How the Other Half Lives

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1890

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Background

Historical Context: The New York City Tenement in the 19th Century

In the 19th century, New York City experienced demographic changes on a scale rarely seen in human history. At the dawn of the century, the city boasted a population of only 60,000. Ninety years later, when Riis published How the Other Half Lives, nearly 2.7 million people called New York City home. The tenement therefore must be understood in the context of a large and unprecedented population surge. The people who went to New York City in the 19th century needed somewhere to live.

Population growth created the city’s housing need, but it did not create the tenement problem. The tenement itself became an issue when housing impoverished people became an opportunity for capital investment and the unmitigated quest for profit. When landlords realized that they could maximize earnings by cramming the largest number of people into the smallest possible spaces and then charging exorbitant rents, the tenement problem was born. Some landlords were more unscrupulous than others, but it was the principle of extracting as much wealth as possible from human suffering that made the tenements what they were: scenes of poverty and despair.

Reform-minded New Yorkers noticed the problem and tried to do something about it. In 1866, New York City officials created the Board of Health to monitor and improve sanitary conditions. A year later, the Tenement House Law of 1867 established living-space and ventilation requirements. An 1879 law imposed more specific standards for ventilation and led to modest changes in building construction. Notwithstanding the reformers’ good intentions, the sheer scope of the problem—three-fourths of New York’s residents were crammed into tenements—rendered meaningful reform elusive. Meanwhile, in the decade following the 1879 law, New York City grew by more than 750,000 people. This was the situation that confronted reformers when Riis published How the Other Half Lives.

Historical Context: The 19th- and 20th-Century View of Race

Riis’s use of language requires a historical context of its own. Broad generalization based on a community’s shared or dominant characteristics is the precondition for prejudice, and group identities of one kind or another have always existed in human societies, so it might be tempting for modern readers to assume that Western attitudes toward “race” have remained more or less constant through the centuries. This would be a mistake. While it is true that “racial” prejudices have always existed to one degree or another, the people of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, in the United States and across the world, stand out for their peculiar obsession with “race.”

In the United States, this obsession took several forms. Policymakers cited “racial” differences in support of segregation and against the assimilation of Indigenous Americans. Social-science journals published “studies” claiming that Black Americans were far more likely to commit crimes in freedom than they had been under slavery. Popular culture, including the earliest motion pictures, reinforced these ideas. Meanwhile, US imperialists in Congress and elsewhere talked openly of taking up the “White Man’s Burden” by “civilizing” the “darker-skinned” inhabitants of the world. These were not fringe assertions. They were mainstream, and they permeated the language of the day.

Similar ideas prevailed outside the United States, albeit with several significant differences. Europeans also took up the “White Man’s Burden” by colonizing large parts of Africa and Asia. “Race,” however, had an even wider application, for it denoted more than skin color. Japan, for instance, built an empire bolstered by ideas of Japanese “racial” superiority over the people of Asia. The world’s obsession with “race” produced catastrophic consequences in late-19th and early-20th-century Europe, where a savage antisemitism, driven in part by a ruthless and fanatical quest to preserve German “racial” purity, helped plunge the world into a period of prolonged darkness. Even Riis, a native of Denmark, writes of German immigrants to the US in a way that echoes that era’s assumptions about Northern European “racial” superiority.

Historical Context: Dawn of the Progressive Era

As a social reformer and critic of unrestrained capitalism, Riis became associated with the Progressive Era in which he lived. This term has a convoluted meaning, particularly since the word “progressive,” discarded by the political left in the mid-to-late-20th-century, has come back into fashion in the early 21st.

As a description of a period defined by some shared characteristic, the Progressive Era often refers to the political events of 1901-20, when two “progressive” presidents, Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson, occupied the White House for a combined 16 years. In this narrow political context, progressivism generally signifies a belief in expanding the scope of the US federal government, in particular the presidency, so as to combat the influence of “special interests” and other pernicious outgrowths of industrial capitalism. Although Riis’s book appeared at the beginning of the 1890s, his argument against unchecked capital places him, to some extent at least, inside the progressive political tradition.

Outside the realms of party and national politics, however, the progressive movement appears far more heterogeneous and thus more difficult to define. In the broadest possible sense, it represents a reform impulse, a desire to ameliorate some of the harshest conditions wrought by industrialization and urbanization. While they welcomed humane laws, progressive social reformers often looked beyond state-sponsored solutions in an effort to improve the way human beings lived and related to one another. Much like the abolitionists and temperance advocates of the early-19th-century, many progressive social reformers found inspiration in Christian moral philosophy. Riis and other progressives began by appealing to individual consciences.