"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.
