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Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City
Journal of Social History, Spring, 2008 by Zachary Falck
Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City. By Daniel Burnstein (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 232 pp. $38.00)
In Next to Godliness, Daniel Burnstein examines how Progressive reformers tried to produce clean, healthy and orderly urban environments and people in New York City's Lower East Side. Burnstein argues that sanitary reform was as important as and essential to social reform. Removing garbage from and along the streets, regulating pushcart peddlers on crowded streets, and encouraging young people to care about neighborhood streets all prevented disease and disorder, supported impoverished immigrants' attempts to improve their living conditions, and sustained the entire city's well-being. In addition, Burnstein suggests that reappraising and appreciating these reformers' innovations and outlooks can reinvigorate socially-aware and morally-vigilant citizens who are disappointed with today's politics.
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Each of the book's four chapters investigates reformers' worries about and interactions with immigrants. Burnstein first recounts the garbage workers' strike in the summer of 1907 to explain New Yorkers' consciousness of filth, disease, and disorder. The second chapter shifts back to Colonel George Waring's management of the Department of Street Cleaning from 1895 to 1898. Waring articulated the shared responsibilities of government and city dwellers in ameliorating the environmental causes of poverty, and, during this brief period, led an otherwise troubled department to increase and to maintain street cleanliness. The next chapter examines the difficulties of devising effective regulations for pushcart peddling. The myriad political and social conflicts accompanying this vital immigrant economic activity interfered with establishing tidy and orderly streets. The fourth and, by far, longest chapter explores juvenile street cleaning leagues. The leagues organized young people to pick up litter, to encourage proper waste disposal, to report dangerous neighborhood conditions, and to help spread the "'gospel of civic cleanliness'" (93) throughout their communities. Across chapters, Burnstein elaborates and reiterates how reformers thought people shaped and were shaped by city environments, public health, moral order, and urban politics. The description of these problems and reform initiatives is thick, but the analysis of their interrelationships is somewhat thin; this mixture obscures what was changing or what did change over time in the Lower East Side.
Burnstein develops this history with evidence from newspapers and periodicals as well as an array of papers, records, and reports of mayors, municipal departments and commissions, civic organizations, settlement houses, and professional societies. Burnstein also incorporates insights from the works of urban, public health, immigration, environmental, and labor historians. This breadth of primary sources and secondary literature does not extend the book's geographical and social panoramas much beyond the Lower East Side where reformers worked with Jews from eastern Europe. Occasional glimpses uptown at Yorkville and Harlem and across the East River at Brooklyn only hint at the scope of the city's socio-environmental problems. Similarly, the relationships of reformers with Italian and African-American newcomers receive sporadic and brief discussion, while many other ethnic communities are not mentioned at all.
The author's careful attention to the overlapping layers of immigrants' lives and reformers' activities in the Lower East Side, however, emphasizes the dynamics of social uplift. Evaluating reform programs with the social psychological concept of compensatory outreach allows Burnstein to interpret these groups' collaborations and negotiations as reasonable and sophisticated rather than antagonistic and oppressive. To minimize conflict in everyday urban life, socially-mindful New Yorkers sought to translate the moral censure operative in traditional communities into an individual's ability to act responsibly as well as to cultivate this attitude in individuals settling in an enormous city. The author concedes Progressives sometimes did employ coercion and conditioning; nevertheless, Burnstein thinks that historians have overstated their intentions to force behavioral change, and, more importantly, too often have neglected the concerns and values shared by middle-class Americans and poor immigrants, especially regarding child rearing and cleanliness. The analysis of reformers' compensatory tactics is primarily and most fully developed in the chapter about juvenile street cleaning leagues. Fostering a normative orientation in the young helped them develop the power of self-restraint and reduced the need for authorities to control their lives. Program leaders promoted mutual obligation and reciprocality to facilitate the comprehension of a wider community good. Waring's street cleaning leagues turned out virtuous, cooperative Americans and were dubbed as "'Citizen Factories'" (105) years before Henry Ford's English schools manufactured Americans in melting pot pageants.
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