The Making of an American

And here I take leave of this loyal friend in the story of my life. A better one I never had. He lived to grow rich in possessions, but his wealth was his undoing. It is one of the sore spots in my life—and there are many more than I like to think of—that when he needed me most I was not able to be to him what I would and should have been. We had drifted too far apart then, and the influence I had over him once I had myself surrendered. It was so with Charles. It was so with Nicolai. They come, sometimes when I am alone, and nod to me out of the dim past: "You were not tempted. You should have helped!" Yes, God help me! it is true. I am more to blame than they. I should have helped and did not. What would I not give that I could unsay that now! Two of them died by their own hand, the third in Bloomingdale. I had been making several attempts to get a foothold on one of the metropolitan newspapers, but always without success. That fall I tried the Tribune, the city editor of which, Mr. Shanks, was one of my neighbors, but was told, with more frankness than flattery, that I was "too green." Very likely Mr. Shanks had been observing my campaign against the beats and thought me a dangerous man in those days of big libel suits. I should have done the same thing. But a few weeks after he changed his mind and invited me to come on the paper and try my hand. So I joined the staff of the Tribune five years after its great editor had died, a beaten and crushed man, one of the most pathetic figures in American political history.

They were not halcyon days, those winter months of reporting for the Tribune. I was on trial, and it was hard work and very little pay, not enough to live on, so that we were compelled to take to our little pile to make ends meet. But there was always a bright fire and a cheery welcome for me at home, so what did it matter? It was a good winter despite the desperate stunts sometimes set me. Reporters on general work do not sleep on flowery beds of ease. I remember well one awful night when word came of a dreadful disaster on the Coney Island shore. Half of it had been washed away by the sea, the report ran, with houses and people. I was sent out to get at the truth of the thing. I started in the early twilight and got as far as Gravesend. The rest of the way I had to foot it through snow and slush knee-deep in the face of a blinding storm, and got to Sheepshead Bay dead beat, only to find that the ice and the tide had shut off all approach to the island.

I did the next best thing; I gathered from the hotel-keepers of the Bay an account of the wreck on the beach that lacked nothing in vividness, thanks to their laudable desire not to see an enterprising reporter cheated out of his rightful "space." Then I hired a sleigh and drove home through the storm, wet through—"I can hear the water yet running out of your boots," says my wife—wet through and nearly frozen stiff, but tingling with pride at my feat.

The Tribune next day was the only paper that had an account of the tidal wave on the island. But something about it did not seem to strike the city editor just right. There was an unwonted suavity in his summons when he called me to his desk which I had learned to dread as liable to conceal some fatal thrust.

"So you went to the island last night, Mr. Riis," he observed, regarding me over the edge of the paper.

"No, sir! I couldn't get across; nobody could."

"Eh!" He lowered the paper an inch, and took a better look: "this very circumstantial account—"

"Was gathered from the hotel-keepers in Sheepshead Bay, who had seen it all. If there had been a boat not stove by the ice, I would have got across somehow."

Mr. Shanks dropped the paper and considered me almost kindly. I saw that he had my bill for the sleigh-ride in his hand.

"Right!" he said. "We'll allow the sleigh. We'll allow even the stove, to a man who owns he didn't see it, though it is pretty steep." 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.

In spite of it, I did not get on. There was not a living in it for me, that was made plain enough. We were too many doing general work. After six months of hard grubbing I decided that I had better seek my fortune elsewhere. Spring was coming, and it seemed a waste of time to stay where I was. I wrote out my resignation and left it on the city editor's desk. Some errand took me out of the office. When I returned it lay there still, unopened. I saw it, and thought I would try another week. I might make a strike. So I took the note away and tore it up, just as Mr. Shanks entered the room.

That evening it set in snowing at a great rate. I had been uptown on a late assignment, and was coming across Printing-House Square, running at top speed to catch the edition. The wind did its part. There is no corner in all New York where it blows as it does around the Tribune building. As I flew into Spruce Street I brought up smack against two men coming out of the side door. One of them I knocked off his feet into a snowdrift. He floundered about in it and swore dreadfully. By the voice I knew that it was Mr. Shanks. I stood petrified, mechanically pinning his slouch hat to the ground with my toe. He got upon his feet at last and came toward me, much wrought up.

"Who in thunder—" he growled angrily and caught sight of my rueful face. I was thinking I might as well have left my note on his desk that morning, for now I was going to be discharged anyhow.

"Is that the way you treat your city editor, Riis?" he asked, while I handed him his hat.

"It was the wind, sir, and I was running—"

"Running! What is up that set you going at that rate?"

I told him of the meeting I had attended—it was of no account—and that I was running to catch the edition. He heard me out.

"And do you always run like that when you are out on assignments?"

"When it is late like this, yes. How else would I get my copy in?"

"Well, just take a reef in when you round the corner," he said, brushing the snow from his clothes. "Don't run your city editor down again." And he went his way.

It was with anxious forebodings I went to the office the next morning. Mr. Shanks was there before me. He was dictating to his secretary, Mr. Taggart, who had been witness of the collision of the night before, when I came in. Presently I was summoned to his desk, and went there with sinking heart. Things had commenced to look up a bit in the last twenty-four hours, and I had hoped yet to make it go. Now, it was all over.

"Mr. Riis," he began stiffly, "you knocked me down last night without cause."

"Yes, sir! But I—"

"Into a snowdrift," he went on, unheeding. "Nice thing for a reporter to do to his commanding officer. Now, sir! this will not do. We must find some way of preventing it in the future. Our man at Police Headquarters has left. I am going to send you up there in his place. You can run there all you want to, and you will want to all you can. It is a place that needs a man who will run to get his copy in and tell the truth and stick to it. You will find plenty of fighting there. But don't go knocking people down—unless you have to."

And with this kind of an introduction I was sent off to Mulberry Street, where I was to find my life-work. It is twenty-three years since the day I took my first walk up there and looked over the ground that has since become so familiar to me. I knew it by reputation as the hardest place on the paper, and it was in no spirit of exultation that I looked out upon the stirring life of the block. If the truth be told, I think I was, if anything, a bit afraid. The story of the big fight the Tribune reporter was having on his hands up there with all the other papers had long been echoing through newspaperdom, and I was not deceived. But, after all, I had been doing little else myself, and, having given no offence, my cause would be just. In which case, what had I to fear? So in my soul I commended my work and myself to the God of battles who gives victory, and took hold.

Right here, lest I make myself appear better than I am, I want to say that I am not a praying man in the sense of being versed in the language of prayer or anything of that kind. I wish I were. So, I might have been better able to serve my unhappy friends when they needed me. Indeed, those who have known me under strong provocation—provocation is very strong in Mulberry Street—would scorn such an intimation, and, I am sorry to say, with cause. I was once a deacon, but they did not often let me lead in prayer. My supplications ordinarily take the form of putting the case plainly to Him who is the source of all right and all justice, and leaving it so. If I were to find that I could not do that, I should decline to go into the fight, or, if I had to, should feel that I were to be justly beaten. In all the years of my reporting I have never omitted this when anything big was on foot, whether a fire, a murder, a robbery, or whatever might come in the way of duty, and I have never heard that my reports were any the worse for it. I know they were better. Perhaps the notion of a police reporter praying that he may write a good murder story may seem ludicrous, even irreverent, to some people. But that is only because they fail to make out in it the human element which dignifies anything and rescues it from reproach. Unless I could go to my story that way I would not go to it at all. I am very sure that there is no irreverence in it—just the reverse.

So I dived in. But before I did it I telegraphed to my wife:—

"Got staff appointment. Police Headquarters. $25 a week. Hurrah!"

I knew it would make her happy.

CHAPTER IX

LIFE IN MULBERRY STREET

It was well that I stopped to make explanations before I took hold in my new office. Mighty little time was left me after. What the fight was about to which I fell heir I have long since forgotten. Mulberry Street in those days was prone to such things. Somebody was always fighting somebody else for some fancied injury or act of bad faith in the gathering of the news. For the time being they all made common cause against the reporter of the Tribune, who also represented the local bureau of the Associated Press. They hailed the coming of "the Dutchman" with shouts of derision, and decided, I suppose, to finish me off while I was new. So they pulled themselves together for an effort, and within a week I was so badly "beaten" in the Police Department, in the Health Department, in the Fire Department, the Coroner's office, and the Excise Bureau, all of which it was my task to cover, that the manager of the Press Bureau called me down to look me over. He reported to the Tribune that he did not think I would do. But Mr. Shanks told him to wait and see. In some way I heard of it, and that settled it that I was to win. I might be beaten in many a battle, but how could I lose the fight with a general like that?

And, indeed, in another week it was their turn to be called down to give an account of themselves. The "Dutchman" had stolen a march on them. I suppose it was to them a very astounding thing, yet it was perfectly simple. Their very strength, as they held it to be, was their weakness. They were a dozen against one, and each one of them took it for granted that the other eleven were attending to business and that he need not exert himself overmuch. A good many years after, I had that experience as a member of a board of twelve trustees, each one of whom had lent his name but not his work to the cause we were supposed to represent. 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.

But to return to Mulberry Street. The immediate result of this first victory of mine was a whirlwind onslaught on me, fiercer than anything that had gone before. I expected it and met it as well as I could, holding my own after a fashion. When, from sheer exhaustion, they let up to see if I was still there, I paid them back with two or three "beats" I had stored up for the occasion. And then we settled down to the ten years' war for the mastery, out of which I was to come at last fairly the victor, and with the only renown I have ever coveted or cared to have, that of being the "boss reporter" in Mulberry Street. I have so often been asked in later years what my work was there [Footnote: I say was; only in the last twelvemonth have I grasped Mr. Dana's meaning in calling his reporters his "young men." They need to be that. I, for one, have grown too old.], and how I found there the point of view from which I wrote my books, that I suppose I shall have to go somewhat into the details of it.

The police reporter on a newspaper, then, is the one who gathers and handles all the news that means trouble to some one: the murders, fires, suicides, robberies, and all that sort, before it gets into court. He has an office in Mulberry Street, across from Police Headquarters, where he receives the first intimation of the trouble through the precinct reports. Or else he does not receive it. The police do not like to tell the public of a robbery or a safe "cracking," for instance. They claim that it interferes with the ends of justice. What they really mean is that it brings ridicule or censure upon them to have the public know that they do not catch every thief, or even most of them. They would like that impression to go out, for police work is largely a game of bluff. Here, then, is an opportunity for the "beats" I speak of. The reporter who, through acquaintance, friendship, or natural detective skill, can get that which it is the policy of the police to conceal from him, wins. It may seem to many a reader a matter of no great importance if a man should miss a safe-burglary for his paper; but reporting is a business, a very exacting one at that, and if he will stop a moment and think what it is he instinctively looks at first in his morning paper, even if he has schooled himself not to read it through, he will see it differently. The fact is that it is all a great human drama in which these things are the acts that mean grief, suffering, revenge upon somebody, loss or gain. The reporter who is behind the scenes sees the tumult of passions, and not rarely a human heroism that redeems all the rest. It is his task so to portray it that we can all see its meaning, or at all events catch the human drift of it, not merely the foulness and the reek of blood. If he can do that, he has performed a signal service, and his murder story may easily come to speak more eloquently to the minds of thousands than the sermon preached to a hundred in the church on Sunday.

Of the advantages that smooth the way to news-getting I had none. I was a stranger, and I was never distinguished for detective ability. But good hard work goes a long way toward making up for lack of genius; and I mentioned only one of the opportunities for getting ahead of my opponents. They were lying all about us. Any seemingly innocent slip sent out from the police telegraph office across the way recording a petty tenement-house fire might hide a fire-bug, who always makes shuddering appeal to our fears; the finding of John Jones sick and destitute in the street meant, perhaps, a story full of the deepest pathos. Indeed, I can think of a dozen now that did. I see before me, as though it were yesterday, the desolate Wooster Street attic, with wind and rain sweeping through the bare room in which lay dying a French nobleman of proud and ancient name, the last of his house. He was one of my early triumphs. New York is a queer town. The grist of every hopper in the world comes to it. I shall not soon forget the gloomy tenement in Clinton Street where that day a poor shoemaker had shot himself. His name, Struensee, had brought me over. I knew there could not be such another. That was where my Danish birth stood me in good stead. I knew the story of Christian VII.'s masterful minister; of his fall and trial on the charge of supplanting his master in the affections of the young and beautiful Queen, sister of George III. Very old men told yet, when I was a boy, of that dark day when the proud head fell under the executioner's axe in the castle square—dark for the people whose champion Struensee had tried to be. My mother was born and reared in the castle at Elsinore where the unhappy Queen, disgraced and an outcast, wrote on the window-pane of her prison cell: "Lord, keep me innocent; make others great." It was all a familiar story to me, and when I sat beside that dead shoemaker and, looking through his papers, read there that the tragedy of a hundred years before was his family story, I knew that I held in my hands the means of paying off all accumulated scores to date.

Did I settle in full? Yes, I did. I was in a fight not of my own choosing, and I was well aware that my turn was coming. I hit as hard as I knew how, and so did they. When I speak of "triumphs," it is professionally. There was no hard-heartedness about it. We did not gloat over the misfortunes we described. We were reporters, not ghouls. There lies before me as I write a letter that came in the mail this afternoon from a woman who bitterly objects to my diagnosis of the reporter's as the highest and noblest of all callings. She signs herself "a sufferer from reporters' unkindness," and tells me how in the hour of her deep affliction they have trodden upon her heart. Can I not, she asks, encourage a public sentiment that will make such reporting disreputable? All my life I have tried to do so, and, in spite of the evidence of yellow journalism to the contrary, I think we are coming nearer to that ideal; in other words, we are emerging from savagery. Striving madly for each other's scalps as we were, I do not think that we scalped any one else unjustly. I know I did not. They were not particularly scrupulous, I am bound to say. In their rage and mortification at having underestimated the enemy, they did things unworthy of men and of reporters. They stole my slips in the telegraph office and substituted others that sent me off on a wild-goose chase to the farthest river wards in the midnight hour, thinking so to tire me out. But they did it once too often. I happened on a very important case on such a trip, and made the most of it, telegraphing down a column or more about it from the office, while the enemy watched me helplessly from the Headquarters' stoop across the way. They were gathered there, waiting for me to come back, and received me with loud and mocking ahems! and respectfully sympathetic toots on a tin horn, kept for that purpose. Its voice had a mournful strain in it that was especially exasperating. But when, without paying any attention to them, I busied myself with the wire at once, and kept at it right along, they scented trouble, and consulted anxiously among themselves. My story finished, I went out and sat on my own stoop and said ahem! in my turn in as many aggravating ways as I could. They knew they were beaten then, and shortly they had confirmation of it. The report came in from the precinct at 2 A.M., but it was then too late for their papers, for there were no telephones in those days. I had the only telegraph wire. After that they gave up such tricks, and the Tribune saved many cab fares at night; for there were no elevated railroads, either, in those days, or electric or cable cars.

On the other hand, this enterprise of ours was often of the highest service to the public. When, for instance, in following up a case of destitution and illness involving a whole family, I, tracing back the origin of it, came upon a party at which ham sandwiches had been the bill of fare, and upon looking up the guests, found seventeen of the twenty-five sick with identical symptoms, it required no medical knowledge, but merely the ordinary information and training of the reporter, to diagnose trichinosis. The seventeen had half a dozen different doctors, who, knowing nothing of party or ham, were helpless, and saw only cases of rheumatism or such like. I called as many of them as I could reach together that night, introduced them to one another and to my facts, and asked them what they thought then. What they thought made a sensation in my paper the next morning, and practically decided the fight, though the enemy was able to spoil my relish for the ham by reporting the poisoning of a whole family with a dish of depraved smelt while I was chasing up the trichinae. However, I had my revenge. I walked in that afternoon upon Dr. Cyrus Edson at his microscope surrounded by my adversaries, who besought him to deny my story. The doctor looked quizzically at them and made reply:—

"I would like to oblige you, boys, but how I can do it with those fellows squirming under the microscope I don't see. I took them from the flesh of one of the patients who was sent to Trinity Hospital to-day. Look at them yourself."

He winked at me, and, peering into his microscope, I saw my diagnosis more than confirmed. There were scores of the little beasts curled up and burrowing in the speck of tissue. The unhappy patient died that week.

We had our specialties in this contest of wits. One was distinguished as a sleuth. He fed on detective mysteries as a cat on a chicken-bone. He thought them out by day and dreamed them out by night, to the great exasperation of the official detectives, with whom their solution was a commercial, not in the least an intellectual, affair. They solved them on the plane of the proverbial lack of honor among thieves, by the formula, "You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours."

Another came out strong on fires. He knew the history of every house in town that ran any risk of being burned; knew every fireman; and could tell within a thousand dollars, more or less, what was the value of the goods stored in any building in the dry-goods district, and for how much they were insured. If he couldn't, he did anyhow, and his guesses often came near the fact, as shown in the final adjustment. He sniffed a firebug from afar, and knew without asking how much salvage there was in a bale of cotton after being twenty-four hours in the fire. He is dead, poor fellow. In life he was fond of a joke, and in death the joke clung to him in a way wholly unforeseen. The firemen in the next block, with whom he made his headquarters when off duty, so that he might always be within hearing of the gong, wished to give some tangible evidence of their regard for the old reporter, but, being in a hurry, left it to the florist, who knew him well, to choose the design. He hit upon a floral fire-badge as the proper thing, and thus it was that when the company of mourners was assembled, and the funeral service in progress, there arrived and was set upon the coffin, in the view of all, that triumph of the florist's art, a shield of white roses, with this legend written across it in red immortelles: "Admit within fire lines only." It was shocking, but irresistible. It brought down even the house of mourning.

The incident recalls another, which at the time caused me no little astonishment. A telegram from Long Branch had announced the drowning of a young actor, I think, whose three sisters lived over on Eighth Avenue. I had gone to the house to learn about the accident, and found them in the first burst of grief, dissolved in tears. It was a very hot July day, and to guard against sunstroke I had put a cabbage-leaf in my hat. On the way over I forgot all about it, and the leaf, getting limp, settled down snugly upon my head like a ridiculous green skullcap. Knowing nothing of this, I was wholly unprepared for the effect my entrance, hatless, had upon the weeping family. The young ladies ceased crying, stared wildly, and then, to my utter bewilderment, broke into hysterical laughter. For the moment I thought they had gone mad. It was only when in my perplexity I put up my hand to rub my head, that I came upon the cause of the strange hilarity. For years afterward the thought of it had the same effect upon me that the cabbage-leaf produced so unexpectedly in that grief-stricken home.