The Hawaiian gazette., 1911-09-22
now
NATIONAL FIGURE
is on White House Calling List
and Has Influence With
Cabinet Officers.

Among tho Irrational Topliners'i be.
ing treated OF in the Illinois Sunday
Magazine by james Hay, Jr. appears
tho name Of a Honolulan, born in this
city Of Austrian parentage. This is
Louis Nicholas Hammerl.ng, newspaper
man Of national fame. OF him Mr..
Hay writes;
AS has been often and tritely ana
truly remarked, history repeats itself,
having a record in this line that sur
passes anything ever pulled off by the
most hardened and corrupt repeater at
the polls Of our fair land when a presi.
dent or an alderman needs a fat
majority. Repet ton, therefore, is a
rule in history; but there ara excep.
tons. That is to say, there was one
notable exception until Lonis Nicholas
Hammerling began to write his name
on the scrolls of the present day.
Before this happened, everybody had
settled down to the belief that, through
out all the centuries and ages and cons
of the world, there had been and could
be only one Tower of Babel. People
had begun to point the finger of scorn,
not to mention the darts of disjain, at
old history and sneerlngly observe that
the Babel building was one thing that
could never be duplicated. They con
sidered it past and gone, dead as the
archeopteryx, which is the deadest bird
known to the annals of time Then
Hammerling happened along and ham.
mered up second Babel house Win
magpie trimmings and cornices con
structed OF garrulity and CAB.
AS a Tower of Babel, Mr.. Hammer
ling is the Boy from Up There. He is
originator, founder, flag, ard president
of the American Association of Foreign
Language Newspapers, and in his quad
ripple capacity he blows into the ma
tional capital from time to time to tell
sthe President and the secretary of com
merce and labor how the immigrat on
laws should be enforced, what treat
ment should be accorded to those who
speak alien languages, and what is be.
Jug said about the government in the
consonantal tongues that adorn the
pages of the publications he controls.
His association has under it four hun
) 'lled and thirty nine papers, repr seating
ia grand and dithyrambic total of twenty.
seven languages, of which not one is
English. But, when it comes to Croat-
ian, Hungarian, Ruthenian, Syria, Jap,
anese, Finnish, Slovak, or any of those
imported and polysyllabic babblings,
the Hammerling person and the Ham
merling association are plentifully sup
piled
The most interesting thing about
0 young Hammerling, however, is not
that he Yields the powerful Influence
embodied in the output of more than
four hundred papers, but that he over.
came tremendous difficulties in reach
5 ing the d istiction of figuring as Tow
? er of Babel No . and the grand mogul
. of all the CULTURAL and labial eolvsr-
D saZiones on earth.
| He is thirty seven years old, and was
born in Honolulu, although his parents
were Austrians. His mother died when
he was two years old, and he was TAX
I en- to the old family home in Prague,
: Bohemia. When he was tweive, he
came to the United States and started
! out as humble but ambitious work
t er in cigar factory in San Francisco,
. where he labored for three months
5 without getting any other pay than his
: board and lodging. At this time he
spoke about as much English as the
Lafayette Statue in Washington.
After soliciting subscriptions for a
! German newspaper in Milwaukee, he fin
ally drifted into Wilkesoarre, Pennsyl
vania, whera- he spent five years in the
coal mines. He began as driver boy
: and wound mp as expert timberman. He
! wrestled with a pick and hammer by
l day, and at night he fought fercer- bat
ties with pencil and the English Ian
guage, coming out of the struggle in
: complete command of all those good
5 old Anglo Saxon words which have nine
4 different meanings and two or three
: different kinds of pronunciations
His next leap was into the field o.
: journalism, and he became correspondent
: for more than one 1undrel foreign Ian
: guage newspapers, writing learned anC
highbrow articles on American citizen
;, ship, American customs, American bust
2 ness methods, and American mines-thi
. whole moral of his tales being thai
1 the foreigners had a lovely chance tt
surround a lot of the American coiI
and that they had better get very bus!
at it right away. This, of course, mad
him popular with all the foreigners.
n When he was at Wilkesbarre he wa
appointed by the State authorities o
U PENNSYLVANIA as their official transla
tor, and in 1902 President Roosevelt
made him mediator in the anthracit
4. coal strike He was recommended TO
the placeeby the population of the re
g gions affected, patted on the back b,
< the miners organizations and aceepte'
r by the coal-carrying railroads. Where
e upon he got very gabby in about seven
le teen different languages and brougn
\, the strike TO a satisfactory conclusion
70 II was so satisfactory that the miners
voting in enough tongues to reac
- - round the globe, donated for the EN-
= bellishment of his person one fine, soil
gold medal.
~ The year 1908 was big one for hin
n He was elected n delegate 10 the RI
h. publican national convention, ard wa
"a offered a place on the Panama Cans
- fiassufaainu rr5hieh ha aaaifuod Iatf