Adopted Sons of Uncle Sam

WHO HAVE MADE GOOD.

Next to being a native son of Uncle Sam, or born to the royal purple, the best thing any one filled with ambition to help his fellows or to win high place for himself can do is to come to America and secure adoption in Uncle Sam’s family.

There is only one political honor, the Presidency, to which an adopted son may not aspire, and a complete list of those Americans not born on this side of the ocean who have won high honor and performed great services would include many of the nation’s most illustrious names.

Not to hark back to the past the adopted sons of to-day are doing themselves credit in most important ways.

They are helping us make our cities, our parks and our homes beautiful with their art.

They are contributing their inventions to our progress in electricity.

They are filling pulpits, educating young men and women, editing progressive periodicals, occupying high places in the government and carrying on valuable reforms, as well as doing their full share of the nation’s everyday work.

Most of those who have reached great success or attained great prominence became Americans by adoption when young, and have risen through long and serious endeavor. This is true of Carl Schurz, revolutionist in Europe, but loyal defender of the government in the United States; of James Wilson, head of the Department of Agriculture in the present Cabinet; of Archbishop Ireland, of St. Paul and Ryan, of Philadelphia; of S. S. McClure and P. F. Collier, whose periodicals have won enormous power in the land; of Joseph Pulitzer, who blazed out for himself a path in journalism; of Andrew Carnegie, steel king; of Jacob H. Schiff, banker, whose word inspires confidence or rouses apprehension; of Alexander Agassiz, scientist and copper miner; of John Weaver, reformer, mayor of Philadelphia, and foremost in the current fighting against the municipal boss system; of Nathan S. Strauss, ex-diplomatist; all these and many others being in this category.

The most prominent exception to the well-nigh universal rule is Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, newest recruit to the ranks of eminent adopted sons — though not naturalized as yet, of course — head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, already one of the most notable institutions of its class in the world, and, if his plans are carried out, to be the greatest art collection in existence. But although a full-fledged celebrity when he came, two years ago, even Sir Purdon began life a poor boy and had to earn his title.

Four of the ninety United States senators are of foreign nativity. Patterson, of Colorado, was born an Irishman; Gallinger, of New Hampshire, a Canadian; Sutherland, of Utah, an Englishman, and Nelson, of Minnesota, a Norwegian. Wetmore, of Rhode Island, was born abroad but his parents were Americans traveling at the time, he is not an adopted, but a native son, in the law; this is true also of Millard of Nebraska. It is hardly likely that either will ever run for the Presidency, but neither will be deterred by the accident of birth.

Perhaps Knute Nelson is the most picturesque of the foreign-born Senators and second to none in loyalty to Uncle Sam. He came to America as a child of six in 1849, brought by his widowed mother from the parish of Voss, Norway. They lived in Chicago a year and were so poor that the child had to help by selling papers on the street. Then to Wisconsin and attended district school winters, cutting and hauling firewood on Saturdays. At sixteen he began to study at the Albion (Wis.) Academy; at eighteen, when the civil war broke out, he went to the front. At twenty-one, honorably discharged, a commissioned officer after three years’ service he returned to the academy and was graduated, studying law afterward; at twenty-four was admitted to the bar, at twenty-five went to the State Legislature, at twenty-seven moved to Minnesota to escape tuberculosis, at twenty-nine was made county attorney. Since then he has been State senator, regent of the State University, Representative in Congress, governor of his state, and at fifty-two, was made United States Senator.

Of the 390 Representatives in Congress fourteen are adopted sons. W. Bourke Cockran of New York, Irish, distinguished for his oratory, and Judge Kahn, of California, actor-lawyer, German — the only Thespian in the House — are best known throughout the country.

The adopted son is not so prominent in American literature as formerly. Richard Le Gallienne, Englishman, has apparently settled down to dwell in the United States; Bliss Carman the poet, is a native of New Brunswick; Norman Duncan comes from the Canadian province of Ontario.

The best-known adopted American devoted to literature to-day is Frances Hodgson Burnett. This adopted daughter is undoubtedly a writer of much greater insight and power than any of Uncle Sam’s adopted sons. That her native place is Manchester England, instead of Tennessee, where as a girl in her teens she fought the beginning of her winning fight, will be news to some readers.

Many adopted sons of high repute are to be found among the educators of the country. One of these, Jacob Gould Schurman, is president of Cornell University, and in 1899 was sent to the Philippines as president of the commission appointed to investigate those islands.

President Schurman is only fifty-five, but his career reads almost as if he were of an earlier generation. He was born in Prince Edward Island on a 100-acre farm which his father had hewn out of the primeval forest. There being neither railroads nor daily newspapers on the island and the farm being remote from any town or village and far from the markets, the life of Schurman was both narrow and frugal. The boy had to work on the farm almost like a man before he was in his teens.

Adopted sons are numerous among the clergy. There are 101 Roman Catholic bishops and archbishops, of whom 44 are foreign born, 28 coming from Ireland, 3 from Belgium, 4 from Germany, 3 from Canada, 2 from England, 2 from France, and one each from Switzerland and Austria.

Of the 100 Protestant Episcopal bishops 12 are adopted sons, including the Rev. S. I. J. Schereschewsky, late bishop of Shanghai, China, under American auspices, but now retired and living in Tokyo, Japan. Of the 40 Methodist Episcopal bishops, 2 are Canadian born, the Rev. Charles H. Fowler, residing in New York, and the Rev. Joseph Berry, residing in Buffalo.

The Rev. Francis E. Clark, founder of the Christian Endeavor Society, was born in Canada, though his parents were natives of the State of New York, and he was brought back to this country when only a child.

Dr. Robert Collyer, the Unitarian blacksmith-preacher, now eighty-three — only six years younger than the Monroe Doctrine, he says — who won his way to the hearts of men in Chicago, but has long been in New York, at the Church of the Messiah (pastor of H. H. Rogers, the humorous Standard Oil multimillionaire), is an Englishman. So is the Rev. W. S. Rainsford, who has only recently resigned as rector of St. George’s Church in New York, of which J. P. Morgan is the chief pillar.

Dr. Collyer is one of the most loyal of all the adopted sons of Uncle Sam. At the outbreak of the civil war he locked up his church in Chicago, placarded the edifice as “closed indefinitely” and went to the front to minister to the ill and the wounded. In appearance he is benevolence, toleration, cheerfulness, contentment as to the past and present, and faith in the future.

The Rev. Dr. R. S. MacArthur, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, in New York, sometimes called the Baptist archbishop, because of his prominence in his denomination, is Canadian by birth, and a most loyal adopted son. The unusual distinctions are his. He has had but one pastorate all his life, this being his thirty-sixth year at Calvary, and more than any one else in the United States he is responsible for the widespread observance of Easter Sunday in the United States by the so-called evangelical church.

Uncle Sam has five sons who are preeminent among electrical inventors — Edison, Westinghouse, Steinmetz, Pupin and Tesla.

The last three are adopted sons, yet not the less loyal Americans for all that, and each has a personal history that abroad would be called “typically American.” For each began practical life poor, obscure, with no opportunities except those which he made for himself, and each has managed to climb from the bottom to the top in a surprisingly short time.

Possibly Steinmetz, the youngest of the trio — he is forty-one, Pupin is forty-eight and Tesla forty-nine — is the most picturesque, though Pupin is more completely a product of American conditions than either of the others. Pupin was only fifteen when he came here, and it was in this country that he began to think of a scientific career. He only of the three is a graduate of an American university.

Pupin is of pure Servian blood, though born in Idvor, Hungary — his full name is Michiel Idvorsky Pupin — and he comes from one of the famous five hundred families who left Servia some two hundred and fifty years ago at the behest of the Hapsburg, then reigning over Austria and Hungary. It was agreed by the monarch that if these five hundred families would settle on the northernmost frontier of Hungary and defend it against Turkish aggression, they should be granted complete self-government in local affairs.

Idvor, where the Pupins located, is near the famous “Iron Gates of the Danube,” and there the family and practically all the others have remained to this day. The part of the frontier they guarded was never forced by the Turks since the settlement and naturally many members of the defending families have risen in the profession of arms, the Pupins being conspicuous among them. It was because he understood that he was destined to be a soldier that Michael Idvorsky managed to get away to America in 1874, when just a little under sixteen. In 1889, just fifteen years after he landed in New York a penniless boy, he was in Columbia as professor of Mathematical physics in the department of electrical engineering, then just established.

He is still a Columbia professor but he is known the world over as the inventor of a device — worked out from conception to completion in six years — which has improved long distance telephoning immensely and, it is supposed, would make it possible to telephone under the sea from continent to continent. For some reason, ocean telephony has not yet materialized, though on this side the Bell telephone interests, and on the other the great German concern of Siemens & Halske, have paid him large sums for his invention.

Steinmetz — whose first name is Charles and whose middle name Proteus, meaning “the giant,” was given to him by his fellow-students ironically, for he was a veritable mite of a man — has also made mathematics serve him effectually in his original electrical work. The names of the two may properly be bracketed because of their profound comprehension of the real meaning and value of mathematical facts and formulae.

Steinmetz reached this country in 1889 at twenty-four. He came in the steerage apparently as a sort of a lark, and without any special notion of becoming an electrical inventor or definite plans of any kind. He was poor, friendless and must have been of the rather happy-go-lucky order at that time; to-day he is rich, chief experimental expert of the colossal General Electric Company at Schenectady, N. Y., and with loads of friends, including Prince Henry of Germany, whom he met as a Captain of Industry at the famous dinner given to the Prince when he visited America a few years ago.

Steinmetz planned to write for various papers from this side and brought letters of introduction to Edison and Rudolf Eickemeyer, then in the electrical construction business at Yonkers, N. Y. Edison would have nothing to do with him and has since been sorry; Steinmetz tramped the streets for weeks unable to find a job, but Eickemeyer finally took him on at $10 or $12 a week as a draftsman. In that capacity he did well enough, but there were no signs that he was likely to rise for some time. One day his chance came; the oddest recorded that ever started genius on its upward career. Eickemeyer, as able in his profanity as in business electric development, bolted into the room where the draftsmen were at work, with an apparently indelible and very ugly stain on both his hands.

“Do any of you fellows know what will take that dash-blanket stain out?” he asked, naming the chemical that was responsible for it. There was no response from any one at first, but presently Steinmetz ventured the information that a certain easily prepared solution would do it.

From the quiet little German draftsman, however, he stormed out of the room, tried the solution, found it as recommended, and shortly returned with cleansed hands.

“Come into my office, Steinmetz,” he commanded, proceeding, when they two were alone, to put the draftsman through a most searching examination on every subject he could think of. “You’ll do!” said Eickemeyer, after an hour or two, “from this time on I want you in this office with me constantly.”

How Steinmetz rose rapidly in Eickemeyer’s eyes; how he went to the General Electric when Eickemeyer’s business was “consolidated in,” serving first at Lynn, Mass., but more latterly at Schenectady; how he went without pay till nearly starved at Lynn, because some one forgot to put him on the pay-roll; how he is now master of the most remarkable electric laboratory in existence, and though still a bachelor has a house at Schenectady that is one of the world’s wonders both for electrical devices and the number of pets — alligators, birds, white mice and many other varieties of creeping and flying things — all these are mere details.

Nikola Tesla, son of a Greek church priest in Smiljan, Province of Lika near the Adriatic Sea, was poor enough when he came to America, and began working for Edison. Yet he had already had much practical electrical experience in Paris and elsewhere. For years his relations to the Westinghouse works have been somewhat like Steinmetz’s to the General Electric’s, but Tesla’s laboratory is in New York, and not connected directly with the main establishment.

Karl Theodore Francis Bitter, sculptor, whose work is credited to America, though he, too, is an adopted, not a native son of Uncle Sam, is two years younger than Steinmetz and, like him, was born a subject of the House of Hapsburg. Bitter, however, is a Viennese, not a villager by birth.

One day in 1889, the same year that Steinmetz came over, Bitter landed at the Battery, a common immigrant, proscribed as an army deserter, without money, friends, prospects or anything else but the marvelous skill which lay in his finger tips and the artistic dreams with which his brain was peopled.

The first thing he did was to go to work as a laborer for a firm of architectural decorators. He heard about a big money prize offered for new bronzed doors for Trinity Church, and told his fellow workmen he should try for the prize. They winked at each other and laughed. For several months during which he was working steadily at his designs, they continued to wink and laugh, but one day they stopped. Bitter, the poor, friendless immigrant and army deserter, had won the prize.

He had shown himself fit for Uncle Sam to adopt as a son. Now? Well, now, Bitter is almost — perhaps quite — at the top of the heap of American sculptors. His statues and reliefs are to be seen in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Boston and elsewhere; he was “it” at both the Chicago and the St. Louis World’s Fairs — in a word, he has made good.

There are others in plenty, so many of them that it isn’t possible to give each room for his name even. One more may be mentioned, however. Heinrich Conried, director of the Metropolitan Opera House, where the most expensive music is purveyed every winter for the most extravagant and the most insistent audiences in the world. He is fifty-one, and he didn’t come here until he was past thirty as stage manager of the East Side theatre in New York, having previously worked his way through every grade of theatrical work both on the stage and in the business office.

He was born in Bielitz, in Silesia, and has received decorations from the Kaisers of both Germany and Austria, and also the King of the Belgians, but he is as American in his push and persistence as any native son of Uncle Sam alive.