68 Facts About Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in America at the turn of the twentieth century.

Jacob Riis is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography.

Jacob Riis endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller.

Jacob Riis attempted to alleviate the poor living conditions of poor people by exposing these conditions to the middle and upper classes.

Jacob Riis was influenced by his father, whose school Jacob Riis delighted in disrupting.

Jacob Riis's father persuaded him to read Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper.

Jacob Riis had a happy childhood but experienced tragedy at the age of eleven when his brother Theodore, a year younger, drowned.

The father disapproved of the boy's blundering attentions, and Jacob Riis was forced to travel to Copenhagen to complete his carpentry apprenticeship.

Jacob Riis immigrated to America in 1870, when he was 21 years old, seeking employment as a carpenter.

Jacob Riis carried $40 donated by friends ; a gold locket with a strand of Elisabeth's hair, presented by her mother; and letters of introduction to the Danish Consul, Mr Goodall, a friend of the family since his rescue from a shipwreck at Ribe.

When Jacob Riis arrived in New York City, he was one of a large number of migrants and immigrants, seeking prosperity in a more industrialized environment, who came to urban areas during the years after the American Civil War.

Jacob Riis returned to New York, and, having pawned most of his possessions and without money, attempted to enlist at the French consulate, but was told that there was no plan to send a volunteer army from America.

Jacob Riis was destitute, at one time sleeping on a tombstone and surviving on windfall apples.

Jacob Riis pleaded with the French consul, who expelled him.

Jacob Riis made various other attempts to enlist, none successful.

Jacob Riis survived on scavenged food and handouts from Delmonico's Restaurant, and slept in public areas or in a foul-smelling police lodging-houses.

At one point, Jacob Riis's only companion was a stray dog.

Jacob Riis complained to the sergeant, who became enraged and expelled him.

Myhlertz sent Jacob Riis, now dressed properly in a suit, to the home of an old classmate in Jamestown, New York, in the western part of the state.

Jacob Riis worked as a carpenter throughout the Scandinavian enclave in surrounding communities, as well as performing a variety of other assorted jobs.

Jacob Riis achieved sufficient financial stability to find the time to experiment as a writer, in both Danish and English, although his attempt to get a job at a Buffalo, New York newspaper was unsuccessful, and magazines repeatedly rejected his submissions.

Jacob Riis was in much demand as a carpenter, a major reason being the low prices he charged.

Jacob Riis was most successful as a salesman, particularly of flatirons and fluting irons, becoming promoted to the sales representative of them for the state of Illinois.

Once recovered from his illness, Jacob Riis returned to New York City, selling flatirons along the way.

Jacob Riis noticed an advertisement by a Long Island newspaper for an editor, applied for and was appointed city editor.

Jacob Riis quickly realized why the job had been available: the editor in chief was dishonest and indebted.

Jacob Riis was sitting outside the Cooper Union one day when the principal of the school where he had earlier learned telegraphy happened to notice him.

Jacob Riis said that if Riis had nothing better to do, then the New York News Association was looking for a trainee.

Jacob Riis was able to write about both the rich and impoverished immigrant communities.

Jacob Riis did his job well and was promoted to editor of a weekly newspaper, the News.

Jacob Riis wrote to Elisabeth to propose, and with $75 of his savings and promissory notes, he bought the News company.

Jacob Riis worked hard at his newspaper and soon paid his debts.

Conveniently, the politicians offered to buy back the newspaper for five times the price Jacob Riis had paid; he was thus able to arrive in Denmark with a substantial amount of money.

Jacob Riis worked briefly as editor of a south Brooklyn newspaper, the Brooklyn News.

However, this enterprise ended when the pair became involved in an armed dispute between striking railroad workers and the police, after which Jacob Riis quickly returned to New York City.

Jacob Riis did well and was offered the job of a police reporter.

Jacob Riis was based in a press office across from police headquarters on Mulberry Street.

Jacob Riis had been wondering how to show the squalor of which he wrote more vividly than his words could express.

Jacob Riis took the equipment to the potter's field cemetery on Hart Island to practice, making two exposures.

For three years, Jacob Riis combined his own photographs with others commissioned of professionals, donations by amateurs and purchased lantern slides, all of which formed the basis for his photographic archive.

Jacob Riis accumulated a supply of photography and attempted to submit illustrated essays to magazines.

Jacob Riis, who favored Henry George's 'single tax' system and absorbed George's theories and analysis, used that opportunity to attack landlords "with Georgian fervor".

Jacob Riis had already been thinking of writing a book and began writing it during nights.

Jacob Riis attributed the success to a popular interest in social amelioration stimulated by William Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out, and to Ward McAllister's Society as I Have Found It, a portrait of the moneyed class.

Children of the Poor was a sequel in which Jacob Riis wrote of particular children that he had encountered.

The book describes how Jacob Riis became a reporter and how his work in immigrant enclaves kindled his desire for social reforms.

Jacob Riis organized his autobiography chronologically, but each chapter illustrates a broader theme that America is a land of opportunity for those who are bold enough to take chances on their future.

Jacob Riis's early experiences in Ribe gave Riis a yardstick with which to measure tenement dwellers' quality of life.

Jacob Riis had both a close friendship and on-going, professional relationship with political figure Theodore Roosevelt.

Jacob Riis asked Riis to show him nighttime police work.

Jacob Riis wrote about this for the next day's newspaper, and for the rest of Roosevelt's term the force was more attentive.

Jacob Riis then continued to serve as an advisor to Roosevelt both on the local and eventually federal level.

Jacob Riis personally ensured the closure of the police-managed lodging rooms in which Riis had suffered during his first years in New York.

Jacob Riis tried hard to have the slums around Five Points demolished and replaced with a park.

Jacob Riis's writings resulted in the Drexel Committee investigation of unsafe tenements; this resulted in the Small Park Act of 1887.

Jacob Riis was not invited to the eventual opening of the park on June 15,1897, but went all the same, together with Lincoln Steffens.

Jacob Riis wrote his autobiography, The Making of an American, in 1901.

Jacob Riis chronicled his time in the Forest Service in his 1937 book, Ranger Trails.

Jacob Riis remarried in 1907, and with his new wife, Mary Phillips, relocated to a farm in Barre, Massachusetts.

Jacob Riis's grave is marked by an unmarked granite boulder in Riverside Cemetery, in Barre, Massachusetts.

However, Jacob Riis showed no sign of discomfort among the affluent, often asking them for their support.

Jacob Riis was approached by liberals who suspected that protests of alleged Spanish mistreatment of the Cubans was merely a ruse intended to provide a pretext for US expansionism; perhaps to avoid offending his friend Roosevelt, Riis refused the offer of good payment to investigate this and made nationalist statements.

Jacob Riis emphatically supported the spread of wealth to lower classes through improved social programs and philanthropy, but his personal opinion of the natural causes for poor immigrants' situations tended to display the trappings of a racist ideology.

Jacob Riis's audience comprised middle-class reformers, and critics say that he had no love for the traditional lifestyles of the people he portrayed.

Stange argues that Jacob Riis "recoiled from workers and working-class culture" and appealed primarily to the anxieties and fears of his middle-class audience.

Libertarian economist Thomas Sowell argues that immigrants during Jacob Riis's time were typically willing to live in cramped, unpleasant circumstances as a deliberate short-term strategy that allowed them to save more than half their earnings to help family members come to America, with every intention of relocating to more comfortable lodgings eventually.

Jacob Riis was said to portray them as falsely happy with their lives in the "slums" of New York City.

Jacob Riis's writing was overlooked because his photography was so revolutionary in his early books.