John Greenleaf Whittier - "Personal Poems, Complete"

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William Shakespeare - "The Merchant of Venice"

G.A. Henty - "The Young Carthaginian"

The Making of an American

J >> Jacob A. Riis >> The Making of an American




I like to think of my last meeting with Charles A. Dana, the "Old
Chief" as he was always called in the office. In all the years I
was on the _Sun_ I do not think I had spoken with him a half dozen
times. When he wanted anything of me personally, his orders were
very brief and to the point. It was generally something--a report to
be digested or the story of some social experiment--which showed
me that in his heart he was faithful to his early love; he had
been in his youth, as everybody knows, an enthusiastic reformer,
a member of the Brook Farm Community. But if he thought I saw, he
let no sign escape him. He hated shams; perhaps I was on trial all
the time. If so, I believe that he meant to tell me in that last
hand-shake that he had not found me wanting. It was on the stairs
in the _Sun_ office that we met. I was going up; he was coming
down--going home to die. He knew it. In me there was no suspicion
of the truth when I came upon him at the turn of the stairs,
stumbling along in a way very unlike the usual springy step of the
Old Chief. I hardly knew him when he passed, but as he turned and
held out his hand I saw that it was Mr. Dana, looking somehow older
than I had ever seen him, and changed. I took off my hat and we
shook hands.

"Well," he said, "have you reformed everything to suit you,
straightened out every kink in town?"

"Pretty nearly," I said, falling into his tone of banter; "all
except the _Sun_ office. That is left yet, and as bad as ever."

"Ha!" he laughed, "you come on! We are ready for you. Come right
along!" And with another hearty hand-shake he was gone. He never
saw the _Sun_ office again.

It was the only time he had ever held out his hand to me, after
that first meeting of ours when I was a lonely lad, nearly thirty
years before. That time there was a dollar in it and I spurned
it. This time I like to believe his heart was in it. And I took
it gladly and gratefully.

The police helped--sometimes. More frequently we were at odds,
and few enough in the rank and file understood that I was fighting
for them in fighting the department. A friend came into my office,
laughing, one day, and told me that he had just overheard the
doorman at Police Headquarters say, as he saw me pass:--

"Ugh! the hypocrite! See him take off his hat and then lay us out
cold in his paper when he gets the chance."

He referred to my old-country habit of raising the hat in salutation
instead of merely nodding or touching the brim. No doubt he expressed
a feeling that was quite general at the time. But after Mulberry
Street had taken notice of Roosevelt's friendship for me there was
a change, and then it went to the other extreme. It never quite got
over the fact that he did not "ring me in" on President McKinley
and the Government, or at least make me his private secretary and
deputy boss of the Empire State while he was Governor. The Mulberry
Street idea of friendship includes the loaves and fishes first and
last, and "pull" is the Joss it worships. In fact I had several
times to explain that Mr. Roosevelt had not "gone back on me" to
save his political reputation. When at a public meeting he once
spoke of me as his friend, a dozen policemen brought me copies of
the paper containing "the notice," with a frankly expressed wish
to be remembered when I came into my own, About that time, being
in the neighborhood, I strayed into the Bend one day to enjoy the
sunlight there and the children sporting in it. At the curb stood
a big policeman leisurely peeling an orange, to which he had helped
himself from a cringing Italian's cart. I asked him how were things
in the Bend since the park had come. He eyed me very coldly, and
said, "Bad, very bad." At that I expressed my astonishment, saying
that I was a reporter at Police Headquarters and had understood
differently.

"What paper?" he grunted insolently. I told him. He bestowed a look
of mingled pity and contempt upon me.

"Nix! mine friend," he said, spreading his feet farther apart and
tossing the peel at the Italian, who grinned with delight at such
condescension. I regarded him expectantly. He was a very aggravating
chap.

"Did you say you were at Police Headquarters--for the Sun?" he
observed at length.

"Yes!" He shook his head.

"Nixie! not guilty!" he said tauntingly.

"Why, what do you mean?"

"Haven't you heard of Mr. Riis, Jacob Riis?"

I said I had.

"The Governor's friend?"

"Yes; what of it?"

"Well, ain't he at Headquarters for the _Sun_?"

I said that was so.

"Well?"

I took out my card and handed it to him. "I am that man," I said.

For a fraction of a second the policeman's jaw dropped; but he was
a thoroughbred. His heels came together before, as it seemed, he
could have read my name; he straightened up. The half-peeled orange
fell from his hand and rolled into the gutter, covertly speeded by
a dextrous little kick. The unhappy Italian, believing it a mishap,
made haste to select the biggest and juiciest fruit on his stand,
and held it out with a propitiatory bow, but he spurned him haughtily
away.

"These dagoes," he said, elaborately placing my card in the sweat-band
of his hat, "ain't got no manners. It's a hard place for a good
man down here. It's time I was a roundsman. You can do it. You've
got de 'pull.'"

When Roosevelt had gone to Washington to help fit out the navy for
the war with Spain, I spent a part of the winter there with him,
and Mulberry Street took it for granted that I had at last been
"placed" as I should have been long before. There was great amazement
when I came back to take my old place. The truth was that I had
gone partly to observe what went on at the capital for my paper,
and partly to speed on the war, in which I was a hearty believer
from the first. It was to me a means, first and last, of ending the
murder in Cuba. One of the very earliest things I had to do with
as a reporter was the _Virginius_ massacre, and ever since it had
been bloodshed right along. It was time to stop it, and the only
way seemed to wrest the grip of Spain from the throat of the island.
I think I never quite got over the contempt I conceived for Spain
and Spanish ways when I read as a boy, in Hans Christian Andersen's
account of his travels in the country of the Dons, that the
shepherds brought butter from the mountains in sheep's intestines
and measured them off in lengths demanded by the customers by tying
knots upon them. What was to be expected from a country that sold
butter by the yard? As the event showed, it ran its navies after the
same fashion and was justly punished. I made friends that winter
with Dr. Leonard Wood, whom we all came to know and admire afterwards
as General and Governor Wood; and a fine fellow he was. He was
Roosevelt's friend and physician, and we spent many strenuous hours
together, being in that mood.

For the third time in my life, and the last, I wanted to go to the
war, when they went, and oh! so badly. Not to fight,--I had had
all I needed of that at home,--but to tell the truth about what
was going on in Cuba. The _Outlook_ offered me that post, and the
_Sun_ agreed heartily; but once more the door was barred against
me. Two of my children had scarlet fever, my oldest son had gone
to Washington trying to enlist with the Rough Riders, and the one
next in line was engineering to get into the navy on his own hook.
My wife raised no objection to my going, if it was duty; but her
tears fell silently--and I stayed. It was "three times and out."
I shall never go to the war now unless in defence of my own home,
which may God forbid. Within a year I knew that, had I gone then,
I should most likely not have returned. I had received notice that
to my dreams of campaigning in that way there was an end. Thankful
that I had been spared, I yet took leave of them with a sigh; most
illogically, for I hate the sight of human suffering and of brutal
passions aroused. But deep down in my heart there is the horror of
my Viking forefathers of dying in bed, unable to strike back, as
it were. I know it is wicked and foolish, but all my life I have
so wished to get on a horse with a sword, and slam in just once,
like another Sheridan. I, who cannot sit on a horse! Even the
one Roosevelt got me at Montauk that was warranted "not to bite
or scratch" ran away with me. So it is foolishness, plain to see.
Yet, so I might have found out which way I would really have run
when the call came. I do hope the right way, but I never have felt
quite sure.

The casualties of war are not all on the battlefield. The Cuban
campaign wrecked a promising career as a foreign correspondent which
I had been building up for some ten or fifteen years with toilsome
effort. It was for a Danish newspaper I wrote with much approval,
but when the war came, they did not take the same view of things
that I did, and fell to suppressing or mutilating my letters,
whereupon our connection ceased abruptly. My letters were, explained
the editor to me a year or two later when I saw him in Copenhagen,
so--er--r--ultra-patriotic, so--er-r--youthful in their enthusiasm,
that--huh! I interrupted him with the remark that I was glad we
were young enough yet in my country to get up and shout for the
flag in a fight, and left him to think it over. They must have aged
suddenly over there, for they were not that way when I was a boy.
The real fact was that somehow they could not get it into their
heads that a European bully could be whipped in one round by "the
States." They insisted on printing ridiculous despatches about
Spanish victories. I think there was something about codfish, too,
something commercial about corks and codfish--Iceland keeping Spain
on a fish diet in Lent, in return for which she corked the Danish
beer--I have forgotten the particulars. The bottom fact was
a distrust of the United States that was based upon a curiously
stubborn ignorance, entirely without excuse in a people of high
intelligence like the Danes. I tried hard as a correspondent to
draw a reasonable, human picture of American affairs, but it seemed
to make no impression. They would jump at the Munchausen stories
that are always afloat, as if America were some sort of menagerie
and not a Christian country. I think nothing ever aggravated me
as did an instance of that kind the year Ben Butler ran for the
Presidency. I had been trying in my letters to present the political
situation and issues fairly, and was beginning to feel that they
_must_ understand, when I received a copy of my paper from Copenhagen
and read there a "life" of General Butler, which condensed, ran
something like this:--

"Mr. Butler was an ambitious young lawyer, shrewd and full of bold
schemes for enriching himself. When the war with the South broke
out, he raised all the money he could and fitted out a fleet of
privateers. With this he sailed for New Orleans, captured the city,
and, collecting all the silver spoons it contained, freighted his
vessels with them, and returned to the North. Thus he laid the
foundation for his great fortune, but achieved lasting unpopularity
in the South, which will prevent his election to the Presidency."

I am not joking. That was how the story of the silver spoons looked
in Danish a quarter of a century after the war. Really, now, what
would you have done? I laughed and--well! made remarks by turns,
and in the end concluded that there was nothing else that could be
done except buckle to and try again; which I did.

If I could not go to the war, I could at least go electioneering
with Roosevelt when he came back and try to help him out the best
I knew how in matters that touched the poor and their life, once
he sat in Cleveland's chair in Albany. I do not think he felt that
as an added dignity, but I did and I told him so, whereat he used
to laugh a little. But there was nothing to laugh at. They are
men of the same stamp, not saints any more than the rest of us,
but men with minds and honest wills, if they have different ways of
doing things. I wish some Cleveland would come along again soon and
give me another chance to vote the ticket which Tammany obstructs
with its impudent claim that it is the Democratic party. As for
Roosevelt, few were nearer to him, I fancy, than I, even at Albany.
No doubt he made his mistakes like the rest of us, and when he
did there were not wanting critics to make the most of it. I wish
they had been half as ready to lend him a hand. We might have been
farther on the road then. I saw how faithfully he labored. I was
his umpire with the tailors, with the drug clerks, in the enforcement
of the Factory Law against sweaters, and I know that early and
late he had no other thought than how best to serve the people who
trusted him. I want no better Governor than that, and I guess we
shall want him a long time before we get one as good.

I found out upon our electioneering tours that I was not a good
stump-speaker, especially on the wing with five-minute stops of the
train. It used to pull out with me inwardly raging, all the good
things I meant to say unsaid. The politicians knew that trick
better, and I left the field to them speedily. Thereafter I went
along just for company. Only two or three times did I rise to
the occasion. Once when I spoke in the square at Jamestown, N.Y.,
where I had worked as a young lad and trapped muskrats in the creek
for a living. The old days came back to me as I looked upon that
mighty throng, and the cheers that arose from it told me that I had
"caught on." I was wondering whether by any chance the old ship
captain who finished me as a lecturer once was in it, but he was
not; he was dead. Another time was in Flushing, Long Island. There
was not room in the hall, and they sent me out to talk to the crowd
in the street. The sight of it, with the flickering torchlight upon
the sea of upturned faces, took me somehow as nothing ever had,
and the speech I made from the steps, propped up by two policemen,
took the crowd, too; it cheered so that Roosevelt within stopped
and thought some enemy had captured the meeting. When he was gone,
with the spirit still upon me I talked to the meeting in the hall
till it rose and shouted. My political pet enemy from Richmond
Hill was on the platform and came over to embrace me. We have been
friends since. The memory of that evening lingers yet in Flushing,
I am told.

A picture from that day's trip through Long Island will ever abide
on my mind. The train was about to pull out from the station in
Greenport, when the public school children came swarming down to
see "Teddy." He leaned out from the rear platform, grasping as many
of the little hands as he could, while the train hands did their
best to keep the track clear. Way back in the jostling, cheering
crowd I made out the slim figure of a pale, freckled little girl
in a worn garment, struggling eagerly but hopelessly to get near
him. The stronger children pushed her farther back, and her mournful
face was nearly the last of them all when Roosevelt saw her. Going
down the steps even as the train started, he made a quick dash,
clearing a path through the surging tide to the little girl, and
taking her hand, gave it the heartiest shake of all, then sprinted
for the departing car and caught it. The last I saw of Greenport
was the poor little girl holding tight the hand her hero had shaken,
with her face all one sunbeam of joy.

I know just how she felt, for I have had the same experience. One
of the things I remember with a pleasure which the years have no
power to dim is my meeting with Cardinal Gibbons some years ago.
They had asked me to come to Baltimore to speak for the Fresh Air
Fund, and to my great delight I found that the Cardinal was to
preside. I had always admired him at a distance, but during the
fifteen minutes' talk we had before the lecture he won my heart
entirely. He asked me to forgive him if he had to go away before
I finished my speech, for he had had a very exhausting service the
day before, "and I am an old man, on the sunny side of sixty," he
added as if in apology.

"On the shady side, you mean," amended the Presbyterian clergyman
who was on the committee. The Cardinal shook his head, smiling.

"No, doctor! The sunny side--nearer heaven."

The meeting was of a kind to inspire even the dullest speaker.
When I finished my plea for the children and turned around, there
sat the Cardinal yet behind me, though it was an hour past his
bedtime. He came forward and gave me his blessing then and there.
I was never so much touched and moved. Even my mother, stanch old
Lutheran that she is, was satisfied when I told her of it, though,
in the nature of things, the idea of her son consorting in that way
with principalities and powers in the enemy's camp must have been
a shock to her.

Speaking of which, reminds me of the one brief glimpse into the
mysteries of the universe I had while in Galesburg, Ill., the same
year. I had been lecturing at Knox College, of which my friend
John Finley was the President. It rained before the meeting, but
when we came out, the stars shone brightly, and I was fired with
a sudden desire to see them through the observatory telescope. The
professor of astronomy took me into the dark dome and pointed the
glass at Saturn, which I knew as a scintillating point of light,
said to be a big round ball like our earth, and had taken on trust
as a matter of course. But to see it hanging there, white and big
as an apple, suspended within its broad and shining ring, was a
revelation before which I stood awe-stricken and dumb. I gazed and
gazed; between the star and its ring I caught the infinite depth of
black space beyond; I seemed to see almost the whirl, the motion;
to hear the morning stars sing together--and then like a flash it
was gone. Crane my neck on my ladder as I might I could not get
sight of it.

"But where did she go?" I said, half to myself. Far down in the
darkness came the old professor's deep voice:--

"That time you saw the earth move."

And so I did. The clockwork that made the dome keep up with the
motion of the stars--of our world rather--had run down, and when
Saturn passed out of my sight, as I thought, it was the earth
instead which I literally saw move.

And now that I am on my travels let me cross the ocean long enough to
say that my digging among the London slums one summer only served
to convince me that their problem is the same as ours, and is to
be solved along the same lines. They have their ways, and we have
ours, and each has something to learn from the other. We copied our
law that enabled us to tear down slum tenements from the English
statute under which they cleared large areas over yonder long
before we got to work. And yet in their poor streets--in "Christian
Street" of all places--I found families living in apartments entirely
below the sidewalk grade. I found children poisoned by factory
fumes in a charitable fold, and people huddled in sleeping-rooms
as I had never seen it in New York. And when I asked why the police
did not interfere, they looked at me, uncomprehending, and retorted
that they were on their own premises--the factory, too--and where
did the police come in? I told them that in New York they came in
when and where they saw fit, and systematically in the middle of
the night so that they might get at the exact facts. As for our
cave-dwellers, we had got rid of them a long time since by the
simple process of dragging out those who wouldn't go and shutting
the cellar doors against them. It had to be done and it was done,
and it settled the matter.

"I thought yours was a free country," said my policeman conductor.

"So it is," I told him, "freedom to poison yourself and your neighbor
excepted." He shook his head, and we went on.

But these were mere divergences of practice. The principle is
not affected. It was clear enough that in London, as in New York,
it was less a question of transforming human nature in the tenant
than of reforming it in the landlord; At St. Giles I found side by
side with the work-house a church, a big bath and wash-house, and
a school. It was the same at Seven Dials. At every step it recalled
the Five Points. To the one as to the other, steeped in poverty and
crime, had come the road-builder, the missionary, the school-teacher,
and let light in together. And in their track was following, rather
faster there than here as yet, the housing reformer with his atoning
scheme of philanthropy and five per cent. That holds the key. In
the last analysis it is a question of how we rate the brotherhood,
what per cent we will take. My neighbor at table in my London
boarding-house meant that, though he put it in a way all his own.
He was a benevolent enough crank, but no friend of preaching. Being
a crank, he condemned preachers with one fell swoop:--

"The parsons!" he said; "my 'evings, what hare they? In hall me
life hi've known only two that were fit to be in the pulpit."

Returning to my own country, I found the conviction deepening
wherever the slum had got a grip, that it was the problem not only
of government but of humanity. In Chicago they are setting limits
to it with parks and playgrounds and the home restored. In Cincinnati,
in Cleveland, in Boston, they are bestirring themselves. Indeed,
in Boston they have torn down more foul tenements than did we in
the metropolis, and with less surrender to the slum landlord. In New
York a citizens' movement paved the way for the last Tenement-House
Commission, which has just finished its great work, and the movement
is warrant that the fruits of that work will not be lost. Listen
to the arraignment of the tenement by that Commission, appointed
by the State:--

"All the conditions which surround childhood, youth, and womanhood
in New York's crowded tenement quarters make for unrighteousness.
They also make for disease. ... From the tenements there comes a
stream of sick, helpless people to our hospitals and dispensaries...
from them also comes a host of paupers and charity seekers. Most
terrible of all... the fact that, mingled with the drunken, the
dissolute, the improvident, the diseased, dwell the great mass of
the respectable workingmen of the city with their families."

This after all the work of twenty years! Yet the work was not wasted,
for at last we see the truth. Seeing, it is impossible that the
monstrous wrong should go unrighted and government of the people
endure, as endure it will, I know. We have only begun to find out
what it can do for mankind in the day when we shall all think enough
about the common good, the _res publica_, to forget about ourselves.

In that day, too, the boss shall have ceased from troubling. However
gross he wax in our sight, he has no real substance. He is but an
ugly dream of political distemper. Sometimes when I hear him spoken
of with bated breath, I think of the Irish teamster who went to
the priest in a fright; he had seen a ghost on the church wall as
he passed it in the night.

"And what was it like?" asked the priest.

"It was like nothing so much as a big ass," said Patrick, wide-eyed.

"Go home, Pat! and be easy. You've seen your own shadow."

But I am tired now and want to go home to mother and rest awhile.




CHAPTER XV

WHEN I WENT HOME TO MOTHER



There was a heavy step on the stairs, a rap that sounded much as
if an elephant had knocked against the jamb in passing, and there
in the door stood a six-foot giant, calmly surveying me, as if I
were a specimen bug stuck on a pin for inspection, instead of an
ordinary man-person with no more than two legs.

"Well?" I said, groping helplessly among the memories of the past
for a clew to the apparition. Somewhere and sometime I had seen
it before; that much I knew and no more.

The shape took a step into the room. "I am Jess," it said simply,
"Jess Jepsen from Lustrup."

"Lustrup!" I pushed back papers and pen and strode toward the giant
to pull him up to the light. Lustrup! Talk about seven league
boots! that stride of mine was four thousand miles long, if it
was a foot. It spanned the stormy Atlantic and the cold North Sea
and set me down in sight of the little village of straw-thatched
farm-houses where I played in the long ago, right by the dam in
the lazy brook where buttercups and forget-me-nots nodded ever over
the pool, and the pewit built its nest in spring. Just beyond, the
brook issued forth from the meadows to make a detour around the
sunken walls of the old manse and lose itself in the moor that
stretched toward the western hills. Lustrup! Oh, yes! I pushed my
giant into a chair so that I might have a look at him.

[Illustration: Ribe, in my Childhood. Seen from Elisabeth's garden]

He was just like the landscape of his native plain; big and calm
and honest. Nothing there to hide; couldn't if it tried. And, like
his village, he smelled of the barn-yard. He was a driver, he told
me, earning wages. But he had his evenings to himself; and so he
had come to find, through me, a school where he might go and learn
English. Just so! It was Lustrup all over. I remembered as though
it were yesterday the time I went up to have a look at the dam
I hadn't seen for thirty years, and the sun-fish and the pewit
so anxiously solicitous for her young, and found the brook turned
aside and the western earth-wall of the manse, which it skirted,
all gone; and the story the big farmer, Jess Jepsen's father, told
me with such quiet pride, standing there, of how because of trouble
made by the Germans at the "line" a mile away the cattle business
had run down and down until the farm didn't pay; how he and "the
boy" unaided, working patiently year by year with spade and shovel,
had dug down the nine acres of dry upland, moved the wall into
the bottoms and turned the brook, making green meadow of the sandy
barren, and saving the farm. The toil of twenty years had broken
the old man's body, but his spirit was undaunted as ever. There was
a gleam of triumph in his eye as he shook his fist at the "line"
post on the causeway. "We beat them," he said; "we did."

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