Four years ago, while browsing in Second Story Books in Washington, D.C., I noticed a plain clothbound volume among the fine leather-bound tomes locked in a glass case. I had no business looking at any rare books, but that did not stop me from asking if I might see it. A moment later I was holding a copy of "How the Other Half Lives," the 1890 classic on the squalor of New York's tenements that pricked a nation's conscience and became a template for generations of investigative reporters like myself.
From the note inside the cover, I learned that this was not just any first edition, but the author's own annotated copy. In the front, in black ink, was his signature, "Jacob A Riis" and the date, "Nov 15 1890." In the margins of several pages, were his handwritten notes. The price: $4,000.
I reluctantly surrendered the volume, but my romance with the book did not end there. Days later I tried to negotiate a lower price — to no avail. A month later I contacted a museum in New York, suggesting it acquire the book, but it was apparently too rich for their blood, too.
And so I tried to put it out of my mind, continuing, as I had for years, to teach it in my reporting classes. But its relevance seemed to grow with each passing year. It was an early model of today's multimedia journalism, harnessing a new technology — the flashbulb. For Riis, that meant his camera could now illuminate the darkest recesses of New York's tenement life, producing photos so disturbing that they roused a city to action.
But it was also his subject that demanded fresh attention. His chronicle of abject poverty and public indifference resonated with my students. His time, like our own, was marked by vast wealth (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt) and dire hardship, by scandals and financial manipulation, by institutionalized political corruption, by nativist hostilities to newcomers, and by democracy's struggle to define its responsibilities to those on the margins — the poor, the immigrants, the sick, the elderly. Today, instead of "the other half" we speak of the 1 percent who control about 35 percent of private wealth — echoes of a second Gilded Age. A recent analysis shows that more than half the members of Congress are millionaires.
Physically, the Riis legacy is all around us: in Jacob Riis Park in Rockaway, Queens, and Riis Park in Chicago; in the holdings of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Museum of the City of New York. It lives in classrooms wherever American studies, sociology, photography, history, literature or journalism are taught. His call for recreational space as a refuge from the grimness of the tenements helped fuel a national movement for urban playgrounds. His 1914 obituary in The Times referenced Theodore Roosevelt's proclaiming him the "ideal American."
All this I summoned as a rationale for returning this past fall to that singular first edition and the talismanic hold it had over me.
And so, I telephoned the bookstore once more, half hoping the volume had been sold. It had not, and since my first encounter with the book in 2010 the effects of the Great Recession had lingered, apparently driving off any would-be buyers.
A few emails later, we agreed to a somewhat reduced price. At my request, the store even agreed to put me in touch with the descendant of Jacob Riis who had consigned the book to the store. Her name was Gretchen Cooke, his great-granddaughter. First through emails, then by telephone and finally letters, she and I traversed the history of the book — its provenance — how it seems to have passed from Jacob Riis to his son, John Riis, then to his granddaughter, Martha Elisabeth Riis Moore, and finally, to Gretchen Moore Cooke, where it long enjoyed a favored spot on a shelf of Riis books in her family's Annapolis, Md., living room. In 1978 it was rebound by her brother, John, a master bookbinder. But with three children of her own, Ms. Cooke decided this indivisible treasure should be put up for sale, hoping it would find an appreciative home. And it has.
In October, the book arrived swaddled in Bubble Wrap and buried in popcorn, but as humble a volume as I remembered it to be. I reverently thumbed through the pages. Riis's notes seethe with moral indignation. Next to a passage about an "army of ten thousand tramps," he scribbled "that have sent one tenth of the city's population to the Potter's Field every year in the last five years." His resentment of those who profited from the slums erupted in a note that reads "what sort of landlords they become — consult experience of health officers — worst of the lot. Contest every order."
But the marginalia also expand upon themes of ethnic and racial stereotypes — Chinese, Jews, Poles, blacks, etc. — that would be unacceptable today. He writes "The Italian has nevertheless the instinct of cleanliness but it is drowned by the nastiness of the tenements. Firmly managed he can be made a desirable tenant. (There is a difference, too, between the Southern and Northern Italian.)"
Why he should so annotate his own book is something of a mystery — perhaps in expectation of a second edition. But for all its flaws, "How the Other Half Lives" continues to speak to us today and remains a primer on how to break through collective apathy and self-centeredness in pursuit of a common good.
I think of Riis these days as resistance builds for providing health insurance for millions of uninsured, as about two dozen states refuse to expand Medicaid, as the House votes to deny food stamps to 14 million people over the next decade. I think of him as some 57,000 mostly poor children are removed from the rolls of Head Start because of sequestration, of the immigrants desirous of citizenship who now find themselves in limbo, of the billionaires and beggars, the dwindling middle class, and the ways in which the neediest among us are ignored, or, worse yet, blamed for their own suffering.
Jacob Riis was no stranger to suffering. An immigrant himself, he endured homelessness and rejection soon after his arrival in America in 1870. He was, for a time, of "The Other Half." What, I wondered, might he say about America today, where 47 million live in poverty?
"He would have been very upset at people not looking out for everyone else," says his great-granddaughter, Ms. Cooke. The social conscience of her great-grandfather runs through the Riis bloodline, accounting for generations of writers and champions of the disenfranchised. Ms. Cooke's grandfather, John Riis, was a journalist with a "love of mankind that was inclusive," to quote a newspaper he had worked for marking his passing. Her mother, Martha Elisabeth Riis Moore, was a crusading social worker-turned-reporter in Richmond, Va., who, like her grandfather, used a camera to expose social inequities — in her case, the squalid conditions of black schools in the South of the 1950s. At some point, she passed the Jacob Riis volume on to her daughter, a historian and author.
For years it had bothered me to think of this book sitting forlornly on a shelf in Washington. But I also recognize that while it now belongs to me, it does not rightly belong with me. Its place is in New York City — in a museum or public library — where it might yet rouse others to take up the causes of conscience that stirred Riis and generations of muckrakers. It is a part of New York, the city of its conception. On the centennial of Riis's birth in 1949, Gotham's dynamo, Robert Moses, then parks commissioner, wrote: "May his shadow never grow less."
And on the first day of this new year, Bill de Blasio cited Jacob Riis, among others, in his inaugural address: "It was New Yorkers," he said, "who challenged the status quo, who blazed a trail of progressive reform and political action, who took on the elite, who stood up to say that social and economic justice will start here and will start now."
Fittingly, this year is the centennial of Jacob Riis's passing. Call it a New Year's resolution: I hope soon to donate it and see this book finally find its way home.
Ted Gup is a professor of journalism at Emerson College and the author, most recently, of "A Secret Gift," about the Great Depression.
A version of this article appears in print on 01/12/2014, on page SR9 of the National edition with the headline: The 1890 Book I Had to Have.
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