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3 Introduction History, Ecology, and the Politics of Pests Put cover on your garbage, Revamp the rusty screen, Drive out the rat and bedbug, The roach and fly obscene . . . Yes, clean the vacant places, Where rank disorder roam, Look wide beyond the fences, The city is your home. —Arthur Corwin, M.D., “Clean Up,” c. 1916 Good night, sleep tight, Don’t let the bedbugs bite. Dr. Arthur Corwin’s poem “Clean Up” and the traditional bedtime rhyme about bedbugs evoke two very different facets of life with pests. Parents uttered the latter while tucking their children into bed, hoping to ward off a menace that attacked in people’s most private moments. In contrast, Corwin’s poem made ridding domestic space of pests a civic duty for individual urbanites whose material connections to the city stretched “wide beyond the fences.” Together, these two poems suggest that living with pests is neither simply a private nor a public experience—it is both. 4 Introduction Indeed, the creatures in Corwin’s poem—rats, bedbugs, roaches, and houseflies—have long scurried, hitchhiked, scuttled, and buzzed across the borders of public and private space. Yet responses to pests in American cities often divided the public from the private—or at least attempted to do so. Health departments urged poor women to maintain window screens in their homes while municipal sanitation crews failed to clean up fly-breeding filth throughout their neighborhoods. Public housing managers longed for pesticide technologies that could kill bedbugs in individual apartments so they could avoid the complexities and cost of treating entire buildings. Apartment-dwellers tried to hide roach infestations in shame even as the insects ranged into their neighbors’ units. Scientists and public officials envisioned grand housing rehabilitation schemes that would eliminate rat habitats but neglected to help residents keep rats out of their homes. Politicians dismissed rat problems in African-American neighborhoods as residents’ private responsibility although racial segregation had consigned blacks to substandard homes that harbored long-established rodent populations. In all these cases, authorities—and sometimes residents themselves— assumed that pest problems could be contained to private or public spaces. Throughout the twentieth century, however, these animals have defied attempts at containment. Pests persisted to trouble people who already struggled against housing discrimination, neglectful governments, and social stigma. For a time, one of these pests seemed to be contained, but it has since returned with a vengeance. Since colonial times, the bedbug had made an excellent living in the United States by hitchhiking from home to home, gaining passage to new abodes and hosts via secondhand belongings and human bodies in such public spaces as streetcars and movie theaters. In Arthur Corwin’s day, families toiled for weeks or months to rid themselves of bedbugs, often dousing infested bed frames and other furniture with chemical remedies of dubious value.1 The high labor and financial costs of effective treatments made it difficult for poor families to eradicate bedbugs. If they succeeded, a neighbor still might unwittingly reintroduce them during a visit or on borrowed belongings. Despite these troubles, elites who managed to escape bugs often faulted the poor for continuing to live with them. All the while, many families who lived with bedbugs tried to hide their infestations out of shame and fear of ostracism. Introduction 5 In the 1940s and 1950s, most bedbugs in the United States fell to DDT as exterminators and do-it-yourselfers applied this mythic modern chemical in homes and other structures. DDT made bedbug control affordable across the income spectrum, with the exception of an extremely unfortunate few. Bedbugs’ downfall seemed so complete that by the late twentieth century two generations of Americans knew little of their existence except in the bedtime rhyme.2 Beginning just before the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, bedbugs resurged, belying promises of modern pest control . The bedbugs’ resurgence also reconnected Americans to the largely forgotten private history of bodily discomfort, stress, painstaking labor, and excruciating shame. In the early twenty-first century, again, families trying to rid their homes of bedbugs faced a series of arduous tasks: encasing mattresses, laundering entire wardrobes, eliminating clutter, and vacuuming repeatedly. Desperate families bought their dubious chemicals online. Some of the most isolated, vulnerable people became even more so as they tried to hide infestations from landlords, fearful of stigma and eviction . The old homily “bedbugs don’t discriminate” has also returned, but the affluent can still escape an infestation much more easily than the...

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