Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1911-09-03
TOPLINERS
4 S has been often and tritely and truly

remarked history repeats itself, having
a record in this line that surpasses anything
ever pulled off by the most hardened and
corrupt repeater at the polls of our fair land
when a President or an Alderman needs
fat majority. Repetition, therefore, is rule
in history; but there are exceptions. That
is to say, there was one notable exception
until Louis Nicholas Hammerling began to
write his name on the scrolls of the pres
ent day.
Before this happened, everybody had
settled down to the belief that, Throughout
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 disdain, at old History and sneeringy
observe that the Babel building was one
| thing that could never be duplicated. They
| considered it past and gone, dead as the
archeopteryx, which is the deadest bird
| known to the annals Of time. Then Ham
merling happened along and hammered up
| a second Babel house with maybe trimmings
and cornices constructed of garrulity and
| CAB.
As Tower of Babel Mr. Hammerling is
| the Boy from Up There. He is the origina-
| tor, founder flag, and president of the Amer
| lean Association of Foreign Language News
papers, and in his quadruplc capacity he
blows into the national Capital from time to
| time to tell the President and the Secretary
| of Commerce and Labor how the ilnmigra-
| ton laws should be enforced, what treatment
| should be accorded to those who speak alien
| languages, and what is being said about the
Government in the consonantal tongues that
| adorn the pages of the publications he con-
| trolls.
His association has under it four hundred
and thlrty-nlnc papers, representing grand
and dithyranbic total of twenty Ian
guages, of which not one is English. But,
when it comes to Croatian, Hungarian,
Ruthenian, Syrian, Japanese, Finnish, Slo
wax, or any OF those imported and polysyl-
Liable babblings, the Hammerling person and
| the Hammerling association are plentifully
supplied.
The most interesting thing about young
Hammerllng, however, is not that he wlelds
the powerful influence embodied in the out
put of more than four hundred papers, but
that he overcame tremendous difficulties in
| reaching the distinction Of figuring as Tower
of Babel No. 2 and the grand mogul Of all
the cultural and labial Conversations on
earth.
He is thirty-seven years old, and was born
in Honolulu, although his parents were Aus
TRANS. His mother died when he was two
years old, and he was taken to the old family
nome III Prague, bOneHlld. w men ne was
twelve, he came to the United States and
started out as a humble but ambitious
worker in cigar factory in San Francisco,
where he labored for three months 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 German
newspaper in Milwaukee, he finally drifted
into Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania where he
spent five years in the coal mines. He began
as driver boy and wound up as expert
timberman. He wrestled with pick and
hammer by day, and at night he fought
fiercer battles with pencil and the English
language, coming out of the struggle in com
plete command of all those coed old Anglo
Saxon words which have nine different
meanings and two or three different kinds
of recommendations.
His next leap was into the field of Jour
nalism, and he became correspondent for
more than one hundred foreign language
newspapers, writing learned and highbrow
articles on American citizenship, American
customs, American business methods, and
| American nlines-the whole moral of his
| tales being that the foreigners had lovely
chance to surround lot of the American
coin and that they had better get very busy
at it right away. This of course, made him
popular with all the foreigners.
| When he was at Wilkesbarre he was APP