Mary Phillips Riis

Background

Mary Phillips Riis was born on April 29, 1877 in Memphis, Tennessee, the daughter of Richard F. Phillips, a cotton broker who emigrated from England and eventually became president of the St. Louis Cotton Exchange, and Lina Rensch.

Education

She attended primary and secondary schools in England and France and compensated for her lack of a formal college education by attending evening classes at New York University and by reading heavily in economics.

Career

While in her midtwenties and during a two-year stint as an actress, she met the journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis. Rather than return to St. Louis and her family, she accepted Riis's offer to become his secretary and stay in New York. After the death her husband have left all that remained of his estate to his wife, having previously set up a trust fund for his children by his first wife. In his will, Jacob Riis also named an advisory board to provide support for the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood House; among its members were his wife, his friend Theodore Roosevelt, and several prominent early social workers.

Jacob Riis could spare no money for the settlement house, but support of Jacob Riis House became a lifelong project of his widow. Within three years of her husband's death, Riis decided to find a job to support herself and her young son. After some difficulty, due in part to the fact that she was a woman, she obtained a position selling bonds for $75 per month at Bonbright and Company. Initially, finding customers was not easy, but she made resourceful use of the telephone book and learned the business well.

Two years after starting, she headed a Bonbright branch that employed ten other women and specialized in serving women customers. In spite of her feminist outlook, Riis found men on the average somewhat more reasonable customers.

In 1923, Riis taught an extension class at Columbia University on the principles of investing. The course sought to familiarize women with stocks and bonds; the respective merits of municipal, foreign, railroad, utility, and industrial investments; financial cycles; and procedures for making buy-and-sell decisions. Riis attributed her own success in the securities business to her ability to evaluate facts unemotionally.

Early in 1929 she began urging customers to either sell out or exercise caution. However, she herself had made an ill-considered loan and therefore suffered from the Great Depression.

In 1931, speaking to the Scarsdale (N. Y. ) Women's Club, she sought an explanation for the nation's financial crisis by drawing a parallel between the frenzied speculation in tulip bulbs that precipitated the depression of 1630 and the excessive speculation on Wall Street in 1929.

The depression evoked a political response in Riis. A lifelong Republican - in part because of her husband's friendship with Theodore Roosevelt - Riis switched her political affiliation in 1936.

She endorsed Franklin Roosevelt, praising the lifesaving nature of his relief programs and defending his financial policies. Riis remained in the brokerage business, working for McQuoid and Coady and then Shearson Hammill.

She owned a mansion with twenty-two rooms, stables, and a six-car garage, and was a member of the Cosmopolitan Club. Riis devoted much effort to the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood House. She believed that settlement houses could foster a sense of responsibility for others, enhance democracy, and help immigrants to assimilate. Her fund-raising efforts on behalf of Riis House included annual letters to the New York Times appealing for such items as an automobile for the settlement's summer camp, contributions to an ice-cream fund, new playground apparatus, and awnings. She saw organized recreation as a safety valve for children in an explosive slum. She was president of the Riis House board in the 1920's and 1930's. In 1941, Riis House began running a branch operation in school facilities in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, and two years later, Riis recommended more educational and recreational facilities to curb disorder in this black ghetto. In 1952, Riis House sold its Lower East Side building to Trinity Church and moved its settlement-house program entirely into public housing facilities. Riis continued as honorary chairman of the board.

She died in New York City.

Achievements

• Still active as a broker when eighty years old, she had evolved an investment philosophy that stressed patience and a formula that consisted of investing 20 percent of available funds in safe, incomeoriented instruments, 60 percent in major stocks with growth potential, and 20 percent in more-speculative capital gains. Her personal investments were successful as well.

Connections

She married Jacob Riis on July 29, 1907; they had one child. They bought a farm in Barre, Massachussets, to which state her family had moved. Six years after the marriage, Jacob Riis entered a sanitarium. After his death she never remarried

Father:

Richard F. Phillips

Mother:

Lina Rensch

Spouse:

Jacob Riis