America, circa 1900, had virtually no middle class. Cities like Chicago had neighborhoods of high society and old money and slums of immigrants suffering in atrocious conditions. The separation of these two classes, the rulers from the serfs, and overall alienation from nature allowed the living and working environments of the lower class to become unbearable. With no power to fight for themselves, the poor, along with the environment itself, were simply ignored. Until the wealthy took notice of the great injustices occurring in their own city, reform movements could not happen.
Lewis Hine, a photographer in the early 20th century, decided that only facts would compel people to want change. He set out to document the tragic lifestyles of the lower class. In the film, America and Lewis Hine, a recording despairs, “We do not live in America, we live underneath America. America goes on overhead.” This sentiment was echoed through the slums of America. Working conditions, a focus of Hine’s, were especially deplorable. The standard of the day was perfect work or no pay, with child labor a common occurrence. At home, women and children as young as three worked long hours, seven days a week. In factories, men struggled to survive, with death and injury extremely common.
Jacob Riis, another photographer, focused on living conditions in his book How the Other Half Lives. With the perfection of a flash camera, he was able to show the upper class the horrors of tenements in the slums. An influx of immigrants to cities led to overpopulation, which created these tenements – houses converted to accommodate as many people as possible. Urbanization and Industrialization had indeed improved conditions across America, but not e...
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...nues today. Because America is set on appeasing those with the most money to pay in taxes, movements such as Occupy Wall Street occur. Until America will listen to the demands of the lower and middle class without being backed by the richest 1%, there will always be a need for dissent and protest.
Works Cited
America and Lewis Hine (1996).
Steven Forbes and Robert Earle Richardson. Some Recent Changes in Illinois River Biology. 1919. PSW 16-28
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, Chapter XIII. PSW 9-14
Hull House Residents, “An Inquiry Into The Causes Of The Recent Epidemic Of Typhoid Fever in Chicago,” Commons 81, no. 8 (April 1903): PSW 4-9
Hull House Residents, “An Inquiry Into The Causes Of The Recent Epidemic Of Typhoid Fever in Chicago,” Commons 81, no. 8 (April 1903): PSW 8.
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1905), Chapter Nine. PSW 1-3
Imagine a world where there was a great chance of a mother dying right after giving birth to her child. Sounds like a pretty crazy supposition. Unfortunately, not too long ago, that was the world we called home. Nuland’s book discusses the unfortunate tragedies of puerperal fever and the journey the medical field in Europe took to discover a cause and prevention. Hand in hand, Nuland also depicts the life of Ignác Semmelweis, the unknown founder of the aforementioned cause and prevention strategies: washing hands in chloride of lime. The Doctors’ Plague is a worthwhile read based off the information provided, its ability to break new ground, and the credibility of its author and sources.
Kent, Susan Kingsley. The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. Print.
As the days went by and the number of deaths began to increase, the Board of Health in London began to improve people’s living conditions by creating the indoor restroom, This, however, caused more problems for the people of London, due to the lack of a proper sewage system, “London needed a citywide sewage system that could remove waste products from houses in a reliable and sanitary fashion,...,The problem was one of jurisdiction, not execution,”(Page 117). London didn’t have a place where the sewers could lead off to which keep the disease spreading when people used the restroom. After months of battling the type of disease London was faced with, Mr. Snow convinced the Board of Health to remove the water pump that was on Board Street. By getting rid of this pump, Mr. Snow helped stop major outbreaks from recurring, “The removal of the pump handle was a historical turning point, and not because it marked the end of London’s most explosive epidemic,..., It marks a turning point in the battle between urban man and Vibrio cholera, because for the first time a public institution had made an informed intervention into a cholera outbreak based on a scientifically sound theory of the disease.”(Page 162- 163). This marked the end of the London epidemic and how the world of science
The book, The Ghost Map, tells the story of the cholera outbreak that took place in England during the medieval era. During this time, London became popular, causing it to become one of the most populous urban cities in England. However, it suffered from overcrowding, a large lower class, and little health regulations. As a result, living conditions and water supply were not the cleanest, and many died from the disease cholera. Though this epidemic led to many deaths/illnesses during it’s time, it has proven to be helpful and important to public health today. Some public health advancements that have occurred as a result include healthier, cleaner, and longer lives lived.
History textbooks seem to always focus on the advancements of civilization, often ignoring the humble beginnings in which these achievements derive. How the Other Half Lives by journalist-photographer Jacob A. Riis explores the streets of New York, using “muck-racking” to expose just how “the other half lives,” aside from the upbeat, rich, and flapper-girl filled nights so stereotypical to New York City in the 1800s. During this time, immigrants from all over the world flooded to the new-born city, bright-eyed and expecting new opportunities; little did they know, almost all of them will spend their lives in financial struggle, poverty, and crowded, disease-ridden tenements. Jacob A. Riis will photograph this poverty in How the Other Half Lives, hoping to bring awareness to the other half of New York.
Does your home have a lock on your door, a telephone and working appliances and plumbing? Do you dodge bullets in your sleep, have 13 people living in one apartment or wash your dishes in the bathtub because the kitchen sink hasn’t worked for months? Do you wash your clothes in the bathtub because the laundry room is too dangerous to do your washing? Do you live in an environment with no role models, where the gangs control everything and you can’t trust anyone? You may think these are strange questions for people who live in America in the late 20th century, but some people’s answers to these questions may be very different from yours. Those people are the one’s living in the “other America”. Alex Kotlowitz tells us “the story of two boys growing up in the other America” in his book There Are No Children Here.
The tenement was the biggest hindrance to achieving the American myth of rags to riches. It becomes impossible for one to rise up in the social structure when it can be considered a miracle to live passed the age of five. Children under the age of five living in tenements had a death rate of 139.83 compared to the city’s overall death rate of 26.67. Even if one did live past the age of five it was highly probable he’d become a criminal, since virtually all of them originate from the tenements. They are forced to steal and murder, they’ll do anything to survive, Riis appropriately calls it the “survival of the unfittest”. (Pg.
Pamela K. Gilbert, “’Scarcely to be Described’: Urban Extremes as Real Spaces and Mythic Places in the London Cholera Epidemic of 1854,” Nineteenth Century Studies 14 (2000): 149-72.
“Typhus fever is another disease born of bad sanitation. It is also known as, "jail fever" or "ship fever," because it was so common among men held captive in such putrid surroundings. The disease was highly contagious and usually transmitted through human feces and lice that infested the unclean bodies of the Elizabethans.
Murphy, Jim. An American Plague: the True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793. New York, NY: Clarion Books, 2003. Print.
The last time Typhus was recorded was by the British Troops during World War II. They had forty two cases of Typhus in 1942 and that was one year after the allied forces arrived. Then the year after that there was five hundred and eighty two cases of Typhus...
... lived in New York tenements. In Riis’s book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, he uses prolific prose coupled with emotionally powerful illustrations that paint a vivid picture of immigrant families living in tenements in the late 1800s. Throughout Riss’s book, exposes how immigrant children were forced to work in factories and sweatshops. As a result, Riss successfully achieves his goal of educating the middle class regarding the challenges that urban immigrants faced. Lastly, although Riss tact regarding racial epithets of the immigrants he wrote on and photographed are offensive, the importance of Riss’s photographs outweighs the racial insults because his pictures lie not only in their power to enlighten but also to move his readers regarding how immigrant families were forced into making their children work.
United States. Surgeon-General's, Office, J. K. Barnes, J. M. Woodworth, E. McClellan, J. C. Peters, J. S. Billings, President United States, and Service United States. Public Health. The Cholera Epidemic of 1873 in the United States. 43d Cong., 2d Sess. House. Ex. Doc. 95. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1875.
The ideal concept of American society is one in which all of the citizens are treated equal in all every realm and situation. Class, race or gender does not divide the utopian America; everyone is afforded the same opportunities and chances for success. In this chimerical state Americans are able to go as far as their dreams allow and with hard work and perseverance any thing is possible. Many Americans subscribe to this pluralist view of the Country, believing that within our democratic system it is the majority who maintains control and sets policy. Unfortunately this idyllic country does not exist nor has it ever existed. America is made up of distinct social classes and the movement within those classes is for the most part, limited to the various classes in the middle where the lines of demarcation are blurred. Although the majority of the Country's population would attest to the myth that America is a classless society, the distinctions definitely exist and influence the entire life scope of most Americans. Housing, health care, education, career prospects and social status are all dependent on the amount of wealth one has and their class standing. Our system needs the built in inequities of the class system in order to perpetuate itself and the upper class needs to have their interests as the dominant determiner of corporate and governmental power and policy.
Murphy, Jim. An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic 1793. New York, New York: Clariton Book, 2003. Print.