Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [939]
If his photographs were sometimes presumptuous, his prose was often contemptuous. Slum dwellers were “shiftless, destructive, and stupid, in a word they are what the tenements made them.” He accepted the genteel premise that working people were incapable of “aspiration above the mere wants of the body.” The tenement houses, he believed, “have no aesthetic resources. If any are to be brought to bear on them, they must come from the outside.” Fundamental change would require that the immigrants be Americanized, as he had been: the tide of his autobiography would be The Making of an American. One of the worst aspects of the slums was that they slowed this process by encouraging a clannish defensiveness.
When Riis surveyed the Lower East Side neighborhoods—that “queer conglomerate mass of heterogeneous elements”—he often deployed stereotypes or slurs. The Italians were “gay, light-hearted”; African Americans were sensual and superstitious; and as to Russian Jews—who were still “where the new day that dawned on Calvary left them standing, stubbornly refusing to see the light”—“money is their God,” and their attachment to “thrift” was at once the community’s “cardinal virtue and its foul disgrace.” The Chinese “in their very exclusiveness and reserve . . . are a constant and terrible menace to society”: he ridiculed their customs unmercifully, expressing particular horror at white girls’ submission to Chinamen’s lusts. Only one group seemed more threatening, Lincoln Steffens reported, recalling his deeply pious friend’s response when an assistant brought news of a police raid on a resort of fairies. ” ‘Fairies!’ Riis shouted, suspicious. ‘What are fairies?’ And when Max began to define the word Riis rose up in a rage. ‘Not so,’ he cried. ‘There are no such creatures in this world.’ He threw down his pencil and rushed out of the office.”
For all his country man’s recoil from metropolitan cosmopolitanism, Riis had absorbed more than a touch of Henry George’s values and analysis. In the Other Half, he rejected explanations of immigrant viciousness that looked to intemperance or individual moral failings; instead he insisted that environment in general, and bad housing in particular, was the determining factor in their moral fall.
Riis lit into landlords with Georgian fervor. He argued that the horrors they perpetuated “come near to making the name of landlord as odious in New York as it has become in Ireland.” The tenement mess was the “evil offspring of public neglect and private greed.” He called on his genteel readers to help rectify the situation, if not from love of their fellow man, than from fear of him. One of the most striking images in How the Other Half Lives is the account of a poor ragged man standing on Fifth Avenue and 14th Street. He builds up a head of rage at the fashionable driving by in their carriages, oblivious to “those little ones crying for bread around the cold and cheerless hearth.” All at once, the man “sprang into the throng and slashed around him with a knife, blindly seeking to kill, to revenge.”
Very much in the vein of the era’s apocalyptic novels, Riis warned the propertied classes that their neglect had bred “a proletariat ready and able to avenge the wrongs of their crowds.” The restless, pent-up multitudes “hold within their clutch the wealth and business of New York, hold them at their mercy in the day of mob-rule and wrath.” “The sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters, heaves uneasily in the tenements,” he cried, and “if it rise once more, no human power may avail