Next to Godliness

“The popular maxim, that ‘dirt is healthy,’” Catharine Beecher wrote in 1841, “has probably arisen from the fact, that playing in the open air is very beneficial to the health of children, who thus get dirt on their persons and clothes. But it is the fresh air and exercise, and not the dirt, which promotes the health.” Beecher urged that the entire body be washed daily, and that clothes worn next to the skin be changed often. “No civilized nation,” she maintained, “pays so little regard to the rules of health, on this subject, as our own.” ¹

Readers of Suellen Hoy’s Chasing Dirt may well believe that Beecher’s American contemporaries considered dirt healthy. Hoy’s early chapters offer evidence shocking to modern sensibilities, effectively establishing that early-nineteenth-century Americans were filthy by our standards and by those of their European counterparts. Pigs and other animals roamed city streets, which were thick with dung and mud. Humans relieved themselves in chamber pots and privies, and often left them open. Spitting was ubiquitous; even the Shakers used spitting-boxes. Flies were everywhere.

Chasing Dirt offers, as its author asserts, “the first general history of cleanliness in the United States.” In this relatively brief book (181 pages of text), Hoy has set herself the large task of answering “what appears to be a simple question: How did Americans become so obsessed with cleanliness when, less than 200 years ago, Europeans found them dreadfully dirty and frequently disgusting?” (p. xiv). She has defined the topic broadly, to encompass cleanliness of bodies and clothes, of dwellings, cities, and of the environment in the widest sense. She has done exhaustive research, exhibited in sixty pages of notes. And even evidence that she takes from standard secondary sources or familiar primary ones often appears fresh here; because she frames it in a new topic, we see it in new ways.

Hoy is known to specialists for contributions to public works history and an engaging article on garbage disposers that appeared in Technology and Culture (October 1985). This book departs from any expectations fostered by that background; neither public works nor technology plays a major role. Chasing Dirt is not about soap or water; it offers a history of attitudes toward cleanliness rather than an understanding of its material culture.

The first part of the book presents a history based on individual human agency, a catalogue of people Hoy regards as critical in the nation’s clean-up campaigns. Catharine Beecher, William Alcott, and Florence Nightingale (though she was not American) each merit a few pages. Like Martin Melosi in Garbage in the Cities (1981), Hoy regards Colonel George Waring, “The Apostle of Cleanliness,” as the single most influential figure in her narrative. But some of her most interesting discussions are about individuals more generally known for their work in other contexts. Frederick Law Olmsted, for example, appears here as the secretary and chief executive officer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, hired on the basis of the administrative skills he demonstrated in superintending the construction of Central Park. Similarly, Hoy discusses Frances Willard, Booker T. Washington, and Jane Addams with a focus on their cleanliness activities. She also introduces lesser-known historical actors, such as Caroline Bartlett Crane, a Kalamazoo sanitary reformer who became a national consultant, offering a unique combination of advice to municipal officials and community organizing through large public meetings.

In later chapters, the book’s explanatory framework shifts away from individual agency. Hoy is explicit about this. “Up to the 1910s,” she claims, “the energy to persuade the masses of the benefits of keeping clean flowed largely from private individuals and public servants . .. . But, during the 1920s, a second great dynamic—the profit motive—added such power as to drive the train...