Roosevelt: Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark. After struggling to find a job as a carpenter and having a marriage proposal declined, he moved to the US aged 21 hoping for a fresh start. When he arrived in New York city he was shocked by the conditions and how dangerous it was. The first thing he did was buy a gun with half the money he had. In the 1880s, 334,000 people were crammed into a single square mile of the Lower East Side of New York City, making it the most densely populated place on earth. They were packed into filthy, disease-ridden tenements, 10 or 15 to a room, and the rich knew nothing about them and cared less. The old saying, “out of sight, out of mind” applied. People of importance never set eyes on this part of New York.

Without a job, eventually, Riis was destitute. He survived on scavenged food and handouts from local restaurants and slept in public areas or in a foul-smelling police lodging-houses. At one point, Riis's only companion was a stray dog. One morning he awoke in a police lodging-house to find that his gold locket had been stolen. He complained to the sergeant, who became enraged and expelled him. Riis was devastated. Disgusted, he left New York by doing odd jobs and stowing away on freight trains, Riis eventually reached Philadelphia, where he appealed to the Danish Consul, for help and was cared for, for two weeks by the Consul and his wife.

At the end of the two weeks, the Danish Consul sent Riis, now dressed properly in a suit to a Scandinavian enclave in New York state. There, he worked as a carpenter and handyman. He achieved sufficient financial stability to find the time to experiment as a writer, in both Danish and English, although his attempt to get a job at a Buffalo, New York newspaper was unsuccessful, and magazines repeatedly rejected his submissions. Riis noticed an advertisement by a Long Island newspaper for an editor, applied for and was appointed city editor. He quickly realized why the job had been available: the editor in chief was dishonest and indebt. Riis left in two weeks. Again unemployed, he returned to New York City.

 

Change in Fortunes

Through an acquaintance, Riis heard about trainee position with the New York News Association. He hurriedly washed in a horse trough and went for the interview. Despite his disheveled appearance, he was sent for a test assignment: to observe and write about a prestigious lunch event. Riis covered the event competently and got the given the job.

At his new job, Jacob Riis was able to write about both the rich socialites and impoverished immigrant communities. He did his job well and was promoted to editor of a weekly newspaper. A neighbor of Riis, who was the city editor of the New-York Tribune, recommended Riis for a short-term contract. Riis did well and was offered the job of a police reporter. He now had his own office across from police headquarters and joined them to cover events.

 

Police Reporter

Chapter 7 - Police Raid on Beer Dives, Brothels, gambling, dog fighting 

Jacob Riis had both a close friendship and on-going, professional relationship with political figure Theodore Roosevelt. Their relationship began in 1895 when Roosevelt was appointed as president of the Board of Commissioners of the New York City Police Department. He asked Riis to show him nighttime police work. During their first tour, the pair found that nine out of ten patrolmen were missing from their posts. Riis wrote about this for the next day's newspaper, and for the rest of Roosevelt's term the police force was more attentive. Riis then continued to serve as an advisor to Roosevelt both on the local and eventually federal level.

During these stints as a police reporter, Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city, the kind of place he once lived. Through his own experiences in the poorhouses and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference. Working night-shift duty in the immigrant communities of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Riis developed a dramatic writing style, and he became one of the earliest reform journalists. He reported on the conditions that he saw. The unsanitary conditions, disease, two families sharing a single room and neglected children. Jacob Riis wanted everyone to see it.

It was a time of increasing nationalism and pride in wealth and innovation. The Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies were admired at the pinnacle of civilization. Their large homes, revolutionary industrial machines and extravagant lifestyles were directly tried to and representative of American exceptionalism. However, the wealthy lived in ignorance of the plight of those less fortunate. Riis was disgusted that the wealth and success of a few was illuminated by politicians and journalists but the struggles of the masses were largely forgotten. 

As Riis noticed that many of the cities’ criminals had grown up in the worst slums. He emphasized, seeing a connection between a poor home life and a corrupted adulthood creating criminals.

 

Photography

"One half of the world doesn't know how the other half lives." was one of the quotes from Jacob Riis. He wanted to change that.

Riis had for some time been wondering how to show the squalor of which he wrote more vividly than his words could express. He tried sketching but was not very good at this. Camera lenses of the 1880s were slow and dependent on natural light; photography thus did not seem to be of any use for reporting about conditions of life in dark interiors. In early 1887, however, Riis was startled to read that "a way had been discovered to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest corner might be photographed that way."

Recognizing the potential of the flash, Riis informed a friend, who was also a keen amateur photographer. Together they found two more photographer friends and the four of them began to photograph the slums. Because of the nighttime work, he was able to photograph the worst elements of the New York slums, the dark streets, tenement apartments, and illegal bars, and documented the hardships faced by the poor and criminal, especially in the vicinity of notorious Mulberry Street. These are the stories he told:

 

Tales of New York

At the turn of the 20th century, many people were immigrating to American. The most popular destination was New York City. Italians, Irish, Germans, Chinese and Jewish people came in by the millions. They were usually poor people looking for a better life in America. However, once they got there they struggled to find this better life. Each ethnicity banded together. The Irish mingled with the other Irish and settled specific areas. Other ethnicities did the same, settling Jewtown, Chinatown and Little Italy. 

Riis describes one apartment being home to two families. A room 13 feet by 13 feet. Sometimes 12 adults in a single room. No air conditioning. No electricity. No indoor plumbing. One outhouse for 100 people. And a million people in New York city lived this way. They worked 12-hour days in the cities factories and slept 8 hours in this squalid condition. Leaving 4 hours of free time, usually taken up by chores. His sympathetic portrayal of his subjects emphasized their humanity and bravery amid deplorable conditions and encouraged a more sensitive attitude towards the poor in this country.

"Three beds are there, if the old boxes and heaps of foul straw can be called by that name... piles of rubbish in the corner... The closeness and smell are appalling. Six adults and 5 children live here. On a summers day, the outside was climbing into the 90s but inside that awful room it was 115."

Page 86, homeless can rent a box for their feet.

Page 91 - story of fires 

Disease and starvation - Page 129

Page 30

 

Children 

If the conditions weren't tragic enough, they were even more tragic for children living in the slums. They were often left with two choices. Stay at home in the care of their parents, who were often mentally or physically unable to look after them and their siblings. You might be put to work for 10 hours a day at the age of 12 years old. The money you earned wouldn't be yours but would belong to your parents. They might then go out and spend it on things they want and leave you with very little to eat. 

Page 98 - 12 year old working 10 hour days

Children learning to write - 138

The other option was to run away and join the homeless children on the streets. They wouldn't have a place to sleep every night and they wouldn’t have adults to stay close to. Instead, they would join gangs of homeless children their own age and steal food on the streets. They would sleep on stone, often getting warmth from the hot air coming from below. In 1889, New York, 1 in 8 or 13% of people arrested were under 20 years old. 

Child at police station- 140

Contraception was considered a sin by the Catholic Irish and Italians. The average woman had 7 children in 1900. That means for every woman that didn't have children, someone else had 14. The Pope and Catholic doctrine teaches that sex was created by God for the purposes of having children. Most Catholics therefore didn't take precautions and simply had child after child even if they couldn't look after them or afford them or want them. 

Starving children - page 199

When a child died, very often the parents couldn't afford the cost of the funeral and they were sent to the city's mass grave. The parents job didn't offer them paid time to grieve. So back to work they would go that very next day, that is if they didn't want to risk losing more children. This nightmare drove many women crazy and the lunatic asylum was always full of crying women, broken by the world they lived. 

 

Legacy

Many of the cities’ politicians argued that it was a spiritual problem. They believed people just needed to learn self control. Some argued that it was a material problem. Jacob Riis argued "Destitution and poverty are wedded everywhere to dirt and disease. The diseases these people suffer from are not due to intemperance or immorality, but to ignorance, want of suitable food, and the foul air in which they live and work." Jacob Riis displayed though who were held captive by poverty for the rich to see. He said it was a “Bitter Mockery to the Glory of New York City.”

 

Changes

How would you improve the lives of thousands in New York at this time?

Law was passed that said that a certain size window and a certain amount of ventilation was required to rent a space. Efforts made to improve plumbing and cleaning the streets.

Roosevelt was greatly inspired by Riis' work. After reading the articles, Roosevelt was so deeply affected by Riis's sense of justice that he befriended Riis for life, later remarking, "Jacob Riis, whom I am tempted to call the best American I ever knew, although he was already a young man when he came here from Denmark".

After Roosevelt became president, he wrote a tribute to Riis.

“a man, well qualified to pass judgment, alluded to Mr. Jacob A. Riis as "the most useful citizen of New York". Those fellow citizens of Mr. Riis who best know his work will be most apt to agree with this statement. The countless evils which lurk in the dark corners of our civic institutions, which stalk abroad in the slums, and have their permanent abode in the crowded tenement houses, have met in Mr. Riis the most formidable opponent ever encountered by them in New York City.”

Roosevelt's three page tribute honored Jacob Riis for his gift of expression and his ability to make others see what he saw and feel what he felt. Roosevelt viewed Riis as a powerful promoter of change who allowed no failure to stop him from seeking reform. As long as Riis continued pursuing useful work, Roosevelt believed he would have no trouble receiving more than enough support.

Roosevelt believed society would benefit from more active reformers such as Riis. In fact, it was in part due to Riis' influence that Roosevelt instituted the White House Conference on Children as a means to aid the children exposed in How the Other Half Lives and Children of the Tenements. Roosevelt used the public reaction to Riis’ photographs to push for social support and better conditions for the poor. This was a driving force of the Progressive era. National attention of those most in need brought a national push to remedy the hardships of those most in need.

The moral anger of Jacob Riis sparked a push for even the poorest of society to have sanitary living conditions, windows in every room, indoor plumbing and security. These improvements immeasurably brought greater health, less disease lower crime and greater happiness to everyday new Yorkers.

Riis would’ve agreed with Gandhi when he said, “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.”

How did Jacob Riis improve people's lives? 

Could politicians have solved the problem without him?