The Other Half: The Life
Of Jacob Riis and the World
Of Immigrant America
By Tom Buk-Swienty
Translated from the Danish
by Annette Buk-Swienty
W. W. Norton
448 pages, $27.95
When contemporary journalists honor their professional ancestors, the accolades are frequently based on secondhand knowledge. Too often, we have never actually read the words or studied the images from long ago. I am less guilty than many of my colleagues, but only because of circumstance. Dubbed an “investigative reporter” early in my career, I often paid careless homage to Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Jacob Riis, and the other so-called muckrakers. For many years, my acquaintance with them derived from brief passages in history books instead of any actual immersion in their work.
What made me an honest admirer of the muckrakers was my appointment in 1983 as executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a membership organization of about five thousand journalists. In my new role as spokesman for investigative journalism, I figured maybe I should know what I was talking about. I began with The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), Tarbell’s eight-hundred-plus-page exposé of the world’s most powerful corporation and its chief executive, John D. Rockefeller. Next, I moved on to Jacob Riis’s classic How the Other Half Lives: Studies of the Tenements of New York (1890).
Tarbell’s book so impressed me that I went on to research her entire life. The result, Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, was published earlier this year. With the approaching centennial of Riis’s death in 2014, I was tempted to dig deeply into his life as well. But before I could, the Danish journalist Tom Buk-Swienty took care of it. And his biography is superb—not only as an instructive...
Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.
