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The Making of an American

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




From that interview he came forth a changed man. Long years after
I heard the full story of it from my uncle's own lips. It was simple
enough. The deacon said that duty called him to the communion
table on the morrow, and that he could not reconcile it with his
conscience to go with hate toward his neighbor in his heart. Hence
he had come to tell him that he might have the line as he claimed
it. The spark struck fire. Then and there they made up and were warm
friends, though agreeing in nothing, till they died. "The faith,"
said my uncle in telling of it, "that could work in that way upon
such a nature, is not to be made light of." And he never did after
that. He died a believing man.

It may be that it contributed something to the ordinarily democratic
relations of the upper-class men and the tradespeople that the
latter were generally well-to-do, while the officials mostly had a
running fight of it with their incomes. My father's salary had to
reach around to a family of fourteen, nay, fifteen, for he took
his dead sister's child when a baby and brought her up with us,
who were boys all but one. Father had charge of the Latin form, and
this, with a sense of grim humor, caused him, I suppose, to check
his children off with the Latin numerals, as it were. The sixth
was baptized Sextus, the ninth Nonus, though they were not called
so, and he was dissuaded from calling the twelfth Duodecimus only
by the certainty that the other boys would miscall him "Dozen." How
I escaped Tertius I don't know. Probably the scheme had not been
thought of then. Poor father! Of the whole fourteen but one lived
to realize his hopes of a professional career, only to die when
he had just graduated from the medical school. My oldest brother
went to sea; Sophus, the doctor, was the next; and I, when it came
my time to study in earnest, refused flatly and declared my wish
to learn the carpenter's trade. Not till thirty years after did
I know how deep the wound was I struck my father then. He had set
his heart upon my making a literary career, and though he was very
far from lacking sympathy with the workingman--I rather think that
he was the one link between the upper and lower strata in our town
in that way, enjoying the most hearty respect of both--yet it was
a sad disappointment to him. It was in 1893, when I saw him for
the last time, that I found it out, by a chance remark he dropped
when sitting with my first book, "How the Other Half Lives," in
his hand, and also the sacrifice he had made of his own literary
ambitions to eke out by hack editorial work on the local newspaper
a living for his large family. As for me, I would have been repaid
for the labor of writing a thousand books by witnessing the pride
he took in mine. There was at last a man of letters in the family,
though he came by a road not down on the official map.

[Illustration: Father.]

Crying over spilt milk was not my father's fashion, however. If I
was to be a carpenter, there was a good one in town, to whom I was
forthwith apprenticed for a year. During that time, incidentally,
I might make up my mind, upon the evidence of my reduced standing,
that school was, after all, to be preferred. And thus it was that
I came to be a working boy helping build her proud father's factory
at the time I fell head over heels in love with sweet Elizabeth.
Certainly I had taken no easy road to the winning of my way and
my bride; so reasoned the town, which presently took note of my
infatuation. But, then, it laughed, there was time enough. I was
fifteen and she was not thirteen. There was time enough, oh, yes!
Only I did not think so. My courtship proceeded at a tumultuous
pace, which first made the town laugh, then put it out of patience
and made some staid matrons express the desire to box my ears
soundly. It must be owned that if courting were generally done on
the plan I adopted, there would be little peace and less safety
all around. When she came playing among the lumber where we were
working, as she naturally would, danger dogged my steps. I carry a
scar on the shin-bone made with an adze I should have been minding
when I was looking after her. The forefinger on my left hand has
a stiff joint. I cut that off with an axe when she was dancing on
a beam close by. Though it was put on again by a clever surgeon
and kept on, I have never had the use of it since. But what did a
finger matter, or ten, when she was only there! Once I fell off the
roof when I must crane my neck to see her go around the corner. But
I hardly took note of those things, except to enlist her sympathy by
posing as a wounded hero with my arm in a sling at the dancing-school
which I had joined on purpose to dance with her. I was the biggest
boy there, and therefore first to choose a partner, and I remember
even now the snickering of the school when I went right over and
took Elizabeth. She flushed angrily, but I didn't care. That was
what I was there for, and I had her now. I didn't let her go again,
either, though the teacher delicately hinted that we were not a
good match. She was the best dancer in the school, and I was the
worst. Not a good match, hey! That was as much as she knew about
it.

It was at the ball that closed the dancing-school that I excited the
strong desire of the matrons to box my ears by ordering Elizabeth's
father off the floor when he tried to join in before midnight, the
time set for the elders to take charge. I was floor committee, but
how I could do such a thing passes my understanding, except on the
principle laid down by Mr. Dooley that when a man is in love he
is looking for fight all around. I must have been, for they had to
hold me back by main strength from running away to the army that was
fighting a losing fight with two Great Powers that winter. Though
I was far under age, I was a big boy, and might have passed; but
the hasty retreat of our brave little band before overwhelming
odds settled it. With the echoes of the scandal caused by the ball
episode still ringing, I went off to Copenhagen to serve out my
apprenticeship there with a great builder whose name I saw among
the dead in the paper only the other day. He was ever a good friend
to me.

[Illustration: My Childhood's Home]

The third day after I reached the capital, which happened to be
my birthday, I had appointed a meeting with my student brother at
the art exhibition in the palace of Charlottenborg. I found two
stairways running up from the main entrance, and was debating in
my mind which to take, when a handsome gentleman in a blue overcoat
asked, with a slight foreign accent, if he could help me. I told
him my trouble, and we went up together.

We walked slowly and carried on quite an animated conversation; that
is to say, I did. His part of it was confined mostly to questions,
which I was no way loth to answer. I told him about myself and my
plans; about the old school, and about my father, whom I took it for
granted he knew; for was he not the oldest teacher in the school,
and the wisest, as all Ribe could testify? He listened to it all
with a curious little smile, and nodded in a very pleasant and
sympathetic way which I liked to see. I told him so, and that
I liked the people of Copenhagen well; they seemed so kind to a
stranger, and he put his hand on my arm and patted it in a friendly
manner that was altogether nice. So we arrived together at the door
where the red lackey stood.

He bowed very deep as we entered, and I bowed back, and told my
friend that there was an example of it; for I had never seen the
man before. At which he laughed outright, and, pointing to a door,
said I would find my brother in there, and bade me good-by. He was
gone before I could shake hands with him; but just then my brother
came up, and I forgot about him in my admiration of the pictures.

We were resting in one of the rooms an hour later, and I was going
over the events of the day, telling all about the kind stranger,
when in he came, and nodded, smiling at me.

"There he is," I cried, and nodded too. To my surprise, Sophus got
up with a start and salaamed in haste.

"Good gracious!" he said, when the stranger was gone. "You don't
mean to say he was your guide? Why, that was the King, boy!"

I was never so astonished in my life and expect never to be again.
I had only known kings from Hans Christian Andersen's story books,
where they always went in coronation robes, with long train and
pages, and with gold crowns on their heads. That a king could go
around in a blue overcoat, like any other man, was a real shock to
me that I didn't get over for a while. But when I got to know more
of King Christian, I liked him all the better for it. You couldn't
help that anyhow. His people call him "the good king" with cause.
He is that.

Speaking of Hans Christian Andersen, we boys loved him as a matter
of course; for had he not told us all the beautiful stories that
made the whole background of our lives? They do that yet with me,
more than you would think. The little Christmas tree and the hare
that made it weep by jumping over it because it was so small, belong
to the things that come to stay with you always. I hear of people
nowadays who think it is not proper to tell children fairy-stories.
I am sorry for those children. I wonder what they will give them
instead. Algebra, perhaps. Nice lot of counting machines we shall
have running the century that is to come! But though we loved
Andersen, we were not above playing our pranks upon him when
occasion offered. In those days Copenhagen was girt about with
great earthen walls, and there were beautiful walks up there under
the old lindens. On moonlight nights when the smell of violets was
in the air, we would sometimes meet the poet there, walking alone.
Then we would string out irreverently in Indian file and walk up,
cap in hand, one after another, to salute him with a deeply respectful
"Good evening, Herr Professor!" That was his title. His kind face
would beam with delight, and our proffered fists would be buried
in the very biggest hand, it seemed to us, that mortal ever
owned,--Andersen had very large hands and feet,--and we would go
away gleefully chuckling and withal secretly ashamed of ourselves.
He was in such evident delight at our homage.

They used to tell a story of Andersen at the time that made the whole
town laugh in its sleeve, though there was not a bit of malice in
it. No one had anything but the sincerest affection for the poet
in my day; his storm and stress period was then long past. He was,
it was said, greatly afraid of being buried alive. So that it might
not happen, he carefully pinned a paper to his blanket every night
before he went to sleep, on which was written: "I guess I am only
in a trance." [Footnote: In Danish: "Jeg er vist skindod."] Needless
to say, he was in no danger. When he fell into his long sleep, the
whole country, for that matter the whole world, stood weeping at
his bier.

Four years I dreamt away in Copenhagen while I learned my trade.
The intervals when I was awake were when she came to the town on
a visit with her father, or, later, to finish her education at a
fashionable school. I mind the first time she came. I was at the
depot, and I rode with her on the back of their coach, unknown to
them. So I found out what hotel they were to stay at. I called the
next day, and purposely forgot my gloves. Heaven knows where I got
them from I probably borrowed them. Those were not days for gloves.
Her father sent them to my address the next day with a broad hint
that, having been neighborly, I needn't call again. He was getting
square for the ball. But my wife says that I was never good at taking
a hint, except in the way of business, as a reporter. I kept the
run of her all the time she was in the city. She did not always
see me, but I saw her, and that was enough. I watched her home from
school in the evening, and was content, though she was escorted
by a cadet with a pig-sticker at his side. He was her cousin, and
had given me his word that he cared nothing about her. He is a
commodore and King Christian's Secretary of Navy now. When she was
sick, I pledged my Sunday trousers for a dollar and bought her a
bouquet of flowers which they teased her about until she cried and
threw it away. And all the time she was getting more beautiful and
more lovable. She was certainly the handsomest girl in Copenhagen,
which is full of charming women.

[Illustration: Down by her Garden, on the River Nibs.]

There were long spells when she was away, and when I dreamt on
undisturbed. It was during one of these that I went to the theatre
with my brother to see a famous play in which an assassin tried
to murder the heroine, who was asleep in an armchair. Now, this
heroine was a well-known actress who looked singularly like Elizabeth.
As she sat there with the long curls sweeping her graceful neck,
in imminent danger of being killed, I forgot where I was, what it
was, all and everything except that danger threatened Elizabeth,
and sprang to my feet with a loud cry of murder, trying to make
for the stage. My brother struggled to hold me back. There was a
sensation in the theatre, and the play was held up while they put
me out. I remember King George of Greece eying me from his box as
I was being transported to the door, and the rascal murderer on
the stage looking as if he had done something deserving of praise.
Outside, in the cold, my brother shook me up and took me home,
a sobered and somewhat crestfallen lad. But, anyhow, I don't like
that kind of play. I don't see why the villain on the stage is any
better than the villain on the street. There are enough of them
and to spare. And think if he _had_ killed her!

The years passed, and the day came at last when, having proved my
fitness, I received my certificate as a duly enrolled carpenter of
the guild of Copenhagen, and, dropping my tools joyfully and in
haste, made a bee-line for Ribe, where she was. I thought that
I had moved with very stealthy steps toward my goal, having grown
four years older than at the time I set the whole community by the
ears. But it could not have been so, for I had not been twenty-four
hours in town before it was all over that I had come home to propose
to Elizabeth; which was annoying but true. By the same sort of
sorcery the town knew in another day that she had refused me, and
all the wise heads wagged and bore witness that they could have
told me so. What did I, a common carpenter, want at the "castle"?
That was what they called her father's house. He had other plans
for his pretty daughter.

As for Elizabeth, poor child! she was not yet seventeen, and was
easily persuaded that it was all wrong; she wept, and in the goodness
of her gentle heart was truly sorry; and I kissed her hands and
went out, my eyes brimming over with tears, feeling that there was
nothing in all the wide world for me any more, and that the farther
I went from her the better. So it was settled that I should go
to America. Her mother gave me a picture of her and a lock of her
hair, and thereby roused the wrath of the dowagers once more; for
why should I be breaking my heart over Elizabeth in foreign parts,
since she was not for me? Ah, but mothers know better! I lived on
that picture and that curl six long years.

[Illustration: The Picture her Mother gave me]

One May morning my own mother went to the stagecoach with me to see
me off on my long journey. Father stayed home. He was ever a man
who, with the tenderest of hearts, put on an appearance of great
sternness lest he betray it. God rest his soul! That nothing that
I have done caused him greater grief in his life than the separation
that day is sweet comfort to me now. He lived to take Elizabeth
to his heart, a beloved daughter. For me, I had been that morning,
long before the sun rose, under her window to bid her good-by, but
she did not know it. The servants did, though, and told her of it
when she got up. And she, girl-like, said, "Well, I didn't ask him
to come;" but in her secret soul I think there was a small regret
that she did not see me go.

So I went out in the world to seek my fortune, the richer for some
$40 which Ribe friends had presented to me, knowing that I had
barely enough to pay my passage over in the steerage. Though I had
aggravated them in a hundred ways and wholly disturbed the peace
of the old town, I think they liked me a little, anyway. They were
always good, kind neighbors, honest and lovable folk. I looked
back with my mother's blessing yet in my ears, to where the gilt
weather-vanes glistened on her father's house, and the tears brimmed
over again. And yet, such is life, presently I felt my heart bound
with a new courage. All was not lost yet. The world was before me.
But yesterday the chance befell that, in going to communion in the
old Domkirke, I knelt beside her at the altar rail. I thought of
that and dried my eyes. God is good. He did not lay it up against
me. When next we met there, we knelt to be made man and wife, for
better or worse; blessedly, gloriously for better, forever and aye,
and all our troubles were over. For had we not one another?




CHAPTER II

I LAND IN NEW YORK AND TAKE A HAND IN THE GAME


The steamer _Iowa_, from Glasgow, made port, after a long and stormy
voyage, on Whitsunday, 1870. She had come up during the night, and
cast anchor off Castle Garden. It was a beautiful spring morning,
and as I looked over the rail at the miles of straight streets, the
green heights of Brooklyn, and the stir of ferryboats and pleasure
craft on the river, my hopes rose high that somewhere in this
teeming hive there would be a place for me. What kind of a place
I had myself no clear notion of. I would let that work out as it
could. Of course I had my trade to fall back on, but I am afraid
that is all the use I thought of putting it to. The love of change
belongs to youth, and I meant to take a hand in things as they
came along. I had a pair of strong hands, and stubbornness enough
to do for two; also a strong belief that in a free country, free
from the dominion of custom, of caste, as well as of men, things
would somehow come right in the end, and a man get shaken into the
corner where he belonged if he took a hand in the game. I think I
was right in that. If it took a lot of shaking to get me where I
belonged, that was just what I needed. Even my mother admits that
now. To tell the truth, I was tired of hammer and saw. They were
indissolubly bound up with my dreams of Elizabeth that were now
gone to smash. Therefore I hated them. And straightway, remembering
that the day was her birthday, and accepting the fact as a good
omen, I rebuilt my air-castles and resolved to try on a new tack.
So irrational is human nature at twenty-one, when in love. And
isn't it good that it is?

In all of which I have made no account of a factor which is at
the bottom of half our troubles with our immigrant population, so
far as they are not of our own making: the loss of reckoning that
follows uprooting; the cutting loose from all sense of responsibility,
with the old standards gone, that makes the politician's job so
profitable in our large cities, and that of the patriot and the
housekeeper so wearisome. We all know the process. The immigrant
has no patent on it. It afflicts the native, too, when he goes to
a town where he is not known. In the slum it reaches its climax in
the second generation, and makes of the Irishman's and the Italian's
boys the "toughs" who fight the battles of Hell's Kitchen and Frog
Hollow. It simply means that we are creatures of environment, that
a man everywhere is largely what his neighbors and his children
think him to be, and that government makes for our moral good
too, dreamers and anarchists to the contrary notwithstanding. But,
simple as it is, it has been too long neglected for the safety of
the man and of the State. I am not going to discuss here plans for
mending this neglect, but I can think of three that would work; one
of them does work, if not up to the top notch--the public school.
In its ultimate development as the neighborhood centre of things,
I would have that the first care of city government, always and
everywhere, at whatever expense. An efficient parish districting is
another. I think we are coming to that. The last is a rigid annual
enrolment--the school census is good, but not good enough--for
vaccination purposes, jury duty, for military purposes if you
please. I do not mean for conscription, but for the ascertainment
of the fighting strength of the State in case of need--for anything
that would serve as an excuse. It is the enrolment itself that I
think would have a good effect in making the man feel that he is
counted on for something; that he belongs as it were, instead of
standing idle and watching a procession go by, in which there is
no place for him; which is only another way of saying that it is
his right to harass it and levy tribute as he can. The enrolment
for voting comes too late. By that time he may have joined the
looters' army.

So as properly to take my own place in the procession, if not in
the army referred to, as I conceived the custom of the country to
be, I made it my first business to buy a navy revolver of the largest
size, investing in the purchase exactly one-half of my capital. I
strapped the weapon on the outside of my coat and strode up Broadway,
conscious that I was following the fashion of the country. I knew
it upon the authority of a man who had been there before me and had
returned, a gold digger in the early days of California; but America
was America to us. We knew no distinction of West and East. By
rights there ought to have been buffaloes and red Indians charging
up and down Broadway. I am sorry to say that it is easier even
to-day to make lots of people over there believe that, than that
New York is paved, and lighted with electric lights, and quite as
civilized as Copenhagen. They will have it that it is in the wilds.
I saw none of the signs of this, but I encountered a friendly
policeman, who, sizing me and my pistol up, tapped it gently with
his club and advised me to leave it home, or I might get robbed of
it. This, at first blush, seemed to confirm my apprehensions; but
he was a very nice policeman, and took time to explain, seeing
that I was very green. And I took his advice and put the revolver
away, secretly relieved to get rid of it. It was quite heavy to
carry around.

I had letters to the Danish Consul and to the President of the
American Banknote Company, Mr. Goodall. I think perhaps he was not
then the president, but became so afterward. Mr. Goodall had once
been wrecked on the Danish coast and rescued by the captain of
the lifesaving crew, a friend of my family. But they were both in
Europe, and in just four days I realized that there was no special
public clamor for my services in New York, and decided to go West.
A missionary in Castle Garden was getting up a gang of men for the
Brady's Bend Iron Works on the Allegheny River, and I went along.
We started a full score, with tickets paid, but only two of us
reached the Bend. The rest calmly deserted in Pittsburg and went
their own way. Now here was an instance of what I have just been
saying. Not one of them, probably, would have thought of doing it
on the other side. They would have carried out their contract as
a matter of course. Here they broke it as a matter of course, the
minute it didn't suit them to go on. Two of them had been on our
steamer, and the thought of them makes me laugh even now. One was
a Dane who carried an immense knapsack that was filled with sausages,
cheese, and grub of all kinds when he came aboard. He never let
go of it for a moment on the voyage. In storm and sunshine he was
there, shouldering his knapsack. I think he slept with it. When I
last saw him hobbling down a side street in Pittsburg, he carried
it still, but one end of it hung limp and hungry, and the other was
as lean as a bad year. The other voyager was a jovial Swede whose
sole baggage consisted of an old musket, a blackthorn stick, and
a barometer glass, tied up together. The glass, he explained, was
worth keeping; it might some day make an elegant ruler. The fellow
was a blacksmith, and I mistrust that he could not write.

Adler and I went on to Brady's Bend. Adler was a big, explosive
German who had been a reserve officer, I think, in the Prussian
army. Fate had linked us together when on the steamer the meat
served in the steerage became so bad as to offend not only our
palates, but our sense of smell. We got up a demonstration, marching
to see the captain in a body, Adler and I carrying a tray of the
objectionable meat between us. As the spokesman, I presented the
case briefly and respectfully, and all would have gone well had not
the hot blood of Adler risen at the wrong moment, when the captain
was cautiously exploring the scent of the rejected food. With
a sudden upward jerk he caused that official's nose to disappear
momentarily in the dish, while he exploded in voluble German. The
result was an instant rupture of diplomatic relations. Adler was
put in the lock-up, but set fiee again immediately. He spent the
rest of the voyage in his bunk shouting dire threats of disaster
impending from the "Norddeutsche Consul," once he reached New York.
But we were all too glad to get ashore to think of vengeance then.

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