Immigration: The Making of an American, Jacob Riis

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I have been gathering materials I used on immigration and thought they might be useful to young educators. I retired in 2008, but used many of these stories with excellent results.

Next, we have the story of Jacob Riis, who left Denmark in 1870, when he was 21. He headed for America, filled with false ideas of what he would find upon arrival. He would go on to a successful career in journalism, write a famous book, How the Other Half Lives, and call for reforms to better the lives of the poor.

Looking back on his life, he would write The Making of an American in 1901. Despite many battles along the way, he said, “I would not have missed being in it all for anything.” (preface)

His story begins on a narrow bridge spanning the Nibs River, in the ancient Danish seacoast town of Ribe. He is heading home for a noonday meal, from the carpenter shop where he works. He spies a beautiful girl.

When she has passed he stands looking after her, all the music gone out of him. At the other end of the bridge she turns with the feeling that he is looking, and, when she sees that he is, goes on with a little toss of her pretty head. As she stands one brief moment there with a roguish look, she is to stand in his heart forever—a sweet girlish figure, in jacket of grey, black-embroidered, with schoolbooks and pretty bronzed boots…

Riis is smitten—noting, further, that the boots had tassels. “Curls she had, too—curls of yellow gold. Why do girls not have curls these days?” (p. 2)

At age 52, Riis can still see the landscape of his old hometown, “It was grass, all grass, for miles, to the sand dunes and the beach.”

“Alas!” he adds, “I’m afraid that thirty years in the land of my children’s birth have left me as much of a Dane as ever. (p. 7)

His family was poor in Denmark; and his thoughts turn to his “dear old mother” and how “She had a house full, and little enough to manage with; but never one went hungry or unhelped from her door.” From her, Riis learned it was important to help others, less fortunate. (11)

Steel pens had not crowded out the old-fashioned goose-quill, and pen-knives meant just what their name implies. Matches were yet of the future. We carried tinderboxes to strike fire with. People shook their heads at the telegraph. The day of the stage-coach was not yet past. Steamboat and railroad had not come within forty miles of the town, and [there was] only one steam factory—a cotton mill that was owned by Elizabeth’s father….The watchmen still cried the hour at night….The police force, which in my boyhood consisted of a man and a half—that is, one with a wooden leg—was increased and uniformed, and the night watchmen’s chant was stopped. (12-14)

In his hometown, Riis remembered, there were three classes of people: “the officials, including church, school and government, the tradesmen, and the working people.” His father was of the last. His father’s salary “had to reach around to a family of fourteen, nay, fifteen, for he took his dead sister’s child when a baby and brought her up with us, who are boys all but one.” (21-22)

At fifteen, then, he fell in love with the girl with the golden curls. Elizabeth was her name, and she was only 13. But the great barrier to their love was their status. Jacob was of the working class. Elizabeth’s father was of great importance in the town. He pursued the girl with more fervor than skill, so that matrons in the town spoke of the need “to box my ears soundly.” Riis spent four years, working in Copenhagen, never forgetting the girl.

Once he had learned his trade, been admitted to the carpenters’ union, he dropped his tools “joyfully and in haste, made a bee-line for Ribe, where she was.” Everyone in town knew he had come to propose. Soon, everyone knew his proposal had been rejected, out of hand.

What did I, a common carpenter, want at the “castle?” That was what they called her father’s house. He had other plans for his pretty daughter.

As for Elizabeth, poor child! she was not yet seventeen, and was easily persuaded that it was all wrong; she wept, and in the goodness of her gentle heart was truly sorry; and I kissed her hands and went out, my eyes brimming over with tears, feeling that there was nothing in all the wide world for me anymore, and that the farther I went from her the better. So it was settled that I should go to America. (32-33)

He dreamed of returning, a rich man, and taking Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. So, in 1870, he boarded the steamer Iowa, leaving from the port of Glasgow, and headed for America. Entering the harbor of New York City, some days later, he remembered,

It was a beautiful spring morning, and as I looked over the rail at the miles of straight streets, the green heights of Brooklyn, and the stir of ferryboats and pleasure craft on the river, my hopes rose high that somewhere in this teeming hive there would be a place for me….I had a pair of strong hands, and stubbornness enough to do for two; also a strong belief that in a free country, free from the Dominion of custom, of caste, as well as of men, things would somehow come right in the end, and a man gets shaken into the corner where he belonged if he took a hand in the game. I think I was right in that. If it took a lot of shaking to get me where I belonged, that was just what I needed. Even my mother admits that now. To tell the truth, I was tired of hammer and saw. They were indissolubly bound up with my dreams of Elizabeth that were now gone to smash. Therefore I hated them.

Riis had heard of cowboys and Indians back home; he assumed the weather in the New World was always warm. And he wanted to be prepared to ward off any attackers with bows and arrows.

I made it my first business to buy a navy revolver of the largest size, investing in the purchase exactly one-half of my capital. I strapped the weapon on the outside of my coat and strode up Broadway, conscious that I was following the fashion of the country. I knew it upon the authority of a man who had been there before me and had returned, a gold digger in the early days of California; but America was America to us. We knew no distinction of West and East. By rights there ought to have been buffaloes and red Indians charging up and down Broadway.

If Riis ever had cause to use his big revolver, there is no record of it. Finding work to suit him in the city was harder than expected. “I realized,” he laughed many years later, “that there was no special public clamor for my services in New York, and decided to go West.” (38-39)

Riis remembered two other passengers on the Iowa, immigrants like himself, who also had only the most rudimentary idea of what they would find once they arrived in America. One was a big Dane,

…who carried an immense knapsack that was filled with sausages, cheese, and grub of all kinds when he came aboard. He never let go but for a moment on the voyage. In storm and sunshine he was there, shouldering his knapsack. I think he slept with it. When I last saw him hobbling down a side street in Pittsburgh, he carried it still, but one end of it hung limp and hungry, and the other was as lean as a bad year. The other voyager was a jovial Swede whose sole baggage consisted of an old musket, a blackthorn stick, and a barometer glass, tied up together.

Riis was fairly sure the Swedish fellow did not know how to write.

On the trip over, Riis befriended “a big, explosive German who had been a reserve officer, I think, in the Prussian army.” Riis and Adler, the German, took it upon themselves to complain to the captain about the meat they were being served, “so bad as to offend not only our palates, but our sense of smell.” When the captain seemed willing to listen and bent over the meat for a whiff, Adler jerked the tray on which it sat upward, and the captain’s nose was buried in the dish. (40)

Finding good work hard to come by in New York City, the two men proceeded to Pittsburgh. “I had a horrible fit of homesickness,” Riis recalled.

The days I managed to get through by working hard and making observations on the American language. In this I had a volunteer assistant in Julia, the pretty, barefooted daughter of a coal-miner, who hung around and took an interest in what was going on. But she disappeared after I had asked her to explain what setting one’s cap for anyone meant. I was curious because I had heard her mother say to a neighbor that Julia was doing that to me. But the evenings were very lonesome. The girl in our boarding-house washed dishes always to one tune, “The Letter that Never Came.” It was not a cheerful tune and not a cheerful subject, for I had had no news from home since I left. I can hear her yet, shrieking and clattering her dishes, with the frogs yelling accompaniment in the creek that mumbled in the valley. I never could abide American frogs since.

He stumbled across a group of Welsh miners, who made it clear they did not like seeing a Danish immigrant in the valley. For some reason, he thought he might make money as a coal miner, but “one day was enough for me.”

He recalled his brief experience. The mine where he was sent to work opened on the side of a hill.

You did not go down through a shaft, but straight in through the side of a hill to the bowels of the mountain, following a track in which a little donkey drew the coal to the mouth of the mine and set it down an incline [to be loaded on rail cars]… Through one of these [openings] we marched in, Adler and I, one summer morning with new pick axes on our shoulders and nasty little oil lamps fixed in our hats to light us through the darkness where every second we stumbled over chunks of slate rock, or into pools of water that oozed from above. An old miner whose way lay past the fork in the tunnel where our lead began showed us how to use our picks and the timbers to brace the slate that roofed over the vein, and left us to ourselves in a chamber perhaps ten feet wide and the height of a man.

We were to be paid by the ton, I forget how much, but it was very little, and we lost no time getting to work. We had to dig away the coal at the floor with our picks, lying on our knees to do it, and afterward drive wedges under the roof to loosen the mass. It was hard work, and, entirely inexperienced as we were, we made but little headway. As the day wore on the darkness and silence grew very oppressive, and made us start nervously at the least thing. The sudden arrival of our donkey with its cart gave me a dreadful fright. The friendly beast greeted us with a joyous bray and rubbed its shaggy side against us in the most companionable way. In the flickering light of my lamp I caught sight of its long ears waving over me—I don’t believe I had seen three donkeys before in my life; there were none where I came from—and heard that demonic shriek, and I verily believe I thought the evil one had come for me in person.  I know that I nearly fainted.

That donkey was a discerning animal. I think it knew when it first laid eyes on us that we were not going to overwork it; and we didn’t. When, toward evening, we quit work, after narrowly escaping being killed by a large stone that fell from the roof in consequence of our neglect to brace it up properly, our united efforts had resulted in barely filling two of the little carts, and we had earned, if I recollect aright, something like sixty cents each. The fall of the roof robbed us of all desire to try mining again. (44-46)

Riis and his German friend soon tried their hands at carpentry. Riis now heard the news. Germany and France had declared war. Denmark, he believed, had been robbed of its land by the Germans in 1864. Still patriotic, and still a Dane at heart, he says he “dropped my tools the moment I heard it, and flew rather than ran to the company’s office to demand my time; thence to our boarding-house to pack.”

He would return home and fight. His German friend tried to discourage him, saying his own countrymen would make short work of the French (which they did). “I heeded nothing,” Riis wrote.

All the hot blood of youth was surging through me. I remembered the defeat, the humiliation of the flag I loved—aye! and love yet, for there is no flag like the flag of my fathers, save only that of my children and of my manhood—and I remembered, too, Elizabeth, with a sudden hope. I would be near her then, and I would earn fame and glory. The carpenter would come back with shoulder straps [the mark of an officer]. Perhaps then, in the castle …I shouldered my trunk and ran for the station. Such tools, clothes, and things as it would not hold I sold for what they would fetch, and boarded the next train for Buffalo, which was as far as my money would take me. (47)

There he stuck for a time, finally pawning most of his possessions in order to raise money for a ticket to New York City.

He arrived there “with just one cent” in his pocket. But the Danish counsel was not interested in sending him home to fight. He still had his revolver and a good pair of boots. But he now had to pawn those, too, to pay for room and board, until he could figure out how to get home.

He ran out of money completely and got pitched out of his seedy “hotel” on his ear. He roamed the streets of the city that night with only a gripsack, holding “only a linen duster and a pair of socks.” (51)

A Catholic charity fed him—and he headed out of the city.

Up the railroad track I went, and at night hired out to a truck farmer, with the freedom of his haymow for my sleeping quarters. But when I had hoed cucumbers three days in a scorching sun, till my back ached as if it were going to break, and the farmer guessed that he would call it square for three shillings, I went farther….I did odd jobs to earn my meals, and slept in the fields at night, still turning over in my mind how to get across the sea.

One night, he bedded down in a stable. “In the middle of the night I was awakened by a loud outcry. A fierce light shone in my face. It was the lamp of a carriage that had been driven into the shed. I was lying between the horse’s feet unhurt. A gentleman sprang from the carriage, more frightened than I, and bent over me. When he found that I had suffered no injury, he put his hand in his pocket and held out a silver quarter.

“Go,” he said, “and drink it up.”

“Drink it up yourself!” I shouted angrily. “What do you take me for?”

They were rather high heroics, seeing where I was, but he saw nothing to laugh at. He looked earnestly at me for a moment, then held out his hand and shook mine heartily. “I believe you,” he said; “yet you need it, or you would not sleep here. “Now will you take it from me?” And I took the money.

It rained for two days and Riis headed back to the city, with only a quarter to keep him going. For two more days, he was able to eat. Then he read in the New York Sun, that a volunteer regiment was being “fitted out for France.”

He headed for the office of the paper and asked to see the editor, Charles A. Dana.

I went up to the office, and was admitted to Mister Dana’s presence. I fancy I must have appealed to his sense of the ludicrous, dressed in top boots and a linen duster much the worse for wear, and demanding to be sent out to fight. He knew nothing about recruiting. Was I French? No, Danish; it had been in his paper about the regiment. He smiled a little at my faith, and said editors sometimes did not know about everything that was in their papers. I turned to go, grievously disappointed, but he called me back.

“Have you,” he said, looking searchingly at me, “have you had your breakfast?”

No, God knows that I had not; neither that day nor for many days before. (55)

Dana knew the answer without waiting, and pulled a dollar out of his pocket and offered it to Riis, telling him, “There, go and get your breakfast.” (56)

Riis refused the money, left the office, soon sold his good pair of boots, ate a good meal, and found work in “Pfeiffer’s clay-bank.”

Pfeiffer was a German, but his wife was Irish and so were his hands, all except a giant Norwegian and myself. The third day [Riis worked there] was Sunday, and was devoted to drinking much beer, which Pfeiffer, with an eye to business, furnished on the premises. When they were drunk, the tribe turned upon the Norwegian, and threw him out. It seems that this was a regular weekly occurrence. Me they fired out at the same time, but afterward paid no attention to me. The whole crew of them perched on the Norwegian and belabored him with broomsticks and bale-sticks until they roused the sleeping Berserker in him. As I was coming to his relief, I saw the human heap heave and rock. From under it arose the enraged giant, tossed his tormentors aside as if they were so much chaff, battered down the door of the house in which they took refuge, and threw them all, Mrs. Pfeiffer included, through the window. They were not hurt, and within two hours they were drinking more beer together and swearing at one another endearingly. I concluded that I had better go on, though Mister Pfeiffer regretted that he never paid his hands in the middle of the month. It appeared afterward that he objected likewise to paying them at the end of the month, or at the beginning of the next. He owes me two days’ wages yet. (56-57)

After quitting Pfeiffer’s employ, Riis once again returned to the city. On the way back, he found apples littering the ground in an orchard and picked up a few. In the city, he spent a night sleeping on a stone slab in a graveyard and “chewing the last of the windfall apples that had been my diet on my two day trip.” (58)

His next job was in a brickyard, where he spent six-weeks. He continued to try to find ways to get to France and fight; but the war soon ended in French defeat. The brick-making season ended; and he was out of work again. “I joined the great army of tramps,” he wrote, “wandering about the streets in daytime with the one aim of somehow stilling the hunger that gnawed at my vitals.” At night, he battled with others for space to sleep in sheltering doorways and ash-bins. (66)

“I don’t care two pins for all the social theories that were ever made unless they help to make better men and women by bettering their lot.”

Jacob Riis

He came to believe, that many comfortably-situated reporters were too quick to condemn efforts to raise the less comfortable out of their misery. Someone “had to tell the facts” of what life was like for the downtrodden. And that was one reason he became a reporter. As Riis wrote many years later, after having devoted himself to improving life in his adopted city of New York, “I don’t care two pins for all the social theories that were ever made unless they help to make better men and women by bettering their lot.” That simple principle would become the foundation of his entire career. (68) 

Riis would use photograph to prove how badly the poor were treated in New York City.
Here, three young boys sleep on a warm grate. 

In his days as a tramp, however, he found one particularly “good” doorway to sleep in, despite the periodic approach of the policeman, who would prod sleepers with a foot or his club and tell them to get up and move on.

Riis remembered,

I slept there, or tried to when crowded out of the tenements in the Bend by their utter nastiness. Cold and wet weather had set in, and a linen duster was all that covered my back. There was a woolen blanket in my trunk which I had from home…but the trunk was in the “hotel” as security for money I owed for board, and I asked for it in vain. I was now too shabby to get work, even if there had been any to get….the winter was approaching and every shivering night in the streets reminding me that a time was rapidly coming when such a life as I led could no longer be endured. (69)

One night, in desperation, he went to the nearest police station, and asked for a place to sleep.

He left New York again, bummed his way to Philadelphia, got help from the kindly  Danish counsel and his wife, and was soon headed to Jamestown, New York, where an old schoolmate had settled. “Hope springs eternal at twenty-one,” he wrote three decades later. “I had many a weary stretch ahead before I was to make port. But with youth and courage as equipment, one should win almost any fight.” (77)

In Jamestown, he chopped wood and cut ice on the lake. He helped repair the steamer that ran from that town to Mayville. “I was out to twist the wheel of fortune my way when I could get my hands upon it.” (79)

He and a new friend, with whom he worked, now had one good coat between them. They took turns wearing it to weekly parties in a nearby town. “Dancing being tabooed as immoral and contaminating,” Riis laughed, “the young people had recourse to particularly energetic kissing games, which more than made up for their deprivation on the other score.” 

He found work in Buffalo lumberyard next, piling up boards.

Next, he worked in a factory, making bedsteads. He and a cabinet-maker who hired him “fitted up a bedroom [in the top story of the factory] that was just large enough for one sitting and two standing, so long as the door was not opened; then one of the two had to get out.” (91)

To say that there have always been dysfunctional families, is only saying what should be obvious to all. But the family of his new boss was dysfunctional with a capital “D.” Riis recalls,

I had eventually to give that job up also, because my boss was “bad pay.” He was pretty much all bad, I guess. I do think his house was the most disorderly one I have ever come across. Seven ill-favored children clamored about the table, fighting with their even more ill-favored mother. She used to single out the one she wished to address by slamming a handful of string beans, or whatever greens might be at hand, across the table at him. The youngster would fire it back, and so they were en rapport with each other. The father was seldom sober at meals, and when he “felt funny,” he would stealthily pour a glass of water down the nearest child’s back and then sit and chuckle over the havoc he had wrought. There followed a long and woeful wail and an instant explosion from the mother in this wise. I can hear it now. It was always the same: —

“Gott-himmel-donnerwetter-noch-emal-ich-will-demal-hole-du-spitzbub-eselskerl-wart’-nur-ich-schlag-de-noch-todt-potz-sacrement!”

            He and Adler linked up again.

He had come up to get a $1500 place, as he informed me. That would about satisfy him. That such jobs were waiting by the score for an educated German in this barbarous land he never doubted for a moment. In the end he went to work in a rolling mill at a dollar a day. Adler was ever a stickler for etiquette. In Brady’s end we had very little of it. At mealtimes a flock of chickens used to come into the summer kitchen where we ate, and forage around, to Adler’s great disgust. One day they deliberately flew up on the table, and fell a fighting with the boarders for the food. A big Shanghai rooster trod in the butter and tracked it over the table. At the site Adler’s rage knew no bounds. Seizing a half-loaf of bread he aimed it at the rooster and felled him in his tracks. The flock of foul flew squawking out of the door. The women screamed, and the men howled with laughter. Adler flourished another loaf and vowed vengeance upon bird or beast that did not let the butter alone. (92-93)

Riis had other jobs, some good, some not, but rarely made enough to get ahead. One day he decided to put Buffalo behind him. And off on the road he went again.

Sunday morning found me spending my last quarter for breakfast in an inn at Lime Lake. When I had eaten, I went out in the field and sat with my back against a tree, and listened to the church-bells that were ringing also, I knew, in my home four thousand miles away. I saw the venerable Domkirke, my father’s grey head in his pew, and Her, young and innocent, in the women’s seats across the aisle. I heard the old pastor’s voice in the solemn calm, and my tears fell upon her picture [which he had in a locket] that had called up the vision. It was as if a voice spoke to me and said to get up and be a man; that if I wanted to win Elizabeth, to work for her was the way, and not idling my days away on the road. And I got right up, and, setting my face toward Buffalo, went by the shortest cut back to my work. (96-97)

By Monday evening, he said, “I had walked fifty miles without stopping or eating.” He found work on a lake steamer for good wages. His experiences in America, so far, had taken down his self-esteem “a good many pegs.” But he dreamed of joining a newspaper. “It seemed to me that a reporter’s was the highest, noblest of all callings; no one could sift wrong from right as he, and punish the wrong.…The power of fact is the mightiest lever of this or any day. The reporter has his hand upon it, and it is his grievous fault if he does not use it well.” (98-99)

He stopped in at one newspaper office and said he wanted work. The man he took to be the editor replied, half in jest, “We don’t work here. This is a newspaper office.”

Riis left and tried the office of the Express. This time he met the editor for sure and made his request. He wanted to be a reporter. The editor looked him over—his rough workman’s clothing, his tough hands. The editor asked,

“What are you?”  

“A carpenter,” I said.

The man turned upon his heel with a loud, rasping laugh and shut the door in my face. For a moment I stood there stunned. His ascending steps on the stairs brought back my senses. I ran to the door, and flung it open. “You laugh!” I shouted, shaking my fist at him, standing halfway up the stairs, “you laugh now, but wait— ” And then I got the grip of my temper and slammed the door in my turn. All the same, in that hour it was settled that I was to be a reporter. I knew it as I went out into the street. (100)

He sold furniture for a short time, and while out on the road, working as a salesman, found “my previous training in going hungry for days came in handy at last.” He skipped dinners and tried to save money. Two old friends from Denmark had by now joined him in America, “hearing that I was doing well.” One had forwarded a letter from Elizabeth to him, written long ago, when all of them were young. (Thirty years later, Riis admitted he still had it.)

The friend who brought the letter had a drinking problem. While Riis was off selling furniture, the man enlisted in the army. He rose to the rank of sergeant, got drunk again, ruined his career, and thirty years later he shot himself to death.

            Like any immigrant, the sergeant sometimes longed for his past life. “In all his ups and downs,” Riis recalled, “he never forgot his home. While his mother lived he helped support her in far-off Denmark; and when she was gone, no month passed that he did not send home the half of his wages for the support of his crippled sister in the old town.”  

            Meanwhile, he said, he received news from Ribe. His beloved Elizabeth was to be married. “At the thought,” he said, “I turned my face to the wall, and hoped that I might die.” (115)

            He kept fighting to get ahead. He spent his last $20, a large sum in those days, to go to a business college and learn telegraphing.

            His money ran out.

            He landed a job as a reporter at last on a struggling newspaper on Long Island. The editor put him to work—but couldn’t meet payroll. Riis wrote for nothing in the end, and moved on. He acquired a loyal dog, a big fellow, he named “Bob,” but he was no better off than he had been three years ago. “Three wasted years! Then I had one cent in my pocket, I remembered. Today I had not even so much. I was bankrupt in hope and purpose. Nothing had gone right; and, worse, I did not care.” He looked ahead. “For me there was no supper,” he saw, “as there had been no dinner and no breakfast. Tomorrow there was another day of starvation. How long could this last?” (120-121)

            Then, at long last, Fate smiled on young Jacob. The superintendent of the school on telegraphing saw him—knew he was down on his luck—told him of a possible opening. “The manager of a news agency downtown asked me today to find him a bright young fellow whom he could break in. It isn’t much—$10 a week to start with.”

Riis felt as if he was in a “dream.” He followed the superintendent to his home and gave him “Bob” to keep. “For the second time I saw a hand held out to save me from wreck just when it seemed inevitable; and I knew it for His hand, to whose will I was at last beginning to bow in humility that had been a stranger to me before.”  His first real assignment for the newspaper was to write up a fancy lunch gathering at the Astor House. The young reporter had, at the time, been without food for three days. But he was too proud to ask for any. He wrote up his piece, handed it over to the editor, and heard him say, “You will do. Take that desk, and report at ten every morning, sharp.”

Riis went up the street to a house where a Danish family took in boarders.

I had work and wages now, and could pay. On the stairs I fell in a swoon and lay there till some one stumbled over me in the dark and carried me in. My strength had at last given out.

So began my life as a newspaper man.  (123)

Riis began to prosper, at last. He was a good reporter; and from his job, and also from a job as a court interpreter, he saved $75. He bought a failing little newspaper, mostly on credit.

The upshot of it was that I bought the paper for $650, giving notes for the rest, to be paid when I could. If I could not, they were not much out. And then, again, I might succeed. I did; by what effort I hesitate to set down here lest I be not believed. The News was a big four-page sheet. Literally every word in it I wrote myself. I was my own editor, reporter, publisher, and advertising agent. My pen kept two printers busy all week, and left me time to canvass for advertisements, attend meetings, and gather the news. (132)

             He wrote home, regularly, finally able to tell his mother of success in the New World. Then, one day, a letter arrived. Six years had he been gone from Ribe. Now, at last, he recognized the handwriting on the envelope.

It was from his Elizabeth.

I knew by the throbbing of my heart what it was the instant I saw it. I think I sat as much as a quarter of an hour staring dumbly at the unopened envelope. Then I arose slowly, like one grown suddenly old, put it in my pocket, and stumbled homeward, walking as if in a dream. I went up to my room and locked myself in.

His joy on finally reading it was clear. “How much sunshine one little letter can contain!” he said later. Elizabeth had in fact married. Her husband fell ill almost at once and died. Meanwhile, Riis had made the News a success—sometimes stirring the anger of local politicians—and now sold it for five times what he paid. He wrote to Elizabeth and said he would be visiting his old home soon; but swore her to tell no one. He sailed across the Atlantic, landed in Denmark and took the train for Ribe, and by chance, at one stop, his father and an old doctor friend boarded. “My heart smote me,” Riis said, at the sight of his father. He cried out. His father seemed stunned, as if he “saw a ghost.”

While father and son stood, too overcome with emotion to speak, the doctor recovered his surprise. “Bless my soul! Bless my soul if here is not Jacob come back from the wilds as large as life! Welcome home, boy!” They laughed and shook hands all around. Jacob’s father took him home, but insisted he go in first, rather than startle his wife. “What do you think,” he started to say, but he could get no more words out of his mouth.

“Jacob!” she cried. Somehow she knew, and rising to her feet with great joy, soon had her son in her arms.

Jacob and Elizabeth soon agreed to marry; and he took her away from her home and carried her across the ocean, to a new life in America. He knew she was leaving family and friends, as he had. She never complained. Often, after dinner, as she cleaned the dishes, he heard her singing “softly to herself the old airs from home.” Often the song would be interrupted by “a sob that was not for my ear.” Riis would put on an apron at such times and help his wife, vowing to insure she had a better life in a new land. “Two can battle with a fit of homesickness much better than one,” he explained a quarter century later, “even if never a word is said about it.” (169-175)

In years to come, Riis would become friends with a New York City police commissioner like himself, interested in improving the conditions they saw around them. That man was Theodore Roosevelt.

Riis would write the classic story of poverty, and the need for new ways of addressing the fate of the poor, in particular the children. That book, How the Other Half Lives is still read today.

He and his wife had five children of their own, but Elizabeth died early, in 1905, and Riis died two years later, at age 58.

            Riis never forgot his old home and would travel back to Ribe occasionally. “I felt the tugging of the chain which he must bear through life who exiled himself from the land of his birth, however near to his heart that of his choice and his adoption.” On another occasion, he spoke of the “hoops of steel” that held his heart to Denmark. (399-400)

Late in life, Riis looked back at what he had tried to do to make the world a better place. “I did my work and tried to put into it what I thought citizenship ought to be, when I made it out.”  He met the King of Denmark on one visit and was knighted. He wore the gold cross “gladly,” he said.

It meant.

the defence of womanhood and of little children, and if I cannot wield a lance and sword as the king’s men of old, I can wield the pen. It may be that in the providence of God the shedding of ink in the cause of right shall set the world farther ahead in our day than the blood-letting of all the ages past.” (423; 430)

He had, he said, fought “the slum with its helpless heredity of despair.” Riis knew he had done good by humanity while he lived. (431)

He ended his story so:

I have told the story of the making of an American. There remains to tell how I found out that he was made and finished at last. It was when I went back to see my mother once more and, wandering about the country of my childhood's memories, had come to the city of Elsinore. There I fell ill of a fever and lay many weeks in the house of a friend upon the shore of the beautiful Oresund. One day when the fever had left me they rolled my bed into a room overlooking the sea. The sunlight danced upon the waves, and the distant mountains of Sweden were blue against the horizon. Ships passed under full sail up and down the great waterways of the nations. But the sunshine and the peaceful day bore no message to me. I lay moodily picking at the coverlet, sick and discouraged and sore—I hardly knew why myself. Until all at once there sailed past close inshore, a ship flying at the top the flag of freedom, blown out on the breeze till every star in it shone bright and clear. That moment I knew. Gone were illness, discouragement, and gloom! Forgotten weakness and suffering, the cautions of doctor and nurse. I sat up in bed and shouted, laughed and cried by turns, waving my handkerchief to the flag out there. They thought I had lost my head, but I told them no, thank God! I had found it, and my heart, too, at last. I knew then that it was my flag; that my children’s home was mine, indeed; that I also had become an American in truth. And I thanked God, and, like unto the man sick of the palsy, arose from my bed and went home, healed.  (442-443)

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