Silent Biases in Riis’ How the Other Half Lives

The problem of poverty is still a crucial issue today, as it has been for the past years.

Even after centuries of public and private attention to this problem, the real causes of poverty remain to be not fully understood. It was in1890 when photojournalist Jacob Riis published his now classic book about immigrant tenement poverty in lower Manhattan, called How the Other Half Lives.Although Riis’ book mostly focused on environmental causes of poverty and crime, it was also one of the first books to present ethnographic and psychological details that challenged traditional moralistic accounts, to talk about the separate “ways” of slum dwellers -- which were not necessarily immoral in their difference -- and to speak of the importance of "individuality" or self-esteem in addition to "moral character" (in the reformation of the poor) (Gandal, 1997, p. 8). Riis described in his book how he discovered the poor conditions in the New York tenements worse than that innocuous wording would suggest.He became familiar with the overcrowding, the lack of indoor plumbing and lack of ventilation in the tenements.

He also saw the filthy lodging-houses that rented floor space for two cents a night and the platoons of homeless children left to fend for themselves. Through his reports, he sought to put before the public all that he saw. However, in his perspectives about Italians and other so-called new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Riis melded stereotypes and sympathy, and revealed himself to be a far more complex figure than the classic progressive reformer he was hailed to be.Sally Stein (1983) criticized Riis as exhibiting “a racism which from the outset closely coincided with the nativist ideology of nineteenth-century American society. ” Riis shows his biases as judged the slum dwellers in conventional moral terms: he cites what he considers the Italians' bad passions (gambling) and their virtues (honesty and maternal devotion).

He does judge them on sanitary criteria: he stereotypically refers to their lack of tidiness and notes that they are "content to live in a pigsty" (p. 28). But, he also assesses them on fresh ground, noting their appearances as well as their customs.This aesthetic contemplation of slum habits is something new. Silently airing his biases, Riis claimed the Italians for their “colorfulness”, laid side by side with their “good” characteristics.

He narrated that “with all his conspicuous faults the swarthy Italian has his redeeming traits. He is as honest as he is hot-headed. ” The Italian may have been a brigand at home, and his son may occasionally resort to pickpocketing in the New World, but generally “the ex-brigand toils peacefully with pickaxe and shovel on American ground” (p. 30). His worst offense was keeping the stale-beer dives that contribute to urban dissolution and vice.

He could be violent but usually was “gay, light-hearted and, if his fur is not stroked the right way, inoffensive as a child” (p. 31). The Italian women were “faithful wives and devoted mothers” (p. 31) whose picturesque costumes added color to the otherwise dull monotony of the slums. Riis unflinchingly derided the Italians in his description of them working and selling and flirting and just plain hanging around, sounding like what they are doing was improper.

Unlike a typical Protestant moralist, he does not criticize the population for being idle but understands that at times “it has nothing better to do.He is not scandalized by the community's open love-making; he does not scold the Italians for what he considers their lack of modesty and privacy. Nor does he scold them for what he considers their cutthroat bargaining practices. Rather, he goes on to detail, with obvious enthusiasm and enjoyment, a few of the tricks of these trades: Near a particularly boisterous group, a really pretty girl . . .

has been bargaining long and earnestly with an old granny, who presides over a wheel-barrow load of second-hand stockings and faded cotton yarns. . . . One of the rude swains .

. . o whom the girl's eyes have strayed more than once, steps up and gallantly offers to pick her out the handsomest pair, whereat she laughs and pushes him away with a gesture which he interprets as an invitation to stay; and he does, evidently to the satisfaction of the beldame, who forthwith raises her prices fifty per cent. without being detected by the girl (p. 34).

With his views, Riis criticized the Italian family as such falling short in the domestic sphere upon which Riis placed so much importance. He sounded that Italians should not be imitated if people wanted to go upward in social mobility.He may have been a hard worker, who shunned being bums and he seemingly had a knack for turning dirt into gold, but all that was pointless because it did not help the Italian family rise above the slum tide. Ultimately, the Italian's faults and shortcomings were many, while his so-called virtues—docility, light-heartedness, the tendency to keep his violent tendencies—were not, for Riis, the type of values that could contribute to American character and American progress. Only the Italian woman was given untainted, unqualified virtues.Not surprisingly these virtues were the decidedly American values of devotion and faithfulness.

As Riis covered a lot of ground in How the Other Half Lives, he depicted the Italian type of people were becoming more and more represented to Americans at the turn of the century. Riis both condemned and praised the Italian (more of the former than the latter), but how well did he understand Italians? Obviously, he repaired only to seeing Italians with the ones he saw to a great extent. As a journalist, Riis completely failed to see—or at least write about—the diversity of the Italian immigrants.Wanting to see only poverty, dirt, chaos, and oppression, he failed to note the different responses of Italian immigrants to the rich variety of their immigrant experiences. The text of How the Other Half Lives might have captured the lived reality of a segment of Italian immigrants, but there is little indication that Riis truly examined that reality, much less imagined alternative realities for New York's Italians.

Scholars disagree about the nature of the Italian immigrant experience on many levels, but the scholarship clearly shows that Riis presented a terribly distorted picture.Not only did he deride the Italians, he described the “mendacity” (p. 64) of his Jews, for instance, both a comment that is social and racial. They have a “strong commercial instinct” (p. 71) and are naturals at “mental arithmetic” (p.

61), while their thrift also grew out of particular conditions in the Old Country: "Become an overmastering passion with these people who come here in droves from Eastern Europe to escape persecution, from which freedom could be bought only with gold, it has enslaved them in bondage worse than that from which they fled" (p. 57-58).In the same way, Riis's Chinese men are characterized as essentially stealthy and secretive, even though he speculates that perhaps they learned these traits from the “attitude of American civilization toward the stranger” (p. 50). Riis provided ethnographic details without ever doubting his racial remarks that was not only sweeping, but the use of his words was rather cruel. Riis defended the mode of his writings as Riis spoke the language of “scientific racialism,” if not “scientific racism,” when he described the Italian's dirtiness, docility, and sporadic violence.

At other times, he seemed hopeful that these facts were produced by nurture rather than nature or race. Ultimately, the ever-hopeful Riis maintained a grudging optimism that at the very least, the Italians and other new immigrant groups could in time overcome those barriers, become less different, more like him, more like his image of an American (Cosco, 2003). Definitely, Riis’ biases could interfere with the facts that he is telling the public. People who have Italian heritage would be offended by the choice of words he used. They might not commend the facts he saw but they could think about the feeling they got when reading his passages.

Historians and students, however, could only read this book by its fact and not subjectively looking into the words Riis used in his descriptions. In fact, the book How the Other Half Lives won national attention during his time and led to change New York City’s housing codes and other reforms. Future President Theodore Roosevelt, then New York City's police commissioner, called Riis “the most useful citizen of New York. ” How the Other Half Lives benefited from something besides Riis’ biased prose: the photographs he took to accompany his words, painted a more realistic image about poverty in New York City during his time.