The Dark Side of American History, Part 15: A Note on Poverty and Slums in Gilded Age America
Musings, Quotes, and Documents on Bigotry, Racism, Violence, and Mayhem in the American Story
Jacob Riis Photo of Lodgers in a Bayard Street Tenement, New York City, entitled Five Cents a Spot, 1890, in How The Other Half Lives
A drunk father explains the matter in other cases, as in that of John and Willie, ages ten and eight, picked up by the police. They “didn’t live nowhere,” never went to school, could neither read nor write. Their 12-year-old sister kept house for the father, who turned the boys out to beg, or steel, or starve. Grinding poverty and hard work beyond the years of the lads; blows and curses for breakfast, dinner, and supper; all these are recruiting agents for the homeless army. Sickness in the house, too many mouths to feed.
—Jacob Riis in How The Other Half Lives, 1890
I’ve read a great deal recently of how President Donald Trump likes to refer to the Gilded Age economy of the late 19th century as a golden age for the United States, an age he would like to replicate for Americans today through high tariffs, large tax breaks for the wealthy, and deep cuts to social programs. As with most of his historical assertions, Trump’s claim is patently false. The historical record portrays a much darker picture of the Gilded Age economy—one in which incredible wealth existed alongside stark poverty. Indeed, in 1890, it is estimated that the top one percent of Americans owned 51 percent of the country’s wealth, while the lowest 44 percent owned only 1.2 percent. This inequality of wealth was one of the worst in American history, rivaled only by the inequality that exists today where the bottom 50 percent have only 2.5 percent of the nation’s wealth.
The Gilded Age was also wracked by severe recessions in 1873 and 1893 that left millions of workers unemployed for long periods of time. Since neither unemployment insurance nor old age pensions existed during the Gilded Age, this meant the unemployed were often dependent for assistance during hard times from charitable organizations run by middle-class Americans who often viewed the poor as lazy, immoral, and usually undeserving of help.
While Gilded Age America bankers, financiers, and robber barons lived lives of ease in fine mansions in upscale resort towns like Newport or on the gold coast of Long Island, newly-arrived Italian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian immigrants and their children in big cities like New York toiled long hours for meager wages in dingy sweat shops and lived in slums and tenements of unspeakable squalor.
In 1890, a young Danish immigrant, reformer, and journalist named Jacob Riis vividly documented the misery of these slums in his book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Through his clear, unsparing prose and grim black and white photos of the tenements and their immigrant dwellers, Riis exposed the plight of those poor Americans who did not share in the prosperity of the Gilded Age.
In one passage from How the Other Half Lives, Riss quoted from a report on what a typical tenement looked like:
It is generally a brick building from from four to six stories high on the street, frequently with a store on the first floor, which, when used for the sale of liquor, as a side opening for the benefit of the inmates into evade the Sunday law; four families occupied each floor, and a set of rooms consist of one or two dark closets, used as bedrooms, with the living room, twelve feet by ten. The staircase is often a dark well in the center of the house, and no direct through ventilation is possible, each family being separated from the other by partitions. Frequently, the rear ofthe lot is occupied by another building of three stories high with two families on a floor.
Jacob Riis Photo of Tenement Yard in New York City, 1890, in How the Other Half Lives.
In another passage Riis described a tenement on Cherry Street in lower Manhattan:
The family's condition was most deplorable. The man, his wife, and three small children, shivering in one room through the roof of which the pitiless winds of winter whistled. The room was almost barren of furniture; the parents slept on the floor, the elder children in boxes, and the baby was swung in an old shawl, attached to the rafters by cords by way of a hammock. The father, a seaman, has been obliged to give up that calling because he was in consumption, and was unable to provide either bread or fire for his little ones.
Jacob Riis Photo of a Home of an Italian Ragpicker in New York City, 1890, in How the Other Half Lives
Here Riis described a tenement and family in the Seventh Ward of New York City:
There were nine in the family: husband, wife, an aged grandmother, and six children; honest, hard-working, Germans, scrumptiously, neat, but poor. All nine lived in two rooms, one about ten feet that served as a parlor, bedroom, and eating room, the other, a small hall room made into a kitchen. The rent was seven dollars and a half a month, more than a week's wages for the husband and father, who is the only breadwinner in the family. That day the mother had thrown herself out of the window, and was carried up from the street dead. She was “discouraged,” said some of the other women from the tenement, who had come in to look after the children while a messenger carried the news of the father at the shop.
Jacob Riis Photo of a Room in a New York City Tenement, 1890, in How The Other Half Lives
In this excerpt Riis described a filthy textile sweatshop in a tenement in the Jewish section of lower Manhattan that employed children as workers:
Take the Second Avenue elevated railroad at Chatham Square and ride up half a mile through the sweaters district. Every open window of the big tenements, which stand like a continuous brick wall on both sides of the way, gives you a glimpse of one of these shops as the train speeds by. Men and women bending over the machines, or ironing clothes at the window, half naked. For proprieties do not count on the East Side; nothing counts that cannot be converted into hard cash. The road is like a big gangway through an endless work-room where vast multitudes are forever laboring. Morning, noon, or night, it makes no difference; the scene is always the same.
—
Up two flights of dark stairs, three, four, with new smells of cabbage, of onions, a frying fish, and every landing, whirring sewing machines behind closed doors, betraying what goes on within, to the door that opens to admit the bundle and the man. A sweater, this, in a small way. Five men and a woman, two young girls, not 15, and a boy who says he is 15, and lies saying it, are at the machines, sewing knickerbockers, knee-pants in the Ludlow Street dialect. The floor is littered ankle deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on the couch of many dozens of “pants” ready for the finisher, a bare-legged baby with a pinched face is asleep. A fence of piled up clothing keeps him from rolling off the floor.
Jacob Riis photo entitled “Knee-pants at Forty Five Cents a dozen—A Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop,”1890, in How the Other Half Lives
Jacob Riis’s How the The Other Half Lives did much to spur tenement housing reform in New York City. In 1898, the city created the Tenement House Committee, for which Riis served as a consultant. The Committee’s investigation of the problem of substandard housing eventually led to the passage of the New York Tenement House Act of 1901. This law required all tenements to have indoor bathrooms, outward-facing windows, fire-safety standards, and proper ventilation.
The law was one of the first important reforms of the Progressive Era (1901-1921) that followed the Gilded Age. That era was followed by the liberal social reforms of the New Deal (1933-1945) and the Kennedy-Johnson New Frontier and Great Society (1961-1969), all of which culminated in hard-won achievements that helped to alleviate the worst excesses of the Gilded Age capitalism that President Trump now champions and wishes to revive with his reactionary economic policies.