Jacob A. Riis 1849–1914. The Battle with the Slum. 1902.
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| has to admire Bill Devery; he’s got the dough.” Devery was Tammany’s police chief. The man is entitled to his opinion, but if it gets hitched to the reform cart by mistake, the load is going to be spilled. It has been, more than once. |
| A saving sense of humor might have avoided some of those pitfalls. I am seriously of the opinion that a professional humorist ought to be attached to every reform movement, to keep it from making itself ridiculous by either too great solemnity or too much conceit. As it is, the enemy sometimes employs him with effect. Failing the adoption of that plan, I would recommend a decree of banishment against photographers, press-clippings men, and the rest of the congratulatory staff. Why should the fact that a citizen has done a citizen’s duty deserve to be celebrated in print and picture, as if something extraordinary had happened? The smoke of battle had not cleared away after the victory of reform in the fall of 1894, before the citizens’ committee and all the little sub-committees rushed pell-mell to the photographer’s to get themselves on record as the men who did it. The spectacle might have inspired in the humorist the advice to get two sets made, while they were about it, one to serve by and by as an exhibit of the men who didn’t; and, as the event proved, he would have been right. |