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Motif
Explanation and Analysis—Swarms and Hordes:
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.
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