Diplomats -- United States -- Biography; Morgenthau, Henry, 1856-1946; United States -- Foreign relations -- 20th century
Promptly at eleven the Metropolitan Orchestra began the funeral march
from Beethoven’s “Eroica,” and, carried by six skull-capped bearers, the
coffin, entirely covered by a pall of violets, was placed upon the
stage. Mme. Homer and Riccardo Martin and Robert Blass sang Handel’s
“Largo”; the choir-boys from Calvary Church who had appeared in the
first American production of “Parsifal” intoned a setting of Tennyson’s
“Crossing the Bar”; Dr. Wise and Professor William H. Carpenter, of
Columbia, spoke of the dead man’s work, and then, with the notes of the
Chopin funeral-march sobbing through the Opera House--attended by
music-lovers, judges, artists, financiers, leaders in almost every walk
of life, there was taken from the scene of his greatest work the body of
the weaver-boy of Bielitz.
These memories have taken me somewhat far afield and consumed much of
the space that I had intended to devote, in this chapter, to my own
activities. I should like to tell of my service as director of the
Educational Alliance, the consolidation of a dozen activities for the
benefit of children--and particularly the Jewish children--of that Lower
East Side neighbourhood; and, too, of my work on the Board of Directors
of the Mt. Sinai Hospital, the institution which my father helped so
many years before; and of my interest in the Henry Street Settlement so
ably developed by my friend Lillian Wald, my connection with which
eventually led Mrs. Morgenthau and me to establish the Bronx House. Mrs.
Morgenthau once taught in the Louis’ Downtown Sabbath School at 267
Henry Street, and right next door to it Miss Lillian D. Wald and Miss
MacDowell, the daughter of General MacDowell of Civil War fame, had
started an experiment that was to grow into a vast benefit for the
entire community. Up to that time the people of the Lower East Side who
were unable to afford regular medical treatment for themselves or their
babies went without it until the last minute and then sought the rare
dispensaries; for any other sort of help, they turned to the district
political bosses, who never failed to require a substantial return for
favours and who had few favours to dispense to those who neither voted
themselves nor controlled the votes of others. Miss Wald practically
originated the idea of the house-to-house, or the tenement-to-tenement,
visiting trained nurse, who made friends with the sick and needy in
their own homes, cared for the ill, showed their relatives how to care
for them, gave practical lessons on the bringing up of children, and
demonstrated that household hygiene is the ounce of prevention that is
worth a pound of cure. Out of this evolved the now famous Henry Street
Settlement.
This work deeply interested me, and I have been a constant and frequent
visitor at the house, and have supported a visiting nurse on Miss Wald’s
staff for the past twenty-two years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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