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Sanitation in the Progressive Age
By Camille Avena
The birth of industrial and urban cities resulted in the need for “sanitary reform”. The filth, poor-ventilation, and poor air quality of slum neighborhoods perpetuated diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, and yellow fever. Reformers sought to alleviate and prevent these conditions (see below). Their fight for “sanitary reform” became one with the call for the improvement of public health and the social conditions of tenement life. In Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City, Daniel Eli Burnstein describes the reformers as being motivated “out of compassion, and out of concern that disease and disorder might spread…”[1]. In order to bring about change in the tenement neighborhoods of New York City, progressive reformers sought to clean the streets and ensure the health of all city residents.
Reformers had an extremely holistic view of health, believing that both a patient’s physical and mental conditions are equally important[2]. The dirty streets of the slums and the poor air quality of the tenement houses themselves were obstacles to healthy living, economic stability, and morality, all three of which were seen as essential for the stability, development, and prosperity of New York City – three goals shared by reformers and politicians alike. As the settlement houses addressed the mental conditions of those citizens in need, sanitation reform was designed to address their physical conditions. It was believed that with the elimination of disease and the promotion of healthy habits would lead to civilizing city dwellers.
In the mid-1890s, George E. Waring Jr. became the commissioner of the New York Department of Street Cleaning (DSC). Waring strengthened the call to reform by emphasizing the importance of the civilian cooperation with the Department of Street Cleaning. The DSC, Waring, and reformers enforced lessons on civic sanitation in the education of immigrant children. Juvenile street cleaning leagues were set up to engage young people in sanitation-friendly activities. Also, the street cleaning leagues prevented children and youths from joining gangs and engaging in acts of degeneracy. The leagues would teach children to accept proper civic attitudes and healthy habits that they could take with them into adulthood[3]. Most importantly, the street cleaning leagues, and all sanitation reforms in the early twentieth-century, promoted the idea that both the civilization of a group depended upon physical as well as mental conditions.
Endnotes
[1] Burnstein, Daniel Eli. Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006) 2.
[2] Burnstein, Daniel Eli. Clean Streets and the Pursuit of Progress: Urban Reform in New York City in the Progressive Era (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1995) 2.
[3] Burnstein, Daniel Eli. Clean Streets and the Pursuit of Progress: Urban Reform in New York City in the Progressive Era (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1995) 6-7.
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