Part 2 of the Legacy: Journalism
Another way that Jacob Riis affected the lives of poor immigrants was through his writing. In 1888 a reporter on the staff The New York Evening Sun said "in that position, he made it his mission to open the city's eyes to the desperate lives of the least fortunate." Throughout Riis's career he wrote How the Other Half Lives (1890), Children of the Poor (1892), The Battle with the Slum (1902), Children of the Tenement (1903), and the Making of an American (1901). He is most commonly known for How the Other Half Lives detailing the housing problems the poor immigrant workers faced to argue in favor of reforming New York's tenements. He made the readers "wonder if any principle, moral, or economic could justify such terrible violations." His work made them think in a different way about poverty "to relieve such squalid living conditions in desperate need" which then helped ignite many reform movements. During this time he was giving momentum to a sanitary movement that started in New York State Tenement House Act of 1901.
Tenement House Act of 1901: one of the first laws to ban the construction of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings in the state of New York.
Excerpts from Jacob Riis's writing
The Battle of the Slum: "When, after a hundred years, we opened our eyes, it was upon sixty cents a day as the living wage of the workingwoman in our cities…Our country had grown great and rich: through our ports was poured food for the millions of Europe. But in the back streets multitudes huddled in ignorance and want…Political freedom we had won but the problem of helpless poverty, grown vast with the added offscouring of the Old World, mocked us, unsolved."
How the Other Half Lives: "…What if the words ring in your ears as we grope our way up the stairs and down from floor to floor, listening to the sounds behind the closed doors--some of quarrelling, some of coarse songs, more of profanity. They are true. When the summer heats come with their suffering they have meaning more terrible than words can tell. Come over here. Step carefully over this baby--it is a baby, spite of its rags and dirt--under these iron bridges called fire-escapes, but loaded down, despite the incessant watchfulness of the firemen, with broken household goods, with wash-tubs and barrels, over which no man could climb from a fire. This gap between dingy brick-walls is the yard. That strip of smoke-colored sky up there is the heaven of these people. Do you wonder the name does not attract them to the churches? That baby's parents live in the rear tenement here. She is at least as clean as the steps we are now climbing. There are plenty of houses with half a hundred such in...” (Riis, How the Other Half Lives)
“. . . The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pretense of a bedroom, though the head-high partition enclosing a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes is the shallowest of all pretenses. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as foul...Some sort of an apology for a bed, with mattress and blanket, represents the aristocratic purchase of the tramp who, by a lucky stroke of beggary, has exchanged the chance of an empty box or ash-barrel for shelter on the quality floor of one of these "hotels." A strip of canvas, strung between rough timbers, without covering of any kind, does for the couch of the seven-cent lodger who prefers the questionable comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow to the revelry of the stale-beer dive...” (Riis, How the Other Half Lives)
“...I have in mind an alley— inlet rather to a row of rear tenements— is either two or four feet wide according as the wall of the crazy old building that gives on it bulges out or in. I tried to count the children that swarmed there, but could not. Sometimes I have doubted that anybody knows just how many there are about. Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about. When last spring some workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on a North River pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up. The truant officer assuredly does not know, though he spends his life trying to find out, somewhat illogically, perhaps, since the department that employs him admits that thousands of poor children are crowded out of the schools year by year for want of room...” (Riis, How the Other Half Lives)
"…I counted the other day the little ones, up to ten years or so, in a Bay and street tenement…fourteen or fifteen feet long, just enough for a row of ill smelling closets [outhouses]…I counted one hundred and twenty-eight in forty families." (Riis, How the Other Half Lives)
"…Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about." (Riis, How the Other Half Lives)
“. . . The twenty-five cent lodging-house keeps up the pretense of a bedroom, though the head-high partition enclosing a space just large enough to hold a cot and a chair and allow the man room to pull off his clothes is the shallowest of all pretenses. The fifteen-cent bed stands boldly forth without screen in a room full of bunks with sheets as yellow and blankets as foul...Some sort of an apology for a bed, with mattress and blanket, represents the aristocratic purchase of the tramp who, by a lucky stroke of beggary, has exchanged the chance of an empty box or ash-barrel for shelter on the quality floor of one of these "hotels." A strip of canvas, strung between rough timbers, without covering of any kind, does for the couch of the seven-cent lodger who prefers the questionable comfort of a red-hot stove close to his elbow to the revelry of the stale-beer dive...” (Riis, How the Other Half Lives)
“...I have in mind an alley— inlet rather to a row of rear tenements— is either two or four feet wide according as the wall of the crazy old building that gives on it bulges out or in. I tried to count the children that swarmed there, but could not. Sometimes I have doubted that anybody knows just how many there are about. Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about. When last spring some workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on a North River pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up. The truant officer assuredly does not know, though he spends his life trying to find out, somewhat illogically, perhaps, since the department that employs him admits that thousands of poor children are crowded out of the schools year by year for want of room...” (Riis, How the Other Half Lives)
"…I counted the other day the little ones, up to ten years or so, in a Bay and street tenement…fourteen or fifteen feet long, just enough for a row of ill smelling closets [outhouses]…I counted one hundred and twenty-eight in forty families." (Riis, How the Other Half Lives)
"…Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about." (Riis, How the Other Half Lives)
Citations:
- Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890. Print.
- Riis, Jacob A. The Battle with the Slum . New York: Macmillan, 1902, 1-8. Print.
- Jaycox, Faith. The Progressive Era. New York: Facts On File, 2005, 10. Print