Jacob Riis Settlement House Photographs

"Street Arabs" was a Progressive Era slang term that referred to young boys who were impoverished and often orphaned. "Street Arabs" were very commonplace throughout Progressive Era New York. A younger Jacob Riis shared many similarities with these individuals. Both Riis and the "Street Arabs" lived on the streets, had very little to eat, and shifted between jobs. Photographs such as "Street Arabs at Night" were meant to be of a city fallen from Christian community into neglect and fratricide, rather than of the traditional iconography of Manhattan that advertised New York as a collection of objects and were invariably found in the New York City guide books of the time; "his photographs are a catalog of individuals crushed by narrow alleys, of people clustered tightly while working in dilapidated rooms, of individuals thrust into the darkness of tenements" (Fried, 41). What gradually emerged was a sense of the person, the family, the gang asserting whatever weak individuality could have survived those gruesome conditions. Basically, the human subject became the background.

In his book How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis argued that late 19th century New York City was in complete ruin and decay compare to how it was decades before. Riis used biblical references while making this particular argument; "history is the cycle of fratricide: Riis stating that 'the first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation passed before the the writing was deciphered' " (HOHL, 5) (Fried, 46). He was also quick to argue that the tenements were both a hidden city and the avenging consequences of a fallen moral order; "the darkness of alleys and rooms reveals, even jestingly, a universe torn between sunlight and shadow, between the powers that make for order and those that make for chaos, for 'the sun never shone into the alley from the day the devil planned and the man built it" (Fried, 47). Riis took on the role of the city elder in writing How the Other Half Lives, which happened to be appropriate since he had lived in the city for several years. He commented that during the winter, the tenements and its inhabitants were highly vulnerable to flooding caused by winter storms, and that in the tenements, the homogenous American community was replaced by a collective mass of heterogenous elements. Riis noted that New York was a metropolis that consisted of a series of neighborhoods. He compared this to a city map that had many stripes and colors that represented various nationalities; "this patchwork cartography illustrated how insular and competitive ethnic groups were, making a shared, common culture almost impossible. Riis's most compelling sketches, therefore, remain studies of various, impoverished nationalities within the city whose progress towards acculturation he tried to measure" (Fried, 47).

How the Other Half Lives was a unique book at the time that it was published because unlike other books published during the same period, it was not centered around science or scientism. It can be seen as the last great 19th century sermon taking as its principle of organization the decline of the harmonious community: from brotherhood to fratricide; "the book's central figures are debased people as Riis quickly sketched the history of the city declining from intimacy and order to exploitation to barbarism" (Fried, 45). The victory of literary realism, the description of people and environment as bare, separate data that do not reveal or implicate a transcendent principle, was an unusable triumph for Riis, for to him the modern city embodied man's estrangement from God. In Riis' eyes, God's will is the immanent principle of fraternity in the city, and his spirit is indwelling when the city makes real a humanizing state of affairs. How the Other Half Lives has a rhetoric that transforms the empirical data of urban development into moral values.

During the mid-19th century, many Americans were unaware of the large numbers of tramps who traveled throughout the country in search of migrant labor; however, "it would take a Wall Street crash in September 1873 and five subsequent years of bankruptcies, wage cuts, layoffs, strikes, and mass unemployment- the first international 'great depression'- to thrust the tramp army to the fore of public consciousness" (DePastino, 30). Of course, Riis was always aware of the large presence of tramps, given that he had firsthand experience as a migrant laborer. Once they became aware of the problem, newspaper editors, charity workers, and government officials across the nation began to wonder how to fix it. Unlike Riis' compassionate treatment towards the impoverished and less fortunate, American policy and opinion makers had bad intentions for dealing with the tramps. Instead of offering charity, they called for chain gangs, mass arrests, and workhouses. On July 12, 1877, the Chicago Tribune advised poisoning meat and other supplies with arsenic and strychnine as a warning to tramps to leave the neighborhoods; "another paper proposed flooding poorhouses with six feet of water so that tramps would 'be compelled to bail' or drown" (DePastino, 31). The Gilded Age, which preceded the Progressive Era, was partially defined by concerns about the new corporate industrial order that came to be after the Civil War. America's tramps happened to be at the center of the concerns; "Americans in these years saw the rise of large-scale manufacturing and mass production, the spread of railroads and continental markets, and the creation of strict workplace hierarchies based on a universal system of wage labor" (DePastino, 31). As the pace of industrialization gained more speed and economic power became concentrated in fewer hands, pitched battles erupted between capital and labor over not only the fruits of production, but the very destiny of industrial civilization itself. Tramps were both the victims and agents of the new economic system, and "because they seemed strange and placeless- 'here today and gone tomorrow'- tramps served as convenient screens onto which middle-class Americans projected their insecurities, anxieties, and fantasies about urban industrial life" (DePastino, 32).

Even though middle-class descriptions of tramp life hardly mentioned them, tramps wrestled with their own insecurities. Increasingly reliant upon wages and decreasingly secure in their jobs, working people the nation over face the threat of poverty, dislocation, and the breaking of their customary patterns of life. In response to these changes, some workers took to the road and, in doing so, collectively gave rise to a new modern problem of homelessness that would command the attention of public and private officials for generations to come. Overall, tramping was an expression of the new economic and social relationships that came to dominate American life during the Gilded Age. The alarm of the tramp crisis of the 1870s managed to spill over to the Progressive Era and then into the mid-20th century. When doing charity writing, Jacob Riis used specifc styles of description. He made ethnic and racial generalities, compared immigrant groups to one another, and invoked images of immigrant homelands, by way of contrast to the slums of New York. In addition, he supported and dressed his claims with anecdotes and statistics and recognized the limits of descriptive power in the face of extreme conditions (in particular, filth and wretchedness beyond description, and surroundings full of unspeakable horror). Riis began How The Other Half Lives with the claim that the "worst crime" of the tenements was that "they touch the family life with a deadly moral contagion". He ended his book by threatening his readers with a scene of social apocalypse; "in his study of the tenements, Riis is most of all concerned, like his predecessors, with moral disease and class violence" (Gandal, 31).

Another feature of How The Other Half Lives that makes it unique from other 19th century literature on urban poverty is that Riis exceeded its traditional subject matter and forms of judgement and at times violated its own logic. While Riis still talked about such themes as environmental design, crime, filth, and vice, he temporarily digressed by mentioning the everyday lives of Italian Americans who lived in New York, which included hanging out on the street and idling; "Riis shows not just how the other half sins and suffers, keeps house and works, but also how it speaks and flirts and passes time: to use his word, more fully how the other half lives" (Gandal, 32). When producing charitable writing, Jacob Riis expressed his interest in behaviors and objects that are not part of a moral or sanitary economy. Examples of these include ways of flirting and modes of dress; Riis went to the Jewish market on "bargain days" because it was the most advantageous time to study the ways of the Jews. He also introduced ethnographic terms in his account of the slums, terms that usually overturn traditional moral explanations for behavior; at points, instead of abiding by the usual moral categories of vice and virtue, he employs such terms as 'ways,' 'customs,' and 'fashions,' and he uses traditional ethical terms, such as 'habit,' in new ethnographic ways (Gandal, 32). He challenged his readers to view the poor with a different set of categories that would produce a new, more understanding perception. Through his ethnographic work, Riis found that tenement ways or fashions resulted in certain problematic slum habits, not individual evil or moral weakness. This was the case of the bad habit of slum dwellers' strong liking to have lavish, expensive funerals. The word "habit" is a central term in the conventional language of moral responsibility. "Habit," which once referred to the traditional Protestant set of "universal' and individual vices and virtues, was later applied self-consciously by Riis to a local group behavior outside this set. Riis extended the classification of habit to include a complex ritual of an urban community. Unlike the moral habits of previous charity writing, the expensive funeral is exclusively a group habit. The use of the word "habit" in this case is in itself a Progressive notion: it suggests a direct relationship between the social environment and individual behavior.

Even though he judged the slum dwellers in conventional moral terms and judged them on sanitary criteria, Riis also assessed them on fresh ground, noting their appearances as well as their customs. The aesthetic contemplation of slum habits was something new. For instance, among the Italians' virtues of honesty and maternal devotion, is for Riis the fact that "their vivid and picturesque costumes lend a tinge of color to the otherwise dull monotony of the slums they inhabit" (Riis, 41); "their colorfulness is laid side by side with their probity. Riis is asserting a new type of virtue" (Gandal, 33). Riis did not turn the popularity of the street into another proof that the buildings are uninhabitable; he did not turn the street scene back onto his ostensible theme, the tenement; "when the subject of the tenements arises, he flatly remarks: '[F]or once they do not make the foreground in a slum picture from the American metropolis. The interest centres not in them, but in the crowd" (Riis, 43) (Gandal, 44). Basically, the interest was in the sight, the behaviors, and the objects that were not attended to before, such as collective habits and the tendency to congregate in the street. Overall, Jacob Riis' How The Other Half Lives was urban travel literature that took its readers sightseeing, between its morally concerned introduction and its apocalyptic ending, even within its traditional sorts of passages on Protestant vices and social evils.