[In the following essay, Dunton presents a review of Riis's autobiography.]

Jacob Riis, reporter, philanthropist, reformer, author of How the Other Half Lives, needs no introduction to the nation whose ideals he could scarce honor more highly than he has done in calling his autobiography The Making of an American.

The most striking quality of his book is undoubtedly its artless frankness, which is at first in equal measure appalling and delightful. But before one has read far, he agrees unqualifiedly with that wise friend of Mr. Riis's who told him, when he was hesitating over the first chapters of his reminiscences, "to take the short cut and put it all in." She evidently knew her man, understood the absolute unity of purpose that ran through every act of his life, and felt how fatal it would be should his readers miss seeing that here is a man whose house of life has no back doors and no alley windows. The whole of Mr. Riis is in his book, then, and the real Mr. Riis. He is "speaking right on" in words that have no fictitious limelight glare about them, and little of the grace of artful manipulation; but they are plain-speaking words, whose charm is that they are instinct with the thrill and throb of life, with the joy of labor and the pathos of joy. The Making of an American is the work of a man who deals not with words per se, but with the things behind the words. It is the work of a man, too, who never forgets his past in his present, nor loses sight of his defeat because, he has turned it into a victory. So the second remarkable thing about Mr. Riis's book is that every page of it is alive.

And why did the son of a Danish schoolmaster in the sleepy little old town of Ribe, want to become an American? Because Elisabeth, now his "silver bride," had jilted him, out of respect to her father's very natural scruples about his eligibility as a son-in-law. Here was a boy who seemed to have no sense of the fitness of things, who preferred carpentry to schooling, and who during the short time he had spent at his books had been interested in no study but English, and that only in order to read Charles Dickens's paper, "All the Year Round." In view of what followed it was very fortunate that the Riis family subscribed to "All the Year Round." The boy Jacob's first years in America were difficult enough without the additional hardship that absolute ignorance of the "American language" would have involved.

He landed in New York at the age of twenty-one, with the vaguest notion of what he meant to do next, but with plenty of youthful assurance that Providence would provide for him somehow, if he only gave her a fair chance.

"Of course I had my trade to fall back on, but I am afraid that is all the use I thought of putting it to.

The love of change belongs to youth, and I meant to take a hand in things as they came along. I had a pair of strong hands, and stubbornness enough to do for two; also a strong belief that in a free country, free from the dominion of custom, of caste, as well as of men, things would somehow come right in the end, and a man get shaken into the corner where he belonged if he took a hand in the game. I think I was right in that."

The confirmatory sentence comes easily now, but his trust in the ultimate justice of a democracy must have been strained well-nigh to breaking in the six years' struggle that followed. The first two years were spent literally in taking "a hand in things as they came along,"—in putting up miners' huts on the Allegheny, working in clay-bank and brick-yard, as wood-chopper, trapper, hired man, carpenter, ship-builder, and peddler. Between jobs the young Dane was a homeless, often penniless, wanderer, a tramp except at heart. But he never lost hope; instead he faced life with a smile and bided his time for setting right the injustices done him and others like him. He tells of one awful night spent in a station house in New York City, when he was robbed, and the only friend he had in America, a little black-andtan terrier, was maliciously killed before his eyes.

"The outrage 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."

Thus Mr. Riis made acquaintance with Mulberry Street and the Five Points, in a fashion that was later to give sting and poignancy to the police-reporter's attitude toward them. To these years also can be traced his ambition to be a reporter. Writing of his second winter in America, he says:

"It was about this time that I made up my mind to go into the newspaper business. It seemed to me that a reporter's was the highest of all callings; 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."

Jacob Riis has apparently wasted very little time changing his mind. It would take too long to tell how he won Elisabeth through sheer conviction that he could not do without her, and how for a precisely similar reason, by the hard road of under-pay and over-work, he finally got a staff appointment at Police Headquarters, on the New York "Tribune."

Now began the real work of his life, for which everything hitherto had been a sort of preparation. Mulberry Street was his chance both from a professional and a philanthropic point of view. There were hostile police to circumvent and rival reporters to beat; there were all the woes of the Other Half to be reported in the big sense—which is always Mr. Riis's sense—of the word. He prayed that he might do his work well and then he "dived in," bent on exploiting the facts in which he trusted, determined to tell each story of shame and crime so that beneath the "foulness and the reek of blood" his readers might "see its meaning, or at all events catch the human drift of it."

In this spirit he began his career as police-reporter. On its professional side it immediately resolved itself into "a ten years' war," out of which the despised "Dutchman" came with what he tells us is the only renown he ever coveted, "that of being the "boss reporter' in Mulberry Street." The "battlesome account" of those stirring days is full of good stories of the ups and downs, the set-backs and triumphs, of the fray. The one perhaps which best proves Mr. Riis's oft-repeated assertion that the true reporter is a man of power, having absolutely nothing in common with the ubiquitous, sensation-loving nuisance who sometimes bears the name, is the story of his famous trip up the Croton water-shed. The printed report of what he saw, confirmed by photographs, made a sensation, but it was not sensational. It was fact, and the result was an unpolluted water-supply for New York City. Incidentally the disclosure of the imminent possibility of a cholera epidemic was one of the biggest "beats" on record.

"Beats" alone, however, did not satisfy Mr. Riis; he remembered his dog and he wanted to settle with Mulberry Bend, through which he walked home between one and four o'clock every morning.

"There were cars on the Bowery, but I liked to walk, for so I saw the slum when off its guard. The instinct to pose is as strong there as on Fifth Avenue. It is a human impulse, I suppose. . . . But at 3 A. M. the veneering is off and you see the true grain of a thing. So, also, I got a picture of the Bend upon my mind which so soon as I should be able to transfer it to that of the community would help settle with that pig-sty according to its deserts. It was not fit for Christian men and women, let alone innocent children, to live in, and therefore it had to go. So with the police lodging-rooms, some of the worst of which were right there. . . . The way of it never gave me any concern that I remember. That would open as soon as the truth was told. The trouble was that people did not know and had no means of finding out for themselves. But I had."

Delightfully Platonic, this trust in the power of truth to make men free; but it is not advanced as a general proposition, and it was justified. There were those who had ears to hear—the Charity Organization Society, the City Health Department, the King's Daughters, the various social settlements and tenement commissions, above all President Roosevelt of the Police Board and the rest of the Strong administration,—and they put themselves at the other end of the line, the organized, administrative end, whose value Mr. Riis fully appreciated, though he never meddled with it much.

"To represent is not my business. To write is; I can do it much better and back up the other, so we are two for one. .. . I value the good opinion of my fellow-men, for with it comes increased power to do things. But I would reserve the honors for those who have fairly earned them, and on whom they set easy. They don't on me. I am not ornamental by nature."

Nor did he care to be ornamental. Always a worker, he wished to be known as one who worked well; after that to avenge the death of a little black-and-tan dog. This, it seemed to him, could best be done by letting light and air into the slums whose spiritual darkness and foulness had killed his dog,—by bringing to them the flowers of the fields, by planting small parks there to be bits of God's country in a godless place, by establishing decent schools and pleasant play-grounds, which are the children's rights. How he "sat up with his club," the fact, until these reforms were achieved, is the story that makes up the last half of his autobiography.

"I would not have missed being in it all for anything." That sentence strikes the keynote of the impression which Mr. Riis's book leaves with the reader. If its frankness and virility are singular, no less so is its unassuming optimism, its keen sense of the joy of combat, of the infinite interest and inestimable value of a life lived honestly and with purpose. Every journalist who is weighted with a sense of the futility of newspaper work, passing, as it does, into innocuous desuetude with the next "extra," should read this book. He can scarcely fail to get from it an inspiration that will make him view his responsibilities in their largeness and take up his "club," the fact, with new purpose to wield it well. But the thesis has a wider application. To "hitch your wagon to a star," to make cosmic connections, to see each little day as an important item in a big account, is a philosophy that will ennoble every worker. And Mr. Riis's contribution to its literature is of special value because he shows its practical bearing, freights it with no isms nor ologies, combines it with a very human sense of the importance, not of martyrdom, but of success; and best of all, perhaps, tinges it with a delightful sense of humor. His quality as a humorist and a charming raconteur, with a full fund of racy anecdotes about himself and his friends, each reader must enjoy for himself. It has been the purpose of this review to show the motives which made his game of life seem worth while to him, and, from his point of view, gave his autobiography its excuse for being.