CHAPTER VI. HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN

The loss of our baggage was only the beginning of our troubles in New

York. With the feather ticks went also the money mother had got from

selling the bedsteads and other furniture. She had nothing with which

to buy food and while we were walking the streets we smelt the delicious

odor of food from the restaurants and became whining and petulant. This

was the first time mother had ever heard her children crying for bread

when she had none to give them. The experience was trying, but her stout

heart faced it calmly. In the Old World, her folks and father's folks

had been rated as prosperous people. They always had good food in the

larder and meat on Sunday, which was more than many had. They were the

owners of feather beds, while many never slept on anything but straw.

True they could not raise the passage money to America until father

came and earned it--that would have been riches in Wales. Now we were

in America hungry and penniless, and hard was the bed that we should lie

on.

From Pittsburgh father had sent us railroad tickets, and these tickets

were waiting for us at the railroad office. All we would have to do

would be to hold our hunger in check until we should reach Hubbard,

Ohio, where a kinsman had established a home. But while mother was

piloting her family to the depot, two of the children got lost. She had

reached Castle Garden with six children and her household goods. Now her

goods were gone and only four of the children remained. My sister was

ten and I was eight; we were the oldest. The baby, one year old, and the

next, a toddler of three, mother had carried in her arms. But two boys,

Walter and David, four and six years old, had got lost in the traffic.

Mother took the rest of us to a hotel and locked us in a room while she

went out to search for the missing ones. For two days she tramped the

streets visiting police stations and making inquiry everywhere. At night

she would return to us and report that she had found no trace of little

Walter and David. To try to picture the misery of those scenes is beyond

me. I can only say that the experience instilled in me a lasting terror.

The fear of being parted from my parents and from my brothers and

sisters, then implanted in my soul, has borne its fruit in after-life.

Finally mother found the boys in a rescue home for lost children.

Brother David, curly-haired and red-cheeked, had so appealed to the

policeman who found them that he had made application to adopt the boy

and was about to take him to his own home.

After finding the children, mother stood on Broadway and, gazing at the

fine buildings and the good clothes that all classes wore in America,

she felt her heart swell with hope. And she said aloud: “This is the

place for my boys.”

Every one had treated her with kindness. A fellow countryman had lent

her money to pay the hotel bill, telling her she could pay it back after

she had joined her husband. And so we had passed through the gateway

of the New World as thousands of other poor families had done. And our

temporary hardships had been no greater than most immigrants encountered

in those days.

I later learned from a Bohemian of the trials his mother met with on her

first days in New York. He told me that she and her three children,

the smallest a babe in arms, tramped the streets of New York for days

looking in vain for some one who could speak their native tongue. They

slept at night in doorways, and by day wandered timid and terrified

through the streets.

“At last a saloon-keeper saw that we were famishing,” the Bohemian told

me. “He was a--a--Oh, what do you call them in your language? I can

think of the Bohemian word but not the English.”

“What was he like?” I asked to help find the word. “Red-headed? Tall?

Fat?”

“No; he was one of those people who usually run clothing stores and are

always having a 'SALE.'”

“Jew,” I said.

“Yes, he was a Jew saloon-keeper. He took pity on us and took us into

his saloon and gave us beer, bread and sausages. We were so nearly

starved that we ate too much and our stomachs threw it up. The

saloon-keeper sent word to the Humane Society, and they came and put us

on the train for Chicago, where our father was waiting for us.”

The Bohemians saved from starvation by the pity of a Jewish

saloon-keeper is a sample of how our world was running fifty years ago.

Who can doubt that we have a better world to-day? And the thing that has

made it better is the thing that Jew exhibited, human sympathy.

When I found myself head of the Labor Department one of my earliest

duties was to inspect the immigrant stations at Boston and New York. In

spite of complaints, they were being conducted to the letter of the

law; to correct the situation it was only necessary to add sympathy and

understanding to the enforcement of the law.

An American poet in two lines told the whole truth about human courage:

“The bravest are the tenderest,

The loving are the daring.”

Tenderness and human sympathy to the alien passing through Ellis Island

does not mean that we are weak, or that the unfit alien is welcome. The

tenderer we treat the immigrant who seeks our hospitality, the harder

will we smash him when he betrays us. That's what “the bravest are

the tenderest” means. He who is tenderest toward the members of his

household is bravest in beating back him who would destroy that house.

For example, I received a hurry-up call for more housing at Ellis Island

in the early days of my administration. The commissioner told me he had

five hundred more anarchists than he had roofs to shelter.

“Have these anarchists been duly convicted?” I asked.

He said they had been, and were awaiting deportation.

I told the commissioner not to worry about finding lodging for his

guests; they would be on their way before bedtime.

“But there is no ship sailing so soon,” he said. “They will have to have

housing till a ship sails.”

Now this country has a shortage of houses and a surplus of ships. There

aren't enough roofs to house the honest people, and there are hundreds

of ships lying idle. Let the honest people have the houses, and the

anarchists have the ships. I called up the Shipping Board, borrowed a

ship, put the Red criminals aboard and they went sailing, sailing, over

the bounding main, and many a stormy wind shall blow “ere Jack come home

again.”

On the other hand I discovered a family that had just come to America

and was about to be deported because of a technicality. The family

consisted of a father and mother and four small children. The order

of deportation had been made and the family had been put aboard a

ship about to sail. I learned that the children were healthy and

right-minded; the mother was of honest working stock with a faith in God

and not in anarchy. I had been one of such a family entering this port

forty years ago. Little did I dream then that I would ever be a member

of a President's Cabinet with power to wipe away this woman's tears

and turn her heart's sorrowing into a song of joy. I wrote the order of

admission, and the family was taken from the departing ship just

before it sailed. I told the mother that the baby in her arms might be

secretary of labor forty years hence.