The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform

CHAPTER FOUR- The Politics of Health Reform: Garbage

CHAPTER FOUR The Politics of Health Reform: Garbage One winter morning in 1892 Milwaukee resident James Holton stumbled out of bed and turned on his water faucet. Out came "very dark-colored" material filled with "a large number of brown and green globules of gelatine-like substance ." Waking up faster than he might have otherwise, Holton broadcast his finding to his family, his neighbors, and-on the front pages of the daily press-to municipal authorities.l Other Milwaukeeans experienced similar shocks in the ensuing weeks and bitterly complained that the garbage dumped in Lake Michigan ruined the quality of the city water. Garbage-contaminated water became a major issue in the spring aldermanic elections, and throughout the decade the questions of why the city was unable to provide a potable liquid or to dispose of its garbage in a sanitary manner reverberated through the halls of the health department, the common council, and the municipal courts. Garbage repeatedly polluted Milwaukee's water supply; it also littered the city streets, mixing with horse manure and other street droppings to create an irritation and ofI Milwaukee Sentinel, January 27, 1892, p. I. See also January 28, 30; February 2, 28, 1892. 122 Copyrighted Material HEALTH REFORM: GARBAGE feuse to all who tried to maneuver in the crowded thoroughfares . In the summers, piles of rotting wastes sizzled under the hot sun, reminding everyone of the negative aspects of urban life. Not only was the filth unpleasant, but many urbanites thought it was responsible for the high amount of sickness in the city. The popular miasmatic theory of disease taught that foul atmospheric conditions and excessive filth caused disease. Physicians hoped that cleaning the streets and picking up the garbage would improve the health of city residents.2 With mortality rates high (over 26 per 1,000 in some years) the city could not afford to ignore the sights that it witnessed every day. ''Take a stroll of a few blocks in almost any part of Milwaukee," urged an observer in 1892, and you will find "heaps of dirt ... broken pavements, breakneck crossings and uninviting pools of filth."3 Milwaukee's streets, those "perfect avenues of swill," became the focus of much citizen attention; cleaning them and making them both passable for traffic and safe for health became one of the biggest challenges that municipal government faced-and ultimately conquered-in the Progressive period.4 Ashes, manure, garbage, night soil, sewage, rubbish, and dead animals littered urban streets, but garbage alone caused the biggest dilemma for officials trying to improve Milwaukee 's health statistics. Responsibility for garbage rested with health officials, who frequently found, as one of them said, that no other health problem gave "more trouble and annoyance than this question, that like a nightmare haunts 2 Even after the general acceptance of germ theory in the 18905, ridding the city of gross filth continued to be the focus of public health officials. For a discussion of the popular miasmatic theory, see George Rosen, A History of Public Health (N.Y.: MD Publications, 1958), pp. 287·290; and Richard H. Shryock, The Development of Modern Medicine (N.Y.: Hafner Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 84f, 219f. 3 Sentinel, May 30, 1892, p. 4. 4 The quote is from the Sentinel, January 22, 1869, p. I, but similar descriptions abound into the twentieth century. 123 Copyrighted Material HEALTH REFORM: GARBAGE the health officer."5 Before 1911, when physicians, having solved the acute problems, surrendered the garbage problem to the engineers, Milwaukee had tried all known methods of disposal: feeding it to swine, filling land, fertilizing farms, rendering, cremating, and dumping it in the lake. All the methods caused problems, tried the patience of the public health physicians, and sorely tested the ability of the municipal legislature to cope with the sanitary problems of the quickly growing city.6 Before 1875 individual householders disposed of their own garbage. Usually they left their wastes for the hogs that roamed the streets or the "swill children"-commonly immigrant youngsters trying to supplement the family income -who collected the most desirable kitchen refuse that Milwaukeeans produced.? Obviously unequal to the task of collecting the wastes of an entire city, these "little garbage 5 Robert Martin, "Disposal of Garbage at Milwaukee," Public Health: Papers and Reports of the APHA 15 (1889): 64. 6 Rudolph Hering, the national sanitation expert, commented after studying Milwaukee's garbage situation that...