Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/28



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HAT Jersey City should have produced Mark Fagan is strange enough. But that Mark Fagan, grave, kind, and very brave, should have been able, as Mayor, to make Jersey City what it is: a beginning of better things all over this land of ours, that is stranger still. And no man there pretends to understand it. Yet it is a simple story.

Mark—as they call him—the men, the women, and the children—was born September 29, 1869, in the fifth ward where he lives now. His parents were poor Irish, very poor. They moved over to New York when Mark was a child, and the father died. Mark sold newspapers. The newsboy dreamed dreams and fought fights. He claimed a corner, Twelfth Street and Avenue A, developed a good trade, and when competition came, appealed to the man in the store to say