There are many good citizens of the United States who can look back with pride to their Danish ancestry. Denmark, that land of low-lying, storm-swept coasts, and level plains, has bred for centuries a race of hardy, freedom-loving people. It is only natural that America should hold out to them a promise of even greater opportunity and personal liberty.
On the bleak coast of the North Sea is the little town of Ribe. There, in 1849, was born Jacob A. Riis, son of a schoolmaster and one of fourteen children. Scant were the means for the education and upbringing of so large a family; but from this humble home on the Danish seacoast came a man who, in later years, was to become famous in the new land of his adoption: famous, not because of wealth or inventive genius, but for his citizenship, and for his deeds, which left the world better than he found it.
Copyright by Brown Brothers
Jacob A Riis (signature)
There were no railroads or steamboats in Ribe in those days. It was as it had been almost for centuries. And yet Ribe took pride in its history: its people were a fighting race, fighters for honor and liberty, fighters for the little of peace and security that encroaching neighbors and unfriendly Nature had permitted them to have. They had fought back the Germans in 1849, as they had fought for their homes in years before. And every year, when the wind set in from the northwest, they fought back the sea that rose up over the low beaches and flooded the land as far back as the eye could see.
With such traditions and in such environment, it is small wonder that young Jacob grew to be a healthy, normal boy charged with ambition and energy. There was fighting blood in his veins, but it was the blood that rises and fights against oppression and for the right, and never for conquest or the subjection of the weak.
It was the ambition of the father that Jacob should study for a professional career, but to the young boy, with his strong body and alert mind, the study of a trade appealed more keenly, and he was apprenticed for a year to a carpenter in the town.
But before the year was done, the boy’s ambition grew beyond the opportunities of the little town, and, with the consent of his family, he removed to Copenhagen to continue his apprenticeship under a great builder in that city. Four years were passed here, and during these years Jacob became proficient in his trade; but of even greater value were the opportunities for study which the Danish capital afforded him: study not only in books, but in men and in the observation of the life around him.
One other thing drove his ambition steadily forward. In Ribe was a fair-haired girl, the daughter of the wealthiest and most prominent citizen. Wide was the social and financial gulf between the young and penniless carpenter and the young girl whom he desired for his wife. To everyone but himself his hopes seemed almost ridiculous in their impossibility. He alone refused to accept defeat. If money was needed, he would make it. If Denmark could not offer him success, there was a land beyond the Atlantic that could.