On the hugely difficult, and equally crucial, step we need to take if we
are to address our most desperate American lives and circumstances.
I’ll be the first to admit that I
have a hard time wrapping my own head around, much less writing about or
teaching, the depths of poverty in which so many Americans have lived
throughout our national existence and continue to live today. That difficulty
is at least a bit ironic, since as a professor of (among other things) Ethnic American
Literature I spend quite a bit of time teaching and writing about authors
and communities whose American identities and experiences are, despite shared
and core similarities for which I will argue until my last breath, quite
distinct from my own in many ways. And yet while I would never claim to be able
to speak for what a Frederick
Douglass, a Sarah
Winnemucca, a Gloria
Anzaldúa experienced or lived, it is for whatever reason with significantly
more hesitation still that I write about the identities and worlds of those (of
any race or ethnicity, any gender, any community) in the American underclass.
Part of the reason, I think, is
that it’s so hard, for those of us who have been fortunate enough not to
experience poverty in our own lives and who likewise have not in our
professional careers engaged in any specific or experiential way with these
harshest economic realities, not to speak in abstractions or generalities, not
to lapse into politics or sociology. There’s no one surefire way to counter
that tendency, short of going to live for a month at a homeless shelter or the
equivalent (and even then, it seems to me that living in poverty as an
experiment is as different from living in
it as a swimming pool is from the Pacific); but certainly it helps, from an
AmericanStudies perspective at least, to turn to those American authors and artists
and reformers who have worked to depict with particular sensitivity and
accuracy these most desperate and difficult conditions and existences. And near
the top of that list by any measure has to be the Danish American reformer,
journalist, and photographer Jacob Riis
(1849-1914), and most especially his complex but indispensable masterwork How
the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890).
Riis, who immigrated to the US at
the age of 21 and worked for many years as a journeyman laborer, experiencing
significant poverty in his own right, before making his way into the newspaper
trade, is a worthy nominee for the Hall of American Inspiration for sure. He
was a
pioneer of the use of flash photography in America, was one of the first
muckraking social journalists and a model for many Progressive writers of the
next generation, and fought for poor and working Americans and for relevant
necessary urban causes and reforms throughout his career and life. But even if
he were only to be remembered for Other
Half, it should be sufficient to ensure him a place in our national
narratives and histories. The book is not without its flaws, most especially in
its stereotyping portrayals of ethnic minorities such as the Chinese.
But in its incredible depth and density of detail, its painstaking accuracy
about places and living conditions (including extensive sketches and layouts
produced on site by Riis), its use of photographs
to ground that work in images as well as words more than in any prior
American text, and, perhaps most impressively, in Riis’s ability to push past
whatever generalities and images and narratives existed in his own head about
these communities and lives and to engage with and represent the realities of
their existences on their own terms (again, not for every community with equal
success, but for most of those on which he focuses), the book stands alone, in
its own era and in many ways into the century and a quarter that has followed.
I can’t pretend
to know much of what it means to be part of the “other half” in 2013, but I can
do the best I can to remember and understand and (ideally and crucially)
empathize with those lives; and Riis remains a very meaningful voice in that
process.
Ben
PS.
Crowd-sourced post this weekend, so one more time: what do you think? Thoughts
on this issue? Other questions you’d highlight?
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