How the Other Half Lives

These two relatively brief chapters describe the plight of children in the tenements. To begin, their “very number makes one stand aghast” (179). In one Bayard Street tenement, Riis personally counted 128 children among 40 families before giving up the task. The boys of the tenements are “neither dull nor slow” but are nonetheless doomed to “low and ill-paid drudgery,” held down by trades unions that want no competition for their labor (181). It is no wonder that many become “rough” and “savage,” though Riis challenges readers to “take into a tenement block a handful of flowers” and then “watch the brightened faces” for proof that the tough and angry boys who live there are entirely the products of their surroundings (181-82). Many such boys can be found among the “flotsam and jetsam stranded at Police Headquarters,” their absences unnoticed by dazed, desperate parents or those with an alcohol addiction (183). Others—boys and girls—are simply abandoned. These children can expect little relief from the city government. It is to private organizations, such as the Children’s Aid Society or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, that “the municipality leaves the entire care of its proletariat of tender years, lulling its conscience to sleep with liberal appropriations of money to foot the bills” (186). This is Riis’s first and only use of the word “proletariat,” a Marxist term for the industrial impoverished whose interests are directly at odds with members of the capitalist class. It is a useful reference and probably deliberate, for it allows readers to see mistreated children as potential future revolutionaries.

Many children do not survive long enough to experience such mistreatment. According to Riis, 25,000 infants have been abandoned in the last 20 years, and “these forlorn little waifs have cried out from the streets of New York in arraignment of a Christian civilization under the blessings of which the instinct of motherhood even was smothered by poverty and want” (187). In the late-19th century, the “blessings of civilization” was a common phrase used to justify imperialism, i.e., spreading the “blessings of civilization” to people considered “savage” across the globe. In the context of New York’s abandoned infants, Riis uses the words “civilization” and “blessings” in mockery. For infants retrieved from city streets, the mortality rate is close to 90%. Some abandoned infants are sold by criminals for “adoption” or otherwise exposed to horrors for the sake of money. Nonetheless, Riis closes on a hopeful note, claiming that many good things are being done to save the children and that New York is “the most charitable city in the world” (193). A photograph (“Prayer-Time in the Nursery—Five Points House of Industry”) shows nearly two-dozen children, all of whom appear to be five years old or younger, dressed in white gowns and kneeling in prayer at a nursery-school for rescued children.