The Boston Searchlight Canvass

The Boston Searchlight Canvass is the episode in which Mary Antin, still a schoolgirl, attempts to earn her family's rent by selling subscriptions to a Boston newspaper. It is a day-long picaresque trial that carries her through the city's office buildings, testing the confidence she had built as the celebrated author of a Washington's Birthday poem and the "smartest" girl in her school district against the indifferent machinery of American commerce. The venture yields exactly one subscriber, a handful of humiliations, and one genuine friendship, and it marks a turning point in her understanding of what it means to earn a living in her adopted country.

The Motive and the Plan

The canvass grew out of a standing domestic trouble: rent. The family was always behind, and the landlady, Mrs. Hutch, was very angry, so Mary was particularly ambitious to earn the rent herself. She had had one or two poems published since the celebrated eulogy of George Washington, but nobody had paid for her poems yet. A friend introduced her to a slightly literary lady who introduced her to the editor of the Boston Searchlight, who offered her a generous commission for subscriptions to his paper. The arithmetic seemed effortless: if the rent was three and one-half dollars per week, the annual subscription one dollar, and her commission fifty per cent, she needed only seven subscribers a week—one a day. Mr. James, the editor, assured her she could get 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 Morning in the Office Building

Bright and early one Saturday morning in the fall, Mary started 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. The first half-hour she lost wandering through the corridors, reading the names on the doors, unable to tell which was Wilson & Reed, Solicitors, and which C. Jenkins Smith, Mortgages and Bonds. She decided it did not matter: she would call them all "Sir." She selected a door and knocked, but the building buzzed with noise—swift footsteps echoed on the stone floors, snappy talk broke out with the opening of every door, bells tinkled, elevators hummed—so after a while she noticed that other people went in without knocking, and she did the same. Emboldened by her one success, she went into the next office without considering the kind of business announced on the door, trying brokers, lawyers, contractors, and all, just as they came around the corridor. Most of the people were polite. Some men waved her away, like C. Jenkins Smith. Some looked impatient at first, but excused themselves politely in the end. Almost everybody said, "We're busy here," as if they suspected she wanted them to read a whole year's issue of the Searchlight at once. At last one man told her he did not think it was a nice business for a girl, going through the offices like that.

The Encounter with Mr. Strong

The remark took her aback. She had not thought anything about the nature of the business; she only wanted the money to pay the rent. She wandered through miles of stone corridors, unable to see why it was not a nice business, and yet reluctant to go on with it, with the doubt in her mind. Intent on her new problem, she walked into a messenger boy, and looking back to apologize to him, collided softly with a cushion-shaped gentleman getting out of an elevator. She was making up her mind to leave the building forever when she saw an office door standing open—the first open door she had come across since morning, past noon now—and it was a sign to her to keep on. Mr. Frederick A. Strong was alone in the office, surreptitiously picking his teeth after lunch. He heard her out good-naturedly and asked how much her commission was. "Fifty cents, sir," she said. He replied that he did not care to subscribe, but offered her a quarter anyway. If she did not blush, it was because it was not her habit, but all of a sudden she choked; a lump jumped into her throat, almost the tears were in her eyes. That man was right who said it was not nice to go through the offices. She was taken for a beggar: a stranger offered her money for nothing. She could not say a word and started to go out, but Mr. Strong jumped up and prevented her. He was so genuinely repentant that she could not refuse him. She sat down, and he talked, showing her a picture of his wife and little girl and saying she must go and see them some time. Pretty soon she was chatting too, telling him about the Latin School, and of course he asked if she was French, the way people always did when they wanted to say she had a foreign accent. So they got started on Russia, and had such an interesting time that they both jumped up, surprised, when a fine young lady in a beautiful hat came in to take possession of the idle typewriter. Mr. Strong introduced her very formally, thanked her for an interesting hour, and shook hands with her at the door. She did not add his name to her short subscription list, but she counted it a greater triumph that she had made a friend.

The Afternoon and the Ride Home

It would have been seeking an anticlimax to solicit any more in the building, so she went out into the roar of Tremont Street and across the Common, still green and leafy. She rested a while on a bench, debating where to go next. It was past two by the clock on Park Street Church. She had had a long day already, but it was too early to quit work, with only one half dollar of her own in her pocket. It was Saturday—in the evening the landlady would come. She must try a little longer. She went out along Columbus Avenue, a popular route for bicyclists at that time; the bicycle stores all along the way looked promising, and the people did not look so busy as in the office building. They were not particularly rude, but they did not subscribe. Nobody wanted the Searchlight. They had never heard of it—they made jokes about it—they did not want it at any price. When at last she started for home, a streetcar starter discouraged her from walking, telling her she could not walk it before midnight the way she looked. She could not resist the temptation and rode home in the car, feeling like a thief when she paid the fare—five cents gone to pay for her folly. She was grateful for a cold supper, and thrice grateful to hear that Mrs. Hutch, the landlady, had been and gone, content with two dollars that her father had brought home.

The Significance of the Day

The day's outcome was meager in commercial terms—a single subscriber, one half dollar of her own, and a five-cent car fare spent in guilt—yet the episode reveals the deeper structure of Mary's American education. The canvass was a performance of citizenship, an attempt to convert the symbolic capital she had accumulated as the author of the Washington poem and the prodigy of her school district into actual currency. It failed, but not because she lacked courage; she had the courage of her convictions, as she had shown when she stood before her classmates to pronounce the praises of the Father of his Country, thin, pale, and hollow, with a shadow of short black curls on her brow and the staring look of prominent eyes. The difference was that the audience in the office buildings did not sit in rows of forty Fellow Citizens in clean blouses and extra frills, hypnotized by the solemnity of her demeanor. They were busy, they were polite, and they did not want the Searchlight. The one man who offered her a quarter for nothing taught her the shame of being mistaken for a beggar, while Mr. Strong, who refused to subscribe, gave her something she valued more: the proof that she could make a friend across the divide of age, business, and accent. The episode stands as a comic, humbling interlude in her ascent, a reminder that the American promise of opportunity did not guarantee that every door would open to her knock.