Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 125, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 May 1914 — JACOB RIIS DEAD; ILL A LONG TIME [ARTICLE]

JACOB RIIS DEAD; ILL A LONG TIME

Newspaper Man Who Reformed a Part of New York, Rose From The Ranks of the Lowly. Barre, Mass., May 26.—Jacob A. Riis, author and social worker, died at his home here today aftera long illness. Jacob August Riis became “the most useful citizen” of the metropolis, through his work in behalf of the poorer people of New York, according to a tribute once paid to him by -Theodore Roosevelt, his intiment friend. As an almost penniless immigrant he obtained knowledge of the slums at first hand and found conditions there so repellant that he consecrated his while life to warfare against wretchedness. Riis was the thirteenth child of a Latin teacher in Ribe, Jutland, Denmark. He was born in 1849. Protesting at the literary career which his father had cut out for him, young Riis decided to work .with his hands and became a carpenter’s apprentice. The vocation he had chosen did not prevent him, however, from falling in love with Elizabeth Neilson, daughter of one of the richest men in his native town. But she refused him and when Riis was 21 years old, having learned his trade, he embarked for New York with only S4O in his pocket. He spent half the sum for a heavy navy pistol as soon as he landed “to fight Indians and desperadoes.” Riis led a varied career during the following six years. He built miners’ huts in a Pennsylvania construction camp, mined coal, made bricks, drove a team and peddled flat irons and books. At 27 he spent his last cent in reaching New York, hoping to enlist through the French consul in the French army against Germany for the FrancoPrussian war, but his services were refused, and Riis was forced to accept a beginner’s place as a reporter for a New York news bureau. At the very first he made his most conspicuous success in the study of conditions on the east side of New York. * (With only $75 capital And notes for $575 he succeeded in buying the South Brooklyn News, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, and made such a success with the property that he was able to sell it at a considerable profit a few years later. He returned to Denmark and married the girl who had refused him when he was a carpenter’s apprentice. This first died in 1905, and two years later Riis married Mary Phillipa, of St. Louis.

As a reporter on the New York Tribune and later on the New York Sun, Riis took up his real work in slum fighting. While attending to routine duty as a police reporter, he worked day and night to arouse the people to the need of improved Jiving conditions. One of the first of bis campaigns was against the impurity of the city water, and it was his fight which finally led to the purchase of the Croton watershed to assure safe drinking water for New York. He brought sunlight to the tenement districts by forcing the destruction of rear tenements. He entirely cleared Mulberry Bend, one of, the worst tenement in the city, and replaced the squalid homes by shady parks. Theodore Roosevelt was police commissioner of New York when ißlls attacked the evils of police station lodging houses. He won his point and incidentally a strong ally in Mr. Roosevelt. Rftis drove bakeshops out of tenement basements; he fought for laws abolishing child labor; and was largely instrumental In getting the passage of “the briefest, wisest and best statutes on the books of New York, laying down the principles that hereafter ‘no school shall be built without an adequate playground.’/’ After twenty-seven years as a reporter, Rile resigned to continue his fight by writing and lecturing. Among the products of his -pen are "How the Other Half Lives,” "The Children of the Poor,” ‘The Making of an American” (his autobiography), ‘The Battle With the Slum,” “Children of the Tenements,” ‘The Old Town,” Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen,” and “Hero Tales From the Far North.” %