Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives

How Life Shapes Us
Roman poet Horace once stated: Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant. Horace’s proclamation can be tested and ultimately proven true through evidence and experience. In the book How the Other Half Lives, there are many parts and quotes that can be used to support Horace’s statement. For example, Jacob Riis wrote, “He goes to describe the plight of the city’s poor children, many of them homeless, having been cast out by families no longer able to support them. He writes of the disastrous effects of alcohol, alludes circumspectly to the opportunity and danger that prostitution presents to poor girls, deplores mendicants and other dependent on charity” (Riis
Jacob Riis immigrated to the United States from Denmark, in 1870; all he carried with him was $40 and a locket containing a hair from a girl he loved. For awhile, he struggled to find a steady source of income, Riis took on a variety of low income jobs such as bricklaying, carpentry, and sales to try and cover the expenses of living.Through these experiences, he witnessed firsthand the sheer poverty in America. Astonished by the amount of crime going on and the epidemic of diseases, Riis felt that the unsanitary and dangerous living conditions of the poor were an atrocious injustice. After several years, Riis managed to establish a steady income as a journalist for the New York Tribune. This job allowed him to journey to some of most dangerous part of New York city and report the acts of heinous crimes. It was during this time that Riis befriended police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt. Using journalism as his platform, Riis showed his readers what it was truly like to live in poverty-stricken areas. He became a pioneer of latest vesion of photography, flash photography. Through his camera skills he used the images to show the public’s eye the crowded tenements, dangerous slums and disturbing street scene. Images of the underclass that most readers had only read about, if that. Due to Jacob Riis’s experiences, he feels for the poor and wants to shed light on their struggles to make others see their struggles. If he did not go through the experiences he did then he would have not wrote his book or spend all the time that he did trying to show the rich how the poor are impacted. What he went through shaped who he became as a person and what he became passionate