The Battle with the Slum

About this book

Jacob A. Riis’s The Battle with the Slum is a nonfiction follow‑up to his groundbreaking 1889 expose How the Other Half Lives. Written in 1902, the work opens with a self‑referential preface in which Riis recounts a three‑year span of reporting, revisiting the “battle” against New York’s tenements and expanding on articles that first appeared in Century Magazine. He frames the struggle as a continuation of a “war” that began when society first recognized the slum as its enemy, and he promises a review of recent reforms, illustrations, and case studies, from the “Old Church” tenement to the Mulberry Bend park, organized into a series of numbered chapters that blend narrative, statistics, and vivid sketches of street life.

The voice is that of a reform‑driven journalist of the Progressive Era, combining brisk reportage with moral urgency. Riis’s prose is direct, peppered with rhetorical appeals and occasional literary flourishes, reflecting the social‑science discourse of the early twentieth‑century. Readers interested in urban history, social reform, or the origins of American muckraking will find his detailed accounts of tenement conditions, political corruption, and early settlement‑house initiatives compelling, while those seeking a literary novel should look elsewhere.