THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN.* The Making of an American
is the autobiography of Jacob Riis, a Dane who went as a very young man to seek his fortune in America. The book opens with some charming pictures of his boyhood in the little town of Ribe, on the North Sea coast of Denmark. The reader is continually reminded of Hans Andersen as each little sketch of provincial life in Denmark is spread out before him. Jacob was the son of a schoolmaster whose slender salary had to "reach around to fourteen children." He was destined by his father for a learned profession, but he hated his lessons, and finally, by his own desire, he was apprenticed to a carpenter. As a carpenter's boy he helped in the building of a new factory which was being set up by the richest man in the town, and, like Andersen's little heroes, he fell desperately in love with the manufacturer's daughter. He tells how she used to come and play in the timber-yard, and how he could not keep his eyes off her, and therefore could not keep them on his work, and once cut off the top of his finger by reason of his pre- occupation. No sooner was he out of his apprenticeship, and a duly enrolled carpenter of the Guild of Copenhagen, than he proposed to the lady of his dreams ; but naturally the rich burgess had other views for his pretty daughter. Jacob Riis was refused, and then and there determined to try his luck in the United States. He had, he tells us, already a fair know- ledge of English, learned chiefly from AU the Year Bound, which his father took in.
In New York he found "no special-public clamour for his services," and determined to go West. An offer of a free railway journey and some wood-chopping work took him to the little town of Dexterville. He bad, be tells us, no notion of accepting this role as permanent; he was "out to twist the wheel of fortune his way," and sure that he could eventually do it, he set to to make the best of things during the interval. Life in Dexterville was by no means dull. In order to attend the "weekly parties" given by the town Jacob Riis expended a dollar on a second-hand dress-coat, and thus attired he enjoyed himself hugely. Puritan ideals prevailed in Dexter- • • The Making of an American. By Jacob Bile. London: Macmillan and Co. 1132. edi villa. "Dancing being tabooed as immoral and contamina- ting, the young people had recourse to particularly energetic kissing games." It was all very harmless and very funny, he goes on, and certainly the descriptions he gives of his priva- tions and his recreations overflow with humour and good humour; but however much the reader may laugh, he will agree with the autobiographer when he says, "though it may never be a disgrace to be poor, it is sometimes very inconvenient." From wood-chopping Mr. Riis took to com- mercial travelling, and peddled flat-irons from place to place, enjoying the many adventures upon which he happened in his wanderings. His next experiment was in journalism. He went to work at fifteen dollars a week on a small Brooklyn "organ," and in a short time was editing it. About this time he tells us that he underwent a con- version, and determined to "consecrate his pen." He goes into no details in the matter of religious experience, but shows the reader a portrait of the minister who converted him, and informs him that he felt like a man "travelling in the road" who finds out that he is going wrong. "He did not roll in the dust and agonise over his mistake, he just turned round and went the other way." Whether he consecrated his fists as well as his pen we are not told, but he seems to have had a good many rough- and-tumble fights with persons who arrived at his office under the impression that they had grievances. A grocer, for instance, living in the neighbourhood confided in the editor that some of his customers did not pay. The South Brooklyn News accordingly published their names and the amounts of their unpaid bills. We are net surprised to hear that while the paper flourished the editor grew "personally unpopular," even with the ungrateful grocer, of whose subsequent failure Mr. Riis says he heard without regret. Finally, things got to such a pitch as to make it necessary to hire an Irish coalheaver to receive the aggrieved and keep the office quiet enough to write in. After some more very pretty quarrels the editor failed "to get along with" the politicians he served, concluding that though he should much like to edit an independent newspaper, he did not care to run "an organ." Perhaps this conscientious relin- quishing of a post out of which he got, if not much money, at least a varied and interesting life, is a proof, for which we confess we had hitherto looked in vain, of the consecration of our hero's pen.
After a short interlude, during which Mr. Riis travelled about with a magic lantern giving open-air entertainments, in which "the advertisements of Brooklyn merchants were interspersed with beautiful coloured views," he obtained regular work as a police reporter on the Tribune with a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. We quote his own description of his duties :—" The police reporter on a newspaper is one who gathers and handles all the news which means trouble to some one—the murders, fires, suicides, robberies, and all that sort of thing—before it gets into court. The reporter who through acquaintance, friendship, or natural detective skill can get that which it is the policy of the police to keep from him, wins." The code of professional honour current among American reporters is not, we gather, very high, and Mr. Riis tells one or two stories about how he obtained material for his copy which for the sake of h own dignity he would have done well to suppress. However, by hook or by crook he got his information, and got it faster than other men, so that at last he obtained, he tells us, the only renown he ever coveted,—that of being the " boss " reporter of Mulberry Street, one of the worst neigh- bourhoods in New York. But Mr. Riis won another renown, whether he cared for it or no, the renown of a successful philanthropist. Instead of the cynical tolerance such work might well be expected to engender, he conceived a genuine love for the slum-dwellers of New York. He set himself to let in a flood of light upon Mulberry Street, and to rouse the well-off inhabitants of the city to "how the other half lives,"—a phrase which he chose for the title of his first book. He waged war on the Tammany police. He made public the awful state of the housing accommodation, he clamoured for open spaces, rebuilding, new schools, new truancy laws, wearing out his strength and risking his life in the cause he had at heart,—in fact, he dealt a really effectual blow at the bad municipal government of New
York. Above all, he laboured for the good of the chil- dren, to improve the lot of the little boys who tried to play baseball in underground playgrounds, and of the other little boys who succeeded in "playing hookey," and went to jail instead of to school. By all this he gained no personal advantage, unless indeed we count the friendship of various men, of which he is naively proud. For President Roosevelt, with whom he worked when the now President of the United States was President only of the Police Board in New York, he has an enthusiastic admiration, which, we think, bears evident marks of disinterested reality. Of Mr. Roosevelt he tells some amusing and honorific stories, with which we recommend our readers to divert themselves.
Two sources of interest strike us in The Making of an American other than the entertainment which the book affords. Unlike many autobiographies, it contains a striking portrait of the writer, and from first to last the book betrays a great deal of literary skill. Made up of papers originally contributed to magazines, and giving an impression of having been written very fast, it is nevertheless a complete whole. The story of the love affair which began with the carpenter's lad in Ribe, and ended with the police reporter of New York, is interwoven throughout the book with extraordinary delicacy of touch. The Hans Andersen-like note struck in the first chapter sounds again and again throughout above all the noise and clatter of "the ten years' war in Mulberry Street." "The American" as he reveals himself in the making is certainly a very pleasant acquaintance, who delights us by his humorous view of life and the effervescent quality of a nature which seems to give off happiness. In his character of police reporter we can but regret that professional ardour occasionally led Mr. Riis to suppress the gentleman-like scruples which we are sure that he always felt.
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