The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [75]
To the surprise of almost everyone, the Commission was an outstanding success. Deaths in the Union army from disease, although still higher than from battle, were significantly reduced, as seen in the contrast between the Civil War and the Mexican-American War of 1846–48. The Union army had three deaths from disease for every two from gunshot wounds. In the Mexican-American War, six soldiers had died from disease for every one killed in battle. But the Commission’s triumph reached beyond the Civil War. By “wrapping cleanliness and order in the mantle of patriotism and victory,” as the contemporary historian Suellen Hoy puts it, the Commission forced Americans to think differently about hygiene. Doctors and government officials had new respect for simple, ordinary cleanliness. Veterans returned home impressed with the comforts of hot water, foot baths and even soap. And civilians, whose wives, mothers and sisters had volunteered in the thousands to further the work of “Sanitary,” as the Commission was known, became accustomed to constant discussions about “Sanitary.” That was not trivial, for, as the writer and clergyman Edward Everett Hale wrote, “prominence given to a word gave, of necessity, prominence to an idea.”
The war hospital at Fredericksburg, Virginia, May 1864. The Sanitary Commission of the Union army taught Americans the virtues of soap and water.
The newly prominent idea quickly became symbolic. Dirt was seen as primitive and chaotic, exactly what Americans did not want to be. Cleanliness, on the other hand, promised morality, good order and reform. Women were crucial in these wars against dirt, just as their volunteer work had been critical in the Civil War. The success of their war work, which was very similar to the cleaning, cooking and nursing they did at home, gave them confidence and a reputation for significant skills. While the model middle-class Englishwoman of the day, the so-called “Angel in the House,” had servants, her American counterpart was much more directly involved in the running of her household. Cleanliness—practising it and teaching it to her children—became an important and typically American part of the womanly arsenal.
After the war, flushed with confidence and a messianic sense of purpose, the sanitarians moved their campaign to the clean-up of the northern cities, which occupied them during the 1870s and ’80s. Beginning in the 1880s, when a new wave of European immigrants threatened to unsettle the national equilibrium, they would focus on teaching them personal cleanliness. But first, they faced four million freed slaves—not newcomers to America, but newcomers to self-reliance.
For Booker T. Washington, the century’s most prominent African American, the key to that was cleanliness. Born into slavery on a Virginia plantation in 1856, Washington had been taught by a few demanding New Englanders who impressed him with the importance of neatness and hygiene. As a houseboy for a Vermont ex-schoolteacher, he acquired a lifelong inability to leave a scrap of paper on a floor or a yard. After that, in his late teens, he travelled to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, hoping to be admitted. When the head teacher asked the young applicant to