Although a number of efforts were made beginning in the late nineteenth century to use urban sewage on farms, especially in the West, a region desperate for water no matter what its source, U.S. cities had by the 1920s severed the connection between human waste and the soil. Seduced by the convenience of water, urban areas, packed with people and water closets, unwittingly launched one of the largest aquatic experiments in the nation’s history.21
In 1933, the western end of Lake Erie, one observer remarked, “looked as if it were coated with green paint.” That paint was algae—an algae bloom, to be more precise. Algae are microscopic plants normally present in lakes. In Lake Erie’s healthier days algae existed in sparse numbers, in part because the lake’s limited supply of phosphorous kept them from flourishing. But when the cities around the lake—Buffalo, Cleveland, and Toledo—started discharging untreated sewage into it, the algae had a field day. Human waste contains large amounts of phosphorous and with city dwellers flushing away in their water closets, more of it wound up lake bound, where it made the algae thrive. Eventually, the algae died and the green slime sank to the bottom, where bacteria set to work decomposing it—using lots of oxygen to carry out the job. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the oxygen decline (in conjunction with overfishing) changed the species make-up of Lake Erie and the rest of the Great Lakes. Whitefish, herring, trout, and sturgeon, the major commercial fish, depend on clear, oxygen-rich water. With the decline in lake conditions, however, species more adapted to the new aquatic environment, such as yellow perch, catfish, and pickerel, replaced them.22
Urban sewage had an even more devastating effect on fish in the lower part of the Delaware River. As late as the 1890s, the Delaware watershed’s shad fishery was the nation’s largest, supplying urbanites as far away as Cleveland, Chicago, and areas further west with a fish that was enormously popular in the Gilded Age. A catch of 16.5 million pounds in 1899, however, plummeted to just 210,000 pounds in 1921. A number of factors probably contributed to the decline, including overfishing and changes in precipitation. But the primary blame rested with Philadelphia’s burgeoning population and the enormous amount of waste-laden water it flushed out into the Delaware. Water use in the city skyrocketed, increasing from 58 million gallons per day in 1880 to an astounding 319 million 30 years later. All that water, of course, once used, had to go somewhere. The sewage entering the river was so foul-smelling that by the early twentieth century sailors were known to jump ship rather than spend the night breathing in the noxious fumes. By the decade of the 1910s, dissolved oxygen in the river near Philadelphia registered just two to zero parts per million. With shad requiring at least five parts per million to survive, the fish—headed upstream to spawning grounds—suffocated and died.23
One could point to other examples of the harmful effects of sewage on aquatic life, such as oyster contamination in San Francisco Bay, Newark Bay, or Staten Island Sound. But the point is that installing sewers, although hailed as a victory for public health, also had some sorry ecological consequences. Human waste was discharged into lakes and streams, at times polluting the water supplies of towns downstream. Instead of having social value in maintaining a region’s agroecology, it became just plain shit. By the turn of the century, city dwellers knew little about where their food came from and perhaps even less about where their bodily waste went, as sewers helped obscure from view the very real ecological impact of biological necessity.
THE GARBAGE PROBLEM
In the period before the 1870s, urbanites took it upon themselves to dispose of their own garbage. Some people just left it outside for pigs to devour. Others gave it to “swill children,” who collected it in carts and sold it to farmers to use as fertilizer or hog feed. It would be wrong to romanticize this system of waste removal. In Milwaukee, one account from the 1870s describes the “little garbage gatherers” leaving the alleys “reeking with filth, smelling to heaven.”24 But this approach did have the virtue of giving social value to garbage, recycling it for human good, as well as providing a much-needed source of income for working-class families struggling to survive in the city’s Dickensian economy.
Whatever the virtues of this ad hoc approach to disposal, it broke down in the face of the mountain of garbage created by the teeming masses who populated U.S. cities by the late nineteenth century. Consider the problem of dead horses. In 1880, New York City carted away some 15,000 of them, with an average weight of 1,300 pounds each. In 1912, when cars began to dominate the city, Chicago still had to send scavengers out to take care of 10,000 horse carcasses.25
Surveys conducted between 1903 and 1918 showed that a single city dweller produced a half ton to a ton of refuse each year. Ashes from the burning of wood and coal remained the single largest refuse item, at least in the colder climates of the Midwest and North. In the South, the warmer weather and longer growing season meant more organic waste, which had to be taken care of quickly before it rotted. Watermelon rinds alone made up 20 percent of Savannah, Georgia’s, summer garbage in 1915. But with the nation’s economy becoming increasingly organized around consumer spending, generating a vast array of new packaged items, the amount of garbage increased dramatically. Between 1903 and 1907, trash collected in Cincinnati rose from 21,600 to 31,255 tons, an increase of nearly a third, a trend apparent in most American cities.26
CAROLINE BARTLETT CRANE
Known nationally for her work in the municipal housekeeping movement, Crane is shown here inspecting a Seattle garbage incinerator. (Western Michigan University)
In the 1880s, along came the sanitary reformers to tackle the stinking piles of refuse. Women, especially, championed the cause. In New York, 15 women from the wealthy Beekman Hill area, incensed by the dirt and dust that soiled clothing and ruined homes, complained to the city board of health about a pile of manure they claimed was roughly 25 feet in height. The owner of the pile, Martin Kane, employed approximately 100 men to remove manure from stables that held on the order of 12,000 to 13,000 horses, selling the dung as fertilizer to nearby farmers—often stockpiling it until prices rose to his satisfaction. Kane was eventually ordered to remove the nuisance, but he was later allowed to reopen his operation as long as he promised to keep the pile of horse droppings at a minimum.27
Freed by servants from many of the chores associated with taking care of their homes, middle-class women took to the streets to join the municipal housekeeping movement. In 1884, the women banded together to form the Ladies’ Health Protective Association, an organization dedicated to street-cleaning and municipal garbage reform. There followed the Women’s Health Protective Association of Brooklyn, the Municipal Order League in Chicago, the Women’s Civic Association in Louisville, and the Neighborhood Union in Atlanta, a group of African American women who prevailed on the city to provide black residents with trash collection. Entering the traditionally male domain of civic life, women activists, led by the legendary Jane Addams and other Progressive reformers, succeeded in expanding their public authority, but ultimately had only limited success in improving sanitary conditions.28
Municipal garbage collection of course put the swill children out of work, although it took some time. In Milwaukee, aldermen let each ward decide whether it wanted contractors, hired by the city, to pick up its trash. But the new service failed when residents, still loyal to the swill children, refused to turn over their garbage. “Most of the garbage … is removed by boys and girls and women, mostly of Polish nationality, who use the material collected to feed hogs,” a health department report noted. In 1878, a new health commissioner finally convinced officials to establish one garbage contract for the entire city. New restrictions on both children and pigs accompanied the contract. As one working-class newspaper put it, “it is a great pity if [our] stomachs must suffer to save the noses of the rich.”29
Once collected, where did city garbage go? In part it depended on the kind of garbage a place produced. Incinerators, a technology invented by the British, proved popula
r in the southern states, where the warm climate and large quantities of organic waste made immediate disposal imperative. Northern cities, in contrast, had more ash, which accumulated in piles and then was generally dumped on the land or at sea. The city of New York was notorious for dumping garbage in the Atlantic Ocean—some 760,000 cubic yards of refuse in 1896 alone. Chicago unloaded its refuse in Lake Michigan. St. Louis and New Orleans both turned to the Mississippi River. In 1886, New York’s garbage scows pitched 80 percent of the city’s 1.3 million cartloads of refuse into the sea. From there it drifted south to New Jersey, where swimmers commonly encountered it—as old mattresses and shoes bobbing along in the waves.30
Smaller cities often sold their garbage as hog feed or set up pig farms. (The quantity of refuse in large cities prevented them from doing the same because it would have required costly additional collections to keep the refuse from rotting.) City-owned piggeries flourished, especially in New England, where temperatures cooperated in keeping the garbage edible. In the early twentieth century, 61 cities and towns in Massachusetts operated some kind of swine-feeding program. Grand Rapids, St. Paul, Denver, and Los Angeles also used pigs as garbage disposals. During World War I, the U.S. government, anxious to conserve food, encouraged more cities to feed their refuse to hogs. The practice, however, called for the careful separation of the edible organic matter from the glass and other items hazardous to such creatures. “Surely very few phonograph needles would find their way into the garbage pail,” one government report opined, “if the householders could imagine the tortures suffered by the unfortunate animals.”31
Feeding refuse to pigs, which could be slaughtered and turned into pork, gave garbage a role in the food cycle. Still, by the turn of the century, the vast majority of urban refuse was either buried, dumped at sea, or burned—in short, wasted. Before the rise of a consumption-oriented economy in the late nineteenth century, Americans as a whole generated little in the way of trash. Swill children salvaged scattered pieces of food, which their mothers incorporated into meals, and sold metal, bones, and bottles to junk dealers. Ragmen scoured city streets for old clothes for making paper. Women fed leftover food scraps to chickens and pigs. The recycling of waste, in other words, played a role in producing goods and bolstering living standards. Then municipal trash collection eliminated the swill children. The invention of wood pulp did away with the need for ragmen. The recycling networks that had arisen earlier disappeared and a social system dedicated to clean homes and cities superseded them. Ironically, that move simply shifted waste outside the immediate food and soil cycles to downstream and downwind regions, where it did far more harm.32
CONCLUSION
The great cleanup, which spelled death for the organic city, had many virtues: a decline in diseases, especially water-borne ones like typhoid fever, and an improved and more aesthetically pleasing urban environment, plus no more pigs to contend with on the streets. But tidying up the metropolis meant compromising life in other quarters. A whiter and brighter life came at the cost of fish kills, algae blooms, and garbage-strewn beaches. The cleaning compulsion also hurt the poor, who once put filth to work in the service of the family economy. Meanwhile, the rise of mass production and distribution—packaged foods, thick newspapers, products planned, on purpose, to become obsolete—made it even more difficult for American cities to keep pace with what its citizens no longer wanted. How did this new consumer culture go about feeding itself? What did it do with its trash? How did people get from place to place? To such questions we now turn.
PART THREE
CONSUMING NATURE
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MOVEABLE FEAST
Had Thomas Jefferson, drafter of the Declaration of Independence, been alive at the time, he no doubt would have been delighted to see the “Liberty Bell” created for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was quite a sight—6,500 oranges meticulously piled into a monument to freedom and democracy, courtesy of some deft souls from California.
Jefferson not only played an important role in the birth of the nation but was also an avid horticulturalist who cherished a good apple or pear. And although he never made it to California, he left his mark on the American West by securing the Louisiana Purchase and masterminding the rectangular survey that divided the region up into manageable boxes. How profoundly happy he would have been to find that, clear across the continent, his efforts were literally bearing fruit.
By the turn of the century, huge changes were afoot in daily life. Self-sufficiency at home gave way to mass production. Many of the items that Americans had come to depend on—from food and clothing to cars and cigarettes—now came from distant factories. A new and radically different system of distribution emerged to market these products, centered on brand names and advertising. By 1910, this new consumer economy catapulted the United States into the greatest industrial power on the face of the earth.
From an environmental perspective, consumerism involved equally radical changes. Its most important legacy stemmed from the separation in space of production from consumption. The growth of specialized, one-crop industrial agriculture in places such as California brought the commercialization of farming to a new level. Just as oranges traveled to the Midwest for the exposition, by the turn of the century California factory farms routinely sent trainloads of fruit—enough to build millions of orange, pear, plum, and cherry bells—across the nation to the tables of American consumers.
Meanwhile, the farms that once dominated the outskirts of New York City, until the turn of the century the nation’s most important produce-growing center, lost ground to competitors in California and the South. In California especially, orchardists operated free from the worry of frost, which periodically buffeted New York growers. Capitalizing on a more favorable climate, on cheap labor from Asia and later Mexico, and on the virtues of speedy, refrigerated train travel, California’s fruit and vegetable growers went on to become the richest farmers in the nation. As early as 1927, two-thirds of all canned fruit purchased in the United States originated in the Golden State. By 1980, two-fifths of all the nation’s fresh produce was grown there. The rise of this moveable feast, however, exacted a high social and ecological price.
CITRUS LIBERTY BELL
Composed of 6,500 oranges, this replica of the famous Liberty Bell was displayed at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, organized to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to America. (Final Report of the California World’s Fair Commission … [Sacramento, CA: State Office, 1894])
LAND OF SUNSHINE
In the late nineteenth century, boosters tried to lure people to the Golden State by selling them on the climate. And no one did more to market the image of California as a sun-drenched oasis than the journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis. In 1885, Lummis, recovering from a bout of malaria, decided that the best route to recovery was to journey, by foot, from his home in Cincinnati, Ohio, some 3,000 miles to Los Angeles. After 143 days of walking, Lummis arrived in southern California, tan, fit, and eager to testify to the virtues of the west coast’s magnificent climate. In 1895, Lummis became the editor of a magazine aptly named Land of Sunshine. In it he argued that California’s sunny climate made people healthier and fostered intellectual and creative talents. It was no coincidence that some of the world’s greatest minds, from Jesus to Plato to Michelangelo, came from lands blessed with a great deal of sun. In the United States, he deduced, all roads led to Los Angeles.1
Much of what Lummis told his readers was hype. But there is little question that California’s cloudless skies—putting aside for the moment the agricultural implications of too little rain—gave it an edge over the East when it came to growing food. Indeed, California is one of only five places on the planet blessed with such a sun-rich climate (the others are central Chile, southern Africa, southern Australia, and the Mediterranean basin). In Fresno, California, the heart of raisin country, for instance, average precipitation in May is just a third of an inch. Barely a tenth of an in
ch of rain falls in June, and essentially none in July and August. Virtually all of the area’s 10 inches of precipitation occurs between November and April. The rest of the year it is sunny, amazingly so, with sunshine favoring the city an average of more than 90 percent of the time in the summer months.
Californians have something known as the Pacific High to thank for all the sunny weather. This zone of high pressure lies stationed off the coast of the central part of the state, deflecting all precipitation north to the Pacific Northwest. From late March until October the high pressure stands watch over the Golden State’s sunny skies, before drifting south to Mexico in the fall and allowing rain to slip in. As regular as clockwork, the Pacific High returns north in the spring, and with it sunshine beats down on the land, creating perfect conditions for photosynthesis.
With respect to solar radiation, California has struck it rich. But the state’s good fortune does not end there. It extends into the realm of geology as well. One of the largest river valleys on earth, the Central Valley, an area nearly the size of England, stretches more than 400 miles through the center of the state. Drained by the Sacramento River in the north and the San Joaquin in the south, the valley is, in the words of one environmental scientist, “the richest agricultural region in the history of the world.”2
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