Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (ORIGINAL)
The Italian in New York
The Italian comes in at the bottom, and in the generation that came 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 submits to robbery at the hands of the rentcollector without murmur….
Ordinarily he is easily enough governed by authority—always excepting Sunday,
when he settles down to a game of cards and lets loose all his bad passions.
Like the Chinese, the Italian is a born gambler. His soul is in the game from the
moment the cards are on the table, and very frequently his knife is in it too before
the game is ended. Every member of the family, from the youngest to the oldest,
bears a hand, shut in the qualmy rooms, where meals are cooked and clothing
washed and dried besides, the livelong day. It is not unusual to find a dozen
persons—men, women, and children—at work in a single small room.
Chinatown
Red and yellow are the holiday colors of Chinatown as of the Bend, but they do
not lend brightness in Mott Street as around the corner in Mulberry. Rather, they
seem to descend to the level of the general dulness, and glower at you from
doors and windows, from the telegraph pole that is the official organ of
Chinatown and from the store signs, with blank, unmeaning stare, suggesting
nothing, asking no questions, and answering none. Fifth Avenue is not duller on
a rainy day than Mott Street to one in search of excitement. Whatever is on foot
goes on behind closed doors. Stealth and secretiveness are as much part of the
Chinaman in New York as the cat-like tread of his felt shoes. His business, as his
domestic life, shuns the light, less because there is anything to conceal than
because that is the way of the man. Perhaps the attitude of American civilization
toward the stranger, whom it invited in, has taught him that way. At any rate, the
very doorways of his offices and shops are fenced off by queer, forbidding
partitions suggestive of a continual state of siege. The stranger who enters
through the crooked approach is received with sudden silence, a sullen stare,
and an angry “Vat you vant?” that breathes annoyance and distrust.
Jewtown
Penury and poverty are wedded everywhere to dirt and disease, and Jewtown is
no exception. It could not well be otherwise in such crowds, considering
especially their low intellectual status. The managers of the Eastern Dispensary,
which is in the very heart of their district, told the whole story when they said:
“The diseases these people suffer from are not due to intemperance or
immorality, but to ignorance, want of suitable food, and the foul air in which they
live and work.” The homes of the Hebrew quarter are its workshops also….
Every member of the family, from the youngest to the oldest, bears a hand, shut
in the qualmy rooms, where meals are cooked and clothing washed and dried
Jacob Riis
besides, the livelong day. It is not unusual to find a dozen persons—men,
women, and children—at work in a single small room…. It has happened more
than once that a child recovering from small-pox, and in the most contagious
stage of the disease, has been found crawling among heaps of half-finished
clothing that the next day would be offered for sale on the counter of a Broadway
store.
Source: Excerpts from Jacob Riis’s book How the Other Half Lives, 1890.
Document A: Booker T. Washington (ORIGINAL)
Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life
we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state
legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political
convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or
truck garden.
A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the
mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of thirst!”
The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket
where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up
from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where
you are.” And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your
bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the
injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from
the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering
their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of
cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door
neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”— cast it down in
making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are
surrounded….
Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in
the professions…. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity
in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and
not at the top.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and
strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I
would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.”
Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose
fidelity and love you have tested… As we have proved our loyalty to you in the
past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and
fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the
future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner
can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours,
Jacob Riis
interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way
that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social
we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential
to mutual progress.
Source: Excerpt from Booker T. Washington’s ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech,
1895.
Document C (ORIGINAL)
[A]n Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking at the public school will help her
mother to connect the entire family with American food and household habits.
That the mother has never baked bread in Italy–only mixed it in her own house
and then taken it out to the village oven–makes all the more valuable her
daughter's understanding of the complicated cooking stove. The same thing is
true of the girl who learns to sew in the public school, and more than anything
else, perhaps, of the girl who receives the first simple instruction in the care of
little children–that skillful care which every tenement-house baby requires if he is
to be pulled through his second summer….
Thus through civic instruction in the public schools, the Italian woman slowly
became urbanized in the sense in which the word was used by her own Latin
ancestors, and thus the habits of her entire family were modified. The public
schools in the immigrant colonies deserve all the praise as Americanizing
agencies which can be bestowed upon them, and there is little doubt that the
fast-changing curriculum in the direction of the vacation-school experiments will
react more directly upon such households.
Source: Excerpt from Jane Addams’ book, Twenty Years at Hull-House, (1910).
This passage comes from a chapter called "Immigrants and Their Children.”
Jacob Riis
Jacob Riis