Jacob August Riis

• Jacob A. Riis
• Born: May 3, 1849
• Died: May 26, 1914

Journalist, author, and reformer, was born in Ribe, Denmark, the third child of Niels Edward Riis, a teacher at Ribe Latin School, and Caroline B. (Lundholm) Riis, daughter of the warden of Kronberg Castle. Of their fourteen children, only three survived childhood. The Riis family, though gentry, was not wealthy, and Niels Riis had to struggle to support his large family. He supplemented his teaching income by writing editorials for the town’s newspaper, and Jacob Riis often helped his father prepare copy for the paper. At the age of nine Jacob Riis was enrolled in his father’s school. His father instructed him privately in English, which he learned relatively quickly. A bright and precocious child, he loved the outdoors and disliked attending school, preferring to learn independently.

In 1865 Riis was apprenticed to a builder in Copenhagen; he received his certificate of entrance into the carpenter’s guild three years later. He soon discovered, however, that there were no jobs available in Ribe, and in the spring of 1870 he emigrated to America to find work.

For the next seven years Riis lived on the brink of poverty, and his personal experiences were to provide him with an understanding of the plight of the poor. He took a series of odd jobs as a farmer, ironworker, coal miner, and peddler to support himself, but on several occasions spent nights in jails when he found himself without funds. In 1874 he enrolled in a business-school telegraphy course and succeeded in obtaining a job as a reporter for the New York News Association, covering stories on New York City events. In May of that year he began working for the South Brooklyn News, a Democratic party political paper. Riis quickly rose to the post of editor and within a year purchased the debt-ridden paper for a down payment of seventy-five dollars. Under his control the newspaper was transformed into a crusading reform journal, and within six months it was making a profit. He eventually sold it back to its original owners at a 500 percent profit.

In December 1875 Riis returned to Denmark to marry his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Nielsen; the Methodist wedding ceremony took place in March 1876, and the couple settled in Brooklyn in the summer of that year. The Riises had six children, four sons and two daughters. Riis resumed his position as editor of the News, but resigned in 1877 and took a job on The New-York Tribune.

For the next eleven years Riis worked as a police reporter for the Tribune and the Press Bureau. During this period he developed his writing skills, made contacts with philanthropic organizations, and obtained firsthand knowledge of New York City’s tenements and immigrant populations. Riis’s newsbeat included the police and fire departments, the coroner’s office, the excise bureau, and the Board of Health. At the latter agency he made contact with reform-minded officials. Riis became a dedicated advocate of reform, using his journalistic talents to campaign for improvements in the slums and to expose the wretched circumstances of the inhabitants. His stories, rich in emotional appeal, provided many biographical portraits of ghetto dwellers, both the unusual and the commonplace. His articles told of the miseries of slum life and of its ruinous effects on people’s health and welfare. Vividly he depicted the crowded, dirty quarters in which men, women, and children struggled to survive each day; the appalling sanitary conditions that bred epidemics; and the lack of opportunity that led many into lives of crime and vice.

Riis became an active member of the Charity Organization Society, whose New York chapter had been founded by Josephine Shaw Lowell in 1872, and publicized its programs, including day nurseries, penny savings banks, trade-school classes, and housing lodges. During this period he also took a strong editorial stand on municipal corruption. In 1884, under the direction of Theodore Roosevelt, then a young assemblyman, the New York State legislature undertook an investigation of New York City’s Department of Public Works. Riis wrote about the scandals exposed at the hearings and became a strong admirer of Roosevelt’s. The same year a series of lectures presented by Felix Adler, founder of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, aroused his interest in action to improve tenement housing. By the end of that year he was a firm opponent of greedy landlords, corrupt politicians, and inertia in state government. He became an American citizen in 1885.

At Riis’s suggestion the King’s Daughters of New Jersey, a women’s club, started to do volunteer work in New York City’s tenement areas in 1889. The following year the group acquired temporary quarters on Henry Street on the Lower East Side and began providing food and nursing services to the area’s residents. By the fall a permanent settlement house had been established, with educational, nursing, cultural, and charitable facilities. The center was later named the Jacob A. Riis Settlement. Riis, like other reformers of the period, viewed settlement work as a means of bringing people of all classes together and preserving the moral integrity of the poor. Taking the view that the upgrading of urban life had to begin with upgrading of the environment, he instigated the demolition of the notorious Mulberry Bend tenements, and was the first to propose that all public schools be equipped with playgrounds.

In 1888 Riis began preparing a series of lectures, accompanied by photographs, on New York City’s slum life. The recent invention in Germany of a new type of flash lighting for cameras made it possible for him to get detailed pictures of dark tenement rooms and hallways. From February to November Riis toured America with his lecture program. The next year he wrote several articles on the theme of the “two Americas,” recommending improved health laws, better public schools, the elimination of child labor, and public support of private philanthropic groups.

In 1890 Riis’s investigative work of two decades was published in How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. The book, illustrated with line drawings based on his photographs, graphically described to affluent Americans the wretchedness of slum life, especially for children, and provoked the first attempts at remedial legislation. The work established Riis as one of America’s leading experts on the urban poor, and for the next four years he was a publicist for slum reform, speaking and writing in New York, New England, and the Midwest and studying social-welfare programs that had been established in Britain and Denmark.

In 1891 an article by Riis about contaminants in New York City’s water supply prevented a cholera epidemic and induced the state government to purchase the land around the Croton Reservoir to stop sewage dumping. In the following year he published his second book, Children of the Poor, an account of the plight of the young in tenements that was based on extensive quantitative data.

Riis returned to Europe in 1893, this time to study firsthand foreign slum conditions and possible remedies. On returning to New York City he became a member of the Conference of Charities’ Committee on Vagrancy, whose main objective was to examine various means of providing proper shelter for the homeless. Riis opposed the common practice of using police lodging houses to hold both criminals and destitute people. During the depression of 1893-95 Riis carried on a campaign to induce New York City to expand public-works projects as a means of combating unemployment, but he came to oppose institutional forms of public relief, preferring government efforts to prevent the causes of poverty. Often he spent his own money to help the needy.

The depression made Riis realize that the resources of private philanthopic organizations were inadequate in times of emergency. He worked for laws to regulate working conditions in order to end exploitation of the workers, and he advocated public kindergartens, vocational education, special facilities for truant children, and city parks and playgrounds. Riis also became a member of the Society for the Prevention of Crime and an unofficial adviser to the State Tenement House Committee in 1894.

During the term of reform mayor William L. Strong, which began in 1895, Riis became general agent for the New York Council of Good Government and an adviser to the Board of Police Commissioners headed by Theodore Roosevelt. Under Roosevelt, police lodging houses were finally closed and a hundred tenement sweatshops condemned. When Roosevelt became governor of New York in 1899, Riis became his labor adviser on urban affairs. Together they worked to establish a State Tenement House Commission and succeeded in persuading the legislature to appropriate $10,000 to establish it.

In 1900 Riis developed a heart condition and was forced to slow his pace. When Roosevelt was elected vice president that year, Riis turned his attention to national issues. His autobiography, The Making of An American, completed in 1901, emphasized that poor immigrants could make a place for themselves in America, but that there was a need for government action to open up opportunities and to reconstruct the urban environment. After Roosevelt became president, Riis served as an adviser, apologist, and publicist for administration policies. In 1904 he published a biography of the president entitled Theodore Roosevelt the Citizen.

In the last decade of his life, Riis, despite poor health, continued to write and lecture. He became an advocate of creative play and physical fitness. Elizabeth Riis died in 1905, and two years later Riis married his secretary, Mary A. Phillips, who was twenty-eight years his junior. From 1905 to 1909 Riis worked to establish boys’ clubs in America; he was one of the organizers of the Boy Scouts. He also did volunteer work for the University, College, and Henry Street settlements, helped found the Greenwich House Settlement, and became president of the Jacob A. Riis Settlement House. In 1912, when Roosevelt broke from the Republican party, Riis supported his unsuccessful candidacy on the Bull Mouse ticket.

Riis died at his summer home at Pine Brook Farm in Barre, Massachusetts, at the age of sixty-five, never having recovered from a heart attack suffered a month earlier. He was buried under an unmarked granite stone in the cemetery adjacent to his farm.

Jacob Riis’s papers are at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Russell Sage Library at the City College of New York. Riis’s writings, in addition to those cited above, include Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement Life in New York City (1898); The Battle with the Slum (1902); Is There a Santa Claus? (1904); The Peril and Preservation of the Home (1903); The Old Town (1909); and Hero-Tales of the Far-North (1910). The best accounts of his life are J. B. Lane, Jacob A. Riis and the American City (1974) and E. L. Ware, Jacob A. Riis: Police Reporter, Reformer, Useful Citizen (1939). Also useful are F. Cordasco, ed., Jacob Riis Revisited (1968); R. Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890-1917(1962); J. Felt, Hostages of Fortune: Child Labor Reform in New York State (1965); and A. F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (1967). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1935). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, May 27, 1914.