Americanization and Cultural Preservation in Seattles Settlement

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw Part of the Social Work Commons Recommended Citation Schwartz, Alissa

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw

Part of the Social Work Commons

Recommended Citation

Schwartz, Alissa (1999) "Americanization and Cultural Preservation in Seattle's Settlement House: A Jewish Adaptation of the Anglo-American Model of Settlement Work," The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol 26 : Iss 3 , Article 3

Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol26/iss3/3

This Article is brought to you by the Western Michigan

University School of Social Work For more information,

please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.edu

Americanization and Cultural Preservation

in Seattle's Settlement House:

A Jewish Adaptation of the

Anglo-American Model

of Settlement WorkALISSA SCHWARTZ

New York City

This article examines the dual agendas of Americanization and tion of Ashkenazic Jewish culture through an historical analysis of the work

preserva-of Seattle's Settlement House, a social service center founded in 1906 by elite, Americanized Jews to serve poorer, immigrant Jews of Ashkenazic and Sephardic origin Such analysis is set against the ideological backdrop

of Anglo-Americanism which pervaded the field of social work in its early efforts at self-definition and professionalization Particular attention is paid

to the role of the arts at Settlement House, with comparisons to Chicago's Hull-House, the prototypical American settlement operating at the turn

of the century This case study analyzes a German Jewish adaptation of an Anglo-American, Christian model of social work.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ment work figured as a central component to the newly devel-oping field of social work Today, a multitude of paths constitutethe practice and conceptualization of social work, and their fore-runners in the settlement movement extend beyond the work

settle-of Hull-House and Henry Street Settlement and their intelligent,articulate founders, Jane Addams and Lillian Wald As currentdiscussions range across the field regarding what constitutes aneffective multicultural practice of social work, it is important topause and examine past practice in all its forms to understandhow this issue was conceptualized in an earlier era

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, September, 1999, Volume XXVI, Number 3

26 Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Prior to 1890, only four settlements operated in the United

States-Neighborhood Guild and College Settlement in NewYork City, Hull-House in Chicago, and Andover House in Boston(Carson, 1990) By 1910, the settlement movement blossomed

to include roughly four hundred centers operating across theUnited States (Trattner, 1994) Although settlement houses wereestablished in cities of all sizes, most historical analyses of earlysettlement work have focused on an elite vanguard of workersoperating in the largest cities of the United States More rarely arevoices from smaller, "second tier" (Crocker, 1992, p 6) settlementsmade a priority for analysis This study makes use of archival ma-terial from the University of Washington and secondary sourcesregarding the settlement movement in general and settlementwork by and for Jews in particular to bring forth a different, lesserknown voice of early social work, that of Seattle's SettlementHouse

The dual agendas of Americanization and preservation ofAshkenazic culture operating at Settlement House are examinedand set against the ideological backdrop of Christian-influencedAnglo-Americanism which dominated the burgeoning field ofsocial work in its early efforts at self-definition and profession-alization Settlement House's practices are compared to those ofHull-House, both because Hull-House figured as a practice modelfor the founders of Settlement House (Andrews, 1984; Devine1976) and because as an example of a settlement founded byAnglo-Americans to serve newly arriving immigrants, it offers

a prototypical model of settlement work to compare with that ofSettlement House

Like most settlements, Seattle's Settlement House was a placefor immigrants to socialize, receive medical care and education,and to adjust to life in their adopted homeland Founded in 1906

by elite, German Jews who had lived in the city since the 1860s,Settlement House served the needs of the poorer and more re-cently transplanted East European and Sephardic Jews By choos-ing to focus on the needs of Jews over those of other communitymembers, Settlement House founders departed from the (suppos-edly) non-sectarian model of Anglo-American settlement work.Settlement House workers' interest in Americanizing immigrantsparalleled, however, the mission of Anglo-American workers

Seattle's Settlement House 27

At the turn of the century, Seattle was a small, frontier town,far from the American Jewish epicenters of Chicago and NewYork City Although the city's Jewish population was quite smalland assimilation threatened to further decrease its numbers, Jewsdivided themselves along the same ethnic and cultural lines

as those living in larger numbers elsewhere Ashkenazim andSephardim maintained their distinctions, as did Germans andEast Europeans Sephardim also separated themselves along ge-ographic lines of origin Settlement House workers' preference inpreserving Ashkenazic over Sephardic culture helped to main-tain such distinctions In addition, Settlement House workerspromoted a non-traditional Judaism that was alien to both EastEuropean Jews and Sephardim Workers favored the use of Eng-lish over Yiddish and Ladino, and they promoted secularity overorthodoxy These emphases ultimately contributed to the devel-opment of a new identity for Jews living in the United States, that

of the American Jew

Also examined in this article is the role that artistic ity, particularly theater, played at Settlement House in facilitat-ing the dual missions of Americanization and preservation ofAshkenazic culture In the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, the arts were considered an essential element of socialwork (Patterson, 1997) Both Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr,co-founders of Hull-House, were passionate advocates of thearts and crafts movement promoted by English pre-RaphaelitesWilliam Morris and John Ruskin (Patterson, 1997) Morris andRuskin argued that industrialism negatively affected individual-ity and caused an artificial schism to develop between work andexpression, resulting in alienation and a loss of traditional skills.Jane Addams advocated the use of theater in settlement work,praising art for counteracting the "uncouth stranger, Modern In-dustry" (Addams, 1932, p 3 8 2) A report from Seattle's SettlementHouse parallels Addams' sentiments: "Nothing is more valuablefor character building than the giving of plays" (1923/24 Report,CJW Archives)

activ-Although some of Settlement House's theatrical activity drewupon East European traditions, Sephardic cultural productionsnever appeared on its stage To understand the ethnic tensionsthat precluded such activity from occurring at Settlement House,

28 Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

one must understand the cultural and religious differences amongGerman, East European, and Sephardic Jews What follows is anintroduction to the various Jewish ethnic groups whose membersimmigrated to the United States during the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries

DIFFERENCES AMONG GERMAN, EAST

EUROPEAN AND SEPHARDIC JEWS

The two major Jewish cultural groups living in the UnitedStates are Ashkenazim, Jews of central and east European descent,and Sephardim, Jews of Spanish descent Prior to the SpanishInquisition of 1492, Sephardim represented the majority of worldJewry; however, since their dispersion, their representation hasdecreased until they have since accounted for only 5-10% ofworld Jewry (Adatto, 1939; Roth, 1971) The United States' firstwave of Ashkenazic immigration comprised 200,000 GermanJews fleeing nationalistic, anti-Semitic laws between the years

1820 and 1880 From 1880 to 1924, East European Jews grated in a second wave of 2.5 million (Lowenstein, 1967; Toll,1982) Although Sephardim have a history of migration to theUnited States that stretches back to a small, first wave emigrat-ing from England and the Netherlands in the seventeenth cen-tury, their numbers in the United States are significantly lowerthan those of Ashkenazim (Adatto, 1939; Benardete, 1982) Be-tween the years 1899 and 1913, several thousand Sephardimfrom the Mediterranean region arrived in a second wave to theUnited States, bringing their total number to roughly 15,000(Adatto, 1939)

immi-Having not encountered one another until they arrived in theUnited States, varying degrees of discord developed among Jewsfrom different geographic origins Tensions ran particularly highbetween German and East European Jews Americanized, Ger-man Jews feared that their social status would fall through theirassociation, in the minds of non-Jews, with their newly arriving,East European counterparts Although they looked alike, theirpractices and values differed significantly German Jews had a his-tory of assimilation that stretched back to the late seventeenth cen-tury (Cohen, 1984), and unlike the orthodox, culturally separatist

Seattle's Settlement House 29

Jews of Eastern Europe, they did not practice a particularly servant form of Judaism, or speak a language, Yiddish, whichseparated them from the general population East European Jews,for their part, did not understand why the "decorum loving"

ob-(Lowenstein, 1967, p 79) German Jews carried themselves as

gentiles Having lived primarily in shtetls-small, pre-industrialtowns-East European Jews fled anti-Semitic pogroms and direpoverty for the United States, only to discover that their social,cultural, and religious practices conflicted with American ones aswell as those of German Jews

As with East Europeans, Sephardim maintained a culturalseparation from their host countries and lead rural and isolatedlives centered on religion (Cohen, 1984) Nationalism and in-dustrialism, rather than anti-Semitism, were the driving forcesbehind Sephardim leaving their homes Many Jews left the Med-iterranean when faced with forced conscription in the Turkish

army after the 1909 overthrow of the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid (Benardete, 1982) Upon arrival in the United States, Sep-

hardim maintained distinctions among themselves in reference

to geographic origin In an early account of Sephardim living in

the Mediterranean, Hacker (1926) writes:

The men of Castoria, in their synagogues, employed a slightlydifferent cantilation that was unpleasing to the men of the island

of Chios Because of a localism that was the development of

centuries, men from towns only thirty miles apart were prone to

regard one another with distrust (As quoted in Benardete, 1982,

p 172)

All Sephardim, however, shared a similar culture and language,

Ladino, which dated back to their common history in Spain

In the United States, Sephardic culture and practices were

for-eign to Ashkenazim and not well tolerated by them Speaking

dif-ferent languages and practicing Judaism difdif-ferently, Ashkenazimand Sephardim maintained separate social, educational, and re-ligious institutions Racism was also a factor, with Ashkenazimdisparaging Sephardim for their darker skins One Sephardi re-ports at the beginning of the twentieth century: "the LevantineJews feel more discrimination from the other wings of the Jews

than they do from non-Jews" (Adatto, 1939, p 28).

30 Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

JEWISH IMMIGRATION TO SEATTLE AND

THE FOUNDING OF SETTLEMENT HOUSE

The first Jews arrived in Seattle in 1860 from Germany Sellingclothing, food, and tools, they "mine[d] the miners" (Droker,

1983, p 6) of the Californian and Alaskan gold rushes Firstsettled by white people in 1852, Seattle in the 1860s was a frontieroutpost of roughly one thousand people and home to three Jewishfamilies, the Schwabachers, Frauenthals, and Kaufmans (Cohn,1982) German Jews participated in the city's civic and sociallife, and they attained financial success rather quickly In 1884,Babette Schwabacher Gatzert helped found Seattle Children'sHome, Seattle's first charitable organization Bailey Gatzert, herhusband, served as mayor of the city in 1876, and he also sat on theChamber of Commerce as their first president (Avner & Buttnick1995; Droker, 1983)

At the same time that German Jews were enjoying a certainamount of material and social success in Seattle, they ran upagainst anti-Semitic attitudes which excluded them from elite,Anglo-American organizations In response, they established sep-arate civic and social organizations for themselves In 1883, Ger-man Jews founded a local chapter of the B'nai B'rith, a nationalfraternal organization aiding in members' health and death ex-penses In 1892, German Jewish women-excluded from suffrageclubs, the Women's Century Club, and the Daughters of the Amer-ican Revolution (Blair, 1988)-founded the Ladies Hebrew Benev-olent Society, an organization serving the newly arriving East

European Jews (The Jewish Experience in Washington State, 1990).

For East European Jews arriving in Seattle in the 1880s, ticipation in the city's social and civic life was less importantthan the maintenance of their culture, and the first organizationsthey established for themselves were religious congregations Thesame holds true for Sephardim who arrived from Turkey andRhodes two decades later Having never encountered one anotheruntil their arrival in the United States, the two Sephardic groupsestablished separate religious and social organizations, althoughthey occasionally united for larger cultural events

par-As a coastal city, Seattle beckoned as an attractive site forSephardic immigration, which began in 1903 (Droker, 1983) By

Seattle's Settlement House 31

1910, Sephardim comprised 600 of the 4,500 Jews living in

Seat-tle, the largest Sephardic population outside of New York City

(Adatto, 1939; Droker, 1983) By the First World War, the ber of Sephardim had climbed to 1,500 With 10,000 Jews living

num-in Seattle, the number of Sephardim and their proportion toAshkenazim were significantly higher than the national average

(Adatto, 1939).

Ashkenazim did not initially acknowledge as Jews the firstSephardim arriving in Seattle One Ashkenazi wrote what wasapparently considered at the time to be a sympathetic portrayal

of Sephardim: "We Jews were originally all half-niggers"

(Jew-ish Transcript, March, 1928 as quoted in Adatto, 1939, p 132).

Sephardim maintained a correspondingly low opinion of nazim They disparaged German Jews as "Protestantes" and "hat-

Ashke-less Jews" (Adatto, 1939, pp 118, 119) because of their reform

practices, and they called East European Jews "schmaltz" (Droker,

1983, p 9), Yiddish for the chicken fat used in their cooking.

At the turn of the century, most of Seattle's Jews, less of origin, lived in an ethnically mixed, primarily Jewish

regard-neighborhood called the Central District (Droker, 1983) Many

families lived without hot water, electricity or baths and were

in need of services to aid them in their adjustment to life in

the United States (Devine, 1976) Settlement activities in

Port-land, Oregon's Jewish community prefigured those in Seattle

by a year and were instrumental in the founding of Seattle's

Settlement House (Toll, 1982) In 1905, Portland's Council of

Jew-ish Women (CJW), a national social and charitable organization

founded by German Jewish women in Chicago, coordinated their

piecemeal services for immigrant Jews and established

Neigh-borhood House A year later, a member of Portland's CJW ited the Seattle CJW and "chastiseld] them for a lack of an initiative" (Toll, 1990, p 76) At that time, Seattle's CJW activ-

vis-ities were limited to hospital visitations, care-taking of graves,and sewing classes After the embarrassing visit, Seattle's CJWfounded Settlement House, basing it on eastern models of socialwork, particularly that of Chicago's Hull-House (Andrews, 1984;

Devine 1976).

Originally housed in the bottom floor of a privately ownedhome, Settlement House moved three times in its first decade

32 Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

of operation Initial offerings of sewing and religion classes panded to include free baths, medical care, Americanizationclasses, and Ashkenazic cultural activities In 1916, SettlementHouse established a permanent locale in its own three-story brickbuilding, changing its name in 1917 to the Educational Center, tobetter reflect its mission of Americanizing immigrants (Devine,1976) Throughout this article, Settlement House will be referred

ex-to as "Settlement House" when discussing events prior ex-to 1917and as the "Educational Center" in reference to events duringand after 1917

THE SOCIAL GOSPEL MOVEMENT AND

AMERICANIZATION AT HULL-HOUSE

While some historians (Davis, 1967; Rose, 1994; Trolander,1987) may argue that Seattle's Settlement House, with its sec-tarian focus, did not cultivate a true practice of settlement work,this "heroic version" (Crocker, 1992, p 6) of the movement asnon-religious disregards its Christian roots The development inEngland of Christian Socialism, a religious movement focused

on tackling social problems through the practical application ofChristian values, was central to the development of settlementwork Christian Socialism transplanted in the United States be-came known as the Social Gospel movement, and it informedthe practice of many American workers, including Jane Addams.Addams wrote that the movement had a "bent to express insocial service and in terms of action the spirit of Christ," andthat Christian humanitarianism should be applied to settlementwork (Addams, 1910, p 124 as quoted in Garland, 1994, p 81).With the huge flux of immigration to the United States inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the question

of how to incorporate new immigrants into American culturewas a topic of debate among Americans and immigrantsalike, and the Social Gospel movement influenced settlementworkers' thoughts and practices Three conceptualizations ofAmericanization predominated: pluralism, cosmopolitanism,and Anglo-Americanism (Lissak, 1989) Proponents of pluralismadvocated that ethnic groups maintain separate identities whileenjoying equal access to political and economic opportunities

Seattle's Settlement House 33

Cosmopolitans, adopting the melting pot as their symbol, cated a melding together of various cultures to form a new hybrid.Advocates of Anglo-Americanism called for "compulsory accul-turation" (Lissak, p 179) in which immigrants would be forced toabandon allegiance to their countries of origin and give up theirmother tongue before acquiring United States citizenship.The Social Gospel movement, with its pluralistic stancetowards the various Christian denominations "laid the ground-work for the advocacy of cultural pluralism that became a hall-mark of the American settlement movement" (Carson, 1990,

advo-pp 57-58) While settlement work thus associated itself with theideology of pluralism, Hull-House workers actually worked morefrom the values of cosmopolitanism and Anglo-Americanism.Blood (1993) writes:

Addams envisioned a mixture [of American society] in which thebourgeois, "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" values of early Americawould remain dominant, and education and political autonomywould be maintained by an educated, moneyed elite, who in turnhad a kind of patrician responsibility to serve the good of all Amer-icans (p 73)

While not forcing acculturation, Hull-House workers cated a gradual assimilation into Anglo-American culture Ad-dams developed a three-part plan for acculturating immigrantswhich consisted of first respecting and promoting a particulargroup's traditions and contributions to American society, thenencouraging such a group to take on more Anglo-American val-ues, and finally mixing different immigrant groups together forthe purpose of Americanization (Blood, 1993; Lissak, 1989) Lissakcomments:

advo-The contribution idea served therefore as a psychological devicedesigned to make newcomers feel that their cultures were respectedand found worthy of inclusion in the American common fund,when they were actually engaged in a process of transition fromtheir particularistic cultures to the American so-called universal,cosmopolitan civilization (p 161)

Cultural tolerance, then, was put into service for the creation of anAmerican society based on the "genteel tradition" (Lissak, 1989,

p 158), an amalgamation of cultures ranging from the ancient

34 Journal of Sociology & Social WelfareEgyptian, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman civilizations; to those ofthe Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment; and culminat-ing in the culture of Progressive nineteenth-century Europe andAmerica Ironically, the culture of modern-day Hebrews, that ofJews, was presumed to be outside of this tradition.

AMERICANIZATION AT SETTLEMENT HOUSE

Anglo-American cultural discrimination against Jews, then,was also aimed at Settlement House's German Jewish founders.The settlement movement functioned as an early liberation move-ment for upper and middle-class, educated women (Patterson,1997) In the late nineteenth century, these women were social-ized to administer to family and friends within the confines df

their homes Due to the immense social and economic problemscaused by industrialism, such women began to engage in publicwork The founders of Seattle's Settlement House, elite GermanJewish women, were subject to the same social forces as theirAnglo-American counterparts (Toll, 1982) Ironically, as Jewishwomen were liberated from the confines of their homes, theywere oppressed by their exclusion from joining Anglo-Americanwomen's social and charitable organizations (Blair, 1988) Evenwhile Jewish women's marginal status as Americans precludedthem from joining such circles, Settlement House's founders com-mitted themselves to the Americanization of East European andSephardic Jews, whom they considered lacking in gentility Anexcerpt from a yearbook makes manifest their mission:

A SETTLEMENT is not a sentiment-it is a social necessity The

dependence of all classes, one upon the other, must be satisfactorily

adjusted; and this can only be done by the SOCIAL ELBOWING of

life If we are going to share with our less fortunate brethren, let us

also share our PRESENCE If we are truly our "Brother's keeper,"

it is for us who are fortunate in the possession of education-ofleisure-of wealth-and of talent-to make ourselves permanentlyuseful to our less fortunate brethren [Bold and capitalizations are

in the original document.] (1921/22 Yearbook, CJW Archives)

Overt Americanization activities included celebrating ington's and Lincoln's birthdays, leading children in "patrioticexercises" of saluting the American flag and singing songs, andinvolving immigrants in "patriotic work" during the First World

Wash-Seattle's Settlement House 35

War (CJW Archives) Beginning in 1915, Settlement House offeredcitizenship and English classes As immigration declined after theFirst World War and public schools began to offer these classes,such services waned Throughout these years, however, manyclubs-notably the Mothers Club-offered informal opportuni-ties for immigrants to learn and practice English A report fromthe 1921/22 CJW Yearbook emphasizes the importance of suchclubs in the Americanization process:

Miss Cone [resident worker] has so given of herself to these mothers,-that they feel inspired to read, write, and TALK the Englishlanguage Two representatives of the Public Schools complainedbitterly of the fact that the children are not encouraged to use theEnglish language in the homes of many of the foreigners,-and, inmany cases, forget their pronunciation from Friday to Monday Themothers, in turn, have complained that their children were forget-ting their language,-and so, the situation could only be met bygetting the mothers interested in learning the language themselves.(CJW Archives)

Settlement House's Americanization process consisted oftwin goals, that of introducing the genteel tradition to immigrantJews and of helping to transform orthodox, East European Jewsinto secular, American Jews According to the founders of Settle-ment House, the ideal American spoke English, was involved inpatriotic activities, and embraced Anglo-American values Theideal American Jew was both an ideal American and an idealJew, practicing an Ashkenazic Judaism stripped of its ethnic andorthodox overtones

Settlement House workers utilized Jewish holidays to ize East European immigrants in an American Jewish culture, onewhich involved a smoothing out of differences among the Jewishethnicities and a secularization of religious activities Chanukahfestivals at Settlement House included vaudeville performances

social-in a "Hebrew [Yiddish] dialect" (Elliot, 1944, p 52), classical danceand music recitals, and plays in English performed by social clubs.Sara Efron, an East European Jew who made use of the House as

a child, recalls:

Now, thinking back on it, it amazes me that my parents being

so orthodox would have permitted me to go there, but it was

innocuous The stories were [from the] Bible, and I believe they