Throughout How the Other Half Lives, Riis focuses on the idea that evil, or immoral behavior, can be passed down genetically from parent to child. This fixation on heredity occurs as a motif throughout the text, as early as the introduction:
If it shall appear that the sufferings and the sins of the "other half," and the evil they breed, are but as a just punishment upon the community that gave it no other choice, it will be because that is the truth.
Note the specific use of the term "breed" in this passage, intended to imply that the children produced by impoverished people will bear the same "evil" that their parents do. In fact, this passage implies that the only thing the tenements can produce is evil. This viewpoint is solidified throughout the text, as exemplified by the following passage from Chapter 15, aptly entitled "The Problem of the Children":
The problem of the children becomes, in these swarms, to the last degree perplexing [. . .]. For, be it remembered, these children with the training they receive—or do not receive—with the instincts they inherit and absorb in their growing up, are to be our future rulers.
It is key to note that Riis was not the sole proprietor of these beliefs, nor the sole perpetrator of this heredity-based rhetoric. In fact, such notions were commonly held by eugenicists and social reformers at the time, so Riis seems to have incorporated these ideas into his social analysis, ultimately undermining any attempt to approach the situation with empathy.
Throughout the book, Riis uses animalistic, demeaning language to describe tenement residents, more often than not speaking about them as a large, threatening group as opposed to as individuals with agency and identity. This imagery of the "swarms" or "hordes" of impoverished immigrants is so widely used in Riis's work that it becomes a motif, one he employs as early as the introduction, mentioning the "question" of "how to lay hold of these teeming masses in the tenements." He also uses the term "herd" in Chapter 1 to describe crowding in cities, noting that many other overcrowded cities were far less crowded than New York:
The utmost cupidity of other lands and other days had never contrived to herd more than half [the people who lived in New York tenements] within that same space.
Disturbingly, Riis also describes children in this manner in Chapter 4:
A horde of dirty children play about the dripping hydrant, the only thing in the alley that thinks enough of its chance to make the most of it.
This imagery, which Riis utilizes throughout his writing, generates a fear of the presumed degenerate masses that has its roots in the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This generation of fear and disgust surrounding large masses of people becomes a motif within Riis's work, surfacing often in the descriptive language he chooses.
Throughout How the Other Half Lives, Riis focuses on the idea that evil, or immoral behavior, can be passed down genetically from parent to child. This fixation on heredity occurs as a motif throughout the text, as early as the introduction:
If it shall appear that the sufferings and the sins of the "other half," and the evil they breed, are but as a just punishment upon the community that gave it no other choice, it will be because that is the truth.
Note the specific use of the term "breed" in this passage, intended to imply that the children produced by impoverished people will bear the same "evil" that their parents do. In fact, this passage implies that the only thing the tenements can produce is evil. This viewpoint is solidified throughout the text, as exemplified by the following passage from Chapter 15, aptly entitled "The Problem of the Children":
The problem of the children becomes, in these swarms, to the last degree perplexing [. . .]. For, be it remembered, these children with the training they receive—or do not receive—with the instincts they inherit and absorb in their growing up, are to be our future rulers.
It is key to note that Riis was not the sole proprietor of these beliefs, nor the sole perpetrator of this heredity-based rhetoric. In fact, such notions were commonly held by eugenicists and social reformers at the time, so Riis seems to have incorporated these ideas into his social analysis, ultimately undermining any attempt to approach the situation with empathy.
