25 for 25. How the Other Half Lives (1895)

Inequality is an escapable feature of the natural world. Indeed it is an essential part of the evolution that produced the natural world as it exists today. Some trees are taller than others, and their height shades other trees, which evolve to grow in the understory. Some lions are stronger than others, and their more numerous strong  offspring make the lion the king of beasts. Homo sapiens were cleverer than other hominids and produced our present billions.

Within the human race, inequality took economic form upon the adoption of agriculture. Farming produced a surplus which allowed some humans to live off the labor of others.

In feudal societies inequality was obvious. Lords lived in manors and serfs lived in hovels. Laws and habits reinforced the distinction between rich and poor.

Industrialization made inequality more extreme. In theory this needn't have been so. Machines leveraged labor power, and the larger surplus might have been split between the owners of the machines and their operators. In practice the owners tended to seize the surplus for themselves, intensifying inequality further. Fortune scaled linearly in agricultural societies, per productive unit of land. Fortune scaled exponentially in industrial societies, as invention funded new invention which funded newer invention. Where planter George Washington had extracted the surplus from hundreds of workers (mostly enslaved), industrialist John Rockefeller battened on tens of thousands.

Inequality became more visible in industrial America. The mansions of New York’s moguls were a short walk from the tenements where their workers and the workers’ families crowded together, dozens to a room. Yet the moguls never entered those cramped quarters, and far less did Americans who lived outside the great industrial cities.

Until Jacob Riis gave them a guided tour. Riis was a reporter and reformer, an immigrant from Denmark who thought his adopted country a wonderful place but not as wonderful as it might be. He haunted the alleyways of New York to reveal to his readers how the other half of their city—the poor not covered by his competitors and their upscale papers—lived.

He wrote their stories, but more tellingly he illuminated them by the flash powder that made photographs possible in their windowless dwellings. The photographs that accompanied Riis’s reporting, gathered into the 1895 book How the Other Half Lives, caused a sensation. They revealed the home lives of America’s most vulnerable, etching unforgettable images in their viewers’ minds. The plight of the poor became a political issue as never before.

The pictures changed journalism as well. Papers previously had consisted of printed words with occasional drawings. Recent innovations in printing press technology made possible reproductions of photographs. The photos included detail and nuance the drawings missed, and they lent an immediacy to stories like the ones Riis wrote. Soon no story was complete without photos, the more emotionally compelling the better.

Visual images have been a central part of journalism ever since. Movie newsreels and then television made the pictures move. Mobile phones and social media deputized us all as photojournalists.

Jacob Riis would have been pleased, and envious.