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Dirty Work: How Hygiene and Xenophobia Marginalized the American Waste Trades, 1870–1930
Carl Zimring
| AT THE BEGINNING of the twenty-first century, Americans think recycling is a good, even moral behavior. We all would like to see more reuse of things, tempering our rampant consumption and reducing the amount of garbage we throw into landfills and incinerators. Recycling now means leaving a cleaner, better planet to our children. Yet even today, most of us look down on the actual work of recycling, displaying little respect for the people who handle our waste, whether residential or industrial. |
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That was even more true a century ago. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the creation of waste of all kinds increased dramatically, the industries that developed to manage those wastes (including garbage hauling, hazardous waste storage, and scrap-material trading) were much maligned. Industrialists, politicians, and even progressive reformers, who in many ways displayed the social concerns we associate with contemporary recycling, saw scrap handling as dirty work, work that was not just physically dirty, but morally degraded. That perception reflected revulsion at the kinds of people who did the work as well as the work itself, conflating the unsanitary status of the work with xenophobic stereotypes of the immigrants willing to do the work. Such disdain ensured that the people who entered the waste trades were not those perceived as respectable members of society but economically and culturally marginalized individuals. |
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This marginalization, modern thinkers suggest, is intuitive, for waste is by definition negative, and association with waste has social and cultural implications. Mary Douglas characterizes waste as taboo; handling waste requires breaking taboos about cleanliness and order. Individuals circumventing accepted notions of sanitation are themselves unclean, and not in compliance with social norms. What objects are deemed waste or of negative value—be they old food, asbestos, rusty metal, or used automobiles—are socially constructed. In Rubbish Theory, Michael Thompson adds that a society's designation of objects as durable goods, transient aging goods, or rubbish of negative worth is dependent on issues of need, order, and context that have class and status connotations.1 |
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Research into the relationship of Americans with their waste has revealed much about the systems we have constructed to manage it and our changing cultural and social norms. Martin Melosi and Joel Tarr's work on urban waste management systems reveals that, though there never has been a perfect sink for our trash, American cities developed elaborate systems to remove waste from residential and industrial areas and put them in the ground, water, or (as smoke) air. Susan Strasser's Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash traces the changing social constructions of waste, constructions that produced the culture of disposability that made a scrap industry possible. Both Strasser and Suellen Hoy demonstrate that managing waste disposal has had gender dimensions in the twentieth century, with women expected to maintain the order of things in the household. The historiography on American waste management reveals much about our society's management and perceptions of waste, yet less attention has been given to the perception of waste handling as an industry.2 |
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