Ushering in the age of the Progressive journalist, who used the power of the press to pit democracy against the social injustices wrought by the excesses of industrialized capitalism
Jacob A. Riis
(1849–1914)
The closing quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth in the United States are often called the “Gilded Age.” It was a name Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined for the period in the title of their 1873 satirical novel, The Gilded Age. These years were a period of American economic expansion, explosive growth of the nation’s cities, and great American optimism and opulence. Yet, as the historian Sean Cashman wrote, “Throughout the Gilded Age, the specters of poverty and oppression waited on the banquet of expansion and opportunity.”
It was an era with an insatiable demand for labor, so long as that labor was dirt-cheap. As economic historian Clarence Long noted, the mean hourly wage of male factory workers, age sixteen and older, was 16 cents in 1890, with a low of 11 cents for cotton-mill workers and a high of 29 cents in the printing industry. Such wages ensured that unskilled and even semiskilled labor would always be the working poor, consigned to industrial shantytown slums and, in the largest cities, to tenements that were nothing more than miserable warehouses for human beings.
During the closing quarter of the nineteenth century, New York City spawned more tenements and tenement slums than anywhere else in the nation. It was New York that attracted a massive influx of immigrants looking to the United States for a better life than they could find in the Old World. On balance, many achieved their dream, but many also were consigned to the squalor of neighborhoods packed with badly overcrowded, ill-lit, and suffocatingly narrow apartment buildings. By 1900, some 2.3 million people—two-thirds of New York City’s population—lived in such places.
Life in the tenement slums was both grim and dangerous. But as the demand for cheap labor increased, so did the immigration of Europe’s poorest people, and the tenements were continuously occupied. The city’s middle and upper classes avoided the Lower East Side of Manhattan, turning a blind eye to conditions there—until 1890, when a journalist named Jacob August Riis published How the Other Half Lives, an exquisitely detailed, eloquently reported exposé of life in the slums of New York.
The remarkable documentary narrative quoted extensively from the slum-dwellers themselves, thus giving them a voice hitherto seldom heard. It was accompanied by Riis’s own stark photographs, which illuminated the darkest corners of tenement life using the harsh light of flash powder. The Victorian approach to social injustice, poverty, and suffering was often softened with romantic sentimentalism, whether the subject was the slums of London or those of New York. Riis purged the sentimental, presenting instead the naked truth with a hard-edged compassion born of painful objectivity.
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Jacob Riis was himself an immigrant. He was born in Ribe, Denmark, one in a family of fifteen children of Niels Edward Riis, a schoolteacher who also wrote part time for the local newspaper, and Carolina Riis, a homemaker. The desperately poor conditions in Riis’s Denmark can be gauged by the fact that only three of the Riis children, including Jacob, survived to witness the opening of the twentieth century.
Jacob’s father saw his son as a talented writer and urged him to develop and pursue a literary career, but Jacob, seeing the poverty all about him, apprenticed himself to a carpenter instead. When the father of the girl he loved rejected him as a prospective son-in-law, the twenty-one-year-old Riis immigrated to the United States in 1870. For the next seven years, he scraped and scrambled to make it as a carpenter. For long stretches, he was close to starvation—even though he was actually a very good carpenter.
Frustrated, he finally wandered back toward the path his father had wanted for him. Riis found freelance work writing occasional news stories and was able to cobble together a small amount of cash along with a wad of promissory notes, which bought him a bankrupt weekly newspaper. He made a go of it before selling the enterprise at a handsome profit. He used the funds to return to Denmark, where the young woman, whose father had rejected him years earlier, now accepted his proposal of marriage. Riis brought his bride back to New York, where he briefly worked for a Brooklyn paper before joining the staff of the New-York Tribune in 1877.
He was assigned as a police reporter and given a desk in a dingy press office on Mulberry Street across from police headquarters. Savvy New Yorkers called Mulberry Street “Death’s Thoroughfare.” It was the heart of the Lower East Side immigrant slums and a beat with rarely a dull moment. Riis walked the streets of this district relentlessly, especially between the hours of two and four in the morning, determined, as he said, to catch the neighborhood “off its guard.” He was, in effect, a voyeur with a social conscience, gliding noiselessly in the godless hours through places like Bandits’ Roost, Bottle Alley, Bone Alley, Thieves’ Alley, and Kerosene Row.
Riis prowled and reported his beat for years. As the 1880s approached their close, he recognized that the nation, now in the gathering throes of Progressivism, was ready to see what he saw. A new crop of social activists and politicians was bent on improving American civilization, including the lot of the immigrant, and Riis had good reason to believe that the stories around him could earn a place on something other than a police blotter. The message he wanted to deliver was that the Lower East Side “was not fit for Christian men and women, let alone innocent children, to live in, and therefore it had to go.”
He took up the pencil and camera that had served him so well as a newspaper reporter, and he used them, all with his journalist’s nose for a compelling story, to systematically document the district he had known intimately for more than a decade. He believed that what most broke his heart would break the hearts of his readers as well, and so he focused most sharply on the children of the neighborhood. The book he published in 1890, How the Other Half Lives, billed as a document of New York City tenement life, is mostly a book about the doomed children of the Gilded Age slums. He wrote:
A little fellow who seemed clad in but a single rag was among the flotsam and jetsam stranded at Police Headquarters one day last summer. No one knew where he came from or where he belonged. The boy himself knew as little about it as anybody, and was the least anxious to have light shed on the subject after he had spent a night in the matron’s nursery. . . . He sang “McGinty” all through, with Tenth Avenue variations, for the police, then settled down to the serious business of giving an account of himself. The examination went on after this fashion:
“Where do you go to church, my boy?”
“We don’t have no clothes to go to church.” And indeed his appearance, as he was, in the door of any New York church would have caused a sensation.
“Well, where do you go to school, then?”
“I don’t go to school,” with a snort of contempt.
“Where do you buy your bread?”
“We don’t buy bread; we buy beer,” said the boy, and it was eventually the saloon that led the police as a landmark to his “home.” It was worthy of the boy. As he had said, his only bed was a heap of dirty straw on the floor, his daily diet a crust in the morning, nothing else.
How the Other Half Lives was a bestseller. No less a Progressive than Theodore Roosevelt hailed it as “an enlightenment and an inspiration.” It not only exposed slum conditions in New York but also alerted the entire nation to such conditions elsewhere. No one who read the book and looked at its photographs could any longer claim ignorance of the misery of “the other half.”
How the Other Half Lives inaugurated programs of slum clearance throughout urban America. It was almost as if a switch had been thrown. Before Riis’s book, there had been no concerted efforts to clear the slums. Riis was but one of a small legion of Progressive writers who appealed to the conscience of the Gilded Age. Collectively, they were called the “muckrakers,” a word adopted by Theodore Roosevelt from John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which portrayed a man armed with a “muck-rake” to sweep up the filth around him while he remained unaware of the celestial glory above his head. American muckraking was born from the marriage of the Progressive movement and the professionalization of journalism.
Following the muckraking trail that Riis had blazed was Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel The Jungle told the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who worked in a Chicago meatpacking plant. Rudkus represented the plight of millions of immigrants, who were soft targets for exploitation by employers, policemen, and others with power. Sinclair described Rudkus’s workplace in nauseating detail, including, among other things, the big meatpackers’ use of tubercular beef and the grinding up of rats. Six months after the novel’s publication, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and a Meat Inspection Act.
Other Riis-esque muckrakers included Ida Tarbell, who exposed the evils of industrial monopoly in her History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), and Lincoln Steffens, whose Shame of the Cities (1904) reported on the machinations of the nation’s corrupt urban political machines. These and others issued unblinking reports on business corruption, political skullduggery, child labor, slum conditions, racial discrimination, prostitution, sweatshop labor, insurance fraud, and illegal stock manipulations. Together, they disrupted business-as-usual, creating real, documented, and measurable change in American society. They did not tear down American capitalism, but did their best to saddle it with a conscience.