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Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, combined photography and journalism into a powerful indictment of poverty in America. His 1890, How the Other Half Lives shocked Americans with its raw depictions of urban slums. Here, he describes poverty in New York. Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance. In New York … the boundary line of the Other Half lies through the tenements. … To-day three-fourths of its people live in the tenements, and the nineteenth century drift of the population to the cities is sending ever-increasing multitudes to crowd them. The fifteen thousand tenant houses that were the despair of the sanitarian in the past generation have swelled into thirty-seven thousand, and more than twelve hundred thousand persons call them home. The one way out he saw–rapid transit to the suburbs–has brought no relief. We know now that there is no way out; that the “system” that was the evil offspring of public neglect and private greed has come to stay, a storm-centre forever of our civilization. Nothing is left but to make the best of a bad bargain. What the tenements are and how they grow to what they are, we shall see hereafter. The story is dark enough, drawn from the plain public records, to send a chill to any heart. If it shall appear that the sufferings and the sins of the “other half,” and the evil they breed, are but as a just punishment upon the community that gave it no other choice, it will be because that is the truth. The boundary line lies there because, while the forces for good on one side vastly outweigh the bad–it were not well otherwise–in the tenements all the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral contagion. This is their worst crime, inseparable from the system. That we have to own it the child of our own wrong does not excuse it, even though it gives it claim upon our utmost patience and tenderest charity. What are you going to do about it? is the question of to-day. It was asked once of our city in taunting defiance by a band of political cutthroats, the legitimate outgrowth of life on the tenement-house level. Law and order found the answer then and prevailed. With our enormously swelling population held in this galling bondage, will that answer always be given? It will depend on how fully the situation that prompted the challenge is grasped. Forty per cent of the distress among the poor, said a recent official report, is due to drunkenness. But the first legislative committee ever appointed to probe this sore went deeper down and uncovered its roots. The “conclusion forced itself upon it that certain conditions and associations of human life and habitation are the prolific parents of corresponding habits and morals,” and it recommended “the prevention of drunkenness by providing for every man a clean and comfortable home. Years after, a sanitary inquiry brought to light the fact that “more than one-half of the tenements with two-thirds of their population were held by owners veto trade the keeping of them a business, generally a speculation. The owner was seeking a certain percentage on his outlay, and that percentage very rarely fell below fifteen per cent., and frequently exceeded thirty. . . . The complaint was universal among the tenants that they were entirely smeared for, and that the only answer to their requests to have the place put in order by repairs and necessary improvements was that they must pay their rent or leave. The agent’s instructions were simple but emphatic: ‘Collect the rent in advance, or, failing, eject the occupants.”‘ Upon such a stock grew this upas-tree. Small wonder the fruit is bitter. The remedy that shall be an effective answer to the coming appeal for justice must proceed from the public conscience. Neither legislation nor charity can cover the ground. The greed of capital that wrought the evil must itself undo it, as far as it can now be undone. Homes must be built for the working masses by those who employ their labor; but tenements must cease to be “good property” in the old, heartless sense. “Philanthropy and five per cent.” is the penance exacted. If this is true from a purely economic point of view, what then of the outlook front the Christian standpoint? Not long ago a great meeting was held in this city, of all denominations of religious faith, to discuss the question how to lay hold of these teeming masses in the tenements with Christian influences, to which they are now too often strangers. Might not the conference have found in the warning of one Brooklyn builder, who has invested his capital on this plan and made it pay more than a money interest, a hint worth heeding: “How shall the love of God be understood by those who have been nurtured in sight only of the greed of man?” [Source: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890).]
Based on his own experiences as an immigrant and his knowledge of the slums as a police reporter, Riis advocated for practical solutions to a wide array of social problems. Through lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, and books like How the Other Half Lives (1890) and The Children of the Poor (1892), Riis worked tirelessly to influence public opinion. He met with a hostile reception from New York City’s powerful political machine, Tammany Hall, whose leaders saw well-meaning, middle-class reformers as a threat to their influence. But in 1894, an anti-Tammany reform candidate, William L. Strong, won the mayor’s office and instituted a period of “good government” policies. Among Strong’s appointments was a young Theodore Roosevelt as police commissioner. Roosevelt befriended Riis and supported his causes, as Riis advocated for the destruction of the worst of the old tenements, the construction of parks, education for children, and the closing of the dangerous police station lodging houses.
Jacob Riis was very concerned about the impact of poverty on the young, which was a persistent theme both in his writing and lectures. For the sequel to How the Other Half Lives, Riis focused on the plight of immigrant children and efforts to aid them. Working with a friend from the Health Department, Riis filled The Children of the Poor (1892) with statistical information about public health, education, and crime. He argued that teaching immigrant children about American democracy would help to make them productive citizens. For this project, Riis radically changed his approach to his subjects. He established a rapport with the children who posed for him before taking their photograph and included their stories in his text. Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/reformer.html#obj019_6
From 1854 to 1874, the Children’s Aid Society in New York City established twenty-one industrial schools, which offered academic and technical classes, medical care, and recreational programs to children who, because of the conditions of their impoverishment, could not attend public school. Riis met Katie at the West 52nd Street Industrial School, where he interviewed her and took her portrait. Riis featured her story, as well as those of other children, in his 1892 Scribner’s article illustrated with wood engravings made from Riis’s photographs. Later that year Riis turned his “The Children of the Poor” article into a book of the same name: This picture shows what a sober, patient, sturdy little thing she was, with that dull life wearing on her day by day. . . . She got right up when asked and stood for her picture without a question and without a smile. “What kind of work do you do?” I asked, thinking to interest her while I made ready. “I scrubs,” she replied, promptly, and her look guaranteed that what she scrubbed came out clean.
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In a chapter on “The Homeless and Outcast,” in The Children of the Poor, Riis emphasized that most homeless boys were not orphans: The great mass. . . . of newsboys who cry their “extrees” in the street by day . . . are children with homes who contribute to their family’s earnings, and sleep out, if they do, either because they have not sold their papers or gambled away their money at “craps” and are afraid to go home . . . . In winter the boys curl themselves up on the steam-pipes in the newspaper offices that open their doors at midnight on secret purpose to let them in. Riis worked for the New York Sun in the 1890s and may have known these boys. Unlike the “Street Arabs” who feigned sleeping to pose for How the Other Half Lives, these boys seem genuinely asleep.
Jacob Riis. Newsboys Sleeping in the Offices of the New York Sun, 1891–1892. Modern gelatin printing out paper. Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Roger William Riis (90.13.4.131) (090.00.00) Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/reformer.html#obj090
The students at an industrial school were asked to share with their parents a handout—“a Voter’s A, B, C, in large type, easy to read”—about an upcoming vote at the school. Riis inserted the handout in his manuscript for his book The Children of the Poor. He believed that children could teach their immigrant parents about the fundamentals of citizenship and that introducing immigrant youth to the principles of American democracy would go a long way toward making them proud citizens. At the Beach Street Industrial School, an administrator asked the students to vote on whether the school day should begin with a salute to the American flag. In The Children of the Poor (open to the illustration of three girls who were selected as election inspectors), Riis observed that “the tremendous show of dignity with which they took their seats at the poll was most impressive.”
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Who were the other half that Jacob Riis referred to in his 1890 book?
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