The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [91]
Homing in on a man’s anxieties about the work world, one of their magazine ads shows a silver-haired, well-groomed man looking skeptically at an unkempt fellow. The grubby man, who has sullied the elder one’s tidy desk with a worn briefcase and fedora, turns away to look at a huge, surreal version of himself, biting his fingernails. The headline reads, “He had to fight himself so hard … he didn’t put it over!” Admitting to himself that he’s his own worst enemy, the slovenly man asks himself, “Oh why had he neglected the bath that morning, the shave, the change of linen? Under the other fellow’s gaze it was hard to forget that cheap feeling… The clean-cut chap can look any man in the face, and tell him the facts—for when you’re clean, your appearance fights for you.” The conclusion, in large letters: “There’s self-respect in SOAP & WATER.”
Lifebuoy soap made bathing fun, while its “searching, super-cleansing power” emulsified odour-causing waste matter and carried it away.
In another advertisement, a woman stares pensively out of the window at a group of children playing between her house and the neighbours’. The woman and her husband, who looks up at her quizzically from his newspaper, are a handsome, prosperous couple. But the headline asks, “What do the neighbours think of her children?” Naturally every mother, the ad tells us, considers her children ideal. “But what do the neighbours think? Do they smile at happy, grimy faces acquired in wholesome play? For people have a way of associating unclean clothes and faces with other questionable characteristics.” It’s not clear from this ever—so—slightly menacing message whether the well-intentioned mother should interrupt her children’s play with soapy washcloths and a change of clothes. The ad ends, “There’s CHARACTER—IN SOAP AND WATER.”
The Cleanliness Institute tried to touch as many bases as possible. But it concentrated its efforts in the schools, aiming not just to make children clean, “but to make them love to be clean.” To that end, it produced and sold at cost hundreds of thousands of stories, along with leaflets, posters and teachers’ guides. It devised a cleanliness curriculum, with clearly stated objectives, that stretched from the earliest grades to high school. Conditioning began in grade one, with Health Town, a toy town made by the teacher. Each child made a house of paper, labelled it with his name and placed it on a street. If he was found deficient in the daily “Keep Clean Parade,” his house was removed from Health Town until he redeemed himself. But cleaning should never be seen as punitive, the Institute stressed, and the morning check-up should be “a period of rejoicing over cleanliness rather than searching for dirt.”
The declining sales that had worried the soap industry did not materialize, or not in the way they imagined. The price of soap held firm throughout the 1920s, as the supply increased. What hurt its business, as it hurt everyone’s business, was the Depression. Just as the Cleanliness Institute closed its doors in 1932, a casualty of the stalled economy, Aldous Huxley published his satire of a sanitized utopia, Brave New World. It’s doubtful that Huxley, living in England, had heard of the Institute, although naturally enough there are parallels between its emphasis on indoctrination and social pressure and the vastly more extreme measures taken in the novel’s odour-and germ-phobic future civilization.
AN ENGLISH VIEW OF AMERICAN HYGIENE
“With a steady hand Aimée fulfilled the prescribed rites of an American girl preparing to meet her lover—dabbed herself under the arms with a preparation designed to seal the sweat glands, gargled another to sweeten the breath, and brushed into her hair some odorous drops from a bottle labelled: ‘Jungle Venom.’”