While attending Lombard College in the late 1890s, Carl Sandburg and his friends went to hear several lectures at Knox College. He was particularly impressed by Jacob A. Riis who delivered a lecture and showed stereopticon slides of the slums in New York City.

 

Riis had published a book of his photographs, with commentary, in 1890. How the Other Half Lives was an immediate success. The book was an early example of photojournalism and investigative reporting. It exposed immigrant living conditions on the Lower East Side of New York City. More than 334,000 people were crammed into one square mile of the city.

 

Jacob A. Riis was born May 3, 1849, in Ribe, Denmark. He was the third of thirteen children. His father, Niels E. Riis, was a school teacher. He encouraged Jacob to read the works of Charles Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper to improve his English. At his own request, Jacob was apprenticed as a carpenter. The job prospects were poor in his homeland. He decided to emigrate to the United States. It took two years for him to earn the money to pay for the $50 ticket on a ship to America. His friends gave him $40 to make a start in his adopted homeland in 1870, when he departed.

 

After arriving in New York, Riis had difficulty finding a job and was nearly destitute on more than one occasion. He had a variety of jobs and started several businesses which failed. He even sold flatirons door-to-door. Eventually, he became a reporter and bought a weekly labor newspaper with borrowed money. He made a success of the newspaper and sold it back to the politicians who had originally owned it. He was offered a job by a neighbor to become a police reporter for the New York Tribune. He saw the worst crime-ridden and impoverished conditions and wrote about them. He wanted to inform middle and upper class people about what was happening in the city.

 

He became a photographer  in order to show the conditions in which immigrants lived. He also learned to use flash powder with the camera to get clearer, more detailed photographs of people living in the tenements and children sleeping on the streets at night.

 

Riis walks the beat in New York City behind his friend and fellow reformer, NYC Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt (1894—Illustration from Riis's autobiography)

In 1895, Theodore Roosevelt was appointed president of the Board of Commissioners of the New York Police Department. He read How the Other Half Lives and went to see Riis. They visited the slum areas  from midnight until 4 o'clock in the morning and discovered ninety percent of the policemen were not on duty. Roosevelt was in a position to make changes in the police department. He was well-to-do and could deal with community leaders and officials in order to make sure improvements were made in their neighborhoods. Roosevelt and Riss became close friends for the rest of their lives..

 

In 1897, the City tore down the worst of the tenements near the notorious Five-Points slum and created a park. It was named for Jacob A. Riis. A settlement house was also established and named for him.

 

Riis was a firm believer in making things better. He had his own prejudices about ethnic groups and their behavior and attitudes; but he fought injustice wherever he found it.

 

In his autobiography, Always the Young Strangers, Sandburg wrote “Riis had become a national figure...as a builder and a changer of conditions.” “[H]e had fought politicians and landlords and had come through with results for humanity.” Jacob Riis was a man after Sandburg's own heart.