JACOB RIIS
Jacob Riis, who may well stand as a representative of the best that America has received from the Scandinavian countries, was born at Ribe, Denmark, May 3, 1849. He emigrated to the United States in 1870, where he subsequently obtained a position as reporter onThe New York TribuneandThe Evening Sun. It is at the close of his well-known autobiography that he relates how he came to a realization that he was indeed an American in heart as well as in name. In words of patriotic fervor he says:—“I have told the story of the making of an American. There remains to tell how I found out that he was 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.”Besides being the author of several books, such as “The Battle with the Slum,” “How the Other Half Lives,” and “The Children of the Poor,” dealing with the life of the people of New York’s East Side, he was an active and practical reformer. In the course of his struggles to ameliorate the condition of the poor, he met Theodore Roosevelt and formed the friendship which inspired the volume represented in the following selection. Riis and Roosevelt had much in common. There was in both a great deal of the old Anglo-Saxon fighting spirit, ennobled by modern influences and employed in defenseof right and justice. Their mutual and steadfast devotion to each other resembled that of ancient liegeman and lord. This hero-worship is, after all, not unique in our history. It should be a cause for great pride that so many of our leaders, of whom, of course, Lincoln is the most striking example, by embodying the noblest and the best in American life, have been the living ideal of countless immigrants.
Jacob Riis, who may well stand as a representative of the best that America has received from the Scandinavian countries, was born at Ribe, Denmark, May 3, 1849. He emigrated to the United States in 1870, where he subsequently obtained a position as reporter onThe New York TribuneandThe Evening Sun. It is at the close of his well-known autobiography that he relates how he came to a realization that he was indeed an American in heart as well as in name. In words of patriotic fervor he says:—
“I have told the story of the making of an American. There remains to tell how I found out that he was 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.”
Besides being the author of several books, such as “The Battle with the Slum,” “How the Other Half Lives,” and “The Children of the Poor,” dealing with the life of the people of New York’s East Side, he was an active and practical reformer. In the course of his struggles to ameliorate the condition of the poor, he met Theodore Roosevelt and formed the friendship which inspired the volume represented in the following selection. Riis and Roosevelt had much in common. There was in both a great deal of the old Anglo-Saxon fighting spirit, ennobled by modern influences and employed in defenseof right and justice. Their mutual and steadfast devotion to each other resembled that of ancient liegeman and lord. This hero-worship is, after all, not unique in our history. It should be a cause for great pride that so many of our leaders, of whom, of course, Lincoln is the most striking example, by embodying the noblest and the best in American life, have been the living ideal of countless immigrants.
There was never a day that called so loudly for such as he, as does this of ours. Not that it is worse than other days; I know it is better. I find proof of it in the very fact that it is as if the age-long fight between good and evil had suddenly come to a head, as if all the questions of right, of justice, of the brotherhood, which we had seen in glimpses before, and dimly, had all at once come out in the open, craving solution one and all. A battle royal, truly! A battle for the man of clean hands and clean mind, who can think straight and act square; the man who will stand for the right “because it is right”; who can say, and mean it, that “it is hard to fail, but worse never to have tried to succeed.” A battle for him who strives for “that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to him who does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.” I am but quoting his own words, and never, I think, did I hear finer than those he spoke of Governor Taft when he had put by his own preferences and gone to his hard and toilsome task in the Philippines; for the whole royal, fighting soul of the man was in them.
“But he undertook it gladly,” he said, “and he is to be considered thrice fortunate; for in this world the one thing supremely worth having is the opportunity coupled with the capacity to do well and worthily a piece of work the doing of which is of vital consequence to the welfare of mankind.”
There is his measure. Let now the understrappers sputter. With that for our young men to grow up to, we need have no fear for the morrow. Let it ask what questions it will of the Republic, it shall answer them, for we shall have men at the oars.
This afternoon the newspaper that came to my desk contained a cable despatch which gave me a glow at the heartsuch as I have not felt for a while. Just three lines; but they told that a nation’s conscience was struggling victoriously through hate and foul play and treason: Captain Dreyfus was to get a fair trial. Justice was to be done at last to a once despised Jew whose wrongs had held the civilized world upon the rack; and the world was made happy. Say now it does not move! It does, where there are men to move it,—I said it before: men who believe in the right and are willing to fight for it. When the children of poverty and want came to Mulberry Street for justice, and I knew they came because Roosevelt had been there, I saw in that what the resolute, courageous, unyielding determination of one man to see right done in his own time could accomplish. I have watched him since in the Navy Department, in camp, as Governor, in the White House, and more and more I have made out his message as being to the young men of our day, himself the youngest of our Presidents. I know it is so, for when I speak to the young about him, I see their eyes kindle, and their handshake tells me that they want to be like him, and are going to try. And then I feel that I, too, have done something worth doing for my people. For, whether for good or for evil, we all leave our mark upon our day, and his is that of a clean, strong man who fights for the rightand wins.
Now, then, a word to these young men who, all over our broad land, are striving up toward the standard he sets, for he is their hero by right, as he is mine. Do not be afraid to own it. The struggle to which you are born, and in which you are bound to take a hand if you would be men in more than name, is the struggle between the ideal and the husk; for life without ideals is like the world without the hope of heaven, an empty, meaningless husk. It is your business to read its meaning into it by making the ideals real. The material things of life are good in their day, but they pass away; the moral remain to bear witness that the high hopes of youth are not mere phantasms. Theodore Rooseveltlives his ideals; therefore you can trust them. Here they are in working shape: “Face the facts as you find them; strivesteadily for the best.” “Be never content with less than the possible best, and never throw away the possible best because it is not the ideal best.” Maxims, those, for the young man who wants to make the most of himself and his time. Happily for the world, the young man who does not is rare.