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Page 158

 		 Page 158 - Jacob Riis Exposes Child Labor

The reading selection

   Jacob Riis was a immigrant from Denmark who rose to fame for his photographs and reports about life in the poor sections of New York City in the Gilded Age.
 
   His own story after arriving in America in 1870 is remarkable in itself - at one point he was out of work and nearly dead from hunger.  He became a newspaper reporter, and once on his feet, he was determined to show conditions at the bottom of American society.  His best known book, published in 1890, is titled How the Other Half Lives.
 
   The selection condensed in the workbook is from one of his articles about child labor in a poor tenement neighborhood.
 
   The interest shown by readers of such reports reveals that the plight of the poor was becoming a concern of the middle and upper classes.

The picture

   A boy selling newspapers in the streets.  Cities at that time often had many homeless boys who supported themselves by selling papers and other work.
 

Group discussion question

   Jacob Riis shows that children in the poor tenement neighborhoods do a wide variety of jobs.  Some shine shoes, others work as newspaper sellers.  He met a girl who worked in a paper box factory, and another in a sweat-shop.  Even very young children, he found, might work at home, sewing coats or watching a younger child so the mother could work.  Most children, he said, did something to help the family earn a living.
   Of the children mentioned in the article, the typical age seems to be between ten and 13 years.

   What concerned Riis was not just that the children were working.  Most people at that time did not have the kind of formal education that is taken for granted today.  Factory owners even claimed that they were providing an education.  Riis, however, rejected such claims.  The typical work done by children, he points out, does not prepare them for anything except "hopeless and profitless drudgery."
    Riis clearly thought that children needed more than what could be learned in a factory.  Such work tended to make the children "mere machines" without the training for the responsibilities of life.






Copyright Notice

   Copyright 2018 by David Burns.  All rights reserved.  Illustrations and reading selections appearing in this work are taken from sources in the public domain and from private collections used by permission.  Sources include: the Dover Pictorial Archive, the Library of Congress, The National Archives, The Hart Publishing Co., Corel Corporation and its licensors, Nova Development Corporation and its licensors, and others.  Maps were created or adapted by the author using reference maps from the United States Geological Survey and Cartesia Software.  Please see the home page for this title for more information.