Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis
Jacob Riis in 1906
Born	May 3, 1849(1849-05-03) Ribe, Denmark
Died	May 26, 1914 (aged 65) Barre, Massachusetts, USA
Nationality	American
Field	Social reform, journalism, photography

Jacob August Riis (May 3, 1849 - May 26, 1914), was a Danish American social reformer, muckraking journalist and photographer. He is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City, which was the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He helped with the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. As one of the most prominent exponents of the newly practicable flash, he is considered a pioneer in photography.

Biography

Early life

Jacob Riis was the third of the 15 children (one of whom, an orphaned niece, was fostered) of Niels Edward Riis, a schoolteacher and occasional writer for the local Ribe newspaper, and Carolina Riis (née Carolina Bendsine Lundholme), a homemaker.^[1] Among the 15, only Jacob, one sister, and the foster-sister would survive into the twentieth century.^[2] Riis was influenced by his father, whose school Riis delighted in disrupting, but who persuaded him to read (and improve his English via) Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper.^[3]

There was at least one preecho of Riis's later concern for the poor. At eleven or twelve, he donated a coin he had received for Christmas to a poor Ribe family living in a squalid house, but on condition that they cleaned it up. The tenants took the money and obliged; when he told his mother, she went to help.^[4]

Jacob had a happy childhood, but his first tragedy struck when he was eleven. His brother Theodor, a year younger than he, was drowned. He would never forget his mother's grief.^[5]

Although his father had hoped that Jacob would pursue a literary career, Jacob wanted to be a carpenter.^[6]

When Riis was 16, he fell in love with Elisabeth Gjortz, the twelve-year-old adopted daughter of the owner of the company where he was doing work as an apprentice carpenter. The father disapproved of the boy's blundering attentions; and Riis was forced to complete his apprenticeship in carpentry in Copenhagen.^[7] Riis returned to Ribe in 1868 at age 19. Discouraged by poor job prospects in the region and by Gjortz's rejection of his marriage proposal, Riis decided to emigrate to the United States.^[8]

Immigration to the United States

Riis went to the United States in 1870, when he was 21, seeking employment as a carpenter. He first took a small boat from Copenhagen to Glasgow, where on 18 May he boarded the steamer Iowa, traveling in steerage. He carried $40 donated by friends (he had paid $50 for the passage himself); a gold locket with a strand of Elisabeth's hair, presented by her mother; and letters of introduction to the Danish Consul and a Mr. Goodall (later president of the American Bank Note Company), a friend of the family since his rescue from a shipwreck at Ribe.^[9]

Riis disembarked in New York on 5 June. He was underinformed about the state of affairs, on his first day there spending half the $40 his friends had raised for him on a revolver for defense against human or animal predators.^[10]

This was an era of social turmoil. The demographics of American urban centers grew significantly more heterogeneous as immigrant groups arrived in waves, creating ethnic enclaves often more populous than even the largest cities in the homelands.^[11] Large groups of migrants and immigrants flooded urban areas in the years following the Civil War seeking prosperity in a more industrialized environment. Twenty-four million people moved to urban centers, causing the population to increase eightfold.^[11] "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." ^[12]

After five days, during which he used up almost all his money, Riis found work as a carpenter at Brady's Bend Iron Works on the Allegheny. After a few days of that he turned to mining for the increased pay, but quickly returned to carpentry. Learning on 19 July 1870 that France had declared war on Germany, he expected that Denmark would join France to avenge the Prussian seizure of Schleswig, and determined to fight for France. He returned to New York, and, having pawned most of his possessions and with no money, attempted to sign up at the French consulate, but was told that there was no plan to send a volunteer army from America. Pawning his revolver, he walked out of New York until he collapsed from exhaustion; on waking, he walked on to Fordham College where a Catholic priest served him breakfast.^[13]

After a short period of farming and odd jobs at Mt. Vernon, Riis returned to New York, where he read in the New York Sun that the paper was recruiting soldiers for the war. Riis rushed there to enlist, but the editor (who he would later realize was Charles Dana) claimed or affected ignorance but offered the famished Riis a dollar for breakfast; Riis indignantly declined.^[13] Riis was destitute, at one point sleeping on a tombstone and surviving on windfall apples. Still, he found work at a brick-yard at Little Washington and was there for six weeks, until he heard that a group of volunteers was going to the war; he thereupon left for New York.^[14]

On arrival, Riis found that the rumor was true but that he had arrived too late. He pled with the French consul, who threw him out. He made various other attempts to enlist, none successful.^[15] As Autumn came, Riis was destitute, with no job or, in view of his appearance, hope for any. He survived on scavenged food and handouts from Delmonico's and slept rough or in a foul-smelling police lodging-house. At one point Riis's only companion was a stray dog, who brought him inspiration. One morning he woke in a lodging-house to find that his gold locket, with its precious strand of Elisabeth's hair, had been stolen; he complained to the sergeant, who, enraged, threw him out and beat the dog to death for good measure. Riis was devastated.^[16] The story became a favorite of Riis's.^[17] One of his personal victories, he later confessed, was not using his eventual fame to ruin the career of the offending officer.^[18] In disgust, he left New York, buying a passage on the ferry with the silk handkerchief that was his last possession, and by doing odd jobs and hopping freight trains eventually reaching Philadelphia, where he appealed to the Danish Consul, Ferdinand Myhlertz, for help and was taken care of for two weeks by the Consul and his wife.^[19]

Myhlertz sent Riis, now dressed properly in a suit, to the home of an old classmate in Jamestown.^[20] Riis worked within Scandinavian communities in the west of New York State as a carpenter, also taking a variety of other jobs. He achieved sufficient financial stability to find the time to experiment as a writer, in both Danish and English, although his attempt to get a job at a Buffalo newspaper was unsuccessful, and magazines rejected his submissions.^[21]

Riis was in much demand as a carpenter, but a major reason was the low price that he charged. However, his employers exploited his efficiency and low price, and Riis returned to New York City.^[22] He was most successful as a salesman, particularly of flatirons and fluting irons, rising to sales representative for Illinois. However, in Chicago he was cheated of both his money and his stock, and had to return to an earlier base in Pittsburgh, where he found that his subordinates he had left to sell in Pennsylvania had cheated him in the same way. He was again short of money, and while bedridden with a fever learned from a letter that his childhood sweetheart Elisabeth was engaged to a cavalry officer. But Riis managed to recover from his despair, and again returned to New York City by selling flatirons on the way.^[23]

Early journalism

Riis noticed an advertisement by a Long Island newspaper for an editor, applied, and was appointed city editor. He quickly realized why the post had been available: the editor in chief was dishonest and indebted. Riis left in two weeks.^[24]

Again unemployed and broke, Riis returned to Five Points. He was sitting outside the Cooper Institute one day when the principal of the school where he had earlier learned telegraphy happened to notice him and said that if he had nothing better to do then the New York News Association was looking for a trainee. After one more night on the streets and a hurried wash in a horse trough, Riis went for an interview, where despite his disheveled appearance he was sent on a test assignment: to cover a luncheon at the Astor House. Riis wrote this up competently and got the job.^[25]

Riis was able to write about both the rich and also life in impoverished immigrant communities. He did his job well and was able to move to editor of a weekly, the News. However, this newspaper, a front for a political group, soon went bankrupt. Simultaneously, and unusually, Riis got a letter from home, which told him that both his older brothers, an aunt, and his sweetheart Elisabeth Gortz's fiançé had died. Riis wrote to Elisabeth to propose, and with $75 of his savings and promissory notes, he bought the News.^[25]

Riis worked hard at his newspaper, soon paying off his debts. Newly independent, he was able to target the politicians who had previously been his employers. Meanwhile, he received a provisional acceptance from Elisabeth, who asked 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 arrive in Denmark a rich man.^[26]

After some months in Denmark, the newly married couple arrived in New York. Riis worked briefly as editor of a south Brooklyn newspaper, the Brooklyn News. To supplement his income, he used a magic lantern to advertise in Brooklyn, either onto a sheet hung between two trees or onto a screen behind a window. The novelty made a success, and Riis and a friend moved on to upstate New York and Pennsylvania as itinerant advertisers. However, this was cut short when the pair were caught up in an armed dispute between striking railroad workers and the police; Riis quickly returned to New York City.^[27]

Years at the Tribune

A neighbor of Riis was the city editor of the New York Tribune, who recommended Riis for a short-term contract. Riis did well, and was offered the post of police reporter. He was based in a press office across from police headquarters in Mulberry Street. "Nicknamed 'Death's Thoroughfare'", 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."^[28]

During these stints as a police reporter, Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city. Through his own experiences in the poor houses, and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference for those who had no voice.^[11] Working the night-shift duty in the immigrant communities of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Riis developed a tersely melodramatic writing style; his pieces gave him credibility in the nascent field of urban reform.

Photography

Bandit's Roost by Jacob Riis, 1888, from How the Other Half Lives. This image is Bandit's Roost at 59½ Mulberry Street, considered the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of New York City.

Riis had for some time been wondering how to show the squalor of which he wrote more vividly than his words could express. He tried sketching, but was incompetent at this.^[29] Lenses of the 1880s were slow — necessarily, for depth of field despite their considerable focal length — as was the emulsion of photographic plates; photography thus did not appear to be of any use for a reporter of goings on in dark interiors. In early 1887, however, Riis was startled to read that "A way had been discovered [. . .] to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest corner might be photographed that way."^[30] The German innovation, by Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, was to mix magnesium with potassium chlorate and antimony sulfide for more stability;^[31] the powder was used in a pistol-like device that fired cartridges.

Riis informed a friend, Dr John Nagle, a keen amateur photographer and chief of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the City Health Department. Nagle found two more photographer friends, Henry Piffard and Richard Hoe Lawrence, and the four of them set out to photograph the slums. The first report of this appeared in the New York Sun on February 12, 1888; an unsigned article by Riis, it described its author as "an energetic gentleman, who combines in his person, though not in practise, the two dignities of deacon in a Long Island church and a police reporter in New York". The "pictures of Gotham's crime and misery by night and day" are described as "a foundation for a lecture called 'The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York.' to give at church and Sunday school exhibitions, and the like." The article was illustrated by twelve line drawings based on the photographs.^[32]

Riis and his photographers were among the first Americans to use flash.^[33] Pistol lamps were dangerous and looked threatening,^[34] and it would soon be replaced by another, in which Riis lit magnesium powder on a frying pan. The process involved removing the lens cap, igniting the flash powder, and replacing the lens cap; the time taken to ignite the flash powder sometimes allowed a visible image blurring with that created by the flash.^[35]

Riis's first team soon tired of the late hours, and Riis had to find other help. Both were lazy and one was dishonest, selling plates for which Riis had paid. Riis successfully took him to court. Nagle suggested that Riis should become self-sufficient, and so in January 1888 Riis invested $25 in a 4×5 box camera, plateholders, a tripod, and equipment for developing and printing. He took the equipment to potter's field on Hart Island to practice, making two exposures. The result was seriously overexposed but successful.^[36]

For some three years Riis combined his own photographs with others commissioned of professionals, donations by amateurs, and purchased lantern slides, all of which formed the basis for his photographic archive.

Because so much of the work was done at night, he was able to capture the true, feral element of the New York City slums and penetrate the dark streets, tenement apartments, and "stale-beer" dives, and was able to capture the hardships faced by the poor and criminal, especially on the notorious Mulberry Street.

Public speaking

Riis accumulated a supply of photographs and attempted to submit illustrated essays to magazines. But when an editor at Harper's New Monthly Magazine said that he liked the photographs but not the writing, and would find another writer, Riis was despondent about magazine publication and instead thought of speaking directly to the public.^[37]

This was not so easy. The obvious venue would be a church, but several churches, including Riis's own, demurred, fearing either that the talks would offend the churchgoers' sensibilities or that they would run afoul of the rich and powerful landlord circles. However, Adolph Schauffler (of the City Mission Society) and Josiah Strong arranged to sponsor Riis's lecture at the Broadway Tabernacle. Lacking money, Riis found a partner in W. L. Craig, a Health Department clerk.^[38]

Riis and Craig's lectures, illustrated with lantern slides, made little money for the pair, but they both greatly increased the number of people exposed to what Riis had to say and also let him meet people who had the power to effect change, notably Charles Parkhurst and an editor of Scribner's Magazine, who invited him to submit an illustrated article.^[38]

Books

An eighteen-page article by Riis, "How the Other Half Lives", appeared in the Christmas 1889 edition of Scribner's Magazine. It included nineteen of his photographs, rendered as line drawings. Its publication brought an invitation to expand the material into an entire book.^[38]

Riis had already been thinking of writing a book, and went straight to work on it, during nights. (Days were for reporting for the New York Sun, evenings for public speaking.) How the Other Half Lives, subtitled "Studies among the Tenements of New York", was published in 1890, a powerfully written book that reused the eighteen line drawings that had appeared in the Scribner's article but also seventeen reproductions in halftone,^[39] and thus "[representing] the first extensive use of halftone photographic reproductions in a book".^[40] (The magazine Sun and Shade had done the same during a year or so from 1888.^[39])

How the Other Half Lives sold well and was much quoted. Reviews were generally good, although some reviewers criticized it for oversimplifying and exaggerating.^[39] Riis attributed the success to a popular interest in social amelioration piqued by William Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out, and also to Ward McAllister's Society as I Have Found It, a portrait of the moneyed class.^[41] The book brought imitations, such as Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1892), which somehow appropriated Riis's own photographs.^[42]

Children of the Poor (1892) was a sequel in which Riis wrote of particular children that he had encountered.^[42]

Theodore Roosevelt

Riis walks the beat in New York City behind his friend and fellow reformer, NYC Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt 1894 - Illustration from Riis' autobiography

Theodore Roosevelt introduced himself to Riis, offering to help his efforts in some way. Upon his appointment to the presidency of the Board of Commissioners of the New York City Police Department in 1895, Roosevelt asked Riis to show him night-time police work. On their first night-time tour, the pair found that nine out of ten patrolmen were missing. Riis wrote this up for the next day's paper, and for the rest of Roosevelt's term the force were more attentive.^[43]

Roosevelt closed the police-run lodging rooms in which Riis had suffered during his first years in New York. After reading the exposes, Roosevelt was so deeply moved by Riis's sense of justice that Roosevelt met and befriended Riis for life, later calling Riis "the best American I ever knew."^[44]

After Roosevelt became President, he wrote a tribute to Riis that started:

For his part, Riis wrote a campaign biography of Roosevelt that praised him highly.^[46]

Public works

A particularly important effort by Riis was his exposure of the state of the New York's water supply. His 5-column story "Some Things We Drink", in the 21 August 1891 edition of the New York Evening Sun, included six photographs (later lost). Riis wrote:

The story led to the purchase of areas around the Croton Watershed, and may well have saved New Yorkers from an outbreak of cholera.^[47]

Riis tried hard to have the slums around Five Points demolished and replaced with a park. His writings led to the Drexel Committee investigation of unsafe tenements; this led to the Small Park Act of 1887. Riis was not invited to the eventual opening of the park, on 15 June 1897, but turned up all the same, together with 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!" Other parks too were created, and Riis was popularly credited with them as well.^[48]

Later life

Riis wrote his autobiography The Making of an American in 1901. His daughter, Clara C. Riis, married Dr. William Clarence Fiske.^[49] His son, Edward V. Riis, was appointed US Director of Public Information in Copenhagen toward the end of World War I; he is known to have spoken publicly against antisemitism.^[50] In 1905, Jacob Riis's wife grew ill and died. In 1907, Riis remarried, and with his new wife, Mary Phillips, moved to a farm in Barre, Massachusetts. Riis died on May 26, 1914, at the farm. His second wife would live until 1967, continuing work on the farm, working on Wall Street and teaching classes at Columbia University.^[51]

Social attitudes

Riis's concern for the poor and destitute often led people to assume a dislike or even hatred of the rich. However, Riis showed no sign of discomfort among them, taking whatever opportunities arose to ask them for their support.^[28] Although seldom involved in party politics, Riis was sufficiently repelled by the corruption of Tammany Hall to move from the Democrats to the Republicans.^[43] The period leading up to the Spanish–American War was difficult for Riis: he was approached by liberals who suspected that alleged Spanish mistreatment of the Cubans was merely a ruse intended to provide a pretext for US expansionism; perhaps in order not to offend his friend Roosevelt, Riis declined the offer of good payment to investigate this, and made nationalist statements.^[52]

Riis's concern for improving the conditions in which the poorest and weakest lived has seldom been questioned. But this sense of populist justice did not prevent him from belittling women and people of certain ethnic and racial groups.^[11][53] As described in Riis's books, "The Jews are nervous and inquisitive, the Orientals are sinister, the Italians are unsanitary."^[54]

In his autobiography, The Making of an American, Riis decided to allow his wife to add a chapter examining her own life. After letting her begin an honest and evocative biographical sketch over several pages titled "Elizabeth Tells Her Story", Riis decided his wife had had enough of the stage: "I cut the rest of it off, because I am the editor and want to begin again here myself, and what is the use of being an editor unless you can cut 'copy?' Also, it is not good for woman to allow her to say too much."^[55]

Writings

Books

• How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890.
• The Children of the Poor. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892. (Harvard University Library scan of a copy of the 1902 imprint here.)
• Nibsy's Christmas. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1893. Fiction for younger readers. (Here at Project Gutenberg.)
• Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement Life in New York City. New York: Century, 1896. (Harvard University Library scan of a copy of the 1898 imprint available here.)
• A Ten Years' War: An Account of the Battle with the Slum in New York. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900. (Harvard University Library scan of a copy available here.)
• The Making of an American. New York: Macmillan, 1902. (Here at Project Gutenberg. Harvard University Library scan of a copy of the 1904 imprint available here.)
• The Battle with the Slum. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901. (Here at Project Gutenberg. Harvard University Library scan here.)
• Children of the Tenements. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903. (Here at Project Gutenberg. Harvard University Library scan here.)
• The Peril and the Preservation of the Home: Being the William L. Bull Lectures for the Year 1903. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1903. (Harvard University Library scan here.)
• Is There a Santa Claus? New York: Macmillan, 1904.
• Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. New York: Outlook, 1904. (Scan at the University of Michigan library.)
• The Old Town. New York: Macmillan, 1909. (Harvard University Library scan here.)
• Hero Tales of the Far North. New York: Macmillan, 1910. (Here at Project Gutenberg.)
• Neighbors: Life Stories of the Other Half. New York: Macmillan, 1914. (Harvard University Library scan of a copy of the 1919 imprint available here.)
• Christmas Stories. New York: Macmillan, 1923. An anthology of fiction for younger readers.

Other

• "How We Found Our Farm". The World's Work: A History of Our Time 23 (February 1912), pp. 475–479. (Here at Google Books.)

Memorials

• Jacob Riis Park, on Rockaway Peninsula in the Gateway National Recreation Area, Queens
• Jacob Riis Triangle, in Richmond Hill, Queens^[56]
• Jacob Riis Playground, at Babbage and 116 Streets, 85 Ave, Queens^[57]
• P.S. 126 The Jacob Riis Community School, on Catherine Street in New York City, is a high poverty public PK-5 school^[58]
• From 1915 until 2002, Jacob Riis Public School on South Throop Street in Chicago was a high school operated by the Chicago School Board.^[59]
• Jacob Riis Settlement House, a multi-service community based organization, is in the Queensbridge Houses, in Long Island City, Queens, NY.^[60]
• Jacob Riis Houses of NYCHA at Avenue D (Manhattan)

Notes

References

• Alland, Alexander. Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen. Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1993. ISBN 0-89381-527-6
• Dowling, Robert M. Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem. University of Illinois Press, 2008. ISBN 025207632X
• Pascal, Janet B. Jacob Riis: Reporter and Reformer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0195145275
• Stange, Maren. Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Ware, Louise. Jacob A. Riis: Police Reporter, Reformer, Useful Citizen. New York: Appleton-Century, 1938. Also available here at archive.org.
• Yochelson, Bonnie and Czitrom, Daniel, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York. New York: New Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-59558-199-0

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jacob Riis

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Jacob Riis

• Jacob Riis page from the Open Collections Program at Harvard University. Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930 collection.
• "Jacob A. Riis's New York". New York Times. February 27, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/27/nyregion/20080227_RIIS_SLIDESHOW_index.html. Retrieved 2008-08-08. 
• Davis, Kay. "Documenting 'the Other Half': The Social Reform Photography of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine"
• Jacob Riis at Find a Grave