Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives”
Biography

Jacob Riis’s 1901 autobiography, The Making of an American regaled readers with accounts of the degrading experiences of his early years as a struggling immigrant through his astounding rise as a celebrated writer and confidant of the president of the United States—a story he used to promote his reform causes. In his later years, Riis offered illustrated lantern slide lectures based, in part, on his autobiography. On this opening page of his lecture notes, Riis summarizes his Danish roots and refers to his precarious status upon arriving in America when he notes the ominous directive to “buy a revolver.”

Riis’s notes for his lecture titled “Making of an American” were drawn from his 1901 autobiography of the same name and his book The Battle with the Slum published in 1902. These notes offer a shorthand account of Riis’s entire career up to that point. Selected pages appear throughout the exhibition and serve as touchstones for Riis’s experience and observations. In these final two pages of the lecture notes, Riis recounts a personal epiphany he experienced while ill during a visit to Denmark in 1900, when he realized he had truly taken on an “American identity.”

Between September 1871 and August 1875, Riis kept a pocket diary, first in Danish and then in English. Two of his three diaries survive; they recount a period of struggle and painful self-doubt. Riis wrote his final entry on August 16, 1875, after asking for Elisabeth’s hand in marriage. The happy pair married in Ribe, Denmark, in 1876 and raised a family in New York. They remained married for twenty-nine years, until Elisabeth’s untimely death on May 18, 1905. In this May 7, 1905, telegram, Riis urges their son John to hurry home to see his failing mother. Riis was heartbroken at her passing.

In 1884, Riis purchased a plot of land in Richmond Hill—today part of Queens, New York, and home to many South Asian, South American, and Caribbean immigrants. In 1886, Riis moved his family into a new house there. In the image above, probably taken in their yard, Riis’s wife Elisabeth is seated and surrounded by their five children.