Abstract
This paper explores the rhetorical agency of Hilda Satt Polacheck, author of I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl, the only known memoir of life at Hull-House written by an immigrant woman. Polacheck wrote the memoir during the 1950s and 1960s, and her daughter, Dena Epstein, edited the manuscript for posthumous publication in 1989. I Came a Stranger focused on the influence of Jane Addams on Polacheck’s early twentieth century experiences as a “Hull-House girl” and how she became an American at the social settlement. Although the memoir ends in 1935 with the death of Jane Addams, Polacheck’s writings and political activities after 1935 shed new light on the author’s reconstruction of her experiences at Hull-House. When Polacheck began writing the memoir in the 1950s, the FBI was investigating her and her adult children for alleged un-American activities. This article considers how Polacheck reconstructed her rhetorical agency and authority after Jane Addams’ death to promote a more expansive and tolerant Americanism during the politically repressive Cold War era.
