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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.
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| 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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Burnstein reminds us of the expansiveness of Progressive reformers' vision, attending to juvenile as well as adult behavior. Allied with Waring and other political officials, Progressives turned to society's youngest members in an effort to clean up the city. Transforming children's behavior had the net effect of altering their local environments. Picking up litter in their block made the streets cleaner. As important, it taught children individual responsibility. Burnstein views such efforts, such as this children's crusade, as a sort of human bridge between what he calls "community orientation" and a "Jacksonian-individualistic drive." Burnstein offers his perspective on Progressivism and its paradoxes—a well-worn and important historiographical debate to which he makes a solid contribution. |
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As this review appears in Environmental History, it is also worth noting that Burnstein does not appear to have set out to address the scholarship in the field broadly or in the study of urban environment particularly. As any good writer does, he gives the book a focus, an agenda—using sanitation as a case study to explore core issues in the historiography of Progressivism. He often uses "environment" very broadly, to refer to any of a number problems and issues related to the wider societal context. These include socio-economic conditions such as poverty, as well as more literal matters of environment, such as litter and refuse. However, Burnstein pays relatively little attention to the ways that the physical and cultural world of the environment intersected and shaped reform. Nor is sufficient attention given to the contradictions, benefits, costs, and complexities of immigrants' environmental practices as contrasted with those of reformers. This is not to say that Burnstein is not familiar with this literature. Quite the contrary, this study builds its foundation on the urban environmental literature. Even so, if environmental historians note such absences, they will nonetheless appreciate Burnstein's efforts to integrate the field into more traditional historiographical concerns, and take note of the suggestively broad manner in which this book conceives of the environment. |
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Well researched, and at times both provocative and insightful, Next to Godliness offers a tendentious portrait of Progressive reformers; this book will certainly be welcomed by political and urban historians studying this era. |
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Mark Tebeau is associate professor of history at Cleveland State University. His book, Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950 (Johns Hopkins, 2003) examined the history of firefighting and fire insurance. He is working on the history of public art and urban landscapes in twentieth-century America. |
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