The Peril and the Preservation of the Home was published by George W. Jacobs & Company in 1903, based on Riis’s popular lecture of the same title. The book extends his analysis of tenement conditions into a broader argument about the relationship between housing and democracy.
Riis’s thesis is that the home — the private family dwelling, with space for parents and children to live in dignity — is the foundation of democratic citizenship. The tenement system destroys the home by making privacy impossible, by forcing families into spaces where domestic life cannot be conducted with decency, and by creating conditions (overcrowding, lack of sanitation, absence of light and air) that make family breakdown inevitable.
The “peril” is not merely physical disease or moral degradation but political: a nation of people without homes — people whose domestic lives are conducted in public, under conditions of surveillance and promiscuity — cannot sustain the habits of self-government that democracy requires. The “preservation” requires not merely better buildings but a rethinking of the relationship between housing, labor, and citizenship: living wages that allow families to afford decent housing, building standards that ensure every dwelling is fit for human habitation, and public investment in the infrastructure of community life.
Collecting The Peril and the Preservation of the Home
First edition (George W. Jacobs, Philadelphia, 1903): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition: $20–$50
- Later editions: $5–$15