by H. W. Brands
But his children would have what he lacked. “He could send his children to school, to learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. The common school, at least, perhaps high school; for one or two, perhaps even college! His children should be students, should fill his house with books and intellectual company; and thus he would walk by proxy in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning. As for the children themselves, he knew no surer way to their advancement and happiness.” The proudest day of his relatively young life—he was only thirty-five—was the day he walked them to school. “He would not have delegated that mission to the President of the United States,” Mary said.
The four of us stood around the teacher’s desk; and my father, in his impossible English, gave us over in her charge, with some broken word of his hopes for us that his swelling heart could no longer contain. I venture to say that Miss Nixon was struck by something uncommon in the group we made, something outside of Semitic features and the abashed manner of the alien. My little sister was as pretty as a doll, with her clear pink-and-white face, short golden curls, and eyes like blue violets when you caught them looking up. My brother might have been a girl, too, with his cherubic contours of face, rich red color, glossy black hair, and fine eyebrows. Whatever secret fears were in his heart, remembering his former teachers, who had taught with the rod, he stood up straight and uncringing before the American teacher, his cap respectfully doffed. Next to him stood a starved-looking girl with eyes ready to pop out, and short dark curls that would not have made much of a wig for a Jewish bride.
All three children carried themselves rather better than the common run of “green” pupils that were brought to Miss Nixon. But the figure that challenged attention to the group was the tall, straight father, with his earnest face and fine forehead, nervous hands eloquent in gesture, and a voice full of feeling. This foreigner, who brought his children to school as if it were an act of consecration, who regarded the teacher of the primer class with reverence, who spoke of visions, like a man inspired, in a common schoolroom, was not like other aliens, who brought their children in dull obedience to the law; was not like the native fathers, who brought their unmanageable boys, glad to be relieved of their care. I think Miss Nixon guessed what my father’s best English could not convey. I think she divined that by the simple act of delivering our school certificates to her he took possession of America.2
JACOB RIIS SETTLED less easily into American life, being alone and still desperately in love. His ship docked at Castle Garden on the Hudson River side of lower Manhattan on Whitsunday of 1870. “It was a beautiful spring morning, and as I looked over the rail at the miles of straight streets, the green heights of Brooklyn, and the stir of ferryboats and pleasure craft on the river, my hopes rose high that somewhere in this teeming hive there would be a place for me.” What sort of place, he didn’t know, and he couldn’t decide where to start looking. The obvious route for one of his background was carpentry. New York needed builders, and trained tool-men commanded good wages. But hammer and saw repelled him. “They were indissolubly bound up with my dreams of Elizabeth that were now gone to smash.”
Riis’s strongest impressions of America had been formed by conversation with a Danish veteran of the early, wild days of the California gold rush; on the basis of this intelligence he purchased a large revolver, which he strapped conspicuously outside his coat before setting off up Broadway, “conscious that I was following the fashion of the country.” A policeman let him know he was off by twenty years and three thousand miles. Riis took the hint and dispensed with the weapon gladly enough. “It was quite heavy to carry around.”3
He returned to Castle Garden, where a labor contractor enticed him with the promise of a job at a steel mill near Pittsburgh. The contractor bought railroad tickets for Riis and a score of other immigrants. Only Riis and one other man reached the destination. “The rest calmly deserted in Pittsburgh and went their own way.” Riis took a lesson in American freedom. In Denmark workmen honored a contract almost unquestioningly; in America apparently not. “Here they broke it as a matter of course the minute it didn’t suit them.”
Riis labored for the steel company just long enough to repay his ticket and then tried his hand at coal mining, which suited him no better. As he was quitting the mine he learned that France had declared war on Prussia and that Denmark would probably join France. Riis felt his patriotic blood rising—the more so since a returning hero might win Elizabeth’s affection—and he headed for the Danish consulate in New York to enlist. To his surprise, the consul wasn’t interested. Neither was the French consul. Some Frenchmen he spoke to told him he was crazy to want to leave America to fight in Europe’s war. But he read an article in Charles Dana’s New York Sun describing a volunteer regiment that was forming to fight for France. He visited the Sun office and demanded to see Dana. The editor, intrigued by this pushy fellow, invited him into his office. Riis asked where the regiment was. Dana asked what regiment he meant. The one in the paper, Riis said. Dana confessed that editors didn’t always know everything that appeared in their papers.
I turned to go, grievously disappointed, but he called me back. “Have you,” he said, looking searchingly at me, “have you had your breakfast?”
No, God knows that I had not; neither that day nor for many days before. That was one of the things I had at last learned to consider among the superfluities of an effete civilization. I suppose I had no need of telling it to him, for it was plain to read in my face. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a dollar.
“There,” he said, “go and get your breakfast; and better give up the war.”
Give up the war! and for a breakfast. I spurned the dollar hotly.
“I came here to enlist, not to beg money for breakfast,” I said, and strode out of the office, my head in the air but my stomach crying out miserably in rebellion against my pride.
Riis and Dana would meet again, the former recalling the New York editor’s generosity, the latter the immigrant’s stubborn pride. For now Riis required work. He signed on with a New Jersey brickyard for twenty-two dollars a month plus board. “That night, when I turned in after a square meal, in an old wagon I had begged for a bed, I felt like a capitalist.” He slept in the wagon because the barracks of the brickyard was filled with Germans, who loudly celebrated the news of each Prussian victory.
Brickmaking—shaping raw clay into blocks to dry and fire—was a seasonal business in the 1870s, and with autumn’s rains the workers were laid off. Riis returned to New York. As his money ran out he pawned what little he owned and sought whatever work offered. None did.
The city was full of idle men. My last hope, a promise of employment in a human-hair factory, failed, and, homeless and penniless, I joined the great army of tramps, wandering about the streets in the daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals, and fighting at night with vagrant curs or outcasts as miserable as myself for the protection of some sheltering ash-bin or doorway. I was too proud in all my misery to beg. I do not believe I ever did. But I remember well a basement window at the downtown Delmonico’s, the silent appearance of my ravenous face at which, at a certain hour in the evening, always evoked a generous supply of meat-bones and rolls from a white-capped cook.
In his desperation he made first acquaintance with the Five Points, the roughest neighborhood in New York. He slept in a doorway and wished he had never left Denmark. One rainy night he became thoroughly soaked and began shivering uncontrollably; all that saved him was a mongrel dog as miserable as he. Huddling close, each kept the other barely warm. After midnight Riis approached a police sergeant and asked for shelter in the Church Street station. The officer told him to leave the dog outside. “I pleaded for it in vain. There was no choice. To stay in the street was to perish.” He fell into an exhausted stupor on the station floor, only to awaken hours later and discover that his one remaining treasure from Denmark—a gold locket he wore around his neck—had bee
n stolen from under his shirt. When he complained to the sergeant, the officer growled that he must be a thief himself to have come by such a piece, and he told the doorman to throw him out. The doorman kicked him through the portal and down the stair. But on the stair waited Riis’s canine friend, which, seeing his partner abused, bit the doorman. The doorman swore, angrily seized the dog by the hind legs, and battered its brains out upon the pavement.
Riis, already overwrought, nearly lost his mind. He hurled Danish curses and paving stones at the walls and windows of the station. The sergeant, apparently deciding that the doorman had overreacted and not wishing to provoke this lunatic further, instructed two patrolmen to escort him from the precinct. The officers marched him to the Hudson and put him on a ferry. Twenty minutes later he was in New Jersey, vowing never to return to New York.
He hoboed to upstate New York, where he had heard there was work in the woods for Scandinavians. He felled trees, harvested lake ice, and tried his hand at trapping. The following summer he joined an Irish construction crew on a railroad near Buffalo. “I had never done such work, and was not built for it. I did my best to keep up with the gang, but my chest heaved and my heart beat as though it would burst.” Convinced that manual labor would kill him, he searched about for something else. Years earlier his father had edited a newspaper in Denmark, and he had occasionally helped. Now, despite a rudimentary grasp of English, he presented himself at the office of one of the Buffalo papers. The editor brusquely turned him away. He tried a second paper. The editor laughed scornfully and slammed the door in his face.
For a moment I stood there stunned. His ascending steps on the stairs brought back my senses. I ran to the door, and flung it open. “You laugh!” I shouted, shaking my fist at him, standing halfway up the stairs, “you laugh now, but wait—” And then I got the grip of my temper and slammed the door in my turn. All the same, in that hour it was settled that I was to be a reporter. I knew it as I went out into the street.4
THE POOR NEIGHBORHOODS of New York were the ones the wealthy had left or hadn’t yet reached. In the early nineteenth century, while money still clustered about Manhattan’s foot, impecunious immigrants built cabins and shanties to the north of the developed district, along the Hudson in what would become Hell’s Kitchen, on the East River near Fortieth Street, and in Harlem, then considered a distant village. As the older part of the city grew more crowded, as its inventory of buildings aged, and as the well-to-do migrated uptown, the poor filled in behind them. Landlords converted single-family dwellings into apartments or boarding houses and filled garrets and basements and stables with renters besides. Factories and warehouses were likewise refitted; a brewery in the Five Points neighborhood became home to hundreds of Irish immigrants and African Americans.
Other buildings were constructed expressly for the new residents. Tenant houses, or tenements, were narrow and deep, to fit the lots, and three to six stories tall. The couple dozen apartments in a tenement each typically consisted of two rooms: a parlor with a window and a bedroom without. Designed for as many families as apartments, the tenements in practice usually held more, as the families themselves took in boarders or the landlords simply rented floor space to individuals.5
The crowding in the tenements, the lack of ventilation and sanitation facilities (residents lined up to use outdoor privies and water pumps), and the general poverty of the residents contributed to recurrent outbreaks of disease. Until the mid-nineteenth century, infectious disease respected neither class nor income; yellow fever decimated Philadelphia in 1793, while an outbreak of cholera in 1832 prompted petitions to the White House for a national day of prayer (Andrew Jackson declined, judging it beyond his constitutional competence). But as cities improved their water supplies—New York’s Croton aqueduct opened in 1842, to popular delirium—the worst of the water-borne epidemics diminished for those tied into the water systems.
For those not so blessed, high mortality rates persisted. An 1849 cholera outbreak prompted New York officials to commence a general cleanup. The many thousand pigs that rooted in the cellars and garbage of the poor neighborhoods were slaughtered or relocated. Cows were barred from the streets. Horses remained essential to transport, but contracts were let to clean their dung from the thoroughfares. Sewer pipes drained the effluent from various neighborhoods, starting with the wealthier ones. Garbage collection improved. Streets were paved.
The tenements were a harder problem. Repeated investigations publicized the crowded conditions in which the poor lived. An 1857 committee expressed shock at conditions in the Eleventh Ward. “It is astounding that everyone doesn’t die of pestilence,” the committee’s report declared. An 1867 statute established minimum standards for tenements, requiring fire escapes, toilets (one per twenty residents), and better ventilation (via air shafts and more windows). During the following decade an architectural competition produced a model tenement, the “dumbbell,” wide at the front and back, narrow in the middle to allow air and light to penetrate between adjacent buildings. The principles of the dumbbell informed an 1879 law that mandated a window for every tenement bedroom.6
THE LAW HAS done what it could,” Jacob Riis wrote a decade later. Riis had found his way back to New York as a journalist, a first of the breed of investigators derided, then respected, as “muckrakers.” The label fit Riis particularly, for his investigations focused on the lives of those on the mudsill of society. Having dwelt there himself, he felt compelled to bring the plight of the lower classes to view. “Long ago it was said that ‘one half of the world does not know how the other half lives,’ ” he wrote in 1890. “That was true then. It did not know because it did not care.” It might not care still had the life of the lower half not intruded increasingly on that of the upper. Peasants in the Old World could starve invisibly, far from the manor; poverty in America elbowed wealth every day on the streets of New York and other cities.7
Yet wealth looked away and hurried by. Riis proposed to make it stop and look. With camera and pen he entered the slums of New York, and he invited readers and viewers to join him. “Down below Chatham Square, in the old Fourth Ward, where the cradle of the tenement stood, we shall find New York’s Other Half at home,” he wrote. “Leaving the Elevated Railroad where it dives under the Brooklyn Bridge at Franklin Square, scarce a dozen steps will take us where we wish to go. With its rush and roar echoing yet in our ears, we have turned the corner from prosperity to poverty. We stand upon the domain of the tenement.” An arched gateway, a remnant of the neighborhood’s better days, led to a dark alley. “The wolf knocks loudly at the gate in the troubled dreams that come to this alley, echoes of the day’s cares. A horde of dirty children play about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it: it is the best it can do. These are the children of the tenements, the growing generation of the slums; this is their home.”
Riis guided the reader deeper. Blind Man’s Alley got its name from a colony of blind beggars who had lived there as tenants of a blind landlord—a capitalist who had made a fortune from his sightless tenants only to grow blind himself in old age. One of the tenement-reform laws had required a clean-up of the alley, resulting in the displacement of most of the blind beggars, who had dispersed to who knew where. Yet the clean-up was only relative, as Riis discovered. He was new at photography, and on one occasion, in one of the darker byways of a tenement in Blind Man’s Alley, his clumsiness with the flash powder resulted in a minor explosion. As his eyes recovered from the dazzle, he realized he had set the walls on fire. He nearly panicked.
There were six of us, five blind men and women who knew nothing of their danger, and myself, in an attic room with a dozen crooked, rickety stairs between us and the street, and as many households as helpless as the one whose guest I was all about us. The thought: how were they ever to be got out? made my blood run cold as I saw the flames creeping up the wall, and my first impulse was to bolt for the street and shout for help.
The next was to smother the fire myself, and I did, with a vast deal of trouble. Afterward, when I came down to the street I told a friendly policeman of my trouble. For some reason he thought it rather a good joke, and laughed immoderately at my concern lest even then sparks should be burrowing in the rotten wall that might yet break out in flame and destroy the house with all that were in it. He told me why, when he found time to draw breath. “Why, don’t you know,” he said, “that house is the Dirty Spoon? It caught fire six times last winter, but it wouldn’t burn. The dirt was so thick on the walls, it smothered the fire!”
Riis’s tour led along another alley. “Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else.” The passageway snaked and dove down a flight of stairs. “You can feel your way, if you cannot see it.” The air oppressed. “What would you have? All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms that in turn receive from the stairs their sole supply of the elements God meant to be free, but man deals out with such niggardly hand.” A woman passed with a pail, to be filled at the hydrant in the hall. “Hear the pump squeak! It is the lullaby of tenement-house babes. In summer, when a thousand thirsty throats pant for a cooling drink in this block, it is worked in vain. But the saloon, whose open door you passed in the hall, is always there. The smell of it has followed you up.” Riis heard something. “Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail—what do they mean? They mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs will have another story to tell—Oh! a sadly familiar story—before the day is at an end. The child is dying with measles. With half a chance it might have lived; but it had none. That dark bedroom killed it.”
