From How The Other Half Lives By Jacob Riis Summary

Ngoc Le

Nagel

ENGL 99 - Paper 1

Jan 18, 2017

True Charity

According to America Now (2015), the eleventh edition, composed by Robert Atwan, Jacob Riis was a Danish immigrant; he later became a reporter and a pioneering photographer who focused on social issues, primarily poverty. Riis has also written many influential books based on this topic. One of these books’ short introduction was made into the essay “From How the Other Half Lives” featured in America Now (2015), which explains the reasons behind the increase in poverty and crime. Jacob Riis believed that the underlying cause was the neglect and ignorance of the rich towards the poor. He expressed his idea by explaining and analyzing the living conditions of the “other half” particularly

However, doing so would only corrupt them even more; thus nothing would be solved to both maintain peace and improve their lives at the same time. Therefore, in order to achieve satisfaction for both sides, such charity would be the last solution to think of; instead, the society should focus more on providing jobs and restricting mass immigrations.

While it is true that building tenements and giving out houses are the way the public shows its conscience, the people would gradually be corrupted by all the free things they are given. Through the reading “From How the Other Half Lives,” it is clear that Jacob Riis wanted to criticize the “upper half” for their selfishness and ignorance towards the “other half”. He claimed that due to such indifference, many crimes had taken place: “By

Charities as well as financial, housing provisions might not be the best solutions to the increase of crimes: the problem had to be solved where it rooted. As Jacob Riis suggested, the cause of it is most likely because of both legal and illegal immigration: “In New York, the youngest of the world’s great cities, that time came later than elsewhere, because the crowding had not been so great. There were those who believed that it would never come; but their hopes were vain” (365). Riis also implied that community gave those people - the “other half” no other choice; yet they had more choice than most: they were living in a city much younger than others, less crowded and many of them were immigrants who moved to New York by choice - conscious choice made rather recently, to say the least. Furthermore, Jacob Riis was quick to discard the fact that having this kind of agency may have been a spark to the riots - the unquenchable desire for better lives coupled with an unwillingness to accept reality as it is. Instead, he claimed that the cause of the crimes were “the very places where they had their homes in the city” (Riis 366) - the living condition that the poor were having. The living condition, in fact, was not the primary cause in this case, but the number of unwanted immigration that was gradually increasing like a speeding car without brakes.