Jacob Riis & Stephen Crane
In How the Other Half Lives (1890) and The Children of the Poor (1892) Jacob Riis, an
immigrant from Denmark who became a police reporter for the New York Tribune, stunned American
readers with accounts of the conditions affecting urban outcasts, particularly the miserable state of
tenement children of the Lower East Side, in the Mulberry Street area. (Some one million Irish,
German and Jewish immigrants, it is estimated, were living in approximately 37,000 tenements in
1880.) Riis's noble battle against crowded tenements, child labor, prostitution and other plights of the
poor enlisted the support of Theodore Roosevelt -- who went from head of the City's police board, to
governor, to president -- and prepared the nation for legislation to alleviate such conditions.
Riis's still-striking account was also a parable of the decline of the City. The first tenements, he
noted, were sectioned out of some of old New York's finest homes. "Nothing would probably have
shocked their original owners more than the idea of their harboring a promiscuous crowd; for they
were the decorous homes of the old Knickerbockers, the proud aristocracy of Manhattan in the early
days." The bucolic wholesomeness of old New York had been violated, suggested Riis. An ancient
cow-path became the Mulberry Street "Bend," the "foul core of New York's slums," for example.
"Echoes of tinkling bells linger there still, but they do not call up memories of green meadows and
summer fields; they proclaim the home-coming of the rag-picker's cart. In the memory of man the old
cow-path has never been other than a vast human pig-sty."
Though he indulged in demeaning ethnic stereotypes, Riis balanced moving portraits of misery
with sharp complaints against those who benefited from inequity. His photographs, anticipating those
of Lewis Hine, framed the poor, particularly the children of the slums, with dignity. In a chapter called
"The Reign of Rum," he wrote, "the rumshop turns the political crank in New York. The natural yield
is rum politics." In such conditions, the City was turning its young men into toughs and its young
women into exploited workers and prostitutes -- the very models Stephen Crane would soon
incorporate into his parable of the City's outcasts, Maggie: Girl of the Streets (1893). Furthermore,
Riis helped to popularize the Darwinian notion of environmental conditioning, thus removing blame
from the City's victims. America's slums, he pointed out, were little better than those in Europe, from
which immigrants in New York had fled. Yet Jacob Riis believed that America held a promise of
social redemption which was unavailable in Europe.
The role of the writer, Stephen Crane must have concluded from reading Riis, was to expose
the hard truth of the urban condition to readers –who were conditioned by comforting tales designed to
distract them from urban miseries—and to awaken the conscience of the nation. Crane, like Riis,
became a literary explorer of the City's darker streets, but Crane was more artful, less given to ethnic
stereotypes and less moralistic.
In "An Experiment in Misery" (1894), a sketch of urban life, Crane portrayed a nation whose
callous indifference toward the displaced was symbolized by New York's arrogant buildings. They
were "emblematic of a nation forcing its regal head into the clouds, throwing no downward glances; in
the sublimity of its aspirations ignoring the wretches who may flounder at its feet." Crane's prose
registered the shock of an outsider, in a language of select, symbolic details. "The roar of the city to
him was the confusion of strange tongues, babbling heedlessly; it was the clink of coin, the voice of the
city's hopes were to him no hopes," but he strained to identify with the "other half." Crane's persona,
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wearing tattered garb, conducts "an experiment in misery" by living among the lowly. Perhaps Crane's
experiment had as much to do with literary realism (an experiment in depiction) and the extension of
authorial consciousness as it did with the eliciting of public sympathies or the rectification of social
injustices. At the end of his report he tells a friend that he may not have discovered the poor man's
point of view, "but at any rate I think mine own has undergone a considerable alteration." New York,
city of oppression and opportunity, transformed Stephen Crane's view of the world, just as he knew it
would.
In "The Men in the Storm" (1894) Crane registered more awe than moral outrage at the sight of
long-suffering men who stood in line waiting for a "charitable house" to open its doors. Their
individualities were muffled by miseries and their identities were lost in the moving mass of the crowd.
As Peter Conrad suggests, convincing tales of urban life were difficult to relate, from Dickens to O.
Henry. "There are a million or -- in O. Henry's calculation -- four million stories in New York, but
you're prevented from telling them because you can't extricate from the crowd the people to whom
they're happening." Whitman's celebratory merging of the individual with the crowd was, by the
1890s, a thing of the past. Again, in "Men in the Storm," the young reporter crosses from the known
world and enters a surreal section of the City, where middle-class standards of conduct were missing:
"in a certain part of a dark West-side street, there was a collection of men to whom these things were
as if they were not." The New York poor -- like his imaginary participation in the Civil War, The Red
Badge of Courage (1894), or his imaginative recasting of hours spent adrift at sea, "The Open Boat"
(1897) -- provided Crane with further opportunities to transcend his middle-class consciousness and to
enter the wonderland of those lost souls who live in misery.
William Dean Howells, who found a commercial publisher for Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,
admitted that he learned much from Stephen Crane, the young man who had experimented with his life
and art by living among the miserable. As Howells wrote in a moving letter to Cora Crane, after her
husband's death in 1900, "he never came without leaving behind him some light on the poor, sad life
he knew so well in New York, so that I saw it more truly than ever before."