The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [77]
It has happened more than once that a child recovering from small—pox, and in the most contagious stage of the disease, has been found crawling among heaps of half—finished clothing that the next day would be offered for sale on the counter of a Broadway store; or that a typhus fever patient has been discovered in a room whence perhaps a hundred coats had been sent home that week, each one with the wearer’s death-warrant, unseen and unsuspected, basted in the lining.
As for the vaguer menace, the immorality that flourished in the slums, cleanliness would remedy that, too. When New York opened a public bathhouse, Riis breathed a sigh of relief, for now “godliness will have a chance to move in with cleanliness. The two are neighbours every-where, but in the slum the last must come first.”
(Sanitarians in Europe as well as America believed firmly in the connection between cleanliness and morality, and a paper published in Science in 2006 seems to con-firm the link, but not in the direction they intended. Behavioural researchers found that when subjects were asked to imagine they had done something unethical, they filled in the blanks of incomplete words, such as w–H and SH–ER, making WASH and SHOWER. Subjects who had imagined doing ethical acts returned various words, such as WISH and SHAKER. Half the subjects who had imagined unethical acts were given the chance to wash their hands. Then all the subjects who had imagined the doing of unethical acts, unwashed and washed, were asked to volunteer to help researchers who needed unpaid subjects. Those with washed hands were about 50 per cent less likely to volunteer—which suggests that the cleansed felt absolved enough, and had no need to do a good deed.)
Jacob Riis’s photograph of New York newsboys washing up in their lodging-house was published in his 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives.
One of the main places where newcomers learned to think and act like Americans was the big-city public school. A Jewish immigrant to New York City named Sol Meyerowitz remembered:
The teacher would start the day with a reading from the Old Testament, then she would inspect our hair, turn our hands around, look at our ears, examine my neck to see if it was dirty. One day she sent me home because I had a dirty neck. And she actually rubbed my skin to see if it was dirty.
We were just a bunch of sad kids, you know, snotty little sad kids: always poorly dressed. We were dirty, dirty. You had a bath maybe once a week, and you wore your underwear all week.
Teachers demonstrated the use of the washing bowl and soap, and one complained to Riis of a new student, “He took hold of the soap as if it were some animal, and wiped three fingers across his face. He called that washing.” A public school principal in New York City ordered that the teachers ask the children every day, “What must I do to be healthy?” The children were to chorus in answer:
I must keep my skin clean
Wear clean clothes
Breathe pure air
And live in the sunlight.
Jacob Riis’s famous photograph appeared in his 1902 book, The Battle with the Slum. He captioned it “The Only Bath-tub in the Block: It Hangs in the Air Shaft.” The two-acre block he referred to, on New York’s Lower East Side, held thirty-nine tenements and 2,781 people, including 466 children under the age of five.
Schools were useful for training future parents and citizens, but worsening conditions demanded quicker solutions. A cholera epidemic in 1849 intensified calls for public baths, but America’s municipal governments had other priorities—water and sewage systems, fire and police departments. The country’s first bathhouse designed for the poor opened its doors on Mott Street in New York City’s Lower East Side in 1852, but it survived less than a decade. Its fees of five to ten cents per bath were probably too high for a poor family. After the Mott Street failure, America dragged its feet for forty years, while the country struggled with the Civil War, labour unrest, depressions and yet more immigrants.
NOT IN MY NEIGHBOURHOOD