Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a Danish immigrant and photojournalist best known for his first book, How the Other Half Lives, subtitled Studies among the Tenements of New York. Published in 1890, the book shocked the conscience of Americans by showing in vivid detail the slum conditions of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Jewish, Bohemian, German, Italian, Chinese, and Irish immigrants were packed into tenements, many of them with no windows or ventilation, and waged a daily battle against overcrowding, crime, disease, filth, and poverty.

A number of developments enabled Riis's book—and Riis himself, later a confidant of President Theodore Roosevelt—to achieve prominence. One was technological. Riis was among the earliest journalists to take flash photographs, using a mixture of magnesium and potassium chlorate powder. Without this early kind of “flash bulb,” developed in Germany in 1887, Riis would not have been able to illuminate the darkened, airless corridors and rooms of the slum tenements he visited, often at night.

The other developments were social. Of particular importance was the Progressive movement, which began as a social movement in the late nineteenth century and would evolve into a political movement in the early twentieth. The movement was a response to various factors, including the immense number of immigrants to the United States and the nation's rapid industrialization after the Civil War. Progressives attacked social ills—child labor, sweatshops, grinding poverty, racism, income inequality, corporate malfeasance, disease, ignorance—on many fronts. One was journalism, and during the late nineteenth century numerous writers began to document social and economic conditions that made the lives of the poor—particularly the urban poor—a misery. In time, the efforts of these journalists, later called “muckrakers,” would lead to legislation designed to correct some of the social ills they witnessed.

In How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis exposed tenement conditions in New York City. They book came out in subsequent editions and remained something of a best-seller. More than a century later, the phrase “how the other half lives” continues to be used to highlight the divide between poverty and wealth.