Chapter XXIII: The Man With The Knife

Chapter 23 of How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis begins with the author illustrating a scene of a man observing the daily happenings of Manhattan on Fourteenth St. and 5th Avenue. This man, an immigrant who works hard to feed his family and barely gets by becomes upset as he watches rich people walk around carrying their expensive clothing and stores selling things so expensive that they could feed his family for a year. The man bursts with anger and begins swinging his knife around, he is arrested and sent to jail and forgotten yet his message does not lose its resonance. Riis uses this example to illustrate the class struggle that existed between the rich and poor, Americans and immigrants respectively. He suggests that the biggest issue in this struggle stems from ignorance. The rich were unaware of the true living conditions of the poor because form the outside their lives did not seem all that horrible, especially in comparison to that of slums in other countries. Riis compares tenements to apples with “fair skin” but “rotten cores”. He believes that because tenements look good on the outside, the rich turn their backs to the true horror in which their residents lived in.  He suggests that overtime the people in them will become the opposite because of the horrible livings conditions, leading to a permanent struggle between rich and poor.

Gianni Rivera