Jacob Riis
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encyclopedia)
Jacob August Riis (May 3,
1849 - May 26, 1914), a Danish-American muckraker journalist,
photographer, and social reformer, was born in Ribe, Denmark. He is known
for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to
help the less fortunate in New York City, which was the subject of most of
his prolific writings and photographic essays. He helped with the
implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of
humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. As one of the first photographers to use
flash, he is considered a pioneer in photography.Jacob Riis was the third
of fifteen children born to Niels Riis, schoolteacher and editor of the
local Ribe newspaper, and Carolina Riis, a homemaker. Riis was influenced
both by his stern father, whose school Riis took delight in disrupting,
and by the authors he read, among whom Charles Dickens and James Fenimore
Cooper were his favorites. At age eleven, Riis's younger brother drowned.
Riis would be haunted for the rest of his life by the images of his
drowning brother and of his mother staring at his brother's empty chair at
the dinner table. At twelve, Riis amazed all who knew him when he donated
all the money he received for Christmas to a poor Ribe family, at a time
when money was scarce for anyone. When Riis was sixteen, he fell in love
with Elisabeth Gortz. To his dismay, Riis was forced to seek work in
Copenhagen as a carpenter without her.Riis went to the United States by
steamer in 1870, when he was 21, seeking employment as a carpenter. He
arrived during an era of social turmoil. Large groups of migrants and
immigrants flooded urban areas in the years following the Civil War
seeking prosperity in a more industrialized environment.
The demographics of American urban centers grew significantly more
heterogeneous as immigrant groups arrived in waves, creating ethnic
enclaves often more populous than even the largest cities in the
homelands. Riis found himself just another poor immigrant in New York. His
only companion was a stray dog he met shortly after his arrival. The dog
brought him inspiration and when a police officer mercilessly beat it to
death, Riis was devastated. One of his personal victories, he later
confessed, was not using his eventual fame to ruin the career of the
offending officer. Riis spent most of his nights in police-run poorhouses,
whose conditions were so ghastly that Riis dedicated himself to having
them shut down.Riis held various jobs before he accepted a position as a
police reporter in 1874 with the New York Evening Sun newspaper. In 1874,
he joined the news bureau of the Brooklyn News. In 1877 he served as
police reporter, this time for the New York Tribune. During these stints
as a police reporter, Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished
slums of the city. Through his own experiences in the poor houses, and
witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to
make a difference for those who had no voice. He was one of the first
Americans to use flash powder, allowing his documentation of New York City
slums to penetrate the dark of night, and helping him capture the
hardships faced by the poor and criminal along his police beats,
especially on the notorious Mulberry Street. In February 1888, the New
York Sun published his essay, "Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in
Dark Places by the Lightning Process," and in December 1889, Scribner's
Magazine published Riis's photographic essay on city life, both of which
Riis later expanded to create his 1890 magnum opus How the Other Half
Lives. This work was directly responsible for convincing then-Commissioner
of Police Theodore Roosevelt to close the police-run poor houses in which
Riis suffered during his first months as an American. After reading it,
Roosevelt was so deeply moved by Riis's sense of justice that he met Riis
and befriended him for life, calling him "the best American I ever knew."
Roosevelt himself coined the term "muckraking journalism", of which Riis
is a recognized example, in 1906.At age 25, Riis wrote to Elisabeth Gortz
to propose a second time. This time Gortz accepted, and joined Riis in New
York City, saying "We will strive together for all that is noble and
good". Indeed, Gortz did support Riis in his work, and he spent the next
25 years using his artistic medium to advance the concerns of the poor.
During this time, Riis wrote another twelve works, including his
autobiography The Making of an American in 1901. In 1905, his wife grew
ill and died. In 1907, Riis remarried, and with his new wife Mary
Phillips, moved to a farm in Barre, Massachusetts. Riis's children came
from this marriage, but Riis died on May 26, 1914, at his Massachusetts
farm. His second wife would live until 1967, continuing work on the farm,
working on Wall Street and teaching classes at Columbia University.
