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27 1 Flies Agents of Interconnection in Progressive Era Cities As temperatures climbed into the nineties in June 1900, a female Musca domestica buzzed about a small stable in southeastern Washington, D.C. She alit upon a heap of horse manure inside an old wooden bin and deposited 120 eggs under a lump of dung. The young maggots emerged twenty-four hours later and then ate their way into the dung heap for four days. As they grew to their full larval length of about half an inch, they migrated back toward the edges of the pile along with thousands of well-fed cousins. They spun pupae around themselves; inside, they spent four or five more days transforming into adult houseflies. Still, the manure remained in the bin.1 Some ten days after their mother laid them as eggs, the adult houseflies emerged from their pupae and climbed out of the pile. They joined a buzzing cloud of their kin in the tight space between the top of the manure heap and the lid. Some flew through a gap in the lid, but most remained until a man opened the bin to shovel in fresh dung. The hungry swarm burst out of the bin. One fly flew through an unscreened stable window and a few yards toward a produce cart carrying, among other things, cherries that had begun to ferment during their transit from a farm on the city’s outskirts. The fly alit upon a cherry, and the minuscule hairs on her feet, akin to taste buds, sensed a viable meal. She vomited digestive fluids onto the cherry’s skin, extended her proboscis with its raspy, liplike lobe, and began to mouth and ingest the cherry as it softened.2 She flitted about the produce cart all day as it made deliveries to markets near the Capitol. Some grocers waved her and the other flies away, but others seemed unconcerned about their presence. 28 The Promises of Modern Pest Control She copulated with a male fly. Garbage pails and dairy trucks nourished her, and the eggs inside her, for five days. Then the fly detected a new scent: a heap of human waste excavated from a privy by a small-time scavenger and dumped illegally in a lot just across the alley.3 The heap’s fragrance overpowered that of the horse dung in the street and even that of the block’s half-dozen privies. The ammonia odor of urine fermenting on a steamy day not only attracted the fly, its chemical signal also induced oviposition, the deposition of eggs. She nestled into a sheltered area on the side of the mound and, over the course of the next day, laid ten dozen eggs.4 The air above hummed with hundreds of other flies, residues of human feces and urine clinging to the hairs on their feet. Several flies alit and rested for a moment upon the outside wall of the nearest house. A mix of odors wafted from a window, and several flies found easy passage indoors. Some fed at a garbage pail and a sticky pot in the kitchen. Others circled the head of an infant drinking a bottle of milk, tickling the baby’s ears. In 1900, the emerging science of medical entomology gave Progressive reformers a troubling new perspective on urban houseflies. Could ubiquitous flies, bred in poorly managed horse manure, pick up germs from privies and human waste dumps? Leland O. Howard, chief of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Bureau of Entomology, routinely found illegal dumps teeming with flies as he walked the streets of Washington , D.C. He described one dump, left under cover of a steamy night, that by the next day “swarm[ed] with flies in the bright sunlight.” Indoor spaces provided no haven from flies bred outdoors or the germs they might pick up there. Howard observed that “within 30 feet [of the dump] were the open windows and doors of the kitchens of two houses kept by poor people.”5 Flies endangered infants and young children particularly; one educator estimated that over seventy thousand died each year in the United States from fly-borne disease.6 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, many urban reformers feared that houseflies would imperil city-dwellers at home so long as horse manure clogged streets and privies plagued poor neighborhoods. They saw flies as agents of interconnection, linking diseased bodies with healthy ones, delivering pathogens across neighborhoods...

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