This dissertation investigates the ways in which volunteers and participants at Chicago settlement houses used the spoken arts to bridge social boundaries and develop a collaborative approach to democratic participation. In Progressive Era Chicago, groups of working-class, immigrant, and Black community members of all ages took advantage of the venues and resources offered by settlement houses to establish self-governing clubs with social, artistic, and political agendas. At meetings, receptions, and performances, club members innovated a shared repertoire of speaking practices, ranging from storytelling and ensemble-based drama to political oratory and debate. When they transferred their artistic philosophy—which centered on the concepts of “give and take” and “with, not for”—to political organizing, the result was a form of reciprocal exchange across social divides that settlement leaders identified as a model for collective decision-making at the organizational and governmental levels. Ultimately, the creative experiments conducted at settlement houses served as a rehearsal for reimagining city governance as a collective project in service of the common welfare.

Generations of scholars have explored the ways in which Chicago settlement leaders codified neighborhood service into new academic and professional fields, claimed a role for women in federal policymaking, and contributed to pragmatist philosophy and democratic theory. This dissertation uncovers the full “ensemble cast” of Chicago Progressivism by introducing two previously unexamined settlement constituencies: student volunteers from local universities, who drew on their interdisciplinary training in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to facilitate settlement pedagogy; and, most significantly, the neighborhood families who embraced settlement programming and made it their own. Weaving together thousands of fragmentary archival materials, including texts produced by neighborhood young people and families, “Democratic Ensembles” contends that through everyday acts of cultural production, Chicagoans rehearsed a more participatory and inclusive civic culture.

This dissertation joins an interdisciplinary scholarly conversation concerning how political, social, and artistic speaking genres have generated theories and practices of democracy, and it applies analytical frameworks drawn from book history, rhetoric, and theatre and performance studies. Combining archival research, interdisciplinary methods, and process-oriented theatre pedagogy, the project constructs a social and political history of spoken arts education, which adds to scholarly inquiry in urban history, gender history, and the history of childhood and youth and offers an actionable model for current practice. The chapters that follow reconstruct the day-to-day operations of settlement programs; the lived experiences of participants and volunteers; the links between settlements and institutions of higher learning; and the ways in which experiments in artistic methodology—emphases on process, reciprocity, improvisation, and ensemble—became metaphors for urban reform. I use institutional publications to investigate the content, methods, intentions, and interactions in settlement clubs, and I highlight the perspectives of neighborhood participants by mining oral history interviews, meeting minutes, club newspapers, and memoirs. The project places on-the-ground activity in conversation with theories of education, recreation, and democracy through analysis of published primary source texts, including university elocution curricula; articles and books written by prominent reformers, educators, and theorists; and contributions to reform periodicals. “Democratic Ensembles” tells the story of enfranchisement through cultural experiences and, in so doing, contributes a new conception of the role of the spoken arts in civic life.