On this day in 1912, over 1,000 people gathered at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York to hear Boston writer Mary Antin. She had come to make a plea for more aid to support Jewish immigrant girls arriving alone in the United States. Antin had recently published The Promised Land, a memoir of her emigration from Russia to Boston's South End. She believed that the strength of her story lay in the fact that it illustrated "scores of unwritten lives." Attention from the book brought Mary Antin into social and professional circles that included Theodore Roosevelt and other prominent Americans. She became a vocal and energetic presence in public conversations about the most critical issues of the early twentieth century, including immigration, education, and Zionism.