THE AMERICAN MADE
LONG ago, when I found my work beginning to master me, I put up a
nest of fifty pigeonholes in my office so that with system I might
get the upper hand of it; only to find, as the years passed, that
I had got fifty tyrants for one. The other day I had to call in a
Hessian to help me tame the pigeonholes. He was a serious library
person, and he could not quite make out what it meant when among
such heads as "Slum Tenements," "The Bend," and "Rum's Curse," he
came upon this one over one of the pigeonholes:--
Him all that goodly company
Did as deliverer hail.
They tied a ribbon round his neck,
Another round his tail.
With all his learning, his education was not finished, for he had
missed the "delectable ballad of the Waller lot" and Eugene Field's
account of the dignities that were "heaped upon Clow's noble yellow
pup," else he would have understood. The pigeonhole contained most
of the "honors" that have come to me of late years,--the nominations
to membership in societies, guilds, and committees, in conventions
at home and abroad,--most of them declined, as I declined Governor
Roosevelt's request that I should serve on the last Tenement-House
Commission, for the reason which I have given heretofore, that to
represent is not my business. To write is; I can do it much better
and back up the other; so we are two for one. Not that I would be
understood as being insensible of the real honor intended to be
conferred by such tokens. I do not hold them lightly. I value the
good opinion of my fellow-men, for with it comes increased power
to do things. But I would reserve the honors for those who have
fairly earned them, and on whom they sit easy. They don't on me. I
am not ornamental by nature. Now that I have told all there is to
tell, the reader is at liberty to agree with my little boy concerning
the upshot of it. He was having a heart-to-heart talk with his
mother the other day, in the course of which she told him that we
must be patient; no one in the world was all good except God.
[Illustration: The Cross of Dannebrog.]
"And you," said he, admiringly. He is his father's son.
She demurred, but he stoutly maintained his own.
"I'll bet you," he said, "if you were to ask lots of people around
here they would say you were fine. But"--he struggled reflectively
with a button--"Gee! I can't understand why they make such a fuss
about papa."
Out of the mouth of babes, etc. The boy is right. I cannot either,
and it makes me feel small. I did my work and tried to put into it
what I thought citizenship ought to be, when I made it out. I wish
I had made it out earlier for my own peace of mind. And that is
all there is to it.
For hating the slum what credit belongs to me? Who could love
it? When it comes to that, perhaps it was the open, the woods, the
freedom of my Danish fields I loved, the contrast that was hateful.
I hate darkness and dirt anywhere, and naturally want to let in
the light. I will have no dark corners in my own cellar; it must
be whitewashed clean. Nature, I think, intended me for a cobbler,
or a patch-tailor. I love to mend and make crooked things straight.
When I was a carpenter I preferred to make an old house over to
building a new. Just now I am trying to help a young couple set up
in the laundry business. It is along the same line; that is the
reason I picked it out for them. If any of my readers know of a
good place for them to start I wish they would tell me of it. They
are just two--young people with the world before them. My office
years ago became notorious as a sort of misfit shop where things
were matched that had got mislaid in the hurry and bustle of life,
in which some of us always get shoved aside. Some one has got to
do that, and I like the job; which is fortunate, for I have no head
for creative work of any kind. The publishers bother me to write
a novel; editors want me on their staffs. I shall do neither, for
the good reason that I am neither poet, philosopher, nor, I was
going to say, philanthropist; but leave me that. I would love my
fellow-man. For the rest I am a reporter of facts. And that I would
remain. So, I know what I can do and how to do it best.
[Illustration: After Twenty-five Years.]
We all love power--to be on the winning side. You cannot help
being there when you are fighting the slum, for it is the cause of
justice and right. How then can you lose? And what matters it how
you fare, your cause is bound to win. I said it before, but it
will bear to be said again, not once but many times: every defeat
in such a fight is a step toward victory, taken in the right spirit.
In the end you will come out ahead. The power of the biggest boss
is like chaff in your hands. You can see his finish. And he knows
it. Hence, even he will treat you with respect. However he try to
bluff you, he is the one who is afraid. The ink was not dry upon
Bishop Potter's arraignment of Tammany bestiality before Richard
Croker was offering to sacrifice his most faithful henchmen as
the price of peace; and he would have done it had the Bishop but
crooked his little finger in the direction of any one of them. The
boss has the courage of the brute, or he would not be boss; but
when it comes to a moral issue he is the biggest coward in the
lot. The bigger the brute the more abject its terror at what it
does not understand.
Some of the honors I refused; there were some my heart craved,
and I could not let them go. There hangs on my wall the passport
Governor Roosevelt gave me when I went abroad, dearer to me than
sheepskin or degree, for the heart of a friend is in it. What would
I not give to be worthy of its faithful affection! Sometimes when
I go abroad I wear upon my breast a golden cross which King Christian
gave me. It is the old Crusaders' cross, in the sign of which my
stern forefathers conquered the heathen and themselves on many a
hard-fought field. My father wore it for long and faithful service
to the State. I rendered none. I can think of but one chance I
had to strike a blow for the old flag. That was when in a typhus
epidemic I found the health officers using it as a fever flag to
warn boats away from the emergency hospital pier at East Sixteenth
Street. They had no idea of what flag it was: they just happened
to have it on hand. But they found out quickly. I gave them half an
hour in which to find another. The hospital was full of very sick
patients, or I should have made them fire a salute to old Dannebrog
by way of reparation. As it was, I think they had visions of ironclads
in the East River. They had one of a very angry reporter, anyhow.
But though I did nothing to deserve it, I wear the cross proudly
for the love I bear the flag under which I was born and the good
old King who gave it to me. I saw him often when I was a young lad.
In that which makes the man he had not changed when last I met him
in Copenhagen. They told there how beggars used to waylay him on
his daily walks until the police threatened them with arrest. Then
they stood at a distance making sorrowful gestures; and the King,
who understood, laid a silver coin upon the palace window shelf
and went his way. The King must obey the law, but he can forget
the principles of alms-giving, as may the rest of us at Christmas,
and be blameless.
Of that last meeting with King Christian I mean to let my American
fellow-citizens know so that they may understand what manner of man
is he whom they call in Europe its "first gentleman" and in Denmark
"the good King." But first I shall have to tell how my father
came to wear the cross of Dannebrog. He was very old at the time;
retired long since from his post which he had filled faithfully
forty years and more. In some way, I never knew quite how, they
passed him by with the cross at the time of the retirement. Perhaps
he had given offence by refusing a title. He was an independent old
man, and cared nothing for such things; but I knew that the cross
he would gladly have worn for the King he had served so well. And
when he sat in the shadow, with the darkness closing in, I planned
to get it for him as the one thing I knew would give him pleasure.
But the official red tape was stronger than I; until one day, roused
to anger by it all, I wrote direct to the King and told him about
it. I showed him the wrong that had been done, and told him that I
was sure he would set it right as soon as he knew of it. And I was
not mistaken. The old town was put into a great state of excitement
and mystification when one day there arrived in a large official
envelope, straight from the King, the cross long since given up;
for, indeed, the Minister had told me that, my father having been
retired, the case was closed. The injustice that had been done was
itself a bar to its being undone; there was no precedent for such
action. That was what I told the King, and also that it was his
business to set precedents, and he did. Four years later, when I took
my children home to let my father bless them,--they were his only
grandchildren and he had never seen any of them,--he sat in his
easy chair and wondered yet at the queer way in which that cross
came. And I marvelled with him. He died without knowing how I had
interfered. It was better so.
[Illustration: King Christian as I saw him last.]
It was when I went home to mother that I met King Christian last.
They had told me the right way to approach the King, the proper
number of bows and all that, and I meant to faithfully observe it
all. I saw a tired and lonely old man, to whom my heart went out
on the instant, and I went right up and shook hands, and told him
how much I thought of him and how sorry I was for his losing his
wife, the Queen Louise, whom everybody loved. He looked surprised
a moment; then such a friendly look came into his face, and I
thought him the handsomest King that ever was. He asked about the
Danes in America, and I told him they were good citizens, better
for not forgetting their motherland and him in his age and loss.
He patted my hand with a glad little laugh, and bade me tell them
how much he appreciated it, and how kindly his thoughts were of
them all. As I made to go, after a long talk, he stopped me and,
touching the little silver cross on my coat lapel, asked what it
was.
I told him; told him of the motto, "In His Name," and of the labor
of devoted women in our great country, to make it mean what it
said. As I spoke I remembered my father, and I took it off and gave
it to him, bidding him keep it, for surely few men could wear it
so worthily. But he put it back into my hand, thanking me with a
faithful grasp of his own; he could not take it from me, he said.
And so we parted. I thought with a pang of remorse, as I stood in
the doorway, of the parting bow I had forgotten, and turned around
to make good the omission. There stood the King in his blue uniform,
nodding so mildly to me, with a smile so full of kindness, that
I--why, I just nodded back and waved my hand. It was very improper,
I dare say; perfectly shocking; but never was heartier greeting to
king. I meant every bit of it.
The next year he sent me his cross of gold for the one of silver
I offered him. I wear it gladly, for the knighthood it confers
pledges to the defence of womanhood and of little children, and
if I cannot wield lance and sword as the king's men of old, I can
wield the pen. It may be that in the providence of God the shedding
of ink in the cause of right shall set the world farther ahead in
our day than the blood-letting of all the ages past.
These I could not forego. Neither, when friends gathered in the
King's Daughters' Settlement on our silver wedding day, and with
loving words gave to the new house my name, could I say them nay.
It stands, that house, within a stone's throw of many a door in
which I sat friendless and forlorn, trying to hide from the policeman
who would not let me sleep; within hail of the Bend of the wicked
past, atoned for at last; of the Bowery boarding-house where I lay
senseless on the stairs after my first day's work in the newspaper
office, starved well-nigh to death. But the memory of the old days
has no sting. Its message is one of hope; the house itself is the
key-note. It is the pledge of a better day, of the defeat of the
slum with its helpless heredity of despair. That shall damn no longer
lives yet unborn. Children of God are we! that is our challenge to
the slum, and on earth we shall claim yet our heritage of light.
[Illustration: The Jacob A. Riis House No 50 Henry Street, New
York]
Of home and neighborliness restored it is the pledge. The want of
them makes the great gap in the city life that is to be our modern
civic life. With the home preserved we may look forward without
fear; there is no question that can be asked of the Republic to
which we shall not find the answer. We may not always agree as to
what is right; but, starting there, we shall be seeking the right,
and seeking we shall find it. Ruin and disaster are at the end of
the road that starts from the slum.
Perhaps it is easy for me to preach contentment. With a mother
who prays, a wife who fills the house with song, and the laughter
of happy children about me, all my dreams come true or coming true,
why should I not be content? In fact, I know of no better equipment
for making them come true: faith in God to make all things possible
that are right; faith in man to get them done; fun enough in between
to keep them from spoiling or running off the track into useless
crankery. An extra good sprinkling of that! The longer I live the
more I think of humor as in truth the saving sense. A civil-service
examination to hit home might well be one to make sure the man
could appreciate a good story. For all editors I would have that
kind made compulsory. Here is one chiding me in his paper,--oh! a
serious paper that calls upon parents to "insist that children's
play shall be play and not loafing" and not be allowed to obscure
"their more serious responsibilities,"--chiding me for encouraging
truancy! "We are quite sure," he writes, "that no really well-brought
up and well-disposed boy ever thinks of such a thing." Perish the
thought! And yet, if he _should_ take the notion,--you never can
tell with the devil so busy all the time,--there's the barrel they
kept us in at school when we were bad; I told of it before. Putting
the lid on was a sure preventive; with our little short legs
we couldn't climb out. Don't think I recommend it. It just comes
to me, the way things will. It was held to be a powerful means of
bringing children up "well disposed" in those days.
[Illustration: Christmas Eve with the King's Daughters]
Looking back over thirty years it seems to me that never had man
better a time than I. Enough of the editor chaps there were always
to keep up the spirits. The hardships people write to me about were
not worth while mentioning; and anyway they had to be, to get some
of the crankery out of me, I guess. But the friendships endure.
For all the rebuffs of my life they have more than made up. When I
think of them, of the good men and women who have called me friend,
I am filled with wonder and gratitude. I know the editor of the
heavy responsibilities would not have approved of all of them. Even
the police might not have done it. But, then, police approval is
not a certificate of character to one who has lived the best part
of his life in Mulberry Street. They drove Harry Hill out of the
business after milking him dry. Harry Hill kept a dive, but he
was a square man; his word was as good as his bond. He was hardly
a model citizen, but in a hard winter he kept half the ward from
starving; his latch-string hung out always to those in need. Harry
was no particular friend of mine; I mention him as a type of some
to whom objection might be made.
But then the police would certainly disapprove of Dr. Parkhurst,
whom I am glad to call by the name of friend. They might even object
to Bishop Potter, whose friendship I return with a warmth that is
nowise dampened by his disapproval of reporters as a class. There
is where the Bishop is mistaken; we are none of us infallible,
and what a good thing it is that we are not. Think of having an
infallible friend to live alongside of always! How long could you
stand it? We were not infallible, James Tanner!--called Corporal
by the world, Jim by us--when we sat together in the front seats of
the Old Eighteenth Street Church under Brother Simmons's teaching.
Far from it; but we were willing to learn the ways of grace, and
that was something. Had he only stayed! Your wife mothered my
Elisabeth when she was homesick in a strange land. I have never
forgotten it. And you could pass civil service, Jim, on the story
I spoke of. I would be willing to let the rest go, if you will
promise to forget about that bottle of champagne. It was your
doings, anyhow, you know.
[Illustraion: James Tanner.]
Amos Ensign, I did not give you the credit you should have had for
our success in Mulberry Street in the early days, but I give it to
you now. You were loyal and good, and you have stayed a reporter,
a living denial of the charge that our profession is not as good
as the best Dr. Jane Elizabeth Robbins, you told me, when I was
hesitating over the first chapters of these reminiscences, to take
the short cut and put it all in, and I did, because you are as
wise as you are good. I have told it all, and now, manlike, I will
serve you as your sex has been served from the dawn of time: the
woman did it! yours be the blame. Anthony Ronne, dear old chum in
the days of adversity; Max Fischel, trusty friend of the years in
Mulberry Street, who never said "can't" once--you always knew a
way; Brother W. W. J. Warren, faithful in good and in evil report;
General C. T. Christensen, whose compassion passeth understanding,
for, though a banker, you bore with and befriended me, who cannot
count; Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, my civic conscience ever; John
H. Mulchahey, without whose wise counsels in the days of good
government and reform the battle with the slum would surely have
gone against us; Jane Addams and Mrs. Emmons Blaine, leaven that
shall yet leaven the whole unsightly lump out yonder by the western
lake and let in the light; A. S. Solomons, Silas McBee, Mrs. Roland
C. Lincoln, Lilian D. Wald, Felix Adler, Endicott Peabody, Lyman
Abbott, Louise Seymour Houghton, Jacob H. Schiff, John Finley,--Jew
and Gentile who taught me why in this world personal conduct and
personal character count ever for most,--my love to you all! It is
time I am off and away. William McCloy, the next time I step into
your canoe and upset it, and you turn that smiling countenance upon
me, up to your neck in the lake, I will surely drown you. You are
too good for this world. J. Evarts Tracy, host of my happy days on
restful Wahwaskesh! I know of a certain hole in under a shelving
rock upon which the partridge is wont to hatch her young, where
lies a bigger bass than ever you tired out according to the rules
of your beloved sport, and I will have him if I have to charm him
with honeyed words and a bean-pole. And Ainslie shall cook him to
a turn. Make haste then to the feast!
[Illustration: The little ones from Cherry Street.]
Ahead there is light. Even as I write the little ones from Cherry
Street are playing on the grass under my trees. The time is at hand
when we shall bring to them in their slum the things which we must
now bring them to see, and then the slum will be no more. How little
we grasp the meaning of it all. In a report of the Commissioner of
Education I read the other day that of kindergarten children in an
Eastern city who were questioned 63 per cent did not know a robin,
and more than half had not seen a dandelion in its yellow glory.
And yet we complain that our cities are misgoverned! You who think
that the teaching of "civics" in the school covers it all, I am
not speaking to you. You will never understand. But the rest of
you who are willing to sit with me at the feet of little Molly and
learn from her, listen: She was poor and ragged and starved. Her
home was a hovel. We were debating, some good women who knew her
and I, how best to make a merry Christmas for her, and my material
mind hung upon clothes and boots and rubbers, for it was in
Chicago. But the vision of her soul was a pair of red shoes! Her
heart craved them; aye, brethren, and she got them. Not for all
the gold in the Treasury would I have trodden it under in pork and
beans, smothered it in--no, not in rubber boots, though the mud in
the city by the lake be both deep and black. They were the window,
those red shoes, through which her little captive soul looked out
and yearned for the beauty of God's great world. Could I forget
the blue boots with the tassels which I worshipped in my boyhood?
Nay, friends, the robin and the dandelion we must put back into
those barren lives if we would have good citizenship. They and the
citizenship are first cousins. We robbed the children of them, or
stood by and saw it done, and it is for us to restore them. That
is my answer to the missionary who writes to ask what is the "most
practical way of making good Christians and American citizens" out
of the emigrants who sit heavy on her conscience, as well they may.
Christianity without the robin and the dandelion is never going to
reach down into the slum; American citizenship without them would
leave the slum there, to dig the grave of it and of the republic.
Light ahead! The very battle that is now waged for righteousness
on the once forgotten East Side is our answer to the cry of the
young who, having seen the light, were willing no longer to live in
darkness. I know, for I was one of the committee which Dr. Felix
Adler called together in response to their appeal a year ago.
The Committee of Fifteen succeeded to its work. "What does it all
help?" the doubting Thomases have asked a half-score years, watching
the settlements build their bridge of hearts between mansion and
tenement, and hundreds give devoted lives of toil and sacrifice to
make it strong and lasting; and ever the answer came back, sturdily:
"Wait and see! It will come." And now it has come. The work is
bearing fruit. On the East Side the young rise in rebellion against
the slum; on the West Side the League for Political Education runs
a ball-ground. Omen of good sense and of victory! So the country
is safe. When we fight no longer for the poor, but with the poor,
the slum is taken in the rear and beaten already.
[Illustration: My Silver Bride.]
The world moves. The Bend is gone; the Barracks are gone; Mulberry
Street itself as I knew it so long is gone. Cat Alley, whence came
the deputation of ragamuffins to my office demanding flowers for
"the lady in the back," the poor old scrubwoman who lay dead in
her dark basement, went when the Elm Street widening let light into
the heart of our block. The old days are gone. I myself am gone.
A year ago I had warning that "the night cometh when no man can
work," and Mulberry Street knew me no more. I am still a young
man, not far past fifty, and I have much I would do yet. But what
if it were ordered otherwise? I have been very happy. No man ever
had so good a time. Should I not be content?
[Illustration: Here comes the Baby!]
I dreamed a beautiful dream in my youth, and I awoke and found
it true. My silver bride they called her just now. The frost is
upon my head, indeed; hers winter has not touched with its softest
breath. Her footfall is the lightest, her laugh the merriest in
the house. The boys are all in love with their mother; the girls
tyrannize and worship her together. The cadet corps elects her
an honorary member, for no stouter champion of the flag is in the
land. Sometimes when she sings with the children I sit and listen,
and with her voice there comes to me as an echo of the long past
the words in her letter, that blessed first letter in which she
wrote down the text of all my after-life: "We will strive together
for all that is noble and good." So she saw her duty as a true
American, and aye! she has kept the pledge.
But here comes our daughter with little Virginia to visit her
grandpapa. Oh, the little vixen! Then where is his peace? God bless
the child!
* * * * *
I have told the story of the making of an American. There remains
to tell how I found out that he vas made and finished at last.
It was when I went back to see my mother once more and, wandering
about the country of my childhood's memories, had come to the city
of Elsinore. There I fell ill of a fever and lay many weeks in
the house of a friend upon the shore of the beautiful Oeresund.
One day when the fever had left me they rolled my bed into a room
overlooking the sea. The sunlight danced upon the waves, and the
distant mountains of Sweden were blue against the horizon. Ships
passed under full sail up and down the great waterway of the
nations. But the sunshine and the peaceful day bore no message to
me. I lay moodily picking at the coverlet, sick and discouraged
and sore--I hardly knew why myself. Until all at once there sailed
past, close inshore, a ship flying at the top the flag of freedom,
blown out on the breeze till every star in it shone bright and
clear. That moment I knew. Gone were illness, discouragement, and
gloom! Forgotten weakness and suffering, the cautions of doctor
and nurse. I sat up in bed and shouted, laughed and cried by turns,
waving my handkerchief to the flag out there. They thought I had
lost my head, but I told them no, thank God! I had found it, and
my heart, too, at last. I knew then that it was my flag; that my
children's home was mine, indeed; that I also had become an American
in truth. And I thanked God, and, like unto the man sick of the
palsy, arose from my bed and went home, healed.
[Illustration: That minute I knew]