Urban Poverty in 18th Century America Depicted in Riis,...

With his book How the Other Half Lives, Riis offers the audience a glimpse into the unsettling and unnoticed reality of the urban poverty in America at the turn of the 19th century. Not only he revealed the dark side of the society, he also showed the urgent need for change. Riis used emotional as well as logical appeal to support his argument in favor of the need for a social reform. By combining powerful pictures and detailed annotations accounting the conditions of life in the New York, Riis made How the Other Half Lives unique and very effective in delivering his message and initiating a change. How the Other Half Lives served as a wake up call for the upper and middle class and installed a feeling of moral responsibility. Even though†¦show more content†¦Riis shows how society had long turned a blind eye to this less reality. As he informs the readers in How the other Half Lives, the upper classes had long harbored fear from the poor. This fact proved very useful for Riis as it gave him room to use fear-evoking arguments to convince the higher class that the social reform is essential for everyone’s good. Riis argued that the ever- growing poverty in America posed a high risk not only for immigrants living in the slums. He employed statistical data correlating the ever-growing poverty with the increase the crime rate as well as the rapid expansion of tenement, to warn the middle and high class that poverty is a serious risk for them too. Hi goes on to argue that the cholera epidemic showed Americans how devastating such widespread illness could be, especiall y in urban areas. He warned the middle and high class that the tenements were the hotbeds for such epidemics and reminded them that such deceases never discriminate but bring death to the rich and poor alike. In contrast to his fear evoking ways, Riis supports his case by arguing that poverty was nurture vs. nature issue rather than one of genetic hierarchy or anything else. In How the Other Half Lives he write that to certain extent, we are all creatures of the conditions that surround us, physically and morally,