“Work with a Will”: Spoken Arts as Democratic Labor at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890–1920

This paper uncovers a diverse coalition of working-class performing artists in Progressive Era Chicago who transformed interpretive speech into a form of political labor. Beginning in the 1890s, thousands of working-class, immigrant, and Black community members proactively contributed to performing arts initiatives at Chicago settlement houses. Meeting in self-governed clubs, participants honed skills in storytelling, elocution, and creative writing and pooled their abilities in service of improvised and scripted dramatic performances. Experiences with collective decision-making in club meetings and rehearsals provided a transferable framework for accomplishing the hands-on labor of civic organizing.

The paper begins by exploring the relationship between art and labor in settlement thought, from Arts and Crafts ideology to the use of performance methodology as a metaphor for economic and political cooperation. It then profiles the wide array of working-class “neighbors” who organized and joined settlement literary and dramatic clubs, from trained expat artists and ambitious autodidacts to “delinquent” boys, “Little Mothers” (girls who were tasked with caring for younger siblings), neurodivergent and physically disabled youth, and immigrant mothers who rarely ventured beyond their tenement homes. I use performance programs and reviews, oral history accounts, and club members’ textual productions to reconstruct participants’ creative and political agenda, which reformers in turn embraced as a model for “socializing democracy” through the arts. The paper ends by gesturing to the enduring legacy of settlement performing ensembles, as Chicagoans’ cultural labor in the Progressive Era laid the foundations for contemporary bottom-up, ensemble-based theatre from the local to the international scale. The questions this study raises include: In what ways did performers who devoted the bulk of their daily lives to manual labor understand the spoken arts as cultural and political work? What is revealed when artistic practice is considered in conversation with labor organizing and civic reform?