5
See the World in the Wider Social Context
Books about imaginary worlds or grand philosophical theories or even great people can all inspire, but so too, perhaps perplexingly, can books about the grubby details of life, the seedy corners of the cities—or even the bloody details of scalping prisoners. Thus it is with Jacob A. Riis, journalist and photographer, who became famous for his tireless work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century exposing corruption and public ills in the United States, who seems to have been set on his way by the novels of Charles Dickens, works like A Tale of Two Cities, which are equally divided between subtle psychological characterizations and polemical denunciations of the ills of public life in a world turned upsidedown by industrialization. And so it is in recent years too, with Mike Duffy, founding CEO of CityBase, who says that the book that inspired him was a rather depressing tale of life when you are “down and out” in big cities: George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.
It’s not an immediately obvious connection. Duffy, after all, has a background in entrepreneurship and finance, including time at Northern Trust managing assets in short-term interest rate markets. But he developed his interest in behavioral economics over a decade working in capital markets, including as a Federal Reserve analyst at Northern Trust. He then concentrated in economics, econometrics and statistics, and entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business before founding CityBase and “embarking on his mission for humanity” as his website today unabashedly puts it.
He explains that CityBase pulls together all his business interests—finance, behavioral economics, and government—and that the core idea is to use technology to “unlock” the opportunity to give each citizen their own experience. Today his website proudly declares that “Mike was driven to embrace local government’s distinct operational challenge of serving every person, regardless of their needs or demographics.”
All over the United States different municipalities are at different stages of implementing his ideas, with Chicago, for instance, busy installing a kiosk in every library, police station, and alderman’s council to enable every citizen easy access to their services.
And all this, as Duffy revealed in a 2017 comment for Inc.com, drew in several crucial respects on Orwell’s book; it had been for him “a gateway to . . . deeper exploration of behavioral economics and the struggle of the working class.”
Duffy goes on to explain how the English writer, best known for the two dark political classics Animal Farm and 1984, became a key influence, saying of Down and Out:
This memoir is about his time living essentially as a tramp in the late 1920s, during a time when Europe—and the U.S., for that matter—was peaking in an economic boom fueled by the creative monetary policy that would soon lead to a global Depression. The associated asset inflation of the boom widened the gap between those who owned and those who earned: workers whose standard of living had eroded. Orwell captures the humanity and spirit of the downtrodden poor during this period, in 1929, at a peak of extravagance that we now know was in its twilight, on the cusp of the Great Depression and WWII.
And when asked to suggest his favorite George Orwell quotation, Duffy points to Down and Out, saying that one line sticks with him even today: “When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that.”
But let’s go back to well over a hundred years ago and Jacob Riis. In 1891, one of his photo stories revealed sewage flowing unchecked into New York reservoirs and on its own is considered to have led to public health programs that saved tens of thousands of lives. It was feats such as this that led that grand political figure Theodore Roosevelt to describe him as “the most useful citizen of New York” and to history itself according him the honor of pioneering a vital, investigative kind of journalism, the variety nowadays called (if sometimes rather disparagingly) “muckraking.”
One of Riis’s images of “the other half”: Brandt’s Roost, in New York. (Jacob Riis, Preus Museum, n.d. https://www.flickr.com/photos/preusmuseum/5389939434/in/photolist-9dhRdf.)
It all came together for Riis when he wrote an article for an illustrated magazine that included engravings adapted from his photographs, and if it seems hard to imagine the effect it had now, in an age of cameras and indeed pretty shocking images everywhere, it was the visual representations as much as the words that had the power to shock readers to the extent that change became unavoidable and to upset convention to the extent that other magazines (or at least their proprietors) henceforth refused to deal with him. Nonetheless, the public debate led to an invitation to write a book that proved to be even more influential than features in the weeklies.
The book was called How the Other Half Lives, and it emerged just a year later, in 1890. Today, it is still counted as a classic work of photojournalism documenting the conditions of life in the slums and bidonvilles of New York in the closing decades of the nineteenth century as well as raising broader issues about the extent to which the rich lived completely parallel lives to their struggling neighbors, barely conscious of the everyday realities of life just around the corner.
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES:
STUDIES AMONG THE TENEMENTS OF NEW YORK
AUTHOR: JACOB RIIS
PUBLISHED: 1890
Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance.
―How the Other Half Lives
Riis’s pioneering account describes the living conditions in the New York slums in the late nineteenth century.
The book follows a standard pattern for works advocating social reform of the time: there is a section on crime, on the Protestant virtues and vices (including idleness and uncleanliness), on the miserable living conditions, on disease, and a lament for the loss of human dignity and the dissolution of the family.
Without doubt, it was the inclusion of images that gave the book its impact. The photos brought the squalid conditions to life and also increased sympathy for the individuals depicted in them. Riis told his readers that the poor were not so by choice and that the dangerous and unhygienic conditions in which they lived were a social evil that society needed to address rather than shun. Riis ends How the Other Half Lives with a plan for fixing the problem.
In 1891, the New York Times lauded its content, calling it a “powerful book” concerning “matters we ought to know.” The Christian Intelligencer reviewed it, saying, “Books like this that lift the curtains and expose to public gaze the great evils of the system will hasten the day of reform.” And so, indeed, it did.
The title of Riis’s book is an inseparable part of its success and has a curious origin. It had, in fact, been adapted from a phrase in a classic French tale called Pantagruel. This is, on the surface of it, an absurd and not infrequently scatological (meaning plain rude) story about the adventures of two giants—yet underneath lurks a story about society too, one that the Russian philosopher Michael Bakhtin later dubbed “grotesque realism.” What is more, the underlying theme and insight of the Frenchman’s tales, according to Bakhtin, is that of social conscience and collective thinking—themes that are at the heart of Riis’s work too. Take, for example, the way people feel and behave during carnivals in a town or village. These are precious moments when a special sense of time and space causes social divisions to fold away, and the individual becomes part of the collectivity, even to the extent that they cease to be individuals. At such special instants in time, a special form of free and familiar contact briefly reigns among people who may otherwise be divided by “the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age,” as Bakhtin puts it. It’s an idea that is also present in those writings of Charles Dickens that Mike Duffy mentions. Dickens, a writer usually more at home describing life in cities, particularly life in the slums of the big cities, sees in carnivals a kind of suspension of man-made time in favor of an alternative “festive time” that is rooted in nature and the seasons.
Time, and the perennial battle between nature and human plans, is one aspect of the complex social life that Riis describes and photographs. However, it is not with the multilayered novels of the likes of Dickens but with a very different, much more straightforward, set of stories that his own journey starts. It is in the ripping yarns of James Fenimore Cooper—sometimes called America’s first novelist—that Riis found his inspiration. Cooper is best known today for Last of the Mohicans, not merely as a book but as a plotline for many TV dramas, but he was also the author of a book called The Deerslayer, and it is to this that Jacob Riis frequently refers.
This book is not only a fantastic tale of the adventures of a woodsman known as Deerslayer and his Indian friend Chingachgook but also, beneath the surface, a more profound study of the interface between wilderness and civilization and the clash of nature and human values. At the time that Cooper was writing, the American settlers were legislating the forced removal of the Native Americans from the lands described in the book to the bleaker landscapes of the Midwest. In real life, Cooper supported these cruel and frequently fatal removals, citing things such as the cultural and religious divisions between white man and Indian. It is for throwing light on these deeper issues that Riis owes Cooper an intellectual debt.
And surely without such books, Riis would have had no reason to contemplate such subtle things as the different social and cultural perspectives of two communities living side by side in the same land but with completely different experiences of it. For such concerns were truly remote for a child born in Ribe, a small town in Jutland, Denmark, the third of fifteen children. Indeed, only Jacob, one sister, and a foster sister would survive to see the twentieth century.
His father was the opposite of a woodsman, or indeed any kind of adventurer, being a schoolteacher and writer for the local newspaper, while his mother was happy to be a hjemmegående husmor, which is what the Danes call a housewife or homemaker. On the other hand, being himself a literary man, his father did urge Jacob to read and improve his English, particularly by tucking regularly into the much-admired writing of Charles Dickens via a magazine called All the Year Round that Dickens himself had founded and edited. If, in Riis’s day, books were a luxury, his father’s magazine was full of tales of the virtuous poor suffering from slum conditions and poverty, including serializations and extracts from Dickens’s writings, such as the tearjerker of the orphan Oliver Twist asking for “more gruel from the master of the parish workhouse” and the drama of Monseigneur’s carriage recklessly racing through the streets of Paris and running over a child. Indeed, the magazine included a serialization of A Tale of Two Cities, which included that sad story of the carriage accident as well as passages like this one: “The wives and mothers we have been used to see since we were as little as this child, and much less, have not been greatly considered? We have known their husbands and fathers laid in prison and kept from them, often enough? All our lives, we have seen our sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery, oppression and neglect of all kinds?” (A Tale of Two Cities, book 3, chapter 3).
Such passages would, at the very least, have alerted the young Jacob to the huge issues of social justice. And A Tale of Two Cities, printed in full (naturally in little chunks) in the magazine, was Charles Dickens’s sixteenth novel and a perfect example of why the English author was in his own lifetime a publishing phenomenon, read enthusiastically both in England and abroad. The “two cities” are London and Paris, and the tale weaves together chaos, espionage, and adventure in the two great European capitals against the backdrop of the terrifying French Revolution. In characteristic Dickens style, the social upheaval is mirrored too in the lives of the novel’s two male leads, Charles Darney and Sydney Carton, and their battle for the attention of Lucie Manette, the woman they both love.
Dickens’s influence was made evident by the fact that when still only age eleven or twelve, Jacob donated all the money he had to a poor family living in squalor in a house in Ribe—on condition that they clean it. Apparently the tenants accepted the help and the terms attached, and indeed when his mother learned of the project she went to help.
So, surely it is Dickens’s social conscience that reappears in Jacob Riis’s concern for the people of the hidden New York, but his actual decision to travel there in the first place and his fascination for exploring the darker side of the city owes more to his reading of the novels of a very different kind of author. It is from Fenimore Cooper, an American writer whose adventure stories offer an exciting and romantic picture of frontier life, that Riis borrows the framework that defines his investigations of the world between wilderness and civilization and of social life tugged in two directions by the laws of nature and the laws of man.
THE DEERSLAYER, OR THE FIRST WAR-PATH
AUTHOR: JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
PUBLISHED: 1841
“Point de quartier aux coquins!” cried an eager pursuer, who seemed to direct the operations of the enemy.
“Stand firm and be ready, my gallant 60ths!” suddenly exclaimed a voice above them; “wait to see the enemy, fire low, and sweep the glacis.”
“Father! Father” exclaimed a piercing cry from out the mist. “It is I! Alice! Thy own Elsie! Spare, O! Save your daughters!”
“Hold!” shouted the former speaker, in the awful tones of parental agony, the sound reaching even to the woods, and rolling back in a solemn echo. “Tis she! God has restored me my children! Throw open the sally-port; to the field, 60ths, to the field! Pull not a trigger, lest ye kill my lambs! Drive off these dogs of France with your steel!”
This is an exciting moment drawn from The Deerslayer, the last of Cooper’s so-called Leatherstocking Tales. “Exciting,” at least, for generations of young readers. It is the last in the series, although its time period makes it the first installment chronologically in the lifetime of its hero, Natty Bumpoo, a frontiersman and “deerslayer” who objects to the practice of taking scalps, a confusing time reversal of the kind that not only annoys many readers but in Cooper’s case left the logic of his tale lacking in many places. As to “scalping,” though, this is indeed quite a thread in the book, often done while the victim was alive, and there is much warmongering and massacring to boot, which seems to have established the tall tales in the American imagination. Add to which that Fenimore Cooper starts the story by relating the rapid advance of “civilization” in New York State, and the action takes place around a lake that the author actually lived by, thus giving some of the descriptions of the landscape a genuine fondness.
Yet, stripped of its defense of being historically interesting, for many readers, as indicated by reviews on Goodreads, the book is a literary disaster on stilts. It seems it is exactly as Mark Twain put it in his famous essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”: there are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction, and in The Deerslayer Cooper violated all but one of them. Unfortunately, Twain doesn’t say specify the rule Cooper didn’t break, and it’s certainly not obvious.
If books like The Deerslayer appear on the surface, and indeed quite a long way down too, to be unsophisticated yarns built on an unconscious assumption of the white man’s superiority, it is still true that Cooper was one of the first major American novelists to include African, African American, and Native American characters in his works. Perhaps that’s the best thing about the so-called Leatherstocking, or frontiersman, tales of which The Deerslayer is the final installment.
However, not everyone appreciated the finer points. Cooper’s older contemporary Mark Twain was no great fan of the stories. To be precise, he hated them. In a little essay directed at some professors who had the temerity to praise the author, entitled “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Twain writes,
Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the Reds and Whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred other handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.
Twain also quotes, disparagingly, two examples of Deerslayer’s mode of speech. In the first, talking as it were “normally,” he has a strange dialect: “If I was Injin born, now, I might tell of this, or carry in the scalp and boast of the expl’ite afore the whole tribe; of if my inimy had only been a bear.” But later, both his thoughts and his language are lifted to almost poetic heights by thoughts of his beloved. Then, as Twain notes, when someone asks Deerslayer if he has a sweetheart and if so, where she is now, this is the finely expressed response: “She’s in the forest—hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain—in the dew on the open grass—the clouds that float about in the blue heavens—the birds that sing in the woods—the sweet springs where I slake my thirst—and in all the other glorious gifts that come from God’s Providence!”
That’s an example of literary inconsistency that could be said to nonetheless convey some emotional content. Not so with the many practical implausibilities that seem to enrage Twain in the way that some people are enraged by continuity errors in films. (I mean things like the scene in Pulp Fiction [1994] in which Jules and Vincent escape a hail of bullets fired at point-blank range, an implausible feat that is additionally marred when you look closely because there you can see bullet holes are already visible on the wall well before any shots have been fired.)
Yet even if Mark Twain hated the writing, another great writer, D. H. Lawrence, called The Deerslayer “one of the most beautiful and perfect books in the world: flawless as a jewel and of gem-like concentration.” So back to Riis’s favorite read; here’s a passage describing how another character in the novel, Pathfinder, displays his awesome powers with a rifle, shooting not merely at a target but at a tiny nail placed on the target:
“Be all ready to clench it, boys!” cried out Pathfinder, stepping into his friend’s tracks the instant they were vacant. “Never mind a new nail; I can see that, though the paint is gone, and what I can see I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquito’s eye. Be ready to clench!”
The rifle cracked, the bullet sped its way, and the head of the nail was buried in the wood, covered by the piece of flattened lead.
It is, to be sure, an unlikely kind of literary jewel, maybe more like a shiny trinket of a Boys’ Own adventure.
But, well, you know, that too has its place sometimes, and certainly the book seems to have given Jacob Riis a thirst, a curiosity to travel to the Americas. And if it is not a logical or even a very literal connection that was made via these ripping yarns of Indian trackers and dead-shot settlers in the woods of the New World, it is still an important one.
A small defense can be mounted for literary stereotypes too, maybe. In ancient Greece, actors in plays wore masks painted with exaggerated expressions. The idea was that this enabled them to portray different roles without confusing the audience. In a similar way, crude stereotypes such as the “virtuous,” beautiful girl and the suspicious man with a scar on his face can allow for the exploration of deeper ideas.
Thus, underneath the surface silliness of the Leatherstocking Tales can be discerned something more complex, a subtext that highlights the tenuous relationship between frontier settlers and American Indians. In The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, for example, a captured white girl is taken care of by an Indian chief until, after several years, she is eventually returned to her parents—all of which, at least, hints at subtler notions of personal identity. Often, Cooper offers contrasting views of characters to emphasize the ancient message of the potential of individuals for good versus their tendency to produce mayhem. Thus, Cooper’s most famous story, Last of the Mohicans, includes both the character of Magua, the Indian known as Cunning Fox, who is devoid of almost any redeeming qualities, as well as Chingachgook, the last chief of the Mohicans, who is portrayed as noble, courageous, and heroic.
Anyway, whatever Mark Twain may have thought, the French novelist Victor Hugo pronounced Cooper the greatest novelist of the century, meaning, of course, outside France. Another icon of French literature, Honoré de Balzac, while mocking a few of Cooper’s novels as “rhapsodies” and expressing reservations about his portrayal of characters, enthusiastically called the first of the Leatherstocking series, The Pathfinder, a masterpiece and compared his portrayal of his portrait of nature to the work of the Scottish poet and playwright Sir Walter Scott, famous for his book Ivanhoe.
Praise for Cooper’s depiction of women characters in his work is impossible to find though. Instead, as James Russell Lowell, a contemporary and a critic, wrote rhymingly:
The women he draws from one model don’t vary.
All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.
Notwithstanding any such literary weaknesses, Cooper was honored on a US commemorative stamp, the Famous American series, issued in 1940, and there is a gilded and red tole chandelier hanging in the library of the White House in Washington, DC, that is from the family of James Fenimore Cooper. It was brought there through the efforts of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in her great White House restoration. There is also a James Fenimore Cooper Memorial Prize at New York University that is awarded annually to an outstanding undergraduate student of journalism. And in 2013, Cooper was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame. Mark Twain ain’t there, but then he’s not from New York.
Most effusive of all were the words of the renowned Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, who even declared The Pathfinder to be “a Shakespearean drama in the form of a novel,” a “triumph of modern art” in the form of “epic poetry.” It seems that for Russians, the author’s middle name, Fenimore, was exotic, and indeed it became a symbol of exciting adventures among that country’s readers. For example, in the 1977 Soviet movie The Secret of Fenimore, a mysterious stranger known simply as Fenimore pays nightly visits to a boys’ dorm in a summer camp and relates fascinating stories about Indians and extraterrestrials.
Perhaps Russians have a taste for action heroes. Oleg Konovalov, business guru, contemporary author, rated “#1 Global Thought Leader on Culture” by Thinkers 360 told me once that adventure stories read in his youth had an influence on his life well after his tastes changed
“For sure, Jack London and his White Fang, The Sea Wolf, The Call of the Wild, and others. I even reread some of Jack London’s books again not long ago. What inspired me in Jack London—adventure, challenging own boundaries, being own self, focus on a goal whatever difficult it can be, and going for unexplored terrains.”
Be that as it may, much as the young Jacob enjoyed Cooper’s ripping yarns and was inspired by Dickens’s morality-laden stories, and much as his father had hoped that he would head toward careers like his own involving writing, it turned out that all Jacob wanted to be was a carpenter. So he became an apprentice instead and promptly fell head over heels in love with Elisabeth, the (twelve-year-old!) daughter of the company owner, who did not approve of the apprentice’s attentions. The result was that Jacob was obliged to finish learning his trade in Copenhagen. And then, at the end of his apprenticeship, unable to find a post, far less woo his beloved, Riis decided to travel to the New World and seek his future there instead.
The Australian writer and art critic Robert Hughes sums up the scene he would have found on arrival through the judicious use of statistics, saying, “In the 1880s, 334,000 people were crammed into a single square mile of the Lower East Side, 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 well-off knew nothing about them and cared less.”
When Riis arrived in the United States in 1870, he was still just twenty-one years old and focused less on exploring the wilderness, let alone social do-gooding, and more on finding employment as a carpenter. He had arrived, after all, with just forty dollars donated by friends (having used up all his own savings to pay the fifty dollars for the passage), plus a gold locket with a strand of Elisabeth’s hair given him by her mother and letters of introduction to Mr. Goodall, the Danish Consul. Actually, this letter, the result of his family’s involvement in Goodall’s rescue from a shipwreck at Ribe, gave Riis considerable advantages over the large number of migrants and immigrants seeking prosperity in a more industrialized environment in a society still recovering from the American Civil War.
The first thing Riis did with his meager resources was to spend twenty dollars, fully half of it, on a gun. It was doubtless a tribute to his literary tastes that he considered this an essential precaution, as he imagined, to ward off wild animals and human predators alike. Fortunately, an immigrant with a practical trade can usually find work, and within a week Riis had a new post as a carpenter at Brady’s Bend Iron Works on the Allegheny River above Pittsburgh. However, barely had he started there than he was distracted by the news from Europe that France had declared war on Germany, news which to a Dane dangled an opportunity to join up and help avenge the Prussian seizure of Schleswig.
Indeed, Riis’s enthusiasm for this warlike project led him to pawn all his possessions and attempt to enlist at the French consulate in New York, but there he was firmly told that there was no plan to send a volunteer army from the United States, and so instead he was left to try to walk home, which he did until he collapsed from exhaustion. He woke up at Fordham College with a Catholic priest serving him breakfast.
After a brief period working on a farm and performing other odd jobs, Riis found himself destitute, sleeping on a tombstone, and surviving on windfall apples. His only project remained joining in the war in Europe, so he set out again for New York. Again, he was unable to enlist and again he ended up living on scavenged food and handouts while sleeping on the streets or in a foul-smelling police lodging-house with only a stray dog for a companion. At last, one morning in a lodging-house, he awoke to find that his gold locket, with its more than precious strand of Elisabeth’s hair, had been stolen. This was truly his lowest point.
Perhaps the experience triggered a new resolve. In any case, Riis now left New York and eventually reached Philadelphia, where he received vital help from the Danish Consul and his wife that letter proving the power of words again! They looked after him for two weeks, bought him a new suit, and put him in touch with an old friend who offered him a job—as a carpenter.
Set up thus, Riis was soon in much demand for his woodworking, but more for the low rates he charged than for any particular skills. Nonetheless, this success enabled him at last to return to the Big Apple, where he was able for the first time to find work as a journalist, ending up as a trainee at the New York News Association. It was this job that at last brought Riis back to his investigations of the lives of both the rich and successful and the struggling and impoverished immigrant communities. In due course, he become editor of one of the group’s newspapers, the weekly News, and when the company struggled financially he even managed (partly with seventy-five dollars of his savings but mostly with promissory notes) to buy the News company itself.
Now fully independent, he was able to investigate and report freely on the politicians who had previously been his employers. And there was wonderful news from Denmark too: his childhood love, Elisabeth, had written to ask him to come to Denmark for her, saying, “We will strive together for all that is noble and good.” Conveniently, the politicians offered to buy back the newspaper for five times the price Riis had paid; he was thus able to travel to Denmark, marry Elisabeth, and return to the United States to take up a series of positions on newspapers, including crucially one as police reporter for the New-York Tribune.
He was based in a press office across from police headquarters on Mulberry Street, nicknamed by the locals “Death’s Thoroughfare.” As Riis’s biographer Alexander Alland writes, “It was here, where the street crooks its elbow at the Five Points, that the streets and numerous alleys radiated in all directions, forming the foul core of the New York slums.”
And so it was as a reporter working alongside police officers that Riis really came to know the slums of the city. It was these experiences in the poorhouses, there as a neutral, careful witness, that led him to a new role as a pioneer of socially aware and committed reporting, always characterized by a precise and factual style that reflected the precision of the police he was working alongside and reporting on.
At the same time, Riis was aware of an element missing in these dry, clinical accounts and strove to find ways to make the reality of the slums more real to his readers. He tried sketching but soon found he had no talent for it. Photography was impractical as the cameras of the day relied on large photographic plates coated in emulsion that took many minutes to record an image—and that was under bright lights. In those days, the ability to snap moments from real life and in real conditions was limited to landscape photography. And then, in 1887, Riis read of a new way to take pictures using sharp flashes of light.
This was a German innovation called “flash powder,” and it involved igniting a mixture of magnesium and potassium chlorate (with a dash of antimony sulfide for added stability) and firing a kind of pistol device fitted with cartridges.
Soon, equipped with this new weapon of truth, Riis and three friends, including Dr. John Nagle, chief of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the City Health Department (who was also a keen amateur photographer), returned to photograph the slums. Their story, featuring pictures of Gotham’s crime and misery “by night and day,” was published in the New York Sun on February 12, 1888, under the tagline “The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York.” It caused a sensation.
What was actually printed in the newspaper, though, was not yet actual photographs but line drawings based on them. Riis’s second innovation was to enthusiastically adopt new ways to screen black-and-white images into dots suitable for printing. He also adapted the flash technique so that it utilized not a pistol, which both looked dangerous and also was dangerous, but a kind of large frying pan.
Flash photography enabled him not only to work at night but also to photograph the dark streets, dingy tenements, and “stale-beer” dives by day and the faces of the people living and dying there.
This is when that all-important, eighteen-page article by Riis, “How the Other Half Lives,” appeared in the Christmas edition of Scribner’s Magazine, along with those nineteen photographs, still rendered as line drawings. The article attracted so much interest that Riis was invited to expand the material into an entire book. How the Other Half Lives, subtitled Studies among the Tenements of New York, was published a year later, in 1890, reusing the line drawings that had appeared in the Scribner’s article but also including for the first time seventeen screened photographs. In fact, this was one of the first, maybe the first, extensive use of halftone photographic reproductions in a book.
How the Other Half Lives sold well and was favorably reviewed, although some critics accused Riis of oversimplifying and exaggerating. A sequel, called Children of the Poor (1892), describing the lives of children that he had encountered in the slums, also sold well. This starts, “The problem of our children is the problem of the State. As we mould the children of the toiling masses in our cities, so we shape the destiny of the State which they will rule in their turn, taking the reins from our hands.”
Riis then, characteristically, offers some statistics—précised to two significant figures too!—noting that whereas at the beginning of the century the urban population of the United States was “3.97% of the whole” or “not quite one in twenty-five,” that it had now become “29.12%” or “nearly one in three.”
It is fortunate, then, that Riis mixes statistics with a more poetic flair with words, and so he also speaks of the slums “as a dumping ground” by which New York seeks to rid itself of helplessness and incapacity, leaving the procession of the strong and the able free to move on. “This sediment forms the body of our poor, the contingent that lives, always from hand to mouth, with no provision and no means of providing for the morrow.” The slum, he says, “is the measure of civilization.”
“In self-defence, you know, all life eventually accommodates itself to its environment, and human life is no exception.”
A particularly important effort by Riis was his exposure of the condition of New York’s water supply. His five-column story “Some Things We Drink,” in the August 21, 1891, edition of the New York Evening Sun, included six photographs (later lost). Riis wrote, “I took my camera and went up in the watershed photographing my evidence wherever I found it. Populous towns sewered directly into our drinking water. I went to the doctors and asked how many days a vigorous cholera bacillus may live and multiply in running water. About seven, said they. My case was made.”
And all the time, at the heart of Riis’s writings are his early experiences in Ribe, which gave him a yardstick with which to measure tenement dwellers’ quality of life. His own experiences as a poor immigrant lent authenticity to his news articles and larger works, whereas his themes of self-sufficiency, perseverance, and material success are archetypes that many other Europeans also used in describing the exceptional opportunities that seemed to exist in the United States.
Riis emphatically supported the spread of wealth to lower classes through improved social programs and philanthropy, but several chapters of How the Other Half Lives, open with his observations of the economic and social situations of different ethnic and racial groups via indictments of their perceived natural flaws—often prejudices that may well have been fueled by prevailing theories claiming scientific evidence for hierarchies of the races. Or maybe from reading too much Fenimore Cooper.
Recent critics like Professor Maren Stange have complained that Riis “recoiled from workers and working class culture” and appealed instead to the anxieties and fears of his middle-class audience. One contemporary economist, Thomas Sowell, even claims that the plight of many immigrants during Riis’s time was not quite what it seemed but rather that the migrants were often choosing to live in unpleasant circumstances as a deliberate short-term strategy that allowed them to save more of their earnings both to help other family members come to the United States and in preparation for onward migration of the whole “clan” to more comfortable lodgings later.
Such slum dwellers, Sowell argues, were extremely unwilling to relocate to better housing as advocated by reformers like Riis, because other lodgings were too costly to allow for the high rate of savings possible in the tenements. Indeed, as Sowell points out, Riis’s own personal experience had been to live in the tenements only temporarily before earning enough money to relocate to different lodgings. But such criticism is perhaps overdone. Riis, after all, is also criticized for suggesting that African and West Indian immigrants were happy with their lives in the “slums” of New York City, with accounts and images of them celebrating carnivals, for example.
That said, Riis tried hard to have part of the slums around Five Points in Lower Manhattan demolished and replaced with a park. His writings resulted in the Drexel Committee investigation of unsafe tenements and the Small Park Act of 1887. Riis was not invited to the eventual opening of the park on June 15, 1897, but went all the same, together with another journalist with a reputation as a “muckraker,” Lincoln Steffens. In the last speech, the street cleaning commissioner credited Riis for the park and led the public in giving him three cheers of “Hooray, Jacob Riis!” When other parks were created, Riis was often popularly credited with them as well.
But let’s fast-forward now to the twenty-first century and the parallel tale of Mike Duffy. On the surface, the two reformers’ lives are worlds apart, but the founding CEO of CityBase, a database company based in Chicago with offices in San Francisco, does share one crucial thing with Riis which is an inspirational debt to a book.
Now, databases can sound like boring things, and, in fact, they can actually be rather boring things, but these days our lives revolve around them. We all use Google, which is one huge database, and when we go to the shop, the things we buy are there courtesy of another database. In fact, today, according to Duffy’s company’s website, more than a hundred government agencies and utility service providers across the United States use CityBase to handle payments and provide access to digital services. But what really links Mike Duffy across the centuries to Jacob Riis is a shared focus on people on the margins of society. As Duffy puts it, he wants his company to serve people who are unbanked and must pay a bill in cash just as well as those who want to complete a transaction using their credit cards and smartphones. Duffy says he brought to the design of CityBase lessons from over a decade working in capital markets, including as a Federal Reserve analyst at Northern Trust, and academic studies at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, but there’s also a deeper level of awareness of the problems of the socially excluded that comes, it seems, from reading Orwell’s classic tale of life when you are “down and out” in the two great European capitals.
Orwell is one of my own favorite writers, who inspired me in a broad sense. For me, though, it was not so much the sociological aspects of his writing as the sheer elegance of his craft. But anyway, Down and Out in Paris and London was Orwell’s first book, published in January 1933 by Victor Gollancz, who was a founder of Left Book Club Committee, and always had a political (and progressive) purpose.
DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON
AUTHOR: GEORGE ORWELL
PUBLISHED: 1933
This is actually Orwell’s first book-length work, a personal memoir on the theme of poverty in the two cities. The first part of the book is an account of being a casual worker in restaurant kitchens in Paris, while the second part is a kind of travelogue describing London from a tramp’s perspective, which majors on the hostel accommodation available and the often rather unsavory characters to be encountered within them. A curious historical detail of the book is that an early version was rejected by no less a literary figure than T. S. Eliot, then an editor for Faber and Faber. The manuscript was eventually published by Gollancz and favorably reviewed by literary icons including C. Day Lewis and J. B. Priestly. The former summed up the book as “a tour of the underworld, conducted without hysteria or prejudice,” and the latter called it “an excellent book and a valuable social document.”
Some readers, notably those in the restaurant trade, disputed his lurid picture. However, in his later, and I think rather better, book The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell referred to the tramping experiences described in Down and Out, writing that “nearly all the incidents described there actually happened, though they have been re-arranged.”
Orwell, whose real name, by the way, was Eric Blair, was actually born into quite privileged circles and went to some of the poshest British schools. It was only later, as a struggling writer in Paris, that Orwell discovered poverty in all its dimensions. He encountered it in the hotels, hospitals, and parks of the mean and degenerate Paris. In the book he describes how at one point he has to pawn all his clothes to save himself from starvation. He records the cruel behavior of a clerk at the counter of a pawnshop, where there is a long queue of people standing for the purpose:
It was the first time that I had been in a French pawnshop. One went through grandiose stone portals (marked, of course, “Liberté, Egatité, Fraternité” they write that even over the police stations in France) into a large, bare room like a school classroom, with a counter and rows of benches. Forty or fifty people were waiting. One handed one’s pledge over the counter and sat down. Presently, when the clerk had assessed its value he would call out, “Numéro such and such, will you take fifty francs?” Sometimes it was only fifteen francs, or ten, or five—whatever it was, the whole room knew it. As I came in the clerk called with an air of offence, “Numéro 83—here!” and gave a little whistle and a beckon, as though calling a dog.
Later, returning to London, Orwell lived in some of the cheap rented room of London but reported that they were better furnished than the lodgings of Paris. He also now realized that there was more going on in tramp behavior than met the eye: that they moved from one place to another in groups and stayed in “spikes,” which were abnormally dirty and provided the worst kind of food. He reports of a bathroom in such a spike: “The scene in the bathroom was extraordinarily repulsive. Fifty dirty, stark-naked men elbowing each other in a room twenty feet square, with only two bathtubs and two slimy roller towels between them all. Bad food, dirty lodgings, have turned tramps almost into animals. It is most humiliating to watch when they are gathered up like cattle in a small passage in the spikes.”
Orwell is shocked to see the animal-like looks of tramps in such a civilized place as London: “You can not conceive what ruinous degenerate curs we looked, standing there in the merciless morning light.” And he adds, “A tramp’s clothes are bad, but they conceal worse things, to see him as he really is, unmitigated, you must see him naked. Flat feet, pot bellies, hollow chests, sagging muscles—every kind of physical rottenness was there.”
Orwell never loses sight of our common shared humanity. He writes, “They are worthy people capable of something but due to a lack of opportunity they have become mentally and physically wrecked.”
Once, Orwell was among a hundred tramps who were given free tea and six slices of bread and margarine but in return had to sit for mass; the tramps behaved shamelessly, chatting, laughing, smoking, calling out, and “frankly bullying” the few elder women of the congregation to such an extent that Orwell commented, “It was our revenge upon them for having humiliated us by feeding us. A man receiving charity practically hates his benefactor—it is a fixed characteristic of human nature.”
Orwell described in detail how hotels in Paris functioned, the hierarchy of employees, how each caste in the hierarchy tried to express pride in their job, and how the more expensive the dish the more frequent the cooks and waiters dipped their greasy and sweaty fingers in it so that there was a counterintuitive link between how expensive and fashionable the food was and how hygienic.
Orwell ends his manuscript with what he learned from these months living as a down-and-out tramp in London and Paris:
I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels (since they can’t purchase drinks), nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy (living on just tea and two slices of bread and margarine), nor subscribe to the Salvation Army (since they treat the hosted tramps as prisoners), nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill (so that the distributor of handbill can finish his job early), nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.
Here, in a nutshell, is the insight and philosophy that could inspire Mike Duffy. And though Orwell was writing well after Jacob Riis, it is surely one that he too would share. But for Duffy we don’t need to speculate as, in fact, he specifically cites George Orwell as a key influence in that interview for Inc.com in 2017, saying,
I was first exposed to George Orwell’s writing through his famous works Animal Farm and 1984. I was entertained by his wit (the “civility” of the Spanish Civil War) and absorbed by his commentaries weaving politics, economics, and sociology.
Duffy then goes on to make that evocative comparison of the “extravagance” of the 1920s and the twilight of the Great Depression that followed it as well as selecting that line about how absolute poverty can, in a way, make you less worried about money, “for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that.”
In these ways, Orwell’s book provided for Duffy a new way, a new perspective on social relationships, just as the Leatherstocking Tales, superficially trivial or not, led Jacob Riis to develop not only a fascination with the characters of the slums and “forgotten corners” of New York but also a deeper understanding and empathy.