Boston Searchlight

The Boston Searchlight enters Mary Antin's memoir as the instrument of her first commercial venture in America, a newspaper whose subscription drive promised to solve the family's most pressing material problem. In the chapter devoted to her landlady, Mary records that rent was a standing trouble, that the family was always behind, and that the landlady was very angry. It was to meet this crisis that she turned to the Searchlight, a paper whose editor, Mr. James, offered her a generous commission for subscriptions. The arithmetic of the scheme was intoxicatingly simple: with rent at three and one-half dollars per week, the annual subscription to the Searchlight at one dollar, and her commission at fifty per cent, she needed only seven subscribers a week—one a day. Mr. James assured her she could secure two or three any afternoon between the end of school and supper, and if she worked all Saturday, her head went dizzy computing the amount of her commissions. It would be rent and shoes and bonnets and everything for everybody.

The Canvass and Its Humiliations

Bright and early one Saturday morning in the fall, Mary set out canvassing, a neatly folded copy of the Searchlight in her hand, faith in her lucky star and good-will towards all the world in her heart. She began with one of the great office buildings on Tremont Street, as Mr. James had advised, but the first half-hour was lost wandering through the corridors, reading the names on the doors. There were so many people in the same office that she could not tell which was Wilson & Reed, Solicitors, and which C. Jenkins Smith, Mortgages and Bonds, so she decided it did not matter: she would call them all "Sir." Her first attempt ended in confusion when a man waved her away over his shoulder, saying, "Take it away—take it away. We're busy here," presenting only the back of his head. She stole out of the room in great confusion, wondering whether this was the way she was going to be received, since Mr. James had said nobody would hesitate to subscribe to the best paper in Boston, which no business man could afford to be without. She concluded she must have made some blunder, perhaps by speaking to C. Jenkins Smith himself, and resolved to try again. She selected a real estate office next, reasoning that a real estate broker was certainly a business man, and that Mr. George A. Hooker must be just waiting for the Boston Searchlight.

The Paper's Place in Mary's Economic Life

The Searchlight episode belongs to a larger pattern in Mary's American life, in which her literary ambitions and her material needs repeatedly collided. She had had one or two poems published since the celebrated eulogy of George Washington, but nobody had paid for her poems—yet. She was coming to that, of course, but in the mean time she could not pay the rent with her writing. Her acquaintance with men of letters gave her an opening: a friend introduced her to a slightly literary lady who introduced her to the editor of the Boston Searchlight, who offered her the commission. The paper thus functioned as a bridge between her literary connections and her family's economic desperation, a commercial application of the very social capital she was accumulating through her writing and her schooling. The episode also reveals the naivete of her economic thinking, as she computed her potential commissions with the same eager arithmetic she brought to her studies, imagining that the world of Boston commerce would receive her as readily as her teachers had.

The Searchlight and the Transformation of Mary's Interests

The Searchlight canvass stands in pointed contrast to the transformation that followed it, a contrast Mary herself draws when she introduces the chapter on her second great transformation. Just when Mrs. Hutch was most worried about the error of her ways, Mary entered on a new chapter of adventures, even more remote from the cash girl's career than Latin and geometry. She calls this the second transformation of her life, as truly as her coming to America was the first great transformation. The commercial failure of the Searchlight venture, with its humiliating rejections and its arithmetic that never materialized into rent money, helped clear the way for a different kind of pursuit. Where the Searchlight represented the world of business, of selling, of the cash girl's career that Mrs. Hutch worried she was abandoning, the natural history studies that followed represented a world of wonder and disinterested curiosity. Mary confesses, with a feeling of shame akin to the lover's, how late in her life nature took the first place in her affections, and she looks back to her bookworm days before the study of natural history outdoors with remorse. The Searchlight episode thus marks the low point of her purely commercial ambitions, the moment when the dream of earning rent and shoes and bonnets through salesmanship collapsed into confusion and retreat, before the richer rewards of nature study and intellectual growth claimed her.

The Paper as a Measure of Americanization

The Searchlight also serves as a measure of Mary's Americanization, a test of how well she had absorbed the commercial culture of her new country. Her willingness to canvass, to call strangers "Sir," to knock on doors and present her paper, represents an embrace of American enterprise that her Russian childhood could never have produced. Yet her failure reveals the limits of that embrace: she had learned the forms of American commerce but not its substance, the rituals of salesmanship but not its hardness. The paper, like the other American institutions she encountered—the public school, the public library, the Natural History Club—was supposed to be a vehicle of her transformation, but unlike those institutions, it failed her. The Searchlight could not be converted into rent, just as her poems could not yet be converted into money, and the episode stands as a reminder that the American promise of opportunity did not always translate immediately into material reward. The paper's editor had promised her a generous commission, but the actual business of collecting subscriptions proved far more difficult than the arithmetic suggested, and the gap between Mr. James's assurances and the reality of the canvass became another lesson in the distance between American rhetoric and American experience.