The Making of an American quotes

I don't know—there may have been more; perhaps others wore them. I know she did. Curls she had, too—curls of yellow gold.

Why do girls not have curls these days?

It is such a rare thing to see them, that when you do you feel like walking behind them miles and miles just to feast your eyes. Too much bother, says my daughter. Bother? Why, I have carried one of your mother's, miss!

"With tassels!" says my wife, maliciously—she has been looking over my shoulder.

Well, with tassels! What then?

Did I not worship a pair of boots with tassels which I passed in a shop window in Copenhagen every day for a whole year, because they were the only other pair I ever saw? I don't know—there may have been more;

I believe it because it is so now.

Over against the tenement that we fight in our cities ever rises in my mind the fields, the woods, God's open sky, as accuser and witness that His temple is being so defiled, man so dwarfed in body and soul.

[Illustration: The View the Stork got of the Old Town]

No doubt Christmas had something to do with it.

Poverty and misery always seem to jar more at the time when the whole world makes merry.

We took an entire week off to keep Christmas in. Till after New Year's Day no one thought of anything else. The "Holy Eve" was the greatest of the year.

No need to be afraid. It is safe.

Christmas charity never corrupts. Love keeps it sweet and good—the love He brought into the world at Christmas to temper the hard reason of man.

Let it loose for that little spell. January comes soon enough with its long cold. Always it seems to me the longest month in the year. It is so far to another Christmas!

[Illustration: A Cobblestone paved Alley]

Narrow streams are apt to run deep.

An incident which I set down in justice to the uncompromising orthodoxy of that day, made a strong impression on me.

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.

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.

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;

"So your brother vas one shump, vas he?" he yelled. "Your brother vas a long sight better man zan you, mine frient. He go fight for la France. You stay here. Get out!" And he put me out, and saved the day and the trousers.

It was never a good plan for me to lie. It never did work out right, not once.

I have found the only safe plan to be to stick to the truth and let the house come down if it must. It will come down anyhow.

It was never a good plan for me to lie. It never did work out right, not once.

I have found the only safe plan to be to stick to the truth and let the house come down if it must. It will come down anyhow.

I reached New York with just one cent in my pocket, and put up at a boarding-house where the charge was one dollar a day. In this no moral obliquity was involved.

The night dews and the snakes, and the dogs that kept sniffing and growling half the night in the near distance, had made me tired of sleeping in the fields.

The dead were much better company. They minded their own business, and let a fellow alone.

[Illustration: "The dead were much better company"]

That was the saving clause.

I accepted his rolls as instalments of the debt his country owed me, or ought to owe me, for my unavailing efforts in its behalf.

It was under such auspices that I made the acquaintance of Mulberry Bend, the Five Points, and the rest of the slum, with which there was in the years to come to be a reckoning.

And I am going to stay one until the last of that ilk has ceased to discourage men from trying to help their fellows by the shortest cut they can find, whether it fits in a theory or not.

I don't care two pins for all the social theories that were ever made unless they help to make better men and women by bettering their lot.

I have had cranks of that order, who rated as sensible beings in the ordinary affairs of life, tell me that I was doing harm rather than good by helping improve the lot of the poor;

Life is too short; but I am glad I did not miss that one. Those are the fellows for whom Roosevelt is not a good enough reformer; who chill the enthusiasm of mankind with a deadly chill, and miscall it method—science.

The science of how not to do a thing—yes! They make me tired.

There was until last winter a doorway in Chatham Square, that of the old Barnum clothing store, which I could never pass without recalling those nights of hopeless misery with the policeman's periodic "Get up there! move on!"

As my hand stole mechanically down to caress it, it crept upon my knees and licked my face, as if it meant to tell me that there was one who understood; that I was not alone.

And the love of the faithful little beast thawed the icicles in my heart.

I picked it up in my arms and fled from the tempter; fled to where there were lights and men moving, if they cared less for me than I for them—anywhere so that I saw and heard the river no more.

… of that night became, in the providence of God, the means of putting an end to one of the foulest abuses that ever disgraced a Christian city, and a mainspring in the battle with the slum as far as my share in it is concerned.

My dog did not die unavenged.

I walked all day, following the track, and in the afternoon crossed the long trestlework of the Jersey Central Railroad over Newark Bay, with my face set toward Philadelphia.

… sent me on my way to an old schoolmate in Jamestown, N.Y., clothed and in my right mind, I was none the worse for my first lesson in swimming against the current, and quite sure that next time I should be able to breast it.

Hope springs eternal at twenty-one.

I had many a weary stretch ahead before I was to make port. But with youth and courage as the equipment, one should win almost any fight.

It happened to be the one thing he knew about.

Popular favor is a fickle thing.

The audience that had but now been applauding my efforts to organize the earth took his word for it without waiting for an explanation and went out in a body, scouting even the ichthyosaurus as a prehistoric fake.

I paid off all my debts, and quarrelled with all my friends about religion.

I never had any patience with a person who says "there is no God." The man is a fool, and therefore cannot be reasoned with.

But in those days I was set on converting him, as my viking forefathers did when from heathen they became Christians—by fire and sword if need be.

no one could sift wrong from right as he, and punish the wrong. In that I was right. I have not changed my opinion on that point one whit, and I am sure I never shall.

The power of fact is the mightiest lever of this or of any day.

The reporter has his hand upon it, and it is his grievous fault if he does not use it well. I thought I would make a good reporter.

The wedding was to be in the summer. It was then the last week in April. At the thought I turned my face to the wall, and hoped that I might die.

But one does not die of love at twenty-four.

The days that passed slowly saw me leave my sick-bed and limp down to the river on sunny days, to sit and watch the stream listlessly for hours, hoping nothing, grasping nothing, except that it was all over.

"No, no, Jacob," he said; "not that. We have preachers enough.

What the world needs is consecrated pens.

"

I suppose my renown as a scrapper survives yet in the old ward. As in the other case, the chain of circumstantial evidence was perfect. No link was missing. None could have been forged to make it stronger.

I wouldn't hang a dog on such evidence.

And I think I am justified in taking that stand.

the postmark of the little town of Hadersleben, where she was teaching school, the old-fashioned shape of the envelope—they all then and there entered into my life and became part of it, to abide forever with light and joy and thanksgiving.

How much of sunshine one little letter can contain!

Six years seemed all at once the merest breath of time to have waited for it. Toil, hardship, trouble—with that letter in my keep? I laughed out loud at the thought. The sound of my own voice sobered me.

"Wish you joy, old man," he said heartily. "Tell us of it, will you?" And I did.

It is true that all the world loves a lover.

It smiled upon me all day long, and I smiled back. Even the beats looked askance at me no longer. The politicians who came offering to buy the influence of my paper in the election were allowed to escape with their lives.

"What do you think—" he began, but his voice shook so that mother rose to her feet at once.

How do mothers know?

"Jacob!" she cried, and, pushing past him, had me in her embrace.

… good-bys from the steps, and the wheels of the mail-coach rattled over the cobblestones of the silent streets where old neighbors had set lights in their windows to cheer us on the way,—out into the open country, into the wide world,—our life's journey had begun.

Looking steadfastly ahead, over the bleak moor into the unknown beyond, I knew in my soul that I should conquer.

For her head was leaning trustfully on my shoulder and her hand was in mine; and all was well.

Looking steadfastly ahead, over the bleak moor into the unknown beyond, I knew in my soul that I should conquer.

For her head was leaning trustfully on my shoulder and her hand was in mine; and all was well.

[Illustration: "Out into the open country into the wide world—our life's journey had begun."]

I had drunk that cup to the dregs, and I knew. I just put on a gingham apron and turned in to help her.

Two can battle with a fit of homesickness much better than one, even if never a word is said about it. And it can very rarely resist a man with an apron on.

I suppose he looks too ridiculous.

So I would have to begin life over again in a new place. I gave the matter but little thought. I suppose the old folks, viewing it all from over there, thought it trifling with fate. It was not.

It was a trumpet challenge to it to come on, all that could crowd in.

Two, we would beat the world.

I gave the matter but little thought. I suppose the old folks, viewing it all from over there, thought it trifling with fate. It was not. It was a trumpet challenge to it to come on, all that could crowd in.

Two, we would beat the world.

Before I record the onset that ensued, I must stop to tell of another fight, one which in my soul I regret, though it makes me laugh even now. Non-resistance never appealed to me except in the evildoer who has been knocked down for cause.

So were the beats who were behind in their bills, and whose champion I had unexpectedly become. A doughty champion, too, a walking advertisement of my own prescription; for I grew fat and strong, whereas I had been lean and poor.

I was happy, that was it; very, very happy, and full of faith in our ability to fight our way through, come what might.

Nor did it require the gift of a prophet to make out that trying days were coming; for my position, again as the paid editor of my once "owners," the politicians, was rapidly becoming untenable. It was an agreement entered into temporarily.

He pointed to a paragraph which described how, after the wreck of the watchman's shanty, the kitchen stove floated ashore with the house-cat alive and safe upon it. I still believe that an unfriendly printer played me that trick.

"Next time," he added, dismissing me, "make them swear to the stove. There is no accounting for cats."

But, though I did not hear the last of it in the office for a long time, I know that my measure was taken by the desk that day. I was trusted after that, even though I had made a mistake.

When we met at the end of that season, and heard how narrow had been the escape from calamity due to utter lack of management, a good Methodist brother put in words what we were each and every one of us thinking about.

"Brethren," he said, "so far as I can make out, but for the interposition of a merciful Providence we should all be in jail, as we deserve. Let us pray!"

I think that prayer was more than lip-service with most of us. I know that I registered a vow that I would never again be trustee of anything without trusteeing it in fact. And I have kept the vow.

Sweet comfort for "the Dutchman"! My salary was raised, but that was of less account. We had saved the day and the desk. After that it was not all pulling up-stream in Mulberry Street.

Nothing in this world succeeds like success.

Before that I had been once suspended myself for missing something in this very case. I was not to blame, and therefore was angry and refused to make explanations.

Not that I think, by any manners of means, that it was the best way, but it was mine. And goodness knows I had no desire to be an editor. I have not now.

I prefer to be a reporter and deal with the facts to being an editor and lying about them.

In the end the complaints died out. I suppose I was given up as hopeless.

There were a hundred ways in which I could hound him then, out of place and pay, even as he had driven me forth from the last poor shelter and caused my only friend to be killed.

Speak not to me of the sweetness of revenge! Of all unhappy mortals the vengeful man must be the most wretched.

I suffered more in the anticipation of mine than ever I had when smarting under the injury, grievous as the memory of it is to me even now. Day after day I went across the street to begin the search.

… policemen themselves who hated to lodge under one roof with tramps, from citizen bodies that saw in the system an outrage upon Christian charity and all decency, but all without producing any other effect than spasmodic whitewashing and the ineffectual turning on of the hose.

Nothing short of boiling water would have cleansed those dens.

Nothing else came of it, because stronger even than the selfish motive that exploits public office for private gain is the deadly inertia in civic life which simply means that we are all as lazy as things will let us be.

But they came down, as the walls of ignorance and indifference must every time, if you blow hard enough and long enough, with faith in your cause and in your fellow-man.

It is just a question of endurance. If you keep it up, they can't.

They began to give, those grim walls, when typhus fever broke out in the city in the winter of 1891-92. The wonder was that it did not immediately centre in the police lodging-rooms.

As in passing I stooped over the weeping girl, one of them, thinking I was one of the men about the place, and misunderstanding my purpose, sprang between us like a tigress and pushed me back.

"Not her!" she cried, and shook her fist at me; "not her! It is all right with us. We are old and tough. But she is young, and don't you dare!"

I went out and stood under the stars, and thanked God that I was born. Only tramps! It had been dinned into my ears until I said it myself, God forgive me!

"Not her!" she cried, and shook her fist at me; "not her! It is all right with us. We are old and tough. But she is young, and don't you dare!"

I went out and stood under the stars, and thanked God that I was born.

Only tramps! It had been dinned into my ears until I said it myself, God forgive me! Aye, that was what we had made of them with our infernal machinery of rum-shop, tenement, dive, and—this place.

If I were a clergyman I would practise photography and preach about it. But I am jealous of the miracle. I do not want it explained to me in terms of HO(2) or such like formulas, learned, but so hopelessly unsatisfying.

I do not want my butterfly stuck on a pin and put in a glass case. I want to see the sunlight on its wings as it flits from flower to flower, and I don't care a rap what its Latin name may be.

Anyway, it is not its name. The sun and the flower and the butterfly know that. The man who sticks a pin in it does not, and never will, for he knows not its language. Only the poet does among men.

Children have been born, and one we carried over the hill to the churchyard with tears for the baby we had lost. But He to whom we gave it back has turned our grief to joy.

Of all our babies, the one we lost is the only one we have kept.

The others grew out of our arms; I hardly remember them in their little white slips. But he is our baby forever. Fifteen happy years of peace have they been, for love held the course.

It will brighten the office, the store, or the schoolroom all through the day. Let them have no fear that their gift will not be appreciated because it costs nothing.

Not alms, but the golden rule, is what is needed in the tenements of the poor.

"If those who have not the time or opportunity themselves will send their flowers to 303 Mulberry Street, opposite Police Headquarters, it will be done for them.

With tongue or pen, the argument shaped itself finally into the fundamental one for the rescue of the home imperiled by the slum. There all roads met. Good citizenship hung upon that issue.

Say what you will, a man cannot live like a pig and vote like a man.

The dullest of us saw it. The tenement had given to New York the name of "the homeless city." But with that gone which made life worth living, what were liberty worth?

Good land! what are we that we should think ourselves always right, or, lest we do wrong, sit idle all our lives waiting for light? The light comes as we work toward it.

Roosevelt was right when he said that the only one who never makes mistakes is the one who never does anything.

Preserve us from him; from the man who eternally wants to hold the scales even and so never gets done weighing—never hands anything over the counter. Take him away and put red blood into his veins.

All the good in it came out; and there is a lot of it in the worst of times. Roosevelt had the true philosopher's stone that turns dross to gold, in his own sturdy faith in his fellow-man.

Men became good because he thought them so.

By which I am not to be understood as meaning that he just voted them good—the police, for instance—and sat by waiting to see the wings grow. No, but he helped them sprout.

That is a child's right, and it is not to be cheated of it. And when it is cheated of it, it is not the child but the community that is robbed of that beside which all its wealth is but tinsel and trash.

For men, not money, make a country great, and joyless children do not make good men.

[Illustration: A Tenement House Air-shaft]

Ten years before, when he was Mayor, he had put through the law under which the Mulberry Bend had been at last wiped out. We held our meetings at the City Hall, where I had been spurned so often.

All things come to those who wait—and fight for them.

Yes, fight! I say it advisedly. I have come to the time of life when a man does not lay about him with a club unless he has to. But—eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!

When I had done, the chairman said courteously that they were greatly indebted to me for my frank opinion. Every man was entitled to his own. And he could quite sympathize with me in my inability to catch their point of view.

"Because here," he added, "I have been reading for ten years or more the things Mr. Riis writes in his newspaper and in the magazines, and by which he makes a living, and for the life of me I never was able to understand how any one could be found to pay for such stuff."

So there you have my measure as a reformer. The meeting nodded gravely. I was apparently the only one there who took it as a joke.

Of the thousands who land there, barely one per cent kept good company before coming. All the rest were the victims of evil association, of corrupt environment. They were not thieves by heredity; they were made. And the manufacture goes on every day.

The street and the jail are the factories.

"

… I read as a boy, in Hans Christian Andersen's account of his travels in the country of the Dons, that the shepherds brought butter from the mountains in sheep's intestines and measured them off in lengths demanded by the customers by tying knots upon them.

What was to be expected from a country that sold butter by the yard?

As the event showed, it ran its navies after the same fashion and was justly punished. I made friends that winter with Dr. Leonard Wood, whom we all came to know and admire afterwards as General and Governor Wood; and a fine fellow he was.

"On the shady side, you mean," amended the Presbyterian clergyman who was on the committee. The Cardinal shook his head, smiling.

"No, doctor! The sunny side—nearer heaven."

The meeting was of a kind to inspire even the dullest speaker. When I finished my plea for the children and turned around, there sat the Cardinal yet behind me, though it was an hour past his bedtime.

"But where did she go?" I said, half to myself. Far down in the darkness came the old professor's deep voice:—

"That time you saw the earth move."

And so I did. The clockwork that made the dome keep up with the motion of the stars—of our world rather—had run down, and when Saturn passed out of my sight, as I thought, it was the earth instead which I literally saw move.

"I thought yours was a free country," said my policeman conductor.

"So it is," I told him, "freedom to poison yourself and your neighbor excepted."

He shook his head, and we went on.

And in their track was following, rather faster there than here as yet, the housing reformer with his atoning scheme of philanthropy and five per cent. That holds the key.

In the last analysis it is a question of how we rate the brotherhood, what per cent we will take.

My neighbor at table in my London boarding-house meant that, though he put it in a way all his own. He was a benevolent enough crank, but no friend of preaching. Being a crank, he condemned preachers with one fell swoop:—

In that day, too, the boss shall have ceased from troubling. However gross he wax in our sight, he has no real substance.

He is but an ugly dream of political distemper.

Sometimes when I hear him spoken of with bated breath, I think of the Irish teamster who went to the priest in a fright; he had seen a ghost on the church wall as he passed it in the night.

"It was like nothing so much as a big ass," said Patrick, wide-eyed.

"Go home, Pat! and be easy. You've seen your own shadow."

But I am tired now and want to go home to mother and rest awhile.

Have I not felt the thrill, when wandering abroad, at the sight of the stars and stripes suddenly unfolding, the flag of my home, of my manhood's years and of my pride?

Happy he who has a flag to love. Twice blest he who has two, and such two.

We have yet a mile to the frontier and, with the panorama of green meadows, of placid rivers, and of long-legged storks gravely patrolling the marshes in search of frogs and lizards, passing by our car-window, I can stop to tell you how this filial …

At last the waiting is over, and her faith justified.

Dear old mother! Gray-haired I return, sadly scotched in many a conflict with the world, yet ever thy boy, thy home mine.

Ah me! Heaven is nearer to us than we often dream on earth.

Then he packs the dry clothes in his cart, puts the boy in with them and, puffing leisurely at his pipe, lounges soberly homeward.

There is no hurry with the mail.

There is not. It was only yesterday that, crossing the meadows on a "local," I found the train pulling up some distance from the village to let an old woman, coming puffing and blowing from a farm-house with a basket on her arm, catch up.

"Couldn't she," he said, with some asperity, as she flounced aboard, "couldn't she get here sooner?"

"No," she said, "I couldn't. Didn't you see me run?" And he rang the bell to start the boat.

Time to wait! In New York I have seen men, in the days before the iron gates were put on the ferry-boats, jump when the boat was yet a yard from the landing and run as if their lives depended on it;

The people, including many of the employers, contributed liberally to keep them from starving. It was a war of principles, and it was fought out on that line, though in the end each gave in to something.

Yes, it is good, sometimes, to take time to think, even if you cannot wait for the tide to float you off a sandbank.

Though what else they could have done, I cannot imagine.

The moor was ever most to my liking. I was born on the edge of it, and once its majesty has sunk into a human soul, that soul is forever after attuned to it.

How little we have the making of ourselves. And how much greater the need that we should make of that little the most.

All my days I have been preaching against heredity as the arch-enemy of hope and effort, and here is mine, holding me fast.

But not so.

He is the heathen who loves not his native land.

Thor long since lost his grip on the sons of the vikings. Over the battlefield he drives his chariot yet, and his hammer strikes fire as of old. The British remember it from Nelson's raid on Copenhagen;

It was well meant, and it was Danish all over.

Stick up for your rights at any cost. These secure, go any length to oblige a neighbor.

Journeying so, I came from the home of dead kings at last to that of the living,—old King Christian, beloved of his people,—where once my children horrified the keeper of Rosenborg Palace by playing "the Wild Man of Borneo" with the official silver lions in …

"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 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;

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.

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.

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.

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]

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?

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!