CHAPTER VI

BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW WORLD


I came to the United States in September, 1888. I came as a steerage
passenger. My first lodging on American soil was with one of the
earth's saints, a little old Irish woman who lived on East 106th
Street, New York City. I had served in Egypt with her son, and I was
her guest.

I had come here with the usual idea that coming was the only
problem--that everybody had work; that there were no poor people in
this country, that there was no problem of the unemployed. I was
disillusioned in the first few weeks, for I tramped the streets night
and day. I ran the gamut of the employment agencies and the "Help
Wanted" columns of the papers. It was while looking for work that I
first became acquainted with the Bowery. It was in the current of the
unemployed that I was swept there first. It was there that I first
discovered the dimensions of the problem of the unemployed, and my
first great surprise in the country was to find thousands of men in
what I supposed to be the most wonderful Eldorado on earth, workless,
and many of them homeless.

An advertisement in the morning paper calling for a
"bed-hand"--whatever that might mean--led me to a big lodging-house on
the Bowery. They wanted a man to wash the floors and make the beds up,
and the pay was one dollar a day. I got in line with the applicants. I
was about the forty-fifth man. Many a time I have wished that I could