Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in
Progressive Era New York City (review)
Carl A. Zimring
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 38, Number 1, Summer 2007,
pp. 149-150 (Review)
Published by The MIT Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/216879
Accessed 16 Jun 2017 16:06 GMT
R E V IE WS
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He ignores scores of historians who have reconstructed patterns of voter
and legislator behavior and party organization from the Civil War era to
the Great Society. Neglecting this rich literature undermines the effectiveness of The Democratic Party Heads North as a synthesis of partisan history. Mining this lode of scholarship could have broadened the author’s
analysis of coalitions and “coalition-building.”
Ware conceives of coalitions largely in a national sense, that is, as
states that party leaders aggregated into winning collections of electoral
votes in presidential elections. An alternative reading of coalitions would
have focused on distinct voter groups, as well as organized and unorganized interests. Analysis of partisan victories at the state level cannot penetrate deeply into this behavioral foundation of American party politics.
Ware’s mismatch of evidence with research objective calls into question
much of his extensive data presentation. This analytic weakness, coupled
with the skewed references to the secondary literature, and an argumentative format, undermines the work’s success as a reinterpretation of
American politics.
Ballard C. Campbell
Northeastern University
Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York
City. By Daniel Eli Burnstein (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2006)
200 pp. $38.00
Following the lead of Rosen more than a half-century ago, a literature
on urban sanitary reforms has emerged, focusing particular attention on
the achievements of the Progressive era. This compact study of Progressive sanitation reforms in New York City is a valuable addition to this
literature, deepening our understanding of the relationship between
Progressives and immigrants while also discussing effective implementation of public health policy.1
Burnstein uses records of municipal agencies and reform groups, as
well as newspaper accounts, to provide a narrative reºecting Progressive-era views of sanitation. He begins by discussing the garbage workers’ strike of 1907 as an example of how important street cleaning was to
New Yorkers’ conceptions of order and public health. Uncleaned streets
produced odors and nuisances that caused the Woman’s Municipal
League of New York to warn, “there seems to be every danger of disease developing” (11).
The garbage crisis of 1907 speaks directly to the reforms of George
1 Current editions of major works in the history of American urban sanitary reform include
John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana, 1990); George
Rosen, A History of Public Health (Baltimore, 1993; orig. pub. 1958); Suellen Hoy, Chasing
Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York City, 1995); Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 2000);
idem, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment (Pittsburgh, 2005).
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CARL A. ZIMRING
Waring the commissioner of the Department of Street Cleaning (dsc)
between 1895 and 1898. Burnstein breaks chronology with a chapter on
Waring’s innovations following his look at the strike. The discussion of
how Waring’s methods related to the miasma theory of disease transmission is not new. However, Burnstein’s treatment of how Waring’s political acumen produced an effective dsc, despite resistance from elements
of the Tammany Hall machine, is instructive. From the start, Waring
deliberately exceeded his department’s budget to clean the streets
because he calculated that citizens would notice the improvement and
demand better services. Although machine politicians attacked Waring
in the local newspapers, some within Tammany felt that his municipal
housekeeping was both important and popular. Waring received his
budget, allowing him to modernize street cleaning in New York City.
His accomplishment serves as a reminder that, as with Raymond Tucker
implementing meaningful smoke control in St. Louis in the 1930s, successful reformers combined progressive ideas with political calculation.2
A strength of the book is its discussion of the relationship between
ethnicity and Progressive ideas, which goes beyond simply stating that
Progressives and immigrants either cooperated or clashed. Burnstein
maintains that ªrst-generation immigrants adopted modern sanitary
practices in an attempt to be perceived as clean by native-born Americans, consequently making hygiene an aspect of American identity. Yet
although many immigrants accepted new sanitary practices, Burnstein
also reports conºicts between Progressives and New York’s thriving immigrant pushcart trade, citing concerns about the cleanliness of food
from peddlers and ethnocentric caricatures of Jews as ªlthy in newspapers. Tensions between middle-class reformers and working-class (and
impoverished immigrants) led to restrictions on peddlers. Burnstein’s
observations reºect similar clashes in Chicago involving immigrants and
Progressive reformers.3
Burnstein concludes by examining Waring’s employment of children in the juvenile streetcleaning league under the rationale that municipal housekeeping saved children from the chaos of the polluted city.
Though Waring’s tenure as dsc commissioner was short, Burnstein ably
shows that this politically savvy Progressive’s reforms lasted long after his
death. Next to Godliness will appeal to historians interested in the complicated history of immigrants, reformers, and public health, as well as to
those seeking inspiring examples of effective reform.
Carl A. Zimring
Oberlin College
2 Joel A. Tarr and Zimring, “The Struggle for Smoke Control in St. Louis: Achievement
and Emulation,” in Andrew Hurley (ed.), Common Fields: An Environmental History of St. Louis
(St. Louis, 1997), 199–220.
3 Jane Addams and the Chicago Juvenile Protective Association criticized immigrant junk
peddlers for posing moral and physical threats to Chicago’s children. See Zimring, Cash for
Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America (New Brunswick, 2005), 59–80.