SOCIAL SERVICE: Carr to Hull House

SOCIAL SERVICE

The late, great Jane Addams shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize with the eminent Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler. Moreover, Theodore Roosevelt once called her “America’s most useful citizen.” But down to the end of her long life in 1935 Jane Addams was never so proud of anything as she was of Hull House, the lively, sprawling Chicago settlement which she founded in 1889, where she worked until her death. When Miss Addams, an erect, brown-haired young lady of 29, first appeared with her equally lady-like friend, Ellen Gates Starr, in the big red-brick house that Lawyer Charles J. Hull had surrendered to the encroaching slums, her ribald neighbors threw garbage onto her porch, stones through her windows. In the half-century that followed Hull House was to grow over two city blocks, become one of the biggest, certainly the most famed of U. S. settlement houses. It was also to span and partially inspire the nation’s great era of private benevolence, live on into a day when many of its burdens of charity were shouldered and organized by the State.

Last summer this old fortress of personal good works turned with the times as its directors chose to succeed Founder Addams as head-resident an efficient, practised public charitarian. She was Charlotte Carr, executive director of New York City’s Emergency Relief Bureau. A tall, hefty, genial spinster who studied at Vassar before the War, Miss Carr left her job as employment manager of Knox Hat Co. in 1923 and soon became acting director of the New York Labor Department’s Division of Women in Industry under Frances Perkins. After that she served as director of Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Women & Children, was appointed Secretary of Labor & Industry by Governor Gifford Pinchot in 1930, held that post for four years until New York’s Governor Herbert Lehman drafted her to advise him on Relief. Last week, Head Resident Carr arrived in Chicago to take up her Hull House duties. For all Hull House’s fame, the new head resident will have to accustom herself to an old-fashioned budget that rarely exceeds $100,000 a year. Said she after her arrival: “I wouldn’t presume to say I could carry on the tradition of Miss Addams. I’m going to do the best I can.”