The Making of an American
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Jacob A. Riis >> The Making of an American
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22 Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
[Illustration: "The MM Co."]
[Illustration: Jacob A. Riis]
THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN
BY JACOB A. RIIS
AUTHOR OF "HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES," "A TEN YEARS' WAR," "OUT OF
MULBERRY STREET," ETC.
WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS
To LAMMET
TO THE READER
The papers which form this autobiography were originally published
in _The Outlook_, the chapter telling of my going "home to mother"
in _The Churchman_, and parts of one or two others in _The Century
Magazine_. To those who have been asking if they are made-up stories,
let me say here that they are not. And I am mighty glad they are
not. I would not have missed being in it all for anything.
J. A. R.
RICHMOND HILL, N.Y., October, 1901.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE MEETING ON THE LONG BRIDGE
CHAPTER II
I LAND IN NEW YORK AND TAKE A HAND IN THE GAME
CHAPTER III
I GO TO WAR AT LAST, AND SOW THE SEED OF FUTURE CAMPAIGNS
CHAPTER IV
WORKING AND WANDERING
CHAPTER V
I GO INTO BUSINESS, HEADLONG
CHAPTER VI
IN WHICH I BECOME AN EDITOR AND RECEIVE MY FlRST LOVE LETTER
CHAPTER VII
ELIZABETH TELLS HER STORY
CHAPTER VIII
EARLY MARRIED LIFE; I BECOME AN ADVERTISING BUREAU; ON THE "TRIBUNE"
CHAPTER IX
LIFE IN MULBERRY STREET
CHAPTER X
MY DOG IS AVENGED
CHAPTER XI
THE BEND IS LAID BY THE HEELS
CHAPTER XII
I BECOME AN AUTHOR AND RESUME MY INTERRUPTED CAREER AS A LECTURER
CHAPTER XIII
ROOSEVELT COMES--MULBERRY STREET'S GOLDEN AGE
CHAPTER XIV
I TRY TO GO TO THE WAR FOR THE THIRD AND LAST TlME
CHAPTER XV
WHEN I WENT HOME TO MOTHER
CHAPTER XVI
THE AMERICAN MADE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Jacob A. Riis
Our Stork
The Meeting on the Long Bridge
Ribe, from the Castle Hill
The View the Stork got of the Old Town
The Domkirke
Within the Domkirke
Mother
The Deserted Quay
Downstream, where Ships sailed once
A Cobblestone-paved Alley
Father
My Childhood's Home
Down by her Garden, on the River Nibs
The Picture her Mother gave me
Brady's Bend as I knew it
"I found the valley deserted and dead"
"The dead were much better company"
Lunching at Delmonico's
The Fight on the Police Station Steps
"There I set my traps"
Our Old Pastor
When I worked in the Buffalo Ship-yard
"One end of the town was burning while I was canvassing the other"
"I went to hear Horace Greeley address an open-air meeting"
"The wide world seemed suddenly a cold and far-off place"
"Hard Times"
Brother Simmons (_the Rev. Ichabod Simmons_)
The Letter
Elizabeth's Mother
Elizabeth's Home--"The Castle"
Elizabeth as I found her again
"I was face to face with my father"
Bringing the "Loved-up" Flowers
"Out into the open country, into the wide world,--our life's journey
had begun"
Mulberry Street
_Tribune_ Police Bureau
"In which lay dying a French nobleman of proud and ancient name"
Our Office--my Partner, Mr. Ensign, at the Desk, I in the Corner
"About that interview, now," he drawled
"The carriage went on"
"The General said never a word"
Dr. Roger S. Tracy
General Ely Parker (_Chief of the Six Nations_)
The Lodging-room at the Leonard Street Police Station
The Church Street Station Lodging-room, in which I was robbed
The Yellow Newspapers' Contribution
The Mulberry Bend as it was
"The tenants bolted through the windows"
Lodgers at Five Cents a Spot
Bandits' Roost--a Mulberry Bend Alley
Bottle Alley, Mulberry Bend. Headquarters of the Whyo Gang
The Mulberry Bend as it is
My Little Ones gathering Daisies for "the Poors"
Mr. Lowell's Letter
The Boys' "Playground" in an Old-time School
Typical East Side Tenement Block (_five hundred babies in it, not
one bath-tub_)
President Theodore Roosevelt, of the Police Board
"One was sitting asleep on a butter-tub"
Chief of Police Thomas Byrnes
The Mott Street Barracks
Gotham Court
A Tenement House Air-shaft
The School of the New Day
The Way to prevent the Manufacture of "Toughs"
Ribe, in my Childhood (_seen from Elisabeths Garden_)
At Home in the Old Town (_the last time we were all together_)
"The 'gossip benches' are filled"
The Extinct Chimney-sweep
The Ancient Bellwoman
The Village Express
Holy Andrew's Cross
Sir Asker Ryg's Church at Fjennesloevlille
"Horse-meat to-day!"
The Cross of Dannebrog
After Twenty-five Years
King Christian as I saw him last
The Jacob A. Riis House (_No. 50 Henry Street, New York_)
Christmas Eve with the King's Daughters
James Tanner
"The little ones from Cherry Street"
My Silver Bride
Here comes the Baby!
"That minute I knew"
CHAPTER I
THE MEETING ON THE LONG BRIDGE
[Illustration: Our Stork]
On the outskirts of the ancient town of Ribe, on the Danish north
seacoast, a wooden bridge spanned the Nibs River when I was a boy--a
frail structure, with twin arches like the humps of a dromedary,
for boats to go under. Upon it my story begins. The bridge is long
since gone. The grass-grown lane that knew our romping feet leads
nowhere now. But in my memory it is all as it was that day nearly
forty years ago, and it is always summer there. The bees are droning
among the forget-me-nots that grow along shore, and the swans arch
their necks in the limpid stream. The clatter of the mill-wheel
down at the dam comes up with drowsy hum; the sweet smells of meadow
and field are in the air. On the bridge a boy and a girl have met.
He whistles a tune, boy-fashion, with worsted jacket slung across
his arm, on his way home from the carpenter shop to his midday
meal. When she has passed he stands looking after her, all the
music gone out of him. At the other end of the bridge she turns
with the feeling that he is looking, and, when she sees that he
is, goes on with a little toss of her pretty head. As she stands
one brief moment there with the roguish look, she is to stand
in his heart forever--a sweet girlish figure, in jacket of gray,
black-embroidered, with schoolbooks and pretty bronzed boots--
"With tassels!" says my wife, maliciously--she has been looking
over my shoulder. Well, with tassels! What then? Did I not worship
a pair of boots with tassels which I passed in a shop window in
Copenhagen every day for a whole year, because they were the only
other pair I ever saw? I don't know--there may have been more;
perhaps others wore them. I know she did. Curls she had, too--curls
of yellow gold. Why do girls not have curls these days? It is such
a rare thing to see them, that when you do you feel like walking
behind them miles and miles just to feast your eyes. Too much
bother, says my daughter. Bother? Why, I have carried one of your
mother's, miss! all these--there, I shall not say how long--and
carry it still. Bother? Great Scott!
[Illustration: The Meeting on the Long Bridge.]
And is this going to be a love story, then? Well, I have turned
it over and over, and looked at it from every angle, but if I am
to tell the truth, as I promised, I don't see how it can be helped.
If I am to do that, I must begin at the Long Bridge. I stepped
on it that day a boy, and came off it with the fixed purpose of a
man. How I stuck to it is part of the story--the best part, to my
thinking; and I ought to know, seeing that our silver wedding comes
this March. Silver wedding, humph! She isn't a week older than the
day I married her--not a week. It was all in the way of her that
I came here; though at the time I am speaking of I rather guessed
than knew it was Elizabeth. She lived over there beyond the bridge.
We had been children together. I suppose I had seen her a thousand
times before without noticing. In school I had heard the boys
trading in her for marbles and brass buttons as a partner at dances
and games--generally trading off the other girls for her. She was
such a pretty dancer! I was not. "Soldiers and robbers" was more
to my taste. That any girl, with curls or without, should be worth
a good marble, or a regimental button with a sound eye, that could
be strung, was rank foolishness to me until that day on the bridge.
And now I shall have to recross it after all, to tell who and what
we were, that we may start fair. I shall have to go slow, too,
for back of that day everything seems very indistinct and strange.
A few things stand out more clearly than the rest. The day, for
instance, when I was first dragged off to school by an avenging
housemaid and thrust howling into an empty hogshead by the ogre of
a schoolmarm, who, when she had put the lid on, gnashed her yellow
teeth at the bunghole and told me that so bad boys were dealt with
in school. At recess she had me up to the pig-pen in the yard as a
further warning. The pig had a slit in the ear. It was for being
lazy, she explained, and showed me the shears. Boys were no better
than pigs. Some were worse; then--a jab at the air with the scissors
told the rest. Poor father! He was a schoolmaster, too; how much
sorrow it might have spared him had he known of this! But we were
too scared to tell, I suppose. He had set his heart upon my taking
up his calling, and I hated the school from the day I first saw
it. Small wonder. The only study he succeeded in interesting me in
was English, because Charles Dickens's paper, _All the Year Round_,
came to the house with stories ever so much more alluring than the
tedious grammar. He was of the old dispensation, wedded to the
old ways. But the short cut I took to knowledge in that branch I
think opened his eyes to some things ahead of his time. Their day
had not yet come. He lived to see it dawn and was glad. I know how
he felt about it. I myself have lived down the day of the hogshead
in the child-life of New York. Some of the schools our women made
an end of a few years ago weren't much better. To help clean them
out was like getting square with the ogre that plagued my childhood.
I mind, too, my first collision with the tenement. There was just
one, and it stood over against the castle hill, separated from it
only by the dry moat. We called it Rag Hall, and I guess it deserved
the name. Ribe was a very old town. Five hundred years ago or so it
had been the seat of the fighting kings, when Denmark was a power
to be reckoned with. There they were handy when trouble broke out
with the German barons to the south. But the times changed, and of
all its greatness there remained to Ribe only its famed cathedral,
with eight centuries upon its hoary head, and its Latin School.
Of the castle of the Valdemars there was left only this green hill
with solemn sheep browsing upon it and ba-a-a-ing into the sunset. In
the moats, where once ships sailed in from the sea, great billowy
masses of reeds ever bent and swayed under the west wind that
swept over the meadows. They grew much taller than our heads, and
we boys loved to play in them, to track the tiger or the grizzly
to its lair, not without creeping shudders at the peril that might
lie in ambush at the next turn; or, hidden deep down among them,
we lay and watched the white clouds go overhead and listened to
the reeds whispering of the great days and deeds that were.
[Illustration: Ribe, from the Castle Hill.]
The castle hill was the only high ground about the town. It was
said in some book of travel that one might see twenty-four miles
in any direction from Ribe, lying flat on one's back; but that was
drawing the long bow. Flat the landscape was, undeniably. From the
top of the castle hill we could see the sun setting upon the sea,
and the islands lying high in fine weather, as if floating in the
air, the Nibs winding its silvery way through the green fields.
Not a tree, hardly a house, hindered the view. It was grass, all
grass, for miles, to the sand dunes and the beach. Strangers went
into ecstasy over the little woodland patch down by the Long Bridge,
and very sweet and pretty it was; but to me, who was born there, the
wide view to the sea, the green meadows, with the lonesome flight
of the shore-birds and the curlew's call in the night-watches,
were dearer far, with all their melancholy. More than mountains
in their majesty; more, infinitely more, than the city of teeming
millions with all its wealth and might, they seem to me to typify
human freedom and the struggle for it. Thence came the vikings
that roved the seas, serving no man as master; and through the dark
ages of feudalism no lord long bent the neck of those stout yeomen
to the yoke. Germany, forgetting honor, treaties, and history, is
trying to do it now in Slesvig, south of the Nibs, and she will
as surely fail. The day of long-delayed justice, when dynasties by
the grace of God shall have been replaced by government by right
of the people, will find them unconquered still.
Alas! I am afraid that thirty years in the land of my children's
birth have left me as much of a Dane as ever. I no sooner climb the
castle hill than I am fighting tooth and nail the hereditary foes
of my people whom it was built high to bar. Yet, would you have
it otherwise? What sort of a husband is the man going to make who
begins by pitching his old mother out of the door to make room for
his wife? And what sort of a wife would she be to ask or to stand
it?
But I was speaking of the tenement by the moat. It was a ramshackle,
two-story affair with shiftless tenants and ragged children. Looking
back now, I think likely it was the contrast of its desolation with
the green hill and the fields I loved, of its darkness and human
misery and inefficiency with the valiant fighting men of my boyish
dreams, that so impressed me. I believe it because it is so now.
Over against the tenement that we fight in our cities ever rises
in my mind the fields, the woods, God's open sky, as accuser and
witness that His temple is being so defiled, man so dwarfed in body
and soul.
[Illustration: The View the Stork got of the Old Town]
I know that Rag Hall displeased me very much. I presume there must
have been something of an inquiring Yankee twist to my make-up,
for the boys called me "Jacob the delver," mainly because of my
constant bothering with the sewerage of our house, which was of
the most primitive kind. An open gutter that was full of rats led
under the house to the likewise open gutter of the street. That was
all there was of it, and very bad it was; but it had always been
so, and as, consequently, it could not be otherwise, my energies
spent themselves in unending warfare with those rats, whose nests
choked the gutter. I could hardly have been over twelve or thirteen
when Rag Hall challenged my resentment. My methods in dealing with
it had at least the merit of directness, if they added nothing to
the sum of human knowledge or happiness. I had received a "mark,"
which was a coin like our silver quarter, on Christmas Eve, and I
hied myself to Rag Hall at once to divide it with the poorest family
there, on the express condition that they should tidy up things,
especially those children, and generally change their way of living.
The man took the money--I have a vague recollection of seeing a
stunned look on his face--and, I believe, brought it back to our
house to see if it was all right, thereby giving me great offence.
But he did the best for himself that way, for so Rag Hall came under
the notice of my mother too. And there really was some whitewashing
done, and the children were cleaned up for a season. So that the
eight skilling were, if not wisely, yet well invested, after all.
[Illustration: The Domkirke]
[Illustration: Within the Domkirke.]
No doubt Christmas had something to do with it. Poverty and misery
always seem to jar more at the time when the whole world makes
merry. We took an entire week off to keep Christmas in. Till after
New Year's Day no one thought of anything else. The "Holy Eve" was
the greatest of the year. Then the Domkirke shone with a thousand
wax candles that made the gloom in the deep recesses behind the
granite pillars seem deeper still, and brought out the picture
of the Virgin Mary and her child, long hidden under the whitewash
of the Reformation, and so preserved to our day by the very means
taken to destroy it. The people sang the dear old hymns about the
child cradled in the manger, and mother's tears fell in her hymn-book.
Dear old mother! She had a house full, and little enough to manage
with; but never one went hungry or unhelped from her door. I am
a believer in organized, systematic charity upon the evidence of
my senses; but--I am glad we have that one season in which we can
forget our principles and err on the side of mercy, that little
corner in the days of the dying year for sentiment and no questions
asked. No need to be afraid. It is safe. Christmas charity never
corrupts. Love keeps it sweet and good--the love He brought into
the world at Christmas to temper the hard reason of man. Let it
loose for that little spell. January comes soon enough with its
long cold. Always it seems to me the longest month in the year.
It is so far to another Christmas!
[Illustration: Mother.]
To say that Ribe was an old town hardly describes it to readers
at this day. A town might be old and yet have kept step with time.
In my day Ribe had not. It had never changed its step or its ways
since whale-oil lanterns first hung in iron chains across its
cobblestone-paved streets to light them at night. There they hung
yet, every rusty link squeaking dolefully in the wind that never
ceased blowing from the sea. Coal-oil, just come from America, was
regarded as a dangerous innovation. I remember buying a bottle
of "Pennsylvania oil" at the grocer's for eight skilling, as a
doubtful domestic experiment. Steel pens had not crowded out the
old-fashioned goose-quill, and pen-knives meant just what their name
implies. Matches were yet of the future. We carried tinder-boxes
to strike fire with. People shook their heads at the telegraph.
The day of the stage-coach was not yet past. Steamboat and railroad
had not come within forty miles of the town, and only one steam
factory--a cotton mill that was owned by Elizabeth's father. At
the time of the beginning of my story, he, having made much money
during the early years of the American war through foresight in
having supplied himself with cotton, was building another and larger,
and I helped to put it up. Of progress and enterprise he held an
absolute monopoly in Ribe, and though he employed more than half
of its working force, it is not far from the truth that he was
unpopular on that account. It could not be well otherwise in a town
whose militia company yet drilled with flint-lock muskets. Those
we had in the school for the use of the big boys--dreadful old
blunderbusses of the pre-Napoleonic era--were of the same pattern.
I remember the fright that seized our worthy rector when the German
army was approaching in the winter of 1863, and the haste they
made to pack them all up in a box and send them out to be sunk
in the deep, lest they fall into the hands of the enemy; and the
consternation that sat upon their faces when they saw the Prussian
needle-guns.
The watchmen still cried the hour at night They do, for that matter,
yet. The railroad came to town and the march of improvement struck
it, after I had gone away. Century-old institutions were ruthlessly
upset. The police force, which in my boyhood consisted of a man and
a half--that is, one with a wooden leg--was increased and uniformed,
and the night watchmen's chant was stopped. But there are limits
to everything. The town that had been waked every hour of the night
since the early Middle Ages to be told that it slept soundly, could
not possibly take a night's rest without it. It lay awake dreading
all sorts of unknown disasters. Universal insomnia threatened
it; and within a month, on petition of the entire community, the
council restored the songsters, and they squeak to this day. This
may sound like exaggeration; but it is not. It is a faithful record
of what took place and stands so upon the official minutes of the
municipality.
[Illustration: The Deserted Quay.]
When I was in Denmark last year, I looked over some of those old
reports, and had more than one melancholy laugh at the account
of measures taken for the defence of Ribe at the first assault of
the Germans in 1849. That was the year I was born. Ribe, being a
border town on the line of the coveted territory, set about arming
itself to resist invasion. The citizens built barricades in the
streets--one of them, with wise forethought, in front of the drug
store, "in case any one were to faint" and stand in need of Hoffman's
drops or smelling-salts. The women filled kettles with hot water
in the houses flanking an eventual advance. "Two hundred pounds
of powder" were ordered from the next town by foot-post, and a
cannon that had stood half buried a hundred years, serving for a
hitching-post, was dug up and put into commission. There being a
scarcity of guns, the curate of the next village reported arming
his host with spears and battle-axes as the next best thing. A
rumor of a sudden advance of the enemy sent the mothers with babes
in arms scurrying north for safety. My mother was among them. I
was a month old at the time. Thirty years later I battled for the
mastery in the police office in Mulberry Street with a reporter for
the _Staats-Zeitung_ whom I discovered to be one of those invaders,
and I took it out of him in revenge. Old Cohen carried a Danish
bullet in his arm to remind him of his early ill-doings. But it was
not fired in defence of Ribe. That collapsed when a staff officer
of the government, who had been sent out to report upon the zeal
of the Ribe men, declared that the town could be defended only by
damming the river and flooding the meadows, which would cost two
hundred daler. The minutes of the council represent that that was
held to be too great a price to pay for the privilege of being
sacked, perhaps, as a captured town; and the citizen army disbanded.
[Illustration: Downstream where Ships sailed once]
If the coming of the invading army could have been timed to suit,
the sea, which from old was the bulwark of the nation, might have
completed the defences of Ribe without other expense to it than
that of repairing damages. Two or three times a year, usually in
the fall, when it blew long and hard from the northwest, it broke
in over the low meadows and flooded the country as far as the eye
could reach. Then the high causeways were the refuge of everything
that lived in the fields; hares, mice, foxes, and partridges huddled
there, shivering in the shower of spray that shot over the road,
and making such stand as they could against the fierce blast. If the
"storm flood" came early in the season, before the cattle had been
housed, there was a worse story to tell. Then the town butcher went
upon the causeway at daybreak with the implements of his trade to
save if possible, by letting the blood, at least the meat of drowned
cattle and sheep that were cast up by the sea. When it rose higher
and washed over the road, the mail-coach picked its way warily
between white posts set on both sides to guide it safe. We boys
caught fish in the streets of the town, while red tiles flew from
the roofs all about us, and we enjoyed ourselves hugely. It was part
of the duty of the watchmen who cried the hours to give warning if
the sea came in suddenly during the night. And when we heard it we
shivered in our beds with gruesome delight.
The people of Ribe were of three classes: the officials, the
tradesmen, and the working people. The bishop, the burgomaster,
and the rector of the Latin School headed the first class, to which
my father belonged as the senior master in the school. Elizabeth's
father easily led the second class. For the third, it had no
leaders and nothing to say at that time. On state occasions lines
were quite sharply drawn between the classes, but the general
kindliness of the people caused them at ordinary times to be so
relaxed that the difference was hardly to be noticed. Theirs was a
real neighborliness that roamed unrestrained and without prejudice
until brought up with a round turn at the barrier of traditional
orthodoxy. I remember well one instance of that kind. There lived in
our town a single family of Jews, well-to-do tradespeople, gentle
and good, and socially popular. There lived also a Gentile woman
of wealth, a mother in the strictly Lutheran Israel, who fed and
clothed the poor and did no end of good. She was a very pious woman.
It so happened that the Jewess and the Christian were old friends.
But one day they strayed upon dangerous ground. The Jewess saw it
and tried to turn the conversation from the forbidden topic.
"Well, dear friend," she said, soothingly, "some day, when we meet
in heaven, we shall all know better."
The barrier was reached. Her friend fairly bristled as she made
reply:
"What! Our heaven? No, indeed! We may be good friends here, Mrs----,
but there--really, you will have to excuse me."
[Illustration: A Cobblestone paved Alley]
Narrow streams are apt to run deep. An incident which I set down in
justice to the uncompromising orthodoxy of that day, made a strong
impression on me. The two concerned in it were my uncle, a generous,
bright, even a brilliant man, but with no great bump of reverence,
and the deacon in the village church where they lived. He was the
exact opposite of my uncle: hard, unlovely, but deeply religious.
The two were neighbors and quarrelled about their fence-line. For
months they did not speak. On Sunday the deacon strode by on his way
to church, and my uncle, who stayed home, improved the opportunity
to point out of what stuff those Pharisees were made, much to his
own edification. Easter week came. In Denmark it is, or was, custom
to go to communion once a year, on Holy Thursday, if at no other
season, and, I might add, rarely at any other. On Wednesday night,
the deacon appeared, unbidden, at my uncle's door, craving an
interview. If a spectre had suddenly walked in, I do not suppose
he could have lost his wits more completely. He recovered them with
an effort, and bidding his guest welcome, led him courteously to
his office.
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