Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats by Dawn Day Biehler (review)

The resurgence of bedbugs in the twenty-first century United States is a reminder of the stubborn resilience of pests. Biehler’s Pests in the City traces the history of bedbugs, flies, German cockroaches, and Norway rats in modern American cities. Biehler demonstrates how the ecologies of these pests and the efforts to eliminate them were intertwined with social tensions and political struggles throughout the twentieth century. Both pests and pesticides crossed borders between public and private spaces, with particular consequences for poor Americans who were trapped in dirty, run-down neighborhoods and lacked the resources to eradicate pests on their own. Class and race shaped exposure to pests in American cities even as urban reformers and community activists sought to address housing and public-health crises. This history of pests traces the ecologies and politics of urban neighborhoods, showing how homes were complex environments rather than isolated, private spaces.

The first section of the book explores the histories of four different pests in roughly chronological order. It begins with the problem of flies in Progressive-era cities, arguing that the modernization of urban transportation proved more important in the control of flies than did sanitary education and reform efforts. The narrative then moves to the problem of bedbugs from the 1920s to the 1940s. This chapter and the next, about the German cockroach, examine the use of such pesticides as hcn and ddt, which promised greater control over nature. In practice, however, these chemicals often complicated pest problems and exacerbated class divisions. The discussion of ddt and the ecology of insecticide resistance provides an example of Biehler’s ability to integrate material from history, geography, ecology, and entomology. She explains not only the science behind the evolution of resistance but also how real-world conditions complicated that process. The politics of public housing and management practices in multi-family buildings affected the impact of chemicals in the urban environment. The final chapter of Part I turns to rats during the 1930s and 1940s, showing how both ecological and chemical approaches to rat control relied on reductionist assumptions. As Biehler writes, “The biological ecology of rats could not be separated from the political ecology of cities” (138).

Pests in the City is an exemplary work of interdisciplinary history. Each chapter in Part I begins and ends with brief narratives about the plight of the pests from the point of view of the pests themselves in which Biehler blends her command of scientific studies with descriptions of urban life and the built environment at particular historical moments. Race, class, and gender form important categories of analysis throughout the book, but in Part II, Biehler turns even more explicitly to questions of environmental injustice as the narrative moves into the age of ecology. The final two chapters open with scenes from Richard Wright’s Native Son (New York, 1940) and the writings of Lorde to show how pests were integral to the experiences of urban African Americans, becoming “symbols of both racism and survival” (179).¹ These chapters document both the persistence of pests in urban homes during the late twentieth century and the rise of protests that publicly raised the political, economic, and social issues underlying that persistence.