Introduction
Jacob Riis' How the Other half Lives is a riveting account of life in New York's Lower East Side tenements of the last century written by one of the Progressive Era's preeminent reformers. Drawn from the author's long career as a police reporter, the book captures the stark realities of life for the destitute and represents one man's campaign to reform society by challenging the social injustices of his times. First published in 1890 by Scribner & Sons, the book called attention to the poverty and immorality of New York's toughest neighborhoods, from the sweatshops to the crime-ridden alleys, and the plight of the marginalized people who lived and worked in the hellish enclaves of tenement slums. Although some critics found Riis' depictions of squalor offensive to more refined sensibilities, most reviewers praised the book with rave reviews. The New York Evening Sun called it a "unique and valuable volume." The Boston Times pronounced it a "commanding invitation to join the battle." The Brooklyn Times described it as a book of "immense shuddering interest." It also propelled Jacob Riis, a feisty Danish immigrant, to the forefront of the urban reform movement.
Born in Ribe, Denmark, the third child of a family of fourteen, Jacob Riis showed promise as a crusader even in childhood. Nicknamed "the Delver" for his habit of mucking around in the sewer beneath the family house and waging war on rats, he once gave his Christmas money to a poor and disreputable family in his village. The gift was conditional: The family had to mend their slovenly ways and keep their children presentably clean. Riis left school at the age sixteen to become a carpenter'sapprentice and promptly fell in love with his employer's daughter. Although they would later marry, Elizabeth's family initially discouraged the match. Riis, the spurned suitor, left Denmark to make his mark in America.
With only forty dollars in his pocket, he arrived in New York in 1870. He held a number of temporary jobs, failed to achieve any substantial success and was forced to seek out the hard charities of New York tenement slums. Here, finding a night's "board" meant a wooden board bed which was turned over after each night's lodger. In his autobiography The Making of an American, Riis recalled a night of overpowering desolation which would become a turning point in his life. Jobless, hungry, and drenched in a chilly October rain, he was without hope when a small stray dog befriended him. When Riis sought shelter for the night in one of the charity quarters operated by the local police, the little dog followed him and curled by the door outside to wait for him. During the night, a gold locket keepsake was stolen as he slept and a policeman savagely and inexplicably killed the little dog. Twenty-five years later, when the notorious police lodging houses were closed for good, Riis felt he had finally avenged the death of his dog.
In 1877, as a newly hired reporter for the New York Tribune and Associated Press Bureau, Riis developed an even deeper intimacy with the neighborhood he would eventually immortalize in How the Other Half Lives. Assigned to cover the police beat, his job was to write about crime and human misery in a notorious area of downtown Manhattan that Riis grew to detest. More than half of all the pawnshops and saloons in the entire city of New York could be found in and around Mulberry Street and The Bend, an area more densely populated than Calcutta, India. As Riis soon discovered, the landlords who owned the tenement houses were indifferent to the conditions in which tenants were forced to live. Many lacked heat, water, and sanitation. It was common to find forty families crowded into sunless, airless spaces meant for no more than five or six. Many died in the heat of the summer when families took refuge on top of the roofs and rolled off in their sleep. Or, they died in fires that blazed through buildings without fire escapes; or they perished in the many epidemics that swept through these unwholesome places, such as the one that claimed up to 20 percent of the infants and small children in one building alone. Outraged and deeply troubled by the inhumanity of this indifference, Riis used his talents as a journalist to draw attention to the plight of the tenement poor and arouse public opinion.
Jacob Riis was not alone in his desire to rectify society of its social ills. The Progressive Era, from roughly 1880 to 1920, included various and eclectic groups and movements, among them the Social Progressives, who sought social justice for society's most oppressed and powerless people. Although Riis reserved some of his harshest criticism for the profiteering slum lord who charged inflated rents and were impervious to human suffering, he did not believe in dismantling the apparatus of capitalism or agitating for a more equitable division of wealth.
Although he often gave generously and from his own pocket to the destitute individuals he encountered, he was opposed to direct charity for the poor, believing it would merely encourage a perpetuation of the ingrained habits which the poor had acquired from their degrading environment. He worked instead to bring people together, to humanize the poor, often the immigrant and alien poor, for a society coming to terms with immigration and often fearful of what were called "the dangerous classes." Like other urban social reformers of the Progressive movement, Riis was an advocate of the "nurture" view of the human condition. He embraced a fervently moralistic view based on a strong sense of Christian fairness and sought to elevate impoverished humanity by changing the environment, thus eliminating the brutalizing forces that shaped, or in this case misshaped, the human character.
Many critics and biographers describe Jacob Riis as a man of considerable, if obsessive, concentration and passion, even an idealogue. Yet he was far from being a simple, shrill champion of the poor. His talents as a communicator, fueled by his need to expose the horrors of tenement life for readers who lived a world apart, gave his creativity a compelling momentum. Not only did his popular writing serve the cause, he leapt into the fairly new business of photojournalism to make his case and support his claims. In his single-minded pursuit of more effective ways of stirring the charitable sensibilities of the upper classes, he became America's first photojournalist, mastering the newest techniques of indoor photography. In his quest for better ways to capture the dark interiors of the tenement world, Riis was among the first to utilize a new lighting technique with a highly flammable flash powder. Some of Riis' startled subjects were known to dive out the nearest window in fear and panic. On one occasion, he inadvertently set fire to the lodgings of several blind people.
Riis won recognition for his efforts and his achievements continue to be acknowledged in almost every major history book covering the social reformers of America's Progressive movement. His circle of friends included Theodore Roosevelt, who was New York Police Commissioner when the two men first met. (It was Roosevelt, impressed with Riis and How the Other Half Lives, who was instrumental in closing down the infamous police lodging houses.) Riis also awakened the social conscience of readers and fueled their compassion sufficient to bring about change. He worked to establish wholesome outdoor areas for inner-city children, believing healthful exposure to the natural outdoors would imbue them with finer natures. He became known as the "father" of the small park movement and today many plaques in small New York City parks bear his name. He was also a talented investigative reporter out to expose all manner of wrongs. He has been credited with averting an epidemic when he discovered New York City's water supply was polluted with sewage at its source upstream.
It is equally easy to recognize Jacob Riis as a man of his own times. He had stereotypical and prejudiced views of racial and ethnic groups found in the Lower East Side neighborhoods. According to Riis, blacks were clean and therefore commendable but child-like; the Chinese were clever and treacherous with their opium dens; the Italians seemed to enjoy the filth in which they lived and expressed no desire to change their surroundings. These pronouncements seem curious in light of Riis views on the importance of environment as the determining factor in human behavior. To his credit, he did not demean any of the individual subjects he introduced to his readers but emphasized their humanity.
Jacob Riis was a prodigious writer with hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles to his credit. He was the author of fifteen books including Children of the Poor (1892), Out of Mulberry Street (1898), The Making of an American (1901), Children of the Tenements (1903), and a somewhat fawning biography of his friend Theodore Roosevelt. Despite the moderate successes he enjoyed with his various publications, How the Other Half Lives is Riis' most acclaimed work. With the addition of Riis' brilliant photographic images, taken from 1888 to 1898, the volume acquired even more value and appeal.
Although Riis' original photographic collection of glass plate slides served him well as visual accompaniment to his public lectures, the bulk of his work remained hidden away in a Massachusetts farmhouse from the time of his death to their rediscovery in 1945 and 1946, the result of a lengthy campaign by photographer Alexander Alland, Sr., to track them down. It was Alland's conversion of Riis' positive images to prints that reintroduced the genius of Jacob Riis to an appreciative new audience. His work has since been exhibited in several New York museums including the Museum of New York, which is the permanent home for the Jacob Riis collection.
Ansel Adams found both integrity and intensity in Riis' photographs. In his words, they are "magnificent achievements" of the humanist spirit. And indeed, the subjects, who stare straight at us with their haunting gazes have lost none of their humanity or their power to affect us. How the Other Half Lives is a monument to one's man commitment to a more just and humane society and the timeless value of that impulse.
Dail Murray, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist and a member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Marinette, where she teaches sociology and anthropology.
