“SO IT WAS SETTLED THAT I SHOULD GO TO AMERICA”
ON JUNE 5, 1870, a twenty-one-year-old Danish immigrant named Jacob Riis stepped off a trans-Atlantic steamer at the southern tip of Manhattan, anxious to begin a new life in America. The young Dane had been born and raised in Ribe, a town of three thousand inhabitants on the windswept North Sea coast near the Prussian border. Riis’s father, a schoolteacher, had supported his family relatively comfortably, yet life was far from easy. Only four of the seventeen children Riis’s mother gave birth to survived into their teens. One year the family could not afford to buy overcoats to protect the children from the cold Scandinavian winter. But Riis’s childhood years were not especially difficult ones.
Despite his father’s prodding, young Jacob took little interest in academic pursuits and he was eventually apprenticed to a carpenter. In his midteens, he fell passionately in love with a twelve-year-old schoolmate named Elisabeth Gortz, but both she and her stepfather (a prosperous lumber merchant) rebuffed the young man’s advances. When Riis publicly insulted the stepfather at a town dance, apparently destroying all prospects of winning her affection, he decided to leave Ribe and complete his apprenticeship in Copenhagen.
Four years later, Riis returned to his birthplace and proposed to Elisabeth. The stepfather again rejected him. “I kissed her hands and went out,” he recalled years later, “my eyes brimming over with tears, feeling that there was nothing in all the world for me any more, and that the farther I went from her the better. So it was settled that I should go to America.” Elisabeth’s mother, feeling sorry for the spurned suitor, slipped Riis a photograph of her daughter and a lock of her hair. “I lived on that picture and that curl six long years.”
Believing that all the United States was wild and dangerous, Riis upon arriving in New York spent half his savings on a huge pistol, which he strapped to his waist as he strode up Broadway. A policeman, “seeing that I was very green,” suggested that Riis leave it at home. Riis had letters of introduction to the Danish consul in New York and an American businessman who had once been saved from a shipwreck near Ribe, but both men were in Europe when he arrived. Rather than await their return, he visited the employment office at the Castle Garden immigration depot, where he signed on to labor at a new ironworks in western Pennsylvania. A few days later, Riis was using his carpenter’s skills to construct huts for the company’s employees.1
When the news reached Pennsylvania in July that Prussia and France had gone to war, Riis precipitously quit his job and returned to New York, hoping to volunteer for the French Army and “take revenge for the great robbery of 1864” in which Prussia had annexed parts of southern Denmark near Ribe. He also hoped that military glory would win him the heart of his beloved Elisabeth. Riis pawned almost everything he owned to finance the journey to New York, arriving with a single cent in his pocket. Much to his chagrin, he discovered that the French were neither accepting volunteers in New York nor paying for their transportation to Europe. Having sold his boots to pay for his lodging, Riis was now completely destitute, and decided to walk northward out of town to look for work. He did odd jobs in exchange for food in Westchester County, sleeping in barns, carts, fields, and on roadsides. When he had saved a bit of money, he returned to New York to try to volunteer again, only to be rebuffed once more. Next, he took work in a New Jersey brickyard, until reading six weeks later of a French volunteer unit being outfitted in New York. He hurried there, but found that the regiment had already sailed for Europe. Entreaties to the French consul also proved fruitless. One day, he was offered work on a steamer sailing imminently for Le Havre, and realizing that this would at least bring him closer to the seat of war, he ran to his boardinghouse to collect his meager belongings. But by the time he returned to the docks, his ship had sailed. Riis sat on the pier and wept.
By this point it was autumn. “The brick-making season was over,” he recalled, and “the city was full of idle men.” Riis learned firsthand about New York’s seasonal labor market. “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. . . . 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.” He spent weeks in the notorious neighborhood, sleeping in the doorways or alleys of the district’s worst dwellings, sometimes relocating to a stoop in Chatham Square when Five Points’ “utter nastiness” was too much to bear, and subsisting on “meat-bones and rolls” that a sympathetic French cook at Delmonico’s would slip him out a rear kitchen window. Wondering how he could improve his circumstances and where he would stay now that it was too cold to sleep outside, Riis contemplated suicide. In the end, however, he decided to seek shelter at a police station house instead. But later that night the police evicted him from his cell for fighting, killed his dog, and put him on a ferry to Jersey City. Riis vowed he would never return to New York.
Out of the metropolis, Riis’s prospects finally began to improve. He walked one hundred miles to Philadelphia, “living on apples and an occasional meal earned by doing odd jobs.” There the Danish consul fed and clothed him and sent the twenty-one-year-old to a job in western New York near Jamestown. Riis worked making cradles in a furniture shop, as a lumberman felling trees, and on the frozen lakes harvesting ice. He tried to strike out on his own, operating an “express business” in which he hauled goods by wheelbarrow from the nearest ferry to his inland village, but he could not earn enough money to support himself. He was more successful as a trapper, sometimes earning a dollar a day selling muskrat skins, but this too did not last long. Riis did odd jobs on a farm, then moved to Buffalo, where he stacked boards in a lumberyard, made bedsteads, and finished doors in a planing mill. Cheated by his employer, he left town to toil at railroad construction. He returned to Buffalo to work in a shipyard. All this in a single year.
Riis flitted from job to job in part because he yearned to escape manual labor altogether. Thus, when some other Scandinavian woodworkers asked him to promote their furniture as a traveling salesman, he enthusiastically agreed. He did this for a number of years, peddling irons when the furniture makers went bankrupt. He tired of the nomadic salesman’s life, however, and returned to New York to enter telegraphy school. But he ran out of money before he could finish.
Riis began looking over the help-wanted ads, and one immediately caught his attention. A small weekly newspaper across the river in Long Island City was seeking a “city editor.” Ever since arriving in America, Riis had aspired to be a reporter. This motivation to pursue journalism may have originated with his father, who had once published a small weekly paper in Ribe. Riis saw the reporter’s vocation as far more dignified and honorable than the others he had pursued since arriving in the United States. He got the job in Long Island City, not pausing to wonder why he could land it so easily despite his lack of experience. After two weeks, though, he discovered that his employer was penniless, and quit.
By this point, it was the autumn of 1873. A terrible depression had brought business to a virtual standstill, and steady employment was nearly impossible to find. The news that his beloved Elisabeth was engaged—to a dashing cavalry officer, of all things—compounded Riis’s misery. He sold books door to door, but often went hungry, until one day at the end of the year he met the principal from his telegraphy school. Perhaps remembering Riis’s career goal, the man told him of an opening for a reporter at the New York News Association, a wire service. With a reference from the principal, Riis got the job, which paid ten dollars per week. He never went hungry again.2
Five months later, Riis left the wire service to take a position with the South Brooklyn News, the organ of some local Democrats. After two weeks, the politicos made him editor (he was the paper’s only employee) and raised his salary to twenty-five dollars per week. When the owners captured the fall elections, though, they decided to close their money-losing venture. Riis, inspired by the news that Elisabeth’s fiancé had died, induced the journal’s proprietors to sell it to him, for $75 down and the remaining $575 when he could raise it. Riis toiled unceasingly to make the paper a success, and his pluck, enthusiasm, boundless energy, and ambition soon began to pay dividends. In half a year he paid off his entire debt, delivering the final installment on June 5, 1875, Elisabeth’s birthday. That night “found me sleepless,” he recalled, “pouring out my heart to her” in a letter and begging her to marry him. This was his first communication with her since he had left Ribe, other than a perfunctory letter of best wishes he had written after learning of her engagement. “I carried the letter to the post-office myself,” Riis remembered, “and waited till I saw it started on its long journey. I stood watching the carrier till he turned the corner; then went back to my work.”
When Elisabeth received Jacob’s letter, she was still in deep mourning for her man in uniform, whom she had loved passionately. She had always been impressed with Jacob’s ardor but had felt little for him. Angered at Riis’s impudence and insensitivity, she dashed off another rejection letter and gave it to Riis’s mother to forward to her son in America. Mrs. Riis, however, opened the envelope and read the letter. To protect her son from further heartache, she decided not to send it.
Months passed, and with no word from Elisabeth, Riis immersed himself in other pursuits. He became a devout Methodist and was “converted” at one of the group’s revival meetings. He also threw himself into his work with even greater energy. No longer dependent on the politicos, Riis criticized them for firing good city employees who did not do the bosses’ political bidding. The ward heelers promised Riis patronage if he would toe the party line and secured him a post as court interpreter (which paid $100 per month for very little work) to induce him to find other targets for his editorial barbs. Riis could not stifle his independent spirit for long, however, and after three months he was fired from his sinecure.
Meanwhile, “the summer and fall had worn away, and no word had come from home” from Elisabeth. “Every day when the letter-carrier came up the street, my hopes rose high until he had passed. The letter I longed for never came.” Elisabeth, though, began to have second thoughts about Riis. Her fiancé in his dying days had told her that “‘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.’ . . . Did he mean Jacob,” she wondered, “who had surely proved constant, and like me, had suffered much? He was lonely and I was lonely, oh! so lonely!” After wrestling with her ambivalence for weeks, she finally decided to contact Jacob, telling him “we might write and get acquainted, and get used to the idea of each other, . . . and that if he still would have me, I was willing to go with him to America if he would come for me sometime.”
Around November 1,1874, this letter arrived on Riis’s desk. “I think I sat as much as a quarter of an hour staring dumbly at the unopened envelope,” he recalled twenty-five years later. He took it home and locked himself in his room before opening it. His screams of joy upon reading it were so loud that his neighbor knocked at the door to make sure he was all right. At first, the couple decided that he should not return to Europe for at least a year. Riis could not restrain himself, however, soon writing that he would come for her in six months, then five, then four.
In the end, he could not wait even that long. “What had happened was that just at the right moment the politicians had concluded . . . that they could not allow an independent newspaper in the ward, and had offered to buy it outright.” Riis sold them the South Brooklyn News for five times what he had paid just a year earlier. His pockets bulging with his newfound wealth, Riis boarded the very next steamer for Hamburg. He arrived in Ribe on New Year’s Eve 1875, proposing to a surprised and somewhat overwhelmed Elisabeth that same evening. They were married there in March and soon returned to America.3
To say that Jacob Riis was a man of determination and energy is obviously an understatement. Soon he would use that energy as a reformer, determined to improve the decrepit living conditions of poor New Yorkers, especially those in Five Points. First through his innovations in the use of flash photography, then through his groundbreaking book How the Other Half Lives, Riis revived and intensified New Yorkers’ concern for Five Points and its infamous slum housing.