The Spirit of America

by Henry Van Dyke

In New York there are more than forty hospitals, of which six are municipal institutions, while the others are incorporated by associations of citizens and supported largely by benevolent gifts; and more than forty free dispensaries for the treatment of patients and the distribution of medicines. In fact, the dispensaries increased so rapidly, a few years ago, that the regular physicians complained that their business was unfairly reduced. They said that prosperous people went to the dispensary to save expense; and they humbly suggested that no patient who wore diamonds should be received for free treatment.

In the United States in 1903 there were 1500 hospitals costing about $29,000,000 a year for maintenance: $9,000,000 of this came from public funds, and the remaining $20,000,000 from charitable gifts and from paying patients. One-third of the patients were in public institutions, the other two-thirds in hospitals under private or religious control. There is not a city of any consequence in America which is without good hospital accommodations; and there are few countries in the world where it is more comfortable for a stranger to break a leg or have a mild attack of appendicitis. All this goes to show that the Americans recognize the care of the sick and wounded as a part of the common order. They perceive that the State never has been, and probably never will be, able to do all that is needed without the help of benevolent individuals, religious bodies, and philanthropic societies.

How generously this help is given in America, not only for hospitals, but for all other objects of benevolence, may be seen from the fact that the public gifts and bequests of private citizens for the year 1907 amounted to more than $100,000,000.

Let me give another illustration of voluntary social coöperation in this sphere of action which lies at least in part beyond the reach of the State. In all the American cities of large size, you will find institutions which are called “Settlements,”—a vague word which has been defined to mean “homes in the poorer quarters of a city where educated men and women may live in daily contact with the working people.” The first house of this kind to be established was Toynbee Hall in London, in 1885. Two years later the Neighbourhood Guild was founded in New York, and in 1889 the College Settlement in the same city, and Hull House in Chicago, were established. There are now reported some three hundred of such settlement houses in the world, of which England has 56, Holland 11, Scotland 10, France 4, Germany 2, and the United States 207. I will take, as examples, Hull House in Chicago, and the Henry Street Settlement in New York.

Hull House was started by two ladies who went into one of the worst districts of Chicago and took a house with the idea of making it a radiating centre of orderly and happy life. Their friends backed them up with money and help. After five years the enterprise was incorporated. The buildings, which are of the most substantial kind, now cover a whole city block, some forty or fifty thousand square feet, and, include an apartment house, a boys’ club, a girls’ club, a theatre, a gymnasium, a day nursery, workshops, class rooms, a coffee-house, and so on. There are forty-four educated men and women in residence who are engaged in self-supporting occupations, and who give their free time to the work of the settlement. A hundred and fifty outside helpers come every week to serve as teachers, friendly visitors, or directors of clubs: 9000 people a week come to the house as members of some one of its organizations or as parts of an audience. There are free concerts, and lectures, and classes of various kinds in study and in handicraft. Investigations of the social and industrial conditions of the neighbourhood are carried on, not officially, but informally; and the knowledge thus obtained has been used not only for the visible transformation of the region around Hull House, but also to throw light upon the larger needs and possibilities of improvement in Chicago and other American cities. Hull House, in fact, is an example of ethical and humane housekeeping on a big scale in a big town.

The Henry Street Settlement in New York is quite different in its specific quality. It was begun in 1893 by two trained nurses, who went down into the tenement-house district, to find the sick and to nurse them in their homes. At first they lived in a tenement house themselves; then the growth of their work and the coming of other helpers forced them to get a little house, then another, and another, a cottage in the country, a convalescent home. The idea of the settlement was single and simple. It was to meet the need of intelligent and skilful nursing in the very places where dirt and ignorance, carelessness and superstition, were doing the most harm,—

“in the crowded warrens of the poor.”

This little company of women, some twenty or thirty of them, go about from tenement to tenement, bringing cleanliness and order with them. In the presence of disease and pain they teach lessons which could be taught in no other way. They nurse five or six thousand patients every year, and make forty or fifty thousand visits. In addition to this, largely through their influence and example, the Board of Education has adopted a trained nursing service in the public schools, and has appointed a special corps of nurses to take prompt charge of cases of contagious disease among the school children. The Nurses’ Settlement, in fact, is a repetition of the parable of the Good Samaritan in a crowded city instead of on a lonely road.

These two examples illustrate the kind of work that is going on all over the United States. Every religious body, Jewish or Christian, has some part in it. It touches many sides of life,—this effort to do for the common order what the State has never been able to accomplish fully,—to sweeten and humanize it. I wish that there were time to speak of some particularly interesting features, like the Children’s Aid Society, the George Junior Republic, the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the Kindergarten Association. But now I must pass at once to the second kind of social effort, that in which the voluntary coöperation of the citizen enlightens and guides and supplements the action of the State.

Here I might speak of the great question of the housing of the poor, and of the relation of private building and loan associations to governmental regulation of tenements and dwelling-houses. This is one of the points on which America has lagged behind the rest of the civilized world. Our excessive spirit of laissez-faire, and our cheerful optimism,—which in this case justifies the cynical definition of optimism as “an indifference to the sufferings of others,”—permitted the development in New York of the most congested and rottenly overcrowded ten acres on the face of the habitable globe. But the Tenement House Commission of 1894, and the other commissions which followed it, did much to improve conditions. A fairly good Tenement House Act was passed. A special Department of the municipality was created to enforce it. The dark interior rooms, the vile and unsanitary holes, the lodgings without water or air or fire-escapes, are being slowly but surely broken up and extirpated, and a half-dozen private societies, combining philanthropy with business, are building decent houses for working people, which return from 3 per cent to 5 per cent on the capital invested.