Edward Everett Hale

Edward Everett Hale, known throughout Boston as "The Grand Old Man of Boston," occupies a unique place in Mary Antin's account of her Americanization. He was not a teacher in any official sense, nor a formal patron, but rather the human face of American democracy itself—a man whose colossal figure seemed to tower over every public gathering and whose open house was kept, as Antin puts it, in every public building in the city. His significance in the memoir lies in the way he converted the grand abstractions of citizenship and freedom into a personal, intimate friendship with an obscure immigrant child from the slums, making her feel that she was not merely tolerated in America but genuinely wanted and valued. Where the public schools and the library gave her the instruments of American life, Hale gave her the conviction that she belonged to it, and that it belonged to her.

Identity and Public Presence

Hale's public identity was inseparable from the city he served. Antin describes him as a man who kept open house in every public building in Boston, appearing wherever two citizens met to devise a measure for the public weal, and lifting his mighty voice wherever a worthy cause needed a champion. At some time or another, she writes, his colossal figure towered above an eager multitude from every pulpit in the city and from every lecture platform. Yet his reach extended far beyond the grand stages of public life. Antin insists that no map of Boston could give the names of the lost alleys and back ways where the great man went in search of the lame in body who could not join the public assembly, and in quest of the maimed in spirit who feared to show their faces in the open. This combination of public grandeur and private charity was the essence of his reputation. Antin offers a striking image of his ubiquity: if all the little children who had sat on Dr. Hale's knee were started in a procession on the State House steps, standing four abreast, there would be a lane of merry faces across the Common, out to the Public Library, over Harvard Bridge, and away beyond to remoter landmarks. The image captures both his intimacy with the city's children and his status as a civic monument.

The First Meeting and the Morning Call

That Antin met Hale at all she presents as inevitable, as natural as the turning of the year. "He was a part of Boston, as the salt wave is a part of the sea," she writes, and she can hardly say whether he came to her or she came to him. The meeting itself is described as a kind of mutual recognition between two people who both rose early in the service of citizenship. A day or two after their first meeting, she called on him at his invitation, arriving at eight o'clock in the morning because he had risen early to attend to a hundred great affairs and she had risen early so as to talk with a great man before going to school. She thinks they liked each other a little the more for the fact that when so many people were still asleep, they were already busy in the interests of citizenship and friendship. The visit itself was brief—she is sure she did not stay more than fifteen minutes—and all she recalls of the conversation is that Hale asked her a great many questions about Russia, in a manner that made her feel that she was an authority on the subject. As he said good-bye, he gave her a bit of homely advice: that she should never study before breakfast. The advice was characteristic of the man—practical, warm, and utterly without condescension. The effect on Antin was transformative. For the rest of that day she moved against a background of grandeur; there was a noble ring to Virgil that day that even her teacher's firm translation had never brought out before, and obscure points in the history lesson were clear to her alone of the thirty girls in the class. Even the tulips in Copley Square seemed to open that day and shine in the sun like lighted lamps.

The Open House on Highland Street

Hale's hospitality became a regular feature of Antin's life, and she describes it as a source of remembered happiness so intense that she does not know how to convey it. She enjoyed so many half-hours in the great man's house that the memory defies summary. Her friend used to keep her in conversation a few minutes in the famous study, which Antin thought fit to have been preserved as a shrine, after which he sent her to roam about the house, explore his library, and take away whatever books she pleased. The privilege was royal in her eyes: "Who would feel cramped in a tenement, with such royal privileges as these?" The house itself was as modest as the man. It was a gray old house of a style that New England no longer builds, with a pillared porch curtained by vines, set back in the yard behind the old trees. Whatever cherished flowers glowed in the garden behind the house, the common daisy was encouraged to bloom in front. And whether there was sun or snow on the ground, the most timid hand could open the gate, and the most humble visitor was sure of a welcome. Out of that modest house, Antin writes, the troubled came comforted, the fallen came uplifted, and the noble came inspired. The house was thus an extension of Hale's character—public in its openness, private in its warmth, and utterly without pretension.

The Gift of the Printed Story and the Portrait Commission

Antin's relationship with Hale was not one of mere reception; she also gave. Once she brought him a present: a copy of a story of hers that had been printed in a journal. His manner of accepting it was such that she might have thought she was a princess dispensing gifts from a throne. The gesture reveals the mutual respect that underlay the friendship—Hale treated her literary production with the same seriousness he would have accorded any author, and she, in turn, felt herself elevated by his regard. She wished she had asked him, that last time she talked with him, how it was that he who was so modest made those who walked with him so great. The question, left unanswered, points to the central mystery of Hale's influence: his greatness seemed to consist precisely in his ability to confer greatness on others. The connection extended beyond Hale himself to his family. It was Miss Hale, his daughter, who first found a use for the Antins' "superfluous baby," the tiny Celia. She came to Dover Street several times to study the infant in swaddling clothes improvised by Antin's mother, after the fashion of the old country, because she wanted a baby for a picture of the Nativity she was doing for her father's church. Of all the babies in Boston, it was the little Jewish Celia who posed for the Christ Child. Although the Infant that lies in the lantern light, brooded over by the Mother's divine sorrow of love, in the beautiful altar piece in Dr. Hale's church, was not actually painted from the baby in the end, the point for Antin was that her mother, in less than half a dozen years of America, had so far shaken off her ancient superstitions that she feared no evil consequence from letting her child pose for a Christian picture. The episode thus becomes a measure of the family's Americanization, with the Hale household as the catalyst.

Significance and Legacy

Hale's role in Antin's narrative is ultimately that of a living proof of American promise. He embodied the possibility that an obscure immigrant child from the slums could be welcomed into the highest circles of civic life, not as a charity case but as a fellow citizen and friend. His significance is underscored by the contrast with the other figures in her life—the teachers who instructed her, the landlords who pressed her for rent, the social missionaries who pitied her. Hale alone treated her as an equal, asking her questions about Russia as though she were an authority, accepting her printed story as a gift from a princess, and sending her into his library to take away what books she pleased. In the arc of the memoir, he stands at the point where the public institutions of America—the school, the library, the lecture hall—are personified in a single individual. He is the human embodiment of the democratic friendship based on the love of a common flag that Antin elsewhere describes as the ideal of American life. His modesty, his openness, and his capacity to make others feel great were, in her account, the very qualities that made America itself great. The friendship was thus not merely personal but symbolic: in meeting Edward Everett Hale, Antin met America, and America took her closer to its breast.