Brainstorms: The First Muckraker

When White House press secretary Dana Perino admitted last year that she didn’t know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was—let’s review, shall we: the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown—Dan Czitrom was shocked. But the professor of history also found her lack of historical thinking typical of a thirty-something.

“Most young people are focused on the present,” Czitrom admits, “so trying to get them to think about the past is a tough sell.” A proponent of the teacher-scholar model of education, Czitrom hopes his own research and publishing projects will help engage his students in the cultural and political history, including American media history and the history of New York City, that is his specialty.

His most recent book may do just that. Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of the-Century New York (The New Press) offers a close look at the nation’s first “muckraker,” whose photographs documenting the squalid tenements on New York’s Lower East Side are well known. Less well understood is Riis’s deeply conservative worldview, which held that the goodwill of evangelical Christians, and not the government, would solve the problems of recent urban immigrants.

“Riis’s solution was philanthropy plus five percent,” notes Czitrom, who cowrote the book with Bonnie Yochelson, the former curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, which houses Riis’s collection. “Rich Christians would build housing and only take 5 percent profit.”

While keeping one foot firmly planted in traditional thinking—his books also are liberally punctuated with the racial and ethnic stereotypes that appealed to the upper classes of the day—Riis also knew the underside of the city from his work as a police reporter. His journalism and photography contributed to a more social-scientific and less moralistic approach to the crisis of urban poverty.

From Riis onward, “every attempt at reform has had a visual component. In terms of muckraking, Riis is ground zero,” Czitrom notes. Riis also inspired the next generation of reformers, including Frances C. Perkins 1902, who read Riis as an MHC undergraduate and went on to become secretary of labor under Franklin Roosevelt.—M.H.B.