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55 2 Bedbugs Creatures of Community in Modernizing Cities Hundreds of Cimex lectularius rested throughout a long summer day in 1920 in a flat on Chicago’s West Side. Most huddled together on the narrow wooden bed frame on the lodger’s side of the flat’s single bedroom. Some hid in grooves in a chest below the foot of the bed, others under peeling wallpaper or behind a framed picture, leaving a blotchy crust of feces and egg cases. A few squeezed between loose floorboards. As night fell, the lodger returned to his quarters, which smelled faintly of overripe raspberries. In the wee hours, the bugs finished digesting their previous meal. Roused by hunger, they sensed the lodger’s breath and body heat and crept toward him.1 The bugs crawled onto the lodger’s limbs and trunk. Each one pierced his skin with two barbed mandibles, then inserted its other mouthparts, two tiny tubes. One tube delivered saliva that carried an anticlotting agent, and the other sucked up the host’s blood—a process that might take five minutes for a nymph or ten minutes for an adult. The saliva provoked an allergic reaction, and itchy weals soon rose on the lodger’s skin.2 He stirred frequently, scratching bites old and new and smashing several bugs. As the bugs’ engorged abdomens burst, the blood left red-brown spots on the sheet. Most escaped the lodger’s thrashing, crawling off his body and back to their abodes. The woman of the house and her daughters shared a bed on the other side of a partition. Two Sundays each month, dozens of bugs perished as the two girls spent the afternoon scrubbing kerosene into the bed frame and banging their mattress with a broom handle over a tub of used bathwater.3 Thanks to this routine, their side of the partition had fewer bugs than the lodger’s, but they never rid themselves 56 The Promises of Modern Pest Control of every one. Tough cases protected eggs from kerosene, and mother bugs’ gluey secretions kept them stuck to the mattress.4 Some impregnated adult females dispersed away from the main colony on the bed frame. These females laid a few eggs each day in hidden spots—cracks in the floor, between books on a shelf—while escaping both human control efforts and male bugs who attempted to reinseminate them by rupturing their abdomens.5 The nymphs emerged a week later, nearly colorless, and smaller than a millet seed, hungry for their first meal; incubation took longer in winter. Those bugs that evaded control turned a deep red hue from the blood they ingested. As their abdomens filled, adults bulged to the size of a sunflower seed meat. Between meals, their abdomens appeared to deflate; this, along with their color, earned them the nickname “mahogany flats.”6 Bugs from the lodger’s side of the partition replenished the population on the other side, migrating slowly on their own six legs or more rapidly as hitchhikers on the lodger’s clothes that happened to drop off as he walked by. Bugs also rained upon the clothesline when the upstairs neighbor shook out her rugs. The lodger’s mattress, bought from a neighbor, had been the original source of the infestation. Once, a bug rode the younger girl’s coat home from school. Some bugs even traveled across town, joining the elder daughter in the handbag she carried to her housekeeping job. Her employer had recently hired an exterminator to eliminate bedbugs from the home.7 Bedbugs had long plagued Americans of all social classes, using the movement of human bodies and belongings to permeate communities large and small. In the early twentieth century, however, a confluence of trends altered bedbug ecologies and Americans’ attitudes toward this widespread insect. First, Americans came to associate bedbugs with poverty as improved but costly control became available. Second, medical entomology raised suspicions that bugs might spread pathogens, in addition to causing stress and itchy welts. Third, the increasingly professionalized exterminator industry promoted bug control as a public health service while arguing that it should be provided by the private sector. With these trends, bedbugs became for some a more private problem, even a private shame, and for others a reason to intervene in infested homes. Meanwhile, an effective but dangerous chemical became available that killed all bedbugs in homes where it was used: hydrocyanic acid gas, known as HCN. One exterminator called HCN “the ultimate...

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