Why Every American is an Immigrant at Heart
In our book, After the fact, the author wrote “Before Riis there was no broad understanding of urban poverty that could lead to political action.” To me after reading these books and chapters, I can only agree. Riis was the first reporter / researcher who was able to give the public a first hand experience of what the actual conditions of urban life really were. Terrible! Bad! Even worse, degrading to those who even had to live that type of life, just to live, in this country! Riis showed reality. His photographs were a detailed record on how the ‘other half’ really lived in this country by his photographs “artlessness”. His photos at first were what one could call bland, almost boring, but on the other hand they would capture the hearts of those of the public whom were interested in what was really going on in their society, by grasping the reality by the ‘realness’ of those others lives.
Now on the other hand what you would see when Riis would take photographs of how the ‘other half lived’ you would also see in part, his own personal style, his vision, how he wanted you to see what was going on. An example would be when a picture may be taken you may not see the ‘true’ picture of poverty because of selective detail chosen for each picture. This ends up giving a different interpretation of what really might be happening or going on at the time of when that picture is being taken. The fact that some people would be added or left out of a picture to ‘make the picture right’ just gives way to personal styles and beliefs of how one should see what is really going on. So then are you really seeing the truth or are you only seeing what someone want you to see. This is when our own intuition had to come into play with what we believe in what the press would tell us and show us. This was only the beginning of what is still an ongoing battle of wits.
So once we knew that there were really as many immigrants living the way they were, we actually seen them with our ‘own eyes’, where would we go from there to know how they lived for an even better knowledge of how they lived? We would of course begin with those first pictures. Pictures of where they lived, such as a small attic, where families or groups of 5, 10 or more would live, just to get by, stay warm, to have a place they could call ‘home’. These places were breeding ground for diseases, especially epidemic type. Money was tight so food at times was also a scare commodity, and reason being was because work was unsteady those who were considered immigrants. The scale for work would go from Native born Americans (for getting work first), to men, to women who were immigrants, then on to Blacks, Latinos and Asians on the bottom run of the ‘work force’.
You would go from one extreme, of having many, many men, women and children living in a room, no bigger than an average size room (12 x 12 or smaller), to a small ‘apartment’ type place, where a boarder or two, would be taken in just to help make ends meet. These couples who took in boarders, both worked, yet they could still not make ends meet. Then fairly often, it was necessary for their children to work as well. The children would either work on the street trying to get odd jobs or in sweat shops working for only a third of what adults would make and would work for fifty or sixty hours a week for their meager pay. Then came what was nicknamed ‘the city machine’.
The city machine was basically city organizations. There were some Republican ‘machines’ but on the most part the ‘machines’ were Democratic. ‘Boss’ Tweed was the leader during this time of the city machine’s beginnings. He was a very successful businessman mainly because of his ability to bribe officials to ‘alter sheets’ and paying ‘fraudulent voters’ to vote in multiple locations as well as many counties and much more! Boss Tweed did do some other good deeds for the immigrants to help keep them leaned towards his side of the voting front. He helped with getting the development of streets built, with cleaning those streets, plus the ones that were currently being used, he got funding to build parks and bath houses in where the immigrants and poor lived. Tweed was able to get funding for cash, fuel and food for those of the poor and immigrants who really needed it, plus aid for the unemployed.
But there seemed to always be a downfall to the good that was being brought on by the deeds of Tweed. Cities eventually had monies being brought in for funding and used it as they seen fit, mostly in part to reduce their debits. The cities took over the handling of the monies being used for the poor and immigrants and ended up not doing well for those who really needed it. Housing conditions did not get better and the welfare agencies now lacked the funding to help take care of those who really needed it, even though in the beginning it was there when Boss Tweed started the whole ball rolling. When the cities got a hold of the monies they seen fit to move and use the money to other items on their agenda and for their own uses, so the poor and immigrants were stuck back on the bottom of the totem pole for those who needed help or needed anything. They were yet again left out in the cold.
What seemed to be really to be odd was the balancing act of the total government system. In the middle 1800’s a child would make no more than twenty-cents a day and by the late 1800’s more than 1.5 million children worked 60 or more hours a week for those meager earnings. By the early 1900’s nearly one in 8 Americans lived below the poverty level and by then adults only made a mere dollar fifty a day for a ten hour work day (taken from our lecture summary 2). Andrew Carnegie was one of those children who worked for meager earnings but he seemed to thrive to become of the richest men of the world during his time. Carnegie was a very shrewd business but even as he was and he did have a saying that ‘the man who dies rich dies disgraced’ (from lecture summary 2), I feel that instead of giving away his millions of dollars to charities, he could have done a few things a little different for his fellow man. One of which would have been to pay a higher wage rather than such a low wage to so many people. Also he could have made working conditions better for those who worked for him. In approximately a 40 year time span, about 4000 people died in the steel working factories. For that time and age it was a considerable number of people, and even today I would consider it too many. He did give a lot of his money away to charity and it is very possible that the reason he gave his money to charities was because of the social benefits of receiving even more money from those who thought he was being so generous they would give him money just for him and his causes. That would be very shrewd and to this day that very reason is used throughout the government for why one system is funded and another is not. It is all about the ‘Benjamin’s’.
