Throughout the book, Riis utilizes statistics as a means of reasoning with his audience. Emotional appeals aside, statistics on rent and disease provide one of the strongest logical arguments—or logos—for working to improve life in the tenements. He notes early on, in the introduction, that:
Experts had testified that, as compared with uptown, rent was about twenty-five to thirty percent higher in the worst slums of the lower wards.
This statistic about rental prices provides important context for Riis's readership that emotional appeal alone could not; more than giving his readers someone to pity, Riis gives them a very real way to measure the lives of tenement residents against their own. A 25 to 35 percent rent hike in the tenements is clearly ridiculous, especially when compared to the better-priced, well-maintained housing that costs so much less. Riis goes on to provide statistics throughout, including ones about disease in the tenements:
In one cholera epidemic that scarcely touched the clean wards, the tenants died at a rate of one hundred and ninety-five to the thousand of population; which forced the general mortality of the city up from 1 in 41.83 in 1815, up to 1 in 27.33 in 1855, a year of unusual freedom from epidemic disease.
While morality and charity are key components of Riis's argument, they cannot stand alone. Riis, knowing this as a journalist, leans on statistics to form the scaffolding of this earnest appeal for social reform.
Throughout the book, Riis utilizes statistics as a means of reasoning with his audience. Emotional appeals aside, statistics on rent and disease provide one of the strongest logical arguments—or logos—for working to improve life in the tenements. He notes early on, in the introduction, that:
Experts had testified that, as compared with uptown, rent was about twenty-five to thirty percent higher in the worst slums of the lower wards.
This statistic about rental prices provides important context for Riis's readership that emotional appeal alone could not; more than giving his readers someone to pity, Riis gives them a very real way to measure the lives of tenement residents against their own. A 25 to 35 percent rent hike in the tenements is clearly ridiculous, especially when compared to the better-priced, well-maintained housing that costs so much less. Riis goes on to provide statistics throughout, including ones about disease in the tenements:
In one cholera epidemic that scarcely touched the clean wards, the tenants died at a rate of one hundred and ninety-five to the thousand of population; which forced the general mortality of the city up from 1 in 41.83 in 1815, up to 1 in 27.33 in 1855, a year of unusual freedom from epidemic disease.
While morality and charity are key components of Riis's argument, they cannot stand alone. Riis, knowing this as a journalist, leans on statistics to form the scaffolding of this earnest appeal for social reform.
