Mary Antin's first meeting with Edward Everett Hale

Mary Antin's first meeting with Edward Everett Hale, the man Boston called "The Grand Old Man of Boston," was not an extraordinary event in the city's eyes—it was, as she put it, as inevitable as her being a year older every twelvemonth. Yet for the young immigrant from Polotzk, this encounter was the apex of her American experience, the moment when her adopted country "took me closer to her breast." It was the living proof that the freedom and opportunity she had dreamed of across the ocean were not abstract ideals but tangible realities, embodied in a man who kept "open house in every public building in the city."

The Grand Old Man of Boston

Edward Everett Hale was a towering figure in Boston's civic and spiritual life. Wherever two citizens met to devise a measure for the public weal, he was a third; wherever a worthy cause needed a champion, he lifted his mighty voice. At some time or another his colossal figure towered above an eager multitude from every pulpit in the city, from every lecture platform. He was known for seeking out the lame in body who could not join the public assembly, and the maimed in spirit who feared to show their faces in the open. The narrator imagined that 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. He was, in her words, "a part of Boston, as the salt wave is a part of the sea."

The Meeting and the Morning Visit

The meeting itself was as natural as the tide. Mary could hardly say whether he came to her or she came to him; they simply met. A day or two after their first encounter, she called on Dr. Hale at his invitation. It was only 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 she went to school. She thought 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 lasted no more than fifteen minutes. All she recalled of their conversation was that Dr. Hale asked her a great many questions about Russia, in a manner that made her feel that she was an authority on the subject. With his great hand in good-bye he gave her a bit of homely advice: that she should never study before breakfast.

The Afterglow of the Encounter

That was all, but for the rest of the day Mary 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. Obscure points in the history lesson were clear to her alone, of the thirty girls in the class. It happened that the tulips in Copley Square opened that day, and shone in the sun like lighted lamps. The encounter had transformed her perception of the world around her, making her feel that she was not merely a student in a foreign land, but a recognized participant in the life of her new country.

The Significance of the Meeting

This meeting was the culmination of a long journey that began with her father's emigration to America three years before her own arrival. He had left home in search of bread for his hungry family, but he went blessing the necessity that drove him to America. The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. He was only thirty-two when he landed, and most of his life he had been held in leading-strings. He was hungry for his untasted manhood. His primary quest for a livelihood had failed, but he found compensation in intellectual freedom, which he sought to realize in every possible way. He could not take advantage of the public evening school due to his struggle for a bare living, but he lost nothing of what was to be learned through reading, through attendance at public meetings, through exercising the rights of citizenship. If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be worshipped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw one step nearer to them: he could send his children to school, to learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. His children should be students, should fill his house with books and intellectual company; and thus he would walk by proxy in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning. So it was with a heart full of longing and hope that her father led them to school on that first day, taking long strides in his eagerness, the rest of them running and hopping to keep up. Mary's meeting with Dr. Hale was the fulfillment of her father's proxy dream—the proof that his children had indeed entered the world of liberal learning and civic prominence that he could only worship from afar.

A Symbol of American Promise

The meeting also represented the broader promise of America that Mary had come to embrace. From her first day at public school, which she described as the apex of her civic pride and personal contentment, she had been on a trajectory of Americanization. She had shed her impossible Hebrew name for the simpler Mary, and her family had learned the mysteries of the iron stove, the washboard, and the speaking-tube, and above all, had to learn English. She had walked on air when promoted to grammar school, feeling herself a student in earnest, carrying home half the books in her desk as a badge of scholarship. She had come to love the Boston Public Library, her "palace," where she would lean against a pillar in the entrance hall, watching the people go in and out, reminding herself that she had a right to be there, that she was at home there. The meeting with Dr. Hale was the human embodiment of this institutional welcome—a personal handshake from the city itself. It was a moment that transcended the mere acquisition of cultural capital, representing instead a profound emotional and spiritual adoption. The grocer Mr. Rosenblum, who gave her oil for her lamp and supported her education, understood this promise: "In America everything is possible. But you have to work hard, Goldie, like Mary Antin—study hard, put your mind on it." Mary's meeting with Dr. Hale was the living proof that this promise was real, that the obscure child from the slums could indeed seal a democratic friendship with a chosen leader of the people, based on the love of a common flag.