The year 1866 marks the historical timeframe when the United States saw tremendous growth in urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Immigrants from Southern and Eastern European countries, travelled to America mainly in search of economic fruitfulness. The abundant increase in machinery did pave the way for many to become successful, but overpopulation, low wages, and culture shock caused a plethora of social problems that muckrakers such as Jacob Riis felt compelled to address. In his book, How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis documents the living conditions of the poor in order to shed light on the immediate need for sociological reforms in New York City.

To begin with, many historians have debated the monopolistic practices and culture shock issues during the Gilded Age, but Jacob Riis provides an immersed sense of reality through stories and photographs of the era that eliminates hypothetical hindsight via man-on-the-street type stories. For example, in chapter two Riis eloquently paints a picture of disease plaguing the gloomy slums of New York City. “The dread of advancing cholera, with the guilty knowledge of the harvest field that awaited the plague in New York’s slums, pricked the conscience of the community into action soon after the close of the war” (Riis). Disease and more specifically the health of the immigrants is primarily a vital key of information that many pass over while examining the social issues during the Gilded Age.

Another illustration Jacob Riis portrays in chapter two of, How the Other Half Lives is the close and narrow living quarters that new immigrants resided in, often allowed for disease to travel quickly. “Official reports, read in the churches in 1879, characterized the younger criminals as victims of low social conditions of life and unhealthy, overcrowded lodgings, brought up in “an atmosphere of actual darkness, moral and physical” (Riis). Police municipality reports are ideal for examining social conditions due to their brutal honest nature of reality. Riis investigates further by quoting a medical physician which also gives credibility to his report without any bias. “If we could see the air breathed by these poor creatures in their tenements,” said a well-known physician, “it would show itself to be fouler than the mud of the gutters”(Riis). Ultimately, Riis immersed himself into the world of the poor which allowed him to provide a profound documentary which is the creative treatment of actuality.

Jacob Riis’s purpose to inform for the sake of reform continues into chapter twenty-five where he brings proposed ideas on how to improve the poor living conditions in New York City. “There are three effective ways of dealing with the tenements in New York: I. By law.  II. By remodeling and making the most out of the old houses. III. By building new, model tenements” (Riis). He arrives at these suggestions after he himself witnessed various landlords cheapen the way they repaired housing for tenants. “From where I stood watching the operation, I looked down upon the same dirty crowds camping on the roof, foremost among them an Italian mother with two stark-naked children who had apparently never made the acquaintance of a wash-tub” (Riis).

Final analysis of How the Other Half Lives reveals the dominant mental attitude society as an entity had during the late 1800’s. The deeper subject Jacob Riis hints toward is that it was commonly believed if one was poor in America, the land of opportunity, it was out of pure lethargic behavior of the individual. The rich and middle class whom had been here for generations were not forced to deal with issues of assimilation and culture shock. Self-help resources were unavailable at the time to new immigrants with the exception of ethnic familiarity. It was the work of Riis and other muckrakers that aided new programs in the Progressive Era.

Works Cited

Riis, Jacob. “How The Other Half Lives Chapter II.” 1890. Bartelyby Books. 25 March 2015 https://www.bartleby.com/208/2.html