Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half at The Museum of the City of New York, and: Activist New York at The Museum of the City of New York

Abstract

413 Exhibition Review Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half at The Museum of the City of New York. Exhibition on view through March 20, 2016 (will travel to Washington, D.C., and to Denmark following its presentation at The Museum of the City of New York). Activist New York at The Museum of the City of New York. Ongoing exhibition. Exhibit review essay by Debra Jackson, Independent Scholar The 2016 Presidential campaign has already produced a good deal of immigrant-bashing rhetoric, a ploy that is frequently rolled out in American political life as constituencies jockey for political power and dominance over the public discourse. Throughout New York City’s history there have been many moments when residents openly expressed anti-immigrant sentiments. The historically inspired Martin Scorsese film, Gangs of New York (2002), includes an immigrant-bashing episode. In it the character Bill the Butcher hurls a rock at a family of Irish immigrants departing a steamer, striking a woman in the face. As a proud nativist, Bill was motivated by a hatred of foreigners, and he lashed out in resentment at the influx of Irish immigrants into New York City. Immigration and the issues it provokes are themes that intersect in Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half, an exploration of the career of the pioneering social reformer, and Activist New York, a reflection on nearly 400 years of activism in New York City. Both exhibitions grapple with the consequences of the reality that, with the exception of Chinese and then Asian exclusion, no laws existed in the United States until the 1920s that would “regulate or curtail the flow of newcomers.” 414 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY The newcomers arrived in numbers that were staggering. The “Nativists and Immigrants” display in Activist New York indicates that some 3.7 million landed in New York Harbor between 1820 and 1860. In the decades before the American Civil War, immigrants crowded into shoddy dwellings in the Five Points, a Lower East Side neighborhood believed to be the most unhealthy and densely-populated place in the world. Social critics used the congestion and unsanitary living conditions in the tenements of the Five Points against immigrants, arguing it was proof of their innate degradation. The immigrant presence in the city inspired the creation of the first anti-immigrant political party, the Native American Democratic Association. “Nativist” commentators, like Samuel F.B. Morse, condemned them as “filthy and ragged in body, ignorant in mind,” who would “fill your streets with squalid beggary, and your highways with crime.” The “Nativists and Immigrants” presentation assembles materials that highlight the political agenda of nativist agitators, which included a twenty-one-year waiting period before immigrants could become citizens. The presentation also demonstrates that the nativist assault did not remain unchallenged, and it reveals how Irish Americans advocated for social and political justice. It is important to consider how the nativist response to antebellum immigration contrasts with the post-Civil War period, when a new voice emerged to challenge the standard narrative and dominate the public debate on life among the urban poor. In the organization of Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half, curator Bonnie Yochelson draws on the City Museum’s collection of Riis’ ground-breaking “flashlight” photography, and reunites these photographs with the Riis archive, on deposit at the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. The exhibition creates a well-rounded portrait of the passionate activist and reformer who promoted a different view of immigrant life and changed the hearts as well as the minds of not only New Yorkers, but people throughout the United States. In the introductory gallery, visitors learn that between “1870 and 1900, three quarters of the 12 million immigrants who came to the United States settled in New York.” The flow of newcomers had not diminished since the antebellum years, and Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was among those newcomers ; he arrived in New York City from his native Denmark in 1871. It is ironic that he arrived just a few years after the worst tenements in the Book Reviews 415 Five Points had been razed, but the specter of that...