Statistical Legacy of Hull-House Maps and Papers: Part 5

Part 1 of this series introduced the Hull-House Maps and Papers, a landmark of statistics published in 1895. What are its lessons for statistical work today?

Reaction to Hull-House Maps and Papers in 1890s

The longest and most detailed contemporaneous review of Hull-House Maps and Papers appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (1896). The reviewer praised the “vivid” maps that “render possible an easy apprehension of the nature and condition of the community in which Hull-House is doing its work.”

Other reviews were shorter yet still complimentary. The New York Times (1895) called the book an “admirable publication” but did not mention the maps. Lindsay (1896) wrote that the maps in the “interesting and valuable” book “follow the coloring used by Charles Booth in his wages-maps, and the work is of equal excellence.”

Ironically, given the reputation of Hull-House Maps and Papers today as a groundbreaking statistical contribution, the most unfavorable contemporary review of the book appeared in the Publications of the American Statistical Association. Economist Emily Greene Balch’s (1895) sole comment on the maps criticized the decision to record family rather than per capita wages on the wage maps (Figure 1).*

Figure 1. Wage Map 1 from Hull House Maps and Papers.

The first printing of 1,000 copies of Hull-House Maps and Papers sold out, but the color maps — the feature so valued by the readers and reviewers (other than Balch) — were expensive to produce. Addams (1910, p. 153) wrote that “apparently the Boston publisher did not consider the book worthy of a second” printing.

Figure 2. Map of part of Philadelphia’s 7th ward from Du Bois (1899).

The limited number of copies limited the book’s immediate influence. One author who did have a copy, however, was sociologist and statistician W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s (1899) study of Philadelphia was modeled on the Hull House investigation. Du Bois, too, chose to focus on a small part of the city — the seventh ward, which contained approximately 1/4 of Philadelphia’s African American population. He interviewed more than 5,000 of the ward’s residents, recording data on forms similar to the family schedule used to collect the Hull House data.

Du Bois (1899) included several pages of maps displaying economic conditions. The map in Figure 2, typical of the set, used black-and-white shading (cheaper to print than color) to categorize households’ “social conditions” into one of four subjective classes (similarly to Charles Booth’s maps); he did not use Holbrook’s dollar categories. Du Bois did, however, employ color in his innovative statistical displays about African American life, winning a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900.

Holbrook (1894) wrote: “The most cherished hope in the whole settlement idea is to amalgamate all that is best in university culture, in broad social life, and in the work-a-day world, and by invigorating the whole, to inaugurate a higher and fuller civilization than has yet been known.” But by 1920 “university culture” in sociology excluded the Hull House women (see Deegan, 1988ab, and Lengermann and Niebrugge, 2006 for the history of this exclusion). Schultz (2007) wrote: “By the 1920s the kind of sociological investigations undertaken at Hull-House no longer fit the criteria of academic research.” Their statistical work was deemed unscientific by some male sociologists (Women of Hull House, 2000).

From the viewpoint of a statistician in 2020, however, the maps and statistical work in Hull-House Maps and Papers were far ahead of their time.

Mapping and Graphics

All of Tufte’s (1983) criteria for excellence in statistical graphics are met by the Hull House Maps.** The nationality maps (Figure 3) displayed the data for 19,748 persons that had been collected on nearly 4,000 family data schedules. Each data point was displayed at the two-dimensional location of residence. For each person, you can see the nationality of other house-dwellers and neighbors, the proximity to shops and railroads, and the size of the house’s footprint. Holbrook’s use of the same map skeleton for the family wage information (Figure 1 shows the first map) encourages the reader to relate the two variables.

Figure 3. Nationalities Maps from Hull-House Maps and Papers.

Transparency and Documentation

Holbrook (1895) carefully documented the decisions made when collecting the statistics and constructing the graphs. Her short section on Map Notes and Comments gives the reader all the information needed to interpret the maps.

She emphasized that the map colors were proportional to the demographic distribution within each house, but “no clew to the density of population” was given. All of the residents in a solid dark blue house were Italian, but the map did not tell how many residents were in that house. One must read the text to learn that the solid blue blocks of Italians on Ewing Street “represent more people to the square inch than any other lots — a fact which is in no way indicated on the diagrams.” The total dark blue area in Figure 3 is not proportional to the total number of Italians in the Hull House neighborhood because the population density is greater in the blue areas than in the non-blue areas.***

The same area-vs.-population issue arises on maps today, but often not as carefully discussed as by Holbrook. She refers the reader to Wright (1894) for the detailed population statistics and makes perfectly clear what her maps display: “the view of each house and lot in the charts, suggesting just how members of various nationalities are grouped and disposed, and just what rates of wages are received in the different streets and sections, may have its real as well as its picturesque value.”

Privacy and Confidentiality

There is always a tradeoff between collecting useful data and safeguarding the privacy of those contributing the data. Carroll Wright was a strong voice for protecting the confidentiality of information provided to the government (Goldberg and Moye, 1985) and protected “personally identifiable information” by limiting data dissemination to summary statistics in tables. The Hull House maps, however, disclosed individuals’ information by displaying wage information at specific addresses.

Holbrook (1895) was aware that the maps displayed sensitive information about the neighborhood residents. She argued, however, that the value of the data outweighed the privacy intrusions:

Insistent probing into the lives of the poor would come with bad grace even from government officials, were the statistics obtained so inconsiderable as to afford no working basis for further improvement. The determination to turn on the searchlight of inquiry must be steady and persistent to accomplish definite results, and all spasmodic and sensational throbs of curious interest are ineffectual as well as unjustifiable. The painful nature of minute investigation, and the personal impertinence of many of the questions asked, would be unendurable and unpardonable were it not for the conviction that the public conscience when roused must demand better surrounding for the most inert and long-suffering citizens of the commonwealth. Merely to state symptoms and go no farther would be idle; but to state symptoms in order to ascertain the nature of disease, and apply, it may be, its cure, is not only scientific, but in the highest sense humanitarian. (Holbrook, 1895, pp. 13-14)

Holbrook’s discussion of the privacy issues presaged the discussion about data confidentiality that took place later in the 20th century. Today, confidentiality protection is codified in laws. The Census Bureau, for example, is bound by Title 13 of the United States Code to maintain confidentiality and is prohibited from publishing private information that identifies an individual.

Fidelity to the Data

Although Florence Kelley and Agnes Holbrook were clearly in sympathy with the downtrodden residents of the neighborhood, they kept their opinions separate from the data display. Holbrook (1895) wrote: “These notes and comments are designed rather to make the maps intelligible than to furnish independent data; and the aim of both maps and notes is to present conditions rather than to advance theories — 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. While vitally interested in every question connected with this part of the city, and especially concerned to enlarge the life and vigor of the immediate neighborhood, Hull-House offers these facts more with the hope of stimulating inquiry and action, and evolving new thoughts and methods, than with the idea of recommending its own manner of effort.”

Any data collection is shaped by decisions of what to measure, how to measure it, and what statistics to calculate and display, as discussed in Part 4 of this series. Kelley had previously tabulated workers’ wages in her 1892 canvass of sweatshops in Chicago, and had noted “the lack of uniformity in wages or prices for the same kind and amount of work, and the fluctuations in wages to the same people at different seasons” (Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1893). She had documented the poverty and working conditions under which the “sweaters” labored, and it was natural that she would choose wages for one of the map displays (which also followed the example of Booth, 1889) to display that poverty in graphic form.

Kelley had deliberately chosen the area east of Hull House for the Bureau of Labor investigation because of the extreme poverty and dreadful working conditions she had observed there. This area was not representative of all neighborhoods of Chicago; it was not even representative of Chicago neighborhoods where sweatshops were prevalent. Schultz (2007) wrote: “Her selection of the blocks to be investigated was motivated, it would seem, out of concern to remedy the extreme hardships of people in the worst sections of the district.” But the authors of Hull-House Maps and Papers never claimed that the neighborhood portrayed in the maps was representative of other areas of Chicago; they acknowledged that these blocks were among the poorest areas of the city. The map constructors portrayed the data from this small part of Chicago as accurately as they could.

Using Data to Identify Societal Problems

Hull House Maps and Papers was one of the earliest works advocating evidence-based policymaking. The authors took the view that one could not solve problems of society without first knowing the extent of those problems through high-quality data. They wanted to “paint faithfully the character of the region” and give a “photographic reproduction of Chicago’s poorest quarters on the west, and her worst on the east of the river” (Holbrook, 1895).

Following the publication of Hull-House Maps and Papers, Hull House residents continued statistical investigations in the city and throughout the country. They were among the few people in the world who had experience with rigorous data collection and statistical analyses. Haar (2002) found records of 23 investigations conducted by Hull House residents between 1892 and 1933. That number includes only investigations done while in residence, and does not include the statistical work residents conducted after leaving Hull House.

Julia Lathrop, who authored a chapter in Hull-House Maps and Papers, became head of the U.S. Children’s Bureau in 1912. Lathrop and her successor, Hull House alumna Grace Abbott, called for better data on children’s mortality and welfare. Their statistics, showing that the U.S. had one of the highest children’s mortality rates in the industrialized world, led to public health interventions and education that cut infant mortality in half between 1900 and 1930 (Women of Hull House, 2000). Grace Abbott’s sister Edith published a groundbreaking statistical investigation of crime in Chicago in 1915 whose recommendations still apply today.

By all accounts, 1893, the year in which the Hull House data were collected, was a horrible year for many Chicagoans. The rest of the world read about the city’s magnificent World’s Columbian Exposition, but that exposition was far removed from the everyday life of Chicago’s factory and sweatshop workers. The Panic of 1893, starting in the spring of that year, led to severe unemployment and a four-year economic depression. In addition to the smallpox outbreak that Florence Kelley had investigated, diseases such as diphtheria and typhoid fever abounded. Tuberculosis, the leading cause of death in the United States throughout the 1890s, spread easily in the overcrowded urban tenements.

The Hull-House Maps and Papers shone a light on the poverty and working conditions in one Chicago neighborhood. The authors of the book knew that during times of crisis, disease, unemployment, and deprivation, having accurate data — and communicating that data clearly — is essential for knowing the extent of the problems and finding solutions to them. This is as true for the challenges of 2020 as it was in 1895.

Copyright (c) 2020 Sharon L. Lohr

Footnotes

*Balch, an economist who joined the Wellesley College teaching staff in 1896, clearly viewed the book’s contributions from an economics rather than a statistical perspective. She wrote: “It is of comparatively little use to know that most of the families in the district receive from five to ten dollars a week when the number of the family varies as it must, and no average size is given,” and she saw little of interest in the “topographical presentation of this set of facts.” It is interesting that the most critical review of the book came from Balch, who might have been expected to be more sympathetic because of her own close ties to the settlement movement— Balch had co-founded Boston’s Denison House in 1892, and she was a close personal friend of Jane Addams. In 1946, Balch became the second American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; Jane Addams in 1931 became the first American woman to receive the prize.

**The Hull House Maps are not included in Tufte’s (1982) review of landmarks of statistical graphics. In my opinion, however, their artistry and data-to-ink ratio (the proportion of ink used in the graphic that displays information) are on par with Minard’s famous graph of Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign, which Tufte says “may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.”

***Could Holbrook have displayed the relative population sizes? Probably not without a tremendous amount of additional work. She could have drawn an additional map showing number of persons or families per house. Or, instead of coloring each house in completely, she could have drawn a divided bar (or rectangle) in each house with length (or area) proportional to the number of persons; this, however, would have delayed the map production because she would have needed to know the maximum house population before starting, instead of coloring the map each evening with that day’s newly-filled-out schedule. She could have indicated the nationality of each person by a colored dot, so that houses with higher population density would contain more dots than houses with few residents, but it’s a bit horrifying to think of having to draw nearly 20,000 points of equal size with pen and ink.

These alternatives, however, would not have the aesthetic appeal of the map in Figure 3, and would make it more difficult to see the wage and nationality clustering. Other options, such as the cartograms used by Mark Newman to display county-by-county election results, would show areas proportional to the number of people in each house but distort the geographic locations and sizes of the houses.

References

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