Riis, Jacob August

Best known as author of How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) and for his poignant photographs of slum dwellers, urban reformer Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914) was also a journalist, lecturer, settlement house founder, and adviser to Theodore Roosevelt at the city, state, and federal levels. Reared in Ribe, Denmark, he arrived in New York in 1870 at the age of 21. For seven years he drifted from job to job, an immigrant without connections, frequently unsure where his next meal was coming from. Then came his big break. Hired on a trial basis by the New York Tribune, he wrote a graphic eyewitness account of a fire that earned him a job as a police reporter. His beat: a district in Manhattan's Lower East Side known as Mulberry Bend, where nearly 300,000 people were packed into one square mile of land, often 20 to a room. The sweatshop conditions became grist for stories about immigrant children who often had no formal schooling, including garment makers, cigar rollers, ragpickers, beer runners, disfigured newsboys, and the homeless. A decade of contact with public health and charity officials provided insights and data that made How the Other Half Lives an indictment of a habitat born of public neglect and nurtured by private greed. Although containing negative ethnic stereotypes that Riis later regretted, it humanized the slums to a wide readership and ushered in a generation of humanitarian interest in fighting urban poverty.

For the next quarter-century, Riis was a publicist for reform, whose illustrated speeches and articles characterized machine politicians as the enemies of progress. During the winter of 1893 he mobilized relief committees and lashed out at Tammany for tolerating dangerous housing conditions and rampant police corruption. Viewing Republican William L. Strong's 1894 mayoralty victory as an opportunity for public-spirited action, he became general agent for the New York Council of Good-Government Clubs, served as secretary to Strong's Advisory Committee on Small Parks, and befriended Theodore Roosevelt, the boisterous, publicity-conscious president of the Board of Police Commissioners. For one who had faith in the possibilities of enlightened governmental leadership, it was a blow when Tammany swept back into office in 1897.

Despite the fragility of public support for patrician reform, Riis retained confidence that channeling the energies of local citizens and municipal experts would bring about progress. His muckraking articles and books, such as The Battle With the Slum (1902) and Children of the Tenements (1903), helped sustain the Progressive Movement. Working closely with Jewish and Italian American community leaders, Riis sometimes clashed with professional social workers and proponents of “scientific philanthropy” and came to embrace cultural pluralism. As he stated in The Making of an American (1901), one could be a patriot without renouncing one's heritage. Believing that people were largely a product of their environment, the Danish American took special interest in such child-saving activities as the George Junior Republic, the Jacob A. Riis Social Settlement, Sea Breeze Tuberculosis Hospital for Children, the Fresh Air Fund, and the Boy Scouts. In January 1909, thanks in part to his prodding, his hero Theodore Roosevelt [Page 685]hosted the first White House Conference on Children. Jacob Riis Park on Long Island is a testament to his importance within park and playground movements.

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