The word gilded means to cover an object with a thin layer of gold to make it look more appealing. Mark Twain coined this time period the Gilded Age because on the surface, the time seemed like a great combination of immigration, industry, and economy, but underneath the thin layer of sparkling gold lay vast layers of corruption. Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives brings to light a lot of the negativity that was a part of the Gilded Age, peeling back the superficial layer of the time and revealing the undesirable parts of the time. Riis was a Danish immigrant and he aligned with many set stereotypes of different races, describing the “dull gray of the Jew,” the “bright red of the Italian” and the “sharp streak of yellow” of the Chinese; however, Riis was very sympathetic of the impoverished people in America of the time. The Gilded Age, as described by Jacob Riis in his book, How the Other Half Lives, and in lecture, was filled with crowded living spaces, poverty, prejudice, and alcoholism. When he made his conclusions about the challenges of the Gilded Age, Riis was slightly biased racially. However, he also had a better understanding of the living conditions of the poor immigrants and described them accurately in my opinion. Riis began his book by summarizing the beginnings of the tenement housing situations, or the “Genesis of …show more content…
Riis alluded to many conditions that those who lived in tenements had to deal with on a daily basis, although his writing was often racist and stereotypical, generalizing many groups of people. However, Riis did do justice to the horrors that the “Other Half” experienced, informing those who did not live there or did not know much about the actual living