Telling Boundary Stories

If boundary construction is, as Charles Tilly claims, “a fundamental social process,” it also “depends closely on the adoption and modification of shared stories about the boundary.”Footnote ²⁵ These stories “often form and operate in the zone of contentious politics, the zone where people make discontinuous, public, collective claims on each other.”Footnote ²⁶ Stories about boundaries or borders between private and public were rewoven by organized women influenced by Hull-House. Jane Addams herself told such persuasive stories. For Addams, there was “perhaps no one thing in American life at present which is changing so rapidly as the dividing line between private beneficent effort and public governmental effort.”Footnote ²⁷ As she and a number of other Chicago reformers saw it, a number of activities originating in philanthropic associations had been absorbed into the public sphere; many tasks that women had traditionally performed in the home had been relocated to various departments of the modern city. Therefore, “if women are to go on doing those things which they have always done they will have to have some share in the government which is now doing them. If not, these activities will be turned over altogether to the men.”Footnote ²⁸

With such boundary stories providing the rationale for what would have been seen, not long before, as untenable transgressions into the male public domain, women's groups generated identities as highly competent municipal housekeepers, bringing brooms to public spaces. For Addams, men embraced ideals of individuality whereas women aspired to social action, a sense of interdependence, and a wider ethic; women could be viewed as real progressives and builders of community whereas men could be cast as retarding progress and engaging in competitive, expensive, and often destructive activities.Footnote ²⁹ Men had been unable to solve any number of urban ills, and both the city and the nation needed women's wisdom and public housekeeping.Footnote ³⁰

Public Housekeeping, Hull-House Style

Public housekeeping, for its practitioners, included the regulation of industrial conditions. Hull-House and other settlements worked the boundaries that divided middle from working classes.Footnote ³¹ Addressing industrial ills and social maladjustments as they affected the rapidly growing populations of Chicago and other American cities, reform women used their consumer power to affect industrial practicesFootnote ³² and also argued that women had to leave home in order to continue to be involved with provision of goods and services that had increasingly moved outside the home.

Women who were prominent in reform movements and organizations of the period had a strong consciousness of being engaged in issues that were the special provenance of women.Footnote ³³ This was part of the practice and discourse of maternalism, and “maternalism necessarily operated in relation to other discourses—about citizenship, class relations, gender differences, and national identity.”Footnote ³⁴ These turn-of-the-century reformers built a public space to talk credibly about child welfare and exploitation of children, and about the health of mothers and of wage-earning women.Footnote ³⁵ Hull-House, too, characteristically focused on reaching families in its neighborhood through mothers and children.Footnote ³⁶ Maternalism helped women carve out a professional sphere of their own.

Hull-House modeled one way of generating professional skills. Relationships with wealthy women, often forged through the General Federation of Women's Clubs, helped Hull-House budding professional women perform work in the community. By 1895, Addams had developed a “fellowship system” to link a newly identified community need, a woman worker ready to meet that need, and an individual donor willing to pay that worker's monthly salary. The fellowship recipient reported both to Addams and to the person giving the money.Footnote ³⁷ This fellowship system allowed women to experiment and to define new professions for themselves.Footnote ³⁸

Female reformers needed to construct the boundaries and differences between their approach, values, and expertise from that of men, and they were also wont to emphasize how the work they did outside of the academy differed from the work of emerging academic professionals.Footnote ³⁹ A public claim of jurisdiction—developed over a period of time and often contested—usually entails a claim for legitimate control of the work in question, a claim to dominate public definitions of the tasks involved, and perhaps an obligation to perform this work; “[p]ublic jurisdiction, in short, is a claim of both social and cultural authority.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Claiming Jurisdiction through Social Science Research

One important means by which organized women—especially middle-class, college-educated women as were many of those associated with Hull-House—asserted their policy expertise and specific jurisdictional claim was by embracing and deploying the language and tools of new social scientific research. Women, prominent in several departments of the American Social Science Association even in the 1880s—Public Health, Education, and Social Economy—found that social science tools permitted them to engage in reform efforts on equal footing with men.Footnote ⁴¹ Hull-House women had been engaged in data-gathering since at least 1893, when Florence Kelley and other Hull-House residents were joined by staff of the U.S. Bureau of Labor in door-to-door collection of local community data on ethnic origins, number of residents per household, wages, work history, and location of sweat shops for what became the Hull-House Maps and Papers, published in 1895.Footnote ⁴² When, by the 1890s, female reformers had embraced social scientific language and tools, they were able to connect with a wider progressive discourse and a state that was increasingly turning to objective, scientific administration and approaches to social problems. “Social science taught the importance of cooperation, prevention, and expertise.”Footnote ⁴³ Professionalizing women sought to convince their fellow citizens—through dissemination of research, publicity, lobbying, and writing—that the problems they were addressing were public problems whose solutions required governmental, and not merely private resources.Footnote ⁴⁴ Organized women in the progressive era served as an example of how “social movements often identify social problems, which later become potential expert work,” and how lay leaders may gradually turn into professionals.Footnote ⁴⁵

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, “[a]lthough a few governmental bureaus, such as the U.S. Department of Labor, brought together experts and collected data capable of guiding public policy in attacking social problems created by rapid industrialization, explosive urban growth, and massive immigration, for the most part such expertise remained sequestered in universities, private foundations, and voluntary organizations.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Women who engaged in social scientific research to expand public sector social provision helped build state capacity, and they were working not only at the federal but also at the state and municipal levels.Footnote ⁴⁸

From Women's Political Culture to Institutional Power

Scholars who locate organized women at the center of the dynamic expansion of the social welfare state in the United States in municipalities, states, and the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently explain their role and success because of the development of women's political culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the growth of autonomous, woman-centered institutions that nevertheless cooperated closely with male reformers.Footnote ⁴⁹ For Paula Baker, women domesticated politics; working with social service and charitable organizations, they took up issues such as care of dependents not fully inscribed in the world of male politics.Footnote ⁵⁰ Robyn Muncy emphasizes the development of a peculiarly female culture forged by middle-class and often college-educated women that emphasized relationships, care, humility and service.Footnote ⁵¹ Women broke into the public sphere not by frontal assault on male-dominated professions but by creating “within the public realm a new territory they could rule themselves: it was that territory of policy and professional expertise which affected women and children exclusively.”Footnote ⁵² And Mary Jo Deegan points to the ways the feudal female world based on family, home, emotions, and consumer roles became, in this period, an important resource for social change and for “redefining the larger social situation.”Footnote ⁵³

Theda Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers adds an important structural dimension to any explanation of the influence of maternalist organizations in the United States around the turn of the century. Skocpol focuses on the central role of proliferating gender-identified and sometimes cross-class mass-membership organizations with chapters all over the United States, such as the General Federation of Women's Clubs, in forging new welfare state institutions during the progressive era. “Because the women's groups were organized into geographically widespread federated associations, they had much more ability than other groups of the day—such as urban professional associations, or trade unions of male industrial wage earners—simultaneously to influence politics at local, state, and national levels.”Footnote ⁵⁴ These federated groups that included women with higher education, “could spread a policy idea quickly from New York or Chicago or Washington, DC, across the forty-eight states and right down into local communities, the districts that were the homes of representatives to state legislatures and to the U.S. Congress”;Footnote ⁵⁵ they managed to gain “decentralized political leverage on legislatures.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Engendering new welfare state institutions such as the Children's Bureau, these mass-membership organizations were able to bring about policies to protect women and children.Footnote ⁵⁷

Establishing an institutional beachhead became a means not only of pushing policy ideas but also of mobilizing women's organizations to help achieve and implement policy goals at the local level. As director of the Children's Bureau, Julia Lathrop used the new institution not only to conduct investigations and prepare reports, but also as a base for lobbying for new federal policy initiatives on behalf of mothers and children, pressing for what would become the Sheppard-Towner Act.Footnote ⁵⁸ Under her handpicked successor, Grace Abbott, extant women's organizations with “boots on the ground,” such as the General Federation of Women's Clubs and League of Women Voters, were enlisted to help the Children's Bureau implement Lathrop's and Abbott's visions, working for passage of required state and local programs so that federal funds could be disbursed, and administering these programs at the local level.Footnote ⁵⁹

Skocpol's analysis both centers progressive era women's organizations in the narrative of institution building and serves as a reminder to scholars to think more about the directionality of political development. Her analysis takes seriously the role of voluntary organizations in state building. Skocpol also highlights the conditions that she believed permitted nationally organized women pursuing maternalist goals at a particular historical moment to be effective in reshaping key elements of the nation's social welfare policy agenda.

The Sheppard-Towner case seems to suggest something more. It arguably demonstrates that working across, and to some extent blurring, the boundaries between public and private responsibility helped organized women with maternalist agendas build success in the progressive era. The IPL case study pursues that suggestion, drawing from Skocpol and incorporating other insights from recent work on hybrid governing arrangements, public-private partnerships, and boundary work. Although not a nationally organized mass-membership organization modeled along the lines of the General Federation, the IPL effectively networked with other groups to which its development was linked in the field of immigrant protection—also chiefly women's groups, some of which had paved the way—drawing upon accumulated knowledge, skills, and successful practices to build successes, including an impressive institutional beachhead. If the IPL was mixed in its success in institutionalizing programs, it nevertheless demonstrated some success in leveraging the state to take up new public tasks, albeit with varying levels of commitment.

The IPL: Building on Predecessors

The IPL, begun as the League for Protection of Immigrants in 1907 and formally established in Chicago in 1908, was not first into the field of migrant protection, although it was the organization most prominently engaged in attempting to alter federal and state policies to better secure its aims. The IPL incorporated and built upon projects designed by earlier women's organizations involved in immigrant work and, with the group's close connections to Hull-House, drew upon Hull-House resources and evolving practices. As early as 1888, the Travelers' Aid Committee of the Chicago YWCA had established a model that would be assimilated into the work of the IPL. To protect unwitting women from exploitation, the Travelers' Aid Committee hired matrons to help women newcomers who arrived alone at Chicago railway stations. They sought to run interference with brothel procurers and others seeking to take advantage of new female arrivals, and denounced false newspaper advertisements that misled young female job seekers.Footnote ⁷³ After Hull-House was founded in 1889, Edith Abbott recalled that:

Such was the “protective” network for those arriving at Chicago train stations, whether the new arrival was foreign or native-born, circa 1890.

The timing of the foundation of the IPL seems hardly coincidental. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe had been coming to Chicago for a number of years by this time. But importantly, the advent of the IPL coincided with the naming of a new problem. The term “white slavery” appears in certain quarters a few years earlier, but white slavery as a problem began to attract wide interest in 1907, in part as sensational stories and tracts began to circulate.Footnote ⁷⁵McClure's Magazine published George Kibbe Turner's “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities” in its April 1907 issue and began a series on the white slave trade shortly thereafter. Although a substantial share of white slavery interest focused on the threatened moral purity of young native stock American girls coming to the city, Turner claimed Russian Jews were especially involved in the trade in women and identified young, low-paid factory workers and department store girls as being particularly vulnerable.Footnote ⁷⁶ Clifford Roe, an important Chicago crusader and assistant state's attorney in Chicago, and Illinois District Attorney E. W. Sims were prominent in the white slave crusade. Roe estimated that, on Chicago's West Side, half the prostitutes were Jewish, and additional sources linked Chicago Jews to the white slave trade.Footnote ⁷⁷ The railroad stations in Chicago were the chief point of entry for new immigrants in Illinois, and immigrant girls crossed state lines to get there. Representative James Robert Mann, who chaired the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, contributed his name to the 1910 Act making it a federal crime to transport a young woman across state lines for immoral purposes—an exercise of the federal government's commerce power. The act was consonant in spirit with the Immigration Act of 1907 that made it a federal crime to import into the United States any alien girl or woman for purposes of prostitution.

A potent narrative about a social and moral evil and the vulnerability of poor immigrant girls in it took root. There were definite anti-immigrant tones to the discourse; however, the appeals for government action meshed with and mapped onto maternalist reformers' focus upon vulnerable, exploitable young women and moral hazards in the swelling population of America's cities.

Juvenile Court Connections

Female reformers in Illinois and elsewhere were already involved in trying to protect young girls and young working women from moral harms. Julia Lathrop, a number of her Hull-House associates, and supporters from the Chicago Woman's Clubs had succeeded in establishing the nation's first juvenile court in 1899; focused on prevention of delinquency and child protection, the court movement rapidly spread throughout the country.Footnote ⁷⁸ Jane Addams joined other Hull-House reformers and Chicago juvenile court activists to form the Juvenile Protective League, designed to prevent juvenile delinquency.Footnote ⁷⁹ Volunteer and paid probation officers worked with foreign and native-born girls who came before the juvenile court in an attempt to save the young and turn them away from dangerous habits and amusements.Footnote ⁸⁰ Addams expressed concern for the absence of healthy and safe amusements for young working girls, native or immigrant, seeking entertainment after long hours of labor. Unsupervised socializing with men and premarital sexual activity were considered the undoing of young women. Settlements and civic associations attacked the problem on a number of levels, some of which included establishing playgrounds, boys' and girls' clubs, cooperative residences for young working-class women, helping enforce compulsory school attendance and opposing child labor, improving living conditions in tenement housing, providing safe movies and supervised dances, and attempting to prosecute bar and pool hall owners for contributing to the delinquency of minors.Footnote ⁸¹

Female reformers stressed that the protection and well-being of the young had been women's domain in the home and remained part of women's work in the new and increasingly interdependent urban environment.Footnote ⁸² Women were helping identify and deal with these problems through organized activity, but they insisted that these were, in fact, public problems. Addams, a prolific writer, and other Hull-House associates, wove stories for their contemporaries about new public responsibilities, the role of organized women in beginning to address these important problems, and the necessity for new governmental initiatives.

The National Council of Jewish Women

Working to assist immigrant women arriving without male family protectors at Ellis Island, or traveling to inland cities after arrival, the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) project predated, influenced, and contributed importantly to the work and practices of the IPL.Footnote ⁸³ A number of female Jewish social reformers, who mobilized to form the NCJW at the time of the Columbia Exposition in 1893, were middle-class German Jews with concerns that Russian Jewish migration had to be handled in such a way that these new and different working-class Jews were quickly assimilated.Footnote ⁸⁴ The New York branch of the NCJW's immigration committee reacted early to white slavery concerns; during the sensationalist period when some white slavery crusaders were turning the spotlight upon Russian Jews, the organization worked to combat any practices that could fuel anti-Semitism. The Jewish women's organization targeted women traveling alone who were unfamiliar with American customs and the English language, who were in need of work, and who might be befriended by the wrong sorts who lured them into prostitution. By the turn of the century or shortly thereafter, Council Sections in other port cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and San Francisco were actively engaged in protecting immigrant women.Footnote ⁸⁵ By 1902, the Philadelphia Section contributed money to the Philadelphia Travelers' Aid Society for “maintaining a matron at principal railroad stations.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The NCJW modeled many of its services for young Jewish immigrants and girls on the work of settlement houses, and the mobilization of sections in a number of port cities made it an excellent ally for some of the IPL's work. Women's immigrant protection groups drew upon the successful innovations and practices of one another. The NCJW focused on women and mothers and emphasized trained volunteer social workers, friendly visitors, and preservation of ethnic customs and identity.Footnote ⁸⁷ The practice of using trained and supervised friendly visitors had been pioneered by the Charity Organization Societies that emerged beginning in the late 1870s; the practice was adopted by Hull-House in 1896.Footnote ⁸⁸ Friendly visitors, as originally envisioned, went about “seeing and knowing people in their homes and trying, by means of personal influence and practical suggestion, to improve their condition.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The Ellis Island program developed by the NCJW was a model for the IPL and helped form the backbone of its information network for unaccompanied girls traveling to Chicago.

The NCJW's New York program and infrastructure also attracted the attention of the federal government. In what seems a clear example of government borrowing capacity from the “private” sector, the federal government turned to the NCJW for assistance. NCJW had developed a set of practices and an infrastructure that could be adapted to aid governmental purposes. “By 1903, NCJW had so clearly established itself as the undisputed leader in this unique work that the U.S. government sought its help in preventing immigrant girls from falling into the hands of white slavers.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The NCJW responded by establishing a Department of Immigrant Aid, later renamed Service to the Foreign Born, and by 1905, they had created a permanent aid station at Ellis Island to meet Jewish women.Footnote ⁹¹ Staffed by both paid agents and volunteers, the Department of Immigrant Aid hired employees who could speak Yiddish and brought in volunteers who spoke additional languages. They also obtained names from detention lists and ship manifests and interviewed every young Jewish female entrant who was between twelve and thirty. Translators acted as advocates for immigrants and could often smooth difficulties with customs officials, warding off detention.Footnote ⁹² NCJW printed a leaflet that was distributed abroad—in Russia and in European ports of origin—telling young women how to seek help from NCJW, warning them about strangers offering well-paid work or marriage, explaining that U.S. law barred employment of anyone under fourteen, that there was compulsory school attendance, and that violation of laws could result in deportation.Footnote ⁹³ NCJW maintained representatives in about 250 cities and European ports of origin to assist single girls who were entering the United States.Footnote ⁹⁴

By 1907, the personal interview conducted by NCJW employees or volunteers had become an important data-gathering mechanism that would help link immigrant protection groups in a network of supervision of young females. Through the interview, NCJW Ellis Island agents developed lists with the intended destinations of the young women admitted. Networking with either a NCJW section or, where that was absent, a correspondent in another city, Council agents would try to locate family members the immigrants named. Making sure names were authentic, agents “would instruct the client on how to travel to her destination, frequently escorting her to the door of the train and occasionally paying her fare.”Footnote ⁹⁵ At the final destination, volunteers were alerted by cable to expect the immigrant and would meet the train, if possible accompanied by the named relatives. The volunteer would accompany the immigrant to her new home, asking a series of questions to be assured of the girl's safety, making sure the girl was living with older persons who could exercise supervision. The volunteer—a friendly visitor—would then “adopt” the family, returning to visit on a regular basis, helping the family with employment, health care, educational opportunities, and perhaps entertainment options. The friendly visitor reported back to the Section at port of entry, indicating that the young woman had arrived safely and was appropriately settled. There was attempted supervision not only from dock to door but for several years or until help was no longer needed.Footnote ⁹⁶ This networking of women that provided information about those expected to arrive at an inland destination would also be vital to, and would be further augmented by, the IPL.

The Women's Trade Union League

The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), sometimes credited with having been first in the field of outreach to immigrant women, could be considered the mother of the IPL, but it, too, was embedded in networks that shaped its work. According to one historian, the IPL:

Although the Chicago WTUL Immigration Committee was the immediate catalyst for the formation of the IPL, the network connections are richer than this. The Chicago WTUL acknowledged its own debt to the NCJW: “The Immigration Committee was formed last July [1907] by the Women's Trade Union League of Chicago in answer to the request of the Women's Municipal League of New York City and the Council of Jewish Women, to co-operate with them in meeting the needs of immigrant women and girls who come to America via Ellis Island.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The WTUL had been founded in Boston in 1903 by working women and middle-class women reformers who had met in the settlement movement; the organization was founded when it became clear the American Federation of Labor was not interested in including women, and by 1904, there were additional branches in New York and Chicago.Footnote ⁹⁹ WTUL membership included both upper-middle-class female reformers and working girls, and its activities were largely financed by its wealthier members. A number of the working women who joined were in the clothing and needle trades and were recent immigrants, including a number of Russian Jewish girls who rose to positions of leadership. Some ideas and activities spread when leaders moved between cities. Margaret Dreier, a wealthy young woman from Brooklyn who joined the work of the WTUL in 1904, took her labor activism with her to Chicago when she married Raymond Robins, then a Chicago social worker and supporter of organized labor.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In New York, Dreier began by conducting research on the exploitation of working girls by employment agencies and by those who misrepresented work; she saw links between the exploitation of women's labor and the exploitation of women's sexuality.Footnote ¹⁰¹ “Dreier formed committees to meet women traveling from rural areas to the city for work, to create nonprofit employment agencies to aid them in job searches, and to assist them in finding decent housing.”Footnote ¹⁰² By 1907, Dreier had moved to Chicago and was elected president of the Women's National Trade Union League.

The Chicago WTUL joined with kindred organizations for protection of immigrants and as “research organizations to study and improve local conditions for women” in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The four cities began “co-operating under the Inter-Municipal Research Committee of which Miss Frances A. Kellor is secretary.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Kellor and Margaret Dreier Robins had worked and investigated together with the Women's Municipal League of New York City, and worked together from 1904 on the new interstate Municipal Committee.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ What seems to have begun as a networking among women's organizations in New York—the NCJW Immigration Committee, the Women's Municipal League of New York City,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and the New York WTUL—reached out and appealed to create a network of women's organizations concerned both with immigration protection and immigration research that was chiefly focused on problems faced by women and girls. The Chicago-based WTUL joined in. Data collection and its dissemination were part of what was networked.

By 1907, the WTUL of Illinois, meeting at Hull-House, was making public appeals for funds to support its immigrant committee.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Some of the major expenses were to pay “a share in the salary of the special agent at Ellis Island and the salaries of the director and two investigators in Chicago.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It seems probable that they were sharing expenses with the NCJW and with at least the New York branch of the WTUL. The appeal explained:

The Chicago group stated that they were meeting the immigrant trains at the stations and were trying to appoint matrons at these stations. The committee wanted to make close connection with the new residents; “[t]he importance of this work is readily apparent to all who appreciate the emergencies which arise when women and children travel,”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ and most of the girls ranged from fifteen to twenty-seven years of age. During ten weeks in the summer of 1907, they had been alerted to 496 cases, had located 280 of these, and were investigating those they could not readily find.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The committee also wanted to secure work for the women met at the stations and claimed they were cooperating with the State Free Employment Bureau, several nationality-based associations, a number of unions (clothing unions were especially well represented), and the Relief and Aid Society and the Bureau of Charities.Footnote ¹¹¹

The WTUL was involved chiefly out of concern that skilled immigrant workers were becoming caught up in sweatshops and were accepting low wage work. “Owing to their ignorance of our language, laws, and customs they are caught in the net-work of the sweat-shops, in every way disastrous alike to the family and the community.”Footnote ¹¹² This counteracted the efforts of women who were trying to unionize and improve wages; for WTUL members, unionization was vital to improving the living and working conditions of working girls.Footnote ¹¹³ Sophonisba Breckinridge, active in the WTUL, perceived that these immigrant girls “were willing to work for very low wages, and it was difficult to bring these non-English-speaking girls into the unions.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The WTUL Immigration Committee sought “to find work for the young immigrant woman under good conditions, and to secure for her the necessary protection.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ The WTUL also sought to protect housekeepers and house workers (positions often taken by Scandinavian girls), to “study the social and economic aspects of the Immigration problem, with special reference to women,” and to bring new arrivals “into sympathetic understanding and relationship with American ideals and standards.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ They wished to steer women toward less congested and better organized trades, and to offer protection to the vulnerable.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In keeping with practices of other cities having WTUL organizations, they established a Department of Friendly Visiting to help immigrant women “find fair employment and good living conditions.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Friendly visitors to homes provided information about reliable employment offices and sought to impress upon new arrivals the importance of seeking unionized work.Footnote ¹¹⁹ According to the WTUL, the home visitors sought:

The WTUL Immigration Committee began collecting data on nationalities, employment, and living conditions of the girls whose names had been sent from Ellis Island.Footnote ¹²¹ The committee quickly realized that their work of combatting exploitation required greater organization and resources.Footnote ¹²² As soon as the first WTUL Immigration Committee report was issued, a meeting was held to organize the League for the Protection of Immigrants.Footnote ¹²³

The middle-class and often college-educated female leaders in the WTUL, like their successors in the IPL, saw these issues as integrally interlinked, were working with narratives and stories in which women were centrally concerned with the problems faced by immigrant girls, and in which boundaries between issues of sexual and economic exploitation, or between housing arrangements and moral risk, were porous. This work was part of the maternalist reformers' project of protecting the vulnerable. By the time of the founding of the IPL, concerns over the dangers of prostitution and sexual exploitation linked reformers to the rising and sensationalist discourse of white slavery. The IPL identified factors that contributed to the moral endangerment of young women en route to their final destinations, and many more once they arrived, including dire economic circumstances and crowded, mixed-gender tenements. These dangers mapped onto maternalist ideas for expanding the mission of the state. In Chicago, it extended to juvenile court probation work, where many of those who came before the court were immigrants or the children of immigrants. It extended to combatting child labor and keeping children in school. To keep poor children with their mothers, efforts extended to the creation of the nation's first mothers' pensions, which were administered by the juvenile court.Footnote ¹²⁴ These same reformers combatted low wages, as well as long hours of work for women, unsafe working and living conditions, and other problems that degraded rather than elevated life. Because the issues were interlinked in the minds of these reformers, women who built skills and reforms in one arena of endeavor would readily apply their skills and perspectives into others.Footnote ¹²⁵

Protective Labor Legislation and the National Consumers' League

In Chicago, efforts to protect vulnerable immigrant girls and women dovetailed with other pieces of the progressive era reform agenda, shaped in such large part by settlement women, club women, and their allies. It intersected with the maternalist drive for protective labor legislation. The Illinois Women's Alliance had successfully pressed the Illinois legislature to pass an eight-hour day law for women in factories and workshops in 1893, only to have it struck down by the state Supreme Court in 1895.Footnote ¹²⁶ After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Oregon's ten-hour day for working women in 1908, Illinois reformers renewed their efforts and got what was popularly referred to as the “Woman's Ten-Hour Law” passed in 1909; when it was predictably challenged, the Muller team of Brandeis and Goldmark came to Illinois to defend the new law, under the auspices of the National Consumers' League. Under the direction of Florence Kelley, the National Consumers' League maintained close connections with its local affiliates as it encouraged, and pressed other states to follow, the Oregon lead.Footnote ¹²⁷ By 1910, the Illinois Supreme Court, citing Muller and broad understandings of state police power (being articulated by prominent University of Chicago law professor and friend of the reformers, Ernst Freund) upheld the new law.Footnote ¹²⁸ This illustrates the capacity of large-scale, mass-membership, women's organizations to disseminate agendas and influence legislation, as Skocpol has maintained. Here, the National Consumers League also deployed its forces to win court victories.

Tools and Tactics

Leaders of the IPL had the academic tools and resources to deploy methods and tools of social science to advance their causes. They deployed legal arguments and legal expertise and spent time and resources spreading their findings in scholarly publications and reports and by “going public.”

Building Bridges, Generating Legibility

Importantly, the IPL, the WTUL, and the NCJW were also organizations that noted, counted, tracked, and registered individual immigrants and categories of immigrants. Collecting and then disseminating data from investigations were among the core purposes the IPL leaders envisioned for the organization.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ In the industrialized West, “quantification has been part of a strategy of intervention, not merely of description.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ The IPL (and its predecessor in Chicago's WTUL) also brought supervision, regulation, admonition, and reformation to immigrants and immigrant communities. The IPL was among the organizations that brought the state from Ellis Island to immigrant communities wherever they were found. The state was led there by the reformers, who were first in the field.

While carefully gathering and assembling data from investigations, constructing narratives, and then disseminating information that was not previously available, Abbott and the IPA were helping generating state capacity that could produce progressive social welfare policies. But they were also helping produce the modern administrative state—a growing administrative state that could only control and order society if administrators could see and read the formerly dark corners.Footnote ¹⁸² As Scott argues, in the construction of corporate-administrative states, uncategorizable people and activities have to be observed and assimilated onto administrative grids; “[l]egibility is a condition of manipulation.”Footnote ¹⁸³ Visible units have to be invented; “Whatever the units being manipulated, they must be organized in a manner that permits them to be identified, observed, recorded, counted, aggregated, and monitored. The degree of knowledge required would have to be roughly commensurate with the depth of the intervention.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ For the state or the federal government, dealing with immigrants and their problems—either to “protect” or to control—required this legibility that the organization helped provide.

To help with employment and adjustment of new immigrant girls in Chicago, IPL workers wanted to be able to devote even more time to “following them to their homes.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Because it would have then been highly inappropriate for males to visit female immigrants in their homes, data collection on the experiences of young female immigrants was a woman's affair. To help women and girls, organized women were needed to make boundaries between public and private permeable and to navigate complex moral coding. There were often multiple visits, with data-gathering along the way. To gather information on the work and practices of private employment agencies, the IPL would often be in more homes, because a number of those—especially those serving females—operated out of private homes. A form found in the records of the IPL demonstrates kinds of data systematically collected in some of its home visits.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ In addition to name, nationality, address, ages, place of birth, first arrival in the United States of adults, employer, occupation abroad and occupation in the United States, the IPL collected names, ages, and school or occupational status of children, and condition, rent, number of rooms, and number of persons per room of housing occupied; banking and personal property information; and relatives expected, detained, or supported abroad. Entering into relationships with young immigrant women seeking to participate in the labor market helped IPL members understand the difficulties these young women (and male members of the household) faced, and the information derived was used to leverage policy reforms.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

By gathering and systematizing new information, naming and narrating social problems within discourses developed by maternalists and Hull-House reformers, and deploying the language of social scientific inquiry, the IPL spoke and wrote authoritatively in their attempts to influence public perceptions and policy makers in favor of immigrant protection. “Scientific determination” of conditions was a source of power.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ And when researchers spoke in this way, they could transcend boundaries. As Brian Balogh has observed:

While Scott sees legibility as a state project, reform organizations with strong, urban, place-based networks of workers and volunteers who saw themselves as practicing scientific data-gathering for purposes that included leveraging the state to act upon their own agendas could almost be viewed as Gramscian organic intellectuals of the high modernist, bourgeois state. If every social class has its own specialized intellectuals, progressive era reforms in organizations such as the IPL could be viewed as directors and organizers of reformism coming largely out of the bourgeoisie, though some of them might have been seen, or have viewed themselves, as socialists or radicals.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ At a time when tables and statistics allowed their makers to claim objective, scientific knowledge, the IPL and similar reform organizations were masters. The reformers were instrumental in making possible what Scott sees as the great achievement of modern statecraft, deplored by Proudhon in the quote at the beginning of “The IPL and the Hybrid Origins of State Power.”

Dynamic Learning, Bridging Capital

There was, however, a tension between what Hull-House-inspired pragmatists may have thought they were doing and building with data and this sense of legibility and control that Scott attributes to the modern state. Data-gathering in the home could, for example, become a means either for continual adjustment of practices and knowledge, or it could simply become a means to control categories of people.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Maternalist reformers aspired to change public discourse, revision the state, and extend the social ethic, social morality, and the sympathy they felt was essential to democracy to the larger society. “Social action served as a bridge from a self perceived as individual to a self perceived as interdependent.”Footnote ¹⁹² Citizens with a sense of interdependence were better democratic citizens. Therefore, for reformers inspired by Dewey, Addams, and William James, knowledge about one's neighbors was not simply a matter of data-gathering. It required a dynamic understanding of their characteristics, values, and experiences; “identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of Democracy becomes the source and expression of social ethics.”Footnote ¹⁹³ Data collection was a kind of social scientific inquiry that created a wider experience and broadened the sample of life to which the privileged had been exposed; it was a kind of blurring of class boundaries. Thus, the privileged would learn from their interactions with the poor, and they would all envision goals together.

For pragmatists, knowledge acquisition required experimentation and experience; the object was to discover what improvements worked on the ground, regardless of what scientists and social scientists advised.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Like Dewey and James, Addams saw learning as a relational process, where thinking and action were not disjoined and habits of intelligence emerged from action.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Consumers of services possessed unique knowledge of their particular and local circumstances that needed to be taken into account if services were to be useful to them, and they should be involved in co-producing these services.Footnote ¹⁹⁶

Addams's sociology of knowledge was critical of the existing order and of hierarchy; she distinguished her approach to knowledge as quite different from the budding social scientist who was seeking specialized knowledge in order to build and defend professionalization within the academy.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Addams even suggested that “a settlement finds itself curiously more companionable with the state and national bureaus in their efforts in collecting information and analyzing the situation, than it does with university efforts: the bureaus seek data for legislation and applicability, and not for knowledge itself.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Given the extent to which the IPL drew upon progressive faculty members from the University of Chicago (Mack, Freund, Mead), and the extent to which some of these women held academic positions at the same university (Breckenridge, the Abbott sisters, and occasionally Addams herself), Addams's characterization of the university seems rather harsh. It is nevertheless the case that a theory of knowledge that is antihierarchical, relational, and dynamic is at peril in a modern state committed to objectivity, legibility, and control. If Addams and IPL reformers saw themselves as part of a research alliance with state and national bureaus, it is not incorrect that they were sometimes involved in the co-production of knowledge for purposes of its application.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ To the extent pragmatism inspired organizations such as the IPL to seek to empower community members rather than impose solutions through the acquisition of knowledge,Footnote ²⁰⁰ some of these purposes seem to have been eclipsed, at least for a number of decades, as the bureaucratic state developed.Footnote ²⁰¹

Contemporary scholars who have been revisiting progressive era pragmatic reforms have found much to mine as they seek lessons for possible alternative problem-solving arrangements to those in place in large, inflexible, bureaucratic institutions. A number of practices and governing arrangements developed during the progressive era involved learning by monitoring, democratic experimentalism, and incremental reform.Footnote ²⁰² In some, local citizens were given opportunities to participate in practical deliberations concerning matters affecting them. In some cases, research labs, by routinizing knowledge creation, might have offered a means of counteracting the tendency toward organizational rigidity.Footnote ²⁰³ Through such means, it was at least possible that organizations of the period could learn by monitoring, respond to local diversity, and maintain some accountability of local public officials and service providers to the citizens. Local jurisdictions could and did learn from one another.Footnote ²⁰⁴ And because discrete programs were mutually dependent, successes or problems occurring in one arena might well suggest changes warranted in another.Footnote ²⁰⁵ The creation of institutions of problem-solving deliberation required long-term, viable collaboration.Footnote ²⁰⁶

Thinking about Hull-House-inspired progressive era reformers' strong commitment to pragmatism, we may be better able to make sense of—and even trace their hand in—the generation of hybrid institutions with both public and private dimensions.Footnote ²⁰⁷ As progressive era organizations such as the IPL pressed new agendas and responsibilities on the state, they often sought to remain part of the implementation process of policies and programs they considered “theirs.”Footnote ²⁰⁸ They wished to monitor, adjust, and innovate in light of local experience, maintaining a connection to the state and to the programs they had helped launch. In addition, reformers of this period aimed to prevent the emergence of social problems through work in the neighborhoods; not all such work could likely be turned over to the state or to rigid and distant bureaucracies. Service provision and working for the city's needs required local and decentralized efforts.Footnote ²⁰⁹

Boundaries and Boundary Shifting

Julian Mack's remark to the IPL in 1916 that “[p]rivate citizens always have to lead the way and then turn the task over to the public,” makes it appear as if distinctions between public and private were settled and well understood. However, Judge Julian Mack himself was hardly a private actor. He was an elected judge in the Circuit Court of Cook County and during some of his years with the IPL, a judge on the Illinois Appellate Court. And yet, his work with what became United Jewish Charities, with the Juvenile Court Committee and the Juvenile Protective League, and with the IPL, associations with Hull-House, and more suggests that the boundaries between public and private work were often porous and indeterminate in this period. Mack's remark is also suggestive of a dynamic in which what is begun privately is taken over by the state after the activity has been launched by private actors. This would be consistent with Paula Baker's narrative in which female reformers (or female-dominant organizations) realized that the scope of the problems required more than municipal housekeeping and local effort, and often required the infusion of more financial resources than charitable organizations could marshal. For Baker, this growing sensibility, plus women's own growing sense of the advantages of professionalization in addressing social problems, helps explain why organized women willingly yielded up their charitable activities to the state.Footnote ²¹⁰ But although some aspects of the IPL case might be read to fit this narrative, it is insufficient and sometimes misleading if we are attempting to trace means and processes of state building, and it does not help us to grasp complexities in delineating public from private in this era.

Incubation: Demonstration Projects and Political Development

The IPL's railroad station work is a good example of a private initiative launched with an eye to persuading government to take up and even extend the work. It was not so much that the flood of immigrants arriving in Chicago overwhelmed the system of provision run by the IPL, as Baker's trajectory would have it, but rather the IPL leaders seem to have been engaged in strategic action. The IPL seems to have been following a model already adopted successfully by some of these very same Chicago reformers, as in the juvenile court case: develop a prototype, a model, or an experiment, fundraise to implement it, and use a successful model to convince the state to take over funding, operations, and responsibility.

Different railway lines had different stations in Chicago, but in 1910, the IPL persuaded the Chicago and Western Indiana Railroad to donate a small building across the street from its Dearborn station.Footnote ²¹¹ There the IPL set up offices, reception areas, bedrooms, and baths.Footnote ²¹² From that spot, the IPL workers and volunteers tried to get immigrants away from the cabbies and others trying to hustle them from the station to their conveyances. They aided increasing numbers of immigrants. Still, the police were not at first very helpful in directing immigrants across the street. Footnote ²¹³ The first full year the office was in operation (1911), the IPL reported helping about 5,200 people; in 1913, the number had risen to over 41,000.

The IPL wanted the federal government to set up a bureau to protect immigrants in the Chicago railway stations. But the organization wanted government to do more and augmented their case with constitutional argumentation. Grace Abbott and her colleagues contended that because the federal government controlled immigration, its responsibilities did not end with immigrants' entry at Ellis Island or other ports of entry. Rather, because immigrants traveled by ship or train to inland destinations, they should be overseen to their final destination. Agents should be aboard ships and trains to make sure immigrants were not exploited; ships and railroad companies had been splitting up the traffic, often routing immigrants very indirectly to their destinations, when immigrants were not prepared for extra days in transit—often lacking food and money for these unanticipated delays. Grace, who had studied law and who had a longtime advisor in Ernst Freund from the University of Chicago Law School, placed responsibility clearly on the shoulders of the federal government because a key Court decision had taken regulation of immigrants—both in ports and as they moved to cities in the interior—out of the hands of the states. “The decision of the United States Supreme Court holding the state head tax on immigrants unconstitutional ended state regulation and compelled the United States Government to take over this work.”Footnote ²¹⁴ Furthermore, the federal government-levied head tax on immigrants “was much more than enough to pay for really adequate protection and assistance during the first period of adjustment. The need of the Federal Government's undertaking this work was therefore constantly urged.”Footnote ²¹⁵

Abbott made clear that a very important purpose of the IPL's work was “to demonstrate that official supervision was both necessary and practical.” She saw that:

Note that “to demonstrate” meant more than lobbying and drawing on constitutional arguments; it included making a bricks-and-mortar demonstration based on the work of organization and volunteer efforts.

Seeking allies for this crusade, Abbott also enlisted support from the influential Commercial Club of Chicago to pressure Congress to take up this responsibility and establish a federal immigration station in Chicago.Footnote ²¹⁷ The Commercial Club had launched its grand plan for Chicago development and beautification (known as the Burnham Plan) a few years prior and had joined with social reformers on several other initiatives. This underscores Sklar's contention that the linages forged between organized political women and a range of male-dominated political groups advocating various sorts of social welfare legislation between 1900 and 1920 were important because, so joined, “they tipped the balance of the political process heavily in favor of such legislation.”Footnote ²¹⁸ The IPL reported that the Commercial Club of Chicago began cooperating with them in 1910 to secure certain changes in federal immigration policy, including support for a federal protective bureau, provision for inspectors (some women) who would travel on immigrant trains, and reform of the method of sending immigrants from ports of embarkation to the interior so travel would be by the most direct route.Footnote ²¹⁹ In 1913, Illinois Congressman Sabath introduced a bill to establish federal bureaus in train stations. Grace Abbott gave testimony before Secretary of Commerce and Labor Charles Nagel, and with the “most active” support of the Commercial Club, that bill became law in July.Footnote ²²⁰ Under the new law, the Secretary of Labor was authorized to establish immigrant stations in interior cities, and the law “authorized the Secretary to detail immigrant inspectors to travel on immigrant trains.” Money was appropriated to maintain an immigrant station in Chicago.Footnote ²²¹

The federal government became a Chicago landlord by renting a building to provide more or less the same services the IPL had been providing. There were reception rooms, beds, baths, and a laundry. However, after the nice appointments were in place by early 1914, the facility was hardly used for the next two years. Government made no provisions to get immigrants to the new building from the train station. Abbott noted that at first, immigrants were required to pay a local transfer agency to take them to the new immigrant station, but by summer of that year, all railroads bearing Chicago-bound immigrants had agreed to transfer immigrants from their Chicago terminals to this station without charge. However, unless an immigrant had asked at Ellis Island for a transfer to the Federal Station in Chicago, the federal government did not make the transfer happen. Abbott concluded sadly, “This illustration of the way in which an administrative department of the Government can refuse to carry out the laws passed by Congress should be interesting to students of political science.”Footnote ²²²

The IPL acted as a stopgap, offering to perform the terminal-to-center transfer function; however, it ended up having to take over all the work. With the outbreak of World War I, which greatly reduced the volume of immigrants arriving, Congress failed to appropriate enough funds to continue the project.Footnote ²²³ The prototype had been developed; government had been persuaded to assume responsibility, costs, and operations; but ultimately, obtaining ongoing national commitment to make this form of immigrant protection state work failed. If the IPL had envisioned putting itself out of the railroad station aspect of its work, it had only come close.

While the IPL turned to the federal government to accomplish some of its aims, it pressed the state of Illinois to expand its public role to accomplish others, underscoring the point that state building efforts were not simply national. The organization worked for many years to get Illinois to take over a good deal of the non-railway station work of the IPL itself.Footnote ²²⁴ New ventures and ideas from other states influenced the IPL to move in this direction. Grace Abbott's work had come to the attention of Massachusetts, and the new Massachusetts Commission on Immigration, created by the legislature in 1913, would influence the IPL. Upon invitation, Abbott agreed to come to Boston to serve temporarily as the executive secretary of the Massachusetts Commission. The Commission was to “make a full investigation of the status and general condition of immigrants within the Commonwealth, including the way of living, distribution, occupation, educational opportunities and business opportunities and facilities, and also their relation to the industrial, social and economic condition of all the people of the Commonwealth.”Footnote ²²⁵ The Commission was to obtain “information for the enactment of such laws as will bring non-English-speaking foreigners, resident or transient, into sympathetic relations with American institutions and customs”—language mirrored in part of the charge of the Illinois Immigrant Commission.Footnote ²²⁶ Grace completed a comprehensive research project in Massachusetts, making the case for the need for immigrant protection.

A Period of Bureaucratic Incorporation

In 1918, with the support of Governor Lowden, the Illinois legislature authorized creation of the Immigrants Commission within the State Department of Registration and Education. The budget was not particularly generous; what commission members thought was their annual appropriation was meant instead to cover two years.Footnote ²²⁷ The legislation directed the new commission to: “Make a survey of the immigrant, alien born and foreign speaking people of the State, and of their distribution, conditions of employment, and standards of housing and living,” and further directed the commission to “examine into their economic, financial and legal customs, their provisions for insurance and other prudential arrangements, their social organization, and their educational needs; keeping in friendly and sympathetic touch with alien groups and co-operating with State and local officials, and with immigrant or related authorities of other states and of the United States.”Footnote ²²⁸ The IPL took this step as evidence that “a very large public appreciates for the first time facts which the Immigrants Protective League has been pointing out to its constituency since its organization,” and projected that “the State will eventually be in a position to do for the foreign-born of Illinois what the Immigrants Protective League, under the handicap from which a private agency suffers, has attempted to do for the foreign-born of Chicago.”Footnote ²²⁹ Illinois had, in the view of the IPL “created machinery which if properly used will enable the state to avoid unnecessary difficulties and will insure a scientific determination of how those who come to make Illinois their home can be most easily adjusted to their new environment.”Footnote ²³⁰

It would not be much of an overstatement to say that Grace Abbott, who agreed to return to Chicago to take over as executive secretary of the new state Commission, simply moved the office, the records, the staff, the client service work, and the investigative agenda of the IPL from an ostensibly private organization to a state one. Addams had earlier noted that sometimes, settlements had worked under the direction of the bureaus, and under Abbott's leadership of the Commission, we appear to have one such example.Footnote ²³¹ Edith Abbott recounted that her sister Grace “organized the work of the commission on the basis of her Chicago experience.”Footnote ²³² The IPL voted “to put at the disposal of the Commission its records and information as to the Chicago immigrants and to assign a number of agents for work under the direction of the Commission”; this included a stenographer and foreign language agents.Footnote ²³³ Abbott envisioned having these agents—who were also working to secure the attendance of immigrant mothers in special classes offered by the Chicago public schools—help with the surveys that were from time to time going to be made and wanted these visitors of the League to be made agents of the Commission with a nominal (perhaps $1) yearly salary. One member of the Commission said that “similar arrangements for cooperation between public and private agencies have been successful in the past and he felt it should be done in this instance,” and the appointed chairman said he would inquire into state practice.Footnote ²³⁴ Still, Abbott apparently did not intend to subsume the IPL completely into the state:

“To show the general functions of the Commission as viewed by those who asked for the legislation, a letter from Prof. Freund [University of Chicago Law School; IPL policy adviser] outlining the general place which such a Commission should occupy was read” at an early Commission meeting; Abbott also provided a statement about “the general lines of work which might be undertaken and examples of the agencies the Commission would probably cooperate with.”Footnote ²³⁶ With the small budget she had, Grace intended to continue the protective casework and also immediately began more investigations, such as of conditions facing immigrants in the coal-mining communities of southern Illinois and on the educational needs of the state.Footnote ²³⁷ Abbott, of course, wrote of the need for greater public assistance to immigrants. She treated the institutional beachhead as a place from which to expand the immigrant protection agenda.

There was some disagreement on the Commission about the advisability of conducting protective casework lest the Commission “be looked upon as an eleemosynary institution by the immigrant,” with others seeing the value of individual work as the means of discovering conditions and making general investigations; Abbott pointed out that the New York, California, and Massachusetts Commissions all found it necessary because “some agency was needed to make accessible to the immigrant the social agencies both public and private which were able to serve his needs and to give him the information and advice which he needed.” Others were concerned only to the extent the appropriation seemed prohibitively small.Footnote ²³⁸ What Abbott envisioned could be viewed as one type of a public-private hybrid and collaborative institutional venture, with public and private funding and complex relations of responsibility.Footnote ²³⁹ The casework would preserve the benefits of decentralization and of ongoing knowledge building.

The sympathetic governor was succeeded by Governor “Len” Small in 1921, and the “sound public welfare authority” Grace was attempting to build and popularize came to a quick and ignominious end. Her sister's explanation was that the new governor was a “patronage man” who expected to be able to appoint the Commission's employees; Grace had organized the staff on a state civil service basis and would not yield up the positions. The governor then vetoed the Commission's appropriations, and literally overnight, the Commission ceased to exist. Grace, who remained convinced that no private organization or group of such organizations could do this work adequately, “hurriedly reorganized the Immigrants' Protective League, with headquarters at Hull House, and moved such files and such material as were not state property, and set the old machinery of the League in motion as promptly as possible.”Footnote ²⁴⁰ She herself soon left to become successor to Julia Lathrop at the Children's Bureau, and with the loss of her leadership, increasing national pressure for immigrant restriction that led to legislation in 1921 and 1924, the rise of deportation raids, and a difficult fundraising environment, the energy of the IPL was diminished. In 1926, the organization was still trying to reconstitute itself because the reformers had hoped, for some years, that the state would come to its senses and reauthorize the state commission.

Other Pathways for State Building and Capacity Building

The launch of a federal immigration station in Chicago and creation of an Illinois Immigrants Commission were, at one level, failures of institutionalization, but the development of capacity by the IPL that either the federal government or state government could have built upon was far more successful. These instances are perhaps the most high-profile means by which the IPL sought to extend public responsibility, authority, and state capacity. But they are hardly the only means by which the IPL and its allies in the field of immigration protection were involved in advancing the development of the modern state. The IPL's role in the enforcement of compulsory school attendance and in providing draft assistance and income tax assistance to immigrants is illustrative. If we keep in mind that institutional borderlands—especially during moments of institution building—should be interrogated rather than assumed, we can find work for the public sector being performed outside of bureaucratic agencies, organized groups sometimes working strategically to construct bridges and pathways for the state to use, and resources and information flowing both from and to the state in processes of state building.

Data provided to the IPL from Ellis Island also became the means of accomplishing state work, including for the State of Illinois, and the IPL was eventually able to persuade the federal government to assume part of this same work. “For several years, . . . until it persuaded the Bureau of Immigration to take over the task, IPL compiled a list of all children, aged six through sixteen, who came to Illinois by way of Ellis Island. These lists were furnished to truant officers and school superintendents in Illinois communities.”Footnote ²⁴¹ Lists were used for enforcing the Illinois compulsory school attendance law that maternalist reformers had pressed for and supported—a law seen as a means of combatting child labor, combatting illiteracy, and that would improve the adjustment of immigrants to the society. According to Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge, authors of a study on Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools, by the 1870s, the influx of immigrants made it clear that “compulsory school attendance was a grave necessity,” and it was clearly within the legislative powers of the state to prevent children from growing up in illiteracy.Footnote ²⁴² “The importance of the compulsory education law as a means of help and protection to the immigrant family cannot be overestimated,” they wrote; compulsory education also safeguarded the state.Footnote ²⁴³

Grace Abbott was concerned about the quality of education immigrant children were getting in some of the parochial schools maintained by inadequate financing from working-class parents—especially the quality of the English language instruction. She thought that a good, and perhaps the best, response was for state enforcement of a statute “providing that children shall be regarded as truants if they are attending a private school in which English is not the language of instruction and which does not ‘equal in thoroughness and efficiency and in the progress made’ . . . the public schools in the same city or town.”Footnote ²⁴⁴

When she became secretary of the Illinois State Immigrants' Commission from 1919–1921, Grace Abbott began implementing on a statewide basis the enforcement of compulsory school attendance for immigrant children. “She used the method she had worked out earlier for Chicago—having the names of all children arriving at the ports of entry sent to the new state commission with their ages and addresses, and then sent out promptly to the different school superintendents throughout the state.”Footnote ²⁴⁵ The maternal reformers viewed data use to achieve compulsory school attendance as a legitimate state interest in the well-being of the child, protecting the child from the harm of illiteracy; however, from a different angle and drawing on Scott's understanding, it was a means of controlling categories of people. So this policing function was performed collaboratively, and the system the IPL had worked out was then implemented by Abbott when she headed the Immigrants' Commission. IPL activities increased legibility and control. If the Bureau of Immigration took over collecting the data that Abbott found so valuable, the federal government shared this information with immigrant protection organizations in the field, apparently for the asking. In such a fashion, government also helped organizations build capacities that might be used to serve the state.

Finally, the IPL could be seen as helping do government work by linking immigrant men to draft boards during World War I, by providing interpreters, and by explaining to recent immigrants their obligations and their rights. The IPL saw this as a special demand made upon the organization by the war. The IPL claimed it had handled 2,840 draft cases up to mid-February 1918.Footnote ²⁴⁶ The organization also helped newcomers who were nonresident alien employees with the new income tax law, working to clarify ambiguities in the law that sometimes led employers to improperly withhold taxes from the wages of all alien workers. The IPL “co-operated in a successful effort to secure such modifications of the original instructions issued by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue as would clear up certain difficulties.” The organization helped immigrants file applications for refunds for improperly collected tax, and spent a good deal of time explaining the law to employers and workers alike.Footnote ²⁴⁷ It is little wonder that the 1920 chart of Americanization activities mentioned earlier considered a number of organizations, including settlement houses, to be “semi-public agencies.”