BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW WORLD
I came to the United States in September, 1888. I came as a steerage
passenger. My first lodging on American soil was with one of the
earth's saints, a little old Irish woman who lived on East 106th
Street, New York City. I had served in Egypt with her son, and I was
her guest.
I had come here with the usual idea that coming was the only
problem--that everybody had work; that there were no poor people in
this country, that there was no problem of the unemployed. I was
disillusioned in the first few weeks, for I tramped the streets night
and day. I ran the gamut of the employment agencies and the "Help
Wanted" columns of the papers. It was while looking for work that I
first became acquainted with the Bowery. It was in the current of the
unemployed that I was swept there first. It was there that I first
discovered the dimensions of the problem of the unemployed, and my
first great surprise in the country was to find thousands of men in
what I supposed to be the most wonderful Eldorado on earth, workless,
and many of them homeless.
An advertisement in the morning paper calling for a
"bed-hand"--whatever that might mean--led me to a big lodging-house on
the Bowery. They wanted a man to wash the floors and make the beds up,
and the pay was one dollar a day. I got in line with the applicants. I
was about the forty-fifth man. Many a time I have wished that I could
understand what was passing in the clerk's mind when he dismissed me
with a wave of the hand. I thought, perhaps, that my dismissal meant
that he had engaged a man, but that was not the case. A man two or
three files behind me got the job.
My next attempt led me to a public school on Greenwich Avenue. The
janitor wanted an assistant. I was so weary with my inactivity, that
any kind of a job at any kind of pay would have been acceptable. The
janitor showed me over the school, told me what his work was. Finally,
he took me to the cellar where he had piled up in a corner about
twenty lots of ashes. That, of course, was the first thing to be done,
and though the pile looked rather discouraging, I stripped to the
work, and went at it. My task was to get the ashes outside ready for
carting away. I was about six hours on the job, when I accidently
overheard the janitor say to his wife: "Shut your mouth, I have just
got a sucker of a greenhorn to get them out." That was enough. I got
my coat and hat, went over to the janitor's door, but before I could
open my mouth, his wife said: "What's up?"
"Oh, the job's all right," I replied, "but what I object to is the way
you do your whispering!"
The lowest in the scale of all human employments is the art of
canvassing for a sewing machine company. I did it for two weeks. My
teacher taught me how to canvass a tenement. The janitor is the
traditional arch enemy of the canvasser. My teaching consisted largely
in how to avoid him, circumvent him, or exploit him. A Mrs. Smith--a
mythical Mrs. Smith--always lived on the top floor. I was taught to
interview her first; then I canvassed from the top down.
My district was on the East Side from Fourteenth to Forty-Second
Street. I encountered some rough work with janitors and janitresses in
this region--so rough, indeed, that I considered it a splendid
missionary field; and when I found, crushed in the heart of that
tenement region, a small Methodist Church, I became interested in its
work. I copied its "bill-of-fare" from the board outside the door, and
began, as time permitted, to attend its services. As an offset to the
discouragements I had experienced, I met in this small church two big
men--big, mentally and morally. They were brothers, and during my
twenty-one years in the United States, I have not met their superiors.
They were Lincoln and Frank Moss, both of them leaders in the church,
and although they had moved with the population northward, they
remembered the struggles of their childhood, and gave to it some of
their best manhood.
Selling sewing machines was a failure, but out of it came the
discovery of this splendid field for social and religious activity. I
was directed to the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A. There, day after day,
I inquired at the Employment Department until the secretary seemed
tired of the sight of me.
I got ashamed to look at him. One night I sat in a corner, the picture
of dejection and despair, when a big, broad-shouldered man sat down
beside me.
"You look as if you thought God was dead!" he said, smiling.
"He appears to be," I replied.
He put his big hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes, and drew out
of me my story. I forget what he said, it was brief and perhaps
commonplace, but I went out to walk the streets that night, full of
hope and courage. Before leaving that night I approached the little
man at the employment desk.
"Did you see that big fellow in a gray suit?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Who is he?"
"Mr. McBurney."
"The man whose name is on your letterhead?"
"The same."
"Great guns! and to think that I've been monkeying all these weeks
with a man like you--pardon me, brother!"
Robert R. McBurney was my friend to the day of his death. Many a time,
when out of the pit, I reminded him of the incident. It was from the
little man at the employment desk of the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A.
that I got my real introduction to business life--if the vocation of a
porter can be called "business."
I became an under-porter in a wholesale house on Broadway at five
dollars a week, and spent a winter at the job. The head of the house
was a leader of national reputation in his particular denomination. I
was sitting on the radiator one winter's morning before the store was
opened when the chief clerk came in. It was a Monday morning, and his
first words were:
"Well, what did you do yesterday?"
"I taught a Bible Class, led a people's meeting, and preached once,"
was my reply. He looked dumbfounded.
"Do you do that often?" he asked.
"As often as I get a chance," I answered.
An abiding friendship began that morning between us. This man might
have been a member of the firm and a rich man by this time, but he had
a conscience, and it would not permit him to dishonestly keep books,
which his employers wanted him to do, and he quit.
My next job was running an elevator in an office building on West
Twenty-third Street. It was one of the old-fashioned, ice-wagon
variety, jerked up and down by a wire cable. It gave me a good
opportunity for study. In the side of the cage I had an arrangement
for my Greek grammar. This of course, could not escape the notice of
the business men, and if I was a few seconds late in answering their
bell, they always looked like a thunder-cloud in the direction of my
grammar. One of my passengers on that elevator was sympathetic. His
name was Bruce Price, an architect; a tall, fine, powerfully built
man, who had a kindly word for me every morning, and the only
passenger who ever deigned to shake hands with me as if I were a human
being.
After that, I mounted a milk-wagon and served milk in the region of
West Fifty-seventh Street. This drop into the cellars of the
well-to-do gave me contact from another angle with janitors,
janitresses, and servants. I started at four o'clock each morning. I
did not finish until late in the afternoon, but I had all of Sunday
off. I found my way by the touch of the hand, and very soon I seemed
to have the eyesight of a cat to find shafts, dumb-waiters, circuitous
turnings in the sub-cellars of large apartment houses.
The life of a milkman is a busy one, but I found time to mumble my
Greek roots as I trotted in and out of the cellars. My grammar, when
weather permitted, was tied open to a bottle in the cart.
From the milk-wagon I went to a publishing house. They had advertised
for a man with some literary ability, and I had the effrontery to
apply. I drove the milk-cart in front of the publishing-house door,
and, with my working clothes bespattered with milk and grease, I
applied personally for the job.
"What are your qualifications?" the manager asked.
"What kind of work do you want done?" I asked in reply. I found that
they were going to make a new dictionary of the English language, but
their method of making it obviated the necessity for scholarship. They
had an 1859 edition of Webster and a lot of the newer dictionaries,
and Webster was to be the basis of the new one, and we were to crib
and transcribe from all the rest. I was the third man employed on the
work.
My salary to begin with was ten dollars a week. The word "salary" had
a fine sound; it is more refined than "wages," though it was less than
my pay as a milkman. After working a month, I had the temerity to
outline a plan for a dictionary which would necessitate the most
profound scholarship in America. This plan was laughed at, at first,
but finally adopted, and it took seven years and millions of dollars,
and hundreds of the best scholars in the United States and foreign
countries to complete the work. They raised my salary from $10 a week
to $100 a month; but when an opening came to work as a missionary
among the Bowery lodging houses at $60 a month, I considered it the
opportunity of a lifetime, and in 1890 entered my new parish--the
Bowery.