Jacob Riis

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National Humanities Center Jacob Riis and
Progressive Reform a live, online professional
development seminar
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Jacob Riis and Progressive Reform
JOY S. KASSON NHC FELLOW, 1996-97 PROFESSOR OF
AMERICAN STUDIES AND ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF NORTH
CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
Buffalo Bills Wild West Celebrity, Memory, and
Popular History Marble Queens and Captives Women
in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture Artistic
Voyagers Europe and the American Imagination in
the Works of Irving, Allston, Cole, Cooper, and
Hawthorne
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Jacob Riis and Progressive ReformFocus Questions

• How did urban poverty and immigration give rise
  to Progressivism?
• What can we learn about poverty, urbanization,
  and immigration by considering Riiss first-hand
  accounts of them, both verbal and photographic?
• How did Riis use photography as an instrument for
  political advocacy?
• What was the importance of Riiss How the Other
  Half Lives as a document of Progressive reform?

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Jacob Riis1849-1914
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(No Transcript)
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The Tenement
A barrack down town where he has to live  because
he is poor brings in a third more rent than a
decent flat house in Harlem. The statement once
made a sensation that between seventy and eighty
children had been found in one tenement. It no
longer excites even passing attention, when the
sanitary police report counting 101 adults and 91
children in a Crosby Street house, one of twins,
built together. The children in the other, if I
am not mistaken, numbered 89, a total of 180 for
two tenements! Or when a midnight inspection in
Mulberry Street unearths a hundred and fifty
"lodgers" sleeping on filthy floors in two
buildings. Spite of brown-stone trimmings,
plate-glass and mosaic vestibule floors, the
water does not rise in summer to the second
story, while the beer flows unchecked to the
all-night picnics on the roof. The saloon with
the side-door and the landlord divide the
prosperity of the place between them, and the
tenant, in sullen submission, foots the
bills. Chapter 2
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Old house with tenement
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Bandits Roost, Tenement alley
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This man slept in this cellar for four years
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In the home of an Italian rag picker
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The Sweat Shop
The bulk of the sweater's work is done in the
tenements, which the law that regulates factory
labor does not reach. To the factories
themselves that are taking the place of the rear
tenements in rapidly growing numbers, letting in
bigger day-crowds than those the health officers
banished, the tenement shops serve as a
supplement through which the law is successfully
evaded. Ten hours is the legal work-day in the
factories, and nine o'clock the closing hour at
the latest. Forty-five minutes at least must be
allowed for dinner, and children under sixteen
must not be employed unless they can read and
write English none at all under fourteen. The
very fact that such a law should stand on the
statute book, shows how desperate the plight of
these people. But the tenement has defeated its
benevolent purpose. In it the child works
unchallenged from the day he is old enough to
pull a thread. There is no such thing as a
dinner hour men and women eat while they work,
and the "day" is lengthened at both ends far into
the night. Factory hands take their work with
them at the close of the lawful day to eke out
their scanty earnings by working overtime at
home. Chapter 11
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Necktie Workshop in a Division Street Tenement
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Bohemian Cigar Makers
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Sewing and Starving
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Health Issues
The message came from one of the Health
Department's summer doctors, last July, to the
King's Daughters' Tenement-house Committee, that
a family with a sick child was absolutely
famishing in an uptown tenement. The address was
not given. The doctor had forgotten to write it
down, and before he could be found and a visitor
sent to the house the baby was dead, and the
mother had gone mad. The nurse found the father,
who was an honest laborer long out of work,
packing the little corpse in an orange-box partly
filled with straw, that he might take it to the
Morgue for pauper burial. There was absolutely
not a crust to eat in the house, and the other
children were crying for food. The great
immediate need in that case, as in more than
half of all according to the record, was work and
living wages. Alms do not meet the emergency at
all. They frequently aggravate it, degrading and
pauperizing where true help should aim at
raising the sufferer to self-respect and
self-dependence. (Chapter 21)
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Bottle Alley
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Stale Bread Vendor
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A home nurse
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Children of the slums
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The street their playground
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Didnt live nowhere
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(No Transcript)
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Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters
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Children of the slums
The Street Arab has all the faults and all the
virtues of the lawless life he leads. Vagabond
that he is, acknowledging no authority and owing
no allegiance to anybody or anything, with his
grimy fist raised against society whenever it
tries to coerce him, he is as bright 'and sharp
as the weasel, which, among all the predatory
beasts, he most resembles His sturdy
independence, love of freedom and absolute
self-reliance, together with his rude sense of
justice that enables him to govern his little
community, not always in accordance with
municipal law or city ordinances, but often a
good deal closer to the saving line of "doing to
others as one would be done by" these are strong
handles by which those who know how can catch
the boy and make him useful. Chapter 17
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Prayer Time in the Nursery
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Immigrants
The crowds that jostle each other at the wagons
and about the sidewalk shops, where a gutter
plank on two ash-barrels does duty for a
counter! Pushing, struggling, babbling, and
shouting in foreign tongues, a veritable Babel
of confusion. An English word falls upon the ear
almost with a sense of shock, as something
unexpected and strange. In the midst of it all
there is a sudden wild scattering, a hustling of
things from the street into dark cellars, into
back-yards and by-ways, a slamming and locking
of doors hidden under the improvised shelves and
counters. The health officers' cart is coming
down the street, preceded and followed by
stalwart policemen, who shovel up with scant
ceremony the eatables--musty bread, decayed fish
an d stale vegetables--indifferent to the curses
that are showered on them from stoops and
windows, and carry them off to the dump. Chapter
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Sabbath Eve in a Coal Cellar
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Talmud School
Public School
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The Bend becomes a Park
The Bend
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How the Other Half Lives, 1890
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• Final slide
• Thank you.