100 Years of Illustration

Merry Christmas in the Tenements - Jacob A. Riis

Christmas Greetings to all. Lest we forget how things used to be for the working poor, I've uploaded segments from Merry Christmas in the Tenements an article by Jacob Riis which appeared as the lead article in The Century Magazine Christmas Number for December 1897. Click on the image to enlarge the illustration by Ellen Bernard Thompson for Children of the People also by Jacob Riis in another national monthly magazine around the same time.

Illustration of Holiday Shoppers on Avenue A by Jay Hambridge in The Century Magazine Christmas Number for 1897. Click on image to enlarge.

Jacob Riis was the most remarkable of reformers. He was unique among a dozen or so dedicated American men and women who, in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, helped turn the tide against wanton greed and indifference to the poverty and despair of the urban working poor. These noble men and women saved the children of the cities, and thereby spared a nation.

Jacob Riis had only a modest formal education, no family fortune or much discretionary income beyond his employment as a journalist. He had a sometimes clumsy writing style that was distinctively different from the mawkish touch of other published writers of the time. Moreover, he had emigrated at the age of 21 from his native Denmark, and so was another "foreigner" to many. His derisive fellow newspapermen whom history has proven were often wrong, but never in doubt, delighted in calling him "The Dutchman."

Bespectacled and unimposing, with thinning hair and a drooping mustache, Jacob Riis was not an imposing figure as was his friend, President Theodore Roosevelt, given to roaring from a "bully pulpit," and famous for his admonishment to "speak softly and carry a big stick."

Jacob Riis did not speak softly. The stick he carried was a journalist's pen and -- eventually -- a large, ungainly camera. Time Magazine said of him in a special issue devoted to photojournalism: "[His] unflinching pictures of tenement life [marked] a turning point between the Victorian idea that poverty was an evil to be condemned and the reformer's conviction that it was a condition to be remedied."

In 1949 New York celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacob Augustus Riis. Mayor William O'Dwyer proclaimed the entire first week of May as Jacob Riis Week, honoring him as the "father of slum clearance" and commemorating his memory as that of "New York's most useful citizen."

Theodore Roosevelt said he was the best American he knew. I consider him the first photojournalist because of his book, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890 by Scribner's. Roosevelt, at the time a rising young reform candidate in the Republican party, was so impressed by the book that he went to Riis's office in the New York Evening Sun, and left his calling card on which he wrote: "I have read your book and I have come to help." Goaded by Riis, TR attacked corruption in the police department, and with other reformers enacted legislation to clean up slums with new laws regarding tenements. Riis' concerns that slums were the breeding grounds for crime, where children lived on the streets learning the ways of petty theft instead of gaining a useful education, caused the policy wonks and beaurocrats to fear an eventual day of reckoning.

Illustration by Jay Hambridge in the same article by Jacob Riis: The School for Italian Children–an Ice-Cream Feast. Click on image to enlarge.

Frederic Dorr Steele - Horses

Frederic Dorr Steele was a very prolific illustrator best know for his Sherlock Holmes illustrations, which you can find at this hot link.

Steele was born in a lumber camp near Marquette, Michigan, later studied at the National Academy of Design in New York City, and also taught illustration at the Art Students Leauge, according to Walt Reed in his excellent compilation of the best in American Illustration "The Illustrator in America 1900-1960's." He worked for all the big American magazines in many different mediums. Shown here are some examples of his best work (in my opinion) that appear to be drawn in litho crayon on a textured paper such as coquille board. Click on all of the images to enlarge them.

The author, Sewell Ford (1868-1946), wrote many short stories about horses which can be found by searching his name on the Internet. Some of his books can be entirely downloaded. This first story of his appeared in the April 1901 edition of Scribner's Monthly Magazine entitled Skipper (being the biography of a blue-ribboner. It's about a police horse who was auctioned off for $35 to a grocer, then sold to a junkman, and finally bought back by his former police officer rider who had inherited a bequest sufficient enough to retire Skipper to a life of ease in Westchester County.

"The first time he saw one of those little wheeled houses . . . he wanted to bolt."

"There were many heavy wagons."

"For many weary months Skipper pulled that crazy cart."

"He was taken to a big building where there were horses of every kind."

[The use of photos as reference is very obvious in the illustrations.]

"Drove him . . . to a big down-town market."

This second Sewell Ford story appeared in the August 1904 edition of Scribner's Monthly Magazine was called Chieftan, a story of the heavy draught service.

"He would do his best to steady them down to the work."

"He cut short their dinner hour."

"The let him . . . snake a truck down West Street."

"For some four days Tim appeared to enjoy it greatly."

On a personal note:

I saw the last of these horses as a kid growing up in a working-class suburb of Boston. The milk man, the ice man and the junk man, who called out, "Rags, paper, rags!" all used horses to pull their carts. The only modern touch was that the milk man's cart had rubber tires.

The evidence of horses was everywhere, as was their pungent smell. Street urchins threw "horse buns" at their victims. Frugal gardeners swept up horse manure for their rooftop containers of herbs and vegetables. It was far from the sanitized life we live today where horses are ridden for pleasure and competition. These noble beasts of burden were often simply worked to death or slaughtered when they lacked the strength to pull a cart.

"Working like a horse," was a common expression. So was "the horse knows the way," referring to how drunks were brought home when too incapacitated to manage on their own.