Jacob Riis: Reporter and Reformer (Oxford Portraits)

Jacob Riis Reporter and Reformer

OXFORD PORTRAITS

Jacob Riis Reporter and Reformer

Janet B. Pascal

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For Aunt Louise and in memory of Uncle Frank, lifelong NewYorkers

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2005 by Janet B. Pascal Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Design: Greg Wozney Layout: Amy Henderson Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pascal, Janet B. Jacob Riis / Janet B. Pascal.— 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-514527-4 ISBN-10: 0-19-514527-5 1. Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August), 1849-1914—Juvenile literature. 2. Social reformers— New York (State)—New York—Biography—Juvenile literature. 3. Photographers— New York (State)—New York—Biography—Juvenile literature. 4. Journalists—New York (State)—New York—Biography—Juvenile literature. 5. Slums—New York (State)— New York—History—Juvenile literature. 6. Tenement houses—New York (State)— New York—History—Juvenile literature. 7. New York (N.Y.)—Social conditions— Juvenile literature. I. Title. HV28.R53P37 2005 361.2’4’092—dc22 2005007757 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper On the cover: Jacob Riis in 1904 Frontispiece: Riis in 1900

C ONTENTS PROLOGUE

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JACOB THE DELVER “I Am Glad I Was a Boy Then” 13

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HOMELESS AND PENNILESS Making Acquaintance with the Slums 26

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RESTLESS ENERGY Jacob Riis, City Editor 36

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“HE WAS ALWAYS THAT WAY” Help from Tammany Hall 46

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“HURRAH!” City Toughs and Country Hoodlums 54

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THE “BOSS REPORTER” IN MULBERRY STREET

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BURROWING DEEP IN THE SLUMS Fire at the “Dirty Spoon” 82

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POVERTY, SQUALOR, AND WRETCHEDNESS Sweatshop Economics 94

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HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES Four Stories of the Tenements 104

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PHOTO ESSAY: RIIS AS A PHOTOGRAPHER

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“I HAVE READ YOUR BOOK, AND I HAVE COME TO HELP” A Friend to Children 126

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“DECENT AND CLEANLY LIVING” The Official Definition of “Dark” 143

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“NEVER HAD MAN BETTER A TIME THAN I” The Sun in Stanton Street 154

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AFTERWORD CHRONOLOGY FURTHER READING AND WEBSITES INDEX

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P REFACE Early in 1888, in the middle of the night, a mysterious party of men crept quietly into a dark New York City tenement building. As the men walked softly up the stairs, the tenants still awake paid them no attention—no one in the building had anything worth stealing, and unknown people often came and went in the tenements. They entered a filthy back room with only one window, opening on a narrow airshaft. Although the room seemed too tiny even for the family of four that officially lived there, fifteen immigrants were crowded into it, sleeping on every available surface. One of the men set down the heavy equipment he carried. Another held out what seemed to be a gun. There was a brilliant flash, and then, while the startled occupants of the room were still blinded by the light, the men ran out. Despite the smell of explosives that now hung in the air, no crime had been committed—except perhaps trespassing. Police reporter Jacob Riis had just taken the first photograph ever of one of the dark interior rooms of a tenement house, where no natural light could reach.With this photograph and others like it, he hoped to open the eyes of his fellow New Yorkers to the intolerable conditions in which 6

P REFACE the poor immigrants of the city lived. The photographs would be used for a series of illustrated lectures and then in a book called How the Other Half Lives. The publication of this book in 1890 opened the eyes of the nation, inspired a generation of reformers, and made Jacob Riis one of the century’s most prominent advocates and spokesmen for the poor. Equally at home chatting with the immigrant children who made cigars or shirts in tenement sweatshops or eating breakfast in the White House with the President, he became a link between one half of the country and “the other half.” Riis had been writing newspaper articles about the slums for years before he took his first photograph of the tenements. He was not alone. Many progressive, determined thinkers from educated and religious backgrounds were trying to come to terms with the terrible problems of illness, poverty, and overcrowding that were becoming worse every year as more and more immigrants poured into America’s slums. Other lecturers and writers had spoken out. Many small missions and churches run by dedicated reformers were working to improve conditions on the Lower East Side, the crowded Manhattan neighborhood that was home to the majority of New York’s recent immigrants. But they had made little impression on the public’s consciousness.

The coal-heaver’s family in this photograph by Riis lived in a tenement known as Poverty Gap.The entire family lived in one room and shared a mattress on the floor. 7

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A photograph by Riis of Hester Street, on the Lower East Side, the largest Jewish neighborhood of New York City. Because the area was so crowded, much of life took place in public. Shops spilled out onto the sidewalk, and children who had no place else to go played in the street.

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The comfortably well-off middle classes were perfectly willing to give alms and cast-off clothing through their churches, and maybe a turkey at Christmas, but they did not know much about the slum’s inhabitants. Most Americans thought of the poor as lazy and ignorant, inclined to drink, and not interested in cleaning up their living quarters. Certainly they knew, in an abstract way, that the people who lived in the tenements were human beings just like themselves, but they rarely imagined them as neighbors with feelings and hopes, fears and needs as real as their own. Riis realized there was a limit to the impact words could have. He wanted to shock one half of the city into truly seeing the other half and realizing that the two groups had much in common. One photograph, he believed, could do more to make the people of the tenements real to his audience than anything he could write. Using the newly invented flash technology that made it possible for the first time to photograph the squalor of the tenements’ dark rooms, Riis set out to do what, in one form or another, he would spend the rest of his life doing—casting light into dark places.

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JACOB THE D ELVER Jacob Riis was born on May 3, 1849, in a fairy-tale town, immeasurably removed from the hectic, crowded, modern New York City to which he devoted his life. Five hundred years before Riis’s birth, Ribe, Denmark, located near the German border, had been an important military establishment, but by the middle of the 19th century the town had been left behind by the world. No train or steamboat came near it and in many ways Ribe was virtually unchanged from medieval days. When people wrote, they used quill pens; to light a fire they used a tinderbox. Whale-oil lamps lit the cobblestone streets, and after dark the night watchman patrolled the town, crying out the hour and assuring the citizens that all was well. Schoolboys practiced military drills using 18th-century flintlock muskets. Periodically the watchman would give warning that the sea was about to flood the town. Then, as Riis recalled in his autobiography, The Making of an American, “we boys caught fish in the streets of the town . . . and we enjoyed ourselves hugely.” Although in so small a place everyone knew everyone else, class distinctions were still observed. “On state occasions lines were quite sharply drawn between the classes,” Riis 9

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On this 1880 map of southern Denmark, Ribe, near the west coast, is about a third of the way down. During Riis’s childhood, Denmark and Prussia warred for control of Holstein, on Denmark’s southern border. Today Holstein is part of Germany.

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wrote in his autobiography, “but the general kindliness of the people caused them at ordinary times to be so relaxed that the difference was hardly to be noticed.” There were three classes: officials such as the bishop and the mayor, called the burgomaster; tradesmen; and the workers, of whom Riis said, they “had no leaders and nothing to say.” As senior master of the local school for wealthy students, Riis’s father belonged to the official class. Niels Edward Riis was a stern and religious man with more education than most inhabitants of Ribe. He had a university education, wrote poetry, and contributed editorials to the local newspaper. Jacob’s mother, Carolina, the daughter of a warden, was born in Kronborg Castle, in the Danish town of Elsinor, the

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home of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Like her husband, Carolina also had some education, and she had served as a governess before her marriage. She was loving and sentimental, devoting herself to her family, and provided Jacob with an early example of openhearted charity. “Dear old mother!” he said of her in his autobiography. “She had a house full, and little enough to manage with; but never one went hungry or unhelped from her door.” The third of what would eventually be 14 children, 13 of them boys, Jacob was closer to his cousin Emma, whom the family adopted when her own mother died, than to any of his siblings. Niels longed to see one of his many children achieve literary or professional success. Only Jacob, his sister Sophie, and his foster sister Emma, who became a teacher, survived long into adulthood, however. Illness killed most of the other children. Six of Jacob’s brothers died of tuberculosis; one drowned. One became a doctor but died shortly after attaining his degree. Jacob seemed an unlikely possibility to become the writer his father hoped for. Strong, energetic, and willful, he preferred to spend his time outdoors, skating, hunting, fishing, and exploring. His friends called him Jacob the Delver because of the curiosity that led him to delve into the rat-filled drains in front of his house. He was quicktempered and fought frequently. On one memorable occasion he attacked a local bully known as Liar Hans with a horsewhip, while his opponent used a skinned cat as a weapon.

Jacob’s mother, Carolina Riis, was a generous woman of whom he said in a letter to his sister,“Mother deserves a Halo, the good soul that she was.” Of his father, Niels Edward Riis, Jacob wrote in his autobiography,“I rather think that he was the one link between the upper and lower strata in our town, enjoying the most hearty respect of both.”

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J ACOB R IIS Not surprisingly, he hated school from his first day. As he remembered in his autobiography, I was dragged off to school . . . and thrust howling into an empty hogshead by the ogre of a school marm, who, when she had put the lid on, gnashed her yellow teeth at the bunghole and told me that so bad boys were dealt with in school. At recess she had me up to the pigpen. . . . The pig had a slit in the ear. It was for being lazy she explained, and showed me the shears. Boys were no better than pigs.

Later he attended the Latin school where his father taught. Although this was an improvement over the village school, it still did not suit him. Founded in 1137, and not much changed since then, the school still offered a classical, Latin-based curriculum. As it was intended only for upperclass boys who would not be expected to work at a trade, it prided itself on avoiding subjects with commercial applications, such as mathematics or science, concentrating on classical languages and religion. Riis’s records from the school chiefly report his misbehaving during lessons, forgetting his books, or being ejected from class. What successful education he had, he received at home. His father encouraged him to read Charles Dickens’s weekly journal, All the Year Round and the American adventure novels of James Fenimore Cooper, from which he learned English. Riis also learned something of how a newspaper was run by helping with the editorial work his father sometimes did for the local newspaper. Riis was 12 or 13 when he had what he called in his autobiography his “first collision with the tenement,” and made his first attempt at reform. Rag Hall in Ribe was “a ramshackle, two-story affair with shiftless tenants and ragged children.” The building offended Riis by its contrast to the green fields he loved.“My methods in dealing with it had at least the merit of directness, if they added nothing to the sum of human knowledge or happiness,” he remarked in his 12

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“I AM GLAD I WAS A BOY THEN” Toward the end of his life, Riis wrote The Old Town, a book affectionately describing his childhood in Ribe. Riis believed children not only deserved natural places to play but needed them to develop into useful adults. Looking back, he forgot the hardships of his childhood, remembering the idyllic times spent fishing, or, as in this description, picking hazel nuts. (“Century runs” are good scores in the game of cricket.) or under the gnarled oaks, only survivors of the sturdy giants that had once covered the land, as the names of half the villages bore witness, and had filled the seas with the bold vikings’ ships, was a wilderness of hazel bushes that was the special preserve of the Latin School boys on Saturday afternoons, or when we had “month’s leave.” Month’s leave was an afternoon off, which the school might choose itself once a month, if it had been good. . . . The hazel bushes grew in the twilight of the woods, much as dogwood grows with us, and were mostly big enough to climb, but the nuts were on the farthest twigs, that could only be reached and stripped by pulling them down. That was fine fun, with enough tumbles to make it exciting, and a very substantial reward if judgment were used in the picking. . . . It does not seem to me that life could be worth much in the Latin School without those nutting expeditions. And so, when I went there with my own boys, and after wading through the old bog where the stork stalked up and down fishing for frogs, we came to the cool shade of the forest and found it hedged in with cheeky American barbed wire and signs up warning intruders off, my spirit rose in instant rebellion. . . . I was told, when I moved to the attack, that times had changed; that school was dismissed at two o’clock, not at five, nowadays, and that therefore month’s leave as we knew it had gone out of existence . . . and that anyhow boys rode cycles and made century runs and such things, where we went nutting. Truly the times do change. I am glad I was a boy then, if I am a back number now.

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J ACOB R IIS autobiography. Approaching the poorest family in Rag Hall, he offered to give them a mark (a coin worth about 25¢) that he had received for Christmas if they would promise to clean up their living quarters and dress the children better. Although Riis was offended when the father of the family checked with his parents to see if it was all right for him to give the money away, this did inspire Riis’s mother to help the family. “And there really was some whitewashing done, and the children were cleaned up for a season.” Riis was good at turning a situation to his own advantage, and he was a natural leader among his schoolmates. One winter his father could not afford to buy him a coat. He responded by forming a “Spartan Club.” In order to join, the boys had to emulate the ancient Spartan warriors, who were famously indifferent to pain or discomfort. He made his schoolmates prove their worth by going without coats. With his bold spirit and leadership ability, he considered that the career for which he was best suited was the army. When he was 15, he was eager to run away and join the Danish Army, which was then fighting Denmark’s traditional enemy, Prussia, with whom it shared a border. His parents prevented him, and the conflict was settled without his help. The only military action he was able to perform was to help throw 25 ancient muskets into the sea so the Prussians would not be able to seize them if they reached Ribe. He tried several more times during his life to join the fight against the Prussians, but never with any success. Thwarted in his desire to join the army and flatly refusing to consider a career as a teacher or scholar, Riis dropped out of school and was apprenticed to a carpenter. He soon found himself working on the construction of the one modern building in town, a cotton mill owned by the wealthy Mr. Goetz. One day while crossing the bridge over the River Nibs, Riis passed his employer’s young foster daughter, Elisabeth. Although he had known her all his life, he had never really noticed her before. But now she caught his eye, and he 14

J ACOB THE D ELVER turned to look back at her. Forty years later he wrote in his autobiography, “As she stands one brief moment there with the roguish look, she is to stand in [my] heart forever—a sweet, girlish, figure.” From that moment, the 15-year-old was convinced he was going to marry Elisabeth. “My courtship proceeded at a tumultuous pace, which first made the town laugh, then put it out of patience and made some staid matrons express the desire to box my ears soundly,” he wrote. Every time Elisabeth came into the lumberyard where he was working, he was distracted. He cut his shin with an adz, a thin blade used for shaping wood, and then cut off the joint of his forefinger. But Elisabeth, who was not yet 13 years old, had little interest in marriage, or in him. Matters came to a head at a local ball. Riis had joined the dancing school to give himself an excuse to dance with Elisabeth. He insisted on being her partner all evening, although he was the worst dancer in the school and she was one of the best. Then, when Elisabeth’s father tried to come onto the dance floor before the time the adults were supposed to join the students, Riis ordered him off and almost fought him. After this display of poor judgment and bad manners, it was decided that Riis should leave Ribe—and Elisabeth—for a while. And so, he recalled in his autobiography,“with the echoes of the scandal caused by the episode still ringing, I went off to Copenhagen to serve out my apprenticeship there.” This was Riis’s first encounter with a city. In 1865 Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, was dealing with some of the same problems that Riis would later encounter in New York City, although on a much smaller scale. People fleeing from areas threatened by the Prussian war were pouring into the city, and its economy was strained by the sudden addition of so many refugees. By the time Riis arrived, 7 percent of the city’s residents were receiving some kind of charity. He was not yet interested in urban problems, however, and he found Copenhagen a pleasant and friendly place. 15

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Jacob Riis’s childhood home in Ribe, Denmark, was large and comfortable, befitting the family’s relatively high status in the village. Still, it must have become rather crowded, since it sometimes housed as many as 15 people.

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Riis did his best to maintain a connection with Elisabeth while he was away. Once when her family was visiting Copenhagen, he jumped onto the rear of their coach and rode it back to discover where they were staying. Then he borrowed a pair of gloves from a friend so that he could visit them and leave the gloves behind. He hoped this would give him an excuse to visit again, but Elisabeth’s father mailed the gloves back to him with a curt request that he leave his daughter alone. After four years, Riis earned his certificate of entrance into the carpenters’ guild, which allowed him to work as a full-fledged carpenter and returned to Ribe. Rural Denmark was experiencing an economic slump, however, and there was very little work in Ribe. Riis’s first act on returning home with his certificate was to propose to the 16-year-old Elisabeth, who refused him. It did not seem that Ribe had much to offer him anymore. And so, like many other young men at loose ends, he began to think of America. He had been interested in America since reading about it as a boy

J ACOB THE D ELVER in James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, the Leatherstocking Tales, which took place during the French and Indian War and offered a romantic, exciting view of an America full of Indians, adventures, and wilderness. He believed he had “something of an inquiring Yankee twist to my make-up,” he wrote in his autobiography. America, he decided, would be a good place to prove himself worthy of Elisabeth. In his autobiography he described himself waiting silently below Elisabeth’s window, hoping for a chance to say good-bye, but she did not wake up. When the servants told her he had been there, she said, “Well, I didn’t ask him to come.” Her mother, relenting slightly, gave him a lock of Elisabeth’s hair and a picture to take with him, and, he said, “I lived on that picture and that curl for six long years.” On May 18, 1870, he set sail for America on the ship Iowa. He had $40 in his pocket, a gift from friends in Ribe, and a great eagerness to be out in the world doing something. For the rest of his life Riis would look back to his childhood in Ribe with nostalgia and longing. The rural values and neighborliness he learned there formed the foundation of his moral system, and he drew on them in his later reform work. Much as he loved the place, however, it was too restrictive for his restless, adventurous spirit, and he was happier looking back at it than he had been actually living there. He left as soon as he could, apparently not intending to return.“I don’t suppose that for many years we shall meet again,” he wrote to a friend in Ribe.“Maybe never.”

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C H A P T E R

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H OMELESS AND P ENNILESS Like most immigrants of the time, Riis traveled in steerage, the section of the ship for passengers paying the lowest fares. While first- and second-class passengers had cabins, steerage passengers were crowded into one large, lowceilinged open space below deck. Ship owners, trying to make as much money as possible on each voyage, squeezed in as many steerage passengers as they could. The space was filled with rows of plank bunk beds, each of which held as many as five or six people. There was no room to sit up in the bunks, and scarcely room to stand in the narrow area between them, where the ceiling was often no more than six feet high. The water supply was insufficient for bathing, and provisions for going to the toilet were minimal and unsanitary. In 1911 the United States Immigration Commission, describing conditions that had changed very little in the more than 40 years since Riis sailed, reported: The ventilation is almost always inadequate, and the air soon becomes foul. The unattended vomit of the seasick, the odors of not too clean bodies, the reek of food and the awful stench of the nearby toilet rooms make the atmosphere of the steerage such that it is a marvel 18

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that human flesh can endure it. . . . Most immigrants lie in their berths for most of the voyage, in a stupor caused by the foul air.

It was not in Riis’s nature to spend his time lying in a stupor. Crowded below decks with more than five hundred other poor people, he seems to have enjoyed the trip more than most, even though the passage was stormy. He was interested in watching his fellow passengers, especially one man with a huge knapsack full of food that he never let go of for an instant. When the food served to the steerage passengers was so spoiled it was inedible, Riis took charge, heading a delegation that brought a plate of the rotting meat to the captain. Riis believed the protest was going well, until a hotheaded companion shoved the captain’s nose into the meat and was put in the ship’s lockup. Riis spent almost all his money on the ticket to America, and he landed on June 5 at Castle Garden—the area of New York City where immigrants disembarked before the

Steerage passengers get some fresh air on the deck of the S.S. Pennland in 1893. Because conditions were almost unlivable below deck in steerage, the passengers spent as much time as possible outside, where they were kept strictly segregated from the better-off travelers.

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J ACOB R IIS Ellis Island facility was opened in 1892—nearly broke. Riis was one among the crowd of 460,000 immigrants who came to America in 1870. Despite his poverty, he had some important advantages over most of them. Although he had a heavy accent, he spoke English well enough to understand what was going on and to explain himself. He knew a skilled trade—carpentry—that was of use in the new country. He was responsible to no one but himself. He arrived alone, and his family back home was not relying on him to send them money. With no dependents, he could take what risks he pleased without worrying about anyone else. Perhaps most important of all, he shared a northern European, Protestant background with the majority of long-settled Americans who made up the well-off, powerful establishment of the country. A Danish Lutheran fit in and was accepted more easily than the majority of the new immigrants, who were mostly Irish or Italian Catholics, Jews, or Chinese. Still, he was all alone at age 21 in a strange country about which he knew very little. To prepare himself for the wild, lawless country he had read about, when he reached New York City he immediately spent half of the small amount of money he had left on a revolver. As he recalled in his autobiography, I strapped the weapon on the outside of my coat and strode up Broadway, conscious that I was following the fashion of the country. I knew it upon the authority of a man who had been there before me and had returned, a gold digger in the early days of California; but America was America to us.We knew no distinction of West and East. By rights there ought to have been buffaloes and red Indians charging up and down Broadway.

Almost immediately a policeman stopped him, but fortunately “he was a very nice policeman, and took time to explain, seeing that I was very green.” Riis was quickly convinced that he should leave his gun behind when walking around Manhattan. 20

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Riis had no clear idea what he wanted to do in America. Although he had letters of introduction to the Danish consul and to a distant family friend, neither was in town. He was impatient, tired of carpentry, hoping for adventure, and willing to let fate direct him. An employment office had been set up at Castle Garden. Here, along with several of his shipmates, he found a job in the ironworks at Brady’s Bend, Pennsylvania, where he was put to work building huts for the miners. He was very lonely and homesick. After the absolutely flat plains of Ribe, the Pennsylvania hills made him feel trapped. He tried working in the coal mines for one day, but to his shame, when a falling stone knocked out his lamp, he fled, so terrified by the utter darkness that he vowed never to enter a mine again. In July, he heard that France had declared war on Prussia, and Denmark was shortly expected to join the battle against its old enemy. After scarcely more than a month in America, Riis decided to return to Europe to fulfill his early ambition to fight Prussia. He had little interest in the specific reasons for the conflict between Prussia and France, nor any particular attachment to France. His motivation was patriotic dislike of a country that had previously attacked his own and seized some of its territory, coupled with the memory of his frustration when he was prevented from running away to join the army as a teenager. He could not help thinking, as well, that if he returned to Denmark as a war hero he might be able to convince Elisabeth to marry him. He sold or pawned everything he owned and raced back to New York City, arriving with one cent in his pocket. At the Danish Consulate, he found that there were no plans to fund volunteers going over to join the fight; however, the consul agreed to notify him if a regiment were formed. Thirty years later, his name was still on file, waiting. Next, he gate-crashed a party being given by a society of Frenchmen, hoping they would help send him to France, but they threw him into the streets. 21

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From 1855 to 1890, about 8.5 million immigrants were processed at Castle Garden, New York. Originally built as a fort, Castle Garden became an immigration facility at a time when individual states were responsible for dealing with immigrants. It was replaced when the federal government took over.

Indignant, penniless, cold and hungry, and at loose ends, he turned and began to walk north out of the city. For the first time in his life, he spent a night on the street, sleeping in a milk cart until the owner threw him out at dawn. Aimlessly he continued walking north, arriving at Fordham University in the Bronx around noon. Fordham was a Catholic Jesuit institution, and as a Lutheran Riis had been taught to mistrust Catholics. Still, he was very hungry, and when a monk offered him food, he could not resist. In his autobiography, he explained the new perspective he gained that day, which would help him in his reform work in the coming years: I ate of the food set before me, not without qualms of conscience, and with a secret suspicion that I would next be asked to abjure my faith, or at least do homage to the Virgin Mary, which I was firmly resolved not to do. But when, the meal finished, I was sent on my way with enough to do me for supper, without the least allusion

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having been made to my soul, I felt heartily ashamed of myself. . . . I have no quarrel with the excellent charities of the Roman Church, or with the noble spirit that animates them. I learned that lesson at Fordham thirty years ago.

For the next few days, Riis kept himself alive by doing odd jobs, but he was still determined to join the war against the Prussians. Returning to Manhattan, he went to the offices of the New York Sun, having read in the newspaper that a volunteer regiment was being outfitted to join the fight against the Prussians. Here he met with the editor, Charles A. Dana, who was amused by his enthusiasm. Dana taught Riis a lesson he would later find useful, telling him, as Riis recalled in his autobiography, that “editors sometimes did not know about everything that was in their papers.” Dana then insulted him by offering him a dollar in charity, which he refused, and telling him to forget the war. Years later, Riis would wind up working for Dana at the Sun. He wandered back out of the city, finding various odd jobs in the surrounding New Jersey towns. He worked in a clay yard where the owner refused to pay him. He spent some time sleeping in a graveyard and living on apples. He worked in a brickyard where the German employees teased him by gloating over Prussian victories in the war. He was still determined to get to that war somehow, and when he heard of a volunteer regiment forming in New York City he dropped everything and raced back to join it. But it was too late; by the time he got there the regiment had sailed. Now he began to haunt the French Consulate, showing up until the consul got sick of him and tried to eject him forcibly. He fought back, giving the consul a black eye. This was, as he says in his autobiography,“the only fight of the war in which I was destined to have a part, and that on the wrong side.” Still not giving up, he unsuccessfully begged passage from the captain of a French warship. Then he actually managed to arrange to work as a stoker—the person who tends the furnace—on a steamer bound for France. But by the 23

J ACOB R IIS time he had retrieved his few possessions from the boardinghouse where he had stowed them, the steamer had left. Even Jacob Riis’s determination had limits, and he finally gave up. In any case, by the beginning of 1871, the war was over. He now hit the lowest point of his life, a time that taught him the heartfelt empathy with the poor he showed in later years. He came to know Mulberry Bend and the Five Points, the slums in lower Manhattan he would fight so hard to eradicate, from the inside. Having given up on the goal that had kept him going, he had no idea what to do next and had no one to turn to. He could find no work. “Homeless and penniless,” he recalled in his autobiography, I joined the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals, and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or doorway. . . . I was finally and utterly alone in the city, with the winter approaching and every shivering night in the streets reminding me that a time was rapidly coming when such a life as I led could no longer be endured.

He was too proud to beg; however, he was kept alive by handouts of “meat bones and rolls” from the cook at Delmonico’s, an elegant New York restaurant. Because the cook was French, Riis rationalized that the meals were not charity, which he had resolved never to take, but a form of payment for all he had suffered trying to fight for France. Finally, sitting on a pier cold and starving one stormy October night, his strength and optimism ran out. No matter what he tried, no one would hire him; he was friendless and desolate; and there seemed no chance he would ever prove himself worthy to claim Elisabeth as his bride. Looking into the depths of the river, he found himself, for the first and only time in his life, considering suicide. Riis was saved by the presence of a little black-and-tan mongrel dog that had attached itself to him. The dog 24

H OMELESS whined and pressed against him, and the affection of a living creature brought him back to himself. At last he convinced himself to take charity, and asked for lodging at the Church Street police station. Police lodgings were a crude form of shelter for the homeless. They were definitely the place of last resort—no one with any other option would choose to stay in one. Most were damp cellars with no toilets, water for washing, or bedding. They provided no food or assistance of any kind, only a bare place to sleep. As many people as possible were squeezed together for the night to sleep on the floor or on uncovered planks. In a city crowded with the desperately poor, even these squalid sleeping places were in overwhelming demand. According to the New York City Police Department, in 1885, a few years after Riis sought shelter at the Church Street station, more than 134,000 homeless people—out of a city with a population of 1,500,000— spent the night in police lodgings.

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Riis took this photograph of the crowd waiting at the Mulberry Street Police lodging. Only the most desperately poor would seek shelter in such a place; nonetheless, the lodgings were usually full.

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MAKING ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE SLUMS When Riis’s autobiography, The Making of an American, first appeared, his son was teased at school for having a father who had been homeless. But for Riis, this unhappy period he spent penniless and with no prospects was one of the most important turning points of his life. In his later years, when he was well off, he never forgot the terrifying feeling of being trapped in the slums with no hope. As he explains in this passage from his autobiography, it helped him see through the comfortable middle-class assumptions of his contemporaries. A Ten Years’ War was the sequel to How the Other Half Lives, later published in expanded form as The Battle with the Slums. ll my money was gone, and an effort I made to join a railroad gang in the Spuyten Duyvil cut came to nothing. Again I reënforced my credit with my revolver and the everlasting top-boots, but the two or three dollars they brought at the pawnshop were soon gone, and once more I was turned out in the street. It was now late in the fall. The brickmaking season was over. The city was full of idle men. My last hope, a promise of employment in a human-hair factory, failed, and, homeless and penniless, I joined the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals, and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or doorway. I was too proud in all my misery to beg. I do not believe I ever did. . . . It was under such auspices that I made the acquaintance of Mulberry Bend, the Five Points, and the rest of the slum, with which there was in the years to come to be a reckoning. For half a lifetime afterward they were my haunts by day and by night, as a police reporter, and I can fairly lay claim, it seems to me, to a personal knowledge of the evil I attacked. I speak of this because, in a batch of reviews of “A Ten Years’ War” which came yesterday from my publishers to me there is one which lays it all to “maudlin sensitive-

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ness” on my part. “The slum,” says this writer, “is not at all so unspeakably vile,” and measures for relief based on my arraignment “must be necessarily abortive.” Every once in a while I am asked why I became a newspaper man. For one thing, because there were writers of such trash, who, themselves comfortably lodged, have not red blood enough in their veins to feel for those to whom everything is denied, and not sense enough to make out the facts when they see them, or they would not call playgrounds, schoolhouses, and better tenements “abortive measures.” Some one had to tell the facts; that is one reason why I became a reporter. And I am going to stay one until the last of that ilk has ceased to discourage men from trying to help their fellows by the shortest cut they can find, whether it fits in a theory or not. I don’t care two pins for all the social theories that were ever made unless they help to make better men and women by bettering their lot. I have had cranks of that order, who rated as sensible beings in the ordinary affairs of life, tell me that I was doing harm rather than good by helping improve the lot of the poor; it delayed the final day of justice we were waiting for. Not I. I don’t propose to wait an hour for it, if I can help bring it on; and I know I can.

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J ACOB R IIS The police refused to let Riis bring his dog inside, and so he was forced to leave it out in the rain. During the night Riis awoke to find that the little gold locket he always wore was missing. Someone had cut the string from around his neck. It contained the curl of Elisabeth’s hair her mother had given him, and he had never been able to bring himself to sell it, even at his lowest point.When he complained, the police sergeant, refusing to believe it was possible for a poor tramp to own a gold locket, accused him of lying or of stealing it. Riis argued hotly, then tried to fight the sergeant and was thrown out. His little dog was still faithfully waiting on the doorstep. Seeing a policeman kicking Riis down the stairs, it bit the policeman’s leg. The policeman seized it and beat it to death against the stone steps. Overwhelmed with rage and grief, Riis threw cobblestones at the police station until he was escorted to the New Jersey ferry, on which, for the price of his silk handkerchief, he crossed the Hudson River. Riis left New York, vowing never to return. That moment, he believed, instilled in him the anger that would one day make him one of the most eloquent and determined reformers to attack the injustice and corruption of New York City. “The outrage of that night,” he claimed in his autobiography, “became . . . a mainspring in the battle with the slum as far as my share in it is concerned. My dog did not die unavenged.”

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R ESTLESS E NERGY Wanting only to put New York behind him forever, Riis joined the stream of tramps hiking along the railroad tracks. Despite his own recent hardships, Riis felt little sympathy with the tramps. He had a strong Protestant work ethic and valued responsibility and self-reliance highly. He expected everyone to fight with the same determination he did. He had no patience with able-bodied men who had given up on conventional life. As far as he was concerned, the tramps who wandered from town to town, moving south in the winter and coming back north in the summer, begging or taking occasional temporary jobs without, apparently, any effort to settle down and become responsible citizens, were just lazy. “Tramps never had any attraction for me, as a sociological problem or otherwise,” he wrote in his autobiography. I was compelled, more than once, to be of and with them, but I shook their company as quickly as I could. As for the “problem” they are supposed to represent . . . it does not differ appreciably from the problem of human laziness in any other shape or age.

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J ACOB R IIS Hitching a ride to Camden, New Jersey, on a cattle car, Riis was caught by a police captain who locked him up overnight in a prison cell, which he found considerably cleaner and more comfortable than the police lodging house in New York. The next morning the captain fed him and paid his passage to Philadelphia, where Riis had distant relatives. Earlier he had proudly refused to seek help in establishing himself. In fact, at a particularly low point, he had torn up his letters of introduction to family acquaintances, so that he would not be tempted to use them. But now he was forced to acknowledge that he could use some help.

The artist depicted the tramp in this 1890 poster as a comfortably dressed and sturdy, healthy man, and added the menacing caption, “I’ll see you again.” Apparently, he agrees with Riis that most tramps were lazy men who could work but chose not to and were a threat to decent folks. 30

R ESTLESS E NERGY In Philadelphia, the Danish consul, Ferdinand Myhlertz, welcomed him, gave him shelter and a place to rest, and then arranged for him to find work in a Danish settlement in upstate New York. During the winter of 1871–72, he worked at a variety of jobs on “Swede Hill” where a group of Scandinavians had established a settlement. He built furniture, chopped wood, worked repairing a steamer that linked towns along Lake Chautauqua, harvested ice, hunted and trapped for furs, and tried to set up his own business transporting steamboat travelers’ luggage in a wheelbarrow. He lived in the house of a Danish family, sharing his room with another young Danish adventurer. After the difficult months he had spent on the streets of New York and traveling the rails, this winter was very pleasant. He became fast friends with his hosts and his roommate, and was surrounded by congenial society. The settlement held a weekly party. Riis, however, could attend only every other week—he and his roommate had only one set of decent clothes between them, which they took turns wearing. At these gatherings, dancing was banned by order of the Lutheran pastor and deacons, who considered it immoral. In letters to the town newspaper, Riis argued bitterly that dancing was not a sin, but it continued to be forbidden, so the young people played kissing games instead. Since he had come to America, Riis had done only manual labor, but he believed he was destined for something better. Now that he was part of a community and no longer starving, he made his first tentative effort to establish himself as a man of culture. He began an educational lecture series at the local workingmen’s society, speaking on the formation of the earth, astronomy, geology, and dinosaurs. He was a lively and dramatic lecturer, holding his audience’s interest while he told them about “loathsome saurians and the damnable pterodactyl,” which looked even more frightening when he drew them on the blackboard. (“I never could draw, anyhow,” he remarked cheerfully in his autobiography.) 31

J ACOB R IIS Eventually, he grew overconfident. Trying to explain about latitude and longitude, which he did not really understand, he became hopelessly confused. Unfortunately, there was a retired sea captain in the hall who stood up and revealed Riis’s ignorance. After that, he lost his audience. With his lecture series brought to this embarrassing end, Riis became restless, still not sure what he wanted to do. When spring came he moved on, hiking to Buffalo. He worked as a cabinetmaker, on a farm as a hired man, on a railroad gang, on a steamship, and at many other occupations. At a door-making establishment, he found work planing and plugging knotholes for 15¢ a door. Riis had always believed that the power to succeed in any venture lay in his own hands. It was his responsibility to work as hard as necessary, to the best of his abilities, and, if he did, he was confident his efforts would be fairly rewarded. Now he set out to earn $15 a week—more than anyone else at the door factory was earning. He worked more efficiently; then he worked faster; then he worked longer hours. But every time he found a way to increase his productivity, his boss decreased the payment per door correspondingly. Finally, the boss made it clear than no matter how much Riis, or any other worker, produced he would continue to lower the wages, so that no one could earn more than $10 a week. The boss claimed to believe it was not good for workers to earn more than that. By working harder Riis could not improve his own earnings; all he could do was decrease what others earned. Later, Riis looked back on this experience as a valuable lesson on the relationship between the owners who profited from a business and their wage-earning employees. He continued to believe that devotion to duty was the best way to succeed, and thought workingmen who adopted a belligerent attitude in conflicts with their employers often harmed their own cause. “But I am not,” he said in his autobiography, “in danger of forgetting the other side which makes that cause.” He had seen that when all the power was on 32

R ESTLESS E NERGY one side, diligence and hard work might not be enough. Sometimes, he acknowledged, it was necessary for workers to unionize against their bosses, and even to strike. There were some situations in which the Protestant virtues of his childhood were not enough. Although Riis managed to earn a living by moving from job to job as a manual laborer, he was not doing anything more than that. He still wanted to distinguish himself in some way. And he was still no closer to the great accomplishment that would enable him to go home and claim Elisabeth as his bride. So while he supported himself with miscellaneous jobs, he began to try his hand as a writer, taking as his subject the Danish-Prussian conflict. When the Danish papers were not interested in what he had to say, he switched to writing in English, but he was not yet at home in the language: “My English outpourings never reached the publishers,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I discovered that I lacked words—they didn’t pour.” Remembering how he had helped his father on the newspaper as a child, Riis thought perhaps working on the staff of a newspaper would be a form of writing at which he could succeed. He applied for work at both the Buffalo newspapers, but he had no experience or education that would recommend him. With his strong Danish accent, threadbare clothes, and background of manual labor, he met with nothing but ridicule. At one office, he claimed in his

A well-off father and a poor mother buy their Christmas dinners at the same market. Although this picture was drawn from life, the ugliness of poverty has been softened by the artist. Riis’s uncompromisingly real photographs of poverty had a strong impact in contrast to such prettified scenes.

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As the panic of May 1884 began, wealthy financiers crowded the streets, hoping to salvage some of their fortunes. Riis returned to New York shortly after a particularly severe panic in 1873.

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autobiography, when he asked for work he was told, “Work! We don’t work here. This is a newspaper office.” Eventually he drifted into work as a traveling salesman, spending the next year or so selling furniture and then clothes irons. Although he was a persuasive salesman, these ventures proved financially disastrous. The furniture manufacturer accidentally provided him with a listing that gave prices much lower than it could honor. Although he made many sales at these unrealistic prices, he ended up earning not the $450 he expected, but only 75¢. For a while he made money selling irons, but he was not an experienced businessman, and was hopelessly confused by adding up figures. He was easy to cheat, made foolish loans, and eventually lost everything he had earned. He fell ill, and while he was lying feverish in an inn he received a batch of letters from home, one of which informed him that Elisabeth was engaged to a cavalr y officer. Once again he found himself, as he had been two years earlier, with no money and no prospects, and with the hope that had sustained him gone. Although he felt like just giving up, he wrote in his autobiography, “one does not die of love at twenty-four.” And so he continued through Pennsylvania, selling enough irons to keep himself alive, with no particular goal, and no hope. He ended up back

R ESTLESS E NERGY in New York City in the fall of 1873. This was not a good time to arrive in New York. The Panic of 1873, the worst depression the United States had ever gone through, was just beginning. New York had an unemployment rate of almost 25 percent. The city’s charity programs were overwhelmed by the increased poverty, especially because corrupt politicians siphoned off much of the government money intended to help the poor. Despondent though he was, Riis was still not willing to seek charity, and he continued to make a living selling irons. For a while he also solicited book orders, ironically for a novel about poverty called Hard Times, by his childhood favorite Charles Dickens. He made barely enough to survive, and often went hungry. “The restless energy that had made of me a successful salesman was gone,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I thought only, if I thought at all, of finding some quiet place where I could sit and see the world go by that concerned me no longer.” He enrolled in business school to learn telegraphy, how to operate a telegraph, planning to go out somewhere on the Western frontier where he could disappear from life and be forgotten. But his money ran out, and he had to leave the class. Then, unexpectedly, a chance arose to realize his dream of writing for a newspaper. He saw an advertisement seeking a city editor for a Long Island weekly. He applied for the job, and actually got it—although he did not even know what a city editor did. Assigned to cover two extremely seedy neighborhoods, he quickly figured out why an inexperienced immigrant had been able to get the job. The owner of the paper was a deadbeat who never paid his bills and certainly had no intention of paying Riis. After only a few weeks, Riis was back in New York City, homeless, with no hope and no prospects again. Once more he was destitute in the slums, this time with a Newfoundland puppy as his companion. As he was trying to sell Hard Times on the street, not having eaten for two 35

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JACOB RIIS, CITY EDITOR Riis entered his chosen profession of journalism with little writing experience and no knowledge about the way the newspaper world worked. His first, ill-fated position with an American newspaper rid him of many of his illusions, and his next opportunity came from a chance encounter while he was living on the streets. Looking back in his autobiography, The Making of an American, he was able to see the humor of incidents that probably did not strike him as very funny at the time. ne day. . . I saw among the “want” advertisements in a newspaper one offering the position of city editor on a Long Island City weekly to a competent man. Something of my old ambition stirred within me. It did not occur to me that city editors were not usually obtained by advertising, still less that I was not competent, having only the vaguest notions of what the functions of a city editor might be. I applied for the job, and got it at once. Eight dollars a week was to be my salary; my job, to fill the local column and attend to the affairs of Hunter’s Point and Blissville generally, politics excluded. The editor attended to that. In twentyfour hours I was hard at work writing up my then most ill-favored bailiwick. It is none too fine yet, but in those days, when every nuisance crowded out of New York found refuge there, it stunk to heaven. Certainly I had entered journalism by the back door, very far back at that, when I joined the staff of the Review. Signs of that appeared speedily, and multiplied day by day. On the third day of my employment I beheld the editor-in-chief being thrashed down the street by an irate coachman whom he had offended, and when, in a spirit of loyalty, I would have cast in my lot with him, I was held back by one of the printers with the laughing comment that that was his daily diet and that it was good for him. That was the only way any one ever got any satisfaction or anything else out of him. Judging from the goings on about the office in the two weeks I was there, he must have been extensively in debt to all sorts of people who were trying to collect.When, on my second deferred pay-day, I met him on the stairs, propelled

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by his washer-woman, who brought her basket down on his head with every step he took, calling upon the populace (the stairs were outside the building) to witness just punishment meted out to him for failing to pay for the washing of his shirts, I rightly concluded that the city editor’s claim stood no show. I left him owing me two weeks’ pay, but I freely forgive him. I think I got my money’s worth of experience. I did not let grass grow under my feet as “city editor.” Hunter’s Point had received for once a thorough raking over, and I my first lesson in hunting the elusive item and, when found, making a note of it. . . . I was bankrupt in hope and purpose. Nothing had gone right; nothing would ever go right; and, worse, I did not care. I drummed moodily upon my book.Wasted! Yes, that was right. My life was wasted, utterly wasted. A voice hailed me by name. . . . I recognized in him the principal of the telegraph school where I had gone until my money gave out. He seemed suddenly struck by something. . . . “The manager of a news agency down town asked me to-day to find him a bright young fellow whom he could break in. It isn’t much—$10 a week to start with. But it is better than peddling books, I know.” He poked over the book in my hand and read the title. “Hard Times,” he said, with a little laugh. “I guess so.What do you say? I think you will do. Better come along and let me give you a note to him now.” When the sun rose, I washed my face and hands in a dog’s drinkingtrough, pulled my clothes into such shape as I could, and . . . walked down to 23 Park Row and delivered my letter to the desk editor in the New York News Association, up on the top floor. He looked me over a little doubtfully, but evidently impressed with the early hours I kept, told me that I might try.

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J ACOB R IIS days, the principal of the business school where he had studied telegraphy walked past him. Although Riis had dropped out of the class, he had evidently impressed the man, who stopped and, as Riis remembered the conversation in his autobiography, asked him, “How would you like to be a reporter, if you have got nothing better to do?” The principal gave him a referral to a news agency, then asked if he could adopt Riis’s puppy. The next morning Riis showed up at the New York News Association with his letter of recommendation, and the agency agreed to give him a trial. “And with such scant ceremony was I finally introduced to Newspaper Row, that had been to me like an enchanted land,” he wrote in his autobiography. His first assignment was to cover a lunch at the Astor House, an elegant society hotel in Manhattan. Half starved after his third day with almost no food, he found it difficult to watch as others ate a banquet. Nonetheless, he managed to write a satisfactory description and was hired. Then his strength finally gave out. On his way to find a boardinghouse, he collapsed from hunger.

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“H E WAS A LWAYS T HAT WAY ” “I had my hands full that winter,” Riis recalled in his autobiography of his first season as a reporter. This was an understatement. The 24-year-old Riis might be told to report on anything that happened anywhere in New York City, from the top to the bottom of Manhattan Island. He might cover six or seven stories a day, over a distance of 15 or 20 miles. In the days before automobiles or subways, he had to travel mostly on foot, or occasionally on a slow streetcar drawn by horses. Because the news service that had hired him sold news to both morning and evening papers, he often found himself working from ten o’clock in the morning until one or two the next morning. Riis did not mind; he was used to hard work and had nothing else to do. Eager for distraction, he threw himself into the job with furious energy, and he quickly earned a reputation as a good reporter who got the job done. Since the main thing required in his position was not eloquence but simply the ability to get the story reported as quickly as possible, his imperfect English was not a problem, and the huge volume of work helped to improve his writing rapidly. Somehow he found the spare time to continue studying the telegraph. 39

J ACOB R IIS Although he never worked as a telegraph operator, he occasionally found this skill useful in later life. “There is scarcely anything one can learn that will not sooner or later be useful to a newspaper man,” he noted in his autobiography. He continued at the New York News Association through the fall and winter of 1873. That spring he was offered a job as reporter for a weekly paper in Brooklyn, which was then a separate city from New York. The South Brooklyn News was owned by a group of Democrats who used it to support their candidates. These owners were not interested in good or unbiased coverage of events. The paper carried news chiefly as a lure to get people to read the political pieces praising their candidates. This political bias was of little concern to Riis, who did not as yet have much knowledge of, or interest in, American politics. Although he would spend much of his later career locked in combat with the Democratic Party—which in his time was not interested in reform, and in New York City was dominated by a ring of crooks—he was willing enough at this point to consider himself a Democrat. All he cared about was the chance to prove himself as a real reporter, and to earn what seemed to him a high salary—$15 a week. After only two weeks, when the newspaper’s owners discovered how lucky they were in their hardworking young reporter, they promoted Riis to editor of the paper. He had no illusions about their motives: it was “not a vote of confidence, but pure economy on the part of my owners. They saved forty dollars a week by giving me twenty-five and the name of editor.” (In his autobiography, Riis did not explain his mathematics.) Still, it was quite a step up for someone who had been starving on the streets only six months earlier. Riis had high ideals about the integrity and independence of an editor. For the next few months he struggled with the owners about the degree of control he should have over the paper. They wanted him to be editor in name only. 40

“H E WAS A LWAYS T HAT WAY ” He wanted to be free to cover any issue as he saw fit. Then came the fall elections, which the candidates supported by the South Brooklyn News won. Since they had their victory, and the paper was losing money, the owners closed it down, and on Christmas Eve they sent Riis to Manhattan to sell the metal type they had used to print the paper. It seemed to the disheartened Riis that, once again, he had failed. “It was all over, and I should have to strike a new trail,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Where would that lead? What did it matter, anyhow? Nobody cared.Why should I?” On his return home, he found a letter from his father that added to his depression. His favorite aunt and his two oldest brothers had all died of tuberculosis. In the postscript, his father added that Elisabeth’s fiancé had also died. Despite his grief, Riis could not help feeling a surge of hope at this news. Elisabeth was no longer engaged; there was still a chance he could win her. Suddenly it was imperative that he succeed, and quickly, before he lost Elisabeth again. He immediately went to the owners of the South Brooklyn News and offered to buy it from them. Although he had only $75 saved, he was so enthusiastic and persuasive that he convinced them he was worth the risk. He bought the paper for $650, paying $75 up front and promising to pay the rest as soon as he earned the money. Within six months, he had made good on his promise. It took a staggering amount of diligence and hard work. He alone was the entire staff of the newspaper. He collected all the news, and then wrote literally every word of the paper, both news and editorials, himself. He canvassed for advertisers. He brought all the copy to the printer in Manhattan.

Riis had considerable respect for the small boys who sold papers like the South Brooklyn News on the streets. In How the Other Half Lives, he described them as having “sturdy independence, love of freedom and absolute self-reliance.”

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J ACOB R IIS On Friday, after the paper was printed, he picked up the week’s edition and carried the whole run home himself. Early the next morning he got up to compete with the other papers to hire newsboys to sell his papers on the streets. Then he started the whole process over again. For the first time, Riis was not just struggling to survive. He had his own newspaper, a platform from which he intended to accomplish great things—although he was not yet sure what they would be. At a Methodist revival meeting, he came under the influence of an eloquent preacher, the Reverend Ichabod Simmons. He experienced a renewal of religious fervor and vowed to consecrate his pen to reform. Throughout his life, religious faith would remain a strong foundation for his reform work. He went about this task with more enthusiasm than knowledge. “My zeal for reform,” he recalled in his autobiography, “encompassed the whole range of my little world; nor would it brook delay even for a minute. It did not consider ways and means, and was in nowise tempered with discretion.” When he was city editor of the Long Island weekly, he had suffered from deadbeats who refused to pay what they owed him, and now he set out to convince such men to pay their just debts. He wrote an editorial warning that he proposed to print the names of chronic local debtors in his paper, along with an accounting of their debts, to whom they were owed, and how long they had been owed. Then, he printed the list. Much to his disappointment, this made him very unpopular. The tradesmen to whom money was owed did not appreciate his exposing their affairs to the public, and joined their customers in denouncing him. Still, the fuss helped increase the paper’s circulation. Riis’s desire to be a moral crusader also brought him up against the realities of American politics for the first time. At that time, politics in almost all large American cities ran on the party boss system. Political appointments, government jobs, and publicly funded projects were under the 42

“H E WAS A LWAYS T HAT WAY ” control of a party boss, who was not an elected official but the head of the political party in power. He gave out his favors in return for bribes, votes, or campaign support. Policemen, judges, newspapermen, and ordinary citizens knew the boss could make it worth their while to support him. The positions he gave out could be very lucrative. A politician who had the boss’s support could confidently take bribes, grant contracts to his friends, or just pocket government money, knowing that he was safe from the legal system, as it was also controlled by the boss. A politician stood no chance if he tried to oppose the boss. This method of operation was not necessarily illegal or even invariably corrupt, but it certainly motivated men to act out of self-interest, supporting politicians for what they could get, rather than for ideological or principled reasons. A longtime New York City politician, George Washington Plunkitt, proclaimed in a speech, “The politician who steals is worse than a thief. He is a fool.With the grand opportunities all around for the man with a political pull, there’s no excuse for stealin’ a cent.” Boss politics could become an almost unbreakable ring of bribery, cheating, and corruption. New York City in the mid-1800s was run by a ring known as Tammany Hall, an example of the boss system at its very worst. This ring, named after the Society of St. Tammany, a social club where many of its members met, reached its height under the infamously powerful and dishonest William Marcy Tweed. Boss Tweed had been disgraced, arrested, and thrown out of power in 1870, the year Riis arrived in America. Tammany Hall, however, continued to flourish. Poor immigrants tended to support boss politics, because it helped them in immediate, concrete ways. In return for their votes, they knew they could go to their local Tammany Hall politician for financial help, to get a job, or to get help fixing a legal problem. Often they sold their votes outright. Sometimes it seemed that the corrupt politicians had their best interests at heart more than distant, 43

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During the Presidential campaign of 1872, banners in front of Tammany Hall support Horace Greeley.The corrupt Tammany political machine endorsd Greeley not because of enthusiasm for his ideas but because it wanted to beat Ulysses S. Grant at any cost.

high-minded reformers who did not take bribes or give out favors. In the long run, political rings of this kind were probably worse for the poor than for anyone else, since they prevented far-reaching major reforms from even being considered. But a poor immigrant with a starving family and no money for the rent might find it hard to believe in theoretical long-term improvements when faced with an immediate offer of cash. As Riis explained in one of his books, The Battle with the Slum: To the poor people of his district the boss is a friend in need. He is one of them. He does not want to reform them; far from it. . . . The reformer comes to them from another world . . . and goes his way. The boss lives among them. He helped John to a job on the pipes in their hard winter, and got Mike on the [police] force. They know him as a good neighbor, and trust him to their harm.

Under such a system a man who refused to sell his opinions in return for official favors found it very difficult to get anything done. This system was so foreign to the idealistic and honest Jacob Riis as to be almost incomprehensible. Naively, he found himself, for a time, part of it, almost without realizing it. The paper he acquired had been Democratic, and he continued it as such. He was comfortable opposing the Republican President Ulysses S. Grant, whose second term 44

“H E WAS A LWAYS T HAT WAY ” was marked by financial scandals. The Democrats of South Brooklyn assumed he was one of them and would serve their interests.When they wanted to dispose of the Republican captain of the police precinct, John Mackellar, they expected Riis’s paper to support them. Mackellar, however, was Riis’s friend. More important, Riis believed he was a good police captain. When he refused to oppose Mackellar in his paper, he was visited by a Democratic Party boss, a judge who had a “friendly talk” with him, pointing out how much he might benefit if he pleased the right people. Shortly thereafter, Riis returned from a hunting trip on Staten Island to discover that he had been appointed Scandinavian and German interpreter in this judge’s court. For a few hours of work, he would be paid one hundred dollars a month. Although he felt uneasy about the situation, Riis accepted the money. He could not see that he was doing any harm—an interpreter was necessary, and he was able to do what was required. However, he continued to support Mackellar in his newspaper. After three months, the party bosses, calling him an “ingrate,” pushed him out of his position as interpreter.“So ceased my career as a public officer, and forever,” he declared in his autobiography. “It was the only office I ever held, and I do not want another. I am ashamed yet, twenty-five years after, of having held that one. Because, however I try to gloss it over, I was, while I held it, a sinecurist, pure and simple.” Riis continued to be somewhat naive about political maneuvering all his life. Years later he told an audience, “This is politics, which I shall not discuss. The President of the United States says my opinion in that quarter is no good at all, and you are free to adopt his view.” All the time he was learning these first lessons about journalism, reform, and American politics, Riis was waiting for a letter from Elisabeth. The very day he had paid off his debt on the paper and was able to consider himself a free man, he had written proposing marriage to her. And then for six months, he had heard nothing. 45

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HELP FROM TAMMANY HALL The corrupt political system operated by Tammany Hall was one of the major obstacles Riis faced in his reform work. But, he also learned to appreciate its good points, and was on friendly terms with many Tammany Hall politicians. While many reformers looked down on the poor from their superior social position, the local politicians were part of their daily lives and knew them personally. The poor mistrusted reformers but would willingly turn to the Tammany politicians for help.This confirmed for Riis the need for a personal connection between reformers and those they were trying to help. In The Battle with the Slums, Riis describes how a local political boss used his influence to help his supporters. (“Coming upon the alley” means relying on the neighbors for support.) remember yet with a shudder a tragedy which I was just in time with the police to prevent. A laborer, who lived in the attic, had gone mad, poisoned by the stenches of the sewers in which he worked. For two nights he had been pacing the hallway, muttering incoherent things, and then fell to sharpening an axe, with his six children playing about—beautiful, brown-eyed girls they were, sweet and innocent little tots. In five minutes we should have been too late, for it appeared that the man’s madness had taken on the homicidal tinge. They were better out of the world, he told us, as we carried him off to the hospital. When he was gone, the children came upon the alley, and loyally did it stand by them until a job was found for the mother by the local political boss. He got her appointed scrub-woman at the City Hall, and the alley, always faithful, was solid for him ever after. Organized charity might, and indeed did, provide groceries on the instalment plan. The Tammany captain provided the means of pulling the family through and of bringing up the children, although there was not a vote in the family. It was not the first time I had met him and observed his plan of “keeping close” to the people. Against it not the most carping reform critic could have found just ground of complaint.

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“H E WAS A LWAYS T HAT WAY ” Twenty-five years later, when Riis wrote his autobiography, he invited Elisabeth to write a chapter telling her side of the story. She was surprisingly frank in her account, recalling how deeply in love she had been with his rival, and admitting that she knew she did not love Jacob Riis when he proposed to her. Elisabeth had demonstrated for Raymond, her cavalry officer, much the same kind of devotion against all odds that Riis had shown for her. Raymond and Elisabeth’s engagement had gone smoothly at first. Then Raymond fell ill with what proved to be tuberculosis.When the doctors pronounced his illness incurable, her parents had demanded that she break off the engagement. Always an obedient daughter, she, for the first time in her life, defied them, telling them that “never should anybody separate me from the one I loved until God himself parted us.” She left her parents’ home to stay with Raymond at his family’s house. He “tried hard to make up to me all I lost; as if I had really lost anything in choosing him before all the world.” Raymond, who knew that he was dying, worried about what would happen to her if her parents refused to take her back. He once said to her, as she recounted in Riis’s autobiography, “If I should die, and some other man who loved you, and who you knew was good and faithful, should ask you to marry him, you ought to accept him, even if you did not love him.” She could not bear to think of it at the time, but later she wondered if he had been referring to Riis. When Raymond died, Elisabeth’s parents did not allow her to move back home, but arranged for her to become a governess in Copenhagen. After several lonely months, they relented and she was invited home for a visit. Her mother then gave her Riis’s letter. Elisabeth, angry that he still persisted in pursuing her and especially that he had written so soon after her bereavement, wrote a refusal that she gave to Riis’s family to send to him. For some reason Riis’s mother delayed sending it, and before she did, Elisabeth, back in 47

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Jacob and Elisabeth Riis around the time of their marriage. In his autobiography, Riis described his contentment at finally marrying the woman he had loved for so long: “her head was leaning trustfully on my shoulder and her hand was in mine; and all was well.”

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her position as a governess, began to have second thoughts. She remembered how Raymond had urged her to marry, and most of all, she recalled, “I was lonely, oh! so lonely!” Finally she wrote to Riis with complete frankness, explaining her doubts, but concluding, “if he still would have me, I was willing to go with him to America if he would come for me some time.” She suggested that he might come in a year or two, after she had time to get used to the idea.When Riis first responded to Elisabeth, he agreed to wait a year, and to keep the engagement secret until then. In his next letter he suggested three or four months; the next suggested two. Finally she received a telegram announcing that he was on his way. A chance had come up to sell his newspaper for five times what he had paid for it, and he could not bear to wait any longer. And so, “instead of waiting several years,” she concludes her account, “he came in a few weeks. He was always that way.” Riis pursued Elisabeth for years, ignoring all obstacles and the probability that he would never succeed. And, as with other impossible goals he was to set himself, he had his way in the end. The story of Jacob Riis’s courtship sounds almost too impossibly romantic to be true. But in fact the marriage was a very happy one. Elisabeth quickly learned to return his love, and he remained deeply devoted to “Lammet,” his pet form of Elisabeth, for the rest of her life.

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“H URRAH !” The 27-year-old Riis brought his young wife back with him to South Brooklyn. Elisabeth had never run a household before, and knew very little about practical housekeeping. In addition, she was very lonely in a completely unfamiliar country where she knew nobody. Riis was sympathetic and helpful. Remembering the difficult times he had suffered when he first came over, he wrote in his autobiography, “I just put on a gingham apron and turned in to help her. Two can battle with a fit of homesickness much better than one.” He was so delighted to have finally won her that he found her every mishap endearing. The first time she attempted to cook a chicken, he sent his assistant home from his office at the South Brooklyn News, where he was again working as a reporter, every hour to check on her. “When I came home in the gloaming, it was sizzling yet, and my wife was regarding it with a strained look and with cheeks which the fire had dyed a most lovely red. I can see her now,” he remembered.“She was just too charming for anything.” Although Riis was radiantly happy at home, he was still not sure what to do with his life.When he sold his newspaper before returning to Denmark, he had promised the buyers 49

J ACOB R IIS that he would not start a new one for at least 10 years. But newspaper work was what he knew best. Although it was something of a comedown, when he returned he had taken a job as a reporter on the paper he once owned. The work did not pay very well, and he had to dip into his savings. In addition, his impetuous temper and quickness to flare up at injustice involved him in many conflicts. He entered into a battle with a local clergyman who criticized the paper for being sold on Sunday, the Sabbath, a day of rest. When shortly thereafter Riis saw this same clergyman throwing rocks on a Sunday to chase his neighbor’s chickens out of his garden, he could not resist writing an editorial accusing him of hypocrisy. “I drew editorial parallels which were not soothing to the reverend temper,” Riis recalled in his autobiography.When the angry minister, accompanied by all his deacons, called on him to protest, Riis solemnly replied that he could not discuss the issue, as he never transacted business on Sunday. Sparring of this sort was fun for Riis and relatively harmless, but it was not suited to the kind of paper for which he worked. The paper was still a Democratic Party organ. It was not intended to be an impartial source of news, it was meant to be a tool to reward or punish people according to their usefulness to the party. There was no place on the paper for a reporter who would happily attack anyone or anything that he thought was wrong, without considering the party’s interests. As Riis recalled in his autobiography, I can say honestly that I tried the best I knew how to get along with the politicians I served, but in the long run it simply could not be done. They treated me fairly, bearing no grudges. But it is one thing to run an independent newspaper, quite another to edit an “organ.”

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supported him. “I suppose the old folks, viewing it all from over there [in Denmark], thought it trifling with fate,” he admitted in his autobiography, but for him it was a challenge to prove he could “beat the world.” Riis made two good friends during his early years in Brooklyn: John Mackellar, the police precinct captain he had refused to oppose, and Ed Wells, a drugstore clerk. On a whim, the three of them purchased a stereopticon magic lantern at a rummage sale. An early form of slide projector, the magic lantern cast sharp images of photographs on a screen as much as 17 feet wide. Black-and-white slides could be hand-tinted to create color images. A stereopticon magic lantern used two slightly different versions of the same photograph to create the illusion of a three-dimensional image. A skilled operator could manipulate images so that one appeared to melt into the next in a primitive form of special effect. Riis had no particular reason to buy the magic lantern except that he thought it was interesting and someday, when he had children it might amuse them. But it was his first experience with photography, which would later play such an important part in his life’s work. Before the development of the electric projector, stereopticons were lit by limelight, which was created by combining

In this stereoscopic photograph of a Victorian family, the older woman in the rocking chair is herself looking at a stereoscopic picture.When the two almost identical side-by-side photos were viewed through a viewer called a stereopticon, they merged into one threedimensional picture.

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The first stereopticon cameras had a single lens that slid a short distance to take the same picture from two slightly different angles.The process became much faster once cameras were developed with two lenses that could take both pictures at once.

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jets of oxygen and hydrogen to produce a very bright flame, which was then used to make a pellet of lime glow behind the slide. Riis was always somewhat careless about the risks he faced from the new technology he used. As he tells the story in his autobiography, he and his friends figured they were safe working with these gases, because, as a drugstore clerk, Wells had some knowledge of chemistry. But they were using very primitive equipment. The first time they tried out their new possession, in Riis’s basement, they had Mackellar sit on the rubber bags holding the gases, so his weight would provide the proper pressure. Only then did they read the warning: “You are working with two gases which, if allowed to mix in undue proportion, have the force and all the destructive power of a bombshell.” Carefully replacing the terrified Mackellar’s weight with stones, they managed not to blow up the house. (They were lucky. Hydrogen and oxygen are also combined to produce rocket fuel.) Riis built up a collection of magic lantern images, and it occurred to him that he might be able to use them to earn an income. At that time, especially in the country, there was not much cheap public entertainment. Brooklyn is on the tip of Long Island, and the rest of the island was still rural. Many farmers from Long Island rode in to Brooklyn to buy from the merchants there. Riis was sure he would be able to attract a crowd in a small town if he offered an outdoor stereopticon show, and, as radio and television shows would later do, he hit on the idea of mixing in advertisements from Brooklyn merchants with his entertainment. His scheme of traveling around to small Long Island towns, combining showmanship and advertising, was finan-

“H URRAH !” cially successful. Watching the audience’s fascinated reaction to the impression of reality given by his slides, Riis received his first exposure to the powerful impact a photograph could have on an audience. Village hoodlums who resented the city invaders would sometimes attack them, throw eggs, and damage their equipment. That was fine with Riis. He always enjoyed a good fight. Describing in his autobiography one battle in which he and his companions satisfactorily routed his attackers before throwing the equipment into a cart and escaping, he wrote, “Vengeance? No! Of course there was the ruined curtain and those eggs to be settled for; but, on the whole, I think we were a kind of village improvement society for the occasion, though we did not stay to wait for a vote of thanks.” For some reason Riis and Wells decided to expand their scheme by publishing an advertising directory of the city of Elmira, New York, on the New York–Pennsylvania border, drawing attention to it with their stereopticon show. In later years, Riis could not even remember why they decided on Elmira, but it turned out to be an unlucky choice. This was the summer of 1877, the year of the great railway strikes. Conditions for railway workers were dangerous. About 200 railroad workers a year were being killed and 30,000 injured in on-the-job accidents. The railroad owners, claiming this was the result of carelessness on the part of the workers and not management’s concern, continued to push the men to work increasingly longer shifts. Fewer and fewer men were forced to operate longer and longer trains. Wages had already been cut. When another pay cut was announced, workers from many different railways, led by the trainmen’s unions, went on strike. Other workers poured out to support them, in what threatened to become a general strike. Some cities entered a state of virtual martial law. The militia was called out, and men were killed. Because the Pennsylvania Railroad, as the largest in the country, was greatly affected by the strike, many Pennsylvania towns were up in arms. 53

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CITY TOUGHS AND COUNTRY HOODLUMS Jacob Riis believed so strongly in the positive moral influence of living in the country that it surprised him to find criminal behavior in rural areas.Toward the end of his life he came to realize that isolation, filth, poverty, or an abusive family in the country could be as dangerous as the terrible living conditions he saw in the overcrowded tenements. However he always carried with him an idealized memory of his childhood village as a wholesome place where honest, kindly citizens of all ranks helped and trusted one another. In this passage from his autobiography, The Making of an American, describing a conflict with country “hoodlums” while presenting his magic lantern shows, he seems surprised and indignant that people from the country could behave this way. made money that fall travelling through the towns and villages and giving open-air exhibitions in which the “ads” of Brooklyn merchants were cunningly interlarded with very beautiful colored views, of which I had a fine collection. When the season was too far advanced to allow of this, I established myself in a window at Myrtle Avenue and Fulton Street and appealed to the city crowds with my pictures. So I filled in a gap of several months, while our people on the other side [in Denmark] crossed themselves at my having turned street fakir. At least we got that impression from their letters. They were not to blame. That is their way of looking at things. A chief reason why I liked this country from the very beginning was that it made no difference what a man was doing, so long as it was some honest, decent work. I liked my advertising scheme. I advertised nothing I would not have sold the people myself, and I gave it to them in a way that was distinctly pleasing and good for them; for my pictures were real work of art, not the cheap trash you see nowadays on street screens. The city crowds were always appreciative. In the country the hoodlums made trouble occasionally. We talk a great deal about city toughs. In nine cases out of ten they are lads of normal impulses whose resources have all been smothered by the slum; of whom the street and its lawlessness, and the

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tenement that is without a home, have made ruffians.With better opportunities they might have been heroes. The country hoodlum is oftener what he is because his bent is that way, though he, too, is not rarely driven into mischief by the utter poverty—æsthetically I mean—of his environment. Hence he shows off in his isolation so much worse than his city brother. It is no argument for the slum. It makes toughs, whereas the other is one in spite of his country home. . . . There ought to be some ex-hoodlums left in Flushing to echo that sentiment, even after a quarter of a century. From certain signs I knew, when I hung my curtain between two trees in the little public park down by the fountain with the goldfish, that there was going to be trouble. My patience had been pretty well worn down, and I made preparations. I hired four stout men who were spoiling for a fight, and put good hickory clubs into their hands, bidding them restrain their natural desire to use them till the time came. My forebodings were not vain. Potatoes, turnips, and eggs flew, not only at the curtain, but at the lantern and me. I stood it until the Castle of Heidelberg, which was one of my most beautiful colored views, was rent in twain by a rock that went clear through the curtain. Then I gave the word. In a trice the apparatus was gathered up and thrown into a wagon that was waiting, the horses headed for Jamaica. We made one dash into the crowd, and a wail arose from the bruised and bleeding hoodlums that hung over the town like a nightmare, while we galloped out of it, followed by cries of rage and a mob with rocks and clubs. But we had the best team in town, and soon lost them.

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J ACOB R IIS Strangely, Riis and Wells seem to have had little idea what was going on. They wandered into the middle of this conflict and began to set up suspicious apparatus—a large sheet that looked like a possible signal flag, and a powerful generator of some sort—at the foot of a bridge where the strikers were gathered on one side and the police deputies on the other. Although they protested that they were just setting up a peaceful advertising show, they were, not surprisingly, ordered out of town. “It was the only time I have been suspected of sympathy with violence in the settlement of labor disputes,” Riis wrote in his autobiography. In later years, Riis promoted the workers’ right to organize and to strike, but quickly turned against any group that advocated violent action. The naivete Riis showed by walking into this situation never completely left him. Even years later, he did not fully understand the bitterness of the strikers’ anger, the depth of the gulf between the strikers and the railroad owners, or the magnitude of the forces involved. Before the railway strikes ended, 100,000 men had gone on strike, half the freight in the country had been paralyzed, the Federal Army had been called in to intervene, and one hundred men, women, and children had been killed. Riis was not unsympathetic to the complaints of the railroad workers, but he thought that if the two sides would just get together and talk like reasonable people, the whole thing could be settled. Reflecting on violent strikers, he commented in his autobiography, The trouble with that plan is that it does not settle anything, but rakes up fresh injuries to rankle indefinitely and widen the gap between the man who does the work and the man who hires it done so that he may have time to attend to his own. Both workmen, they only need to understand each other and their common interests to see the folly of quarrelling. To do that they must know one another; but a blow and a kick are a poor introduction. I am not saying that the provocation is not sometimes great; but better not. It does not do any good, but a lot of harm.

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“H URRAH !” After Riis and Wells ran out of money completely, Riis returned home to his wife. Riis’s first child, Edward, had been born shortly before the trip to Elmira. Despite the sentimental and sometimes excessive detail he devoted in his autobiography to telling the story of his courtship of Elisabeth, Riis was surprisingly reserved about the rest of his private life. He does not even mention his first son’s birth, although possibly the need to support a new baby had played some role in his sudden interest in the unlikely Elmira money-making scheme. With his new responsibilities, Riis realized that he needed to settle down to a less variable and wandering life. One of his neighbors, William Shanks, was the city editor of the New York Tribune. Riis began trying to convince Shanks to hire him as a reporter. At first Shanks turned him down as too green, but he proved unable to withstand Riis’s persistence and finally agreed to hire him on a trial basis.

A portrait of the Riis and Goetz families, taken on an 1888 visit to Ribe. Jacob and Elisabeth are the two black-clad figures in the back row. As his family grew, Riis returned to Denmark whenever he could, and sent his children for longer stays, so they could come to know his homeland and parents.

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J ACOB R IIS The Tribune was a good fit for Riis’s idealistic temperament. Founded by Horace Greeley in 1841 as a paper for the Whig party—one of the early American political parties—it set out to be not merely a political organ but a disinterested servant of the public as well. “We cannot afford,” Greeley editorialized in the Tribune in 1845, “to reject unexamined any idea which proposes to improve the moral, intellectual, or social condition of mankind.” The paper, Greeley declared, would have an ear open to the plaints of the wronged and suffering, though they can never repay advocacy, and those who mainly support newspapers will be annoyed and often exposed by it; a heart as sensitive to oppression and degradation in the next street as if they were practiced in Brazil or Japan; a pen as ready to expose and reprove the crimes whereby wealth is amassed and luxury enjoyed in our own country as if they had only been committed by Turks or Pagans in Asia some centuries ago.

This statement sounds like something Riis might have written about his own reporting. From its beginnings, the Tribune had supported attempts to improve the condition of the working classes. By the time Riis joined the paper in 1877, Greeley himself was dead. His increasing eccentricity and radical politics after the Civil War had led many people to distrust him. And in 1872, he had suffered a crushing and personally humiliating political defeat that contributed to his physical decline and death later that year. However, the newspaper he founded still had an excellent reputation. Riis threw himself into his new job. As a beginner, he was given the assignments no one else wanted. Sometimes he ran into trouble. One low point came when he heard that a winter storm had washed away part of the Coney Island shore, and all the houses on it. He took a sleigh out through the storm, only to discover that Coney Island, then still an actual island, was unreachable. He wrote an article drawn 58

“H URRAH !” from the accounts of the innkeepers on shore. One provided him with a touching humaninterest detail—a watchman’s lost cat had been recovered when it had safely ridden a stove back to shore. When the story was published, the Tribune editor reprimanded him for being too gullible, reporting as fact stories he had not been able to confirm. It took him a long time to live down the story of that cat. Still, the editor was pleased with his diligence. Riis was the only reporter who had braved the storm to turn in any report at all. As the months passed, Riis began to grow discouraged. He had not managed to uncover the kind of story that would bring his name to the editors’ attention, and the pay was too low for him to support his family. Once he even submitted a letter of resignation, but he retrieved his letter and tore it up before the editor could read it. Then, during a snowstorm, he ran into someone outside the Tribune office and knocked him into a snow bank. To his horror, the man turned out to be Shanks. This encounter was a pivotal moment in his life, and in his autobiography he offered a dramatic depiction of it. Although it is, of course, unlikely that he remembered the actual words of that long-ago conversation, he assigned dialogue to himself and the editor as though they were characters in a novel. Riis often used the tools of fiction writing in his nonfiction work. Later he would make effective use of them to describe his encounters with poor and

A poster advertising the New York Tribune as the “Champion of the Rights of the Plain People.”The Roman soldier holding a scroll evokes the classical ideals of justice, law, and good citizenship.Working for the Tribune was a perfect fit for Riis, one of the most eloquent champions of plain people.

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J ACOB R IIS desperate people, giving his scenes a poignancy that spoke directly to the readers’ emotions. Here he gives a picture of a masterful and whimsical editor confronting a diligent and respectful employee. “Is that the way you treat your city editor, Riis?” he asked. “It was the wind, sir, and I was running,” Riis apologized. “And do you always run like that when you are out on assignments?” “When it is late like this, yes. How else would I get my copy in?” Riis was afraid he might be fired for this mishap. The next morning he was called into the editor’s office. “Mr. Riis,” Shanks said, “you knocked me down last night without cause.” When Riis started to protest that it had been an accident, Shanks continued, “Now, sir! this will not do. We must find some way of preventing it in the future. Our man at Police Headquarters has left. I am going to send you up there in his place. You can run there all you want to, and you will want to all you can. It is a place that needs a man who will run to get his copy in and tell the truth and stick to it. You will find plenty of fighting there. But don’t go knocking people down—unless you have to.”

Triumphantly Riis telegraphed his wife: “Got staff appointment. Police Headquarters. $25 a week. Hurrah!”

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T HE “B OSS R EPORTER ” IN M ULBERRY S TREET In his autobiography, Riis defined his new job of police reporter as “the one who gathers and handles all the news that means trouble to some one: the murders, fires, suicides, robberies, and all that sort, before it gets into court.” When he first joined the paper in 1877, he worked the night shift. Police reporters for all the newspapers worked from a shack on Mulberry Street across from the police headquarters. There the reporters had access to the police precinct reports and files from the health department, the fire department, and the coroner’s office, from which they could draw leads for their stories. A good reporter needed a reliable instinct for which one of the brief, colorless police reports might have a good story behind it. Reporters also cultivated relationships with insiders at the police department who might give them leads. Competition among the reporters was intense. Riis joined the Mulberry Street beat during what he called in his autobiography “the heroic age of police reporting,” when every reporter was an adventurer and a detective. Each schemed to beat out his rivals, and the greatest triumph was to report a story exclusively. Reporters made 61

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Judging from the men’s stiff, self-conscious postures, Riis probably staged this photograph of the reporters’ office across the street from police headquarters. However, according to Riis, the men really did spend most of their time playing cards.

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their careers by being clever and aggressive enough to discover events the police did not want known, to get to them before any other reporter found out, and to be on the spot while events were still in progress. This was much more difficult in an age before telephones or rapid transportation— it required ingenuity, guesswork, luck, and the right friends. Despite their fierce rivalry, the reporters also formed a close-knit group that was difficult to break into, and much of the time they worked together. To cover the routine stories, they formed “combines”—groups that shared information so that each individual reporter had only a little work to do and they could spend their spare time playing cards. Any new reporter had to expect a period of hazing from

T HE “B OSS R EPORTER ” IN M ULBERRY S TREET the established Mulberry Street gang. In Riis’s case, it was particularly severe, because his unpopular predecessor had left after a battle with the other reporters. When Riis arrived, they were determined to make the new Tribune reporter’s life difficult. “They hailed the coming of ‘the Dutchman’ with shouts of derision,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and decided, I suppose, to finish me off while I was new.” They gave him false leads, sending him “off on a wild-goose chase to the farthest river wards in the midnight hour.” When he returned with no story, they would mockingly toot a tin horn at him. During his first week of hard labor, Riis had managed to send in so few stories that the newspaper management began to reconsider his appointment. But Shanks urged them to give him a chance. Riis’s fierce determination and energy were difficult to beat. He had his first lucky break when one of the false leads coincidentally led him to a genuine story, which he was then able to report exclusively. He turned the telegraphy lessons he had taken during his wandering days to his advantage—by wiring his stories in, he was able to report them more quickly than any of the other reporters. And he was willing to work harder than anyone else. He began arriving at work an hour earlier than his colleagues, which gave him a free hand at all the best stories before anyone else arrived. When the other reporters also started coming in earlier, he came in earlier still, until they had to acknowledge themselves beaten. Although he held himself to a strict standard of honor, Riis was not above using any unorthodox tricks that might help him get ahead, so long as they were not dishonest. He treated reporting as a game in which the object was to find out whatever it was that other people wanted to hide. He once slipped quietly into a dark carriage with some detectives, hoping to find out where they were going. (He was discovered and put out before he overheard anything useful.) He figured out ways to trick people into disclosing 63

J ACOB R IIS secrets without realizing it. For example, he pretended to know things at which he was actually only guessing, and then asked leading questions that, with luck, might lead to a revealing slip of the tongue. Finally, though, it was his rigid honesty that brought him success. A sensationalist grave-robbing case had seized the public’s attention, and reporters were frustrated when a long period passed without any breaks in the case or further information. Eventually a group of them combined to invent a confidential source who provided them with “progress reports.” Riis sifted through every bit of evidence he could find, and discovered nothing to support the stories. While the other papers published daily articles describing the police progress toward an arrest, Riis insisted that it was all a lie and sent his paper nothing. The Tribune pressured him to provide them with the news the other papers were receiving. At one point, he was even suspended from his job. Once more Shanks came to his defense and the Tribune decided to trust Riis, but he was warned that if he was wrong, he would be fired. Ultimately, when the scam was revealed, Riis received a raise and a commendation: “By zeal, activity and faithful recognition of the Tribune rule of exchanging news with no other paper Mr. Riis has done much to make the Tribune Police reports the best in the city.” After that, Riis settled down to earn what he described in his autobiography as,“the only renown I have ever coveted or cared to have, that of being the ‘boss reporter’ in Mulberry Street”—the best of them all. Riis probably would not have chosen to be a police reporter if he had other options, as it was not an obvious way to fame and fortune. He did not get to write about the important subjects that really affected history. He did not cover international news, politics, war, financial disasters, government corruption, or philosophical issues. Instead, his articles concerned the kind of gory or thrilling subjects that are featured in tabloids today—mysterious bodies discovered 64

T HE “B OSS R EPORTER ” IN M ULBERRY S TREET in the river, a woman sawed in half, fatal shootings, fires, robberies, and drunken brawls. The stories were colorful and gripping, but short-lived. Riis enjoyed the challenge and excitement of his job. He wrote vivid and evocative descriptions of the crime scenes, and excelled in finding telling details that would bring the scene alive for his readers, but the straightforward reporting that was required was not enough for him. The journalist Lincoln Steffens, who later worked the Mulberry Street beat with Riis and became his good friend, described Riis’s method in his 1931 autobiography: “He not only got the news; he cared about the news. He hated passionately all tyrannies, abuses, miseries, and he fought them.” All the reporters got the same news stories, said Steffens, but “only Riis wrote them with heart, humor, and understanding.” Riis felt that just giving the facts was not enough. He wanted his stories to do more than thrill readers.“The fact is,” Riis wrote in his autobiography, it is all a great human drama in which these things are the acts that mean grief, suffering, revenge upon somebody, loss or gain. The reporter who is behind the scenes sees the tumult of passions, and not rarely a human heroism that redeems all the rest. It is his task so to portray it that we can all see its meaning, or at all events catch the human drift of it, not merely the foulness and the reek of blood.

He could not resist commenting on what he reported, trying to make his readers feel and understand what was going on and what should be done about it. Editors complained about his writing practices. A good reporter was supposed to stick to the facts without adding his personal opinions. Commentary was the job of the editors who ran the paper. He paid no attention:“Good or bad, I could write in no other way, and kept right on,” he declared in his autobiography. He quickly became such a valuable reporter that his employers left him alone to write as he pleased. 65

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Officials from New York City’s newly formed Tenement House Department inspect a basement living room in this photograph from 1901. At the time that Jacob Riis first encountered them, such airless, unsanitary dwellings were virtually ignored by city officials.

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At first, despite his passionate desire to reform and to educate, Riis’s reporting had no particular focus. His articles covered a wide range of subjects, and although he often pointed out moral lessons, there was no specific message he was trying to get across. But in the years from 1877 to 1880, when he worked the Mulberry Street beat at night, he was also acquiring an intimate, unbiased, and encyclopedic knowledge of the New York City slums. He did not visit them as an inspector or government official, who would arouse suspicion and hostility and from whom the slum dwellers would try to hide things. He did not go in as a missionary or reformer, whose perceptions would be colored by the beliefs and moral doctrines that motivated him and by whom the people would feel patronized. And he did not go in as a politician, who would befriend or manipulate

T HE “B OSS R EPORTER ” IN M ULBERRY S TREET them in return for support. Although he was an objective observer, because of his lively curiosity, sympathy, and liking for people, he got to know the inhabitants of the slums better than most reporters.When he interviewed them for stories, he was interested in their histories, their personalities, their hopes, and their lives. He put them at ease, and they talked to him freely. He finished his shift in the early hours of the morning. When he returned to his home in Brooklyn, he chose to walk through the heart of the slums so he could get to know them better. In his autobiography he explained, My route from the office lay through the Fourth and the Sixth wards, the worst in the city, and for years I walked every morning between two and four o’clock the whole length of Mulberry Street, through the Bend and across the Five Points [two of the worst slum areas] down to Fulton Ferry. There were cars on the Bowery, but I liked to walk, for so I saw the slum when off its guard.

Although he had no real reason to study the slums beyond what he needed to know for his work, he said, “I think a notion of the purpose of it all crept in . . . even while I was only half aware of it myself.” His purpose began to grow clearer to him when he was finally switched from the night shift to the day shift. “The time came at length when I exchanged night work for day work,” he wrote in his autobiography, and I was not sorry. A new life began for me, with greatly enlarged opportunities. I had been absorbing impressions up till then. I met men now in whose companionship they began to crystallize, to form into definite convictions; men of learning, of sympathy, and of power. My eggs hatched.

Working during the daytime, he found himself reporting on meetings and commissions, both public and private, considering the problems of the slums, and encountering health department officials and reformers. 67

J ACOB R IIS The most important of these, who became a lifelong friend, was Roger S. Tracy, a sanitary inspector in the health department and later a specialist in statistics. They met while Riis was covering a smallpox epidemic, and Riis soon began spending time in Tracy’s office almost every day. Tracy provided him with hard facts and numbers that helped him transform his emotional indignation and personal impressions into a more formal analysis of the problems of the slums. It was to Tracy, said Riis in his autobiography, that “I owe pretty much all the understanding I have ever had of the problems I have battled with.” In return, Riis was able to bring Tracy’s statistics vividly to life for his readers. Another ally was Felix Adler, a prominent reformer who had started workingmen’s schools and healthcare groups for the poor. Born into a liberal Jewish family, Adler founded the Society for Ethical Culture, a religious and educational movement based on the idea that the most important goal of humanity was the creation of a humane society that emphasized moral action over religious belief. In 1884, Adler led the Tenement House Commission, which was one of the first governmental attempts to deal systematically with the living conditions in New York’s tenements—the crowded, filthy, disease-ridden, and badly built apartments where many immigrants lived and died. In his speeches to the commission, Adler was an uncompromising advocate of the government’s responsibility to step in when private enterprise would not. “The laws of common decency bind the government to see to it that these houses shall not prove fatal to the lives and the morality of the inmates,” he declared to the commission. “The government must interfere. It must . . . enforce renovation at the expense of the landlord.” Riis, who attended the meeting as a reporter, was immediately drawn to Adler’s combination of moral fervor and practical recommendations. In contrast to some members of the commission, who slept through most of the meetings, Adler knew what he was talking 68

T HE “B OSS R EPORTER ” IN M ULBERRY S TREET The Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, an inspiration to Riis, launched an attack on police and government corruption in a fiery sermon in 1892. To gather evidence, he toured the worst saloons, gaming houses, and brothels. He was publicly mocked for this, but the evidence he found spurred an official investigation and real reform.

about, and he cared. In confrontations with the landlords, Riis noted in his autobiography, Adler’s “clear, incisive questions, that went through all subterfuges to the root of things, were sometimes like flashes of lightning on a dark night.” The two men became friends and allies. In 1888, while reporting on a housing debate at Chickering Hall, the home of Adler’s Society for Ethical Culture, Riis first met the crusader Charles H. Parkhurst. The eloquent preacher of the upper-class Madison Square Presbyterian Church, Parkhurst had become notorious for his relentless campaign against the corrupt New York City Police Department and Tammany Hall government, which he called in a sermon “a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot.” Parkhurst faced ridicule and harassment from Tammany Hall, but he refused to back down and was eventually 69

J ACOB R IIS instrumental in defeating it. Parkhurst’s critics accused him of bringing politics into the church, where it did not belong, to which he replied that the church was not concerned with what administration was in power, but with attacking evil wherever it arose. This was exactly the attitude Riis had been looking for in a minister. With his deep religious faith and his tendency to look at everything in moral terms, Riis had been consistently disappointed in the New York churches’ lack of interest in the problems of the slums. Listening to Parkhurst at Chickering Hall, Riis said in his autobiography, “I wanted to jump up in my seat . . . and shout Amen! But I remembered that I was a reporter and kept still.” He did not realize it, but he was preparing to be more than a reporter. Later that same year, he suddenly had the idea for a book title. He did not write the book for another two years, but, he said,“it was as good as written then. I had my text.” That title, which would make his name synonymous with urban reform, was “How the Other Half Lives.”

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B URROWING D EEP IN THE S LUMS The decade from 1880 to 1890 was an eventful one for Riis. In 1885, he became a U.S. citizen. Oddly enough for a man who titled his autobiography The Making of an American, he does not discuss this milestone in his books. His family was also growing. His first son, Edward, born in 1877, was joined by Clara in 1879; John in 1882; Stephen, who died in infancy, in 1886; and Katherine, born in 1887. While all these changes were going on in his personal life, Riis was plunging himself deeper and deeper into his study of the slums. With his emotional and empathetic nature, he often found the process overwhelming. If he had not had his home and family in Brooklyn to return to every night, he said in his autobiography, “I do not think I could have stood it. . . . The deeper I burrowed in the slum, the more my thoughts turned, by a sort of defensive instinct, to the country.” He still considered himself, at heart, a country boy. Part of his horror at the slums arose from the contrast between them and his sentimental and idealized memories of his boyhood in the fields of Ribe. “I have to be where there are trees and birds and green hills, and where the sky is blue above,” he wrote in his autobiography. 71

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This photograph of a Richmond Hill, New York, street was taken from Jacob Riis’s front yard. In Riis’s day the area still retained some of its rural character, but today an apartment house occupies the site where his house once stood.

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His home was growing crowded, and he was beginning to feel that Brooklyn was too urban for him. During a walk on Long Island, he discovered a site north of Brooklyn, in Richmond Hill, an area in what is now Queens that was still not built up, yet was close enough for him to commute to Manhattan by train and ferry. Borrowing money from his old friend Ed Wells of the stereopticon days, he bought the site, had a home built, and moved his family there in 1888. Almost inadvertently, this move to the country led to Riis’s first active involvement in social reform. In the spring of 1888, his children, inspired by their father’s descriptions of poor children in the slums, filled his arms with daisies and begged him to take them to the poor in the city. “I did as they bade me,” Riis wrote in his autobiography, “but I never got more than half a block from the ferry with my burden. The street children went wild over the ‘posies.’ They

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pleaded and fought to get near me, and when I had no flowers left to give them sat in the gutter and wept with grief.” Moved by the children’s eagerness, Riis wrote a letter to the newspapers urging readers who lived in the country to bring in flowers as he had. Actually handing a child flowers and seeing his joy, Riis hoped, would help the givers see the tenement dwellers as individuals, feeling people like themselves, in a way impersonal donations to charity never could. He also asked people to send flowers to the Mulberry Street newsmen’s office, where they would be collected by health department workers and given out on their visits to the poor. The response, Riis remembered in his autobiography, was overwhelming. Flowers came pouring in from every corner of the compass. They came in boxes, in barrels, and in bunches, from field and garden, from town and country. Expresswagons carrying flowers jammed Mulberry Street, and the police came out to marvel at the row. The office was fairly smothered in fragrance. A howling mob of children besieged it. The reporters forgot their rivalries and lent a hand with enthusiasm in giving out the flowers. The Superintendent of Police detailed five stout patrolmen to help carry the abundance to points of convenient distribution.

Although Riis did not know it, this was not a new idea. In Boston, Helen W. Tinkham of the Benevolent Fraternity Fruit and Flower Mission had been giving out fresh fruit and flowers since 1869 “to those in the city who love them but have little if any opportunity to secure them,” according to her papers. Riis noticed that he consistently received a large number of flowers from the King’s Daughters, a religious group in New Jersey, so he asked if they would be interested in taking over the flower distribution. The Daughters agreed and began delivering the flowers, using them as an excuse to 73

J ACOB R IIS visit families the sanitary inspectors had told them needed medical help or advice. By the end of the summer, they had become involved with so many families that they decided to make the operation permanent. They established themselves on Henry Street in the heart of the Lower East Side, in a building that became the King’s Daughters settlement house—one of the first in a rapidly growing movement of community-based social service institutions. Settlement houses offered many of the same services as other charities, but the settlement house workers tried to become a part of daily life in the neighborhoods in which they worked, unlike officials and inspectors, who were authority figures from outside. They wanted to provide a neighborhood center where people could find such resources as medical clinics, kindergartens, libraries, housekeeping advice, and vocational training programs near their own homes. By encouraging tenement dwellers to work with their neighbors, the settlement houses hoped to create a sense of community. Although Riis did not take an active part in the daily life of the King’s Daughters project, he supported it, publicized it, and maintained a personal connection to it throughout his life. Riis saw the settlement house as serving some of the same purposes that the church had served back in Denmark, but he emphasized that it was not a religious institution. The settlement house, he told a group of potential student volunteers in a speech at Columbia University, “is there to get us out of the maze of narrowness, of bigotry, of ignorance of one another that is our worst stumbling block. It professes no sect or religious method.” Its function was “searching out the neighbor we have lost in our city crowds.” For Riis this meant creating neighborly feelings among the different ethnic groups of immigrants, and also between the rich and the “other half,” by bringing them into friendly contact with each other. The settlement house Riis inspired still exists today, although it has been moved to 74

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the borough of Queens, where it carries on Riis’s work with new generations of immigrants. It was fortunate that Riis had a refuge to return to at home, for he found the sights he encountered during his newspaper reporting increasingly intolerable. His comments on what he saw grew more pointed. He was more prepared to criticize the systems that oppressed poor people than he had been in his early days of reporting. Writing about an elevated railway accident in which a workman was killed, he commented acidly that the family’s grief “would have wrung tears from a stone. . . . Life had seemed bright to the little family since he got work again. Now darkness had settled on it forever. But the company’s shares were all right.” His articles began to suggest reforms. Riis advocated tighter city supervision of fire hazards and more efficient sanitation laws to deal with problems such as horse manure on the streets, and he challenged the city to face the problem of inadequate school facilities. As Riis grew more interested in committees and volunteer groups working for reform, he became involved with the Charity Organization Society (COS), a group founded in England. Josephine Shaw Lowell, an austere aristocrat from a wealthy Boston family, ran the New York chapter. Lowell’s family had a history of progressive social action; her brother Robert had led the first black battalion to fight in the Civil War. Following her husband’s death in that war, she devoted her life to philanthropy. Her goal was to turn charity from a patchwork of efforts by well-meaning amateurs into an organized science. Under her leadership, the COS aimed to organize the haphazard charities of New York City by studying and coordinating the efforts of the various charity groups to ensure that they did not duplicate each other. From the COS, Riis learned a more systematic way of thinking about charity than he had known before. Lowell believed that most ordinary forms of charity—simply giving 75

J ACOB R IIS out money, food, or clothing—might make the giver feel good, but accomplished very little in the long term. In fact, the COS did not give out any direct aid at all. Its goal was to direct the poor toward the kind of help that would enable them to be self-sufficient and no longer in need of charity. Such help included establishing and supporting daycare centers, penny banks that encouraged immigrants to save their money, trade schools, and lodgings for the homeless that steered their clients toward employment. In an 1883 letter to her sister-in-law, Lowell summed up her opposition to most charity. Common charity, that is, feeding and clothing people, I am beginning to look upon as wicked! Not in its intention, of course, but in its carelessness and its results, which certainly are to destroy people’s character and make them poorer and poorer. If it could only be drummed into the rich that what the poor want is fair wages and not little doles of food, we should not have all this suffering and misery and vice.

Although this approach offered more long-term hope to the poor than other charities did, it ran the danger of being patronizing. It was very easy for the reformers to assume that their own middle-class Protestant morals and beliefs were the guarantee of success, and that the problems of the poor, if they did not actually spring from moral failings, could nonetheless best be dealt with through moral teachings. Reformers worked to provide the poor with more adequate resources and some protection from being taken advantage of by the rich. However, they tended to view their work as an effort to provide an environment that would encourage hard work, sobriety, thrift, self-sufficiency, and delayed gratification. Even the best of the 19th-century philanthropists often sound somewhat condescending today. Reformers such as Lowell sometimes expressed a rather harsh opinion of the people they were trying to help, assuming, for instance, that the poor would not work unless 76

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they were forced to, and would need to be taught industrious habits, often against their will. Riis, too, sometimes made patronizing assumptions of this sort. He reported on workingmen’s societies and enterprising poor people who tried to help each other, specifically to refute the claim that poor people were too lazy or passive to help themselves. Still, he tended to assume that true, fundamental reform must be something handed down to the lower classes by those above them, rather than something they could originate themselves. Nonetheless, Riis had a much more optimistic attitude than Lowell did. Although he sometimes displayed some of the same condescending attitude of moral superiority as other reformers, he generally tried to think the best of people. “The world is not bad,” he told the audience in a speech at the King’s Daughters settlement house. “It is good. You simply have to touch it right.” He preferred to think that, given a fair chance and an atmosphere in which they could thrive, most people, especially children, who were not set in their ways, would choose to be independent rather than to live on charity. With his warm and ready sympathy, Riis was happiest with personal, spontaneous giving from the heart. But through his association with the COS, he began to realize that this would never be an adequate response to the widespread, systematic problems of poverty. It was necessary to deal not only with the results of poverty, but with its causes, and not just with individuals, but with broad trends. Riis wrote articles supporting COS programs that worked toward these goals. He also advocated alleviating increased poverty during periods of economic depression by creating government programs that would hire the poor for civic works such as building parks. President Franklin D. Roosevelt later adopted this approach at a national level in an attempt to end the Great Depression of the 1930s. In his writings, Riis gave his complete support to the idea of scientific charity advocated by Josephine Lowell, but 77

J ACOB R IIS privately he never totally resigned himself to the somewhat cold, impersonal nature of the idea. In his autobiography, he summed up his ambivalent attitude in a discussion of charity at Christmas: “I am a believer in organized, systematic charity upon the evidence of my senses; but—I am glad we have that one season in which we can forget our principles and err on the side of mercy, that little corner in the days of the dying year for sentiment and no questions asked.” Surreptitiously he would break out of the system in little ways at other times of the year, too. For instance, although most reformers considered tobacco a vice, or at least a waste of money, he quietly made sure an old couple had enough for their pipes, even though he knew the reformers with whom he worked would not approve. He thought the couple was too old to be forced to change their habits, and he wanted to see them happy. Although he publicly advocated the principle that casual charity to beggars was useless, frequently Riis was too generous to resist the temptation. Often he was fooled, once discovering that a mother he gave money to every morning was actually nursing only a bundle of rags. His colleague Lincoln Steffens watched him deal with the struggle between his natural tendency toward open, personal generosity and his knowledge that scientific, organized methods were necessary to make any real difference. “He was easily imposed upon because he believed so thoroughly in human nature and loved it,” Steffens wrote in a 1903 tribute to his friend, but he knew that he could be deceived, and that, I think, is why he tolerated organized charity. I have heard him denounce it in private many a time, then go right off to support it publicly with an eloquence that must have derived some of its force from the passion of his rage at it.

Riis continued his nighttime explorations of the slums, often accompanying the health department inspectors. These officials recorded violations of existing health laws, 78

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although even those inadequate laws were difficult to enforce because of government and police corruption. He grew steadily more enraged at the horrors he saw and his inability to do anything about them. “The sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something,” he said in his autobiography. “I wrote, but it seemed to make no impression.” Remembering his success with the stereopticon, he decided to put together a slide lecture showing what life was like in the slums. A newspaper friend agreed to help him make magic lantern slides once the photographs were taken, but there was a problem—tenement apartments were very dark.What light there was came in through the front room windows, which were often dirty and might look out on nothing but a narrow alley in perpetual twilight. The back rooms often had no windows at all, and were lit only by what light could filter through from the front room. This meant that the worst parts of the slums, the parts he was most eager to reveal, were too dark to be photographed. One morning he read about a new technique from Germany using Blitzlichtpulver—flash powder—to photograph in dark places, and he realized that here was his solution. Riis did not own a camera, but he gathered together a party of amateur photographers eager to try the new method, and they descended on the tenements late one night. The earliest photographic flash powder came in cartridges fired from a revolver. “It is not too much to say that our party carried terror wherever it went,” Riis wrote in his autobiography. The spectacle of half a dozen strange men invading a house in the midnight hour armed with big pistols which they shot off recklessly was hardly reassuring, however sugary our speech, and it was not to be wondered at if the tenants bolted through windows and down fire-escapes wherever we went. 79

J ACOB R IIS Arriving uninvited and unannounced, Riis and his party were somewhat cavalier in their disregard for the tenement dwellers’ privacy. However, Riis knew this was the only way he could be sure his photographs showed the unvarnished truth without people posing to dramatize their misery, or trying to conceal some of the humiliating or unattractive aspects of their poverty. After a few days, Riis’s photographer friends, tired of wandering around the slums in the middle of the night, abandoned him. Riis then tried hiring professional photographers, but the first proved too lazy, and the second tried to cheat him. Finally, he decided he would have to learn how to use a camera himself. For $25 he bought a four-by-fiveinch wooden box camera, and taught himself to use it. He switched to a flash method that he felt slightly more comfortable with—blowing magnesium powder through an alcohol flame and igniting it in a frying pan. The process was tricky and not particularly safe: he had to remove the lens cap, immediately ignite the powder, and then put the lens cap back on. He had only one chance at each photograph, because the flash powder filled the room with smoke. Once, accidentally blowing the powder into his face, he almost blinded himself, and he set several fires in the cramped tenement rooms. Still, he quickly received confirmation that his flash photographs would provide the irrefutable argument he was seeking. Visiting a room that was legally supposed to sleep four or five people, he found fifteen, including a week-old infant. Each lodger was charged five cents a night. He reported this illegal overcrowding to the Board of Health, but officials there were inclined to assume he was exaggerating.“It did not make much of an impression—these things rarely do, put in mere words—until my negatives, still dripping from the dark-room, came to reënforce them. From them there was no appeal,” he reported triumphantly in his autobiography. 80

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Now that Riis had his ammunition, he needed to figure out what to do with it. His original idea of giving slide lectures had been proving more difficult than he had expected. Even before he began his experiments with flash powder, Riis had been trying to find an audience for a magic lantern talk on the slums. To his frustration and increasing fury, he found that churches were not interested in hosting his lecture, which they felt had nothing to do with church business. When his own church on Long Island refused him, he resigned his position as deacon, declaring that an institution

The opening page of “How the Other Half Lives,” illustrated only by a small engraving of a trash barrel, gives little indication of the powerful visual impact Riis’s work would eventually have. 81

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FIRE AT THE “DIRTY SPOON” In order to take photographs, Riis and his companions had to intrude upon the inhabitants of the tenements at night, without invitation and often without any warning. The flash photography technique was primitive and not without risk, and the crew met with many mishaps, such as this one Riis describes in How the Other Half Lives. ome idea of what is meant by a sanitary “cleaning up” in these slums may be gained from the account of a mishap I met with once, in taking a flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars in one of the tenements down here.With unpractised hands I managed to set fire to the house. When the blinding effect of the flash had passed away and I could see once more, I discovered that a lot of paper and rags that hung on the wall were ablaze. There were six of us, five blind men and women who knew nothing of their danger, and myself, in an attic room with a dozen crooked, rickety stairs between us and the street, and as many households as helpless as the one whose guest I was all about us. The thought: how were they ever to be got out? made my blood run cold as I saw the flames creeping up the wall, and my first impulse was to bolt for the street and shout for help. The next was to smother the fire myself, and I did, with a vast deal of trouble. Afterward, when I came down to the street I told a friendly policeman of my trouble. For some reason he thought it rather a good joke, and laughed immoderately at my concern lest even then sparks should be burrowing in the rotten wall that might yet break out in flame and destroy the house with all that were in it. He told me why, when he found time to draw breath. “Why, don’t you know,” he said, “that house is the Dirty Spoon? It caught fire six times last winter, but it wouldn’t burn. The dirt was so thick on the walls, it smothered the fire!” Which, if true, shows that water and dirt, not usually held to be harmonious elements, work together for the good of those who insure houses.

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that separated itself from the plight of the urban poor in the slums was no more holy than the slums themselves. He was further enraged to discover that some of the wealthy churches owned tenement buildings and treated their tenants no better than the slumlords he hoped to expose. Finally, on January 25, 1888, he gave his first lecture— not to a church congregation, but to an amateur photography club. In his autobiography, Riis passes over this debut, preferring to recall that his first public appearance occurred on February 28, in a more religious setting, at the Broadway Tabernacle, where he was asked to speak by the City Mission Society. He proved an engaging lecturer. The Tribune reported that he “brought to his task such a vein of humor that after two hours every one wished that there was more of the exhibition, sad as much of it was.” He continued trying to give slide lectures, traveling to any group he could find that was willing to listen. After Reverend Parkhurst invited Riis to lecture at his church, other New York City churches began to let him in. Although the photographs were at the heart of his lectures, Riis used all sorts of tricks to engage his listeners’ full attention. He told funny or pathetic stories about the people in his photographs. He introduced characters such as Edward, the little boy burned with an iron to make him a more effective beggar; the troupe of children who came to Riis’s office to beg for daisies for an old lady’s coffin; and the little lost boy who innocently revealed the consequences of alcoholism combined with poverty when he told the police, “We don’t buy bread, we buy beer.” This boy would reappear in his work for years to come. Sometimes he played sentimentally appropriate music in the background—for instance he accompanied a photograph of boys sleeping in the streets with the popular song “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” His lectures were a form of entertainment that offered his middle-class audience a kind of voyeuristic thrill. Riis 83

J ACOB R IIS realized this fact and even exploited it.“The beauty of looking into these places without actually being present,” he explained to an interviewer from the New York Morning Journal, “is that the excursionist is spared the vulgar sounds and odious scents and repulsive exhibitions.” Still, no matter how much he might cater to his listeners’ longing for excitement, he was also getting through to them. Audience members cried, talked to the photographs, and even sometimes fainted. They were genuinely moved, and receptive to his pleas for action. He was not above appealing to fear either. He reminded his audience of the huge numbers of desperate people whose sense of right and wrong was being destroyed by the conditions in which they lived and who might someday rise against the society that oppressed them. We needed to find solutions, Riis asserted, not only for moral reasons but for self protection. Riis wanted to reach a larger audience than those he could speak to in the New York City area, and he could do so only in print. He could not simply publish his photographs with his regular Tribune articles because newspapers at that time lacked the technology to print them, so he tried to interest one of the illustrated monthly magazines in publishing his work. Someone at Harper’s Magazine seemed interested, “but the editor to whom he sent me treated me very cavalierly,” Riis said in his autobiography.“Hearing that I had taken the pictures myself, he proposed to buy them at regular photographer’s rates and ‘find a man who could write’ to tell the story.” Then an editor at Scribner’s Magazine heard him lecture in a church and invited him to write an article for the magazine. Only three years old at the time, Scribner’s was already one of the most prestigious literary journals in the country; its readership was by and large earnest, upper middle class, and conservative. It was particularly noted for the number and quality of its illustrations. “How the Other Half Lives— Studies among the Tenements” appeared as the lead article 84

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in the December 1889 edition. The rest of the magazine consisted of illustrated serious fiction and poetry (including one poem by Edith Wharton), travel articles, and an editorial. In the 20-page article, Scribner’s used 19 of Riis’s photographs, a large number considering the great expense of the reproduction process. The article gave his photos their first national exposure, although they did not appear as photographs. Following the usual method of the time, they were printed as line engravings—a kind of drawing based on the photograph, made up of a series of fine carved lines. This method made them much easier to print. The engravings, described on the contents page as “illustrations from drawings (after the author’s instantaneous photographs),” were beautifully done and very faithful to the photographs, but they still had the slightly unreal quality of illustrations for a story rather than the raw force of the actual photographs. Riis drew the text from the material of his lectures. He gave a brief history of the tenements, and graphic descriptions of their incredible overcrowding. He told poignant stories of people he met. He described several individual families’ difficulties, their incomes, and the terrible obstacles they faced in improving their lives. He characterized the various ethnic groups and their neighborhoods. The message of the article is summed up in his discussion of a youthful criminal: “No toadstool was ever less justly to blame for not having grown up a spotless rose in its swamp, than he for being a tough. It is manifest that all effort to reclaim his kind must begin with the conditions of life against which his very existence is a protest.” He detailed the ways various charities were working to change the slums that destroyed their inhabitants, and made it clear that more action was needed. “How the Other Half Lives” was so successful that Scribner’s invited him to expand it into a book. Riis began work on New Year’s Day 1890, and the book was published 85

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Riis considered the lack of places for children to play one of the greatest evils of the slums. Charitable groups offered someplace better than the streets, but as this crowded playground in the backyard of a settlement house shows, they were overwhelmed by the number of children.

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by Scribner’s Books in November of the same year.Writing it was quite an ordeal for Riis. His work as a reporter took up all his daytime hours, and he continued to lecture whenever he could, as well. This left him only late nights to write. His unrelenting work schedule sometimes overwhelmed him. Once, when he was calling on someone during a lecture trip to Boston, the maid answering the door asked for his name. Suddenly he could not remember—he had to surreptitiously check the calling card he carried to leave at places he visited, in order to find out who he was. Another time, forgetting that he was supposed to be the lec-

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turer, he sat down in the audience and then wondered why no one was speaking. The day he turned in the last chapter was a tremendous relief to his whole family. “That night,” he recalled in his autobiography, “my wife insists, I deliberately turned a somerset [somersault] on the parlor carpet while the big children cheered and the baby looked on, wide-eyed, from her high chair.” When How the Other Half Lives was published, it contained not only all the illustrations from the Scribner’s article, but 17 pictures reproduced in halftone, a revolutionary new procedure that allowed photographs to be easily reproduced as photographs, not engravings. Finally Riis’s pictures could have the impact for which he had hoped. The book was immediately successful. It was certainly not the first to discuss the problems of urban poverty and squalor, but with its vivid photographs and colorful, conversational writing it spoke directly to people’s hearts as no other book had. A reviewer for the Chicago Tribune epitomized the response the book aroused, claiming that no one could “read it without an instant and unappeasable desire to do something.” It helped arouse the sympathy of well-meaning citizens and reformers throughout the country, and firmly established Riis in the position he would occupy for the rest of his life as spokesman and activist for the urban poor.

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P OVERTY, S QUALOR , AND W RETCHEDNESS By the time Jacob Riis discovered the problem of the slums, it had plagued American cities for many years. The 19th century was a time of tremendous growth for New York City. In the years from 1812 to 1865, the population increased by 800 percent. Much of this growth came from immigrants escaping extreme poverty or persecution in Europe. Many arrived with almost nothing. They settled into densely packed neighborhoods, especially in the Lower East Side of Manhattan—Jacob Riis’s beat as a reporter—usually keeping together with their countrymen. To accommodate the huge influx of people, landlords divided single family houses into apartments and built new buildings, called tenements, designed to hold as many people as possible, as cheaply as possible. Some of the new buildings never attempted to provide anything beyond the tenants’ most basic needs. Others were designed and built with some thought for the comfort of the people who would live there, but they quickly deteriorated because of overcrowding and poor maintenance. The sad history of one notoriously bad building in the slum known as Mulberry Bend can be traced through its changing names: originally built as a “model tenement” intended 88

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to show how to provide cheap, decent housing, it was named Gotham Court. As it degenerated, it quickly became known as Swipes Alley, then Guzzle Row, Hell’s Kitchen, and finally Murderers Row. The lively, exotic streets of the Lower East Side, with their foreign customs, foods, and languages, seemed like a different world to the average New Yorker. As the slums became more crowded, they grew notorious for vice, drugs, prostitution, and criminal gangs as well. They became a place to seek out immoral pleasures and thrills. Novelty seekers began to treat them as a tourist attraction. Tours were offered to ladies and gentlemen who explored the worst parts of the slums as though they were a kind of zoo. Reformers and journalists also visited to report to the outside world on what was happening in this foreign place. Visitors to the tenements vied with each other to produce vivid descriptions of the squalor they saw. In 1856, a State Assembly Select Committee reported:“Dirty, half-naked children filled the cramped rooms and entries to suffocating populousness. There was no provision for ventilation; the drainage was insufficient . . . and the entire structure thick with nauseating smells.” Nine years later an article in The Journal of Social Science described a tenement where: A ray of sunshine has never touched the blackened walls, which [were] . . . covered with dampness and vegetable organisms. The air was thick with decaying filth and its products. . . . We found ourselves in an ever-descending scale of poverty, squalor, and wretchedness. . . . The masses of garbage . . . were made sodden by slops . . . and streams of excreta pouring unhindered.

Most descriptions concentrated on the same basic points: very little light or air reached any rooms, and the tiny back bedrooms were almost totally dark; the few toilets or outhouses were often broken or overflowing; an inadequate water supply made it hard to clean anything; hallways and stairs were dark, narrow, and filled with garbage; and large numbers 89

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Jacob Riis took this photograph of Mulberry Bend, which he called the “foul core of New York’s slums.”The rundown apartments visible from the street were actually the most livable. Behind the front buildings ran a warren of dank, narrow alleys crowded with airless back tenements.

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of people slept in a very small space. Plumbing was an especially vivid problem. In better-off parts of the city, flush toilets and sewers were by now the norm. But most tenements were not connected to a sewer. Waste emptied into a cesspool—basically a hole in the ground—often near enough to pollute the building’s water supply. What captured commentators’ attention most overpoweringly was the appalling smell, composed of human waste, garbage, horse manure, blood from the nearby slaughterhouses, and manufacturing pollution. In the 1880s, a cheap two- or three-room apartment cost from about $8 to $13 a month to rent. This could easily amount to a quarter or more of the family’s income. Rent in tenements was not actually all that cheap. Per square foot, the New York Times calculated at the time, immigrants paid more in rent than did middle-class apartment dwellers for their comfortable uptown homes. In an age before readily available public transportation, however, immigrants had to live near the small factories and other businesses that gave

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them work. Most also preferred to stay near other immigrants from the same country—people who spoke the same language and shared the same memories. The high rent, however, forced many families to take lodgers into their tiny dwellings. Like the room where Jacob Riis found fifteen sleepers where there should have been four, tenement apartments frequently housed many people in addition to their official inhabitants. As many as four families might crowd into one room—one in each corner. Conditions were made worse by the home-based sweatshop manufacturing system. Factories were subject to some laws regulating working conditions. Throughout the 19th century, various limits had been set on the length of the factory workday and the age at which children could be hired. Manufacturers quickly realized that they could save money by avoiding these legal restrictions if they employed people to work at home. In a man’s own home he had the right to do anything he chose, even work 18 hours a day alongside his young children in a dark, unventilated room. A sweatshop was run by a small businessman, often an immigrant himself, who contracted with a manufacturer for work to be done in his own home by family members, sometimes joined by a few outsiders. The manufacturer supplied the raw materials, and the sweatshop owner would carry back heavy stacks of finished work. The tiny front room of the apartment was used as a workshop where seven or eight people spent their days at such tasks as manufacturing; making gloves, hats, jewelry, artificial flowers, and candy; rolling cigars; or sorting coffee beans. They were paid not by the hour but by the piece, which encouraged an unrelenting pace with no breaks. Heat from irons, harmful fumes from chemicals and dyes, and bits of cloth, dust, and feathers made the already inadequate air quality even worse. Because there were so many workers available, these jobs paid very little. Manufacturers frequently cut wages, and pieceworkers often had to 91

J ACOB R IIS work late into the night just to survive. If they objected, someone else could always be found to take their place. Many people became ill, especially with tuberculosis or cholera, and sick people would lie in the same room as the workers. Reformers warned that goods manufactured in a room where people had contagious illness could spread the disease when they were sold in more prosperous parts of the city. Of course not all tenements were foul holes. Some were kept clean, decorated, and relatively pleasant. Probably no more than half fit the reformers’ lurid descriptions, although even the best tenements were dark and airless, and since many lacked running water, they were difficult to keep clean. Not all landlords were out for whatever they could get. Many were themselves immigrants, and some lived in their own buildings. Periodically philanthropists experimented with building “model tenements” that would be profitable yet still livable. Often, however, the tenants themselves sabotaged these attempts. Landlords who put in modern plumbing found that desperately poor inhabitants sometimes removed and sold the fixtures; window frames might be chopped up for firewood. Some defaced the walls or threw garbage out the windows. In 1878, Plumber and Sanitary Engineer magazine held a widely publicized contest, entered by many prominent architects. They were challenged to design an ideal tenement, to “strive to plan a sanitary building which will bring in the most revenue.” In order to be economically feasible, a building had to be able to house at least three families per floor, and the contest required every room—even the back bedrooms—to have a window to the outside. The problem the architects faced was the shape of the standard New York lot. At 25 by 100 feet, it was so long and thin that it was hard to find a way to give windows to a building’s middle rooms, which were usually the bedrooms. When the contest was judged, no one had really managed to meet the challenge. Most entries were some variation on 92

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the “dumbbell” design, in which a small section was cut out of the middle of each building to create a light well—an open shaft like a tiny courtyard in the middle of the building. The bedroom windows opened out into this well, not onto the street or backyard. This solution was barely adequate. The rooms at the bottom of the well got no light; the well was so narrow that it did not let in much air; and some residents used it as a garbage dump, so that it quickly became a source a foul air, rather than an escape from it. Nonetheless, from 1879 on, most tenements were built on the dumbbell plan. Until 1862, all improvements to the housing of the poor were left up to benevolent private landlords or philanthropists. In the generally prosperous first half of the 19th century, Americans believed fiercely in unbridled capitalism and the free market. The best thing, most people agreed, was to let market forces work themselves out—hard work would lead to prosperity, and wages, prices, and rent would find their natural level. Most Americans believed that legislation attempting to control and restrict economic activity would ultimately hurt everyone, including the poor. For instance, an attempt to ban cigar-making sweatshops was defeated on the grounds that it unfairly deprived the cigar

Densely packed slums created an enormous amount of garbage, overwhelming New York’s street cleaning systems.The Tribune described the garbage as “one festering, rotting, loathsome, hellish mass of air-poisoning, deathbreeding filth, reeking in the fierce sunshine.” 93

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SWEATSHOP ECONOMICS A particularly challenging aspect of the sweatshop system was that many of the “sweaters” running the sweatshops were immigrants who had only a few years earlier been poor laborers in someone else’s shop. Many immigrants, therefore, resisted reform, seeing the sweatshop system as their best possibility for success, and not realizing how larger-scale manufacturers and factories exploited the sweaters. Riis realized that the kind of far-reaching economic analysis necessary to solve the problem of the sweatshop system was beyond him. Although Riis offered some suggestions about better regulation, he admitted that he did not have any real solutions to the problem. His strength was his ability to give a vivid, unsensationalized, and unromanticized picture of the sweatshops, as in this description from How the Other Half Lives. p two flights of dark stairs, three, four, with new smells of cabbage, of onions, of frying fish, on every landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors betraying what goes on within, to the door that opens to admit the bundle and the man. A sweater, this, in a small way. Five men and a woman, two young girls, not fifteen, and a boy who says unasked that he is fifteen, and lies in saying it, are at the machines sewing knickerbockers,“kneepants” in the Ludlow Street dialect. The floor is littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on a couch of many dozens of “pants” ready for the finisher, a bare-legged baby with pinched face is asleep. A fence of piled-up clothing keeps him from rolling off on the floor. The faces, hands, and arms to the elbows of everyone in the room are black with the color of the cloth on which they are working. The boy and the woman alone look up at our entrance. The girls shoot sidelong glances, but at a warning look from the man with the bundle they tread their machines more energetically than ever. The men do not appear to be aware even of the presence of a stranger. They are “learners,” all of them, says the woman, who proves to be the wife of the boss, and have “come over” only a few weeks ago. She is disinclined to talk at first, but a few words in her own tongue from our guide set

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her fears, whatever they are, at rest, and she grows almost talkative. The learners work for week’s wages, she says. How much do they earn? She shrugs her shoulders with an expressive gesture. The workers themselves, asked in their own tongue, say indifferently, as though the question were of no interest: from two to five dollars. The children—there are four of them— are not old enough to work. The oldest is only six. They turn out one hundred and twenty dozen “knee-pants” a week, for which the manufacturer pays seventy cents a dozen. Five cents a dozen is the clear profit, but her own and her husband’s work brings the family earnings up to twenty-five dollars a week, when they have work all the time. But often half the time is put in looking for it. They work no longer than to nine o’clock at night, from daybreak. There are ten machines in the room; six are hired at two dollars a month. For the two shabby, smoke-begrimed rooms, one somewhat larger than ordinary, they pay twenty dollars a month. She does not complain, though “times are not what they were, and it costs a good deal to live.” Eight dollars a week for the family of six and two boarders. How do they do it? She laughs, as she goes over the bill of fare, at the silly question: Bread, fifteen cents a day, of milk two quarts a day at four cents a quart, one pound of meat for dinner at twelve cents, butter one pound a week at “eight cents a quarter of a pound.” Coffee, potatoes, and pickles complete the list. At the least calculation, probably, this sweater’s family hoards up thirty dollars a month, and in a few years will own a tenement somewhere and profit by the example set by their landlord in rent-collecting.

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Air shafts were meant to provide fresh air and light to the inner rooms of tenements. But often the air from the shaft was so foul that many tenants nailed their windows shut.

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makers of the right to make a living as they chose and to do whatever they wanted in their own homes. Periodically, the protests of urban reformers or the fear of disease being spread from the slums led to some attempts at reform. In 1862, the first building department in New York City was established with inspectors who were supposed to ensure that the tenements did not become a threat to public health. Under the corrupt Tammany Hall government, inspector posts were given out as political favors to men who collected their salaries but often did no work and knew nothing about sanitation. According to an 1865 editorial cartoon in Harper’s Magazine, one inspector knew so little

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about his job of maintaining the public health that he testified to a state senatorial investigation committee that hygiene— the science of health—meant “the effluvia arising from stagnant water, the consequences of which is disease.” In 1866, fear of a cholera epidemic led the city to establish the Metropolitan Health Board, which was empowered to clean horse manure from the streets, and to control slaughterhouses, sewage, privies, garbage, and tenement conditions. This was followed in 1867 by the first Tenement House Act, which specified some very basic standards. Tenements were required to have one toilet for every 20 people—connected to a sewer if possible, otherwise to a cesspool. Tenants were not allowed to keep farm animals in their apartments. Receptacles had to be provided for garbage, and a water supply made available. Inner bedrooms with no windows had to have a ventilating window connecting them to a room with an air supply. The act was to be enforced by Metropolitan Health Board inspectors. Further acts in 1879 and 1887 established space requirements per person and provided for a janitor to clean the buildings regularly. Except when there was the threat of an epidemic, however, there was very little effort to enforce any of these acts. A May 25, 1879, article in the New York Times lamented, “The poorer tenement-house keepers are more or less in collusion with the petty politicians . . . who obstruct all sanitary or reform legislation in this City.” Many tenants themselves resisted officials and inspectors who tried to enforce the acts. Although the laws might have been to the immigrants’ advantage in the long run, in the immediate sense they seemed to threaten to take away even the basic housing they had. Tenants of substandard buildings feared becoming homeless if their buildings were declared unfit to live in and they had to move out. Despite the laws, many tenement apartments continued to be as foul as before. And there matters stood when Jacob Riis presented the world with his guided tour of the slums. 97

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H OW THE OTHER H ALF L IVES Jacob Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives very rapidly, in the heat of indignation. It does not read like a book that was written to last—certainly not one that would become a classic treatment of its subject. Nineteenth-century readers were accustomed to elaborate writing full of elegant flourishes. Riis’s prose, although it may sometimes sound flowery to the modern reader, was for its time inartistic, straightforward, and workmanlike—more like newspaper writing. The book begins with a short history of the tenement in New York City. Right from the beginning it is full of concrete information and specific, detailed statistics. Riis did not content himself, as earlier writers tended to, with piling on extreme adjectives to indicate the squalor of the tenements. Certainly they are there—“degraded,” “squalid,” “prolific of untold depravities” are some examples from the book’s pages—but Riis was more interested in giving a clear picture of what was happening to specific individuals. Riis mixed in with his historical facts and figures, incidents he had seen, and people he had met. It is these small case studies, the most characteristic aspect of the book, that give it immediacy and appeal. Short and spare, they do not 98

H OW THE OTHER H ALF L IVES play on the reader’s feelings with moralizing or unnecessarily pathetic details. Riis gave only essential information and undeniable facts that drew the reader to imagine the feelings of the people trapped in the tenements. One of the first stories he told was the case of a hard-working family of man and wife, young people from the old country, who took poison together in a Crosby Street tenement because they were “tired.” There was no other explanation, and none was needed when I stood in the room in which they had lived. It was in the attic with sloping ceiling and a single window so far out on the roof that it seemed not to belong to the place at all.With scarcely room enough to turn around in they had been compelled to pay five dollars and a half a month in advance.

The first chapter also discusses, a colored family of husband, wife, and baby in a wretched rear rookery [tenement] in West Third Street. Their rent was eight dollars and a half for a single room on the top-story, so small that I was unable to get a photograph of it even by placing the camera outside the open door. Three short steps across either way would have measured its full extent.

To give an idea of the kind of profits landlords could make, and the situations of the people living in their buildings, Riis described a fire that “made homeless ten families, who had paid an average of $5 a month for their mean little cubbyholes. The owner himself told me that it . . . brought him in $600 a year rent. He evidently considered himself especially entitled to be pitied for losing such valuable property.” Riis gave figures demonstrating that the death rate increased as the population density grew. Then he brought the numbers home by citing the death of a tenement child “registered at the Bureau of Vital Statistics as ‘plainly due to suffocation in the foul air of an unventilated apartment.’” The rest of the book follows this pattern set out in the first 99

J ACOB R IIS chapter: ample, unarguable figures, mixed with simple, unadorned stories of the people who give life to the statistics. “I have aimed to set down a few dry facts merely,” Riis explained. “They carry their own comment.” In this fashion, he discussed the physical conditions of the tenements, the financial hardships created by low wages and the sweatshop system, the physical and spiritual suffering of the poor, and the cost to the city in increased disease, crime, and political corruption. For much of the book, Riis adopted the tone of a tour guide: “Step carefully over this baby—it is a baby, spite of its rags and dirt”—although the sights he has to display are not cultural treasures, but the daily tragedies of the poor. Here is a door. Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail—what do they mean? . . . The child is dying with measles. With half a chance it might have lived; but it had none. That dark bedroom killed it. “It was took all of a suddint,” says the mother, smoothing the throbbing little body with trembling hands.

This guided tour of the tenement and its people was presented in a straightforward fashion, simply as an intro-

The grinding poverty Riis described seemed all the more terrible when contrasted with the luxurious lifestyle of the “other half.”This lavish children’s birthday party was given by a well-off family living less than four miles away from the Lower East Side slums. 100

H OW THE OTHER H ALF L IVES duction to the subject. Subtly, however, Riis used it to give the tenement dwellers a chance to answer the various accusations commonly leveled at the poor. To the more fortunate members of society, it often seemed that it was the poor immigrants’ own vices that kept them in their miserable situations. For instance, immigrants often faced criticism for being too lazy or insular to bother learning English. Although Riis felt nothing but scorn for those who deliberately chose not to learn, he did understand that the issue was rarely laziness. After describing the 15- and 16-hour days worked by many immigrants, even children, just to pay the rent, Riis remarked, “small wonder that there are whole settlements on this East Side where English is practically an unknown tongue, though the people be both willing and anxious to learn. ‘When shall we find time to learn?’ asked one of them of me once. I owe him the answer yet.” At the time of the book’s publication, it was widely believed that foreigners were just naturally dirty. Many people seemed to think that the poor actually disliked being clean. An 1865 report by the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor spoke of “immigrants of the lowest class whose disregard of personal and domiciliary cleanliness would, if left to themselves, convert a palace into a pigsty.” In How the Other Half Lives Riis described how the schools tried to convince poor children to wash, assuming that they were dirty because they wanted to be: The question is asked daily from the teacher’s desk: “What must I do to be healthy?” and the whole school responds:“I must keep my skin clean, wear clean clothes, breathe pure air, and live in the sunlight.” It seems little less than biting sarcasm to hear them say it, for to not a few of them all these things are known only by name.

He allowed an Irishwoman living at the top of a long, dark, steep flight of stairs to answer the accusation that the poor are dirty.“The woman, a stout matron with hard lines of care in her face, is at the wash-tub. ‘I try to keep the childer 101

J ACOB R IIS clean,’ she says, apologetically, but with a hopeless glance around.” The resources were simply not available. Especially in the summer, the water supply often failed. Even in buildings that supposedly had a sink on each floor, there might not be enough water pressure to reach the top floors. Then the tenants had to carry water up all those stairs. This “scandalous scarcity of water,” Riis suggested, offered one answer to the accusation that the vice of drunkenness was one of the chief causes of the poor’s misery. “The thirst of the million tenants must be quenched, if not in [water], in something else.” The poor were often accused of being thriftless; they were poor, the well-off said, because they managed their money badly. As he told people’s stories, Riis tried to show how “poverty compels the tenant to live at a rate if not in a style that would beggar a Vanderbilt, paying four prices for everything he needs, from his rent and coal down to the smallest item in his housekeeping account.” They had to pay the prices charged by people nearby and willing to sell to them, and they could not afford to buy in large quantities, or pay for high-quality goods that would last longer. It was true, Riis said, that sometimes the poor did make unwise purchases of items they could not afford, especially on the installment plan, which tempted them to buy expensive goods because they would not have to pay for them until later. After showing the dreary, colorless lives of those who did this, he concluded, There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessaries of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort. Improvidence and wastefulness are natural results. The instalment plan secures to the tenant who lives from hand to mouth his few comforts; the evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come.

A segment of the book is devoted to the various ethnic settlements of the Lower East Side. This part is very difficult 102

H OW THE OTHER H ALF L IVES to read today, for Riis seems to have accepted the racial and ethnic stereotypes of his time uncritically. He believed that Italians were picturesque, but inclined to be dirty, lazy, and prone to crime. Jews, he said, were hard working and intelligent, but greedy and too much concerned with profit. He described the Chinese as deceptive and secretive. In keeping with the informal tone of his writing, he used common street terms for various ethnic groups—“Joss” for the Chinese, “Dago” for the Italians—that even in his time would have sounded a little coarse, but are today blatantly offensive. In Riis’s case, these repellent attitudes seem to have represented an unthinking acceptance of what everyone around him believed, rather than deep-rooted prejudices. He was gentler in his stereotyping than many of his contemporaries. While Riis accused the Italians of being too clannish, an 1880s Real Estate Report barely seemed to acknowledge they were even human. The report explained that “the Neapolitan may be considered the most filthy, as he seems to have hardly a sense of decency at all, as a rule living in herds more than anything else, seemingly unconscious of vermin or filth.” When Riis talked about an ethnic group as a whole, he dropped into unexamined cliches.When he dealt with individual people, the racial stereotypes fell away. He regarded individuals with sympathy and respect, judging them by their actions rather than their ethnic origin, and the behavior of the people whose stories fill his book does not fall into racial categories. Paradoxically, his unpleasant racial stereotyping, which is so alienating to the modern reader, may have helped increase the book’s impact on the original audience. By not challenging the prejudices that would have been held by most middle-class readers, Riis put his audience at ease, making it easier for them to hear what he had to say. After painting his picture of the desperate condition of the slums, Riis demonstrated the urgency of bringing about reform. He did not mince words—as far as he was concerned, allowing the tenements to exist was nothing less 103

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FOUR STORIES OF THE TENEMENTS The facts and statistics presented in How the Other Half Lives were useful to Riis’s readers, and supported his claims that people were living in terrible conditions. However, the heart of the book was the many small, vivid sketches he drew of the tenement dwellers, which, with a few telling details, go straight to heart of his subjects’ humanity. have not forgotten the deputation of ragamuffins from a Mulberry Street alley that knocked at my office door one morning on a mysterious expedition for flowers, not for themselves, but for “a lady,” and having obtained what they wanted, trooped off to bestow them, a ragged and dirty little band, with a solemnity that was quite unusual. It was not until an old man called the next day to thank me for the flowers that I found out they had decked the bier of a pauper, in the dark rear room where she lay waiting in her pineboard coffin for the city’s hearse.

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am satisfied from my own observation that hundreds of men, women, and children are every day slowly starving to death in the tenements with my medical friend’s complaint of “improper nourishment.”Within a single week I have had this year three cases of insanity, provoked directly by poverty and want. One was that of a mother who in the middle of the night got up to murder her child, who was crying for food; another was the case of an Elizabeth Street truck-driver whom the newspapers never heard of. With a family to provide for, he had been unable to work for many months. There was neither food, nor a scrap of anything upon which money could be raised, left in the house; his mind gave way under the combined physical and mental suffering. In the third case I was just in time with the police to prevent the madman from murdering his whole family. He had the sharpened hatchet in his pocket when we seized him. He was an Irish laborer, and had been working in the sewers until the poisonous gases destroyed his health. Then he was laid off, and scarcely anything had been coming in all winter but the oldest child’s earnings as cash-girl in a store, $2.50 a week. There

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were seven children to provide for, and the rent of the Mulberry Street attic in which the family lived was $10 a month. They had borrowed as long as anybody had a cent to lend.When at last the man got an odd job that would just buy the children bread, the week’s wages only served to measure the depth of their misery. “It came in so on the tail-end of everything,” said his wife in telling the story, with unconscious eloquence. ■

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remember once calling at the home of a poor washer-woman living in an East Side tenement, and finding the door locked. Some children in the hallway stopped their play and eyed me attentively while I knocked. The biggest girl volunteered the information that Mrs. Smith was out; but while I was thinking of how I was to get a message to her, the child put a question of her own:“Are you the spring man or the clock man?”When I assured her that I was neither one nor the other, but had brought work for her mother, Mrs. Smith, who had been hiding from the instalment collector, speedily appeared.

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t a great public meeting in this city, the Working Women’s Society reported: “It is simply impossible for any woman to live without assistance on the low salary a saleswoman earns, without depriving herself of real necessities. . . .” It was only a few brief weeks before that verdict was uttered, that the community was shocked by the story of a gentle and refined woman who, left in direst poverty to earn her own living alone among strangers, threw herself from her attic window, preferring death to dishonor. “I would have done any honest work, even to scrubbing,” she wrote, drenched and starving, after a vain search for work in a driving storm. . . . The ink was not dry upon her letter before a woman in an East Side tenement wrote down her reason for self-murder:“Weakness, sleeplessness, and yet obliged to work. My strength fails me. Sing at my coffin: ‘Where does the soul find a home and rest?’”

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J ACOB R IIS Riis’s work is marred by his casual acceptance of racial prejudice. However, his stereotyping was much milder than the vicious caricatures of ethnic groups that appeared in the newspapers of his time. This cartoon, showing immigrants swallowing Uncle Sam, plays on the fear that they would destroy America.

than murder, and the crime was no less real because it was not direct. “It is easy enough to convince a man that he ought not to harbor the thief who steals people’s property,” he wrote, “but to make him see that he has no right to slowly kill his neighbors, or his tenants, by making a deathtrap of his house, seems to be the hardest of all tasks.” Riis did not argue only in terms of morality. Common selfinterest was enough to make the necessity for reform clear. “For, be it remembered,” he warned, “these children with the training they receive—or do not receive—with the instincts they inherit and absorb in their growing up, are to be our future rulers, if our theory of government is worth anything. More than a working majority of our voters now register from the tenements.” In How the Other Half Lives, as in much of his writing, Riis focused his attention on the children. He was particularly concerned with building the future and with turning immigrants into good citizens. “The rescue of the children is the key to the problem of city poverty, as presented for 106

H OW THE OTHER H ALF L IVES our solution to-day,” he believed.“Character may be formed where to reform it would be a hopeless task.” The immigrants often came from places where children did not usually go to school, and it was assumed that they would work alongside their parents from an early age. Riis argued that for them to become good Americans, they would have to abandon the old practices. In the old country, he suggested, it might have made sense for them to help out on the family farm, but in the city there could be no benefit from the long barren hours spent working at home in a sweatshop. The slums swarmed with children, many of them orphans, and many with no home but the streets. No one knew for sure how many children lived in the slums. Riis was concerned that growing up in such deprivation would stunt these children for life. With such human instincts and cravings, forever unsatisfied, turned into a haunting curse; with appetite ground to keenest edge by a hunger that is never fed, the children of the poor grow up in joyless homes to lives of wearisome toil that claims them at an age when the play of their happier fellows has but just begun.

As every available inch of land in the slums was crammed with moneymaking tenements, there was nowhere left for children to play but the streets. However, wrote Riis, “honest play is interdicted in the streets. The policeman arrests the ball-tossers, and there is no room in the back-yard. In one of these, between two enormous tenements that swarmed with children, I read this ominous notice: ‘All boys caught in this yard will be delt with accorden to law.’” For Riis, with his idyllic childhood memories of playing in the country, the lack of any natural areas for children was particularly distressing. He believed that children needed safe places where they could be left alone for uncontrolled, imaginative play, and that they needed to be exposed to nature. This emphasis on the importance of environment to the formation of character was one of Riis’s most important 107

J ACOB R IIS messages. Many reformers tried to deal with poverty by moral exhortations, claiming that poor people needed to be convinced to give up their vices in order for their condition to be improved. Riis believed this argument was backward. Those trapped in the hopelessness and squalor of the slums would become the kind of people who could survive there. That is, the slums themselves caused the poor to develop such vices as drunkenness, greed, or laziness. “The ultimate and greatest need,” he wrote, “the real remedy, is to remove the cause— the tenement that was built for ‘a class of whom nothing was expected,’ and which has come fully up to the expectation.” Riis was a deeply religious man, and he agreed with the moral goals of other reformers, but he argued that their approach simply did not make sense in such desperate settings. In How the Other Half Lives he described a discussion he had with one such reformer: “Are you not looking too much to the material condition of these people,” said a good minister to me after a lecture in a Harlem church last winter, “and forgetting the inner man?’” I told him,“No! for you cannot expect to find an inner man to appeal to in the worst tenementhouse surroundings. You must first put the man where he can respect himself.”

For Riis, improving the tenement house was only a first step toward creating such surroundings. While he agreed with other reformers who urged the importance of family and home in creating a moral environment, he believed that a strong neighborhood and community were equally important. It was from this point of view that he approached one of the issues that most concerned the moralists: the problem of alcoholism and the saloons. Drunkenness was one of the vices most frequently pointed to as the cause of poverty. In How the Other Half Lives, Riis went beyond the assumption that poor people fell prey to the temptation to drink too much because of moral weakness. He asked why the saloons were so popular. 108

H OW THE OTHER H ALF L IVES In dreary, colorless neighborhoods with no public meeting places, no parks or open areas, and no community centers, he reasoned, the saloons were the only attractive places available where people could escape their homes and get together with their friends.“It is true, worse pity,” he concluded, that in many a tenement-house block the saloon is the one bright and cheery and humanly decent spot to be found. It is a sorry admission to make, that to bring the rest of the neighborhood up to the level of the saloon would be one way of squelching it; but it is so.

He admitted that if he were forced to live in some tenements he knew, he, too, would probably want to spend as much time as he could in the saloons, too. A vital step in the battle with the slums, Riis argued, would be to create attractive community centers that offered a healthy alternative to the saloon. In his later works, especially The Battle with the Slums, the sequel to How the Other Half Lives published in 1902, Riis elaborated on this idea.

Health officers raid a “dive”—a tavern and center for prostitution. Riis believed closing these barrooms accomplished nothing, because “the outcasts” would only find a safer place to set up new “centres of contagion, infinitely more destructive . . . than was the known dive before.”

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J ACOB R IIS He urged the building of small parks to provide a place where whole families could gather. And he was particularly earnest in his efforts to have the schools opened to the community after hours. Children could use the playgrounds, while older children and adults would have a place for clubs and meetings. “Every park, every playground, every bath-house,” he wrote in The Battle with the Slums, “is a nail in the coffin of the slum, and every big, beautiful schoolhouse, built for the people’s use, not merely to lock the children up in during certain hours for which the teachers collect pay, is a pole rammed right through the heart of it.” Many of the reforms Riis envisioned would require legal backing, and Riis never hesitated to agitate for legal reform when necessary. Perhaps because of his mistrust of the corrupt New York City government, however, he was skeptical of how much could be accomplished by passing laws. He believed that the problem usually lay not so much in the laws themselves as in inadequate enforcement and public indifference. The general public needed to be more knowledgeable, aware, and supportive of the purpose of the laws. People needed to see beyond their own immediate gains, Riis suggested, to remember that the public good was, ultimately, every individual citizen’s own good. “The law needs a much stronger and readier backing of a thoroughly enlightened public sentiment to make it as effective as it might be made,” he wrote in How the Other Half Lives. “It is to be remembered that the health officers, in dealing with this subject of dangerous houses, are constantly trenching upon what each landlord considers his private rights, for which he is ready and bound to fight to the last. Nothing short of the strongest pressure will avail to convince him that these individual rights are to be surrendered for the clear benefit of the whole.” Riis was generally an optimist, always ready to believe that improvement was possible. He rarely made prophecies of doom, and he was certainly not a political radical. In the 110

H OW THE OTHER H ALF L IVES conclusion of How the Other Half Lives, however, he warned, as he had in his lectures, that if well-off America continued to ignore the situation of the poor, “the other half ” might eventually be driven to violence. “The gap between the classes in which [the ocean of the poor] surges, unseen, unsuspected by the thoughtless, is widening day by day,” he wrote. “No tardy enactment of law, no political expedient, can close it. Against all other dangers our system of government may offer defence and shelter; against this not. I know of but one bridge that will carry us over safe, a bridge founded upon justice and built of human hearts.” When he first attempted to establish himself as a lecturer, Riis had trouble finding anyone to listen to him. But after the publication of How the Other Half Lives, he was overwhelmed by requests for lectures. Eventually, he had to use an agency to manage his schedule of speaking engagements.

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PHOTO ESSAY: RIIS AS A PHOTOGRAPHER

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acob Riis would be astonished to discover how highly he is now regarded as a photographer. He took up photography only because he needed to, and once he had finished taking the pictures he used for his lectures, How the Other Half Lives, Children of the Poor, The Ten Years’War, and The Battle with the Slums, he put away his camera and apparently never took it out again. When he went back to Ribe to visit his family, he did not bring a camera; he did not photograph his children growing up; and on his lecture tours around the United States, if he wanted a souvenir, he bought a postcard. He did not mark clearly which photographs in his collection he had taken himself, and which were taken by the professionals he hired. And he made no effort to preserve his negatives, which were packed up and forgotten. No one wondered about them until Alexander Alland, himself an immigrant and a skilled documentary photographer, read Riis’s autobiography and began a five-year detective hunt for them. In 1946, he discovered 2,250 fragile glass negatives that had been shoved behind the rafters in the attic of Riis’s former home in Richmond Hill, which was about to be torn down. Using modern techniques not available to Riis, Alland created a beautiful series of prints from the negatives. It is these prints—which are of a higher quality than anything Riis would ever have seen—that are usually displayed today. Unlike many 19th-century photographs, which were deliberately filled with symbols referring to religion, literature, and history, Riis’s pictures were not designed to manipulate the viewer in any obvious ways. They were rarely staged—although he sometimes had difficulty taking his pictures of boys in natural poses before they started showing off for the camera. In fact, because he did not set off his flash powder until the instant he took a photograph, when he was working in a poorly lit tenement room he could not be sure exactly what would be captured by his lens until the picture was already taken. Nonetheless, Riis had a genius for choosing where and how to take his photographs so they had a strong emotional impact beyond their value as a record of fact.

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In a 1903 lecture called “The Perils and Preservation of the Home,” which he gave at the Philadelphia Divinity School, Riis wrote,“I went up the dark stairs in one of those tenements and there I trod upon a baby. It is the regular means of introduction to a tenement house baby in the old dark houses, but I never was able to get used to it.”This photograph is similar to the drawings that were common in 19th-century magazines, especially at Christmastime, of pretty, pathetic waifs such as the “Poor Little Match Girl.” Like them, it is meant to tug at the heartstrings, but the concept is transformed by the harsh realism of the filthy, decaying building, and a pathetic baby.

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Riis’s photographs of children are very honest and affectionate. In this picture of “Little Susie,” who is pasting linen labels on tin pocket-flask covers, he does not attempt to portray Susie as a pathetic victim. Sturdy and healthy looking, she smiles slightly as she works and is clearly very good at what she does. Her hands move so quickly at the task that they appear as a blur.The photograph demonstrates, as Riis frequently reminded his readers, that when a bright, promising child such as Susie is forced to spend all her time at barren tasks at which she learns nothing, the loss of her potential is harmful to the entire society in which she lives.

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This photograph, called “Saluting the Flag at the Mott Street Industrial School,” shows the process of turning little immigrants into Americans. Although the children’s clothes are grimy, the schoolroom is crowded, and the windows look out only on a brick wall, the children are all concentrating seriously on the flag (except for one on the left, who cannot resist peeking at the camera).The little girl holding the flag—who has the cleanest apron—is clearly very proud of herself.

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These working boys, who are unable to go to school during the day, are trying to make up for it at a night school run by the Children’s Aid Society. In Children of the Poor, Riis recorded that the little boy fast asleep in the front of the class was nine-year-old Edward, an orphan who had spent the whole day selling vegetables from a cart.The older boys around him seem to be fighting hard to stay awake.Although they were determined enough to drag themselves to school after the long hours at work, they were so exhausted that it is doubtful how much benefit they could get from it.

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One of Riis’s best-known photographs of a sweatshop, this picture captures a family’s struggle to use the same tiny front room as both a workshop and a home.The family has made an effort to make the place homelike.There are fringed shades on the windows and pictures on the wall. Prominently displayed is an elaborately decorated ketubah, the traditional Jewish marriage certificate. But every inch of floor space is crowded with the equipment and materials they are using to make kneepants.Two of the younger workers have turned to look at the camera, but the older ones continue at their work and pay no attention to it. Since they were paid only 45¢ for a dozen pants, they would not have had time to waste on idle curiosity.

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Four men lived in this coal cellar on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side.This man’s whole life is contained in the tiny space of what was built to be a bin for storing coal.To the left are tools and a sign in Yiddish that indicate he is a cobbler—a shoe repairman. Despite his cramped, squalid living space and extreme poverty, he has made an effort to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath properly. A loaf of challah, the braided bread of the Sabbath, is on the table, and he has even laid out the traditional white tablecloth—although, in a coal cellar, it was not possible to keep it very white.

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This peddler slept in the same coal cellar as the cobbler, on an extremely primitive bed made from two barrels.The man’s straightforward, emotionless expression is characteristic of many of Riis’s portraits of the inhabitants of the slums.This stare may have been caused by a tendency to look at the flash powder when it went off, but as he stares directly out of the picture, the peddler seems to be challenging the viewer. It is this intimate gaze that makes the people in so many of Riis’s photos seem startlingly real and alive.

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It seems unlikely that this picture of an Italian ragpicker and her baby was posed, since it was taken in semi-darkness. Nonetheless, the woman looks out over her baby in an attitude startlingly reminiscent of Italian nativity paintings of Mary and the infant Jesus.The light from the flash powder created shadows that emphasize the filth on the walls and the tired lines on the woman’s face, but it also gave her the radiant glow that often illuminates the face of the Virgin Mary.

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This photograph of Bandit’s Roost, an alley opening off Mulberry Street, is unusual among Riis’s photographs because of its strong sense of menace. These people are not indifferent to the camera or unaware of it. Everyone in the street and in all the windows has stopped what he was doing to stare at Riis. Riis claimed that he never felt he was in any danger wandering the streets of Mulberry Bend, so long as he minded his own business.This photograph is a rare reminder that, no matter how good his intentions, when he took his photographs he was not minding his own business; he was an outsider intruding on the lives of the people he photographed.

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“I H AVE R EAD YOUR B OOK , AND I H AVE C OME TO H ELP ” Of course Riis was not the first to write about the problems of the poor. Probably the most influential book prior to Riis’s was Charles Loring Brace’s The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work among Them, published in 1872, which described his reformation efforts in the generation before Riis. In 1853, Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society, which created many programs within the city— newsboy lodging houses, industrial schools, night schools, and workshops—of the sort Riis would later advocate. Unlike Riis, however, Brace’s main focus was not improving children’s environment within the city. Considering the city itself the source of vice, he tried to get children out of it altogether. He created the “Orphan Trains” that, between 1854 and 1930, placed at least than 200,000 poor, abandoned, or orphaned children in foster homes on farms and in small towns throughout the Midwest. In Darkest England and the Way Out, written by William Booth, who founded the Salvation Army in 1865, came out at almost the same time as How the Other Half Lives. Riis believed that the sale of his own book was helped by the interest Booth’s aroused. Booth’s sympathetic examination 122

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of the situation of England’s poor was similar to Riis’s, but he was concerned with unemployment, not working conditions or housing. And like Brace’s, Booth’s solution was to get the poor out of the city, rather than to change the city. His scheme involved sending away the poor, first to established farming colonies, and eventually to a new colony in a sparsely settled area overseas, perhaps in South Africa. Riis’s writing style was livelier and more personal than that of others on the subject. Most important, he had his photographs. His book was immediately successful. The publication of How the Other Half Lives brought Riis to the attention of readers throughout the United States, but it changed his daily life very little. The day the book came out, he moved to a rival newspaper, the Evening Sun, where he continued his wide-ranging investigative reporting. In his new position, he still covered day-to-day, sensational events, rather than movements of large historic importance. “Do they seem mean and trifling in the retrospect?” he asked, reflecting in his autobiography on his subject matter.“Not at all. They were my work, and I liked it. And I got a good deal of fun out of it from time to time.” He continued to believe that the most important thing he could do was to rouse in his readers a sense of the common humanity of the two halves of society.“Perhaps the notion of a police reporter praying that he may write a good murder story may seem ludicrous, even irreverent, to some people,” he wrote. “But that is only because they fail to make out in it the human element which dignifies anything and rescues it from reproach.” Riis continued to explore the slums and to agitate for improved housing, better living and working conditions, more and better schools, the development of parks, and

The orphan train program run by the Children’s Aid Society sent poor or homeless New York children (not all of them orphans) west to work on farms. The program transplanted an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 children to the country, but this was only a tiny percentage of the waifs in the slums.

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J ACOB R IIS effective government action. In addition to his newspaper reporting, he began to write longer articles focusing on these problems in weekly and monthly journals. But he could accomplish very little so long as the corrupt city government held a stranglehold on funding and civic appointments and had no interest even in enforcing existing social reform laws. When the young Lincoln Steffens came to work in the Mulberry Street reporters’ building in 1892, Riis found a companion and an ally. Steffens immediately caught Riis’s attention when he began his first day by insulting two of the most notoriously brutal, dishonest, and powerful of the police authorities. Riis rescued him from the Mulberry Street gang, which was trying to take advantage of his greenness as they had taken advantage of Riis when he first arrived, congratulated him on having made an enemy of the police superintendent, and offered to show him around. Steffens had come to Mulberry Street to report for the New York Evening Post on the activities of another of Riis’s friends, the Reverend Charles Parkhurst. In 1892, Parkhurst began a vigorous campaign against corruption in city government. He was concerned primarily with immorality, and he concentrated on revealing the sordid details of the Tammany Hall government’s involvement with prostitution, criminal activity, and drunkenness. His courageous public testimony gave rise to a widespread outcry for public reform. In 1894 the Tammany politicians were thrown out of City Hall—at least for a while—by the election of reform candidate William Strong as mayor. At the same time the Lexow Committee, a state- and city-funded investigation headed by Republican State Senator Clarence Lexow, was set up to investigate corruption within the police department. Riis was elated. He wrote to his adopted sister Emma in Denmark, “It begins to look as if I were going to win my war.” Most important for Riis, the Lexow Committee established the Board of Police Commissioners, headed by 124

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Theodore Roosevelt. Riis had first encountered the future President of the United States in 1884 when Roosevelt, at that time a state assemblyman, was chair man of the Committee of Cities, which was revising the charter of New York City. The labor activist Samuel Gompers had taken Roosevelt on a tour of the tenements and sweatshops, and Roosevelt, horrified by what he saw, had developed views similar to Riis’s. The two men were like each other in many ways. Both were sentimental, noisy, and determined, with strong, simple, inflexible moral codes; had immense energy and gusto; and possessed a desire to improve things. Both could seem patronizing or narrow-minded when they held forth on moral points that they believed were self-evident. The “simple philosophy of government” that Roosevelt expressed in his autobiography could have been Riis’s own: “personal character and initiative are the prime requisites in political and social life.”Watching Roosevelt’s vigorous, uncompromising, and joyous battle for whatever he believed was right, Riis developed an admiration for him that bordered on hero worship. “I loved him from the day I first saw him,” Riis recalled in his autobiography, “nor ever in all the years that have passed has he failed of the promise made then.” Shortly after the publication of How the Other Half Lives, Riis came into his office to find a message from Roosevelt: “I have read your book, and I have come to help.” For a while, nothing came of this offer, as Roosevelt was serving as civil service commissioner in Washington, D.C. But as soon as Riis heard about the proposed police reform, he was convinced that finally he would have a chance to work with his idol. “Theodore Roosevelt is the man for president of the police board, and God will attend to his appointment,” he told Lincoln Steffens. “That’s all I want to know. I don’t care who the other commissioners are. T.R. is enough.” He was elated when Roosevelt accepted the position, and Roosevelt’s arrival at police headquarters 125

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A FRIEND TO CHILDREN Riis remembered his time working with Roosevelt as a great success, minimizing their difficulties and defeats. To Riis, one of the most important indications of his idol’s noble character was the fact that children trusted him, as he describes in this story from Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. (The “doubtful ‘ladies’” are prostitutes.) he children usually take to him, as he to them, in the same perfect good faith. We saw it in Mulberry Street, after he had gone, when two little tots came from over on the East Side asking for “the Commissioner,” that they might obtain justice. I can see them now: the older a little hunchback girl, with her poor shawl pinned over her head and the sober look of a child who has known want and pinching poverty at an age when she should have been at play, dragging her reluctant baby brother by the hand. His cheeks were tear-stained, and his little nose was bruised and bloody, and he was altogether an unhappy boy, in his rôle of “evidence,” under the scrutiny of the big policeman at the door. It was very plain that he would much rather not have been there. But the decrees of fate were no more merciless than his sister’s grasp on him as she marched him in and put the case to the policeman. They had come from Allen Street, then the Red Light District. Some doubtful “ladies” had moved into their tenement, she explained, and the other tenants had “made trouble” with the police. The “ladies,” locating the source of the trouble in their flat, had seized upon the child and “punched” his nose. They had even had to send for a doctor. She unrolled a bundle and showed a bottle of medicine in corroboration. Her brother had suffered and the household had been put to expense. Seeing which, she had collected her evidence and come straight to Police Headquarters to “see the Commissioner.” Having said it, she waited calmly for directions, sure that when she found the Commissioner they would get justice.

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I H AVE C OME TO H ELP ” This cartoon, entitled “Roosevelt’s Idea of Reorganization,” claims that as head of the New York City police department, Theodore Roosevelt created a disorganized mess. Roosevelt believed the department’s structure had to be destroyed because it “was so devised as to render it most difficult to accomplish anything good.”

may have been the high point of Riis’s life. Brushing aside all formal ceremony, he pulled Riis and Steffens into his office and, as both Steffens and Riis described in their autobiographies, demanded,“Now then, what’ll we do?” The police department that Roosevelt was appointed to reform was almost entirely corrupt. Positions on the force were purchased outright or obtained through political pull. Almost never was someone hired or promoted because of merit. A policeman would regain his investment by accepting bribes to allow criminal activity in his territory. The 127

J ACOB R IIS superintendent of police, Thomas F. Byrnes, was a dictator who followed no law but his own. In some ways he was very successful. He was a brilliant detective, and with no scruples or laws to bind him, he was effective at solving or preventing the kinds of high-profile crimes that would disturb the upper level of society. Those without political power had no protection from him, and poor people who were unjustly treated had no way to defend themselves. One of Byrnes’s police officers was so well known for beating up suspects with his club that he was called Clubber Williams. Although Riis had many friends among the lower ranks of the police force, he regarded the upper levels as “an open enemy,” said Steffens in his autobiography. He was continually enraged at the injustices he saw at the police department, and his inability to do anything about them. On his first day working the Mulberry Street police beat, Steffens recalled, Riis had taken him to see a bloody, bandaged prisoner. “Maybe he’s done something wrong, that miserable Russian Jew; anyway he’s done something the police don’t like. But they haven’t only arrested him, as you see; they have beaten him up.” Riis showed him a room full of such men and encouraged him to interview them. No paper would print the stories, he said, but Steffens might as well learn the way things were. Roosevelt treated Riis as though he were a member of the police board. To call him, he leaned out the window and gave his cowboy yell, “Hi yi yi!” and Riis would come running from the reporters’ headquarters across the street, usually with Steffens in tow. Roosevelt asked Riis to take him around the city at night and show him how the police behaved on their beats when they thought no one was watching. “I had at last found one who was willing to get up when other people slept—including, too often, the police—and see what the town looked like then,” Riis rejoiced in his autobiography. He described how he “laid out the route, covering ten or a dozen patrol-posts, and we 128

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met at 2 A.M.” Riis took Roosevelt on many of these latenight tours. As head of the police board, Roosevelt was also a member of the health department, and so Riis took the opportunity to show him not only police failings, but conditions in the tenements as well. “The midnight trips that Riis and I took,” wrote Roosevelt in his autobiography, “gave me personal insight into some of the problems of city life. It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowded tenements, and quite another to see what the overcrowding means, some hot summer night.” Roosevelt accomplished much in his two years on the police board. He began by getting rid of corrupt policemen, from Byrnes on down. The sentimental streak in Riis made him regret Byrnes’s departure. He had known Byrnes a long time, and had sometimes seen an unexpected gleam of kindness or justice in him. Although Byrnes was “quite without moral purpose or comprehension,” he wrote in his autobiography, “he made life in a mean street picturesque while he was there, and for that something is due him.” As much as possible, Roosevelt brought an end to the widespread use of bribery, and established instead a system of discipline with rewards and promotions granted for merit, rather than being bought. He drew recruits from ethnic minorities, hired the first woman ever to work in police headquarters, and improved the position of Jews on the force. For the first time, policemen were trained in the use of a gun, instead of just being given one and left to figure it out. Roosevelt also created the first bicycle squad, and modernized the detective department. Previously detectives had operated by such methods as simply arresting every suspicious-looking person who entered the wealthy Wall Street area, thus capturing most criminals—along with a lot of perfectly innocent people. But of all Roosevelt’s achievements, the one that pleased Riis the most was the abolishment of police lodging houses. On one of their midnight rambles, standing in the rain at 129

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The police “Scorcher Squad,” one of Roosevelt’s most successful innovations, put policemen on bicycles to deal with speeding traffic and runaway horses. Because of its speed and maneuverability, the bicycle caught on as a police tool, and many cities still have bike squads today.

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two in the morning in front of the Church Street Station where his dog had been killed so many years before, Riis told Roosevelt the whole story. The scene as Riis dramatized it in his autobiography gives a clear picture of how Riis viewed his idol, whom he depicts as warm-hearted, impetuous, and devoted to justice. “‘Did they do that to you?’ he asked when I had ended. “For an answer I pointed to the young lads then asleep before him.‘I was like this one,’ I said. “He struck his clenched fists together.‘I will smash them to-morrow.’” The next day the board of police commissioners arranged for the abolishment of the police lodging houses. AntiRoosevelt factions claimed that this act was insensitive to the needs of the poor. One newspaper cartoon showed a

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“deserving but unemployed” man shivering miserably in front of the locked door where he could no longer find shelter. Actually, the city did at least attempt to provide an alternative to the police lodging houses. Riis had done extensive research on so-called wayfarer’s lodgings in other cities and offered recommendations for a better system. Temporary housing for the homeless was arranged in a barge on the East River, and eventually the Board of Charities established a municipal lodging house that offered the poor a meal and a place to bathe, and tried to steer them toward help. This system, the ancestor of today’s city homeless shelters, was far from perfect. However, it represented at least an acknowledgment that the city needed to come to grips with the problem of its homeless population in a way that would offer them more than a plank to sleep on in a locked basement with no plumbing. During these hopeful years with Roosevelt, Riis become more deeply involved in organized political action. He was secretary to the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Small Parks, and in the spring of 1896 he began to serve as general agent of the New York Council of Good Government Clubs. These clubs (known to their opponents as “goo-goos”) had been founded by the New York City Club during the effort to drive out the Tammany Hall politicians. There was a chapter, composed of local delegates, in each assembly district in New York City. Riis now hoped to organize them to work for municipal reform. Under his lead, they attacked many of the problems that Riis had been writing about. One problem the clubs tackled was the city schools, “about which,” Riis remarked in his autobiography, criticizing the Department of Education’s vague reports, “no one knew anything for certain.” Riis knew the schools did not have room for all the children of the tenements. At his urging, a census was taken, which established that there were about 50,000 more children than the schools could accommodate. Using statistics from his friend Roger Tracy, the 131

J ACOB R IIS health department inspector, Riis demonstrated that the areas with the greatest problems of juvenile crime also had the greatest lack of school space. The city committed to building 43 new schools, which, for the first time, were legally required to have playgrounds. With his new, powerful backing, Riis also finally made some headway in his battle against the slums. The Board of Health had long been legally entitled to seize and destroy tenement property considered a threat to city health, after compensating the owner, but it almost never exercised this power, even for the most blatantly unlivable buildings. Riis gave the board a list of 16 tenements that he considered the worst—including a Mott Street building in which one out of every three babies had died in the previous year. With Roosevelt’s support, the board condemned them. Riis’s dreams were coming true. “Conceive, if you can,” he wrote in his autobiography, “the state of mind of a man to whom a dark, overcrowded tenement had ever been as a personal affront, now suddenly finding himself commissioned . . . to seize and destroy the enemy wherever found.” At the end of a year, Riis gave up his position with the Good Government Clubs for lack of time, but, as he recalled in his autobiography, “That was a great year. They wanted a positive programme, and my notions of good government were nothing if not positive. They began and ended with the people’s life.” As important to Riis as tearing down tenements was building parks. He often contrasted the foul atmosphere of the tenements and the corruption of city vices with the pure air and healthful influence of the virtuous countryside. Sometimes, he seemed to think of nature as a sort of magic cure-all. For example, he constantly repeated stories about the healthful influence of a single flower. Like many reformers of his day, he tended to idealize country life, preferring to forget that child abuse, overwork, hunger, vice, alcoholism, and even pollution could exist there as well as in the city. 132

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Riis knew and approved of programs such as Brace’s Orphan Trains, but, despite his nostalgic dwelling on his country childhood, he was more realistic than many reformers. He realized that moving people out of the city was not an adequate or realistic solution to the problems of the city. For one thing, he accepted that country life did not suit everyone. He often told the story of a poor family that had been relocated from the city to a farm in New Jersey by a philanthropic organization. Later he found them back in a New York tenement, starving. They had returned because they found the country dull and depressing. In How the Other Half Lives, he quoted the mother’s explanation: “We do get so kind o’ downhearted living this way that we have to be where something is going on, or we just can’t stand it.” In any case, he saw that more and more people were crowding into the city, and the trend was too strong to reverse. He did not like it, but he accepted that solutions were needed that dealt with things as they were.“Nothing is left but to make the best of a bad bargain,” he wrote in How the Other Half Lives. “This is the fact from which we cannot get away, however we may deplore it. Doubtless the best would be to get rid of [the tenement] altogether; but as we cannot, all argument on that score may at this time be dismissed as idle.” Instead, Riis tried to bring some of the benefits of nature into the city slums. Symbolically, the most meaningful of Riis’s accomplishments during the triumphant years with Roosevelt may have been the establishment of a park on the site of the Mulberry Bend tenements.“The Bend,” a crooked stretch of Mulberry Street riddled with squalid alleys and decaying tenements, had at one time the highest population density of any place on earth—2,047 people per acre, as opposed to 115 per acre for Manhattan as a whole. Riis walked past it every day on his way home from the Mulberry Street reporters’ building, and was frequently called there to report on murders and gang violence. For him it became a 133

J ACOB R IIS symbol of the entire Lower East Side slum. “If I made it my own concern to the exclusion of all else,” he wrote in The Battle with the Slum, “it was only because I knew it. I had been part of it . . . and I hated it.” “Mulberry Bend must go” was such a frequent refrain in his writing that his newspaper colleagues called him “the Mulberry Bend Crank.” Riis firmly believed that the crowded tenement districts should be filled with parks. One of the greatest evils of the slums, he claimed, was their lack of any open space. There was not a single park in the entire Lower East Side.With his love of the countryside, he believed that having a green, peaceful place to rest was vital for physical, mental, and moral health, especially for children. Children’s need to play was one of his frequently repeated points. “The American boy,” he wrote in an article advocating playgrounds,“is just a little steam boiler with his steam always up. His play is his safety valve. Sit on it, and the boiler blows up.” He pointed out that when children had no place else they were naturally going to play in the streets, getting into danger, causing trouble, and damaging property. With no other alternatives provided, they would join gangs, spend their time with tramps and thieves, and start on a life of crime. “Play,” he wrote, “is a child’s right, and it is not to be cheated of it. . . . For men, not money, make a country great, and joyless children do not make good men.” He longed to see Mulberry Bend, the symbol of everything he hated, transformed into a park. His battle began as early as 1887, when reformers managed to force the passage of the Small Parks Act, which provided one million dollars a year to build parks in poor areas. Riis discovered, however, that the corrupt city government had no interest in parks, and the money sat unused for years. Under his constant prodding, the city finally took possession of the Mulberry Bend property in 1894, but instead of demolishing it the city simply became a slumlord, collecting the rent itself. In his 1903 tribute to Riis, Lincoln Steffens described how his friend would go every week or so to the 134

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authorities to nag: “‘Done anything?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Then you still intend to?’‘Well, when?’” After a year of complaints, Riis finally forced the city to demolish the old tenements, and there the project stalled. Finally, Riis went before the Board of Health and accused the city of being the owner of a potentially dangerous site. In his complaint he stated: The Bend is a mass of wreck, a dumping-ground for all manner of filth from the surrounding tenements. The Street-cleaning Department has no jurisdiction over it, and the Park Department, in charge of which it is, exercises none. The numerous old cellars are a source of danger to the children that swarm over the block.Water stagnating in the holes will shortly add the peril of epidemic disease.

But it was not until three children were crushed to death while playing in the waterlogged ruins that the park was finally built. The issue of park building was not quite so simple as Riis made it. Disease- and crime-ridden though the Bend was, it was nonetheless home to several thousand people. Riis believed this was not a problem—there was more than enough low-cost housing in the city for everyone in the Bend. While this may have been true, much of the housing was either too expensive for the Mulberry Bend inmates— the poorest of the poor—or too far from their employment and the community of their countrymen to be practical. When the park displaced them, most of these people had to find room in another equally overcrowded tenement, and some may have become homeless. In How the Other Half Lives, Riis recorded his dislike of parks that forbid children from playing on the grass:“I came upon a couple of youngsters in a Mulberry Street yard a while ago that were chalking on the fence their first lesson in ‘writin’.’ And this is what they wrote: ‘Keeb of te Grass.’ They had it by heart, for there was not, I verily believe, a 135

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green sod within a quarter of a mile.” The park at Mulberry Bend was not exactly what he hoped for. Lincoln Steffens in his autobiography described the first time Riis saw the grass in the park. He was so delighted that he wandered off the pathway, exploring it. Suddenly an angry policeman struck him on the backside crying, “Hey! Come off the grass! D’ye think it is made to walk on?” Riis was not even invited to sit with the officials at the opening ceremony for the park, although he was entitled, if 136

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I H AVE C OME TO H ELP ” The former slum of Mulberry Bend was converted into a park in 1897.The transformation of an area that had symbolized for Riis all that was worst in the slums was one of his proudest achievements.

not as the Mulberry Bend Crank who had made the park happen, then certainly as secretary to the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Small Parks. But the crowd gave him three hearty cheers, anyway, and Riis claimed in his autobiography that he did not care about public recognition, so long as he had his park. “It had been such a hard fight, and now at last it was won,” he wrote. “To me the whole battle with the slum had summed itself up in the struggle with this dark spot.” 137

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“D ECENT AND C LEANLY L IVING ” In his tribute to Jacob Riis, “Jacob A. Riis, Reporter, Reformer, American Citizen,” published in McClure’s Magazine in 1903 Lincoln Steffens quoted a conversation he had with his friend while they were investigating corruption in the police department. “‘Do you know,’ [Riis] said, ‘I don’t believe it.’ ‘What?’ ‘Why, what we’ve been writing.’ ‘You know it’s true,’ I said, astonished. ‘I suppose I do. . . . But I don’t believe it.’” This naive inability not to think well of people may have endeared Riis to his friends, but it contributed to one of the most serious flaws in his reform proposals. Too many of his ideas would only work if people decided voluntarily to do what they knew to be right, even if it wasn’t profitable. Riis understood that abolishing the abuses he saw in the tenements and sweatshops would require strong and vigorously enforced laws. However, the work of building new systems to replace what was abolished, he believed, was outside the sphere of government and could not be legislated. “The remedy that shall be an effective answer to the coming appeal for justice must proceed from the public conscience,” he wrote in How the Other Half Lives. “Neither legislation 138

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nor charity can cover the ground. The greed of capital that wrought the evil must itself undo it.” In effect, this would mean that new housing practices were to be established by the very same people who had created the bad old systems. He discussed new forms of housing and new systems of employment that would bring justice to the working poor and still be profitable for the owners—just not as profitable as the old ways. The tenements produced 15 to 30 percent profit for their owners. Acceptable housing could be built, he demonstrated, that would still return a 5 percent profit. Progressive businessmen had already succeeded in doing so, and his writings certainly inspired many more to try. Unfortunately, too many builders would always be more interested in maximizing profit than in volunteering to improve the world. Enlightened benevolence could reach only a small portion of the millions of people already in the slums and the hordes more that arrived every day. Riis never really addressed the issue of how to deal with landlords and employers who did not chose to live up to their moral duty. Riis was not very good at large-scale, systematic thinking. His skill was facing the evils in front of him, not working out long-term solutions. In How the Other Half Lives, when he discussed the sweatshop system, he gave a vivid picture of its cost in human misery and destruction, and of the hopelessness of the people trapped in it, but he did not offer specific answers. He realized that the problem was more than simply evil men taking advantage of helpless people. “Many harsh things have been said of the ‘sweater’”—the small businessmen that ran the sweatshops—he wrote, “that really apply to the system in which he is a necessary, logical link.” Clearly the entire economic system needed to be changed. Although Riis examined some possible solutions, such as trade unions and vocational training, he admitted in How the Other Half Lives that such a

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An edition of McClure’s Magazine, where Riis’s friend Lincoln Steffens was managing editor from 1902 to 1906.The magazine became notorious for its “muckraking” articles, exposing political and industrial corruption.

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J ACOB R IIS sweeping process was beyond him. “Let me confess it at once and have done with it. I should be like the blind leading the blind.” In his lifetime, Riis achieved many solid victories on small local issues involving parks, schools, and housing laws. But ultimately his greatest contribution was not the reforms he himself initiated. Instead, it was his skill in inspiring an entire generation of reformers who would grapple with the issues he raised. The good times for reform in New York City did not last. Roosevelt’s reforms made him many enemies. Although Riis thought he could do no wrong, many people found Roosevelt’s confidence that his beliefs were the only possible way to see things very irritating. He was not tactful, and he paid no attention to the opinions of his fellow commissioners. He finally came to grief over the liquor laws. Although he did not completely agree with the laws that required all taverns to be closed on Sunday—the only day most workingmen had free—Roosevelt did believe he needed to enforce all laws completely and impartially. If people wanted the liquor laws changed, that was a matter for the state legislature. In the meantime, he insisted that the New York City police must enforce the law as it stood. When he began to concentrate his attention on the Sunday closing law, which had been widely ignored, the city turned against him and he was made to look ridiculous. Tired of the constant infighting and believing he had accomplished what he could, Roosevelt left the New York City Police Department in 1897 to become assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy. He wrote to Riis in October 1897, When I went to the Police Department it was on your book that I had built. . . . Whatever I did there was done because I was trying, with much stumbling and ill success, but with genuine effort, to put into practice the principles you had set forth, and to live up to the standard you had established. 140

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For his part, Riis wrote in his biography of Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen, that those two years on Mulberry Street were “the happiest by far of them all. Then was life really worth living, and I have a pretty robust enjoyment of it at all times.” Discouraged by his hero’s departure, Riis wrote in his book about Roosevelt, “When he went, I had no heart in it.” To make matters worse, the old Tammany Hall politicians had regained power under Mayor Robert Van Wyck, whose campaign slogan, according to Riis, was “To hell with reform!” It seemed that all the reformers had achieved under Roosevelt might be lost. “We were beaten,” Riis wrote in The Battle with the Slum. I shall never forget that election night. I walked home through the Bowery in the midnight hour, and saw it gorging itself, like a starved wolf, upon the promise of the morrow. Drunken men and women sat in every doorway, howling ribald songs and curses. . . . The old days were coming back. Reform was dead, and decency with it.

Reforms that were in progress were killed if they could not be finished before the new administration took power. In The Battle with the Slum Riis told the story of the failure of one of his pet projects. He strongly believed that schools should be put in the middle of parks. These parks could then be used both by the schoolchildren during school hours and by the surrounding community during the rest of the day, and in the summer when most school playgrounds were locked and unavailable to the children. “The surrounding tenements were to be torn down to make room for a park and playground which should embody the ideal of what such a place ought to be,” he wrote. A lazy clerk took 21 days to file the plans for the first of these parks. During that time, the new administration came in, and the park was not heard of again. In the description of his conversation with the clerk, Riis characterized the 141

J ACOB R IIS clerk in a way that shows how maddening he found the new administration’s indifference. “Yes, and I think it is just as well it is dead,” the clerk answered. “We haven’t any money for those things. It is very nice to have small parks, and very nice to have a horse and wagon, if you can afford it. But we can’t.Why, there isn’t enough to run the city government.” If the New York city government seemed like a lost cause, Riis now found himself in a position of influence in a wider political field. Roosevelt had become a national hero in 1898 after assembling his own volunteer cavalry regiment, known as the “Rough Riders,” and leading them into battle in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. In 1898 he decided to run as the Republican Party candidate for governor of New York State. To Riis’s delight, he offered Riis a place on the campaign train during its whistle-stop tour of the state. When Roosevelt was elected, Riis finally had access to power outside the confines of New York City politics. Whenever he could, he wrote in his biography of Roosevelt, he ran up to Albany to “have a good long talk with the Governor before the midnight train carried me back home.” Roosevelt turned to Riis chiefly for advice on issues involving sweatshops and tenements.“Is there anything I can do in reference to the slum?” he wrote in a letter to Riis in June 1899. “Can I touch on it in my next message? If so, I will write it with you.” One of the first problems they tackled was the legal regulation of working conditions. Politicians were in general very cautious about putting restrictions on the free operation of wealthy capitalists, but in his first annual message as governor, Roosevelt was willing to say directly that developments in the nature of modern industry had “necessitated legislation in the interest of labor.” Riis wanted to abolish sweatshops altogether. However, he knew this was not possible. As a state assemblyman in 1884, Roosevelt had already attempted to pass such a law, and the state supreme court had declared it unconstitutional. 142

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THE OFFICIAL DEFINITION OF “DARK” Enforcing reform laws was often as difficult as getting them enacted. Somtimes the problem was official corruption or indifference. Sometimes, as Riis describes in The Battle with the Slum, people raised in the tenements had a hard time imagining things any other way. he halls of these tenements are dark. Under the law there should be a light burning, but it is one of the rarest things to find one. The thing seems well-nigh impossible of accomplishment. When the Good Government Clubs set about backing up the Board of Health in its efforts to work out this reform, which comes close to being one of the most necessary of all,—such untold mischief is abroad in the darkness of these thoroughfares,—the sanitary police reported 12,000 tenement halls unlighted by night, even. . . . We had a curious instance, at the time, of the difficulties that sometimes beset reform. Certain halls that were known to be dark were reported sufficiently lighted by the policeman of the district, and it was discovered that it was his standard that was vitiated. He himself lived in a tenement, and was used to its gloom. So an order was issued defining darkness to the sanitary police: if the sink in the hall could be made out, and the slops over-flowing on the floor, and if a baby could be seen on the stairs, the hall was light; if, on the other hand, the baby’s shrieks were the first warning that it was being trampled upon, the hall was dark. Some days later the old question arose about an Eldridge Street tenement. The policeman had reported the hall light enough. The President of the Board of Health, to settle it once for all, went over with me, to see for himself. The hall was very dark. He sent for the policeman. “Did you see the sink in that hall?” he asked. The policeman said he did. “But it is pitch dark. How did you see it?” “I lit a match,” said the policeman.

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J ACOB R IIS Instead Riis and Roosevelt concentrated on creating regulations that would make sweatshops more tolerable. Roosevelt created an advisory council of labor leaders, including three prominent trade union officials. The council concluded that there was no point in passing further laws regulating sweatshop operations, since the ones already in existence were not being enforced. Riis arranged a sweatshop tour with Roosevelt to demonstrate the point. “I shall not soon forget that trip we took together,” Riis recalled in his biography of Roosevelt. It was on one of the hottest days of early summer. . . . I had picked twenty five-story tenements, and we went through them from cellar to roof, examining every room and the people we found there. They were on purpose the worst tenements of the East Side, and they showed us the hardest phases of the factory inspector’s work, and where he fell short.

This tour and other investigative reports led to the Costello Anti-Sweatshop Act, passed in 1899, and an amendment to the Labor Law. These changes strengthened and centralized the power of the Board of Factory Inspectors, which would now be empowered to regulate sweatshops as well as factories. All sweatshops were required to be licensed. Manufacturers had to keep accurate records of any subcontractors they used, so they could no longer dodge their responsibilities by claiming not to know anything about conditions at the subcontractors’ workshops. The number of inspectors was increased and they were guaranteed access to the sweatshops. Furthermore, children under 16 were no longer allowed to operate dangerous machinery, and women were limited to a 10-hour workday. Now that he was in a position to do so, Roosevelt was also eager to fulfill his promise to Riis by creating new housing laws that would be enforceable and end the worst of the tenement problems. In 1899, the Charity Organization Society formed a committee to develop recommenda144

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tions for a housing code that would be cheap enough to actually carry out, simple enough to enforce, and strong enough to bring about genuine improvement. Riis served on the committee, which was headed by Lawrence Veiller, a reformer particularly skilled in navigating the political and legal systems and in drawing up proposals that could get past the legislature. Veiller was a much more organized thinker than Riis was, and the two men sometimes clashed. When the city government, predictably, ignored the committee’s recommendations, the COS organized the Tenement House Exhibition of 1900. The exhibition was mounted in an elegant building on Fifth Avenue. It graphically demonstrated the deplorable condition of housing in the slums, offering detailed maps of the city that tracked rates of poverty and disease block by block, showing how closely they corresponded. The exhibition proved very popular with the public. One of its most widely discussed exhibits was a cardboard model of an actual block of tenements that housed 2,781 people: there were 264 toilets, not a single bathtub, and 32 cases of tuberculosis yearly. More than 10,000 people visited the exhibition, which aroused so much interest that the COS afterward took it on tour to other cities, including two international fairs, the PanAmerican Exposition in Buffalo and the Paris Exposition. Taking advantage of the public outcry generated by the exhibition, Roosevelt was able to get money to fund a new Tenement House Commission, which developed the Tenement House Act that the New York State legislature passed on April 12, 1901. Although Roosevelt was no longer governor by the time the act was passed, he had been the chief impetus behind it. The law was so influential that even today the kind of New York City apartment building created after its passage is called “new-law tenements.” Its primary achievement was to get rid of the old dumbbell apartments. Interior rooms were required to have adequate lighting and ventilation. The standard size for building 145

J ACOB R IIS A display from the Tenement House Exhibition of 1899 shows a proposal for affordable housing. According to the caption, every room would “open on the street or on an interior park 100 feet wide and 250 feet long.” However, such a building would have been impossible to build on a standard New York lot, or even two standard lots, since an entire lot was only 25 by 100 feet.

lots was made wider, so that every window in an apartment could look out onto the street or a courtyard at least fourand-a-half-feet wide, instead of just a narrow airshaft. Every room was legally required to be connected by a window to a room with access to outside air. The law also required every apartment to have its own toilet, properly connected to the sewer. It specified increased natural lighting for all halls (they had to be light enough to read in during daylight hours), and artificial lighting for the halls at night. And the law established improved fireproofing and fire escapes for all buildings, putting an end to the days when, according to Riis, one 146

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building inspector had told him that a wooden staircase was adequate protection—so long as it burned slowly. An important feature of the law was that it did not apply just to future buildings—existing tenements had to be refitted to comply with it. Landlords objected, claiming the act violated their right to do with their own property anything they chose, but public opinion was against them. The Evening Post pointed out that the opposition of builders and building owners “could not count for much with any fairminded hearer.” In a test legal case, Tenement House Department of the City of New York v. Moeschen, building owners claimed 147

J ACOB R IIS Architects created all sorts of variations on the dumbbell tenement design, trying to solve the problem of dark interior rooms, but no one could find a layout that worked on a standard 25 x 100 foot lot. This variant is built on a lot twice the standard size, so the architect was able to double the size of the airwell. However this meant that all the windows in the interior apartments looked out on nothing but the airwell.

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the act was a violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution because it deprived an individual of property. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court before the law was finally ruled constitutional in 1906. Delighted, Riis said in his biography of Roosevelt that the former governor had summoned “the general sentiment for decent and cleanly living and for fair play to all our citizens” and used it “to oppose the mercenary hostility of the slum landlord.” Roosevelt’s attempts to place some restrictions on property owners and corporations alarmed the Republican Party bosses. To get rid of him, they arranged for him to be nominated as the Vice Presidential candidate on the Republican ticket, a position of little real power in which they felt he could do no harm. The Republicans won; however, a few months after the inauguration, President William McKinley was assassinated. On September 14, 1901, Roosevelt became President. Riis was not surprised. He had been sure he would see his friend at the head of the nation ever since their first day together in Mulberry Street. A few years later he wrote his biography of Roosevelt, in which he described his hero in such glowing terms, as so blessed with every virtue and free from every flaw, that even Roosevelt was a little taken aback. He gently suggested that perhaps Riis saw him through rose-tinted lenses, describing him as he would like to be more than as he really was. But Riis meant every word.

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“N EVER H AD M AN B ETTER A T IME T HAN I” In spite of his overwhelming schedule, Riis tried to keep his family a prominent part of his life. Although he was often away on lecture tours, when he was home he spent as much time as he could with his children, working in the garden with them, taking them fishing, and making up elaborate bedtime stories. He had five children. Roger William (Billy), the last, was born in 1894. He planted a fruit tree in the yard in honor of each child’s birth. Despite his own reckless youth, he tried to hold his children to a very strict standard of behavior and morality, and in later years their relationship was sometimes strained. His oldest son, Ed, became a newspaperman like his father and moved out to California. He wanted to be a novelist, but Riis, who did not think he was talented enough, warned him against wasting his time on idle dreams. His daughter Clara married a doctor in 1900 (with Theodore Roosevelt a guest at the wedding), but the marriage did not turn out well. Her husband, who claimed to suffer from a nervous disease, did not work for long periods of time. Riis, who had never had any patience with someone who would not work, offered financial support to his daughter but not 149

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One of Riis’s rare photographs of his own family, taken on Shelter Island, off Long Island. Although Riis was deeply devoted to his family, he considered photography part of his work, which he kept separate from his private life. As a result, very few images of his family survive.

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his son-in-law, and insisted that they live apart until he found work. Eventually Clara defied her father and rejoined her husband. Riis’s son John, like Riis himself as a youth, was restless and defiant. He ran away from school several times, tried to go to sea, and spent several years wandering from job to job in the West, eventually joining the Forest Service. Riis tried to be understanding, but found it difficult to allow his son the freedom he himself had enjoyed. “A fellow is apt to rust if he stays always in one place,” he wrote in a letter to John. “But you are ahead on that count.” Riis was closest to his younger daughter, Kate, who stayed at home taking care of her mother and eventually married a doctor, and to Billy, the youngest child. Riis kept up with his family in Denmark as much as he could, writing frequent letters, returning to visit them several times, and sending his children to Ribe for longer visits.

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Once when Riis was having breakfast at the White House, he told President Roosevelt that he was worried about his mother, who was sick. From the breakfast table, the Roosevelts sent her a telegram: “Your son is breakfasting with us.We send you loving sympathy. Theodore and Edith Roosevelt.” Just before his father’s death in 1893, Riis secretly arranged for his father to receive the Dannebrog Cross, the highest Danish medal of honor, for his services as a teacher. Seven years later, Riis himself was granted the same honor.“Though I did nothing to deserve it, I wear the cross proudly,” Riis wrote in his autobiography,“for the love I bear the flag under which I was born.” In 1900, following his strenuous efforts on behalf of the new tenement house laws, Riis collapsed on the street and was diagnosed with an inadequate supply of blood to the heart and an enlarged heart. For a while he believed he was dying. “I shall no more be able to go sweat-shopping with you,” he wrote to Roosevelt. Although he recovered, doctors cautioned him to take it easy in the future, a warning that he did not take very seriously. In 1901 Riis published his autobiography, The Making of an American. In this informal, anecdotal work, he gave a very cheerful, positive picture of his life. Much of the book is a tribute to Elisabeth, whom he called “my silver bride,” because they were that year celebrating their 25th anniversary. He discussed his battle with the slums, concentrating on the success he had achieved, his high opinion of the people who had fought beside him, and his belief in the potential of the immigrants with whom he had worked. Although he insisted that he had done nothing special, he was careful to give himself full credit for everything he had achieved, sometimes even exaggerating a bit. Throughout he explains how he came to love his adopted country and consider himself an American. The spirit of the entire book is contained in one line: “Looking back over thirty years it seems to me that never had man better a time than I.” 151

J ACOB R IIS The Making of an American proved extremely popular. Riis earned enough money from its publication to enable him to retire from work as a reporter and lead a less strenuous life, which was better for his health. He spent less time in the middle of the battle for social justice. In some ways the fight had moved beyond him. The reforms he had fought for in a personal, emotional way had become an institutionalized social science calling for organized, sustained reasoning, and professional social workers were beginning to take the place of volunteers. This kind of action was not Riis’s strong point. He agreed with Lincoln Steffens’s opinion, expressed in his tribute to Riis, that he had “an undisciplined mind that grasps facts as he himself sees them.”“My day was the day of the bludgeon,” he wrote to Steffens in 1906.“The day of scientific method has come, and I am neither able to grasp its ways, nor am I wholly in sympathy with them.” Riis realized that his greatest talent still lay in his ability to touch people’s hearts, to make them feel their kinship with the “other half ” and inspire them to action. He did not just make people feel sorry for the poor so that they would give to charity. He made them understand that fundamental changes were needed, even if he could not fully explain, or even understand, the specifics of these changes. “Let me tell you, my friends,” he urged in a 1911 lecture, “that the other way—the way of just relieving hunger and distress when it comes to you, without going deeper . . . costs twice as much.” More and more, he spent his time lecturing, talking about the people he had met, the battles he had fought, and the problems that still needed to be solved. Despite his rasping, somewhat squeaky voice, he was an extremely popular lecturer. He reused the same stories of his days in the slums in lecture after lecture. No matter how many times he repeated himself, his passionate belief in the importance of his message came through. He was enlightening, amusing, and full of specific detail. 152

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Riis continued to use the technique he had perfected in his reporting and in How the Other Half Lives. He talked about statistics, principles, and scientific studies, but he made the numbers real and touched his listeners’ imaginations by telling stories about the people he had come to know from the tenements. In a lecture on housing reform in Brooklyn, he cited pages of statistics about the number of tenement rooms with no windows, or windows looking only on an airshaft. Then he stopped. He told his audience about a little girl who lived in a back tenement where the sun shone only for a few short days in June. She had been able to tell him, Riis said, not only the day but the exact hour when the sun would finally reach her room. Numbers were easy to forget, but no one in his audience would forget that little girl. Riis embarked on a strenuous series of yearly lecture tours, traveling all over the country and speaking in as many as six different towns in one week. An article in Charities magazine in 1904 remarked that, because of all the reform and rebuilding for which he had made New York pay, he was sometimes called the city’s “most expensive citizen.” Now, the article suggested, he might become equally expensive for the entire nation. “A lecture by Jacob Riis will soon have to be reckoned a direct element in the budget of the town.” As much as possible, Riis visited the poorer sections of a town before his lecture, so that he would be able to make his lecture specific to the place. He was particularly eager to lecture in western towns that were only now being built up. He hoped that they might be able to avoid the mistakes New York and other large cities had made, so that they would never have a tenement problem to undo. When Riis worked for a specific cause now, it was usually a limited, concrete, practical goal. He took a particular interest in tuberculosis, which had killed six of his own brothers and was very common in the slums. Sea Breeze, a small experimental hospital on the Rockaway Peninsula beach in New York, had found sea air was helpful in 153

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THE SUN IN STANTON STREET In his books and lectures, Riis often reused anecdotes about people he knew from the tenements. Some of the children’s stories particularly touched him. He never forgot them, and he told them many times.The little girl in his Brooklyn lecture, watching for the sun on her wall, first appeared in this passage from The Battle with the Slum. n a Stanton Street tenement, the other day, I stumbled upon a Polish capmaker’s home. There were other capmakers in the house, Russian and Polish, but they simply “lived” there. This one had a home. The fact proclaimed itself the moment the door was opened, in spite of the darkness. The rooms were in the rear, gloomy with the twilight of the tenement although the day was sunny without, but neat, even cosey. It was early, but the day’s chores were evidently done. The tea-kettle sang on the stove, at which a bright-looking girl of twelve, with a pale but cheery face, and sleeves brushed back to the elbows, was busy poking up the fire. A little boy stood by the window, flattening his nose against the pane, and gazed wistfully up among the chimney pots where a piece of blue sky about as big as the kitchen could be made out. I remarked to the mother that they were nice rooms. “Ah yes,” she said, with a weary little smile that struggled bravely with hope long deferred,“but it is hard to make a home here.We would so like to live in the front, but we can’t pay the rent.” I knew the front with its unlovely view of the tenement street too well, and I said a good word for the air-shaft—yard or court it could not be called, it was too small for that—which rather surprised myself. I had found few virtues enough in it before. The girl at the stove had left off poking the fire. She broke in the moment I finished, with eager enthusiasm: “Why, they have the sun in there. When the door is opened the light comes right in your face.” “Does it never come here?” I asked, and wished I had not done so, as soon as the words were spoken. The child at the window was listening, with his whole hungry little soul in his eyes.

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Yes, it did, she said. Once every summer, for a little while, it came over the houses. She knew the month and the exact hour of the day when its rays shone into their home, and just the reach of its slant on the wall. They had lived there six years. In June the sun was due. A haunting fear that the baby would ask how long it was till June—it was February then—took possession of me, and I hastened to change the subject. Warsaw was their old home. They kept a little store there, and were young and happy. Oh, it was a fine city, with parks and squares, and bridges over the beautiful river,—and grass and flowers and birds and soldiers, put in the girl breathlessly. She remembered. But the children kept coming, and they went across the sea to give them a better chance. Father made fifteen dollars a week, much money; but there were long seasons when there was no work. She, the mother, was never very well here,—she hadn’t any strength; and the baby! She glanced at his grave white face, and took him in her arms. The picture of the two, and of the pale-faced girl longing back to the fields and the sunlight, in their prison of gloom and gray walls, haunts me yet. I have not had the courage to go back since. . . . They have yet two months to the sun in Stanton Street.

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J ACOB R IIS treating children with a crippling form of tuberculosis that attacked the bones and glands. Hearing of their work, he devoted much of his energy to raising money to enlarge the hospital. He introduced to the United States the Danish practice of selling ornamental stamps at Christmas to raise money for tuberculosis treatment. This idea was taken up by the Red Cross, and grew into the American Lung Association’s Christmas Seals, still in use today. He was a faithful advocate for any plans that would help get tenement children out into the country, and helped to organize the Boy Scouts, the Federated Boys’ Clubs, and numerous summer camps. And he worked tirelessly raising money for the King’s Daughters settlement house, which in 1901, in honor of his 25th wedding anniversary, was officially named the Jacob Riis Settlement House. In the spring of 1905, Riis set off on a lecture tour. He felt somewhat concerned and guilty about leaving Elisabeth, who was in poor health, but he believed that the work he was doing was so important he could not give it up. While he was away, she contracted bronchial pneumonia. He rushed to her side and spent the next two weeks watching her slowly slip away. “I am conscience-stricken that while I was traveling and lecturing she has been lonesome and longing for me,” he wrote to a friend. “God help us, we have not so many years left that we can afford to waste a day away from one another.” She died on May 18. Her death was a tremendous blow to him. In his diary he noted, “Lammet died. God help us all.” For the first time, he began to question the religious faith that had supported him throughout his life. In a letter to a friend he wrote, I can hardly weep any more. But in the still of nightwatches the loneliness of it all comes upon me and it is dreadful. Still I shall try to take up a man’s work and do it, and so it may be that the road shall not seem so long or so hard anymore.

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Riis’s work helped him to go on. For a while, he closed the house at Richmond Hill and traveled, staying with friends while Billy was at boarding school and Kate boarded with a neighbor. Riis threw all his energy into his fundraising and lecture tours. His heart continued to give him trouble. The exertion of traveling so much was not good for him, but he looked on his illness as an enemy to be fought—and he was always at his best in a fight. He wrote to a friend, “Though I will never be free from my enemy in this life, I will get him under and shall have a fighting chance for some years yet, the doctors promise.” He found comfort in the belief that he still had work to do, writing to another friend, “I shall have a little time yet, and there must be some use for me.” He hired as his secretary Mary Phillips, an acquaintance more than 20 years younger than he, with an interest in social work. She had grown up in the wealthy society of St. Louis, where her father was president of the Cotton Exchange. After being educated in England and France, she had briefly been an actress in New York City. Inspired by hearing Riis lecture, she had decided to offer him her assistance. She was a great help to him in managing the business side of his lecturing and writing, and she had a much better understanding of his finances than he had. (In later years she became one of the first female stockbrokers.) She handled all his business correspondence and arranged his lecture engagements, negotiating with the various lecture-booking agencies for him and keeping track of his complicated travel itineraries. He came to rely on her assistance and on her emotional support. She helped his 13-year-old son, Billy, to deal with the loneliness after his mother’s death, and she and Billy became very good friends. Riis was a deeply affectionate man who always had a strong need for people to love, and it was not natural for him to live without a beloved companion. Gradually he found himself falling in love with Mary. In 1907 the two 157

J ACOB R IIS Riis sent this card to his daughter Clara to announce his upcoming marriage to Mary Phillips. The usually formal Riis, who signed letters to his own children, “Affectionately your father, Jacob A. Riis,” unbent somewhat with Mary, whom he nicknamed “Mariettabean.”

became engaged. He explained in a letter to his son John, “The nest is empty and I am a lonely homeless man.” To the women at his settlement house he wrote, “Will you be glad with me when I tell you that I shall soon no longer be a homeless wanderer on earth. . . . I think that I shall be able to do my work better for the companionship of a strong, loving, and gentle woman.” And to his daughter Kate he wrote, “I too have to begin over again, and it is well so, for man may not lay down his work and still live.” He did not feel that he was forgetting Elisabeth, whom Mary had known. In the letter to the King’s Daughters, he told them, “Her sweet presence . . . will be with us always, and we will both love and cherish it. Meantime I am glad that a voice will welcome me also here.” His second marriage was as happy as his first. Mary was a more active participant in Riis’s work than Elisabeth had been, often accompanying him on his travels. With a much sounder grasp of money matters than he had, she took over his finances. One of the first things she did was convince him to raise his prices for the many articles he wrote. Whenever they were apart, he wrote her love letters every day. For years, Riis had dreamed of living in the genuine country again, as he had in his boyhood. Richmond Hill, 158

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although he loved it, was becoming a suburb of New York. With his health increasingly precarious, he knew he needed to slow down. In 1911, he and Mary began to look for a farm. Riis described their search in an article in World’s Work magazine. He was looking for a storybook farm. His main requirements were a brook and a charming old house. He also wanted sheep because, “Well, because I like them.” He first fell for a farm where “the little flock of sheep looked as if they came right out of a picturebook. . . . I wanted that farm with the nice sheep and the fish-pond and the cute little tricks.” Mary was much more hardheaded. She analyzed each farm’s potential and spoke with agricultural professionals to see if it could be made profitable. Finally they agreed on Pine Brook Farm in Barre, Massachusetts, which was both beautiful and workable, on the condition that “my share of the farming shall be the hunting and fishing of our land, if I will leave her hens alone.” Riis did not really intend to do much hunting. His land would be a “sanctuary for all the wild things of field and forest, except for the foxes,” which might kill Mary’s hens. Although Riis did a lot of work on the farm, especially building sheds and fences, Mary remained in charge and made the decisions about how to turn the farm into a paying concern.“In all matters pertaining to the soil,” he wrote in an article for Craftsman magazine, “I am just the chorus.” They grew potatoes and fruit, and raised livestock—although not sheep. Instead they had cows, which Riis did not like nearly as well, describing in his article the “utter moral depravity of the cows,” who insisted on straying into the fields. For a while they maintained homes in both Richmond Hill and Barre, but in 1913 they moved to Massachusetts full time. Although he had finally moved away, Riis did not cut his ties to New York. He corresponded with the settlement house and other charities, and visited frequently. He continued to write magazine articles and, despite his increasing health problems, he continued his lecture tours. 159

J ACOB R IIS In early 1914, he set out on a lecture tour of the Midwest. Mary, concerned for his health, tried to convince him to stay at home, but he felt he could not stop yet. There was still so much that needed to be done, and so many causes that needed his voice. On a more practical level, the farm was struggling, and they needed the money. He had also grown accustomed to the cheers and approval of his audiences, and probably felt a little lonely without them. In New Orleans he collapsed. He was moved to a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he developed bronchitis.While there, he wrote in a letter, “Now that I have to fight for almost every breath of air, I am more thankful than ever that I have been instrumental in helping the children of the tenements to obtain fresh air.” Mary and his youngest son, Billy, came out to bring him home, and they were with him at Pine Brook Farm when he died on May 25, 1914. He had continued his work to the last: on May 9 he published an article about the Sea Breeze hospital, and he was at work on an article on the creative play movement, proposing that play was not just a luxury but was necessary for children’s development. After his death, Mary received an outpouring of letters from all over the country, from people mourning him both as a beloved friend and as one of those rare people who had genuinely improved the world with his actions. Among the tributes were two he probably would have found particularly meaningful. One came from a personal friend. “I am grieved more than I can express,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt.“I feel as if I had lost an own brother. Jake’s friendship has meant more for me than I can ever say.” The other was a resolution passed at an inter-city conference of settlement house leaders: “Multitudes of men and women, boys and girls, in the East and the West, the North and the South . . . saw with him, often for the first time, the human needs of the forgotten dwellers in the great cities.”

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A FTERWORD Near the end of his life, in 1912, Jacob Riis gave a lecture in Chicago at a gathering in honor of George Washington’s birthday. He spoke of how far the world had come since he was a young man, and of the astonishing progress he had seen. There were still many problems with housing and work conditions, he acknowledged, but at least it was now generally accepted that society had a responsibility to deal with them. He was confident that soon the country would see sweatshops and child labor outlawed, and women would be given the vote and would receive equal pay for equal work. But he also had a warning to give. In 1910, immigration to the United States had reached an all-time high, and he had been hearing people worry that the immigrants were harming the country; that people were coming in who were not good enough to be Americans. He was not afraid of the immigrants, he said. Rather,“I have sometimes been afraid that some of the rest of us who have lived so long under the blessing of freedom that they have forgotten, may fall into the error of thinking it some sort of a special privilege.” He reminded his audience that each wave of immigrants had at one time been the newcomers, the alien 161

J ACOB R IIS ethnicity whose habits, language, and culture had seemed frightening and wrong to those already here. He was also deeply concerned about the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. “Wealth has piled up,” he said. “Poverty in our cities especially, seems more gruesome by contrast. This is a real peril, for the very soul of a democracy is this: a fair opportunity for everyone.” He urged his audience to remember that our aim is “human rights for all, not the coining of dollars by a few.” And, he reminded them that “murder is murder whether done with a disease-breeding tenement, a law-breaking factory. . . or the inhumanity that would starve the workman while fattening on the profits of his labor.” If these comments sound familiar, it is not surprising. A century later, the world we live in is, in some ways, very like the one Jacob Riis knew. Immigration increased in the 1990s until, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, 40 percent of the population of New York City was foreign-born—the highest percentage since Jacob Riis’s day, when, in 1860, it reached a high of 47 percent. (At its lowest, in 1970, it had fallen to 18 percent.) Immigrants today face prejudices similar to those Riis saw—many people still feel what he described to his Chicago audience as “the dread . . . that these [immigrants] have not in them the stuff of which to make Americans.” Once again the gap between the very rich and the very poor is growing rapidly. The nation again seems to be divided into the well off and the “other half.” The innercity problems of substandard housing and schooling, homelessness, and dangerous or inhumane working conditions that Riis brought to the attention of his time still plague us. But there is a difference. The “other half ” is not invisible. These issues are widely discussed in public forums from schools to newspapers. Every branch of government, federal, state, or local, knows it must come to terms with them somehow. Jacob Riis was in some ways a prophet. His beliefs and solutions often seemed simplistic even at the time, and they 162

A FTERWORD are inadequate to deal with the economic and political complexities of today’s world. Nonetheless, with his primitive flash photography, he illuminated a world that had been hidden in darkness, and woke people to a new understanding that, once gained, could not be lost. He opened the eyes of the reformers who followed him. They grappled with the problems he outlined, and from their work grew the entire system of social welfare we have today. If that system is inadequate and there is still much to be done, he would not be surprised. As he warned in his lecture, “Those things are but shadows of what may come again, if we lose our grip and once more let our conscience fall asleep, believing that we have done so much that all is well.”

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C HRONOLOGY 1849 Jacob Riis is born May 3 in Ribe, Denmark 1865 Moves to Copenhagen 1867 First Tenement House Act is passed in New York State 1870 Riis sails to America on the Iowa, May 18–June 5 1870–73 Wanders around the country doing various odd jobs 1873 Offered a position with the New York News Association, his first real newspaper job 1874 Hired as a reporter for the South Brooklyn News; two weeks later, is made editor of the paper 1875 Buys the South Brooklyn News 1876 Marries Elisabeth Goetz, March 5 1877 Purchases a stereopticon magic lantern with two friends; begins giving public shows; first son, Edward, is born; begins working as a reporter on the New York Tribune and that winter is named a police reporter; begins his explorations of the slums 1879 First daughter, Clara, is born 1881 Moves to daytime shift; makes friends with health inspector Roger Tracy 1882 Second son, John, is born 1884 Attends Tenement House Commission headed by Felix Adler

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C HRONOLOGY 1885 Becomes U.S. citizen 1887 Second daughter, Katherine, is born; Small Parks Act is passed 1888 Gives first magic lantern slide lecture about his experiences in the slums, January 25; begins taking photographs and experimenting with flash powder; gives first lecture showing interior photographs of the tenements, February 28; moves to Richmond Hill; meets Charles Parkhurst 1889 “How the Other Half Lives” is published in December edition of Scribner’s Magazine 1890 Riis begins work on How the Other Half Lives on New Year’s Day; the book is published in November; King’s Daughters settlement house is founded 1892 Lincoln Steffens comes to work in Mulberry Street reporters’ building; Children of the Poor is published in October 1894 Third son, Roger William, is born; Tammany Hall politicians are temporarily removed from power following the election of reform candidate William Strong as mayor; Lexow Committee meets to examine police corruption in New York; city government condemns Mulberry Bend tenements, promising to build a park in their place 1895 Theodore Roosevelt becomes New York City police commissioner, May 6 1896 Riis becomes executive officer of the Good Government Clubs of New York; Roosevelt abolishes police lodging houses 1897 Riis becomes secretary of the Small Park Advisory Committee; Mulberry Bend Park officially opens, June 15; Roosevelt leaves New York to become assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy 1898 Roosevelt is elected governor of New York, November 4 1899 Costello Anti-Sweatshop Act passed

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J ACOB R IIS 1900 Riis receives the Dannenbrog Cross of Denmark; Charity Organization Society creates the Tenement House Exhibition to demonstrate the need for reform; Riis collapses on the street from heart trouble, June 22 1901 Governor Benjamin Odell, Roosevelt’s successor, signs the New York Tenement House Act; Riis publishes his autobiography, The Making of an American; King’s Daughters settlement house officially named Jacob Riis Settlement House in honor of Riis’s 25th wedding anniversary; Theodore Roosevelt becomes President of the United States, September 14, when President William McKinley is assassinated 1902 Riis resigns from newspaper work; publishes The Battle with the Slum 1902–14 Riis travels around the country on lecture tours 1904 Theodore Roosevelt is elected President; Riis and his wife attend inauguration 1905 Elisabeth Riis dies, May 18 1906 U.S. Supreme Court rules that the New York Tenement House Act of 1901 is constitutional 1907 Riis marries Mary Phillips, July 29 1911 Purchases a farm in Barre, Massachusetts 1913 Moves to farm full time, finally leaving New York 1914 Groundbreaking ceremony for Sea Breeze Hospital takes place, January 27; Riis dies, May 25 1933 The section of the Rockaway Peninsula beach near Sea Breeze Hospital is renamed Jacob Riis Park

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“Flashes from the Slums.” New York Sun. February 12, 1888. In this article, written anonymously, Riis describes his first photography excursions into the tenements. “How the Other Half Lives,” Scribner’s Magazine. Vol. 6, no. 6 (December 1889), pp. 643–63. Cornell University reproduces the article online, as it originally appeared in Scribner’s Magazine: http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/moa/moacgi?notisid=AFR7379-0006-71 How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. 1890. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1997. The Children of the Poor. 1892. Reprint, New York: Arno and the New York Times, 1971. Out of Mulberry Street. 1898. Reprint, New York: Irvington, 1998. Ten Year’s War: An Account of the Battle with the Slum in New York. 1900. Reprint, Manchester, N.H.: Ayer, 2000. The Battle with the Slum. 1902. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1998. Children of the Tenements. 1903. Reprint, New York: Irvington, 2003. The Making of an American. 1904. Reprint, Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2003. Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904. Reprint, St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1970. The Old Town. New York: Macmillan, 1909.

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Alland, Alexander, Sr. Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen. Millerton, N.Y. : Aperture, 1974. This biography by the man who rediscovered Riis’s negatives contains excellent reproductions of many of his photographs. Chessman, G.Wallace. Governor Theodore Roosevelt:The Albany Apprenticeship, 1898–1900. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.

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J ACOB R IIS Jeffers, H. Paul. Commissioner Roosevelt:The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895–1897. New York : Wiley, 1994. An enjoyable retelling of Roosevelt’s adventures in New York, with Riis on almost every page. Lane, James B. Jacob A. Riis and the American City. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1974. A very scholarly study, this is the most complete biography of Riis. Meyer, Edith Patterson. “Not Charity, but Justice”:The Story of Jacob A. Riis. New York: Vanguard, 1974. This young adult biography gives an admiring portrait of Riis. Roosevelt, Theodore. “Jacob Riis.” Outlook. Vol. 107 (June 6, 1914), p. 284. Roosevelt wrote this tribute to his friend after Riis’s death. Roosevelt, Theodore. Theodore Roosevelt, an Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1919. Steffens, Lincoln. “Jacob A. Riis, Reporter, Reformer, American Citizen.” McClure’s. August 1903, pp. 419–25. A fond portrait of Riis as a reformer and friend. Steffens, Lincoln. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931. The New York sections of Steffens’s autobiography have a lot to say about Riis. Wade, Mary H. Pilgrims of To-day. Boston: Little, Brown, 1916. Yochelson, Bonnie. Jacob Riis. New York: Phaidon, 2001. This biography includes many of Riis’s photographs, with incisive commentary.

PHOTOGRAPHY Doherty, Robert J., ed. The Complete Photographic Work of Jacob A. Riis. New York: Macmillan, 1981. Hales, Peter B. Silver Cities:The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.

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SLUMS

Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points:The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001. A lively story of the slum area that contained Mulberry Bend, this book contains a lengthy biographical sketch of Riis. Freedman, Russell. Immigrant Kids. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980. A photo essay about the lives of immigrant children, which uses some of Riis’s work. Jackson, Anthony. A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost Housing in Manhattan. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976.

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W EBSITES

WEBSITES The Living City www.tlcarchive.org The Living City, a site run by Columbia University, captures the experience of living in New York City between 1860 and 1920, with a wealth of information on a variety of subjects related to public health and housing. Bartleby.com www.bartleby.com/people/Riis-Jac.html Online editions of How the Other Half Lives, The Making of an American, The Battle with the Slum, and Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen, are available at this site. The Museum of the City of New York www.mcny.org/Exhibitions/riis/riis2.htm Information about the Riis exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, where most of Riis’s photographs are located. Lower East Side Tenement Museum www.tenement.org The site of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City includes a virtual tour of an East Side tenement. On the Lower East Side: Observations of Life in Lower Manhattan at the Turn of the Century http://tenant.net/Community/LES/contents.html This site hosts the full text of a variety of articles written in the 19th century about the immigrant neighborhoods of New York City.

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I NDEX References to illustrations and their captions are indicated in bold. Adler, Felix, 68–69 Advertising, in magic lantern shows, 52, 53, 56 Air shafts, 93, 96, 97, 148 Alcoholism. See Drunkenness Alland, Alexander, 112 American Lung Association, 155 Astor House, 38 Bandit’s Roost, 121 Battle with the Slum,The, 24, 43, 45, 110, 134, 141, 143, 154–55 Bicycle squad, police, 129, 130 Booth,William, 122–23 Boy Scouts, 156 Brace, Charles Loring, 122 Broadway Tabernacle, 83 Building department, inspections, 96–97 Byrnes, Thomas F., 128, 129 Castle Garden, New York, 20, 21, 22 Charity, 76, 77, 78–79 Charity Organization Society (COS), 75–77, 146 Chickering Hall, 69, 70 Children, 86, 107–108, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 122–123, 126, 131–32, 146, 154–55, 156, 160 Children of the Poor (Riis), 116 Children’s Aid Society, 116, 122

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Christmas Seals, 155 Churches, 70, 83 City Mission Society, 83 Class distinctions, in Denmark, 9–10 Committee of Cities, 125 Community centers, 110. See also Settlement houses Cooper, James Fenimore, 12, 16 Copenhagen, 15–16 Corruption, 35, 69–70, 78, 124, 125, 127–31 Costello Anti-Sweatshop Act, 145 Dana, Charles A., 23 Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’Work among Them,The (Brace), 122 Danish Consulate, 21–22 Dannebrog Cross, 151 Delmonico’s, 24 Democratic Party, 40, 46, 50 Denmark, Riis’s early life in, 9–17 Dives, 109 Drunkenness, 109–10 Dumbbell apartments, 93, 147, 148 Elmira, New York, 53 Employment reform, 139–40, 142. See also Sweatshops Environment and character, 108 Ethnic groups, 103, 106 Evening Post, 125, 148 Evening Sun, 123

Factory Inspectors, Board of, 146 Federated Boys’ Clubs, 156 Financial panics, 34, 35 Five Points, 24, 26, 67 Flash photography, 79–81, 82 Flowers, distribution to poor, 72–74 Fordham University, 22–23 France, war with Prussia, 21, 24 French Consulate, 24 Garbage, 93, 97 Goetz, Elisabeth. See Riis, Elisabeth Gompers, Samuel, 125 Good Government Clubs, 131, 143 Grant, Ulysses S., 46 Greeley, Horace, 58 Halftone reproduction, 87 Harper’s Magazine, 84, 97 Health, Board of, 81, 132, 135, 143 Health Board, Metropolitan, 97 Health inspections, 68, 78, 96–97, 109, 111 Hester Street, 8 Homeless, housing for, 130–31. See also Police lodging houses Housing. See Tenements Housing reform, 68, 92–93, 96–97, 106–107, 130–31, 132–37, 138–39, 146–48 How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 6–8, 70, 81, 86–87, 94–95, 98–121, 122, 123

I NDEX Immigrants, 6–7, 18–20, 88, 90–91, 94, 101–102, 115 Immigration, 161–62, 163 Immigration facilities. See Castle Garden, New York In Darkest England and the Way Out (Booth), 122 Iowa, 17 Jacob Riis Settlement House, 156 Jacob the Delver (Jacob Riis), 11 King’s Daughters, 73–74 King’s Daughters settlement house, 156, 158 Labor disputes. See Railroad workers and strikes Lectures and lecture tours, Riis, 83–84, 86–87, 111, 113, 152–53, 156, 157, 160, 161 Legal reform, 111, 138 Lexow, Clarence, 125 Lexow Committee, 125 Lighting, in tenements, 147, 154–55 Liquor laws, 140 Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 75, 76, 77, 81 Lower East Side, 7, 88–89, 133–34 Mackellar, John, 46, 51, 52 Magic lanterns, 51. See also Stereopticon magic lanterns Magic lantern slides, 79 Making of an American,The (Riis), 9, 24, 71, 151–52 excerpts, 24–25, 36–37, 54–55 Manufacturing, 91–92. See also Sweatshops

Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Small Parks, 131, 137 McClure’s Magazine, 138, 139 McKinley,William, 148 Metropolitan Health Board, 97 Mulberry Bend, 24, 26, 88, 90, 133–37 Mulberry Street, 67, 133; police lodging, 25; reporters’ building, 61–63, 124–25 Myhlertz, Ferdinand, 31 New York Council of Good Government Clubs, 131, 132 New York News Association, 37, 38, 39–40 New York Tribune, 57–60, 64 New-law tenements, 147 Newspaper boys, 41 Old Town,The (Riis), 13 Orphan Trains, 122, 123 Panic of 1873, 35 Parkhurst, Charles H., 69–70, 83, 125 Parks, 132–37, 141–42 Party boss system, 42–46 Pennsylvania Railroad, 53 Phillips, Mary, 157–60 Photographing How the Other Half Lives, 6–7, 79–81, 112 Photographs, publication of, 84–85 Pine Brook Farm, 159, 160 Plumbing, in tenements, 90, 92, 97, 147 Plunkitt, George Washington, 43 Police Commissioners, Board of, 125 Police corruption. See Corruption

Police lodging houses, 25–28, 129–31 Police reforms, 70, 125, 127–31 Politics in America, 42–46, 50 Poverty Gap, 7 Poverty, causes of, 77–78 Prussia, 14, 15, 21, 23 Rag Hall, 12–14 Railroad workers and strikes, 53–57 Raymond (Elisabeth’s fiancé), 47, 48 Reform groups. See Charity Organization Society, Children’s Aid Society, Society for Ethical Culture Reformers, 7, 68–70, 75–77, 92, 122–23; mistrust of, 43, 76–77, 108–109 Reforms, 125; employment, 139–40, 142; enforcement difficulties, 96–97; government, 70, 125, 131; housing. See Housing reform; police, 70, 125, 127–131; Riis’s suggestions, 75, 77, 106–111; schools, 131–32; threats to, 140–42 Republican party, 148 Ribe, Denmark, 9, 10, 16, 17 Richmond Hill home, 72, 112, 157, 158, 159 Riis, Billy (son), 149, 150, 157, 160 Riis, Carolina (mother), 10, 11, 151 Riis, Clara (daughter), 71, 149–50, 158 Riis, Edward (son), 57, 71, 149 Riis, Elisabeth (Goetz) (wife), 14–15, 16, 17, 34, 41, 46–48, 49, 57, 151, 156, 158 Riis, Emma (adopted sister), 125 Riis, Emma (foster sister), 11

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J ACOB R IIS Riis, Jacob, 2, 57; American citizenship, 71; army, 14; birth and childhood in Denmark, 9–17; as carpenter, 14, 16; death, 160; and dogs, 25, 28, 35, 38; education, 12; health, 151, 157, 160; homelessness, 22, 24–25, 26–27; lectures. See Lecture and lecture tours; newspaper ownership, 41–42, 49–50; newspaper work, 25, 33–34, 35–38, 39–41, 50, 57–60, 61–70, 86, 123–24; personal life and family, 47–49, 57, 71–72, 87, 149–51, 156–60; as photographer, 6–8, 51, 79–81, 112–21; as police reporter, 60, 61–70; as reformer, 12–14, 72–73, 75, 77, 106–11, 140; religious faith, 42, 70, 156; slums, explorations of, 24–25, 66–67, 78; telegraph experience, 35, 38, 39–40, 63; work, early, in America, 21, 23, 31–32, 33–34, 35 Riis, Jacob, books by. See Battle with the Slum,The; Children of the Poor; How the Other Half Lives; Making of an American,The; Old Town,The; Ten Years’ War, A; Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen Riis, John (son), 71, 150, 158 Riis, Katherine (daughter), 71, 150, 157, 158 Riis, Niels Edward (father), 10, 11, 41, 151 Riis, Roger William (son). See Riis, Billy Riis, Sophie (sister), 11 Riis, Stephen (son), 71 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 77–78 Roosevelt, Theodore, 142–48, 149, 151, 160; as New York City police commissioner, 127, 125–31, 140–41 172

Saloons, 109–10, 140 Salvation Army, 122 Sanitation legislation, 97 Schools, 131–32, 141 Scribner’s Magazine, 84–86 Sea Breeze hospital, 153–56, 160 Settlement houses, 74–75, 86, 156, 158 Shanks,William, 57–58, 59–60, 63, 64 Simmons, Ichabod, 42 Slide lectures, 80–84 Slums, 66–68, 70, 71, 72, 88–96; explored by Riis, 24–25, 66–67, 78. See also Tenements Small Parks Act, 134 Society for Ethical Culture, 68, 69 South Brooklyn News, 40–42, 48, 49–50 Spartan Club, 14 Steerage, conditions in, 18–19 Steffens, Lincoln, 65, 78, 124–25, 127, 128, 134–35, 136, 138, 152 Stereopticon cameras, 52 Stereopticon magic lanterns, 51–57 Stereoscopic photos, 51 Stereotypes, ethnic and racial, 103, 106 Strong,William, 125 Sun, New York, 23 Sweatshops, 91–92, 93–96, 117, 139, 142–46 Swede Hill, 31

Tenement House Department of the City of New York v. Moeschen, 148 Tenement House Department, 66 Tenement House Exhibition, 146–47 Tenements, 66, 88–93, 96–97, 143; as cause of vice, 106–107; condemnation of, 132; conditions in, 81, 89–90, 91, 92, 99–101, 102, 129, 143, 147; contest for ideal, 92–93; cost of renting, 81, 90–91, 99; newlaw, 147; photography in, 6–7, 80–81, 82; publication of photos, 85, 87; reform efforts, 68, 92–93, 96–97, 106–107, 130–31, 138–39, 146–48; Riis’s slide lectures on, 83–84. See also Housing reform, How the Other Half Lives, Poverty Gap, Rag Hall, Sweatshops Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen (Riis), 126, 141 Tinkham, Helen W., 73 Tracy, Roger S., 68, 131 Tramps, 29, 30 Tuberculosis, 153–56 Tweed,William Marcy (Boss Tweed), 45

Tammany Hall, 43–45, 46, 70, 96, 125, 141 Taverns. See Saloons Ten Years’War, A (Riis), 24 Tenement House Act, 97, 147 Tenement House Commission, 68, 147

Wells, Ed, 51, 52, 53, 57, 72 Whig party, 58 Working conditions. See also Employment reform, Sweatshops

Unemployment rates, 35 United States Immigration Commission, 18–19 Van Wyck, Robert, 141 Veiller, Lawrence, 146

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the staff at the New York Public Library manuscript collection and at Bobst Library for their knowledgeable assistance; the Oxford University Press staff, especially Nancy Toff, Nancy Hirsch, Amy Henderson, and Brigit Dermott; and Paul and Naomi Pascal, David and Susan Pascal, Harriet Sigerman, Eric Stenclik, Eric Garberson, and Rustin Wright for good advice and helpful information, not all of which I paid attention to.

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P ICTURE C REDITS Children’s Aid Society: 123; Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Making of America Digital Collection. Scribner’s Magazine: 81; Courtesy George Eastman House: 52; Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division: Cover, 7, 8, 30, 33, 34, 41, 51, 59, 69, 93, 106, 109, 113, 115, 117, 119, 120, 127, 139; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection: 136, 137; Back Yard of the Henry St.Settlement House, Ca. 1890, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 86; Bandit’s Roost, Mulberry Street, Circa 1890, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 121; Children’s Party at the Home of Edward G.Veith 67 East 80th Street, 1906, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 100; Kitchen of the Longshoreman, Model Tenements, Brooklyn, N.Y. Riverside Buildings of Mr. Alfred T. White, Museum of the City of New York, Print Archives, Gift of the Community Service Committee: 146–47; Little Suzie, Gotham Court, Circa 1890, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 114; The Mullberry Bend, Ca. 1890. Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 90; New York Reporters’ Office, at 301 Mulberry Street, Circa 1890, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 62; Night School in the Seventh Advenue Lodging House; Children’s Aid Society, Ca. 1890, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 116; Police Station Lodgers Waiting for the Lodging to Open, Ca. 1890, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 28; Sabbath Eve in a Coal Celler, Ludlow Street, Circa 1890, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 118; Shelter Island, Coming through the fields, 1892, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 150; Steerage Deck, SS Pennland of the Red Star Line, 1893, Museum of the City of New York, Byron Collection: 19; Wedding Announcement for Jacob A. Riis and Mary Phillips, which took place on July 29, 1907 at Ipswich, Massachusetts, Museum of the City of New York: 158; Winter at Richmond Hill, Circa 1890, Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection: 72; National Archives, American Cities #34: 96; National Archives, American Cities #61: 66; The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Howard Greenberg: 2; Courtesy of the New York Police Department Photo Unit: 130; Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D.Wallach Division of Arts, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations: 163; Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations: 22, 43; Ribe Byhistoriske Arkiv: 11, 16, 48, 57; Courtesy Royal Library, Copenhagen: 10; Redpath Chautauqua Bureau Collection, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa: 111

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T EXT C REDITS p. 13: Riis, Jacob A. The Old Town. New York: Macmillan, 1909, pp. 149–50. p. 26–7: Riis, Jacob A. The Making of an American. New York: Macmillan, 1913, pp. 66–68. p. 36–7: Riis, Jacob A. The Making of an American. New York: Macmillan, 1913, pp. 116–23. p. 46: Riis, Jacob A. The Battle with the Slum. New York: Macmillan, 1902, pp. 322–23. p. 54–5: Riis, Jacob A. The Making of an American. New York: Macmillan, 1913, pp. 184–86. p. 82: Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. 1890. Reprint; New York: Penguin, 1997, pp. 29–30. p. 94–5: Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. 1890. Reprint; New York: Penguin, 1997, pp. 96–97. p. 104–5: Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. 1890. Reprint; New York: Penguin, 1997, pp. 137, 127, 129, 176. p. 126: Riis, Jacob. Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. Subscription Edition. New York:Washington, D. C.: Johnson Wynne Company, 1904, pp. 346–47. p. 143: Riis, Jacob A. The Battle with the Slum. New York: Macmillan, 1902, pp. 90–92. p. 154–5: Riis, Jacob A. The Battle with the Slum. New York: Macmillan, 1902, pp. 76–80.

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Janet B. Pascal is the author of Arthur Conan Doyle: Beyond Baker Street, also in the Oxford Portraits series. She studied English history and literature at Harvard and Yale, and works for a major children’s publishing house. Originally from Seattle, she now lives on the Lower East Side of New York City, where she walks past the site of Jacob Riis’s Mulberry Street office every day.