Riis’s account is the quintessential example of the melting pot concept of American society in action. It describes New York City as an incredibly cosmopolitan blending nationalities and ethnicities, each one coming from successive waves immigration to the United States. Not only does it defy the idea that there is some default ‘standard American’ look and culture, it presents native born Americans as almost a minority, and if not then usually not more than a generation or two removed from their own ingress into the Land of the Free. While he notably does not mention the presence of black people in these multi-cultural tenements he does provide a hint of the prejudice and discrimination African-Americans would and did face in the slums of northern cities when he describes how “The once unwelcome Irishman has been followed in his turn by the Italian, the Russian Jew, and the Chinaman, and has himself taken a hand of opposition, quite as bitter and quite as ineffectual, against”(Riis) whichever the most recent wave of despised immigrants to hit the shores was.
America is and was very good at simultaneously priding itself on its diversity and tolerance while also exhibiting frothing malice and bigotry toward anyone deemed not like everyone else. As Riis put it, those two contradictory national values affected every wave of immigration to hit Ellis Island and continued right up to this day. While we are of course well past the point where the American government would deny entry to thousands of desperate people on the grounds of religion or national origin there are many commonalities between poor neighborhoods then and now. The main difference race-wise is that a much bigger portion of the poor living in American slums now is white, and more to the point considered white. There is no longer any question that Irish or Russian-descended Americans are white. Now when the white urban poor are derided we just call them millennials.
Works Cited
Riis, Jacob. “How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York.” New York, 1890.
