Newspaper Row

Newspaper Row was the Boston street where the young Mary Antin, having written a poem in praise of George Washington for her school's Washington's Birthday celebration, boldly went in person to have her work printed, marking her first venture into the world of American journalism and public life. It was the destination of a journey that began in a Chelsea classroom and ended with the immigrant girl's words in print, a decisive step in her transformation from a greenhorn into a Fellow Citizen. The street itself was less a place than a threshold: the point where private ambition met public recognition, and where the child who had so recently learned English crossed the Mystic River to claim a voice in her new country.

The Journey to the Row

The expedition to Newspaper Row grew directly out of the triumph of Mary Antin's Washington's Birthday poem. She had stood before her class, thin, pale, and hollow, with a shadow of short black curls on her brow and the staring look of prominent eyes, dressed in a red-and-green plaid frock that had a ghastly effect on her complexion. Heels clapped together and hands glued to her sides, she had lifted up her voice in praise of George Washington, her pronunciation faulty and her declamation flat, but with the courage of her convictions. The applause that followed, led by her teacher Miss Dwight, convinced her that she had produced a very fine thing indeed. When someone—perhaps her father—suggested that her tribute ought to be printed, she did not find it difficult to persuade. She achieved an absolutely perfect copy of her verses at the expense of a dozen sheets of blue-ruled note paper, and then crossed the Mystic River to Boston to invade Newspaper Row.

It never occurred to her to send the manuscript by mail. In fact, it has never been her way to send a delegate where she could go herself. Consciously or unconsciously, she acted on the motto of a wise man who was one of the dearest friends that Boston kept for her until she came: "Personal presence moves the world," said the great Dr. Hale. And so she went in person to beard the editor in his armchair.

The Perils of the Crossing

The way from the ferry slip to the offices of the Boston Transcript was long, strange, and full of perils. She kept resolutely on up Hanover Street, being familiar with that part of her route, until she came to a puzzling corner. There she stopped, utterly bewildered by the tangle of streets, the roar of traffic, and the giddy swarm of pedestrians. With the precious manuscript tightly clasped, she balanced herself on the curbstone, afraid to plunge into the boiling vortex of the crossing. Every time she made a start, a clanging street car snatched up the way. She could not even pick out her street; the unobtrusive street signs were lost to her unpractised sight in the glaring confusion of store signs and advertisements. If she accosted a pedestrian to ask the way, she had to speak several times before she was heard. Jews, hurrying by with bearded chins on their bosoms and eyes intent, shrugged their shoulders and passed on.

The scene captures the double nature of the immigrant's encounter with the American city: the same energy that made Boston a place of opportunity also made it a place of bewilderment. The street signs that a native-born child would have read without thought were illegible to the girl who had spent her life inland, believing that the great waters of the world were spread out before her in the Dvina. Her idea of the human world had grown enormously during the long journey from Polotzk; her idea of the earth had expanded with every day at sea. But the tangle of Newspaper Row was a different kind of education, one that tested not her imagination but her nerve.

The Significance of the Row

Newspaper Row was more than a destination; it was the emblem of a new kind of power. In Polotzk, the written word had belonged to the learned, to the scribes and the rabbis who interpreted the Torah. In Boston, the printed word was a public commodity, produced on streets where anyone with a story and the courage to tell it could seek an audience. The Row stood at the center of a city that was itself a kind of school, where the Boston Public Library, the Latin School, and the lecture halls of Hale House all offered their own lessons in American citizenship. For Mary Antin, the journey to the Row was the first time she acted on the principle that would govern her whole American life: that personal presence moves the world, and that the citizen who wants to be heard must go in person to the place where voices are printed and amplified.

The episode also reveals the continuity between her public performances and her private self. The same girl who had stood before her classmates, hypnotized by the solemnity of her own demeanor, now stood on a Boston curbstone, equally determined to make herself heard. The applause of her teachers and schoolmates had convinced her that her poem was fine; the journey to the Row was the act of faith that turned that conviction into print. And when she finally reached the offices of the Boston Transcript, she carried with her not just a manuscript but the whole weight of her transformation—the girl who had been born in Polotzk, who had been made over in America, and who had learned that the way to the world's attention ran through the streets of Newspaper Row.