Christmas Greetings to all. Lest we forget how things used to be for the working poor, I've uploaded segments from Merry Christmas in the Tenements an article by Jacob Riis which appeared as the lead article in The Century Magazine Christmas Number for December 1897. Click on the image to enlarge the illustration by Ellen Bernard Thompson for Children of the People also by Jacob Riis in another national monthly magazine around the same time.
Illustration of Holiday Shoppers on Avenue A by Jay Hambridge in The Century Magazine Christmas Number for 1897. Click on image to enlarge.
Jacob Riis was the most remarkable of reformers. He was unique among a dozen or so dedicated American men and women who, in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, helped turn the tide against wanton greed and indifference to the poverty and despair of the urban working poor. These noble men and women saved the children of the cities, and thereby spared a nation.
Jacob Riis had only a modest formal education, no family fortune or much discretionary income beyond his employment as a journalist. He had a sometimes clumsy writing style that was distinctively different from the mawkish touch of other published writers of the time. Moreover, he had emigrated at the age of 21 from his native Denmark, and so was another "foreigner" to many. His derisive fellow newspapermen whom history has proven were often wrong, but never in doubt, delighted in calling him "The Dutchman."
Bespectacled and unimposing, with thinning hair and a drooping mustache, Jacob Riis was not an imposing figure as was his friend, President Theodore Roosevelt, given to roaring from a "bully pulpit," and famous for his admonishment to "speak softly and carry a big stick."
Jacob Riis did not speak softly. The stick he carried was a journalist's pen and -- eventually -- a large, ungainly camera. Time Magazine said of him in a special issue devoted to photojournalism: "[His] unflinching pictures of tenement life [marked] a turning point between the Victorian idea that poverty was an evil to be condemned and the reformer's conviction that it was a condition to be remedied."
In 1949 New York celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacob Augustus Riis. Mayor William O'Dwyer proclaimed the entire first week of May as Jacob Riis Week, honoring him as the "father of slum clearance" and commemorating his memory as that of "New York's most useful citizen."
Theodore Roosevelt said he was the best American he knew. I consider him the first photojournalist because of his book, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890 by Scribner's. Roosevelt, at the time a rising young reform candidate in the Republican party, was so impressed by the book that he went to Riis's office in the New York Evening Sun, and left his calling card on which he wrote: "I have read your book and I have come to help." Goaded by Riis, TR attacked corruption in the police department, and with other reformers enacted legislation to clean up slums with new laws regarding tenements. Riis' concerns that slums were the breeding grounds for crime, where children lived on the streets learning the ways of petty theft instead of gaining a useful education, caused the policy wonks and beaurocrats to fear an eventual day of reckoning.
Illustration by Jay Hambridge in the same article by Jacob Riis: The School for Italian Children–an Ice-Cream Feast. Click on image to enlarge.