The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [76]
Booker T. Washington taught African Americans self- reliance through “the gospel of the toothbrush.”
Hampton had been founded by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong to educate freed slaves. The son of missionaries to Hawaii, Armstrong saw both Polynesians and African Americans as people “in the early stages of civilization” who needed fundamental skills. Armstrong’s own cleanliness was legendary: while a student at Williams College, he took a cold sponge bath every morning, and during the Civil War, when he commanded a black regiment, he claimed that his camps were the cleanest in the brigade. Adopting Armstrong’s belief in basic skills, Washington sighed at the spectacle of African Americans trying to learn Greek and Latin when they were barely literate in English. In his autobiography, Up from Slavery, he describes one of the saddest sights of his life—a young black man studying French with grease on his clothes, and filth all around him.
In 1881 Washington founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. There he oversaw an education for African Americans that included learning how to sleep between two sheets, wear a nightgown and bathe. “Absolute cleanliness of the body has been insisted upon from the first,” Washington wrote. “Over and over again the students were reminded in those first years-and are reminded now—that people would excuse us for our poverty, for our lack of comforts and conveniences, but that they would not excuse us for dirt.” Borrowing the idea from General Armstrong, he preached “the gospel of the toothbrush,” and this stratagem became so well known that students often arrived at Tuskegee carrying almost nothing but a toothbrush. Convinced that its use brought about “a higher degree of civilization,” Washington noticed that when a student replaced a first or second toothbrush on his own initiative, he was rarely disappointed in that student’s future.
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON INSPECTS THE ROOMS AT TUSKEGEE
“We found one room that contained three girls who had recently arrived at the school. When I asked them if they had toothbrushes, one of the girls replied, pointing to a brush: ‘Yes, sir. That is our brush. We bought it together, yesterday.’ It did not take them long to learn a different lesson.”
Urban overcrowding and squalor had been a fact of American life since the 1840s, when more than a million Irish immigrants settled in the port cities of the Northeast. In the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of southern and eastern Europeans began arriving, and by 1900, 37 per cent of New York City’s three and a half million people were immigrants. However disadvantaged, the poor in France were French, and the poor in Germany were Germans. The Americans faced a more complex situation in that the people they wanted to convert to cleanliness were foreigners who at first understood neither the English language nor American customs.
Like the ancient Romans setting out to civilize an empire with, among other things, baths, the Americans believed that a crucial way to Americanize the newcomers was to teach them how to wash. Only recently convinced of cleanliness themselves, they had the zeal of the newly converted, seeing hygiene as the antidote to most un-American attitudes and practices. The public bath, a confident Chicago reformer claimed, was the “greatest civilizing power that can be brought to bear on these uncivilized Europeans crowding into our cities.”
“The only water the Irish use is holy water.”
—Nineteenth-century American saying
The “uncivilized” newcomers, who were considered so dirty that Ellis Island was designed to shower eight thousand of them every day, posed the familiar threat to the health of all. Jacob Riis, the reforming chronicler of New York’s tenement houses, sketched a terrifying picture of the “filth diseases” that could spread through the city from the garment workers who finished pieces of clothing in their tenement apartments. In How the Other Half Lives, published