In an Extremely Rare Letter to Muckraking Journalist Jacob Riis, Theodore Roosevelt Promises More Factory Inspections to Expose Unsafe Conditions
TR expresses “love” for reformer Riis, and says he is not “foolish enough to need any reward for what I had done” .
He is proud of being praised in Riis’s latest book, which “will ever be a source of keen pride to me to show to my children”
Jacob Riis, the Danish-born journalist and photographer, was among the most dedicated advocates for America's oppressed, exploited, and downtrodden. He started out by landing a job...
He is proud of being praised in Riis’s latest book, which “will ever be a source of keen pride to me to show to my children”
Jacob Riis, the Danish-born journalist and photographer, was among the most dedicated advocates for America's oppressed, exploited, and downtrodden. He started out by landing a job as a police reporter with the New York Evening Sun. He worked in the poorest, most crime-ridden areas of the city. These were generally slums where immigrants lived in deplorable tenement houses. He began to bring a camera with him to document what he found in these neighborhoods, and the conditions in which these people lived. For this, Riis is considered to be one of the fathers of modern photojournalism. His 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, documented through word and image the lives of those who lived in these slums and tenements in an uncompromising, uncensored, and even brutal fashion. Among those moved by Riis's reportage was Theodore Roosevelt, then New York police commissioner. He introduced himself to Riis, offering to help his efforts somehow. Roosevelt accompanied Riis on his rounds of tenement houses and back alleys in order to see for himself the inhumane conditions endured by many of New York's inhabitants. Roosevelt and Riis became friends, and together, both men fought the injustices they witnessed on those turn of the century nights while the city slept. Riis's mission yielded results, as conditions in the city were improved with TR’s help (such as shutting down the fetid police station basements in 1896). In his 1900 book, A Ten Years War, Riis cheered their demise, and lauded Roosevelt.
Typed Letter Signed as Governor, with a 3-word holograph correction, on his State of New York, Executive Chamber letterhead, Albany, February 17, 1900, to Riis, whom he addresses as “Dear Jake”, expressing love for Riis, both pride and humility at having been included in Riis's latest book, and avowing confidence that the matter concerning factory inspection would be resolved. "Needless to say, I take the greatest pride in having my name in your handwriting at the front of your book and my photograph thought worthy to be put in it. If I were foolish enough to need any reward for what I had done, I should feel that I had it ten times over in what you have said about me, old man, in this book. Most of it is undeserved, because there are rose-tinted glassas over your loyal eyes when you look upon those whom you love and who love you. But I won't pretend to say that I regret to have it in, for I do now, and it will ever be a source of keen pride to me to show to my children. Reynolds has just been here to take dinner, and I have been trying to plan out some way by which we can straighten the factory inspection matter. I think we shall be able to do it."
Roosevelt kept his word, increasing the number of factories that very year.
James Bronson Reynolds was a noted social worker and reformer, trusted by Roosevelt, who had a particular interest in inspecting factory conditions and meat packing plants. Through him TR first became interested in settlement work on the East Side. In 1906, then President Roosevelt commissioned him to prepare the Neill-Reynolds report, which revealed the unsafe and unclean conditions in U.S. meat packing plants. The report led to the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.
Roosevelt grew to consider Riis "the most useful citizen in America” and “the best American I ever knew.”
A search of public sale records going back over 40 years shows only one other letter from TR to Riis, and that had nothing to do with their joint work to improve conditions.
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