Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives Summary

In the very beginning of American society in 1787, a staggering 92% of Americans lived rurally. However, this percentage was steadily declining and would continue to do so, as Jacob Riis accurately predicted in his book How the Other Half Lives: “At the beginning of the century the percentage of our population that lived in cities was as one in twenty-five. In 1880 it was one in four and one-half, and in 1890 the census will in all probability show it to be one in four.” In fact, by 1910, the percentage of rural Americans had dipped to 49%. These urban communities which 47.5 million people lived in by 1910 were densely packed and promoted a new level of interaction. Jacob Riis wrote, “remember that the gap that separates the man with the patched …show more content…
It brought about the ideology of “social Darwinism,” which meant that those who did not succeed was because they were genetically inferior. Darwin says, ““One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” By saying that the weaker, poorer people should die by nature, people began to believe that it was not their business to interact with them. However, Jacob Riis saw the issue with this: “There came a time when the discomfort and consequent upheavals so violent…then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance.” Since people within society are indeed interconnected, as shown by New York values and Riis’ observation, social Darwinism was a dangerous idea because the rich and the poor could not simply ignore each other in this new urban civilization. If the gap were to span any further, society would simply cease to function. Therefore, something needed to be done about this ever-widening power