Last week, I asked the question, “A Jacob Riis Eye Opening expose, photographed and written in 1890, its title is heard in the INXS song Devil Inside. What is it?” The answer was, “How the Other Half Lives.”

The book can be found online, and what I’ve read of it is fascinating. People back then were dealing with many of the same issues that we deal with today. Invasion of privacy, rights of government over people’s lives, high rates of juvenile crime.

The situation was summed up by the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor in these words: “Crazy old buildings, crowded rear tenements in filthy yards, dark, damp basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables converted into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes, are habitations of thousands of our fellow-beings in this wealthy, Christian city.” “The city,” says its historian, Mrs. Martha Lamb, commenting on the era of aqueduct building between 1835 and 1845, “was a general asylum for vagrants.” Young vagabonds, the natural offspring of such “home” conditions, overran the streets. Juvenile crime increased fearfully year by year…In that year the Board ordered the cutting of more than forty-six thousand windows in interior rooms, chiefly for ventilation–for little or no light was to be had from the dark hallways. Air-shafts were unknown. The saw had a job all that summer; by early fall nearly all the orders had been carried out. Not without opposition; obstacles were
thrown in the way of the officials on the one side by the owners of the tenements, who saw in every order to repair or clean up only an item of added expense to diminish their income from the rent; on the other side by the tenants themselves, who had sunk, after a generation of unavailing protest, to the level of their surroundings, and were at last content to remain there…The basis of opposition, curiously enough was the same at both extremes; owner and tenant alike considered official interference an infringement of personal rights, and a hardship. It took long years of weary labor to make good the claim of the sunlight to such corners of the dens as it could reach at all. Not until five years after did the department succeed at last in ousting the “cave-dwellers” and closing some five hundred and fifty cellars south of Houston Street, many of them below tide-water, that had been used as living apartments. In many instances the police had to drag the tenants out by force.

Of particular interest is the chapter on The Color Line in New York, a fascinating (and remarkably liberal for its day) look at race in New York City in 1890. As for the book itself, here is the lowdown. Riis was a big Dickens fan, and it shows in his work. Anyhow, just a reminder that there is usually a lot more to a simple trivia question than an answer!

You knew that Haig was Reagan’s Secretary of State, but did you know that he went to St. Joe’s Prep and Lower Merion High School and worked at Wanamakers? Haig is a fascinating political figure. He worked for MacArthur in the Korean War and essentially ran the country when the Nixon presidency crumbled in 1974. He then had a brief, controversial reign as Reagan’s Secretary of State. Here is his obit in the New York Times.

It was on this date 31 years ago that Jim Jones ordered his followers to “drink the Kool-Aid”, and over 900 people died. Above is an interview with one of Jim’s sons, Stephan, who was on the Temple’s basketball team and thus out of town when the massacre occurred. He talks about his father’s madness, how he and his brother once conspired to kill their father, and how he has come to grips with his father’s legacy. Here is an interview with Stephan back in 1978, almost immediately after the tragedy.

Wow. Didn’t see this until today. Glenn Beck is something else, isn’t he?

First: is all of this venom directed at Obama over health care particularly nasty because he’s black? I’m not sure I agree with this one, because Clinton got dragged through the mud on this too, but it’s an interesting thought.

Here’s a rather amusing look at some of the Great Americans who showed up at the teabagger rally on Saturday. (nod to Milo, whose facebook page I found this and the above thing on.)

Fiscal conservative Andrew Sullivan had this to say about teabaggers a few months ago: These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It’s a function of a movement’s intellectual collapse and a party’s fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.

On 9/11, Obama suggested a Day of Service to honor the dead. In response, Rush Limbaugh said “Community service is one of the baby steps towards fascism.” Wow, you can’t really argue with insanity.

On the other side of the coin, here’s something I don’t quite get: if Obama is doing this for all the right reasons, why won’t he even consider tort reform?

Today would be Malcolm X’s 84th birthday. I can certainly say that the Autobiography of Malcolm X was one of the most fascinating and important books I have ever read. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor. He is certainly one of the most intriguing thinkers in American history.

A few inauguration tidbits for today:

• Play the Obama Inauguration Mad Libs Game.
• Here is the text to Lincoln’s first inauguration speech.
• Some video highlights of JFK’s inauguration speech.
• And finally, the worst inauguration speech of all time. (It was a killer.)