The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It

rniture. 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 petulan

e 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 u

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 s

urly-haired and red-cheeked, had so appealed to the policeman who found them that

buildings and the good clothes that all classes wore in America, she felt h

d pay it back after she had joined her husband. And so we had passed through the gateway of the New World as thousands of o

r three children, the smallest a babe in arms, tramped the streets of New York for days looking in vain for some one who co

mian told me. "He was a-a-Oh, what do you call them in your la

ed to help find the word.

who usually run clothing stores

," I

usages. We were so nearly starved that we ate too much and our stomachs threw it up. The saloon-keeper sent wor

how our world was running fifty years ago. Who can doubt that we have a better world to-d

ions at Boston and New York. In spite of complaints, they were being conducted to the letter of the law; to

lines told the whole t

st are the

g are the

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 a

sland in the early days of my administration. The commissioner told

hists been duly c

been, and were aw

out finding lodging for his guests; the

soon," he said. "They will have t

f 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, p

l. 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