| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City. By Daniel Eli Burnstein. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. x + 200 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth $38.00.

In Next to Godliness Daniel Eli Burnstein examines street sanitation in New York City in the period from 1895 to 1917 as a way to better understand the attitudes and ideals of Progressive social reformers. Of course, cleanliness and sanitation mattered to Progressives, as well as to society more broadly. At once a matter of public health and the social order, Progressive thinking in this area was brought into sharp relief by events such as the 1907 garbage strike and in the leadership of George E. Waring, Jr., the commissioner of New York's Department of Street Cleaning (and also a national leader in reforming sanitation practices). For Burnstein, Waring embodied much of what Progressive reform around sanitation was about: cleaning city streets, producing and protecting a particular middle-class social order, and embedding a heavy dose of individual responsibility into civic life. Waring's views, according to Burnstein, possessed a contradiction between "environment-oriented" solutions and individual responsibility. Such paradoxes were inherent in Progressivism more broadly, and Burnstein demonstrates how they colored the development of both the policy toward pushcart vendors and the creation of juvenile street cleaning leagues.

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