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... the urban poor. His brutal documentation of sweatshops, disease-ridden tenements, and overcrowded schools stirred up public indignation and helped effect significant reform in housing, education, and child-labor laws. Riis lived in poverty in New York City for some time before he found a job with a news bureau in 1873. He became a police reporter for the New York Tribune and the Associated Press in 1877.
Horrified by immigrant life, he began a series of exposes on slum conditions on New York's Lower East Side. In 1884 he was responsible for the establishment of the Tenement House Commission. In 1888 he left the Tribune for the Evening Sun and began work on his book How the Other Half Lives. Riis was among the first photographers to use flash powder, which let him photograph interiors and exteriors of the slums at night. He worked at first with two assistants but soon found it necessary to take his photographs himself. Mainly a writer, he wanted pictures to document and authenticate his reports, and to supply the vividness that would ensure attention.
Sections of How the Other Half Lives appeared in Scribner's magazine in December 1889. The full-length book attracted immediate attention upon publication some months later and was reprinted several times. It had a powerful and lasting effect on movements for many kinds of social reform. For the next 25 years Riis continued to write and lecture extensively on the problems of the poor. He published over a dozen books, including his autobiography, The Making of an American (1901), and many articles. He became known as 'the father of the small parks movement' after his success in creating a park in the infamous Mulberry Bend section of lower Manhattan.
Jane Addams wrote eleven books, one of the most famous being Newer Ideals of Peace. She also wrote hundreds of articles on a variety of subjects such as, industrial conditions, suffrage, civil rights, child welfare and many more. The legacy of Jane Addams began with a trip to Europe with two college friends. A stop in London's East End showed her terrible poverty that came with industrialism.
In England she also saw Toynbee Hall, a settlement house where students form Oxford and Cambridge helped to teach workingmen. This made Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr read every piece of literature on the works of social reform that they could find. When they returned from Europe, both Addams and Starr considered the possibilities of setting up settlement houses in the many run-down streets of Chicago. After visiting many locations, they decided on the former mansion of a wealthy businessman that was serving as a rooming house in an Italian neighborhood in Chicago's overpopulated West Side.
This became known as Hull House. The main reason for doing this was for the poor, but another factor that played a role in this was to break away from the traditional roles given to women of that time. The Hull House was given plenty of work to do. Addams and Starr took care of the children of working mothers, they arranged for medical care of the sick, and they even tried to fight against the waste and rubbish in the streets which had spread disease throughout the neighborhoods.
Addams and Starr tried to enlighten and educate the women and children who struggled with daily poverty. Over time, interest in helping the poor had risen greatly. Addams traveled and spoke to women's clubs, church groups, and college students. Addams was unique not because she was helping the poor, charity was fairly common, but because of all that she gave up to live and help in the slums of Chicago. The impulse to reform strengthened in the 1890 s, as settlement houses became more known and widespread. Addams' pioneering efforts made her an obvious leader as her lectures and writings gave her the loudest voice of reform.
Settlement houses demanded recreation facilities in crowded cities, better sanitation facilities, and protection for female workers, abolition of child labor, improvement of education, and women's suffrage. In the Spring of 1898, Addams became more involved not only with community concerns, but national concerns as well. After the US declared war on Spain, violent crime had immediately risen in the streets of Chicago. Over time, her complaints and protests reached the top as Charles R.
Crane, a close friend of President Woodrow Wilson, sent the President a letter urging him to meet with Addams after he returned from Europe in 1915. "Of course she is the best we have and has been received everywhere as a spiritual messenger... Added to her great spiritual power is wonderful wisdom ad discretion. Every woman in the land and most men would be cheered by knowing that you and she were in conference. " As the US entered World War I, it seemed as if those who tried to stop the war, including Addams, became more hated than applauded for their efforts to prevent worldwide involvement. She declined to work with the Red Cross because it had become part of the military and used to war to rally for their own support. Despite recurring illnesses, Jane Addams worked for a way to give women a strong role in society as well as a sense of patriotism by keeping peace achievable but not seeming to go against the nation. Her dream was to give every child the happy childhood she had by giving them the safe feeling of, "being held up in a pair of dusty hands to see the heavy stone mill wheels go around. " Theodore Roosevelt was an historian, a biographer, a statesman, a hunter, a naturalist, and an orator.
His enormous amount of literary works include twenty-six books, over a thousand magazine articles and thousands of speeches and letters. In 1889 President Harrison appointed Roosevelt as a member of the Civil Service Commission of which he later became president. He kept this office until 1895 when he became the director of the Police Department of New York City. The New York City police department was extremely corrupt when Roosevelt took over his post.
Roosevelt would find as an ally in his war against this corruption, Jacob Riis, the author of How the Other Half Lives, a book on the poor living conditions in New York's slums. Riis was familiar with the city and its corrupt police force and how it operated. Bribery was not only rampant, but accepted behavior, with the payments being divvied out from patrolman up through the ranks. This was made all that much more apparent when the Rev. Charles Parkhurst, from the Presbyterian Church on Madison Avenue began a crusade against the corruption of the police force.
With Roosevelt in charge, this behavior would no longer be acceptable. In 1897 he joined President McKinley's administration as assistant secretary of the Navy. While in this office he actively prepared for the Cuban War, which he saw was coming, and when it broke out in 1898, he went to Cuba as lieutenant colonel of a regiment of volunteer cavalry, which he himself had raised among the hunters and cowboys of the West. He became very famous as the leader of these "Rough-Riders"; whose story he told in one of his most popular books. Roosevelt was elected governor of the state of New York in 1898, he would have sought reelection in 1900, since much of his work was only half done, had the Republicans not chosen him as their candidate for the second office of the Union. He held the vice-presidency for less than a year, succeeding to the presidency after the assassination of President McKinley on November 14, 1901.
In 1904 Roosevelt was elected to a full term as president. The ideals of the twentieth century were built on the work of reform groups. Reform groups still play a large part in changing the way large corporations and the government are run. Because of the constant need for change and reform, the turn of the twentieth century to the twenty-first could be called a progressive era just like the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century was. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barbuto, Domencia. American Settlement Houses and Progressive Social Reform.
New York: Orynx Press, 1999. Bunker, John. Progressivism. Chicago: Schenk man Books, 1977. Michaels, John. Reform in American History. 25 April 2000. < web Miller, Randall A, ed.
American Reform and Reformers: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1996.
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Research essay sample on Jane Addams Twentieth Century
