How Did Jacob Riis Influence Society

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Jacob Riis was a very influential person of his time. He used writing and photography to his advantage. Jacob Riis lived through the New Progressive Era, and he made a vast change to America throughout his life. Jacob Riis made the citizens of New York City aware of how bad the living conditions of tenements were. Throughout his life time living in New York City, he did his best to improve these conditions. Even though Jacob Riis was very hypocritical, he still managed to help the people in need through his talents: writing and photography. Jacob Riis was born in Ribe Denmark in May 3, 1849 . He was the third child of a family of fifteen. He was a Danish American social reformer, journalist and a photographer, but he is mostly known for his…show more content…
Even though Jacob Riis was poor prior to this, Jacob believed the the poor were powerless in society and that he had the power to help them by using this his journalistic skills to communicate this to the public. He wasn’t very sympathetic towards the poor. He constantly argued that the "poor were the victims rather than the makers of their fate" (spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk). Jacob Riis says that the poor are so powerless in society that they don’t even have control over their own fate, they are victims of it. When he got more and more involved with the tribune during these times as a police reporter, Riis worked and wrote about the some of the most dangerous slums of the city. “The slum is the measure of civilization”, he said. Jacob Riis believes that the slums of a city is what defines it, and measures out the potential that the city had; the worst the slum, the worst the civilization. Through his own experiences in the poorhouses, and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference for them. Jacob Riis wanted to show the world that the United States had…show more content…
This is a picture of a child nurse. This child is taking care of the baby, because all of the guardians are working. In 1890, his most famous book, How the Other Half Lives, was published. How the Other Half Lives changed Riis’s life. He became a very public figure in the United States, and he was also well known as an speaker for the getting rid of the immigrant ghettos. His book was well known not only in America, but in England as well. He supported his work everywhere he went to anyone that would listen, and he worked with the politicians of New York to create reform where he could get it. In 1895 Theodore Roosevelt was astonished by his work and wanted to meet him, so he did. At the time, Theodore Roosevelt Jacob Riis shared his feeling towards the slums and tenements with Theodore Roosevelt. Jacob and Theodore became close friends. They liked to take walks and talk about the terrible conditions of the tenements. One of their talks, was about how they could one day put a stop to the horrible conditions. Jacob Riis’s helped set off a tenement housing movement. This movement was very successful and later they passed the Tenement House Act. This was one of the first such laws to ban the making of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings in the state of New York. The law said that new buildings had to be built with windows in every room, an open courtyard, indoor
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