, "If we can have an agricultural department that studies the boll weevil, why can't we have a children's agency that studies children?" And there began the idea of the Children's Bureau.

From 1903 forward then, Wald, women in the Settlement Movement generally, men and women in the National Child Labor Committee, and many other organizations began to lobby Congress and various presidents for the creation of an agency that would be devoted to children, and eventually they won. In 1912, Congress created the Children's Bureau in the Federal Department of Labor.

William Howard Taft was president then - he signed the bill - and everyone assumed that the person who [would be] tapped to head the agency, of course, would be a man, because there was no woman who headed any federal agency at the time. But as Taft was in the middle of his deliberations, Jane Addams wired her friends and said, "Let's try to get a woman appointed head of this agency, and I have just the woman here at Hull House. It's Julia Lathrop."

So, Jane Addams put in contention the name of Julia Lathrop. The women in her network were fully behind the idea, and they began to lobby Taft to appoint Julia Lathrop head of this new bureau. And, sure enough, he did.

QUESTION: Why did Julia Lathrop decide to focus on infant mortality?

ROBYN MUNCY: Julia Lathrop was a very savvy politician. When she took over the reigns of the Children's Bureau, she had a range of issues before her that she could have begun studying. She could have studied child labor, for instance, which was a very controversial issue, as you can imagine. Child labor was an issue on which Americans were very deeply divided. She decided not to start with any of the most controversial issues. She started, instead, with studies of infant and maternal mortality. Who could argue against an effort to lower the maternal and infant mortality rates?

She began with a series of local studies that would attempt to come up with infant and maternal mortality rates in the United States. And the gist of those studies was that the U.S. had one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates of any industrialized country.

And Julia Lathrop, with her genius for publicity and that of her reforming cohort [Addams], she began to publicize the fact that the U.S. was among the worst industrialized countries when it came to maternal and infant mortality. And, moreover, that women and children were dying of things that could have been prevented. That is, she claimed that over half of the infant deaths could have easily been prevented by proper prenatal care, and a little bit of education for the mothers of those babies.

QUESTION: What was the outcome of Lathrop's study?

ROBYN MUNCY: One of the outcomes, the first outcomes, of the infant and maternal mortality studies was that Lathrop was able to argue for increasing vigilance in keeping vital statistics. She's crucial to the effort to keep good birth and death records in particular. In the country at the time, there were vast areas that had no records at all, or very, very shoddy records.

[Lathrop] would get these volunteer women to go door-to-door and knock and ask, "Have you had any babies born here in the last couple of years, are the babies still here, have the babies died, have they been sick?" [The idea was] that these women canvassers would go around and collect the best possible statistics on the birth and death rates of babies in a particular locale.

And then they would march down to the Vital Statistics Office and compare their records with the records in the Vital Statistics Office, and always it revealed that the official statistics were wanting; that they were not being kept well at all. And then the women who had done the canvass were given a routine. They were told [that] they needed to hook up with local politicians to get laws that would require midwives and doctors and nurses and even families to report births and deaths. And, in that way, Julia Lathrop and her voluntary network improved dramatically the collection of vital statistics in the U.S.

QUESTION: Tell me about the study's findings.

ROBYN MUNCY: One of the most important findings of the infant and maternal mortality studies was that there was a very close correlation between a father's earnings and the infant mortality rate. That is, the more a father earned the less likely it was that children would die early on.

Again, this is a part of the campaign to fight this notion that people were poor and suffering because of their own sin, or their own device. Here it looked like she had extremely good evidence that economic conditions had everything to do with the conditions of people's lives, even infant and maternal mortality.

She was not, however, in a position to mount an effective campaign to increase men's wages. By the early teens, when she was doing this work, women reformers had already had their reforming agenda narrowed almost exclusively to women and children.

So, she tries to figure out, "what is within my domain, what is within my power, what's within my gift that I could attack this problem?" And she decides eventually that the education of pregnant women and new mothers would be one of the ways that she might help to decrease infant and maternal mortality. So, she mounts an educational campaign to help women learn about the value of prenatal care, for instance, about the kind of nutrition that pregnant women need to have, the kinds of exercise, the kinds of rest that they need to have in order to have a healthy delivery. And she mounts an educational campaign about the healthiest ways to raise babies.

QUESTION: How did Julia Lathrop get her message out to the public?

ROBYN MUNCY: The educational campaign that Julia Lathrop first devised to try to respond to the infant and maternal mortality rate [involved] a series of pamphlets written for mothers that would help them to learn the latest information about the best ways to take care of themselves and their children.

Those pamphlets became the most widely distributed [government-printed] pamphlets … in the early twentieth century. And those pamphlets were revised over time and were still going out even in the 50s.

[Lathrop] decided that a doctor or a nurse should not write those pamphlets, that someone who was an ordinary mother should be writing those pamphlets. Because in that way the pamphlets would be understandable, they would be accessible to the largest population of women possible.

QUESTION: How effective was this educational campaign? What kind of criticism did it provoke?

ROBYN MUNCY: The people who took most readily to the pamphlets and to the kinds of educational campaigns that the Children's Bureau mounted over time were clearly people who already had been inculcated with the value of expertise, people who were already in the process, at least, of giving authority to experts, rather than to their own mothers or to their next door neighbors, or even to their own experience.

And there certainly were critics of the Children's Bureau who claimed, look, all these people who are giving us all this advice haven't had children of their own, what good are they? And in those claims you see the conflict between two senses of who has authority, whose advice is worth following, who is a legitimate expert in mothering. Is it a social scientist, is it a doctor, is it a nurse? Or is it a mother, somebody who has raised four or five children, is she the person that you should turn to for expert advice? Those two concepts of who should be the legitimate authority in child rearing were a battle throughout the early twentieth century, and for some still are.

QUESTION: How did the Shepard-Towner Act come into being, and what did it do to combat infant and maternal mortality?

ROBYN MUNCY: [Lathrop] decided that since education was a part of the solution to this problem, she would like to be able to provide federal funds to the states so that the states could then devise educational programs, and provide services for pregnant women and new mothers. And the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act ultimately did provide federal matching funds to the states to devise such programs.

The states were not required to participate, so the women's political campaigns were not over with the passage of the act in 1921. Then women had to go back to their state legislatures and try to convince their state legislatures to participate in the program, that is to raise the matching funds it would take to activate Sheppard-Towner in their states. The overwhelming majority of states did participate in the end; only three states didn't participate in the course of the 1920s. The way that the act worked in most states was that the state would identify an [existing] agency that would have authority over these new programs.

And they would usually hire a public health nurse, or a whole bevy of public health nurses, who would then be itinerant, really. Sometimes they went into certain regions on horseback, [to visit] women's clubs in the area, to ask them to try to identify with pregnant women, and women who had new babies, to get them to come to what was called a child health conference. And that meant what we would call a child health clinic.

And while the women's clubs were identifying pregnant women and new mothers, the public health nurse would get in touch with local doctors, and ask them if they could help to serve at this child health clinic on a particular day, in this particular town. And if successful, the nurse would bring the doctor on a particular day to be there to give a full physical to the babies, to talk to pregnant women and see how they were doing, and examine them if necessary.

The nurse would then begin another political process, which was involving the local authorities in trying to provide the funds to set up a permanent clinic [with a permanent doctor or nurse].

QUESTION: What tangible effect did the Sheppard-Towner Act have on infant mortality?

ROBYN MUNCY: [T]he Children's Bureau and others did studies that showed that in the areas where the Sheppard-Towner Act was in effect, infant mortality rates fell over the course of the decade of the 1920s. So, there was a correlation between the Sheppard-Towner Act and falling infant mortality rates. There is no way for us, however, at this remove, to attribute those decreasing infant mortality rates explicitly to the Sheppard-Towner Act.

There are lots of things that are changing in American communities in the 1920s, and we don't know what combination of factors might have been responsible for decreasing those infant mortality rates. It's clear that individual women and individual children were helped. We have anecdotal evidence, but so far as lowering massively lowering infant mortality goes, we really don't know.

Some of the other trends that might have been responsible or contributing to the decrease in infant and maternal mortality in the 1920s would include things like increasing real wages - over which, of course, the Children's Bureau had no effect at all. Increasing urbanization might have had some effect as well, the increasing availability of medical care. There are lots of trends that might have contributed to lowering mortality rates.

NEW RIVER MEDIA INTERVIEW WITH: Daphne Spain Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, University of Virginia Author, How Women Saved the City

QUESTION: What would it have been like to be a mother living in a turn-of-the-century American city?

DAPHNE SPAIN: I think it's hard for us to imagine now what it would be like because infant mortality was so high, and more than one out of every ten children died in the first year of life. Women had a lot of children, but many of them were taken away, and they were carried away by typhoid, by cholera, by smallpox, and sometimes even starvation. And one of the things it meant to be a mother in a tenement house in a city at the turn of the century was to have this never-ending cycle of work, of trying to keep children clean, food clean, themselves clean, and sometimes [getting] paid work, if the father could not bring in enough money, or if there were no father.

So I think of that era as a constant cycle of births and deaths and the women being prematurely aged. The life expectancy at that time was only forty-seven [years]. And compared with today's life expectancy of about seventy-six [years], we're talking about a tremendous difference. The reason it happened is that conditions were very, very difficult. Women and children both worked in factories, so industrial conditions were a concern for reformers at the time. There were no child labor laws, so the kids who were not in school, and perhaps they couldn't afford to go to school, didn't have the clothes to go to school, would wind up working in factories and bringing the money home for the rest of the family.

QUESTION: What different circumstances would have influenced infant mortality?

DAPHNE SPAIN: We're talking about income differences, certainly, and different access to prenatal care, health care for infants. Even educational level, even the knowledge of what a child should be fed was affected by income, social class, and ethnic origin. Apparently some residents of tenements in Chicago thought that the Irish ate only potatoes and drank beer because that's all they saw going into and out of pubs, is potato lunches going in and beer coming out. And they - some immigrants would feed their children that.

Income or social class differences, or even ethnic differences in infant mortality would spring from several sources. One would be the level of education for the parents, whether they would know about proper nutrition, whether they would be able to buy clean milk, even if they knew that contaminated milk might make the babies ill. That was the second issue, that one had to know what the nutritional requirements were, and one also had to be able to afford to buy it, and be able to find it somewhere. So there were clean milk stations and pure milk stations and food stations that volunteers had set up as a way to ensure immigrant mothers and poor mothers of safe food supply for their children.

Access to health care differed dramatically. Many poor women had no prenatal care, and settlement houses and visiting nurses that worked at settlement houses would often provide that prenatal care, or they would go to the home and visit after the baby's birth for about five days and provide services for new mothers. There were also infant - what we would call 'well baby tents.' There were tents set up on the sidewalks in Chicago that were the combined effort of the university settlement - Northwestern University settlement and the Visiting Nurses Association. And these were temporary spaces set up in the summer where mothers could bring their kids, their babies, and learn how to feed them, how to clothe them, how to keep them healthy.

QUESTION: Can you list some of the demographic characteristics of the urban household?

DAPHNE SPAIN: The average household in cities at the turn of the century in poor areas, in tenement districts anyway, would consist of many families under the same roof, and tenement houses were basically apartment houses. They were buildings with more than three or four families in it, and often there were ten, twenty, thirty families, and sometimes families shared the same room. So overcrowding was a big issue because immigrants and [the] poor could not afford housing that would give them a space in sunlight that they needed to raise healthy families.

They would probably be bringing their water up from the street because there was no indoor plumbing, and the children might do that. That might be a kid's job, it might be a woman's job to bring water for bathing and for cleaning clothes and for cleaning the house. There was a particularly big emphasis on cleanliness, not only for health reasons but for middle class, assimilation reasons as well. There was a gospel of cleanliness that was preached that advocated a clean environment being the path toward becoming a clean American. To be a clean American was to be a true American, and that was when we saw the proliferation of public baths that were sponsored by women's municipal organizations. There was a public bath movement in the United States. They tried to build baths with showers, tubs and laundry facilities for men and women and children in the major, most densely populated areas in the cities. So New York had them, Chicago had them, Philadelphia, Boston.

The reason for the public baths had to do with the very epidemics that would sweep through cities and close quarters. Those epidemics were bad for people obviously. It reduced life expectancy. The death rate was twice what it is today.

QUESTION: What might public space in the city look like?

DAPHNE SPAIN: The image that we have of streets and cities at the turn of the century are of the retail districts, and they have intense, vital street life. There are pushcarts and stores and people are out dealing with vendors and kids are playing on the street and such. What we are less likely to see is that the carts are being pulled by hundreds of thousands of horses throughout cities across the country, that the streetcars were being pulled by horses, that pigs were often scavenging for dirt and garbage in the streets. And therefore there was a tremendous amount of animal waste, and actually dead animals at any one time that had to be hauled off the city streets.

If you read statistical accounts from the 1890s, around 1900, there are complaints from citizens about how long the dead horses lie in the streets, how long it takes the municipality to get rid of ashes and dirt. And there was recycling, even in the 19th century, because people had to put their swill in one container on the street, the garbage, the organic matter, and they had to put their ashes in another container. And if they got them separated correctly and the trash pickers could pick them up, the ashes could be used to create tar for the streets, the covering for the streets, because at the time the streets were mud, and that was another thing that added to the general grimy appearance. In the summer they were dusty and muddy, and in the winter they were slushy and snowy. But if the ashes could be properly processed, they would be put on top of the street and that would cut down on the dust before streets were paved.

One of the stories I liked about reading a census report from the 1890s was that New York City even then was exporting its trash to New Jersey, that they would put the carcasses from hogs and horses and cows and so forth on a barge and send them out to New Jersey three times a week. So the complaints about the way cities disposed of their trash are enduring complaints, they are problems that municipalities have had to deal with for a hundred years at least. And even though we think of pollution now as resulting from toxic chemicals and smoke and such, there were comparable pollutants then and they contributed to this lower life expectancy. There were epidemics of typhoid, of smallpox, of cholera.

QUESTION: What happened to older women in the poorer sections of the city?

DAPHNE SPAIN: There were few elderly people by today's standards of what constitutes the elderly. So an elderly person in 1900s might be in their fifties or sixties, before the time that we think of as retirement age now. And those women, if they were alone, which they might have been because men died slightly sooner than women at that time, they might have found themselves dependent on younger family members. If they had no family members, they would be dependent on perhaps a voluntary association like the YWCA that sometimes provided housing for the elderly. And those homes for aged women, they were called, required similar commitments to the types of complete care homes that we see today. They were probably [only for] the wealthier women. For the poor older woman, who probably would have worked until she dropped, she probably had a life span and level of comfort not much better than those draft horses that we see pictures of, pulling carts and wagons until their last breath.

QUESTION: What were some of the difficulties faced by immigrants?

DAPHNE SPAIN: One of the issues that immigrants had to deal with would be the language barrier, and one of the problems and opportunities in families of the time would be that children could speak English but the parents and grandparents perhaps could not. And grandparents who were very isolated from the rest of society had to depend on their children to translate not just civic languages but customs and practices as well. There's one story from Jane Addams' memoirs about Hull House, about how an Italian immigrant showed up at the door completely destitute. She was an older woman in her late fifties at the time. The landlord had evicted her from her tenement basically, so she had come to Hull House as a last resort, and the woman could not even communicate with Jane Addams until she sent for one of her grandchildren to come talk with her to let her know what had happened. So part of what was happening, the power relations were threatened within families as well because in some instances children had more power than their parents or grandparents did.

QUESTION: What are some of the major demographic trends we see?

DAPHNE SPAIN: If you look at the major demographic indicators from about 1900 forward, the major ones that you look at, the infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate, life expectancy, death rate, birth rates, all those indicators were improving over time. And it had to do with improvements in water supply, in hygiene. It had to do with medical improvements, obviously, a greater understanding about what caused disease and what could prevent accidents like industrial accidents. So the types of events that affected life expectancy were not all related to medicine necessarily, or even technological advances, but sometimes to political solutions like labor legislation that protected children from working in factories, that protected all workers from working more than eight hours a day.

I think the initial interest that progressive reformers had in the labor situation had to do with protecting women and children, and they were trying to keep children out of factories and in schools, and they were trying to recognize that women should not be working more than eight hours a day, and should not work night shifts. Not because they didn't think women could handle it like men could, but because they knew that women had to perform all their domestic duties during the day if they worked at night, whereas men typically could sleep during the day if they worked at night.

QUESTION: What was happening with life expectancy and mortality in this period?

DAPHNE SPAIN: The mortality is the death rate. Life expectancy is the result of some combination of that with the birth rate, the death rate, and the morbidity rate. I think for the elderly life was very difficult because if they were elderly it meant they had already survived a number of accidents or diseases or bouts with the flu or bouts with pneumonia and their systems were probably pretty weak. So they might be suffering from any one of a number of just debilitating problems. Medical practices [were important] in the sense that maternal mortality was reduced when doctors recognized that women in hospitals were getting a fever after childbirth that was being transmitted by doctors and nurses. Once that source was identified, they were able to institute hygienic measures that reduced the transmission of that disease. So once the maternal mortality declined, life expectancy also increased.

One of the reasons we saw an improvement in demographic indicators from the turn of the century was that many voluntary associations were performing services and delivering services that we now expect the government to perform like nursing, well baby clinics with an education about nutrition, clothing, appropriate ventilation in the house.

QUESTION: What were some of the voluntary groups and what did they try to do?

DAPHNE SPAIN: Some examples of the types of volunteer associations were the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and the YWCA, a group called the National Association of Colored Women, and settlement houses did this as well. The things they provided were kindergartens, playgrounds, public baths, types of facilities that would improve the quality of life for children and therefore for women as well. Hull House had a variety of clubs, boys clubs and girls clubs, and they had mothers clubs. And in these clubs people would read passages out loud, perhaps they would learn English. Some of the clubs were aimed at promoting domestic skills like sewing, even teaching children how to make up a bed properly, how to dust a room.

So that was a very tangible attempt to improve the quality of life in the home. Others were the visiting nurses who would visit the home and attend to those who were ill. They were also, many of the settlement houses tried to acknowledge the cultural background, the cultural diversity of the immigrant communities, and would display handicrafts, embroidery, types of woodworking that came from the community itself. And they would try to instill in children a respect for skills that their parents and grandparents had. So the educational process was often two-way. It wasn't just volunteers teaching immigrants how to learn English and become assimilated Americans, but they often learned themselves the types of talents that people brought from other countries.

The distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor was the point at which the delivery of charity services changed directions at the turn of the century. The charity organizations of the early nineteenth century very definitely described some as worthy of receiving help and others as not. The social gospel, though, and advocates of the social gospel disregarded that distinction. They thought that poverty was not a result of sin, but rather a result of social conditions, and that it was society's responsibility to address poverty, both the living conditions and health and welfare. So the social gospel was very much an activist, Protestant theology that advocated intervention and social responsibility for the ills of the poor [and was] instrumental in many of the progressive reforms that occurred in that era.

QUESTION: What were some of the prevailing social attitudes about the poor and about immigrants?

DAPHNE SPAIN: There was a great deal of public criticism and negative public opinion about immigrants at the time. And there were attempts to reduce or eliminate immigration from international sources. There were efforts to require literacy tests. Labor unions were not in favor of immigrant workers and tried to block their entry for a number of years. And what settlement workers tried to do was to introduce both working class poor and upper class individuals to each other. Their purpose was to bridge the class divide in the United States at the time. They would sponsor talks by labor leaders like Eugene Debs and members of the community, neighbors, their neighbors would attend the talks.

Race relations became an issue because in about 1890, 90 percent of blacks lived in the South. They began the great migration out of the South around 1917, and they joined the ethnic mix that existed in cities at the time. Many of the settlement house workers like Jane Addams recognized that race relations would become the new form of urban issue. She herself was attentive to these issues. She invited a representative of the National Association of Colored Women to Hull House for lunch, and the press covered at the time, said it was one of the first times that a light-skinned woman had entertained a colored woman.

Jane Addams and people with Hull House, like Louise DeCoven Bowen, who wrote a book titled The Colored Population of Chicago in 1913 were extremely concerned about extending the same types of rights to African Americans as they had to immigrants. It didn't always translate into reality. In fact, Hull House had a separate center for blacks. It was the Wendell Phillips Home, and they also had a Frederick Douglass Center. There were parallel services for black migrants in Chicago at the same time that Hull House existed.

QUESTION: What kinds of data are there to consult from this period?

DAPHNE SPAIN: One of the sources that demographers have for turn-of-the-century statistics are surveys conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One in 1893 specifically was a survey of tenement conditions and slums in the largest cities. For Chicago, the special agent in charge of that survey was Florence Kelly, who was a resident of Hull House and who was very much a labor activist. She used those data and other residents of Hull House, like Julia Lathrop and Jane Addams, used those data to plot the wage distribution of families in tenements and in neighborhoods surrounding Hull House. They also used those data to plot the nationality.

Hull House Maps and Papers shows a map of wage rates for families living in tenements in the blocks surrounding the Hull House settlement. And the range of those wages is from five dollars or less per week to twenty dollars or more per week, indicating that five dollars or less was the poorest of the poor, and twenty dollars or more would be at the high end of the income range for this poor neighborhood. Most of that map indicates that there are more, many more families making five dollars or less per week than there are making in any other category, twenty dollars a week or more. So what the map shows with the concentration of extremely poor households is that for families earning less than five dollars a week, who would also be paying rent for the tenement, perhaps living in a stable even, and paying for food, that their living conditions were extremely mean. They were extremely fragile in the sense that even one day without work could make a difference between whether food could be bought that day or not, whether the rent could be made for the next week or the next month.

QUESTION: How did the Hull House women try to help immigrants?

DAPHNE SPAIN: Some of the programs that Hull House sponsored were intended to help tide families over if they were in extreme poverty. And they were quite innovative for the time, and perceived as something of socialist and therefore somewhat radical for the time too. But one was a coal cooperative. People in the neighborhood could buy their coal at a lower price if they belonged to this cooperative. It was an alternative to children going out on the street and picking up pieces of coal that had fallen out of bins that were being hauled, or falling off the railroad car, for example. That entitled a family to earn certain points of the purchase and the reduced price of their next coal allotment or their next coal purchase.

The lunch room that Jane Addams sponsored initially was patterned after the New England kitchen that Ellen Sloane Richards developed in Boston, Massachusetts, and Richards was one of the first professional nutritionists who advocated the creation of collective kitchens in communities, that would cook food nutritionally and show women how to cook for their families. But also it would distribute food to workers at lunch time and it would be a place that working women and men could come and buy a very inexpensive lunch on their lunch hour.

So they tried for a year or two at Hull House to convince the immigrants that certain types of Yankee food were nutritional and their benefit to eat, but it didn't really work because the immigrants weren't interested in American food. Finally Hull House abandoned the public kitchen and turned it into a coffee house instead. And one of the reasons they wanted a large facility at Hull House, is that the only place to socialize was the saloon, and they were worried that people, families wanted to be able to celebrate events and have parties and such in places that did not serve alcohol. So they made Hull House available as a type of community or neighborhood living room for those who didn't have the room in their own homes.

Some of the programs were aimed at taking care of children while their mothers worked, which enabled more income to come into the family. The children were kept at a nursery and the mothers paid five cents a week for that service. And that was done because sometimes older children wound up taking care of their younger brothers and sisters, or if worse came to worst, a mother might just lock her child in the house the entire time she was at the factory.

QUESTION: Were women working at this time?

DAPHNE SPAIN: About 20 percent of women were in the paid labor force around 1900, and those jobs that they had then were some factory work, teaching, nursing. Domestic service was another type of occupation for women at the time. But our definition of work now has expanded to include non-paid work and indeed volunteer work. That's what a lot of middle class and elite women did, is they worked on behalf of the community and on behalf of the poor to provide the services that the city had not yet organized itself to do.

The voluntary efforts were sometimes linked with religious motivations. Sometimes they were linked with an ideology called municipal housekeeping. Municipal housekeeping was a way that women were encouraged to identify the city as their larger home, and it was a path into civic improvement and civic activity for women because if they treated the city as a place they were responsible for, they had to keep clean, they had to keep healthy for the benefit of their family members and the community as a family, that gave them opportunities for public actions that they didn't ordinarily have. So that a combination of volunteerism fueled by the social gospel, Protestant, evangelical theology or activist theology, Protestant activist theology, and municipal housekeeping, which was the more secular ideology, were really some of the moving forces behind women's voluntary associations at the turn of the century.

QUESTION: What were urban conditions like by the 1920's?

DAPHNE SPAIN: The conditions in cities were improving significantly by the 1920s partly because of progressive reform and partly because of the efforts that voluntary associations had made on behalf of the poor. And the voluntary associations were bringing into public view the types of private troubles that made life so hard at the time. High infant mortality, disease, inability to heat a home, inability to pay the rent. Those had been considered family issues before, if you want to think of them. And yet women's voluntary associations brought them to the forefront and turned private troubles into public issues.

[Women volunteers] convinced politicians and they convinced legislators that it was a public responsibility to address issues of poverty, and when you address issues of poverty, you are by default addressing issues of life expectancy and public health as well. And so they had a very serious agenda. They were taking very certain determined steps toward improving life for everyone in the city. So I think that these women's voluntary associations are due a great deal of credit for filling in and identifying problems before the government could, or was willing to take on responsibility for those problems.

But the voluntary associations that women were particularly active in were not necessarily identified with the progressive movement. So the General Federation of Women's Clubs promoted suffrage, they promoted municipal housekeeping as an agenda. But they had so many thousands of members across the country that they were more visible almost, ironically. Their large numbers of rank and file members, and the very few number of women who actually made a big splash in the headlines the way Jane Addams did repeatedly, that accounted for their strength but it also accounted for their anonymity. I think it's one of the reasons that we have not really recognized the impact that those women's voluntary associations had independently of the political systems.

QUESTION: Did the women volunteers have any critics?

DAPHNE SPAIN: There is a great antagonism, really, between the sociologists of the Chicago school at the University of Chicago, and settlement workers like Jane Addams and others. The settlement workers were interested in activism. They wanted to chart what was happening in neighborhoods, they wanted to collect the statistics to create change. They wanted to know whether garbage was being collected or not, they wanted to know how many babies were dying in the neighborhood so that they could make the city pay attention and deliver municipal services.

Sociologists like Robert Park and Ernest Burgess at the University of Chicago at the time were more theoretically inclined and they actually dismissed the work of the settlement house workers, even though some of those women, like Edith Abbott, had published in sociological journals. So there was a real split between the theoretical branch of sociology and the practitioners branch. What probably evolved more clearly out of settlement house work than sociology or the collection of statistics was urban planning and social work of a type. What those women were doing at the time was creating a new profession for themselves.

QUESTION: Why were these voluntary groups so effective?

DAPHNE SPAIN: I think one of the reasons the voluntary associations were so successful is that they relied on their own strengths and their own talents and they relied on determination. An intense amount of either religious zeal or personal motivation created changes, and they created changes in large and small ways, but mostly they were interested in these small scale changes at the neighborhood level. One of the efforts made by black women in Chicago at the same time that Hull House existed for immigrant groups was a boarding house for women called the Phyllis Wheatley Association. The motto for that club was if you can't push, pull, and if you can't pull, please get out of the way. That indicates a commitment to action, a commitment to going forward with the goals of the association - in this case to provide vocational training and housing for African American women, in spite of all odds. Inviting others to join in that goal and that fight, but not taking no for an answer either.

QUESTION: What was the significance of the publication of Hull House Maps and Papers?

DAPHNE SPAIN: One of the reasons Hull House maps and papers was an important publication is that it represented characteristics of the neighborhood spatially, and this was a technique that sociologists at the University of Chicago were using at the time to plot different areas of income, different areas of home ownership, different areas of mental illness, different areas of juvenile delinquency and gang activity.

It was a neighborhood base from the ground up attempt to illustrate that these were problems that the city had and that the city had responsibility for. And by spatially locating them, by giving them a geographic site in the city, I think they were among the first to promote the importance of the spatial concentration of poverty, or the consequences, certainly, of the spatial concentration of poverty. And when we read contemporary works about poverty like William Julius Wilson's work, we see a return to that issue of the geographic aspect of it and what happens when we have a great concentration of poverty.

Hull House Maps and Papers was particularly important because it was a voluntary effort to document the amount of poverty in a certain area of the city. So it gave poverty a geographic component, it gave it a place, it gave it a face and a sense that one could look at these wage rate concentrations in tenements and think what it must be like to live on less than five dollars a week for a family of six or eight. And it demonstrated the commitment that women volunteers had to addressing the seriousness of the issue.

If you think about Hull House in contemporary terms, it was almost like a reading club. It was - they described it as a dorm in a way, an intellectual enterprise as well as a residential enterprise. I think it was a salon, that these were places where important issues of the day were discussed. And I think Jane Addams took it as her personal mission to educate the wealthy, with whom she had many connections, about the living conditions of the poor. And if she could do that with maps, she did it with maps.

QUESTION: Does anything about this period bear examination in the light of society's problems today?

DAPHNE SPAIN: One of the reasons that we want to pay attention to the period of history of about a hundred years ago is that it presented problems that were similar to the problems we're experiencing today, and it also presented possible solutions to those problems, models for those solutions. And by that I mean a combination of government responsibility, voluntary participation, and faith-based contributions, in addition to private enterprise, because indeed private enterprise has always played a very big role in the welfare of cities and the poor.

I think to the extent that we're still worried about pollution, we're still worried about labor relations, immigration, race relations, women's status, that the more resources brought to bear from the largest number of centers on those problems, the greater the potential for successful solutions.

JOHN MILTON COOPER Professor of History, University of Wisconsin Author, Pivotal Decades November 16, 1998

QUESTION: In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner went to Chicago to deliver his famous paper, "The Closing of the American Frontier." What was it all about? Who was Frederick Jackson Turner?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: Frederick Jackson Turner was a young professor at the University of Wisconsin. He is one of the first people to teach American history, in fact, and to claim that American history was worth studying in and of itself.

When I was chairman at the department at Madison, I once had some visiting historians from Africa, and we had a portrait [of Turner] in the office. And they, of course, asked me who it was, and I identified him to them. And I said to them, "You know, you may find this hard to believe, but we Americans once had a colonial attitude towards our own past." That there was this notion that the real history, what really counted, was European history, and we were some sort of offshoot or pale reflection. And I said. "Turner, that man, did more than anyone else to give Americans a real sense that our past was important, that we counted, that this was something that was intellectually exciting and significant for us to study."

Turner made his name more than anything else by a single paper that he gave, later published as an essay, called "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." And this was delivered at the Great White Columbian Exhibition down in Chicago, that wonderful thing there, which, besides lots of shows and paintings, they also featured scholars and artists and writers giving papers.

And Turner gave this paper, and he was picking up on something that had been noted by the 1890 census. What the 1890 census had noted was that there was no longer a frontier line. Now, this didn't mean, of course, [that] the country was filled up - heck no. I mean, even today anybody who drives out West sees that very quickly. But what it did mean was that there was no definable area on the map that could be codified and then represented by a line on the map.

QUESTION: Was Turner the first person to popularize that particular aspect of the census?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: No. [But] what [he] did was it gave a kind of legitimacy, urgency to a concern that had been around a lot. The country is industrialized. The place of the greatest growth quite obviously is in the cities. We are now becoming a country of cities, and of bigger cities. Immigrants are pouring in from Europe. The highest percentages and highest absolute numbers of immigration to the United States would be from about the mid-1890s, when we begin to recover from that depression, to the outbreak of the First World War. And there is all this concern: What is happening to us? What are we becoming? We are not what we used to be. We are not this nation of independent farmers, artisans, small townspeople.

QUESTION: We're no longer what America was when Frederick Jackson Turner was born in Portage - in 1861 - a small frontier town.

JOHN MILTON COOPER: That's correct. Frederick Jackson Turner was born in this town of Portage, Wisconsin in 1861, the same date as the outbreak of the Civil War. Portage was - I forget how large it was in those days - a town of several hundred, maybe a thousand people. His father was the editor of the paper. It is the kind of town where, of course, everybody knows each other, and most of the dealings that you have - as a business person or as a customer or whatever else - [are] very much face to face.

And this is changing. I mean, obviously with all of these cities, with the growth of big businesses, with the growth of big fortunes, this concern is around as to what does this mean, what are we becoming, what is happening to us? Can we still be who we want to be? Which is the land of opportunity, the land of democracy, the land of the American dream that anybody or any little boy can grow up to be president, rags to riches and all the rest of that.

Turner takes this notice by the census, and he weaves this into an interpretation, basically, of the American character - of what had made us Americans and the significance of the frontier. Now, of course, again this is a way of de-colonizing our own view of ourselves. Because up to this point the major interpretations of American history had been, well, it's what the Europeans have brought over here and given to us, either English origins, or perhaps now the currently fashionable idea was German. You know, somehow the germ of institutions and of townships and polity and things like that had somehow come out of the Teutonic forest.

What Turner is doing in the frontier essay is saying that, well, sure, everything we brought over from Europe is important. .But that what really made us Americans was the frontier, was this constant renewing of ourselves. It's not so much land, it's the possibility of land; therefore lots of people can go out and clear forests and acquire land, and therefore become farmers and become economically independent. Turner says, "Yes, that's important," but to him what's more important is the process itself - the process of constantly founding communities, constantly building communities. That you have to grow your own leaders, you have to grow your own cultural spokesperson in these local communities. It's this constant re-founding, renewal, rebirthing process. This is what he is saying. And he's saying he has no prescriptions there. But a great concern of his is, "Well, gee, what's going to happen to us now that we don't have this frontier any more?"

And what you get frankly in the 1890s is a lot of intellectuals and some politicians - such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge - are taking the search for new frontiers quite literally. This is one of the things about our outward thrust then to become a world power, to acquire colonies, to get into the imperial game. Suddenly what they see is that this will be a very healthy substitute for what we used to have at home, which was the process of settlement.

QUESTION: What does Turner think about the vast immigration that you talked about, particularly from southern and eastern Europe?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: Turner himself, as I recall, is not terribly upset about immigration from non-northern parts of Europe. He seems to be relatively relaxed about it. Interestingly enough, Theodore Roosevelt is rather relaxed about it too. Roosevelt has this optimism about the ability of the American culture, the American economy, the American polity to remake these folks or to assimilate them. There are plenty of other people, though, who are very worried about this, who see this as somehow changing us. It has certainly a religious dimension to it, because the notion again there are lots of people who thought that it really takes a Protestant to be a true, small "d" democrat. That somehow that kind of religious affiliation is the kind of schooling and conditioning that you have to have in order to be a truly democratic person.

QUESTION: You mentioned that Turner went to Johns Hopkins, where there is a placard which says, "History is past politics; politics is present history." Turner did not believe that, did he?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: Turner, in his own work, broke a bit with the Johns Hopkins "past politics present history" mode, because he liked to study other things. He liked to study demography, he liked to study social groups, he liked to study agriculture, economics. He has a broader view, although he preached this better than he practiced it.

QUESTION: It's been said that the advent and rise of social science was sort of the trigger to the progressive movement in America.

JOHN MILTON COOPER: What social science did was to give - or at least appear to give - the tools for controlling society and the economy, to give a basis for doing this, and - at least people thought - a disinterested basis for doing it. . . . I think what social science did was give the means for reform - the reform ideas are around already.

QUESTION: Is there a tension between social science and history - as to whether you tell history through the data or through the parliaments and princes and presidents?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: History has always been the schizophrenic Janus-faced discipline. Is it a branch of literature? Is it a science? Which way do you go?

At this point, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, scientific aspirations - or I'd say quite frankly, scientific pretensions - are riding pretty high. But there are a number of people who don't buy into this at all, particularly the gifted amateurs. Theodore Roosevelt gave a presidential address to the American Historical Associated called, "History as Literature." His great rival and professional academic, Woodrow Wilson, felt exactly the same way. He was very much for history as a branch of literature. In fact, Wilson, although he was a political scientist himself, actually resisted and disliked these scientific pretensions.

QUESTION: How could you tell the history of that time, without getting into, for example, data about immigration? Could you tell that story without data?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: Nobody can write the history of this period without using numbers. But the task is to bring them alive. There were only 8,000 automobiles in the United States in 1900. Now, there's something that shows how far we've come or how things have changed. There wasn't even a single mile of smooth, paved road in the United States in 1900. It's all cobblestones, macadam, gravel, this kind of thing.

[And] I think in some ways one significance of 1900 has been understated. The first census to record an urban majority in the United States is 1920. All of us historians talk about that; others do, too. That's important. But what that 1920 census was doing was recording something after the fact. I think [around 1900 is] the point at which, except in the South, the majority of Americans have come to live in towns and cities.

QUESTION: Can you describe the changes America was going through in the early part of this century?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: I don't think it's possible to overestimate the change in consciousness that people went through I'd say in the course of maybe 40 years, say between 1875 and 1915. What happening to people in the United States, and in the more advanced industrialized parts of the world, is that the changes are coming home to them.

The railroad made land transportation swift and easy for the first time in human history. I mean, this is the first time that [people were] able to get easily from one [place] to another over land. [This task will soon] be taken by the automobile, although that's a more gradual change in the 20th century. But the real revolution is to be able to travel fast over land. And in turn that's also local transportation.

Earlier, what you are getting also is the streetcars [which] helped create suburbs. We tend to blame [the automobile] too much [for] urban sprawl. [But in fact,] the spread-out non-centered city of Los Angeles is not a creation of the automobile; it's the creation of a streetcar. So this in a sense the phenomenon is there even before necessarily the best technological means - the telegraph, the telephone.

And in many ways, I think, it's the creation of a national economy and it's the knitting together [of] a society. These are the people who, I think, [have lived] through perhaps the greatest intellectual revolution of the last half millennium at least - much more so than I think in anything as we have seen since then.

QUESTION: The last half millennium meaning in the last five hundred years?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: [Yes.] Of the half millennium, since the invention of printing, since the expansion of Europe, I think the twenty years or maybe the forty years - 1875 to 1915, let's say - this is the time when the great changes come home to people more I think than at any other time. I mean, to some extent, Americans [around 1875] are still medieval types. We still live in small villages, we still do an awful lot of things by hand before the railroad, before mass-produced shoes, before mass-produced clothing, before telegraphs bring news from New York or from London to you tomorrow.

QUESTION: What machines - other than the automobile - helped to revolutionize people's lives?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: The great changes to come in people's lives and in the way people go about their ordinary lives, [actually] involve gas. Natural gas and bottled gas [become] terribly important, because this is home heating, this is lighting. We forget that gas lighting was the major home and municipal lighting form in most American cities down until the time of the First World War.

You know, one of the great accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal - some would say the greatest single physical accomplishment - was the extension of electricity to rural families. It was estimated I believe that about 80 percent of farm families did not have electricity at the beginning of the 1930s. And somewhere close to 90 percent of farm families did have electricity at the end of the 1930s. One thing that meant, of course, was not only that you could have lighting, but you could [also] have various home appliances. It also means that you don't have to draw water. It means that you can have a pump in order to draw water. Probably the greatest single liberation to the farm life - for example, to the mother in the rural area - is electricity.

QUESTION: Is it accurate to say, in terms of the science of this period, that the theory came in the nineteenth century and the application came in the early twentieth century?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: I think so. But I still look back to the end of the nineteenth century, beginning of the twentieth century because, in some ways, before you can have the application, you've got to have the change in minds. People see the world differently, at least an awful lot of them did. And an awful lot of them are not happy about it, either.

That's why, I think, one of the greatest conflicts between science and religion has happened in the twentieth century, repeatedly. Obviously the great crusade against teaching evolution in the schools - which culminates in the mid-1920's with the Scopes trial down in Tennessee - is part of that. But [I think] that's clearly a measure of how much people's thinking has changed. You know, the term "fundamentalism" isn't even coined until 1909. And the reason it isn't is that you didn't even need it before then, because the kind of evangelical, more or less literal reading of the Bible could be assumed. It's not until it's under attack that people then have to construct these deliberate defenses for it, to coin a term.

QUESTION: The old frontier was closing, but the cities were being flooded by immigrants and by people from rural areas. Was this something of a new frontier for them?

JOHN MILTON COOPER: Yes. The question of the city as a new frontier is a fascinating one, and of course [the city is a new frontier] in many ways. For so many of these immigrants from Europe, they are coming from small cities or small towns, peasant villages, the shtetls. They're hop-scotching two or three centuries of history. They are coming immediately into a strange new world, and in some ways language is the least of their problems. These are pretty adaptable people, especially the younger ones - they learn the language fast.

It's a much more different environment, a different way of looking at the world. But it's an exciting place in many ways. I think we have often dwelt too much on the squalor and the misery. There's plenty of it there - there's no question about it. But on the other hand, there is also an awful lot of opportunity and difference.

There's also another frontier there which I think actually appeals to Frederick Jackson Turner himself in certain ways. One of the great frontiers for middle-class Americans - for young educated Americans - was either to go from the country to the city or to go from the provinces to the metropolis. The city is a place of lights and glamour and opportunity and fun and all of these things, and I think there is a real middle-class migration.

The mass internal migration of Americans from the country to the city, internal migration, I think comes a bit later. Part of [the reason for this] is the shut-off of immigration. The thing that really shut off European immigration was World War I. That meant that [demand for work,] particularly [the] demand for factory work, [rose dramatically]. [And] an awful lot of this is filled by African-Americans who have already [began] migrating north. The migration of African-Americans out of the South really gets started around 1900. It's fairly gradual. But then during World War I, part of it is a chain reaction. A lot of northern labor agents and factory owners go down and actively recruit African-Americans. They are looking for cheap labor, they are looking for non-unionized labor that they want to have down there.

In turn, then, the migration of rural whites more to the cities is more a phenomenon of the 1920's. Most of the white migration, an awful lot of it had gone out of the South but usually was going West - going West or Southwest or West from one rural area to another. In other words, it's still a farming frontier. In that sense the frontier really didn't close in 1890.

QUESTION: How did Frederick Jackson Turner account for the differences between America and Europe?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Well, Frederick Jackson Turner, who was a very prominent and important historian, emphasized the fact that the United States was a society which moved West, [which] made the country a much more open system than Europe. European society was more densely populated. There was no open land [to which] people [could go to] start farms, towns. And so one of the things that made America different from Europe was the fact that it was a frontier society, that it had a frontier.

But then, in his judgment, the frontier ended at the turn of the century, and this for him meant that there would be a qualitative change in the character of America. And America without a frontier would necessarily be a different sort of place. He assumed that this meant opportunity would decline, that a more fixed class system would emerge.

QUESTION: How did the frontier set America apart from other countries?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: The difference between the American society and European society is fairly clear and fairly obvious. Europe is much more stratified, Europeans had a feudalism with a greater respect for the privileged classes. The United States was called a settler society, formed by people coming here.

But it wasn't the only settler society. Canada is a settler society in the same sense that the United States is. Australia is a settler society, New Zealand, Argentina, [some] Latin American countries [are settler societies]. And [so you might think that] they all should look like the United States. [But] they don't, in large part, because their history is different. It's not only the frontier which [accounts] for America being exceptional.

If you look at Canada and the United States, [despite their similarities,] these are two quite different countries. [One] striking difference between their [frontier and ours is evident in] the Indian wars. The biggest event which is commemorated - or commiserated - in the American-Indian wars was Sitting Bull's and the Sioux's triumph over Custer and the army, where they wiped out the whole American Army that faced it, that whole eight hundred or so.

Well, the history books don't tell you what happened [next] to the Sioux. After they finished with Custer, they moved North, and they crossed the Canadian frontier border, and they surrendered to six Mounties. And one of the reasons for this is that the Indians felt that the word of the Canadians could be trusted. [They knew] that treaties were made [with] the Canadian government [and they] were maintained. Treaties were made with the United States and they weren't maintained.

And, again, if you trace this back, Canada had a frontier in which central authority - first the fur companies, later Ottawa - maintained control over the frontier. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were the authority there. They came there before the settlers came, and retained authority. The American frontier was a populace frontier. They had sheriffs [who] were responsible to the population. And the local populace dictated social relations on the American frontier, and they were interested in more land, they were interested in making money, and they really had no respect for the rights of the Indians. So, you might have a treaty that [said] the Black Hills, or the Dakotas, were supposed to be Indian [territory]. But then you find gold there, and that's the end of [the treaty] because the settlers simply moved in and took over. You couldn't do that in the same way in Canada.

Australia, again, is quite a different place. Australia, while much of it is desert, it has less water and the like, and [so it] didn't have the kind of small farms in most of the country that you had in the United States, and for that matter, in Canada. [Instead,] you had big sheep stations, enormous farms, some of which went hundreds of miles, and had hundreds of workers. So these were sort of like rural factories, and there [was] strong trade unionism. And [so you had] class relations in the Australian frontier which one couldn't get in the United States. Latin America is still another case.

QUESTION: What did Turner mean when he called the frontier a "safety valve"?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: When Turner spoke of the frontier as a safety valve, he meant, in part, a political safety valve. Namely, that people who were troublemakers, people who wanted to change the society, people who were frustrated because they'd lost their job or gone bankrupt - instead of trying to change things at home, make a revolution, or what-not - took up and went to the frontier to start all over again. And that was not possible in other societies. So the frontier was a place that helped [release] the pressure, [that's what a] safety valve implies. The pressure was reduced because people could go there.

QUESTION: What precisely does the term "American exceptionalism" mean?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: The term "exceptionalism" has been used in different ways. One, [as] Tocqueville [used it], simply refers to the fact that America is qualitatively different from Europe, and he mentioned a lot of things, but the class structure was particularly important for him, [the religious differences were] important.

A second meaning of [exceptionalism], which you find in later literature, was used by many American radicals, and radicals in Europe also. [What] they meant [by] exceptionalism was that every other country - every other industrialized country - had a large socialist movement, labor party. The United States never had a significant labor party or socialist movement. Hence, it was exceptional.

The third meaning is a more generic or more general meaning, namely that [American society] is qualitatively different from other societies in all sorts of ways - some good ways and some bad ways. I wrote a book some years ago, American Exceptionalism: The Double-Edged Sword. The double-edged sword refers to the fact that America is different in good ways and in bad ways. And, you know, we can list the various good ways. But, you know, we have a very high crime rate; we have very high rate of violence; we have a low rate of voting. We have more people in prison now than any other country has. Well, in that way, you could say America is [also] exceptional.

Well, you know, we have an exceptional class structure, and so the positive and the negative are both different, both exceptional. And, in fact, one can suggest that these are related, the good and the bad.

QUESTION: Can you give a specific example of how the good and the bad aspects of American exceptionalism are connected?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: We're a populist country, [where] the people have more power to elect. But we also have a very low voting rate. And these two get connected. There are over 500,000 elected positions in the United States, counting dog catcher[s], and county officers, and mayors, and so forth. In most European countries, the number of elected officers run into the thousands. In some countries they run into the hundreds. And we have many elections; they have relatively fewer elections.

Well, I would suggest the fact that we have many elections reduces the number of people voting, that people are tired of voting, that they don't see the point of it. They're constantly approached to vote. So, in a sense you can go overboard, which I think in some respects the United States has. So these get connected.

QUESTION: What prompted Frederick Jackson Turner's concerns about American society?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Well, there was a lot of conflict in the late nineteenth century. There were strikes, violence, radical movements. And this, people began to see as European. [They began to think] that the country was going to the European direction. The cities, of course, had slums, and those are dirty things. We've always had for a long time in the United States a "Mr. Clean" syndrome of people who see the dirt that's there. And they used to be called conservationists before World War I, and Teddy Roosevelt was one of the progressives.

And the cities, particularly with immigrant slums, were seen as changing the country. [So] you had anti-immigrant movements, because they thought the immigrants were undermining the nature of American society. It wasn't just a question of economic competition with immigrants, but for many - particularly the better-educated elements - it's that [the immigrants] were [actually] dirtying the society. And in this context, they really didn't want them.

And all of this harks back to [the ideas of Thomas] Jefferson. Because, for Jefferson, cities were a bad thing. Jefferson thought that America was great as an open rural society of yeoman farmers, of self-employed farmers. And, of course, he then saw it, like Turner, as different from Europe. Europe was primarily a rural society, but the Europeans were peasants, were underlings who had to bow down to the people above them. Whereas, America was a system in which the independent farmer not only was economically independent but he was politically independent.

[But, now] workers in the city, workers in the factory, weren't [economically or politically independent anymore].

QUESTION: Was the Lynds' study of Middletown an attempt to chronicle the growing class struggle in America?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Well, the Lynds, of course, did focus on class relations. But there was an unfortunate thing about the choice of Muncie because in the book there's a family called the X Family, which dominates. And this family of the Balls, they own, I think, the glass factory, the biggest factory in town. And the thing about it was that that was one family controlled, one industry controlled [the town]. So, [for] Muncie, it wasn't just class [that determined the power structure], it was the control of a family and an industry. And this was not true for many other cities, and many other places. So, I think you've got an exaggeration of power. Power in Muncie clearly was power of the rich, of this family. To get ahead [people] had to be able to work with this dominant group.

But seeing class and class conflict [in America] was very prevalent [at the time of the Lynd's study]. But [in America, that] conflict never took the form of a socialist party which would try to transform the democracy. But it did take the form of militant unions, unions which, again, were not socialist. In fact, some people [who] have written about them have made the mistake, to my mind, of calling them conservative. And they weren't conservative; they were what in the labor history is syndicalist. They believed in workers' power, they increased power of the workers. But [they didn't believe in] taking over factories, and nationalizing industry, and so forth. So that the old American Federation of Labor under Sam Gompers was a very militant organization which not only struck, but also engaged in violence. And this was an environment [in which] the Lynds were operating.

QUESTION: Did Muncie, Indiana [Middletown] represent the typical American town?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Well, you know, Middletown - if you think of it as being somewhat of a typical American town - exhibits a number of things which we think of as American. One is this pride in country, and pride in place. The people in Middletown were very proud of America, they were also very proud about Muncie, proud of their community. And this kind of boosterism certainly was very prevalent in Muncie. I think Muncie was [also] typical in its religiosity in its churchgoing habits, which again is a very American thing.

QUESTION: How did the American sense of pride in their country figure into the idea of American exceptionalism?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: The whole idea that Americans have pride in the country, gets into another meaning of [American exceptionalism], that [the country] was providential, that it was God's country, that it was the New Jerusalem. Which, you know, the [American] Revolution was thought of, as creating a new and better society, that the hand of Providence, the hand of God was on the country. And, clearly, many of the people before the Civil War, particularly in the North, thought of it in these terms.

In fact, there was an interesting event which sort of reinforced this. You know, the two men who were most important to the Declaration of Independence were Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it, and John Adams, who [as a member of] the Committee of the Free, really pushed Jefferson into writing it. Well, these two men [both] died on July 4th, 1826, which was 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

When the country learned of this, the notion developed that this was proof positive that this was a providential country. That this couldn't be coincidence that these two men would have died on the same day, the same way, and that God, after these 50 years, had taken back his two servants that had helped found America. And it reinforced this sense that this was the providential country, the country of the New Jerusalem, and the essence that we were a better country, a superior country, a country that set a model for the rest of the world. And the notion that somehow we were a better society, more democratic society, a freer society, a wealthier society, a more religious society.

Today, we have opinion polls taken in almost every country. And if you ask people in different countries to react to the statement, "I'm proud to be an American; I'm proud to be British; I'm proud to be Russian; I'm proud to be whatever," a much larger percentage of Americans will say "I'm proud to be an American" than will people from other countries. I think it's in the 90th percentiles. The British, who are second, are in the 70s. And other countries roll down.

So, you find [that] this positive feeling about the country is very strong within the United States. And it's [a feeling for which] we don't have quantitative measures going back into the nineteenth century. But we have what's known as the foreign travel literature, [written by] the thousands of foreigners, mostly Europeans, who came to the United States to study it. And [these writers] comment on the extent to which Americans boast of their country. And people, many of these people, felt that this was kind of vulgar, that you don't do this.

QUESTION: Do you see any parallels between Middletown in the 1920s and America today?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: Americans today could understand the 1920s, because the 1920s [were] a period of enormous prosperity, of [nearly] full employment, of tremendous growth of consumer goods, and of a great deal of satisfaction, because things were going well. People looked forward to the country doing better, and they looked forward to themselves doing better. The Lynds were, I think, a bit cynical about this, because they had more of a critical view [of] America, American society, American capitalism.

But this aspect of being a consumer society, again, that's been characteristic of the United States as compared to other places going way back. And Tocqueville was already noticing the fact that the average person in the city wore the same sort of clothes that the well-to-do people did. Well, that wasn't true in Paris, that wasn't true in London.

QUESTION: What factors made America unique even after the closing of the frontier?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: I think the new machines, the consumption patterns, the automobile which was coming in; the telephone opened the door to communications. We talk of the [Inter]net doing the same thing. People could call each other up, people could speak not only within the city, but one city to another, across the country. And that changed distances, it changed the nature of social relationships, of friendships, of families, and just as the [Inter]net does now in different ways.

And of course, advertising [is also] something which I think was uniquely American, or at least something which came about here earlier. Advertisers make you want more. They tell you life can be better. And [this] demand [gave rise to], a whole flock of new inventions which occurred in the early twentieth century, just as we're having this tremendous pace of new developments today. And again, the United States leads in the rate of innovation.

[Another one of the areas where] the United States is unique in is education. We have had this desire to be better educated, and I think the roots of this can be traced to religion. Because Protestant sectarianism - which is the unique American form of Christianity - demands that people read the Bible and interpret it for themselves. Well, if you demand that people read the Bible they have to be literate. So this became an early emphasis on literacy, and we got schools, we got colleges to train teachers, and train preachers in larger numbers, and earlier than other countries. Well, more people graduated from public school than any other country. As high school became the norm, more Americans went to high school than any other country.

Now, today we complain - in many ways quite rightly - that our lower levels of education, which is a mass system for everybody, [are] inadequate. But our graduate education is unquestionably the best in the world. So at every point the upper levels of education were always better here than elsewhere. And this in turn was related to opportunity.

QUESTION: Do you think people still believe in American exceptionalism?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: In a book I recently published dealing with the absence of socialist movements in the United States, the last chapter is called "The End of Political Exceptionalism?" and [points to a decline] in exceptionalism. Now, in the political sphere, where we didn't have a socialist movement, one can say it has declined, not because of changes in America, but changes in Europe. The Europeans have become like the Americans in terms of education, standards of living, and the like. And today you have socialist parties, you have labor parties which call themselves that, [but] every socialist party in Europe no longer believes in socialism. They all explicitly accept the market, [believe] that the market economy is the best way to work the social system.

That means the differences between the Americans and the Europeans in this respect has declined. But, on the other hand, if you look at the opinion polls - which is our best measure of beliefs and the differences - you still find that even though the gap is narrow, it's still there. So that Americans are much less approving of state intervention. Americans want to have a much smaller role for the state than Europeans. And Europeans, even if not many of them are socialist, are still in favor of the welfare state, in favor of state intervention in different areas. It's a smaller gap, but it's a gap. In that sense, America is still exceptional.

But one has to stress, as I said before, that this doesn't mean we're necessarily better. And every country, in some sense, is exceptional. Every country differs from every other country, and the mixture that makes up a country varies from place to place.

QUESTION: To some, the idea of American exceptionalism is simply a variation on ethnocentrism. Is there any truth in this?

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: There's the whole question of pride in America. Now, one factor - it's a complicated thing to try to explain - is that we believe in something called Americanism. And, as many people have pointed out, Americanism is an ideology. It's not just being an American; it has a content of values. And we, therefore, say people are un-American, which means they don't believe or they don't practice the American ideology. You've never heard of anybody called un-Swedish, or un-British, or un-German, or un-Japanese, well maybe un-Japanese, because you don't have the same kind of belief in a doctrine. We say people should become Americans. People came here from abroad, they could become Americans, and if they became American, they're as American as everybody else.

We're not a political party abroad, but still we would like to see the rest of the world follow us, imitate us. Now, the rest of the world, much of the rest of the world, sneers at this, these people think what we stand for, what we believe in, is no good. And it's true, a kind of ethnocentrism isn't good. But, what underlies this is the fact that we have this ideology.

QUESTION: Clarify what you mean by "Americanism."

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET: The most important factor in Americanism is equality, equality of opportunity, and social equality.

Many years ago there was an American socialist intellectual named Leon Sampson, who wrote a book in which he was dealing with this question of why the socialists were weak in America. And his answer, in part, was that the socialists were weak because America was socialist. Now, he didn't mean it was socialist economically, but he meant it was socialist socially. That what socialists thought they would get in a socialist society - a society of equality - Americans already thought they had. And so that when socialists came along and said, "You should change your system so we can get more equality," they couldn't appeal to people who thought they were living in an [egalitarian] society, that they were living in a society which didn't require deference. Again, it's a society with obviously enormous inequality on the economic side, but not on the social side.