Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives"

Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives" is a New Historicist, journalistic piece that chronicles the immigrant, tenement lifestyle that Stephen Crane uses as his setting in "Maggie".  Where Crane takes a distanced, objective view in his narrative voice, Riis goes even beyond that, using a language that is almost legal sounding in its account of the horrific conditions immigrants were forced to endure in New York City.  While Riis' piece is not a descriptive narrative like Crane's, it does offer a lot of insight into "Maggie" which I found to be very insightful and exegetical.  For example, in Riis' second chapter, "The Awakening," he writes of tenement dwellers, "The tenements had bred their Nemesis, a proletariat ready and able to avenge the wrongs of their crowds" (Riis).  I found this observation to be fully applicable to Crane's characters, particularly Jimmie, who scorn law and landlord alike.  While Maggie's family is forced to endure the exploitation and poverty that characterized life in the tenements for immigrant family's, this very lifestyle hardens them into a community distrustful of anyone from the outside world.  Because they know of nothing else, the tenements offer Maggie's family, and others, one of the few comforts they have: predictability.  

Yet where Crane's characters come from a specifically Irish background, Riis' more lofty, objectively journalistic style offers a more all encompassing view of the ethnicities that comprised particularly the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the heyday of immigration in the United States.  However, that is not to say that Riis is fair and forgiving of all these groups.  In fact, he ironically ethnicizes the abject lives of immigrants in poverty while superficially appearing to try and defeat it.  I was struck by his adherence to ethnic stereotypes and his penchant for superiority in his attitudes towards areas like Chinatown and Little Italy.  As we've discussed in class, America is a nation of immigrants, regardless of when and wherever we have come from, and for Riis to come off as "more American" simply because he has been in the United States longer than some of his subjects is ironically hypocritical.  Ultimately, despite my weariness of Riis' tone, I found his piece to be an illuminating portrayal of the immigrant plight in the United States.  I have to imagine that his stereotyping, while inexcusable, was probably tame for the time period, and at the very least, Riis gives necessary exposure to a group of people otherwise marginalized and forgotten by society.  And of course, I have to mention his photographs-- more expository than any piece of writing, Riis' photos capture his subjects in the realest of forms.