Agnes Sinclair Holbrook and the Hull-House Maps: Part 3

Part 1 of this series introduced the Hull-House Maps and Papers, a landmark of statistical graphics published in 1895. Florence Kelley worked directly with Carroll Wright and the Bureau of Labor on the data collection, but much of the work of designing and constructing the maps was done by a recent college graduate named Agnes Sinclair Holbrook. Holbrook’s introductory chapter in the book, “Map Notes and Comments,” explained the choices behind the data displays and their “kodak view” of the Chicago neighborhood. Her goal was that of statisticians throughout history: to have “the charts paint faithfully the character of the region as it existed during the year recorded” (Holbrook, 1895).

Who was Holbrook, what inspired her to move to Hull House, and why should she be considered a pioneer of statistical reasoning?

Iowa Childhood and College

Agnes Sinclair Holbrook was born on October 25, 1867, the second of the four children of Norman Bruce Holbrook and Elizabeth (Lizzie) S. Adams Holbrook in Marengo, Iowa. Little is known about her mother, who died when Agnes was 14, or about her stepmother who entered the family a year later.

Agnes Holbrook’s father was one of the town’s prominent citizens. By the time Agnes was born he had been a schoolteacher, surveyor, sheriff, publisher of the Iowa State Democrat, and owner of a real estate business. Later, he organized and became president of the Marengo Savings Bank. In 1878 he was elected to the first of four terms in the Iowa House of Representatives.

Agnes, like her father, was the beneficiary of an excellent education. After a year of study at the University of Iowa, she entered Wellesley College in 1886. She took a two-year break from college studies after her sophomore year to travel in Europe (mostly France and Germany; she described her travels in two articles in The Wellesley Prelude), and returned to Wellesley to receive a bachelor of science degree in 1892.

Thanks to Wellesley’s stringent admissions standards, Holbrook’s knowledge of mathematics* would have been far beyond that of her contemporaries even before she started college. Her course of study at Wellesley included classes in mathematics, chemistry, physics, zoology, and psychology, along with literature, rhetoric, religion, and history. Most of her extracurricular activities were in literature. She contributed to and was an editor of The Wellesley Prelude (literary magazine), was literary editor of The Wellesley Legenda (yearbook), and was a member of the Shakespeare Society.

Holbrook also would have learned about the settlement movement while at Wellesley. Katharine Lee Bates,** one of Wellesley’s two instructors of English literature, co-founded Boston’s Denison House (a settlement house modeled after Chicago’s Hull House) in 1892. Holbrook moved to Hull House, the best-known settlement house in America, shortly after graduation.

At Hull House

Settlement houses represented one of the few opportunities for educated women in the 1890s to use their college training in a socially acceptable way — through service to others. Hull House gave Holbrook the freedom to “learn as well as to teach, to follow as well as to lead, to accept and develop new ideas as well as test one's own” and satisfied her “craving to realize in one's life as well as one's creed the unity of society and the brotherhood of man” (Holbrook, 1894, pp. 174, 179).

Holbrook had ample opportunity to develop new ideas and meet new people at Hull House. After a day spent working, residents shared a communal dinner, often joined by one or more distinguished visitors such as Illinois Governor John Altgeld or Katharine Lee Bates. Afterward, they might participate in evening classes, lectures, or musical programs*** given in the Lecture Room (Figure 1) for workers in the Hull House neighborhood.

Holbrook described the array of activities in an article for The Wellesley Magazine:

Teaching, conducting clubs, visiting, entertaining, managing picnics and country parties, connecting the diseased and needy with hospitals and charitable institutions, advising the perplexed and distressed on points of law, finding employment for out-of-works, informing the Board of Health where unsanitary houses and alleys need attention, bringing the neighborhood into touch with the advanced and progressive side of city life, and endeavoring to promote the wellbeing of the neighborhood in such ways as suggest themselves — many such lines of activity are constantly open to those living at Hull-House, and resident physicians, lawyers and teachers are as fully occupied as are the non-professional people who form generally the mainstay of the house. (Holbrook, 1894, p. 172)

Florence Kelley (1898b) wrote that “the trained mind working upon social problems must in the long run make valuable contribution towards their solution” and she enlisted Holbrook’s trained mind in charting the data obtained during Kelley’s investigation with the U.S. Bureau of Labor for the Hull-House Maps and Papers. Kelley’s son Nicholas, about eight years old at the time, later shared his memories of Holbrook:

When my mother began living at Hull House, she served as an investigator in a house-to-house study of the people living in the neighborhood. The results were used in maps that showed each house. Some of the residents sat in the octagon and colored the maps. One who did much of this was Miss Holbrook, a slender young woman whom I remember because she took me to visit her family in Marengo, Iowa, where I had the wholly new excitement of seeing the family deal with a young pig that visited the yard uninvited and had to be hurried out before he could root up the flowers. (Kelley, 1954, p. 427)

Holbrook (1895) took no public credit for designing or constructing the maps. She modestly wrote: “The present work is the result of an attempt on the part of some of the residents of Hull-House to put into graphic form a few facts concerning the section of Chicago immediately east of the House.” But, on the way to the graphic form, a number of decisions had to be made: which data to display, how to categorize nationalities and wages, and how to convey the information so that the maps served “to present conditions rather than to advance theories.” Holbrook made most of those decisions; I’ll discuss these in Part 4 of this series.

After Hull House

Holbrook continued living and working at Hull House until January 1895, but, with her frail health “the climate was against her” in Chicago. She moved to California and earned a Master’s degree in education from Stanford University in January 1896. She was appointed to be an instructor in Stanford’s English Department, but was unable to take the position because, as her Stanford professor Earl Barnes wrote, “before the opening of the new college year she was obliged to seek relief for a weak throat in the dryer climate of Arizona.”

Agnes Sinclair Holbrook passed away on October 31, 1896, six days after her 29th birthday. Her friend and Hull-House roommate Florence Wilkinson described her final months:

From February of that year till the end she never spoke above a whisper, but her letters remained the same, firm in hand, resolute, cheerful, and uncomplaining, so that her friends little dreamed of the sickness that was wearing away her life. In the spring she sought the dry climate of Arizona, but relief failing her, she returned to California, where he father and sister came to her. Tenderly cared for, she was taken to Denver, where she remained for a few weeks, under the care of an eminent physician. He could give little encouragement, but the brave heart of Agnes remained bright and unflinching in the frail and wasted physique. Late in August, with her father and sister, she went to her home in Marengo, Iowa, knowing well, as her father says, “that going home meant going to her long home.” But she was well content to die. She had no fear of death. She only said, “I regret that I have not been able to do more for others when so much has been done for me.” (Wilkinson, 1897)

Agnes Sinclair Holbrook and Statistical Science

With the Hull House Maps, Holbrook created one of the most remarkable examples of statistical graphics of the nineteenth century. As I’ll argue in Part 4 of this series, Holbrook’s approach to data display and interpretation could be used as models for statisticians of today. She exhibited sound statistical reasoning through:

Being committed to displaying the data as accurately as possible. Her goal was “to bring within reach of the public exact information concerning this quarter of Chicago rather than to advise methods by which it may be improved” (Holbrook, 1895).
Thoroughly documenting the steps in collecting the data and making the graphs. A reader knew exactly how families were classified into nationality and wage groups for the graphs.
Acknowledging possible errors in the display and limitations of the data. Holbrook (1895) wrote that although the experienced investigators were undoubtedly able “to get at all particulars with more accuracy than could have attended the most conscientious efforts of a novice, it is inevitable that errors should have crept in.” She noted possible measurement errors from respondents giving incorrect information or changing employment or residence.
Suggesting the maps could be used to explore associations and correlations in the data. She wrote: “A comparison of the two sets of outlines may also be of interest, showing in a general way which immigrants receive the highest, and which the lowest rates, and furnishing points for and against the restriction of immigration.” (Holbrook, 1895). The correlation coefficient is familiar to every statistical student today, but in 1895 it was relatively new. Many statisticians published tables showing cross-classifications by multiple variables, but Holbrook’s maps made the relationships between location, nationality, and wages easy to comprehend without having to do tedious calculations or poring over tables.

Because her time was so tragically cut short, Holbrook wrote only one other article involving a statistical investigation. Holbrook (1897) read a sample of reminiscences giving “an account of vivid memories of fear in early childhood,” and tabulated those fears according to a taxonomy**** she developed. She reported that “monsters are feared more than anything except the dark.” As in the Hull-House Maps, she viewed and used statistics as a tool for seeing the patterns in the data. Her approach to statistics was the same as her recommendation for dealing with childhood fears: “Turn on the search-lights of exact information and objective fact.”

Next: Data and Display Decisions for the Hull House Maps

Footnotes

*In 1886, Wellesley required prospective students to pass examinations in English; geography; history; mathematics including arithmetic, algebra, and plane geometry; Latin; and French or German.

Incoming freshmen were assumed to have mastered the concepts in Complete School Algebra by Edward Olney and A Treatise on Elementary Geometry by William Chauvenet (the Mathematical Association of America’s Chauvenet prize for outstanding mathematical exposition was established in his honor in 1925). The following are typical problems from the books (these may seem familiar to high school students today, but remember, Agnes had to do all the calculations without a computer or calculator):

“Two persons, A and B, start from the same place together, and travel in the same direction. A goes 40 miles per day; B goes 20 miles the first day, and increases his rate of travel ¾ of a mile per day. How far will they be apart at the end of 40 days, and which will be in advance?”
“There is a certain number, to the sum of whose digits if you add 7, the result will be three times the left hand digit; and if from the number itself you subtract 18, the digits will have changed places. What is the number? Verify.”
“The fly-wheel of an engine is connected by a belt with a smaller wheel driving the machinery of a mill. The radius of the fly-wheel is 7 feet; of the small wheel, 21 inches. How many revolutions does the small wheel make to one of the fly-wheel? The distance between the centres of the two wheels is 10 ½ feet. What is the length of the connecting band?”

**Katharine Lee Bates is probably best known today as the author of the lyrics to “America the Beautiful.” Sherr (2001) tells the story of the poem and song, and the (not yet successful) efforts to establish this moving prayer for brotherhood as America’s national anthem. Bates was inspired to write the poem upon viewing the “purple mountain majesties” of Pikes Peak in Colorado on July 22, 1893. The “alabaster cities” reference in the last stanza was inspired by the plaster-of-Paris-coated buildings she had seen earlier in July at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition — the “White City” described by Larson (2003). Bates saw the Exposition again in August 1893 on her trip back to Massachusetts, this time also visiting Hull House while in the city.

***Malinowski (2018) described a program for garment workers held in the Lecture Room (Figure 1), in which Helen Goodrich sang and Holbrook played piano. They “chose musical selections from Rubinstein, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Paderewski, in order to highlight their familiarity with Russian-Jewish and Eastern European composers and as an attempt to display their shared knowledge of music to Russian-Jewish men cloakmakers.” The women’s musical performances were often followed by lectures.

****She first categorized the fears by whether they were fears of something general and indistinct, or fears of something specific and concrete. Within each of the main classes, she then subcategorized by type:

General, defined as “more or less continuous and vague” and accounting for 84 of the instances, with subclasses natural phenomena (including shadows, the dark, death, and thunder), supernatural phenomena (including monsters, ghosts, and hell), and vague (an instinctive dread of “something”).
Specific, defined as “definite instances” and accounting for 54 of the instances, with subclasses people, animals, machinery, and miscellaneous.

Her list of fears was essentially the same as that in guides for parents today (except none of Holbrook’s subjects had been scared by TV shows).

References

References are found at the end of the last part of this series.

history of statisticsSharon LohrJune 20, 2020