Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (review)

Following the lead of Rosen more than a half-century ago, a literature on urban sanitary reforms has emerged, focusing particular attention on the achievements of the Progressive era. This compact study of Progressive sanitation reforms in New York City is a valuable addition to this literature, deepening our understanding of the relationship between Progressives and immigrants while also discussing effective implementation of public health policy.¹

Burnstein uses records of municipal agencies and reform groups, as well as newspaper accounts, to provide a narrative reflecting Progressive-era views of sanitation. He begins by discussing the garbage workers' strike of 1907 as an example of how important street cleaning was to New Yorkers' conceptions of order and public health. Uncleaned streets produced odors and nuisances that caused the Woman's Municipal League of New York to warn, "there seems to be every danger of disease developing" (11).

The garbage crisis of 1907 speaks directly to the reforms of George Waring the commissioner of the Department of Street Cleaning (DSC) between 1895 and 1898. Burnstein breaks chronology with a chapter on Waring's innovations following his look at the strike. The discussion of how Waring's methods related to the miasma theory of disease transmission is not new. However, Burnstein's treatment of how Waring's political acumen produced an effective DSC, despite resistance from elements of the Tammany Hall machine, is instructive. From the start, Waring deliberately exceeded his department's budget to clean the streets because he calculated that citizens would notice the improvement and demand better services. Although machine politicians attacked Waring in the local newspapers, some within Tammany felt that his municipal housekeeping was both important and popular. Waring received his budget, allowing him to modernize street cleaning in New York City. His accomplishment serves as a reminder that, as with Raymond Tucker implementing meaningful smoke control in St. Louis in the 1930s, successful reformers combined progressive ideas with political calculation.²

A strength of the book is its discussion of the relationship between ethnicity and Progressive ideas, which goes beyond simply stating that Progressives and immigrants either cooperated or clashed. Burnstein maintains that first-generation immigrants adopted modern sanitary practices in an attempt to be perceived as clean by native-born Americans, consequently making hygiene an aspect of American identity. Yet although many immigrants accepted new sanitary practices, Burnstein also reports conflicts between Progressives and New York's thriving immigrant pushcart trade, citing concerns about the cleanliness of food from peddlers and ethnocentric caricatures of Jews as filthy in newspapers. Tensions between middle-class reformers and working-class (and impoverished immigrants) led to restrictions on peddlers. Burnstein's observations reflect similar clashes in Chicago involving immigrants and Progressive reformers.³

Burnstein concludes by examining Waring's employment of children in the juvenile streetcleaning league under the rationale that municipal housekeeping saved children from the chaos of the polluted city. Though Waring's tenure as DSC commissioner was short, Burnstein ably shows that this politically savvy Progressive's reforms lasted long after his death. Next to Godliness will appeal to historians interested in the complicated history of immigrants, reformers, and public health, as well as to those seeking inspiring examples of effective reform.