Riis goes to great lengths to depict the reality of the tenements—at least, his perception of them—to the reader through imagery and figurative language. While he succeeds in creating an empathetic image in some passages, certain others end up demonizing the very subjects Riis wishes to help. One can see this clearly in Riis's use of metaphor in the following passage from the introduction:
[The tenements are places] that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years around half a million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral contagion.
Utilizing metaphor in this passage, Riis paints a picture of moral corruption as equivalent to a "contagion," likening evil and immorality to physical disease. This creates a connection between diseases like cholera and influenza (which spread quickly in the packed and unsanitary conditions of the tenements) and what Riis considers to be immoral behavior, which—from his perspective—spreads outward from the tenements just like physical disease. And this spread, he suggests, runs the risk of corrupting the surrounding society.
In Chapter 6, Riis describes the people who live in the tenements as "tramps," painting them as violent crowds of people that have quickly taken over a large swath of the city. Employing a metaphor, Riis implies that these people are dangerous:
The army of tramps that grew up after the disbandment of the armies in the field, and has kept up it's muster-roll, together with the in-rush of the Italian tide, have ever since opposed a stubborn barrier to all efforts at permanent improvement.
Riis uses metaphor here to compare the "tramps" in the tenements to an army. This is a pernicious insinuation, implying that impoverished people are uniformly violent and would exercise that violence against other residents of the city. Use of such generalizing language paints all those who live in the tenements as the same, positioning them as a threat to so-called civilized society. Riis's use of language in the above passage is carefully cultivated to inspire fear in his readership—fear that their middle-class suburbs will be invaded by impoverished immigrants; fear that traditional patriarchal family structures will deteriorate; fear that so-called Christian values will be lost and children corrupted. The fear in this passage —stemming from Riis' militaristic metaphor—was a core component of social reform rhetoric at the turn of the century.
In Chapter 18, Riis discusses the problem of alcohol addiction amongst tenement residents, noting with no small amount of righteous indignation the role that landlords play in cultivating vice. To make this point, he utilizes metaphor:
East Side poverty is not alone in thus rewarding the tyrants that sweeten its cup of bitterness with their treacherous poison.
Riis makes this scathing statement against predatory landlords who generate the conditions for poverty and then capitalize on their tenants' despair by opening bars, thus sweetening the "cup of bitterness" with alcoholic "poison." Using metaphor to compare alcohol to poison is fairly common; here, it provides context for moral reformers' push towards alcohol prohibition, which would be codified into United States law by the 18th amendment in 1920. Prohibition lasted until 1933, when it was repealed by the 21st constitutional amendment.
While Riis specifically targets alcohol and predatory landlords in the above excerpt, his position on these issues should be contextualized within the larger-scale moral panic that took place during the early 20th century. As technology and industry began to develop at the turn of the 20th century, cultural and political upheaval naturally followed. Anti-alcohol sentiment was one part of a much larger movement to stamp out alleged sources of moral corruption, seen by many as the result of such a rapidly changing world. Moral reformers would also go on to campaign against the film industry, leading to censorship and restriction via the Hays Motion Picture Production Code in the 1930s.
