SOURCE; A review of The Battle with the Slum, in The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 11, March, 1903, pp. 334-35.

[In the following essay, West reviews The Battle with the Slum.]

This latest work of Mr. Riis [The Battle with the Slum] supplements his How the Other Half Lives and A Ten Years' War, and completes the history of a struggle to improve conditions in the tenement-house districts of New York city. The book describes the work of the Tenement-House Commissions of 1894 and 1900, and the voluntary citizens' committee of 1898, which led up to the creation of the present Tenement-House Department; but it is far from being a statistical report. It is rather an intimately personal account of the awful conditions which prevailed in the tenement-house districts, with their population of over two millions, and of what has been done, and against what odds, to purge the city. Such triumphs as the razing of Mulberry Bend, the opening of various small parks and playgrounds, the model tenements, the Mills hotels, the vacation schools—all these make a story not often exceeded in interest. The Battle with the Slum illustrates many important civic truths, not the least of which is that sometimes a made American may be worth a great many of the indigenous variety.

The book is enlivened with anecdotes, and contains many telling reproductions from photographs.