Self-Esteem and the Tough

Abstract Riis has a strange investment in the tough—what we would today call the thug. “I have certain theories concerning toughs which my friend the sergeant says are rot,” Riis declares in Out of Mulberry Street.’ For one thing, he claims that he prefers the tough to the pauper, despite the fact that the tough regularly robs, injures, and even kills, while, as Riis admits, the pauper is rarely violent. Riis has no illusions about his favored subject: within half an hour after a camera session with an accommodating gang of toughs, Riis found at the police station “two of my friends … under arrest for robbing a Jewish pedlar who had passed that way after I left them, and trying to saw his head off, as they put it, ‘just for fun’” (168–169). It was one thing to romanticize or sympathize with harmless “street Arabs” and mischievous newspaper boys, as Charles Loring Brace and Horatio Alger did. It was another to spend time with and entertain an empathy for the accomplished tough, thief, or gang member, as Riis does.