Adopted Sons of Uncle Sam Who Have Made Good

By DEXTER MARSHALL.

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 honors 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 Archbishops 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, and almost a whole platoon of his assistants; of James J. Hill, railroad 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. Straus, ex-diplomatist; all these and many others belong in this category.

The most prominent exception to the wellnigh universal rule is Sir Francis 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, as 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, where he worked on a farm summers and attended district school winters, cutting and hauling firewood on Saturdays. At sixteen he began to study at the Albion, Wisconsin, 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. His present term will expire next year.

Knute Nelson is said never to have seen table napery till he was almost in his teens and isn’t ashamed to tell about it. When he began at the Albion Academy he took his bedding, a jug of wood and some furniture to town on a home-made cart hauled by a yoke of steers, and throughout his first term or two at school he lived alone, cooked his own meals and earned his way by doing odd jobs.

Of the 390 Representatives in Congress fourteen are adopted sons. W. Bourke Cockran of New York, Irish, distinguished for his oratory, and Julius 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 55, 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 the Schurmans was both narrow and frugal. The boy had to work on the farm almost like a man before he was in his teens.

At 13 he got a job with a country storekeeper at a yearly wage of $30 with board; next year he took a similar place in another store at double the wage. By the time he was 16 he had $80 saved and then, though $120 a year was offered him to remain, he left the store forever and went to Prince-town to school. He must have had a good headpiece, for he got ready for college in a year, won a scholarship, went to Prince of Wales College at Charlottetown, earned his way by keeping books at night, and in two years was a graduate. Then he taught general school, took a course at Acadia College in Nova Scotia, won a scholarship in the University of London, England, and went abroad to study. He won honors and enough prizes in London and Edinburgh to enable him to spend a year in Germany, where he met Andrew D. White, then United States Minister at Berlin, through whom he, later, went to Ithaca to teach in Cornell University, though before coming to this country he was a faculty member, first of Acadia and then of Dalhousie University at Halifax. He was only 34 when he joined the staff of Cornell, and 37 when he became president of the university. It would be hard to find a more typical American career than his has been.

Adopted sons are numerous among the clergy. There are 101 Roman Catholic bishops and archbishops, of whom forty-four are foreign-born, twenty-eight coming from Ireland, three from Belgium, four from Germany, three from Canada, two from England, two from France, and one each from Switzerland and Austria.

Of the 100 Protestant Episcopal bishops twelve are adopted sons, including the Rev. S. I. J. Schereschewsky, late Bishop of Shanghai, China, under American auspices, but now retired and living in Tokio, Japan. Of the forty Methodist Episcopal bishops two 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 83 — 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 multi-millionaire), is an Englishman. So is the Rev. Dr. 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 seems the physical impersonation of benevolence, toleration, cheerfulness, contentment as to the past and present and faith in the future.

He describes his father as a master blacksmith in Keighley, Yorkshire, faithful, industrious, but able to earn so little that had not the mother been a woman of great ability to “cut and contrive” the children of the family would often have gone hungry and often suffered for the lack of proper clothing.

How he became a Methodist local preacher in England, despite the lack of any schooling except what he could get nights while he was working at the anvil; how, when 27, in 1850, with a young wife, he ventured to America in search of a wider field; how he began here making hammers by hand week days and preaching Sundays; how his vogue as a writer has fully equaled his fame as a preacher; now his last days are gliding along in ideal peace and comfort — all these things are pretty well known to the reading public of to-day.

Robert Collyer was born a Methodist. His mother became a Baptist and was never able to believe in her son’s Unitarianism. “But I believe in thee, lad,” she told him after hearing him preach in Leeds, England, a few years before her death, and he will prize the memory of her faith in him till death in turn shall come to him.

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. Two 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 churches. Many who read these lines can remember when little heed was paid to the day outside the Roman Catholic and Protestant Episcopal faiths. Dr. MacArthur’s early efforts on behalf of its general observance met with wide attention and no little opposition twenty-five years ago, and he is proud to have lived to behold the success of the movement he practically inaugurated. It makes him a national figure beyond peradventure.

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 41, Pupin is 48 and Tesla is 49 — is the most picturesque, though Pupin is more completely a product of American conditions than either of the others. Pupin was only 15 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 Michael 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.

It was because he understood that he was destined to be a soldier that Michael Idorsky managed to get away to America in 1874, when just a little under 16.

After trying to make his living in various ways without success, he got a job as a “rubber” in a Turkish bath in Brooklyn. He had been an apt pupil in the village school at home. Of necessity he had learned two or three languages, his thirst for knowledge was insatiable, he mastered English with ease and he talked incessantly with the patrons of the bath. One of them, an Episcopal clergyman, was so taken with the boy that he got him a scholarship in the Adelphi Academy, now Adelphi College, one of Brooklyn’s most famous institutions.

That was all young Pupin needed. Earning his board by working Saturdays and Sundays at the bath, he went through the Adelphi course with colors flying. Incidentally winning a lot of prizes worth quite a few dollars. Then to Columbia, where he also made a record, standing at the head of his class and then successively to Cambridge, England, and Berlin, Germany, for post-graduate courses, studying under Helmholtz, Bunsen and Kirchhoff, all eminent in science. By 1889, just fifteen years after he landed in New York a penniless boy, he was back 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 was 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 is a veritable mite of a man — has also made mathematics serve him effectively 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 formula.

Steinmetz reached this country in 1889, at 24. He came in the steerage, apparently as a sort of 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.

The prime cause of Steinmetz’s coming to America was his tendency to socialism. His father was a minor government official of some sort at Breslau, Germany, and able to educate the boy, who was always scientific in his tendencies, and when quite young wrote an elementary treatise on astronomy which sold 40,000 copies. Breslau being a university town, Steinmetz began a university course and was becoming famous as an unusually clear writer on popular science when he began to dabble in socialistic writings to help out a friend — the editor of a socialistic journal — who had been sent to prison for his socialism.

When the Government detectives found that Steinmetz was also of socialistic tendencies he made tracks for the Austrian frontier, got safely across and went to Zurich, Switzerland. There he lived two or three years, writing on popular science for the newspapers for a living and studying at the university. He long expected to go back to Breslau to finish his university course, but, it seeming more and more improbable that he would be allowed to do so, he came to America with a young Californian, a chum of his who was ordered home by his father because of a sentimental entanglement.

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-blanked 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.

Eickemeyer hadn’t looked for help 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 payroll; 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, swimming, running and flying things — all these are mere details.

When Steinmetz went into the yards of the Schenectady works on the first day he was smoking. A watchman told him to throw away his cigar. He did, but lighted another. He had to throw that away. This happened four times. Then he left the place and didn’t return till sent for.

“What’s the matter, Steinmetz?” they asked him. “Smoke,” he answered. “No smoke, no work.” So the rule of “no smoking” about the great General Electric works was broken for the first time in his favor. It has never been enforced for him, but to this day Steinmetz is the only General Electric man either officer or employee, who is privileged to smoke while he works, but he smokes as incessantly as ever General Grant did. Steinmetz has been a professor in Union University for years.

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 by 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, 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.

As a boy his aspirations were all artistic and his father, appreciating this, gave the boy such chances as he could to study modeling. He did so well at it as to win a gold medal when only nineteen. Then he was drafted into the army. It is said that he would have put up with army life had it not been for the way he was treated by a certain lieutenant, who seemed to take special delight in annoying him. The Austrian army privates often have to do menial services for their officers. Bitter had to clean and blacken his officer’s boots, to keep his uniform in order and attend to many other disagreeable duties. In return the officer was abusive and more than insulting. One day he chastised young Bitter physically in the most humiliating way that could possibly be devised.

To rebel would have been to invite worse treatment, from which there could have been no successful appeal, so Bitter did the only thing left to him — he ran away. 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 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 by the Astors for a suitable design 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 seven 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. Curious enough, the army officer who was the chief though unwitting cause of Bitter’s great artistic success in this country was for some time glad to be the recipient of his patronage. Evil days befell the officer in some way and he fled to New York, went to Bitter for a place, and for some time was employed by the artist as half valet and half handy man about the studio.

There are others in plenty, so many of them that it isn’t possible to give a room for his name even. One more may be mentioned, however, Heinrich Conried, rector 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 51, and he didn’t come here till he was past 30 as stage manager for an East Side theatre in New York, having previously worked his way through every grade of theatrical work both on stage and in the business office.

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

Copyright, 1903, by Dexter Marshall.