BOWEN COUNTRY CLUB: GENESIS TO REUNION:

The near-west side immigrant community, at the turn of the 20th century, was dominated by Jews, Greeks, and Italians.  The immigrant community, which Jane Addams had labeled "The Hull House Neighborhood" became the laboratory upon which Jane Addams tested her social theories and based her challenges to the establishment. The Bowen Country Club summer camp (1912-1963) was an extension of that laboratory.

Symbolic interactionism vs Eugenics 

Jane Addams’ theory of symbolic interactionism displaced the deterministic doctrine of the Freudian Paradigm but failed to ward off the progressive movement promoting eugenics during that same era.  The liberal intellectuals of that era had proved, to the satisfaction of the establishment, and with geometric logic, that "the American gene pool was being polluted by the genetically inferior southern Europeans." 

Under the banner of social progress, Congress, in 1923, limited  any further emigration from those countries that had given us the cradle of civilization, the beginnings of western civilization and the renaissance.  Those immigrants, genetically connected to the Davids (Jews), the Homers and Alexanders (Greeks) and the Caesars and the Michaelangelo’s (Italians), were excluded from any further participation in the American Dream. 

 The progressive doctrine promoting eugenics also wove its way into the fabric of political platforms evolving during the turmoil of post WWI Europe.  Ironically, the carefully laid out thesis of our socially progressive intellectuals were used by the defense in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.   

Bowen Country Club
In 1912, after the First 20 years of Hull House, Jane Addams and Mrs. Bowen determined that the handful of hours spent at Hull House each week could not displace the 24/7 spent in the cauldron of the near-west side immigrant neighborhood. Easily qualifying in the quote from T.S. Elliot as ". . . rat's alley, where the dead me lost their bones."