Thematic Essay: The Struggle for Social Justice

            The history of New York City is highlighted by beloved individuals and haunted by those who were mistreated and neglected. The people best remembered by history were those who had a chance to change it, to shape it for better or for worse. Names such as Peter Stuyvesant, Frederick Law Olmstead, Theodore Roosevelt, Fiorello LaGuardia, and Robert Moses sit on the minds of some New Yorkers and the majority of historians. When one thinks of New York City, it is grand structures such as the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and the Chrysler Building that come to mind. These structures are tall, promising, and even welcoming, putting an emphasis on the positive attributes of the city. Yet, this city was not one of splendor, glory, and change for many who lived in it. When someone parts the curtains, scratches away the gilding, or takes out a magnifying glass, the problems of the city become clearly visible. While New York was considered a city of opportunity, leading many to riches, this was not the case for everyone. Many people, often immigrants, lived in extreme poverty. Many of those living in poverty worked long hours in dangerous conditions, but were still barely able to scrape by. These individuals often lived in tenements, small buildings that contained many families and were often crowded beyond capacity. It was not uncommon for these buildings to be a danger themselves due to their small rooms, thin hallways, poor ventilation, and poor sanitation. Those without much money led difficult lives, constantly struggling to stay afloat. Poverty was a mire, holding individuals and often times, their children, in poor conditions. Thus, the theme of social justice is one of great importance when considering the history of New York City and the disparity between the rich and the poor. History often forgets those without money, but photographs, artwork, writing, and structures of the time have lasted, allowing their stories to live on. The late 1800s, or the Gilded Age, and the early 1900s, shortly before World War I were periods of significant poverty; they were also the periods in which significant works about poverty were produced. The theme of social justice in these years can still be examined today by the photographs and writing of Jacob Riis, the realistic fiction of Stephen Crane, the paintings of George bellows, and the comparison of the Tenement Museum and the Morgan Library.

The photographs taken by Jacob Riis while working as a photojournalist came to represent poverty during the Gilded Age. Born in 1849, Riis was an immigrant from Denmark. Like many immigrants, his life in New York City was one of struggle, as he faced job insecurity and homelessness (Stamp). He tried his hand at a wide array of jobs, working as a farmhand, iron-worker, brick-layer, carpenter, and salesman (Stamp). The young immigrant was bounced from the streets, to low-rent tenements, to lodging houses, giving him his first taste of the squalor, crime, and illness that ravished the city’s lower-classes (Stamp). His first stable job was as a police reporter for The New York Tribune, where he found his passion and purpose, eventually solidifying his status as an important figure in the history of New York. During this time, he noted that there was a correlation between poverty and crime rates. He got the chance to see beyond the splendor produced by American industry and to notice people who seemed like nobody when compared to businessmen such as Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller. Riis saw the lives of those that had been given the short end of the stick, those who were unable to reap the benefits of American capitalism. With a camera in hand, Riis photographed the living conditions in the Five Points in Lower Manhattan, one of Manhattan’s most notoriously unsafe slums (Smithsonian). Riis’s photographs include many shocking sights and dehumanizing situations. The lens of his camera captures people sleeping in cramped rooms, children sleeping in the street, dead horses and debris littering the street, and collapsing homes. Riis’s photography was indeed powerful, bringing the dark situation faced by many to public attention, eventually leading to housing reforms in these slums. He did this art with a goal, or rather, an agenda, of helping those suffering with poverty. While Jacob Riis’s photographs have come to define the Gilded Age, they were not his only effort to help lessen the troubles of the poor. One cannot neglect Riis’s writing, which was presented alongside his photographs.

In 1890, Jacob Riis published the book How the Other Half Lives, which documented the conditions of New York City’s slums during the 1980s through both words and photographs. In this book, he gave observations, accounts, and statistics about the living in tenements. This book was an immediate success, shocking many New Yorkers. Notably, Riis’s publication caught the eye of Theodore Roosevelt, who had been the New York City Police Commissioner. After reading this book, Roosevelt was motivated to fight for reform and help the lower-class. Roosevelt made sure that the worst of the city’s lodging houses were closed and that strict housing policies were enforced by the city (Stamp). This book was powerfully written, capable of eliciting and an emotional response and provoking action. We can see the power of Riis’s writing in a section of his book titled “The Down Town Back-Alleys.” As he describes the slums of lower Manhattan, he writes about Blind Man’s Alley, a tenement building owned by a blind man that housed many blind beggars. Even though the Board of Health demanded that repairs be made to the building, the owner refused on account of his old age and desire to earn money. Thus, the building was allowed to remain a health and safety hazard. The dangers of this building become clear when Riis accidentally lights fire to the building while photographing its residents: “When the blinding effect of the flash had passed away and I could see once more, I discovered that a lot of paper and rags that hung on the wall were ablaze. There were six of us, five blind men and women who knew nothing of their danger, and myself, in an attic room with a dozen crooked, rickety stairs between us and the street, and as many households as helpless as the one whose guest I was all about us. The thought: how were they ever to be got out?” (Riis 297). Dirty, cluttered, and decaying, this tenement was not safe in the case of an emergency such as a fire. The fact that the majority of its residents were disabled also worsens the situation, as Riis notes. If Riis had not been there, it is likely that the fire would have spread, engulfing the building and its residents in flames. The landlord’s indifference and lack of action in shows a blatant disregard for human life, a clear reason that the city was in need of social justice.

            Riis does not stop after this one story alone. He goes on to provide statistics about disease and crime in the area, two other pressing issues that can affect those living outside of the slums as well. In one area inhabited mostly by Italian immigrants, Riis noted that “in 1862, ten years after it was finished, a sanitary official counted 146 cases of sickness in the court, including “all kinds of infectious disease,” from small-pox down, and reported that of 138 children born in it in less than three years 61 had died, mostly before they were one year old” (Riis 299). Crowded and unclean, tenements served as a hive for severe illnesses and disease. Almost half of all children born in this particular area died as a result of these rampant diseases. Many of them were only infants, exposed to diseases that their immune system could not yet fight off. Too young for medicine—probably too expensive for their families to afford, anyways—these children received a death sentence from their unhygienic surroundings. Unfortunately, disease is not the only thing that infects the slums. Crime rates in these slums were shocking. The captain of the Oak Street police squad reported to Riis that “in seven months [he had] secured convictions for theft, robbery, and murder aggregating no less than five hundred and thirty years of penal servitude” (Riis 301). On one street alone, in less than a year, there were so many violent crimes that the total number of sentences given totaled to more than five centuries. While we do not know how many crimes were committed, this number indicates that it was still a dire situation. It may have been many crimes resulting in many smaller sentences, or several severe crimes that resulted in long sentences. That, however, is not clarified. Whichever the case, these high crime rates were dangerous to those living both inside and outside of the slums. It was also dangerous to children growing up in these areas, as they could fall victim to these crimes or even fall into lives of crime themselves. The horrific conditions of the tenement buildings and the depressing lives of their tenants not only capture the minds of reporter like Riis, but the minds of writers of fiction.

            In 1893, Stephen Crane published the short story Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a fictional story that focuses on themes of social justice and poverty. This tragic tale contains many details reminiscent of Riis’s observations. The story centers around Maggie, a girl from an impoverished Irish family. In the beginning of the story, her brother Jimmie is a street urchin, constantly up to mischief as she takes care of her baby brother Tommie. They live in an overcrowded, unclean tenement with their mother and father. Both parents are alcohols, constantly fighting with each other, breaking furniture, and mistreating their own children. Early in the story, Tommie dies, reflecting the high infant mortality rates in poor areas due to unsanitary conditions. Maggie’s father also dies, although Crane does not elaborate on how this happened. Jimmie and Maggie both begin working at young ages in hopes of improving their lives. Forced into work at young ages, it is likely that neither of them had the opportunity to receive an education. If being Irish was not enough of an undesirable quality in the work force, this lack of education narrows down their job opportunities even further. Maggie pursues a boy named Pete, who has a steady job, as a way of escaping her turbulent home. They date for a while, prompting Jimmie and their mother to push Maggie out of their home. Maggie stays with Pete until he leaves her in favor of Nellie, a woman he had dated in the past. Alone and without a home, Maggie is forced into prostitution. The next time we hear about Maggie, she has been reported dead. Once again, Crane does not elaborate on how she died, but she could have succumbed to any number of threats that haunted the slums: murder, disease, starvation. Overall, this story takes a raw look at conditions of lower-class neighborhoods in New York City. Unlike Riis’s book, Crane’s story put names and faces to the horrid depictions of poverty, eliciting an emotional response from its intended audience of the educated. Heart-wrenching for readers, this book called people to reconsider the struggles of poverty. This book showed that it was not a choice, but something that people were born into, often unable to escape. This sad message became the image of the need for social justice and extended the call for change.

            George Bellows created several paintings depicting the slums of Manhattan, exposing art enthusiasts to a naked image of the overcrowded, inadequate, unclean conditions thousands were forced to live with. Born in 1882, Bellows grew up with a passion for sports and illustration (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). In 1904, having become dedicated to art, Bellows moved to New York City to study under painter Robert Henri (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). At a young age, he became a member of the Ashcan school (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Like other Ashcan artists, his art was routed in realism, depicting the everyday lives of people living in New York City (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Bellows created images of a wide array of people living in the city, however, it is his depiction of tenements and lower-class individuals that are most striking. In 1907, he created a painting entitled “Forty-two Kids,” depicting a group of children standing on a crumbling pier beside the East River, preparing to bathe. At the time, the term kid was slang for a young, troublesome child of working-class immigrants living in tenements on the Lower East side (National Gallery of Art). In this painting, there is a harsh contrast between the bright bodies of the children and their dark, dilapidated surroundings. It reminds the viewer that these children are pure, innocent, and human in spite of their difficult situations. This painting was first displayed in 1908 to mixed reviews, with critiques both adoring and abhorring the piece (National Gallery of Art). It was considered for the Lippincott Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, but a judge denied the work this award, claiming that donors may be offended by the depiction of nudity (National Gallery of Art). Bellows, however, remarked, “No, it was the naked painting that they feared;” a statement that was all too true considering the neglect of New York’s poor (National Gallery of Art).  His 1913 painting “Cliff Dwellers” is a view of the streets surrounding a tenement building. The piece is claustrophobic, with throngs of people extending far into the background. People are standing on each fire escape and beside each window, trying to get the fresh air that does not reach them in their poorly-ventilated homes. Clotheslines extend from one side of the street to the other. Inside the small rooms of tenements, there is no place to hang the clothes to dry. This painting was not created by Bellows as a direct call to action, but rather, as a way of showing the absurdity of tenement life (Las Angeles County Museum of Art).  However, it clearly reflects the social issues of urban poverty and urban reform (Las Angeles County Museum of Art). Through his artistic abilities, Bellows was able to open the eyes of art enthusiasts to the harsh realities of lower-class New Yorkers, living in crowded, unclean, unsafe areas.

            The struggles of New Yorkers living in poverty during the late 1800s and early 1900s is difficult for us to understand today. We did not experience the cramped living conditions, struggles to find employment, and constant threats of illness experienced by New York’s poorest. To understand these struggles, we had to see the living conditions and hear the accounts of true struggles, so depressing they sound as though they may be from a novel. To obtain this perspective of the past, the class had the opportunity to visit the Tenement Museum, a restored tenement building which offers guided tours detailing the actual lives of the buildings past residents. The two apartments we visited at the museum had similar layouts: one room with windows, a kitchen, and a small room without windows. The first apartment belonged to the Gumpertz family in the 1870s. Nathalie and Julius, both immigrants, lived in this apartment with their three daughters. It was difficult for them to provide for their large family, but they managed. At least, until Julius went missing, never to be seen again. Nathalie began sewing customs garments, often requiring assistance from the community to pay the rent and put food on the table. Miraculously, Nathalie’s life was altered when she secured a sum of $600 that her missing husband was set to inherit. With money in her pocket, Nathalie was able to move out of the tenement, securing a better future for her children. Most, however, did not have such luck. Additionally, while the Gumpertz family was living in this tenement, legislation was being put into place and improvements were being made. For instance, gas lines, running water, and indoor flush toilets were installed. Later, in the early 1900s, the landlord improved the building’s entrance with tile floor, burlap wall coverings, molded metal ceilings, and paintings on the walls. In each apartment, windows were installed in existing walls to increase air flow. These were the “luxuries” that future tenants were to receive: seemingly basic improvements.

            While thousands living during the 1900s experiences poverty, surviving off of the bear minimum, a select few people were capable of living luxuriously. Two-and-a-half miles uptown from the tenement museum lies the Morgan Library, another location the class was able to visit. This library, built the years of 1900 and 1906, is grand on both the inside and the outside, built with meticulous detail. The walls of the original library were built without mortar; the stones fit together perfectly. Columns and statues were constructed based upon ancient Italian architecture. The inside of the library is breathtaking with its painted ceilings, patterned marble floors, and stone pillars. One cannot forget his vast collection of rare books, which included three Guttenberg Bibles. His art collection is certainly worth noting as well, containing artifacts from ancient civilization and pieces by renowned European painters. There is no doubt that this library was expensive to construct. Due to his wealth, J. P. Morgan, one individual, was able to create this opulent structure. As stunning as the library may be, it provides a harsh contrast with the tenements many more people were living in. The library was one man’s dream, but even a small fraction of what it costed was the dream of Americans facing poverty. When we compare the library with a tenement, we realize that the disparity in wealth during the early 1900s was severe, with few being rich and many being poor.

            Social inequality and justice is a subject that has haunted the past of New York City in photography, literature, art, and architecture. Jacob Riis, using both words and photos, gave the outside world a look into the difficult lives of the urban poor. He aimed to bring change and was quite successful in doing so thanks to his shocking work. In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane told the life story of a girl from an impoverished Irish family, from her childhood to her early death. This story gave readers a face for poverty, someone who they could better understand and pity. It allowed them to view the poor as being individual people with their own hopes, dreams, and struggles. It made people realize that poverty was not a choice, nor was it an easy cycle to escape. George Bellows used painting as a medium to display the chaos and crowding that was present in areas considered slums. His paintings communicate the busyness and the complexity of the lives of the lower-class. His paintings indicate that their lives were in constant motion, capable of changing drastically at any moment.  Lastly, the Tenement Museum and the Morgan Library are two structures from the same time period that could not possibly be more different. The tenement was built for the poor, while the library was built for one very rich man. Both have their beauty and charm, but the contrast between the two buildings is stark, representative of the disparity present between the rich and the poor. All these pieces of New York City history and culture reflect social justice and the unequal distribution of wealth during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Overall, they clearly show us that poverty is a powerful negative force. Even though much attention was directed towards poverty, it is still a present issue. Perhaps the messages of these writers and artists were forgotten. Too often, citizens and leaders make assumptions, generalizations about lower-class individuals. They forget that everyone has a story. Even today, we struggle to imagine life from the eyes of someone with nothing. The fact that social justice is still a current theme in New York City indicates the efforts of these individuals from the past alone were not enough to solve this gargantuan problem. Even as the lives of the poor improve, we are still in need of talented individuals to translate their stories into mediums that can be understood by all.

Bibliography

“Cliff Dwellers.” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, http://collections.lacma.org/node/228840. Accessed 10 Dec.             2016.

“Forty-Two Kids.” National Gallery of Art, http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-           

            page.134485.html. Accessed 10 Dec. 2016.

“George Bellows.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/bellows.             Accessed 10 Dec. 2016.

Riis, Jacob. “How the Other Half Lives.” 1880, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5bJsJt8H0m1aUVZN21mb0Jobk0

            /view. Accessed 10 Dec. 2016.

Stamp, Jimmy. “Pioneering Social Reformer Jacob Riis Revealed ‘How the Other Half Lives’ in America.”            Smithsonian, 27 May 2014, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/pioneering-social-reformer-jacob-

            riis-revealed-how-other-half-lives-america-180951546/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2016.