Ohio History Journal

JOHN J. GRABOWSKI

 

From Progressive to Patrician:

George Bellamy and Hiram House

Social Settlement, 1896-1914

 

The institution most closely associated with the birth and early

development of turn of the century Progressivism was the social

settlement house, which best symbolized the movement's drive for

reform and order in urban America. As aptly described by Allen Davis,

the settlement houses were "spearheads for reform," whose partisans

were among the first to recognize and attack problems of the in-

dustrial city: the plight of the immigrant, child labor, urban decay,

the social basis of crime, organized political corruption.¹ Settlement

work, moreover, provides a key to an understanding of Progressivism

because the nation's pioneer settlement houses were frequently an

extension of the social philosophy of their founders. Hull House,

Chicago Commons and Henry Street Settlement are rightfully linked

to the names Jane Addams, Graham Taylor and Lillian Wald. Likewise

in Cleveland, Hiram House, the first social settlement in the city, be-

came identified with the commanding figure of George Bellamy, a

founder of the house and director for more than fifty years. A closer

look at Bellamy and the institution he did so much to shape tells us

much about the character of the Progressive impulse, both in Cleveland

and throughout urban America.

 

Dr. Grabowski is an archivist at the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland,

Ohio.

1. Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform, the Social Settlements and the Progres-

sive Movement 1890-1914 (New York, 1967). Davis' book is considered the standard

source on the settlement movement prior to World War I. Judith Trolander's Settle-

ment Houses and the Great Depression (Detroit, 1975) chronicles the movement to the

end of the 1930s. Older, non-analytical works that still provide insight into the move-

ment include: Albert J. Kennedy and Robert Woods, The Settlement Horizon (New

York, 1924); Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York, 1910); Graham

Taylor, Chicago Commons Through Forty Years (Chicago, 1936), and Pioneering on

Social Frontiers (Chicago, 1930); and Lillian Wald, The House on Henry Street (New

York, 1915). The last four titles cited are of interest in that they are autobiographical

views of settlement work. Analyses of the philosophy and contributions of Jane Ad-

dams and Graham Taylor have been prepared by Daniel Levine, Jane Addams and the

Liberal Tradition (Madison, 1971); and Louise Wade, Graham Taylor; Pioneer for Social

Justice, 1851-1938 (Chicago, 1964).

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38                                                         OHIO HISTORY

 

Though lacking the dumbbell tenements and extreme overcrowd-

ing that characterized Chicago and New York in the 1890s, Cleveland

was, nevertheless, a large urban center experiencing all of the problems

of rapid industrial growth. Founded in 1796 as an outpost of Connecti-

cut Yankeedom, the city blossomed into a cosmopolitan urban com-

munity in the decades following the Civil War. By 1890, it was the

tenth largest city in the nation, with over 37 percent of its population

of 261,353 of foreign birth.² Crowded first by Germans and Irish, and

then by vast numbers of eastern and southern European immigrants

seeking a place in the growing job market, the founding families of

Cleveland saw their once pastoral village transformed into a subdivided

metropolis of ethnic ghettos, some of which were overcrowded and

ridden with vice and disease. Just as Chicago's South Side and New

York's Lower East Side were areas suitable for settlement work, there

were neighborhoods in Cleveland that would provide fertile ground

for the movement.

Hiram House was established in 1896 by a small coterie of students

from Hiram College, an educational outpost of the Disciple Church

in northern Ohio. Idealistic, almost all of rural background, they had

studied settlement work in their classes. After seeing the vicissitudes

of urban life during a trip to Cleveland, they decided to put their

lessons and beliefs to the test by starting their own settlement in the

city. In June 1896, without official backing from the college and with

but a modicum of money and theory, they rented a small house that

overlooked the Whiskey Island section of Cleveland, an aptly named

region inhabited primarily by poor Irish families. During the first

summer of residence, the group of seven students began a nursery,

kindergarten and planned to start a night school. However, as Prot-

estants in an overwhelmingly Catholic neighborhood, they saw their

programs collapse when area residents were warned away from the

work by local priests.³

The problems generated by this rejection and impending fiscal col-

lapse brought George Bellamy to the leadership of the project. En-

 

 

2. William Ganson Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland, 1950), 501-02.

3. Institutional histories of Hiram House indicated that the site at Whiskey Island

was intended to be a temporary experimental station while a search was carried on for

a permanent location. However, in an interview conducted in 1935, George Bellamy

indicated that the move was caused by the priests' interference and hence the subse-

quent failure of the work. Judith A. Laughlin, "The History of Hiram House from

1896-1934; a Descriptive Study of the Stages in the Development of the Program,

Physical Structure and Personnel of Hiram House, Cleveland, Ohio, 1896-1934" (M.A.

thesis, Western Reserve University, 1935), 18. See also, The Hiram House, 1896-1912

(Cleveland, 1912), 86, in Hiram House Records, Western Reserve Historical Society,

Container 50, Folder 4, Cleveland, Ohio (hereafter cited HHR).

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George Bellamy                                                          39

 

listed as the group's financial solicitor at the outset of the work,

Bellamy was, perhaps, the most intense believer in its necessity. Born

in Cascade, Michigan, in 1872, Bellamy sprang from a family of

moderate means, but one with its roots deep in the American past.

His mother, Lucy Stow Bellamy, was the eighth generation descendant

of a family which settled in America in 1625 and which numbered

among its members, Oliver Wolcott, a signer of the Declaration of

Independence and Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinet of George

Washington. Both his mother's and father's side of the family were

deeply religious-his father's lineage being traceable to French Hugonot

stock. Given his lineage, and economic and religious background,

Bellamy developed into a self-made man with a mission.⁴ Desiring to

preach in the Disciple Church, he had enrolled in the ministerial

course at Hiram in 1892 with only ninety dollars in his pockets. He

managed to finance his entire four years at Hiram with this money

and with funds he earned by selling supplies at a desk in the school

library and by marketing drafting tables throughout the East and

Midwest during summer vacations.⁵ Successful as a salesman, his

choice as solicitor for the project was therefore quite natural, for his

classmates knew him as "A man of forecast and of thrift, and of a

shrewd and careful mind, in this world of business."⁶

Bellamy's reasons for joining the settlement went beyond busi-

ness, for in Hiram House he saw the opportunity for the practical

application of the tenets of Christianity that he had studied at Hiram.

Early in his college career, he knew he would have to do more than

preach to satisfy his religious convictions.⁷ A     chance meeting with

Graham Taylor, the founder of Chicago Commons Settlement, at a

Chatauqua lecture in 1894 pointed him toward the settlement move-

ment as fulfillment of that goal-and the class project in Cleveland at

last provided him with a means to implement his convictions.

When the project foundered in the late summer of 1896, Bellamy

searched for a new location for Hiram House-one that would be un-

hindered by suspicious priests. He chose the city's major Jewish neigh-

 

4. Bellamy's father was a traveling salesman for a furniture firm owned by his brother-

in-law. Bellamy, autobiographical notes, HHR, Container 45, Folder 1. By the 1920s

Bellamy had developed a social interest in his lineage, as evidenced by his membership

in the New England Society of Cleveland and the Western Reserve. Judith Trolander,

"Twenty Years at Hiram House," Ohio History, LXXVIII (Winter 1969), 25.

5. Bellamy, autobiographical notes, HHR, Container 45, Folder 1.

6. The Spider Web 1896 (Hiram, Ohio, 1896), 153.

7. In 1946 Bellamy wrote of having had a vision while attending church as a youth.

In this vision he supposedly learned that he was to spend fifty years of his life in service

to his fellow man. Essay dated September 9, 1946, HHR, Container 39, Folder 1. Early

college essays prepared by Bellamy support this retrospective piece by showing an interest

in reform. See "Historic Echoes," Ibid., Container 40, Folder 3.

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40                                                          OHIO HISTORY

 

borhood, centered about Orange Avenue and Perry (East 22nd) Street

in the Sixteenth Ward, as the new site. The twenty-five blocks that

formed the core of the new Hiram House service area were home to

3,175 working adults in 1896, of whom at least 25 percent were

Jewish. Over one third of the area's inhabitants were skilled workers,

while only 8 percent were common laborers.⁸ The region had not yet

entered a period of decay, and still presented vistas of small houses

with neat front lawns. Unlike the adjacent First Ward and Whiskey

Island, characterized by Bellamy as inhabited by "vicious" people,

the new area was home to "a splendid army of industrious, hard work-

ing immigrants."⁹ The Sixteenth Ward was in need, but not in chaos

-the neighborhood and its inhabitants could be saved.

In September 1896 the group moved into the neighborhood that

Hiram House would serve for the next forty-five years. Though not

the titular head of the settlement until 1897, Bellamy was, in fact,

its director from the day it moved onto Orange Avenue.10 During the

first two years in the new neighborhood, he was prominent in first

planning and then teaching in several of the programs offered by

Hiram House. These included: a kindergarten, day nursery, college

preparatory courses, summer camp, clubs, and various excursions and

entertainments. At the same time, he maintained total responsibility

for raising operational funds-funds sorely needed as the settlement's

work expanded rapidly once initial suspicions among its primarily

Jewish clientele had been overcome.11

Throughout these early years Bellamy exhibited an almost complete

devotion to his work. He labored without salary and spent many

spare moments seeking funds for the settlement, a difficult task because

the major religious congregations in Cleveland rebuffed the settlement

workers as agents of socialism who catered to a lost and worthless

people. Bellamy later recalled that one churchman had dismissed his

 

 

 

8. Hiram House Neighborhood Surveys, Western Reserve Historical Society. These

surveys consist of an address-by-address listing of all of the residents and their occupa-

tions in the Hiram House neighborhood in 1896, 1906, and 1916. They were prepared

in support of John J. Grabowski, "A Social Settlement in a Neighborhood in Transi-

tion, Hiram House, Cleveland, Ohio 1896-1926" (Ph.D. dissertation, Case Western Re-

serve University, 1977).

9. Bellamy, autobiographical notes, HHR, Container 45, Folder 1.

10. The Head Resident of Hiram House from 1896 to mid-1897 was Miss H. Maude

Thompson, a member of the Hiram Class of 1895. Hiram House a Social Settlement

(Cleveland, 1896), HHR, Container 50, Volume 1.

11. Though initially boycotted by its Jewish neighbors, Hiram House began en-

rolling a large number of Jewish children in its nursery in November 1896. Thereafter

attendance in all phases of the work appears to have increased rapidly. Grabowski, "A

Social Settlement," 43-44.

• 4
 

George Bellamy                                                    41

 

entreaty for financial support with a tirade. "You ought to be ostra-

cized from [for] living among such people. God never intended to save

such people. You should shove them off in a corner and let them be

there and rot."¹² Much of Hiram House's income initially came from

collections taken at rural churches, to which Bellamy shuttled every

weekend. Persisting in his efforts to find local funds as well, Bellamy

traveled from door to door by bicycle until, in 1898, he arrived at

the stoop of Henry White, a prominent jurist and member of the Dis-

ciple Church.

White took an interest in Hiram House, paid its debts and orga-

nized an executive committee to govern its affairs and raise funds for

the settlement. Bellamy used this new-found wealth to expand Hiram

House's operations, bring in more staff, including a professional kin-

dergarten teacher, and begin publication of a bimonthly bulletin en-

titled Hiram House Life. Bellamy used the publication to promote the

work of the settlement, as a vehicle to reprint articles by Jane Addams

and other leading Progressives and as a platform for his own reform

viewpoint. In an 1898 issue devoted to a sociological study of Cleve-

land Bellamy castigated the city fathers for ignoring the inner city in

matters such as school, park and playground construction. Instead

these facilities were usually built in areas of greatest wealth but least

need. Such discrimination, warned Bellamy, drove the children of the

slums to play in the streets, adding ominously, that the street did "not

rear good citizens."13

With the burden of fund raising lifted from his shoulders by the ex-

ecutive committee, Bellamy began to devote more time to other re-

form-oriented endeavors. He was an active member and officer in the

Cleveland Council of Sociology, a discussion group consisting of the

growing cadre of social workers and liberal intellectuals resident in

Cleveland at the turn-of-the-century.¹⁴ In 1901 he was a leading figure

in the Chamber of Commerce's Bath House Committee, and in 1903-

1904, a member of the Chamber's Committee on the Housing Prob-

lem.¹⁵

Bellamy's progressivism also marked his relations with the Disciple

Church, in which he appears to have remained active for a number

of years after the establishment of Hiram House. Attending the Dis-

 

 

 

12. Bellamy, autobiographical notes, HHR, Container 45, Folder 1.

13. Hiram House Life, December 1898, HHR, Container 52, Volume 1.

14. Cleveland Council of Sociology Records, Western Reserve Historical Society.

15. Public Bath House Committee Minutes, 1901, Greater Cleveland Growth As-

sociation Records, Western Reserve Historical Society, Container 5, Volume 13; Housing

Problem Committee Records, 1903, Ibid., Container 6, Volume 12.

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42                                             OHIO HISTORY

ciple Congress of 1905, he delivered a speech in which he praised the social gospel concept and condemned clerics who would stay the prog- ress of their reform-minded colleagues: The representatives of the most advanced religious thought, no matter how God-fearing or how conscientious, have by no means passed the period of church discipline and rebuke. This lack of freedom in religious thought and study has hindered a wholesome, righteous growth of religious understand- ing.16 Bellamy's progressive idealism was transmitted to many of the youngsters he worked with during the early years at Hiram House. This was particularly true of the members of the Social Reform Club, a political discussion group composed of older Jewish boys. Members of the group aided Bellamy in surveying housing conditions around the settlement, and one member, Manuel Levine, went on to become a 16. "The Social Test of Theology," HHR, Container 40, Folder 3.

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George Bellamy                                                43

 

prominent jurist who battled corruption in the city's police courts

and constantly strove to ameliorate the plight of the immigrant.17

Whether Bellamy's executive committee, and later his board of

trustees, thought ill of these activities is not known. Certainly, his

work with the Chamber of Commerce was with an organization in

which many trustees were also active. Of the ten members of the orig-

inal executive committee (including Bellamy, who was a member from

its outset), eight were substantial figures in the local business world-

seven of whom were prominent enough to be listed in the city's

social register.¹⁸ Above all the early executive committee sought to

make Hiram House a fiscally sound, if not a paying, operation. From

1898 to 1900, their concern was not so much centered about what the

settlement and its director did, but that they accomplish their tasks in

an orderly manner. To this end the committee instituted a new system

of bookkeeping for Hiram House and decided that the settlement

needed a new structure-one specifically suited to the type of work it

was doing. A building fund campaign, however, was a major under-

taking and therefore had to be carried out in a formal manner. Hence,

the committee dissolved itself, appointed in its stead a board of trus-

tees and incorporated Hiram House in May 1899. Of the twelve mem-

bers of the new board, eight had Blue Book listings. Two of those not

listed were prominent Jewish businessmen chosen as symbolic repre-

sentatives of the community being served. With the exception of

Bellamy and two clergymen, each board member was a businessman.19

In less than a year the board raised enough money to begin the con-

struction of a modem, brick, four-story settlement house.²⁰ The donors

it enlisted in this cause included John D. Rockefeller and members

of practically every major family in Cleveland, among which were the

Severences, Wades, Squires, Sanders, and most importantly, the

Mathers, the wealthiest family in the city.

By 1900 George Bellamy had achieved personal and professional

success. He had a new building, an adjoining playground, a growing

professional staff and a steady income for himself. But along with this

success he began to lose his personal freedom as a reformer. This loss

was not evident in gag rules or written statements concerning settle-

ment policy issued by his board. Rather, it was embodied in the new

responsibility he had to assume. With the advent of the board and

building, Bellamy became, in essence, the manager of a business, one

whose profits were measured by usage. Though settlement workers

17. Trolander, "Twenty Years," 31.

18. Grabowski, "A Social Settlement," 57-58.

19. Ibid., Appendix I, 319-20.

20. Ibid., 68-69.

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44                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

across the nation strove to point out the validity of their work in terms

of lives and souls rescued, such accomplishments proved statistically

difficult, perhaps impossible, to measure. The only way Bellamy and

other reformers could point out growth and success to their backers

with any measurable constancy was simply by counting the number of

people who used their facilities.

The ramifications of this demographic "profit motive" soon became

apparent at Hiram House. Programs such as night school classes in

purely academic subjects were dropped because they lacked drawing

power. Vocational education, which was more popular, was the im-

mediate substitute.21 Other programs were retained, but modified

to assure their popularity. For instance, calisthenic and corrective

body building programs were dropped from the settlement's gymnasium

program in order to make more time available for highly-attended

intermural basketball games.22 Similarly, the club program which had

been limited mainly to groups meeting for an educational purpose,

was broadened so as to allow the formation of purely social or sport-

ing clubs. Such program changes were in one sense merely a reflec-

tion of the settlement attuning itself to the demands of its neighbor-

hood. Nevertheless, they still represented an abandonment of the

higher educational ideals of the early settlement movement.

Moreover, these changes at Hiram House were geared to show in-

creased usage of the facilities, and Bellamy prominently displayed

these statistical indexes in the reports he presented to his board dur-

ing the first decade of this century. Each of Bellamy's presentations

was a homogenized compilation of reports that he received from the

heads of the settlement's various departments-almost all of which

were burdened with facts and figures concerning usage.²³ The chain of

reports also evidenced the change in Bellamy's relationship with the

poor people he had chosen to serve, for he was now an administra-

tor, withdrawn from almost all intimate, day-to-day activity at Hiram

House. By 1902, eleven department heads answered to Bellamy.

Though he might occasionally meet with the clientele-perhaps to talk

to a boy gone wrong-it was his growing professional staff that formed

the settlement side of the institution/client interface. Bellamy did not

undergo his occupational metamorphosis without some regret. At

times he cursed the large brick building that had become the symbol

of his institution, and he envied staff members who could still meet

 

 

 

21. Ibid., 81-90.

22. Gymnasium Report, 1904, HHR, Container 32, Folder 8.

23. Internal report series, Ibid., Containers 31 through 37.

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George Bellamy                                                 45

 

with neighborhood people in the cozy confines of the residents' cot-

tages that surrounded the main building.²⁴

Success did have its rewards, however, and by mid-decade Bellamy

was quite enamored of them. The greatest of these was a salary. For the

first time in his life, Bellamy could look forward to a regular paycheck.

Unlike other settlement pioneers, such as Addams, Taylor or Wald,

Bellamy did not have family, money or position to fall back upon in

case of failure. By 1905 he had a wife and three children to support.

Thus the success of Hiram House and the good will of its backers

loomed large in his personal life. As Hiram House grew so too did

his salary. By 1910 his annual income had been increased by the board

four times: from $1000 a year in 1899, to $1500 in 1903, $1800 in 1905,

$2500 in 1907, and to $4000 per annum in 1910, at which time it ac-

counted for 19 percent of the settlement's total budget.²⁵

The increases came easily, for the board was greatly impressed

with Bellamy's businesslike management of their institution and his

total devotion to duty and hard work. The salary increase in 1903 and

an attendant paid vacation resulted when the board learned that Bel-

lamy was on the verge of collapse from overwork-a condition they

learned of from his wife, for he endeavored to keep it a secret.²⁶ The

large increase from $2500 to $4000 a year in 1910 came when the

board learned that Bellamy was contemplating taking a new job. In

near panic, the two leading members of the body, Samuel Mather and

board president, Francis F. Prentiss, drafted long letters to Bellamy

urging him to stay on, and then they convinced their colleagues that

Bellamy, the businessman, was indispensible and that the massive

raise was a small price to pay for the continuence of his services.²⁷

Bellamy's growing kinship with his board was shown in other ways.

He made it a practice to keep in almost constant contact with Mather

and Prentiss, reporting all details of the settlement's operation to them.

In return, these men came to rely heavily upon Bellamy's advice and

even took an interest in his personal welfare. When, in 1909, Bel-

lamy's wife, Marie, was terminally ill with tuberculosis, the board

granted him an extended, paid vacation in Colorado so that she might

recuperate. In this instance Mather advanced a personal gift to Bel-

lamy, and in a long letter attempted to dispel any qualms Bellamy

 

 

 

24. Tenth Annual Report of Hiram House (Cleveland, 1906), 6, Ibid., Container 50,

Volume 1.

25. Grabowski, "A Social Settlement," Appendix II, 328.

26. Board minutes, January 22, 1904, HHR, Container 1, Folder 1.

27. Mather to Bellamy, September 10, 1910, and Prentiss to Bellamy, September 1,

1910, Ibid., Container 20, Folder 2.

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46                                                      OHIO HISTORY

 

had about accepting it: "Be assured I deem it a privilege and an op-

portunity to put $500.00 of mine at your disposal as you know it will

not be felt by me in the abundance that I have been made steward

over and will be of material aid to you in assisting you in bringing

about the full recovery of your dear wife."²⁸ When, in spite of the trip,

Marie Bellamy died, Bellamy was brought into even closer fellowship

with Mather who had lost his own wife earlier in the year.

The board's great pleasure in Bellamy's abilities was mirrored by

his own adulation of its members and their lifestyle. By 1904, probably

at the insistance of Samuel Mather, Bellamy too had obtained a list-

ing in the Blue Book. By virtue of his new social position and his friend-

ship with other wealthy board members, he joined in the pleasures

their status could purchase. Board meetings, in particular, were social

events that Bellamy greatly enjoyed. By 1906, almost all of the meet-

ings were held at the prestigious Union Club, or on a private inter-

urban car enroute to an outing at the settlement's rural camp. Seldom

did the board meet at Hiram House. Bellamy was most pleased with

these arrangements, and quite entranced with the Union Club meet-

ings, for as he stated to Francis Prentiss in 1912, he was: ". . . con-

vinced more and more there is only one place where [they] could get

these men together, and that is at the Union Club. More and better

men come there than any other place."²⁹ Bellamy's penchant for so-

cial climbing was noted by his contemporaries, one of whom, Russell

Jelliffe (who first met Bellamy in 1915), remembered that Bellamy

liked nothing better than to be seen walking down the street on the

arm of Samuel Mather.³⁰

With the new wealth embodied in his salary, expanded by vir-

tue of good investment advice from various board members, Bellamy

began to mimic aspects of the lifestyle of the elite-such as maintaining

a summer residence. After 1900 an increasing number of his summers

were spent in residence at his wife's family's farm in Bedford, Ohio,

from which he commuted to the settlement during working hours. Af-

ter his wife's death, the summer away became de regueur.³¹ This

complete break from one of the basic tenets of settlement work-

neighborhood residency-was occasioned in part by the fact that Marie

Bellamy had contracted tuberculosis while at the settlement. Bellamy,

 

 

28. Mather to Bellamy, March 29, 1909, Ibid., Container 20, Folder 1.

29. Bellamy to Prentiss, May 16, 1912, Ibid., Container 20, Folder 3.

30. Grabowski, interview with Russell and Rowena Jelliffe, Cleveland, Ohio,

September 26, 1975.

31. Bellamy managed the Parker Family farm after his wife's death. See Grabowski,

"A Social Settlement," 185-87, for the history of Bellamy's gradual withdrawal to the

country during the summer months.

• 10
 

George Bellamy                                                  47

therefore, refused to endure the same risk during the hot summer months, nor would he have his children endure it. All three of Bel- lamy's children by his marriage to Marie were brought up entirely in Bedford after her death. When in the settlement neighborhood, they stayed and played with the children of a neighboring German family which Bellamy had judged to be respectable.32 The most visible manifestation of Bellamy's changing lifestyle was his manner of dress. He was an executive and wished to look the part. In 1911 Hiram House's playground director opened his annual report with a short story told in neighborhood dialect. Though it was intended for Bellamy's amusement, it showed how he stood out while walking in the streets about Hiram House: "Hey Issie, pipe the gent with the dicer and the high white collar. Ja? Naw not the one with the weed,     32. Grabowski, interview with Laura Bellamy Cole, eldest daughter of George Bellamy, Shaker Heights, Ohio, October 15, 1975.

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48                                                        OHIO HISTORY

 

but the one with the swell tan shoes. That little guy. Sure that's him.

That's Mr. Bellamy. He owns the Hiram House down by Orange

Avenue."³³

As Bellamy's kinship with the elite grew, his attitudes toward re-

form also changed. By 1906 his writings made little mention of so-

cietal and environmental injustice. Rather, they began to stress the

virtues of individual worth. No longer did Hiram House Life print ac-

cusations as startling as those leveled in its early sociological survey

of Cleveland, for by 1906 the publication was defunct, having spent its

last years as a scheduling guide to the settlement's activities.³⁴ Though

Bellamy continued to sit on various, safe, Chamber of Commerce

committees, he dropped from the growing circle of social workers in

Cleveland, imposing a professional isolation that was to characterize

his career until his retirement in 1947.³⁵

Since the operations of Hiram House moved in lockstep with Bel-

lamy's philosophy, they too changed, though a variety of factors were

operative in the transformation. The settlement's need to justify its

existence by attracting large numbers of people played an important

role. Bellamy and his staff had found it difficult to bring first-genera-

tion, foreign-born adults to the settlement.36  Hence they opted to orient

Hiram House programs to the immigrants' American-born children in-

stead and thus fill the settlement's facilities to capacity. By 1906 the

major programs offered by Hiram House consisted of clubs, a play-

ground, and a summer camp-all of which catered exclusively to chil-

dren.

However, the need for numbers was not the only reason behind the

programmatic changes at Hiram House. The camp, and the play-

ground in particular, were born partially of Bellamy's continuing

desire to effect some type of societal change. Despite his increasing

fascination with wealth, Bellamy still wished to see his fellow man

better himself. His first attempts in this direction were couched in

progressive terms of environmental alteration. In his first decade at

Hiram House he had advocated better schools, bath houses, strict

housing codes, and had even combatted the local ward boss in an ef-

fort to change the forces he felt stifled development in his neighbor-

hood. All of this came to nothing, for by 1906 the conditions around

Hiram House were worse than ever. The population of the settlement's

 

33. Playground Report, 1911, HHR, Container 36, Folder 2.

34. Hiram House Life was revived in the 1910s and 1920s as a news sheet relating

to the settlement's activities. It was edited by and directed toward the children who

used the facilities during this period.

35. Judith Trolander, Settlement Houses, 9-11.

36. Grabowski, "A Social Settlement," 83-86, 294-96.

• 12
 

George Bellamy                                                   49

 

service area had grown by at least 48 percent-from 3,175 working

adults in 1896 to 4,698 in 1906. This growth vastly increased the over-

crowding in the region because the number of dwelling units remained

approximately the same. Only sixty-three new structures were erected

in the decade. Hence the resident per dwelling ratio changed from

2.44 to 3.45 during this period.³⁷ The neat, white homes of the area

had, in large part, become shabby sub-divided apartments by 1906.

Of the 4,698 people in the region in 1906, almost all were new resi-

dents, and 48 percent of the population were Jewish.³⁸ Along with the

Jews, new ethnic groupings were added to Hiram House's working

area, as numbers of Italians and slavs (primarily Slovaks) had begun

to settle on its western borders. Despite their relatively small num-

bers (the Italians constituted less than 1 percent of the area's popula-

tion), the new groups proved troublesome to the settlement's workers,

since they were judged to be dull, dirty, and lacking the "splendid

morals and intense home life" that the Jews exhibited.³⁹

Along with the rise in the number of Jews in the neighborhood

came a decline in its economic base in the decade following 1896.

The percentage of skilled workers dropped from 37 to 26 in this period,

while the percentage of laborers rose from 8 to 10. Many of the Jews

in the region eked out a marginal existence by working as peddlers

and hucksters, rather than as common laborers. Approximately 8 per-

cent of the population was engaged in these occupations in 1906 as

compared with slightly over 5 percent in 1896. While the change in

the percentage of laborers and peddlers is small for this period, given

the larger population base for 1906, the numerical change was quite

substantial. The neighborhood was home to 163 peddlers and 252 la-

borers in 1896, while 392 peddlers and 473 laborers resided in its con-

fines in 1906. The growth of the rag and scrap business also had vis-

ible effect as the area about the region's western boundary became

dotted with junkyards by 1906. The number of people engaged in

sweatshop or loft occupations, such as tailoring or cigarmaking also

rose more than 7 percent.40 Whereas Bellamy was hard pressed to

find sweatshops in his neighborhood in the 1890s, he was able to dis-

patch undercover agents to investigate a number of such enterprises

after 1900.41

Economic instability was accompanied by a social transformation.

The increased case load of various non-settlement charitable agencies

 

37. Hiram House Neighborhood Surveys.

38. Ibid.

39. Neighborhood Visitor's annual report, 1912, HHR, Container 33, Folder 6.

40. Hiram House Neighborhood Surveys.

41. Child labor reports, HHR, Container 30, Folder 4.

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50                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

such as the Associated Charities and the Hebrew Relief Association

was an index of the social-economic difficulties. The latter agency was

plagued with an increased number of desertion cases as the "intense

home life" of the Jews was undermined by the general economic situ-

ation.⁴² While in 1896, only a handful of saloons and several brothels

had existed on the fringe of the neighborhood, thirty-two bars were to

be found throughout the area in 1906 and the exploits of women such

as "Frog Island Kate" became increasingly troublesome to Bellamy

and the Hiram House workers in the later period.43 Despite his best

efforts, Bellamy's neighborhood was becoming as "vicious" as the First

Ward and Whiskey Island.

After 1906 Bellamy sloughed off all the progressive lessons he had

once adhered to and turned Hiram House in on itself. Rather than try

to control and change conditions in twenty-five city blocks, he chose

instead to control the several thousand square feet of playground and

eighty acres of campsite that belonged to the settlement. He chose

too, to work with the children of the immigrants, who, unlike their

parents, Bellamy thought free from old-world customs and supersti-

tions, and hence moldable into the type of citizen he felt America

needed--citizens like himself, who by dint of hard work and stern mor-

ality would achieve a place in an orderly world.

Though recreation, camping and the creation of open play areas in

the city were important aspects of settlement inspired reforms, they

were only several parts of the Progressive effort at environmental al-

teration. By making recreation the major aspect of Hiram House's pro-

gram, Bellamy retreated from combat with poor housing, political cor-

ruption and other urban ills. Controlling and directing the lives of

youngsters in the fenced-in confines of the Hiram House playground

and in the pastoral isolation of the camp were means of escaping the

failure and frustration that could, and did, result from trying to change

conditions in a neighborhood, let alone an entire city.

For all practical purposes, the main energies of Hiram House were

devoted to the playground and the camp and the children who used

them in the years from 1906 to 1914. The playground, in particular,

became the focal point of all of Bellamy's energies during this time

period. He turned its confines into a make-believe junior city (dubbed

Progress City) and by virtue of elections, a junior law court, and a

bank stocked with play money, endeavored to teach its citizens (the

children) the value of good government and thrift.⁴⁴ He was rewarded

 

42. Jewish Review and Observer (Cleveland), March 17, 1905, 2, 4.

43. Hiram House Neighborhood Surveys. Neighborhood Visitors reports, 1906, HHR,

Container 33, Folder 5.

44. Progress City reports, 1906-1910, Ibid., Container 36, Folder 3.

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George Bellamy                                                51

 

with accolades from his board and a national reputation as a recreation

expert for this work.⁴⁵

Recreation as a cause and cure symbolized the middle point in the

conservative metamorphosis of Georgy Bellamy and his institution. As

a Progressive, Bellamy had entered his work feeling that a change in

environment would allow all but the most hopeless to prosper. With

the advent of recreational primacy at Hiram House, he served notice

that the adult immigrant population was beyond rescue. The period

after 1914 saw Bellamy's philosophical change reach a conservative

endpoint; a change occasioned primarily by the cataclysm of World

War I and the physical and demographic transformation of the Hiram

House neighborhood.

Bellamy spent much of the war away from the settlement, organiz-

ing recreational facilities around military camps under the auspices

of the War Department's Commission on Training Camp Activities,

raising funds for the War Camp Community Service in New York City,

and in 1919 speaking in behalf of the League of Nations while on

tour with former president, William Howard Taft. For Bellamy, the

war was, "a cleansing wind blowing from the khaki strewn fields of

France," that swept moral lassitude, selfishness and dissension out of

America.⁴⁶

Upon returning to full-time service at Hiram House, however, he

found a neighborhood in chaos. A sizeable portion of the area had

been razed by 1917 to make way for a railroad switch yard, crime

was on the increase, and the former population of Jews and Italians

was being rapidly displaced by blacks who had immigrated from the

South to find jobs in the city's wartime industries. Surveying the situ-

ation, it became obvious to Bellamy that not only had the old progres-

sive panaceas failed, but that even recreation did not hold the solu-

tion to the region's problems.

Bellamy's new solution to these problems was to work with the indi-

vidual and the family, and by virtue of recreation and the proper regu-

lation of rest and diet create citizens strong in character, as well as

body. However, he felt such a program would work only with the right

type of individual. Hence, in 1926 Bellamy began a program of

Family Conservation and Child Development at a branch location,

miles away from the black ghetto that was growing about the old settle-

ment house.

Though the main settlement house remained in operation until 1941,

Bellamy devoted all of his energies to the branch work, leaving the

 

45. Grabowski, "A Social Settlement," 273-74.

46. "Recreation and Racial Progress," HHR, Container 40, Folder 3.

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52                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

administration of the main house to subordinates. Until his retire-

ment in 1947, Bellamy worked unceasingly on schemes for the proper

development of individual character. By focusing his attentions on the

individual, Bellamy signaled the final phase in his retreat from the

grand progressive schemes of environmental alteration and social

change.

The story of George Bellamy and Hiram House highlights the role

of order and business values in the conduct of benevolent work and

in the history of the Progressive movement. Hiram House could pros-

per only after it was transformed into an orderly operation by a group

of businessmen. This change in turn narrowed dramatically the range

of programs the settlement could offer. In a sense, Hiram House's

existence was purchased at the cost of its early idealistic goals. If, as it

has been suggested, the Progressive movement was part of a national

search for order, the history of Hiram House tends to confirm that

thesis. Other settlement houses were, of course, equally in need of

funds and success in order to continue their work. The fact that institu-

tions such as Hull House and Henry Street Settlement seem more

liberal when compared to Hiram House is either a false assumption

based on the lack of in-depth studies of these agencies or a difference

attributable to the fiscal independence of their directors. The second

conclusion seems more likely, for George Bellamy was always a man

apart from his peers, and moved his institution in a different direc-

tion.⁴⁷

Indeed, the need for order and success that could be measured in

business terms was a contributing cause of Bellamy's own change in

social philosophy. Totally dependent upon the settlement for his own

livelihood, hence completely reliant upon the business-dominated

board of trustees, Bellamy internalized the values of his mentors and

sought to measure his success in their terms. Bellamy was, perhaps,

born to be a patrician rather than a Progressive. By successfully

pursuing the latter as a vocation he achieved his birthright.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

47. Trolander, Settlement Houses, 134-47.

• 16