How The Other Half Lives Riis And Agrees Analysis

The idea of wealthy individuals touring through the lives of individuals who are poor and capturing what it is like to be poor is notorious in American History. Jacobs Riis and James Agree are two interesting authors with different backgrounds, but shared similar motives. The two authors bring the struggled of American poverty to life by inserting themselves among poor families and wrote about their lives. In his book “How the Other Half Lives”, Riis reports on the lives of many ethnic and demographic groups in New York as well as their struggles within a societal system that promotes inequality. Meanwhile, James Agree in his book Cotton Tenants which was written as a magazine article based on similar theme as Riis except his story took place in the south. Agree wrote about three families which were tenants and sharecropper in Hale County, Alabama. He records on how the three families navigate through an unfair agriculture system where the poor were giving land to grow crops for a share profits with their landlords or occupy lands own by the landlords. While utilizing photographic and various techniques, both books shared similar theme and paint an image for their audience of a societal system poor individuals have to go against …show more content…
Riis and Agree villainies the landlords has the one to blame for the injustice social class and who oppressed the poor including the Black African American. For example, Riis compared the landlords to the “Czar of all the Russia” when dealing with Blacks tenants (XIII). In the meantime, Agree mentioned landlords are hash “unconscious hypocrisy” (212) and how they took joy on cheating blacks on profits they made (207). Both authors castigated landlords for their greediness in exploiting the poor and especially Black African American who suffered worst treatment in the hands of the landlords than any other