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to social and civic consciousness, an evolution paralleling Howells’s own. He is exposed to Conrad Dryfoos, an Episcopalian social worker (modeled on Father Huntington) who in helping the poor in their tenement houses has provided for the Church a “way back to the early ideals of Christian brotherhood.” March comes to see New York as a “lawless, Godless” society, whose planless “play of energies” yields only a “fierce struggle for survival” in which the stronger preside over “the mutilation, the destruction, the decay, of the weaker.” The novel swirls to a violent denouement—set against a streetcar strike modeled on the real ones of 1886—in which March is forced to acknowledge his connectedness to, and complicity in, a world of which he had hitherto been only a spectator.

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVED

The following year saw the arrival of another realistic book dedicated to probing life in New York City, this one the product of Jacob Riis, who had arrived in New York in 1870 as a hopeful twenty-one-year-old Danish immigrant, only to plunge, with the metropolis, into the great depression. Despite his cultivated background and his acquired skills as a carpenter, Riis had lived from job to job, often from hand to mouth. Some nights found him sleeping in the doorways and ashbins of Mulberry Bend and the Five Points. Once he was rolled in a Church Street police station men’s shelter. For a time, with dismal appropriateness, he survived by selling copies of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times door to door.

Finally, in 1877, Riis had landed a position at the New York Tribune, soon becoming its police reporter. For the next eleven years he worked out of an office across from the Mulberry Street Police Headquarters. He wrote Pulitzerian-type pieces on the people of the slums, articles that tugged at readers’ heartstrings, made them smile, taught them moral lessons. But for all his portrayal of the miseries of slum life, and his growing contacts with genteel reform-minded people, Riis—now a self-made man—had little patience with or sympathy for most slum dwellers. In the early 1880s, he publicly hailed Josephine Shaw Lowell’s COS; in an 1883 article about tramps, wrote severely: “As to the man who will not work, let him starve.”

Privately, however, he was coming to think the COS approach harsh, cold, and patronizing and to wonder if collective prevention was not as necessary as individual cures. This rethinking was spurred when, in 1884, he covered Felix Adler’s lectures on the housing crisis, and as the 1880s wore on, Riis’s critiques of urban injustice grew sharper. He wrote a column called “Gotham Doings” for a Wisconsin newspaper in which he wrote mockingly about Mrs. Astor’s Patriarch’s Balls. He expressed admiration for Henry George and published pieces in the United Labor Party campaign newspaper, though in the end he voted for Teddy Roosevelt. He applauded the emergence of the settlement movement. And in 1888, after accompanying a sanitary inspector on a dreadful slum tour, he decided he must present the facts of slum life to a wider audience than Adler had been able to reach. He had seen sights, he wrote, that “gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist.”

To reach out more effectively, the new convert to the social gospel seized upon two recent technological developments. In 1885 George Eastman had invented the handheld “detective” camera, which could be carried about in a valise, and some Germans had invented a flashgun that burned magnesium powder, creating a brilliant (if dangerous) flare. Together, the two instruments allowed Riis to take pictures indoors, making it possible to hurl javelins of artificial sunshine into the darkest shadows. He began making nocturnal patrols around the city. Accompanied by the police, he would burst into the haunts of the poor and explode his flash in their faces, then vanish—as he explained to the Sun in 1888—before the photographees “could collect their scattered thoughts.”

The photographs garnered in this fashion broke sharply with genteel pictorial