Mel Mencher, my professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, introduced me to Jacob Riis and HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES. The book opened the doorway for my lifelong journey in writing and thinking about how class, impoverishment, economic and social issues are covered in newspapers, magazines, online, books, and images.
By the 1880s in New York, social reformer Riis benefited from a new invention – flash powder. In the era of early photographic technology without artificial lighting, images required long exposures. Flash powder helped Riis to illuminate the squalor of tenement houses packed with families, filth, and the choking smoke of coal stoves. Another reformer, sociologist Lewis Hine, later would help to establish photojournalistic documentation of societal problems.
What ideas do you get from Riis? His reportage? Writing? Photography? Point of View?
How is he a journalist? How is he a social reformer? How is his writing clouded by class and ethnic blinders?
Who are his heirs?
Have you read Jonathan Kozol's Rachel and Her Children : Homeless Families in America? He also wrote stories in NEW YORKER in early 1990s about homelessness.
Who is documenting and writing about the hard edge of the working poor in Missouri? The United States? The world?
What is interesting is the slippery slope, the borderlands between working
poor and the folks who end up at St. Francis House in Columbia. A friend of mine once worked as physician and researcher at MU. He had an employee who made about $16,000
a year. She ate squirrel sandwiches on occasion, made by her grandmother.
Missouri, including Columbia, has lots of people who work hard and barely get along financially.
Luc Sante wrote in his introduction to How the Other Half Lives that author Jacob Riis helped call attention to the situations in which people lived and that the book spurred movements of reform. The living conditions tenement residents had were terrible, but Sante wrote that Riis helped millions of people to live better lives afterwards.
ReplyDeleteI believe that, but I just question Riis’s methodology. In How the Other Half Lives, he writes of his characters in their everyday lives, but he writes about them in such a way that perpetuates stereotypes about these people. Riis writes that the Jewish community continually haggles over prices and leaves the impression that they’re nothing more than cheapskates.
Of the negro community, he writes that when a fight should break out there will be plenty of razor blades tucked away in the boot of the negroes, who are “handy with the razor in a fight” (119) and never perturbed by slights because they are always happy. Chinese people have knives in their sleeves and are prone to opium addiction. Riis portrays Irish and Italians as people prone to fights and rowdiness. He portrays older children as pickpockets and false beggars. (To be fair, he depicts infants in a manner in a way that people could feel some sort of pity.)
By perpetuating these stereotypes, Riis isn’t doing these groups any favors. They may receive better housing or a few more charity gifts here and there, but they need more than that to escape poverty. They actually need to be considered equals in society rather than a lower class of people. I realize the press was different back then that the media didn’t have as much inclusion or desire to cover multiple communities as it does now, but it makes sense if you want to write something to help a community, you should try to portray them in as good of a light as you can.
Riis should’ve framed his book around the commonness of the people he covered to people in “the other half.” Too many times they are considered a monolith. All Italian people do this or all negroes do this, for example. He also writes that the communities written about just won’t move toward a new life. “They will not be helped. Dragged by main force out of their misery, they slip back again on the first opportunity, seemingly content only in the old rut” (129-131).
What reason should members in the other half, i.e. the half not described in this book, have to help the people who are described in this book if they’re going to go back to their old ways of living? I applaud Riis’s tireless work on behalf of those who are less fortunate, but I just think a different methodology could’ve made for a more lasting book.
--Daniel Paulling
For all the righteous indignation that Riis displays in How the Other Half Lives, I was expecting him to have a different opinion of the tenement dwellers whose lives he describes. I thought he’d romanticize the industrious men and women who find beauty in life despite their circumstances. But there’s very little of that. Instead, Riis is often disdainful of and even disgusted by the people he talks to and photographs. To be fair, he’s clearly railing against the degrading conditions of the tenements, which he thinks are the root cause of many of the problems for ‘the other half.’ But he is motivated, it seems, not out of sense of equal rights but of benevolent paternalism. So while he is outraged by the squalid living conditions of poverty-stricken immigrants, he also considers himself above and apart from those same people. I found it disorienting. I’m accustomed to journalists today who in writing about the poor are very careful never to assign blame to the personal characteristics or actions of the poor.
ReplyDeleteConsidering when he wrote this book, some of Riis’ prejudices are not all that surprising. Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese and black residents are portrayed in the meanest light. These groups are inherently inferior in Riis’ mind, and are essentially doomed to failure. He is condescending in describing their living conditions and characteristics. “To the lifting of this great load, the indifferences of those they would help is most puzzling. They will not be helped.” On the other hand, the good German Protestant immigrants, although they are living in the same tenements, can seemingly do nothing wrong. They are willing to work hard, learn English, and generally just do the right thing.
Yet at other times Riis clearly blames the tenements for the problems of the poor. Near the end of the book he writes, “And so it comes down to the tenement, the destroyer of individuality and character everywhere.” He seems torn between assigning blame to individuals or to structural forces. What I find most interesting in his study of tenement life, however, is the fact that Riis is an equal opportunity offender. He is willing to make moral judgments of the rich and poor, the people living uptown and the people living in tenements. That’s something that a journalist writing today about a slum probably would never do. And I wonder if that’s such a good thing. Riis’ prejudices were a sign of his times, and have no place in our world. But his willingness to immerse himself in a society, to be passionate about it, and to question it are all valuable lessons for journalists today. I think on the rare occasions when today’s journalists even cover the working poor, they tend to treat them with kid gloves. It’s dehumanizing in a different way: The poor are given no power to change their circumstances. For Riis the problem was that some of the poor were inherently inferior, while for many of today’s journalists the poor are inherently helpless.
I also applaud Riis for taking on such a large, time-consuming and meaningful project so far ahead of his time. The multi-faceted approach he took (almost an early example of alternative storytelling or convergence journalism) provided more context than a lot of the comparable works of investigative journalism during that time, which I thought made it much more enlightening and worthwhile to read.
ReplyDeleteLike Daniel, I also had some concerns about the way he went about the work, though. It seemed to me that, in addition to the strong stereotypes he reinforced, he also went into the project with an agenda in mind rather than a question he sought to answer. As many of us have learned, this is no way to go into a new research endeavor.
I do understand that Riis probably saw the larger picture — ultimately forcing the improvement of conditions in the tenements and the lives of his subjects — as a loftier goal that could only be reached by pushing the limits of an already-established way of life in New York City.
I found the photography to be primitive, yet simultaneously stunning. It revealed so much about the conditions and had a lot more detail and emotion than I expected when I started reading. The flash powder created such an amazing effect, almost making the stills chilling. However, I thought a few of them to look somewhat staged, making me, again, question how objective Riis was in documenting the subjects in an ethical and journalistic way.
The question Berkley poses about how this type of work is done in our own community is a hard one to answer. The saturation of journalists here causes these types of stories to be covered too often. On the other hand, the sheer number of probing minds promotes distrust among suppressed members of the community. I say this because I worked on a lengthy project that involved a homeless man as the main source. He worked at a decently paying job, though it wasn’t necessarily an honorable one. He worked at an adult superstore, which caused him to be turned away at the homeless shelters in town. Had he been able to stay at the shelter and continue working at his job, he likely would have gotten back on his feet, but his living situation was so erratic that he found himself stuck treading water.
This makes me feel like we need to be uncovering things like this homeless shelter’s judgment and bias rather than the physical conditions of Columbia’s “other half.”
-Taryn Wood
In How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis challenged the notion that the poor deserved to suffer and chose to live miserably. I’m particularly interested in how Riis constructed his message in a manner that would lead to massive changes. As Lincoln Steffens wrote, “Truly no one has accomplished so much – so many specific, tangible reforms.” Dissecting Riis’ prose can be helpful in learning which of his methods can be applied today, when the poor are still sometimes viewed as lazy drunkards not deserving of health care or welfare.
ReplyDeleteRiis carefully weaves together narrative accounts with hard statistics, traditional journalistic sources (such as health reports) and his own suggestions and opinions. It is this combination rather than a reliance on one approach that makes the book powerful. Although English was not Riis’ native language, which sometimes makes his writing unwieldy for today’s audiences, his narratives are packed with vivid imagery. One that continues to haunt me is his description of the rumors about “old-country towns” in which the “bed” was “clotheslines stretched across the room upon which the sleepers hung by the arm-pits for a penny a night” (p. 70). He paints a clear picture of men and women drinking beer out of tomato cans at a stale-beer dive where the floor was “now covered with a brown crust that, touched with the end of a club, came off in shuddering showers of crawling bugs” (p. 58).
Riis also plays with language by using similes, metaphors and strong verbs to add poignancy to his sentences. Most of his prose is simple, which makes these sentences stand out even more. He describes the city as attracting young men “like a lighted candle to the moth” (p. 66). Health officials found a typhus patient “in a room whence perhaps a hundred coats had been sent home that week, each one with the wearer’s death-warrant, unseen and unsuspected, basted in the lining” (p. 85)
Luc Sante says the statistics Riis used were readily available, but he added context to them. He pairs a sympathetic description of a young girl with the terrifying numbers: She earned 5 cents for every 600 paper bags she assembled. At the end of the month, she owed $4 for rent. The use of specific numbers, rather than approximate ones, adds credibility and realness to his work. For example: “There were among these 1,132 children of drunken parents and 416 that had been found begging in the street, is contrasted with the showing of $1,337.21 deposited in the school savings bank by 1,745 pupils” (p. 154).
It cannot be ignored that Riis had prejudices and employed generalizations about immigrant groups that would not be acceptable today. I think his later chapters, which focus on issues such as children, saloons and gangs, hold up today better than his chapters on specific immigrant populations; however, I wonder if the use of stereotypes actually helped Riis achieve his goals in 1890. Were middle class readers more likely to identify with Riis and consider him credible because they held the same stereotypical opinions? Joseph Cosco mentions that Riis, himself an immigrant, was “simultaneously engaging with and disengaging himself from the new immigrants.” To report the story, Riis had to engage with the immigrants and identify with them. But I believe that Riis distanced himself from these immigrants when writing the book. Were the disparaging remarks necessary for Riis to establish commonality with his audience? Sante says Riis’ photography invaded the privacy of innocent people but was “a questionable means to an unquestionable end.” Although unethical, perhaps positioning himself as an American middle-class citizen (rather than a poor Danish immigrant) and inciting fears about an immigrant revolt against Americans (rather than calling for an appreciation of people’s differences) actually helped him bring forth change – another questionable means to an unquestionable end.
The title of “How the Other Half Lives” gives some insight into what may or may not have been the crux of its popularity. The word “other” indicates that this book is not for the bedraggled half but for those on the other side, and for that reason, it is hard to tell whether Riis is intent on fixing the problem or whether he is simply exploiting it. There is a thin line between awareness and “poverty porn,” and Riis wobbles on it most of the time.
ReplyDeleteThe first parts are the most poignant in creating a general picture of the tenements and the decrepitude and hopelessness of the impoverished population – the generalizations in this part feel justified and explainable in economic terms. The exploitation of the working class by greedy tenants (themselves stuck trying to make a living) is described as a destructive spiral in need of legal intervention. The literal darkness and putridity of the rooms is characteristic of the political situation.
But, when Riis employs the common prejudices of the time to justify individual races’ predicaments, he not only further alienates an already “other” group of people, but makes wide generalizations that have nothing to do with his prior arguments. These sections of the book seem to only exist to reinforce the prevailing opinion, at the time, of the poor. Understanding the book was written before the 20th century and that prejudices were abound, it still seems as if Riis is justifying the makeup of the working class with race-driven “facts.” When backed up with true percentages, these ill-conceived notions are falsely attributed to be causes of a particular race’s problems. The generalizations are not without a kernel of truth – opium in the Asian population, crime amongst Italians, etc. – but Riis makes authoritative judgments on them, giving the book an exploitative feel.
From a journalistic perspective, Riis is very thorough and original in his reporting style, which likely contributed to Sinclair’s in “The Jungle” sixteen years later. Unfortunately, the similarities continue in the way each approach their subject: Sinclair reported on the meat industry, and Riis reported on poor people as if they were meat. His motive seems to be the all-around cleanliness (and homogeneity) of the city without true regard for his subjects.
In reading “There Are No Children Here” last week, which emphasized the humanity within poverty, it is obvious that Riis saw it the other way around. Poverty, in the book, is a plague and a cancer to humanity, driving their own discontent.
--Michael Gibney
A door to a tenement is opened. A light shines into the dark; a dozen dirty faces, belonging to a dozen dirty bodies sprawled on the floor, stare back. Riis moves on to the next slum. A door, a light, a crowd. Another ramshackle bric-à-brac of New York’s huddled masses.
ReplyDeleteEach person in these endless scenes is not a name or a story but a daub on a group portrait of poverty, a whole frequently amalgamated down to a singular noun with a definite article. The Italian. The sweater. The tramp.
And in the end, their only real individuality comes as a philosophical inconsequentiality: as integers in the sums of non-ratio statistics.
It’s easy to critique older writers for not having our contemporary arsenal of multiculturalism. But the problem here is something older than time. The problem is a lack of color. The more general Riis is, the more he condemns his subjects to anonymity. In a way, it’s a narrative extension of the very real facelessness forced on America’s immigrants by the individuality-stripping political, social, and economic forces of the day.
Consider Riis’ project. He’s touring the tenements of New York to illuminate the outrageous depth and scope of the city’s poor housing conditions. But does he ever humanize its occupants? Are we ever given anyone to root for?
In other words, we are supposed to be shocked into action — but are we ever given a human reason why?
When the Greeks wanted to exalt in the glories of their forests and oceans they gave us gods with faces and names. When Dickens wanted to write about London, he gave us its princes and paupers.
Because there is a certain salesmanship involved with inviting sympathy or elevating someone. When you turn on the TV and see an adoption ad for children in Africa, they never tell you how many children are homeless in a village. They give you a single child.
As Diane Arbus said, “the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.”
To Riis’ credit, the project he tackled was an impossibly ambitious one. To render a million invisible people visible all at once is, frankly, a hell of a task. A problem of that magnitude would eclipse any single technique or philosophy, so perhaps we are better off to simply applaud the effort.
How the Other Half Lives is written by an immigrant who, for all intensive purposes, has become naturalized. Luc Sante profiles the author in the introduction, writing about his days sharing the dwelling of a dog. This fact was the filter through which I read the observations and analyses of the poor that inhabit the tenements of New York. Riis can sympathize.
ReplyDeleteDespite the sometimes crude characterization of the different ethnicities that live in the tenements, it is worth noting that Riis was observing the way in which these people crowded into small dark rooms by ethnicity. The challenges faced by the Italians were not the same as those the Irish faced. The residents of Jewtown had a different experience than the residents of Chinatown. Black people had to pay more despite being better customers for the landlords.
It is difficult to discern where the journalist is being fair, and where he is letting preconceived notions taint his writing. It is imperative, however, to understand that this was not a uniform group of people. The poor of New York came from all different walks of life, yet they faced the same cruel circumstances.
Riis details the struggles of the depressing living conditions of many people, and in that sense snaps a picture of the American dream on its head. These people were lured by the promise of labor and freedom and became the center of an industry that enriched the landlords already living the capitalist dream. The awful living conditions detailed in How the Other Half Lives is paired with the cruel human abuse of those opportunistic landlords that see the tenants as profit making agents.
The most compelling aspect of this work remains the human aspect behind the statistics. Riis includes photographs and photographic imagery in the narrative that depict the injured father, overworked mother and malnourished child in a way that make them real. I cannot help but sympathize.
This is the true value of the author’s endeavor. Despite the different ethnicities that Riis is profiling, and the different circumstances he faces, he is able to reach the core of the problem: people are dying because they cannot eat or sleep, and someone is profiting from this. This is a critique to the people in New York who cleverly avoid the grim reality of a death camp. This is Riim’s way of implicating the ignorant, and this is his journalistic legacy.
Reading this book retrospectively exercises the imagination the same way a fantasy or science fiction title would. It is hard to think of the Manhattan Riis is living in. I wonder if the state of the poor is significantly different, or if perhaps I don’t truly know ‘how the other half lives.’ After reading this book I wonder where the infants are dying, if anywhere, and who, if anyone, is exposing the truth that the privileged don’t want to hear.
- Juan Pablo Garcia
By contemporary standards the work Riis did might never have been published except for the photographs. I was surprised that so much of what he wrote had little to no action and no individual subject. One section that breaks that mold is “A Raid on the Stale-Beer Dives.” Most of the other sections are long descriptions of physical places and faceless individuals; the pictures brought the conditions to life.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it is for this reason that when I think of contemporary “journalists” who have done the same kind of work as Riis it is not book authors I think of. Mary Ellen Mark, who published a book in 1981 about Falkland Road an area of Bombay where cheap prostitutes live and work, also used stark photographs and text to bring attention to a dreadful practice.
Unlike Riis, Mark was not working in order to change the situation in Bombay, but she did admit that she became friends with her subjects and would not have had the access she did without those relationships. She had to stay in the brothels and spend several months walking the streets to get the material she did. If she had not dealt with the people with compassion and respect, as I imagine Riis did, she would not have been successful.
There is another journalist whose name I cannot remember who did a project about U.S.-Mexico border crossings. He could not follow one family and get the full story of what illegal immigrants go through to pass into the U.S. Instead he spent months in various spots along the borders in order to photograph the horrible incidents of violence, like human-vehicle collisions and border patrol raids. He was working as an journalist advocate trying to expose an issue that most Americans would rather overlook.
Even though Riis wrote an incredible amount I think it was the photographs more than anything else that opened peoples eyes. Yet Riis accompanied his photographs with respectful treatment of the subjects, had they been left without his unique vision of how these people lived concern may not have become action.
I guess it is often the relationship between photos and text that bring about the most change in people. If we just see, but are left to imagine the truth behind the images our own prejudices are allowed to persist. If we only read, but never see faces behind the misery we can pretend that the problem is far away.
Journalism, whether it advocates or not, can be most successful when photos and text are created.
In journalism school we like to talk a lot about wearing hats, cloaks, masks and other accessories to serve as metaphors for stepping beyond the role of the ordinary citizens to ask tough questions, expose injustice and tell stories as journalists. In the case of Riis’s How The Other Half Lives, he balances stacking his social reformer hat on top of his journalism hat. Luc Sante writes in the introduction that Riis “wrote it for no other purpose than to call attention to the horrendous living conditions of the poor in New York City, and to insist on reform.” Indeed, describing the conditions and people who resided in the slums who remain invisible to the other half besides as “the man with the knife” holds journalistic value enough. But to advocate as he does so plainly for the reform goes beyond just the journalistic endeavors of telling a story, describing a scene or providing news.
ReplyDeleteHis descriptions are like an urban-focused Agee with both pragmatic explanations and descriptions of the inner-workings of tenement housing while also gracing them with well-crafted literary gems. His description of the sinks come to mind: “The sinks are in the hallways, that all the tenants may have access—and all be poisoned alike by their summer stenches. Hear the pumps squeak! It is the lullaby of the tenement-house babes.”
However, Riis falls short of telling compelling stories of the individuals living in the tenements. He contradictorily zooms in close on details of the ethic groups while still only referring to them as a homogenous people. With all of the cross-cultural sensitivity that is stressed in modern journalism, the ethnic stereotyping wouldn’t fly. It could have possibly been avoided by using narrative techniques of telling in-depth stories on a few characters or families. Riis does try to make a case that the tenement is “the destroyer of individuality and character everywhere.”
Just yesterday, I saw “Burma VJ,” a documentary film about a network of journalists in the military-run nation of Burma, or Myanmar. They smuggle out video and news over the web of the injustices going on in their country. Their perspectives, like Riis’s were at the time, are the only images of their communities and country that we have. Despite the world becoming more and more connected via the Internet, there are still many “other halves” who live without the glances of the privileged.
I read the bulk of How the Other Half Lives this past weekend in New York, either while riding the F train or sitting at my friend’s apartment in an old tenement building off of Houston Street on the Lower East Side. Although her building has been renovated multiple times since 1890, three of us stayed in her 250 square feet of living space, which seemed like a relevant modern-day approximation of the tenements for three women who grew up in the spacious Midwest suburbs. Minus smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, the scent of rotting tobacco leaves, the incessant whir of sewing machines, rats, roaches, and about ten other people who would have been living in the space with us 150 years ago, of course.
ReplyDeleteA recurring thought I had while reading How the Other Half Lives regarded Jacob Riis’s position as an outsider in telling this story. He indicates that when necessary, he went into certain tenement communities with a translator because so few of these recent immigrants spoke English. From the title onward, Riis emphasizes his outsider-ness, and while he would say his approach in telling the story of the tenements was altruistic, I find it to be coated with a thick layer of condescension. Riis’s tenement dwellers are wretched souls, lifeless bodies or nameless [insert ethnic epithet here]s. If documentary journalism and in-depth storytelling like this is intended to humanize the problems of, in this case, tenement dwellers, Riis is not successful. We rarely meet a character by name with whom we can identify on any level; consequently, I felt more like a voyeur than a reader who was in a position to empathize with this population.
Riis creates broad stereotypes of the different populations living in the tenements, whether based on ethnicity (the Italian, the Chinaman, the negro), lodging situation (the common herd, the cheap lodging room dwellers), or occupation (the sweaters, the tobacco rollers, the stale-beer dive proprietors). I can’t believe that it is just my 21st century pc sensibilities that struggle with some of Riis’s characterizations. In his story, the Italian is a murderer, the Jew has low intellectual status and the Chinaman cherishes only his pigtail. Without knowing a single individual in Riis’s story, the reader must work hard to transcend those stereotypes, especially difficult for those of us reading this book now who have little connection to that period in history.
I read the Leviatin essay after finishing about 2/3 of Riis’s book, and I was very surprised to learn that Riis himself had struggled through the tenements of New York City. In The Making of an American, Riis writes that he was of “the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in 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.” (Leviatin, p. 13) Having been in the trenches of the tenements himself, Riis was once an insider in this community, which makes it doubly surprising to me the lack of empathy conveyed in his writing. He holds his subjects at arm’s length, never getting too close. Was this because he “made it” and didn’t want to relive a painful story that was actually very close to his heart? Or was this to save face, to show the members of his new community, the educated middle-class, that he certainly wasn’t like these people anymore and that it was socially proper to remain detached?
Liz Lance
The Lower East Side is my favorite New York neighborhood, and historical fiction based in fin de siècle NYC is my favorite type of book – whether it takes the form of Whartonian intrigues about high society and la belle époque, or Caleb Carr noir-ish stories set in and around dilapidated tenements and crime dens. All my favorite books about this time period have clearly relied in a very direct way on “How the Other Half Lives.”
ReplyDeleteIt is the seedy underbelly of early 20th c. New York I really love to picture: corrupt, dark, riddled with opium and Tammany Hall scandalmakers, prostitutes lining the Bowery by gaslight, violence-loving Irish toughs gathering in the hellish rat baiting pits like Kit Burns’ Sportsmans Bar, to watch a lone dog battle a bevy of hungry rats in a dirt-floored basement, and urchins spending all day beating around Printing House Square hawking copies of The Sun and The New York World, because if they didn’t do so, they wouldn’t eat.
It is the New York of people who remembered why City Hall is only bedizened with marble facing on three sides – no one would ever see the back of the building, because no one ever ventured so far uptown. And McSorley’s, an East Village bar that’s been in continuous operation since 1854, is the kind of place where it’s easy to envision a scene like the one described by Riis in Chapter 18 – the little boy shivering up to the bar and having his growler filled with beer under the “no minors served” sign. These are horrors easily turned away from, but we swallow that instinct, knowing the necessity of honoring mimesis if we want to understand – and ameliorate – the problems of our society.
Jacob Riis seems to have a paternal relationship with the city. His stories of inserting himself into situations he views as problematic and trying personally to rectify them are forcefully reminiscent of Lincoln Steffens’ description of Joseph Folk’s efforts to clean up St. Louis. He creates a vision of himself as the busybody social reformer, interfering almost to a fault when he encounters a situation that needs fixing.
It is also interesting how carefully he avoids directly blaming the upper class. On page 36 he references a wealthy slumlord who “stood high in the community.” Riis’ description of this scene might hint at culpability, but only slyly; it dances around a direct condemnation of the upper class for their willful ignorance about the struggles of the working poor.
In the introduction, Luc Sante discusses how the book’s mission was, in part, to confront the heedlessness of a privileged class that passively believed that the poor brought their squalor on themselves, deserving or even choosing their pitiable lifestyle. It reminded me of the curiosity tours that were conducted by some entrepreneurs during the turn of the century: thrill-seekers from uptown would pay a Lower East Sider for a guided tour of the scandalous streets of the Five Points, ponying up in equal parts for safe passage among the crime-ridden alleys and for the delight of being shocked and horrified by the squalid conditions of same.
That this served as a form of entertainment (and a lucrative one) makes it even more interesting that Riis so carefully chooses not to blame the upper class for their callous role in creating and propagating the disparity. Perhaps he allowed his preference and penchant for cleanliness and virtue to distort what might otherwise have been his role in castigating the "virtuous" rich, or maybe he recognized that he’d gather more attention to his cause by trying to get out of the way, editorially speaking – not proselytizing, but letting the true stories and images of squalor and degradation stand for themselves.
-Angela Hamilton
I apologize for being the last person to post and essentially agreeing with what many of you had to say. I deeply appreciate risks he took to research How the Other Half Lives and the way Riis opposed the mainstream society’s preference to ignore the poverty stricken in New York slums. If journalism can accomplish anything, it’s exposing inequities and speaking for the mistreated and abused.
ReplyDeleteHowever, while I’m impressed and enjoy the premises of Riss’ work, I agree that it is very hard to ignore the blatant racism of the book. Not only does Riis suggest stereotypes for different racial groups found in the slums, he explains and builds upon them. While educating his readers on the poverty that plagues New York, he sidesteps into illustrating those who live in these conditions as animalistic, filthy and unworthy of a better life. The description of the Chinese were especially offensive. When Riis says, “Ages of senseless idolatry, a mere grub-worship, have left him without the essential qualities for appreciating the gentle teachings of a faith whose motive and unselfish sprit are alike beyond his grasp,” (Riis 73), his prejudice is undeniable. It leads me to question: Why such a small-minded dialogue to such groundbreaking book? Is Riis making a satire of the ridiculous prejudices people in New York have against the lower class? Or are his beliefs simply a sign of the times, when very few had the privilege of not being stereotyped?
As a social reformer though, Riis does an excellent job of describing the squalor conditions the poor are subject to. There are points within the book that you can smell the stench of poverty and feel the tiny tenements creeping around you. Riis leaves no room for excuses for the tenements themselves. They are exploitative and disgusting, and that’s that. In creating this tension about the tenements, Riis allows himself to easily construct the slumlord as one of the villains in the story. To me a sign of good nonfiction writing is still being able to identify the classic archetypes against a true setting.
I think something that has changed in activist reporting since Riis’ time is the idea of hopelessness. Riis very clearly creates on more than one occasion a real sense of hopelessness. For example, he describes the death of a tenant saying, “There was the usual wake and nothing more was heard of it. What, indeed, was there to say?” (Riis 33). Since his time, I think that Americans can only stand to consume harsh and heartbreaking situations if there is immediate balance with relief. Though Riis discusses possibilities for the future at the end of the book, the majority is built upon unforgiving conditions with seemingly no wait out. Maybe the difference is that people today think they know all there is to know about any given situation, be it the environment or boy soldiers, and books as gritty as How the Other Half Lives where there is no easy fix or happy ending, are just too much. In this way, How the Other Half Lives has remained salient to today.
Brooke Still