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The Nose Knows: The Sense of Smell in American History
Connie Y. Chiang
| Most Americans live in a very different olfactory world from that of Americans in the past. In many nineteenth-century cities, raw sewage flowed in nearby waterways, garbage was piled high in the streets, horses left immense amounts of manure in their tracks, and numerous factories engaged in the odorous slaughtering and processing of animals. In rural areas some farmers used human feces—known as night soil—imported from city privies and cesspools as fertilizer for crops sold back to urbanites.1 Smells that many people today would consider intolerable were once unavoidable and ubiquitous. It is not that most Americans now inhabit an odorless world; rather, technology can now eliminate or mask odors deemed unpleasant and engineer aromas deemed agreeable. Supermarkets are stocked with deodorants and air fresheners, while department store cosmetic counters overflow with perfumes in any scent imaginable, from delicate florals to spicy musks. Although industrial odors, like those from chemical plants or oil refineries, are difficult to disguise, people have the power to change the smell of their bodies and many indoor areas almost instantaneously by simply spritzing fragrance stored in a bottle or plugging a deodorizer into an electrical outlet. |
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What does the changing scent of the air tell us about the American past? The sense of smell, while often overlooked as a topic of historical inquiry, holds an important key to understanding historical change generally and reconfigurations in cultural attitudes specifically. Smell's power lies in its subjectivity. While the senses seem to indicate objective truth, data from the senses are open to interpretation and influenced by individual and group preferences. Smell is especially subjective. A smell deemed unbearable by one person might seem hardly noticeable to another. And because we lack a reliable, widely known instrument or system for the measurement and documentation of smell—whereas sight and hearing can be recorded with cameras and digital recorders—it is also fleeting and incredibly elusive.2 As a result, people can project their fears, desires, and prejudices onto smells. These deeply emotional possibilities make the sense of smell a valuable tool in cultural analysis. |
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Whenever Americans evaluated odors, they revealed something about their culture and their communities at that moment. In deciding what smelled good and what smelled bad, they were making decisions about what activities and people they valued. Asserting that a particular odor was offensive sometimes meant marginalizing a specific social group. Racial and ethnic minorities and the working class often suffered the most from the negative connotations associated with the smells of their bodies, homes, and labor; those odors became yet more markers of social difference. But the nose also indicated that social history was never completely predictable. Context mattered, as elites' presumed power was not absolute. |
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As my research on the fishing and tourism industries in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Monterey, California, suggests, the study of smell also reinforces the reciprocal links between social and environmental history. Odors were physical phenomena that often signaled larger environmental transformations, but their meaning and significance were socially constructed. Not surprisingly, the social and material dimensions of odors became inseparable. The second half of this essay will demonstrate how the smell of Monterey's air stood at the center of a community conflict over how the coastline should be developed. As residents debated whether certain smells constituted a nuisance, they were also trying to assert control over the coastline and its inhabitants. To exercise power over the natural world was also to exercise power over other people. |
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