Jacob A. Riis ([1890] 2004) How the Other Half Lives, Studies Among the Tenements of New York.
Posted by celticman on Sat, 21 Sep 2013
There is little point in thinking about tenements and New York and putting the two together and imaging you have some kind of understanding as I did. Like me, you’ll probably be on the wrong continent. To make comparisons you need to think of other continents like the slums of Calcutta or pre-Communist Peking. 330 000 audited tenants per square mile in New York tenements of the 1890s. In The Bend between Broadway and the Bowery for example, were 4300 ‘apartments’. The notice is standing room only is up and nearly 150 ‘lodgers’ were driven from Mulberry Street. Through the long summer days carts patrol The Bend scattering disinfectant in streets and lanes, sinks and cellars and hidden hovels In a room not thirteen feet either way slept twelve men and a woman. There’s little natural light. No water. Poor sanitation Nine deaths in No. 59 (a half-sized tenement) in 1888; five in baby coffins. Most common cause of deaths for adults-falling off the roof whilst sleeping outside. Temperatures measured inside one and fifteen degrees Celsius. This is rudimentary existence and not life. Riis was a social reformer and he blamed rapacious landlords for this failing, but he also blamed poor people for having some innate deficiency in being poor and this was connected to their race.
‘The Italians comes in at the bottom, and in the generation that comes over the sea he stays there. In the slums he is welcomed as a tenant “who makes less trouble” than the contentious Irishman or the order-loving German, that is to say: is content to live in a pig-sty and submit to robbery at the hands of the rent-collector without murmur’.
‘Thrift is the watchword of Jewtown, as of its people the world over. It is at once its strength and fatal weakness, its cardinal virtue and its foul disgrace. Become an overmastering passion with these people who come here in droves from Eastern Europe to escape persecution from which freedom could be bought only with gold, it has enslaved them in bondage worse than that from which they fled. Money is there God. Life itself is of little value compared with even the leanest of bank accounts.’
Riis is a great admirer of thrift, but not too much thrift. He’s not an admirer of the inscrutable Chinaman with his pigtails, inscrutable face and opium pipe. Nor is he an admirer of the hundreds of ale houses, rum joints or stale beer dives in every tenement block because that’s wasted money and wasted lives. Roll on Prohibition and the poor man shall be freed from such inequities. Fling in a few World Wars and it might happen. But you know something Mr Riis the rich still get richer and the poor get poorer. The rich man’s god is money. The poor man takes whatever he can get. How the other half lives is a missed opportunity in which there is nothing more crooked than the truth. Rich people cannibalise poor people. That’s not communism. That’s fact.
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"The rich man’s god is money.
"The rich man’s god is money. The poor man takes whatever he can get. How the other half lives is a missed opportunity in which there is nothing more crooked than the truth. Rich people cannibalise poor people. That’s not communism. That’s fact".
Quite.
The Poor
What's even more shameful is that so many people in New Hampshire, including some of my friends, blame the poor for everything now. They have become the lowest common denominator. Blame the poor for the ineptness of the government in spreading American capitalism. Blame the poor for the ineptness of the rich in creating new jobs. What job creators were these fuckhead Republicans talking about? Everything was about cutting jobs and creating an efficient, capitalistic machine. I don't even bother arguing with people in New Hampshire. They tend to get so angry and I'm not about to start a brawl. People, in general, are so fucking stupid these days that you just want to kill yourself out of pity. So, it has become fashionable to blame the 47% who live off the government and they basically assume that these people are lazy while playing golf on Tuesdays. The general laziness of people in America is amazing, including myself. I find more productive and creative individuals in Alchoholics Anonymous than anywhere else. I get my spiritual food there and these people make America a great place to live. I just cannot stand the hypocrisy in America. As Al Pacino says in the "Godfather," we are all part of the same hypocrisy. I treat my employees good. I teach them everything I know about capitalism. Where else are they going to get that knowledge?
Rich people/ Poor People
Ths situation with the slums in the 1890's, that's based on the racial pecking order of the WASPS (White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants). I've tried to look up some of these works but they seemed to have disappeared. Stephen Jay Gould did some work in this field, but Stephen Jay Gould loved to play the race card and viewed Darwinism as the most fair option although Darwinism can be seen as very racist. You can scapegoat the rich or you can scapegoat the poor, but that won't get rid of the problem. You can put computers in all the classrooms, and that won't get rid of the problem. It is true, those who are at the very top, may at first scapegoat the Jews, the the Jews scapegoat let's say the Irish, then the Irish scapegoat the Italians and on and on it moves down the pecking order until finally, the poor and disenfranchised are scapegoated. The poor know things about life that everyone else denies. They know that it's a rotten game. Leonard Cohen has a song, "Everybody Knows" and that says it all. The funny thing about it is that America is still the best option. So what advice do I have for the poor? Government provides a social safety net. Take welfare then develop good working skills. Read Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Work for places that reward hard work and efficiency. Develop good relationships with the owner. Work for an older owner so you can possibly buy the business when he or she dies. Be optimistic. Get out of the welfare system. The government is rotten to the core. The senators are good, but the senate is evil. As individuals, they are trying to do good, but as a group, they are evil.