Jacob Riis: Magnesium Flash Raids on Tenements With Theodore Roosevelt

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Jacob Riis was born in Denmark in 1849, one of 15 children; six of his brothers died of tuberculosis, and at 11 he saw a younger brother drown. Rejected as a suitor for Elizabeth, his employer's adopted daughter, he emigrated in 1870 with $40 and a gold locket holding a strand of her hair. In New York he scavenged apples and slept on gravestones, and in a police lodging house the locket was stolen; when he complained, the sergeant threw him into the street. He tried coal mining, tried to enlist for France in the Franco-Prussian War and was cheated selling flat irons, until a chance meeting outside Cooper Union led to a news agency job. He later bought a small paper, sold it back to politicians for five times the price, returned to Denmark and married Elizabeth.

As a night police reporter on Mulberry Street, Riis found that words could not convince uptown readers, so he adopted magnesium flash powder, fired first from pistol cartridges and later ignited in a frying pan, to photograph dark tenements and alleys. He showed the images in magic lantern lectures, and his 1890 book on the slums was among the first to use halftone reproduction to print photographs directly. Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the police commissioners, joined him on night patrols, cracked down on absent officers and closed the police lodging houses. The episode also weighs Riis's stereotyping of Jewish, Chinese and Italian immigrants and Thomas Sowell's argument that cheap tenements helped immigrants save money.

• On their night patrols, Riis and Roosevelt found nine out of ten officers missing from their posts.
• Roosevelt called Riis the most useful citizen of New York.
• Riis photographed towns dumping raw sewage into the city's watershed, leading New York to buy the surrounding land.
• He campaigned to replace the Mulberry Bend slum with a public park.
• Remembering his brothers, he brought the Danish idea of Christmas seals to the U.S. to raise money against tuberculosis.