stream along which roses nodded over old garden walls and where
night-watchmen went about the streets chanting the hours, all the people
were neighbors. There were no very rich and few very poor. How Jacob
hated the one ramshackle old house by the dry moat which had surrounded
the great castle of the mighty Valdemar barons in feudal days! This
place seemed given over to dirt, rats, disease, and dirty, rat-like
children. Jacob’s friends called it Rag Hall, and said it was a shame
that such an ugly, ill-smelling pile should spoil the neighborhood of
Castle Hill, where they loved to play among the tall grass and swaying
reeds of the moat.
Rag Hall came to fill a large place in Jacob’s thoughts. It was the grim
shadow of his bright young world. Surely the world as God had made it
was a place of open sky, fresh life-giving breezes, and rolling meadows
of dewy, fragrant greenness. How did it happen that people could get so
far away from all that made life sweet and wholesome? How had they lost
their birthright?
As Jacob looked at the gray, dirty children of Rag Hall it seemed to him
that they had never had a chance to be anything better. “What should I
have been if I had always lived in such a place?” he said to himself.
One Christmas, Jacob’s father gave him a mark,--a silver coin like our
quarter,--which was more money than the boy had ever had
[Illustration: _Brown Bros._
Jacob A. Riis]
before. Now it seemed to him that he might be able to do something to
help make things better in Rag Hall. He ran to the tenement--to the room
of the most miserable family who lived there.
“Here,” he said to a man who took the money as if he were stunned, “I’ll
divide my Christmas mark with you, if you’ll just try to clean things up
a bit, especially the children, and give them a chance to live like
folks.”
The twelve-year-old boy little thought that the great adventure of his
life really began that day at Rag Hall. But years after when he went
about among the tenements of New York, trying to make things better for
the children of Mulberry Bend and Cherry Street, he remembered where the
long journey had begun.
It was no wonder that Christmas stirred the heart of this young viking,
and made him long for real deeds. Christmas in Ribe was a time of joy
and good-will to all. A lighted candle was put in the window of every
farm-house to cheer the wayfarer with the message that nobody is a
stranger at Christmas. Even the troublesome sparrows were not forgotten.
A sheaf of rye was set up in the snow to make them the Christmas-tree
they would like best. The merry Christmas elf, the “Jule-nissen,” who
lived in the attic, had a special bowl of rice and milk put out for him.
Years afterward, when this Danish lad was talking to a crowd of New York
boys and girls, he said, with a twinkle in his eyes:
“I know if no one else ever really saw the Nissen that our black cat had
made his acquaintance. She looked very wise and purred most knowingly
next morning.”
If Christmas brought the happiest times, the northwest storms in autumn
brought the most thrilling experiences of Jacob’s boyhood. Then, above
the moaning of the wind, the muttered anger of the waves, and the crash
of falling tiles, came the weird singing of the big bell in the tower of
the Domkirke--the cathedral, you know.
After such a night the morning would dawn on a strange world where
storm-lashed waves covered the meadows and streets for miles about, and
on the causeway, high above the flood-level, cattle, sheep, rabbits,
grouse, and other frightened creatures of the fields huddled together
in pitiful groups.
One night, when the flood had risen before the mail-coach came in and
the men of the town feared for the lives of the passengers, Jacob went
out with the rescue-party to the road where the coach must pass.
Scarcely able to stand against the wind, he struggled along on the
causeway where, in pitchy blackness, with water to his waist and pelting
spray lashing his face like the sting of a whip, he groped along,
helping to lead the frightened horses to the lights of the town a
hundred yards away. It was hard that night to get warmed through; but
the boy’s heart glowed, for had not the brusk old Amtmand, the chief
official of the country, seized him by the arm and said, while rapping
him smartly on the shoulders with his cane, as if, in other days, he
would have knighted him, “Strong boy, be a man yet!”
Jacob’s father, who was master of the town school, was keenly
disappointed when this alert, promising son declared his wish to give up
the ways of book-learning and master the carpenter’s trade. The boy felt
that building houses for people to live in would be far better than
juggling with words and all the unreal problems with which school and
school-books seemed to deal. Thinking that it would be useless to try to
force his son into a life distasteful to him, the father swallowed his
disappointment and sent him to serve his apprenticeship with a great
builder in Copenhagen. The boy should, he determined, have the best
start in his chosen calling that it was in his power to give him.
Soon after his arrival in the capital, Jacob went to meet his student
brother at the palace of Charlottenborg, where an art exhibition was
being held. Seeing that he was a stranger and ill at ease, a tall,
handsome gentleman paused on his way up the grand staircase and offered
to act as guide. As they went on together, the gentleman asked the boy
about himself and listened with ready sympathy to his eager story of his
life in the old town, and what he hoped to do in the new life of the
city. When they parted Jacob said heartily:
“People are just the same friendly neighbors in Copenhagen that they are
in little Ribe--jolly good Danes everywhere, just like you, sir!”
The stranger smiled and patted him on the shoulder in a way more
friendly still. Just at that moment they came to a door where a
red-liveried lackey stood at attention. He bowed low as they entered and
Jacob, bowing back, turned to his new friend with a delighted smile:
“There is another example of what I mean, sir,” he said. “Would you
believe it, now, that I have never seen that man before?”
The gentleman laughed, and, pointing to a door, told Jacob he would find
his brother there. While the boy happily recounted his adventures,
particularly the story of his kindly guide, the handsome gentleman
passed through the room and nodded to him with his twinkling smile.
“There is my jolly gentleman,” said Jacob, as he nodded back.
His brother jumped to his feet and bowed low.
“Good gracious!” he said, when the stranger had passed out. “You don’t
mean to say he was your guide? Why, boy, that was the King!”
So Jacob learned that in Denmark even a king, whom he had always thought
of as wearing a jeweled crown and a trailing robe of velvet and ermine
held by dainty silken pages, could go about in a plain blue overcoat
like any other man, and be just as simple and neighborly.
In Copenhagen the king of his fairy-book world was a neighbor, too. Hans
Christian Andersen was a familiar figure on the streets at that time.
Jacob and his companions often met him walking under the lindens along
the old earthen walls that surrounded the city.
“Isn’t he an ugly duck, though!” said Jacob one evening, as the awkward
old man, with his long, ungainly neck and limbs and enormous hands and
feet, came in sight. Then the merry young fellows strung themselves
along in Indian file, each in turn bowing low as he passed, and saying
with mock reverence, “Good evening, Herr Professor!”
But when the gentle old man, with the child’s heart, seized their hands
in his great grasp and thanked them delightedly, they slunk by
shamefacedly, and, while they chuckled a little, avoided meeting each
other’s eyes. For in their hearts they loved the old man whose stories
had charmed their childhood, and they knew that the spirit within the
lank, awkward body was altogether lovely.
All the time that Jacob was working with hammer and saw, he was, like
that first Jacob of whom we read, serving for his Rachel. From the time
he was a clumsy lad of twelve he knew that his playmate Elizabeth, with
the golden curls and the fair, gentle looks, was the princess of his own
fairy-tale. Like all good fairy-tales, it simply _had_ to turn out
happily.
When his apprenticeship was over and he had learned all about building
houses for people to live in, he hurried at once to Ribe to build his
own house. It seemed, however, that nobody realized that he was the hero
who was to marry the princess. Why, Elizabeth’s father owned the one
factory in town, and they lived in a big house, which some people called
a “castle.” Small chance that he would let his pretty daughter marry a
carpenter!
Since working faithfully for long, busy years had not brought him to his
goal, Jacob threw aside his tools and decided to seek his fortune in a
new country. In America, surely, a true man might come into his own.
The days of high adventure were not dead. He would win fame and fortune,
and then return in triumph to the old town--and to Elizabeth.
It was a beautiful spring morning--surely a prophecy of fair
beginnings--when this young viking sailed into New York Harbor. The
dauntless Northmen, who pushed across the seas and discovered America,
could not have thrilled more at the sight of their Vineland than did
this Dane of our own day when he saw the sky-line of the great city.
This must indeed be a new world of opportunity for strong men.
It took only a day of wandering about the crowded streets, however, to
convince this seeker that a golden chance is as hard to find in the New
York of to-day as gold was in those disillusioning days of the early
explorers. The golden chance, it seemed, was to be won, if at all, as is
the precious metal--only after intelligent prospecting and patient
digging.
How utterly alone he felt in that crowd of hurrying strangers! Very
different it all was from his cozy little country where every one was a
neighbor, even the king himself.
[Illustration: The Jacob A. Riis settlement, Henry Street, New York]
Out of sheer loneliness and the desire to belong to somebody he threw in
his lot with a gang of men who were being gathered together to work in a
mining-camp on the Allegheny River. Perhaps the West was his Promised
Land, and Pennsylvania would be a start on the way.
The young carpenter was set to work building houses for the workers in
the mines. He could not content himself, however, in this shut-in
country. To one used to the vastness of a level land stretching as far
as eye could see, it seemed as if the hills and forests hedged him in on
every side--as if he could not breathe. To ease the restlessness of his
homesick spirit, he determined to try his fortune at coal-mining. One
day was enough of that. In his inexperience he failed to brace the roof
properly, and a great piece of rock came down on him, knocking the lamp
from his cap and leaving him stunned and in utter darkness. When at last
he succeeded in groping his way out, it was as if he had come back from
the dead. The daylight had never before seemed so precious. Nothing
could have induced him to try coal-mining again.
At this time, 1870, news came of the war between Germany and France. It
was expected, moreover, that Denmark would come to the assistance of the
French, since only a few years before, in 1864, Germany had seized some
of the choicest territory of the little North Sea kingdom--Schleswig-Holstein,
the section through which the important Kiel Canal has been built. Every
Dane longed to avenge the wrong. Jacob Riis at once left his tools and
his work. He would win glory as a soldier.
He reached New York with but a single cent in his pocket, only to find
that no one was fitting out volunteer companies to send to France. Here
he was longing to offer his life for the cause, and it was treated like
a worthless trifle. Clothes and every cherished possession that his
little trunk contained were soon pawned to pay for food and a roof over
his head.
There followed months when the young man wandered about the great city,
homeless, hungry, vainly seeking employment. Too proud to beg, he yet
accepted night after night a plate of meat and rolls which a French cook
in a large restaurant handed him from a basement window. It seemed as
if that was a part of the debt France owed her would-be soldier.
He was part of a weary army of discouraged men hunting for work. He knew
what it meant to sleep on park benches, in doorways, in empty wagons,
and even on the flat stone slabs of a graveyard. There were, in New
York, friends of his family who might have helped him, but he was too
proud to make himself known in his present sorry plight. He even
destroyed the letters to them, lest in a moment of weakness he might be
tempted to appeal to their charity.
This time of hardship, however, was destined to bear fruit. Jacob Riis
came to know the shadows of the great city--all the miserable alleys and
narrow courts of the East Side slums. Then and there, weak and starving
though he was, the boy who had given his Christmas money to help Rag
Hall vowed that he would some day work to remove those plague-spots from
the city’s life. “How true it is,” he said, “that one half of the world
doesn’t know how the other half lives! If they only knew, things would
be different.”
At last the chance for which he had been longing came. Hearing that a
new reporter was wanted by the News Association, he applied for the
position. After looking the haggard applicant over for a moment
doubtfully, the editor was moved to give him a trial. The starving man
was sent to report a political banquet. When he turned in his “copy” at
the office the editor said briefly:
“You will do. Take that desk and report at ten every morning, sharp.”
So began his life as a reporter.
Perhaps you know something of his success as a newspaper man. He knew
how to gather news; and he knew how to find the words that make bare
facts live. The days and nights of privation had been rich in
experience. He was truly “a part of all that he had met.” Something of
his intimate acquaintance with all sorts and conditions of existence,
something of his warm, understanding sympathy for every variety of human
joy and sorrow, crept into his work. Besides, the young man had
boundless enthusiasm and tireless industry.
“That chap just seems to eat work,” said his fellow-reporters.
One day a very special letter came from Denmark, which told him that his
gentle Elizabeth was quite convinced that he was indeed the prince of
her life story. So, as it turned out, he didn’t have to make a fortune
before he was able to bring her to share his home in New York. With her
it seemed that he brought the best of the old life into the new--
Brought the moonlight, starlight, firelight,
Brought the sunshine of his people.
The only homesick times that he knew now were the days when his work as
a reporter took him to the streets of the miserable tenements. All his
soul cried out against these places where the poor, the weak, and the
wicked, the old, the sick, and helpless babies were all herded together
in damp, dingy rooms where the purifying sunlight never entered. During
his years of wandering in search of work he had gained an intimate
knowledge of such conditions. He knew what poverty meant and how it
felt. Afterward, when he saw this hideous squalor, he shared it. These
people were his neighbors.
“Over against the tenements of our cities,” he said, “ever rise in my
mind the fields, the woods, God’s open sky, as accusers and witnesses
that his temple is being defiled and man dwarfed in body and soul.”
He knew that the one way to remove such evils and to force people to put
up decent houses for the poor was to bring the facts out in the open.
When he described what he had seen, the words seemed to mean little to
many of the people that he wanted to reach. Then he hit upon the plan of
taking pictures. These pictures served to illustrate some very direct
talks he gave in the churches. Later, many of them made an important
part of his book, “How the Other Half Lives.”
“These people are your neighbors,” said Jacob Riis. “It is the business
of the fortunate half of those who live in our great cities to find out
how the other half lives. No one can live to himself or die to himself--
‘If you will not grub for your neighbor’s weeds,
In your own green garden you’ll find the seeds.’”
Through his persistent campaigning, one of the very worst parts of New
York, known as Mulberry Bend, a veritable network of alleys which gave
hiding to misery and crime untold, was bought by the city, the buildings
torn down, and the spot converted into a public park.
Several years later, when Roosevelt was President, he asked Mr. Riis to
investigate the conditions of streets and alleys in Washington. It
developed that within three squares of the Capitol there was a system of
alleys honeycombing a single block where a thousand people were crowded
together under conditions that made a hotbed of misery, crime, and
disease. The good citizens of the National Capital, who had read with
horror about the evils of New York and Chicago, were rudely shaken out
of their self-complacency. That square is now one of Washington’s parks.
Jacob Riis early learned the power of facts. His training as a reporter
taught him that. He was also willing to work early and late, when the
need arose, to gather them. At one time when there was a cholera scare
in New York, he happened to look over the Health Department analysis of
the water from the Croton River, and noticed that it was said to contain
“a trace of nitrites.”
“What does that mean?” he asked of the chemist.
The reply was more learned than enlightening. The reporter was not
satisfied. He carried his inquiry farther and discovered that “nitrites”
meant that the water had been contaminated by sewage from towns above
New York. Riis then took his camera and explored not only the Croton
River to its source, but also every stream that emptied into it, taking
pictures that proved in the most convincing way the dangers of the city.
As a result, money was appropriated to buy a strip of land along the
streams, wide enough to protect the people’s water-supply.
Another great work that Jacob Riis was enabled to carry through had its
beginnings in that stormy chapter of his life when he found himself a
vagrant among vagrants. He learned at first hand what the police
lodging-houses for the homeless were like. At that time this charity was
left in the hands of the police, who had neither the ability nor the
desire to handle these cases wisely and humanely and to meet the
problems of helping people to help themselves. Jacob Riis worked
shoulder to shoulder with Theodore Roosevelt, who was then police
commissioner of New York, to make the organized charity of the city an
intelligent agency for relieving suffering and putting on their feet
again those who were, for some reason, “down and out.” Many were brought
back to wholesome living through the realization that they had
“neighbors” who cared.
In the same way he worked for parks and playgrounds for the children. He
saw that the city spoils much good human material.
“We talk a great deal about city toughs,” he says in his autobiography.
“In nine cases out of ten they are lads of normal impulses whose
possibilities have all been smothered by the slum. With better
opportunities they might have been heroes.”
Many honors came to Jacob Riis. He was known as a “boss reporter”; his
books gave him a nation-wide fame; the King of Denmark sent him the
Crusaders’ Cross, the greatest honor his native land could bestow;
President Roosevelt called him the “most useful American” of his day.
But I think what meant more to him than any or all of these things was
the real affection of his many “neighbors,” especially the children.
Many times he gathered together boys and girls from the streets to enjoy
a day with him in the country.
“This will help until we can give them trees and grass in their slum,”
he would say, “and then there will be no slum.” His eyes grew very
tender as he added, “No, there will be no slum; it will be a true City
Beautiful--and the fairest blossoms there will be the children.”
Riis called the story of his life, “The Making of an American.” While
his life was in the making he helped to make many others. He was in
truth a maker of Americans.
Do you not think that he lived a life as truly adventurous as the
vikings of old--this viking of our own day? They lived for deeds of
daring and plunder; he lived for deeds every whit as brave--and for
service.
A PIONEER OF THE OPEN: EDWARD L. TRUDEAU
Oh, toiling hands of mortals! Oh, unwearied feet, traveling ye know
not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on
some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the
setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your
own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to
arrive, and the true success is to labor.
STEVENSON: _El Dorado_.
When you read in your history the stories of the men who discovered
America, did you ever think that not one of them found that for which he
searched when he sailed unknown seas and braved the perils of an
unbroken wilderness? Columbus tried to find a sea-way to the Indies, and
stumbled upon a new world. Henry Hudson, in seeking a short cut to the
Pacific, found New York. De Soto, hunting in vain for gold, was little
comforted by the sight of the muddy waters of the Mississippi. And so
with Ponce de León, Balboa, La Salle, and all the rest. Each journeyed
in search of one thing and found another.
Nor did any of these discoverers know what he had found. De Soto had no
vision of great plains of golden grain, food for millions of men, along
the shores of his river. Henry Hudson never dreamed of the city of New
York. These men only blazed the trail. It was for those who came after
to understand and use what they had found.
Each year men were finding, and helping others to find, a new land. Some
of these men were the pioneers who cleared the ground and planted farms;
some were those who built roads and bridges; some were those who took
iron, coal, and oil from the ground; some were those who taught the
children of the new land in the little bare school-houses. All of these
people helped to discover our America.
Did you know that the work of discovery is still going on? Ten years
from now many changes will have come to pass; in a hundred years a new
world will have been found.
This is the story of one of the greatest discoverers of our day--the
story of a man who found a new world in the North Woods of New York. But
like the other discoverers, he searched for one thing and found another,
and he spent many years of patient work in trying to understand and use
in the best way what he had found.
Edward Livingston Trudeau was born with a love of the woods and the life
of the open. In his father, Dr. James Trudeau, the call of the wild was
so strong that again and again he would leave the city and his work to
lose himself in the great forests of the West far from the world of men.
He used to say that it was only when he could lose himself in this way
that he seemed to find himself. Once he lived for two years with the
Osage Indians, learning their woodcraft and their skill in riding and
hunting. In 1841 he went with Frémont, the explorer, on his great
expedition to the Rocky Mountains. And it was never hard for his friend
Audubon, the famous naturalist, to persuade him to shut up his office
and fare forth with him into the wilds. He was always restless and ill
at ease within walls; only when out under the open sky did he feel fully
alive.
Of course, this uncertain, wandering life ruined his chances of success
in his profession. He gave up his office in New York, and, leaving his
children with their grandfather, returned to his earlier home in New
Orleans, thinking that perhaps it would be easier to settle down there
to a more regular and ordered life. But he was never able to resist for
long at a time the craving for the freedom of the great outdoors.
Edward Trudeau’s childhood was spent in large cities--New York first,
and then Paris; he never knew his father, and yet he shared his strong
love for a wild, outdoor life. He used often to say that it was strange
how the trait which in his father had wrecked his career as a physician
saved the life of his son, at a time when he was so ill that he could
live only in the open air, and really led to his success as a doctor by
showing him that fresh air and sunshine are often a sure cure where
medicines fail.