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Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–78

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Journal of Historical Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ jhg

Flies, manure, and window screens: medical entomology and environmentalreform in early-twentieth-century US cities

Dawn Day BiehlerUniversity of Maryland-Baltimore County, Department of Geography and Environmental Systems, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA

Abstract

This paper traces responses to house flies in US cities as health departments attempted to control pollution and disease in the early twentieth century. Itspeaks to other historical geographies about the state, citizens, and the urban environment by showing how medical entomology prescribed contra-dictory changes to civic and domestic space, and how urban people and nature resisted these changes. With the advent of medical entomology, healthreformers came to see house flies as agents that wove the entire city together as an interconnected ecology, carrying diseases from neighborhood toneighborhood and across the threshold of the home. But different reformers argued for quite distinct exercises of power in the urban landscape andecological processes. Some physicians and entomologists argued that the state must modernize networks of fly-breeding organic matter, most notablyhorse manure and human waste. Such interventions were intended to be preventive and holistic, and aimed to protect all city dwellers. Other reformers,however, doubted the capacity of the state to tame material flows of waste, and instead sought changes to domestic space that would require house-holders – especially women – to shore up the boundaries of the house against flies. When city governments adopted these distinct interventions theyencountered quite distinct sorts of resistance because of the house fly’s tight links with urban nature and domestic practices.� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Insects; Entomology; Public health; Infectious disease; Domestic space; Urban environment

Introduction

When typhoid hit Chicago in 1902 with the city’s biggest outbreakin ten years, most commentators blamed weather and filthy water.According to authorities, heavy summer rains had washed infectedhuman waste out into Lake Michigan, endangering the entire citi-zenry. The Board of Health promised new protections for the city’swater supply – a seemingly progressive measure for this famouslycorrupt town.1

Yet Alice Hamilton, physician and resident of Hull House, arguedthat the scrutiny and action focused on the overall water supplymasked an ongoing injustice at a smaller scale. Only medicalentomology, she said, could explain ‘the peculiar localization of theepidemic’ in poor, immigrant neighborhoods like the nineteenthward.2 Hamilton was attracted to this new etiological theory for its

E-mail addresses: dbiehler@umbc.edu, dawn.biehler@gmail.com1 Not a hot day in the summer, Chicago Daily Tribune (31 August 1902) B1; Water wor

and G. Howe, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Recent Epidemic of Typhoid Fever in Chica2 Hamilton, Gernon and Howe, An Inquiry (note 1), 5.3 Asks Hull House to bring proof, Chicago Daily Tribune (15 April 1903) 16; A. Hamilt

Association 42 (1904) 1034; A. Hamilton, The fly as a carrier of typhoid, Journal of the AmeTransformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago, Chicago, 2005, 333–361.

4 Asks Hull House to bring proof, Chicago Daily Tribune (note 3); Hamilton, The comm

0305-7488/$ – see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.03.003

scientific cachet – and because it served Hull House’s aim to bringhealth services to Chicago’s poorest communities. In the wardswhere typhoid cases were concentrated, landlords bribed healthinspectors to ignore defective privies. Without a public check onthese private properties, house flies thrived in human waste.Hamilton concluded that flies carried germs from that waste to thehomes of unsuspecting neighbors.3 Polluted water could certainlythreaten the entire city. But upgrading safeguards for drinkingwater would do little to help renters whose fates were left to therandom flights of germ-ridden insects.

Hull House’s revelations of unequal health protection shockedthe city and helped spread worry to a nation swarming with flies.4

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, scientists andreformers called on emerging ideas about house flies to urge newinterventions in the urban environment. This paper examines how

se than ever, Chicago Daily Tribune (20 December 1902) 16; A. Hamilton, M. Gernongo, Chicago, 1903, 4.

on, The common house fly as a carrier of typhoid, Journal of the American Medicalrican Medical Association 40 (1903) 576–583; H. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental

on house fly as a carrier of typhoid (note 3).

D.D. Biehler / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–78 69

they attempted to reorder urban space, nature, and domestic life inlight of the ‘agency’ of flies.5 The contrast between Hamilton’sexplanation of the 1902 epidemic and that of the Board of Healthhighlights what flies meant for spatial imaginaries of urban health.The movement of flies between filthy and clean sites called forresponses that were often smaller in scale and more diffuse thanthe water supply reforms the Board of Health initially proposed.

Entomologists and public health agencies grappled with theways house flies wove networks of disease as they bred, fed, andflew throughout the city. How could authorities contain suchubiquitous insects that connected the city’s organic filth withintimate domestic spaces? I argue that reformers prescribedcontradictory actions based on divergent visions of how to controlthe urban environment. On the one hand, some saw these highlymobile vermin as a preventable outgrowth of slow and leakyecological flows, requiring the state to forcibly modernize urbanecologies. On the other hand, some believed that urban filth wasbeyond control; instead, the state should discipline citizens toeliminate fly-borne disease at the scale of individual domesticspaces. By examining anti-fly campaigns I intend to show howcommitments to sanitation and social control shaped efforts toremake urban landscapes – and the resistance posed by people andflies.

City health departments across the US launched fly-controlcampaigns in the first decades of the twentieth century. Entomo-logical studies and projects from several cities inform this paper,but I draw mostly upon sources from Chicago, Washington, andNew York, which launched divergent anti-fly campaigns. The firstsection of this paper situates fly control in the context of literatureabout urban environmental reform. The second reviews theemergence of medical entomology in tandem with the new publichealth and germ theory. The third explores how medical ento-mology constructed the urban fly as an agent of interconnection.Finally, I examine two interventions – screening campaigns andmanure ordinances – that illustrate distinct approaches toremaking the urban landscape, and the ways that nature and citi-zens resisted.

Citizens, nature, and urban environmental reform

This paper’s focus on the remaking of urban nature follows in partfrom political ecologists’ and environmental historians’ interest innature’s ‘agency’ and the rationalization of urban space. MatthewGandy has argued that Progressive-Era reformers re-ordered urbannature based on modernist fantasies, but Linda Nash’s observationthat ideas mix with the material world describes well the case ofthe house fly. To examine the fly’s role in material and imaginativegeographies of early-twentieth-century cities is to replace what

5 Many contemporary treatments referred to flies as agents. Hamilton, Gernon, and How114.

6 T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity, Berkeley, 2002; L. Nas67–69; M. Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Cambridge, MA, 2Akron, 1996; B. Braun, Writing a more-than-human urban geography, Progress in Huma

7 M. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, New York, 1998.8 M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: an Archaeology of Medical Perception, New York

Subjects, Durham, 2006; T. Osborne, Security and vitality: drains, liberalism and power inReason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, London, 1996; C. Otter,Journal of British Studies 43 (2004) 40–65; C. Otter, The vital city: public analysis, dairies517–537.

9 N. Rogers, Germs with legs: flies, disease, and the new public health, Bulletin of theProgress in Human Geography 24 (2000) 219–242; N. Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: MeEngendered/endangered: women, tuberculosis, and the project of citizenship, Journal of HM. Kaika, Interrogating the geographies of the familiar: domesticating nature and construResearch 28 (2004) 265–286.

Bruce Braun has called a ‘static stock of things’ found in manystudies of urban nature with beings that are engaged with thechanging flows of urban life, and with shifting, competing humanpractices. Many environmental reformers understood flies asprolifically and dangerously interconnected with an array of otherthings and spaces: horses, germs, fecal matter, food, garbage,stables, kitchens, and streets, to name a few.6 While these non-humans have resisted control, historical geographers such as MilesOgborn have noted that attempts to exert control over urbanlandscapes extend discourses of modernity, at the same timereconstituting the relation of individuals and families to the stateand public life.7 Here I show that early-twentieth-century sanitaryreformers imposed hygienic order with police power while at thesame time striving to selectively preserve complex urban ecologies,particularly the flow of manure through the city.

But some reformers doubted whether cities could achieve broadhygienic order, and instead sought to control health throughauthority over citizens in domestic space. Therefore this paper alsodraws upon the literature of governmentality and histories ofhealth and urban reform.8 Medical entomology placed newdemands upon city dwellers to adopt conduct that would containroving flies. As Naomi Rogers has shown, many fly-controlcampaigns aimed sharply at conduct in domestic space, especiallywomen’s conduct. Progressive-Era health and housekeepingmovements altered the home’s status as a private realm. SallieMarston and Susan Craddock have both shown how health andhome economics movements opened the home to the gaze ofexperts and the state. Nancy Tomes further shows that consumerproducts promising protection from ‘house diseases’ made healtha private duty for mothers. The case of fly control also illustrates theways the state attempted to alter conduct through domestic tech-nologies. Window screens maintained what Thomas Osborne hasreferred to as the ‘sanitary integrity’ of the home; by installingthem the state established (somewhat) permanent means ofbounding modern homes off from urban nature. Illusions of thesocially and environmentally independent dwelling abetted denialof the ecological connections between public and private space, asMaria Kaika reveals in her research on the domestication of water.9

The case of house flies shows how medical entomology renderedurban nature a threatening ‘other,’ and also cast the duty and toolsto manage that other into the domestic sphere.

As in the case of many sanitary nuisances, demands to fortify theborders of the home against flies fell with extra force upon racial-ized human ‘others’ whose spaces and practices authoritiesdeemed too close to urban nature. Hull House’s typhoid report, forinstance, asserted that flies connected the homes of immigrantswith the rest of the community. Many geographers and historians,such as Susan Craddock, Nayan Shah, Sylvia Washington, and Mary

e, An Inquiry (note 1), 9; L.O. Howard, The House Fly: Disease Carrier, New York, 1911,

h, The agency of nature or the nature of agency? Environmental History 10 (2005)002; J. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective,

n Geography 29 (2005) 635–650.

, 1973; A. Agrawal, Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making ofthe nineteenth century, in: A. Barry, N. Rose, T. Osborne (Eds), Foucault and PoliticalCleansing and clarifying: technology and perception in nineteenth-century London,and slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Britain, Cultural Geographies 13 (2006)

History of Medicine 63 (1989) 599–617; S. Marston, The social construction of scale,n, Women, and the Microbe in American Life, Cambridge, MA, 1998; S. Craddock,istorical Geography 27 (2001) 338–354; Osborne, Security and vitality (note 8), 114;

cting the autonomy of the modern home, International Journal of Urban and Regional

D.D. Biehler / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–7870

Poovey, have documented health authorities’ assertions of powerover the spaces and bodies of such ‘others.’10 Medical entomologyfocused attention on the poor and immigrants, sometimes byseeking to extend state protections by cleaning up fly-breedinghazards – as in Hull House’s crusade – and sometimes by assertingpower over spaces they deemed too permeable to nature anddisease.11

The origins of medical and sanitary entomology

Just as fly control could recast relationships among citizens, thestate, and urban nature, so too could a new public health paradigm.Medical entomology arrived by no coincidence at just sucha moment of transition. Sanitation based on the miasma theory ofdisease drove public health agendas through much of the nine-teenth century, establishing place and environment as the leadingdeterminants of health. Sanitarians pursued public welfare ideals,protecting all citizens from disease sources such as rotting organicmatter and foul waters. But at the turn of the century, a growingnumber of officials embraced germ theory, which enabled urbanhealth departments to identify and target specific sources ofinfection – such as human carriers or contaminated water –through laboratory methods. As the tools of bacteriology came intouse, some sought to scale back sanitation’s role in public health.12

Some historians of medicine have argued that this ‘new publichealth’ narrowed authorities’ focus from the whole environment tothe Petri dish, with a corresponding abandonment of publicwelfare.13

But the discovery of specific germs and the adoption of labora-tory techniques also enabled scientists to assert the role of insectsin disease transmission, keeping attention on the urban environ-ment. Naomi Rogers cites this development to qualify charges of‘narrowing.’ Sanitation remained relevant because disease-bearinganimals thrived in poor environmental conditions, but both germtheory and medical entomology could lead health departments tofocus their activities on particular places.14 I argue that in the caseof flies, health officials and entomologists disagreed on where totackle disease and pollution. Flies bred in horse manure in privatestables and public streets, and in human waste in backyard privies.They traversed the city in their flights – or so some believed –alighting upon produce in markets and milk in the dairyman’struck.15 They infiltrated homes through open windows and doors.Given ubiquitous flies, health authorities had to decide where to

10 S. Craddock, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco, MinneapChicago, 1995; N. Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s ChinatowRacism in Chicago, 1865–1954, Lanham, MA, 2005.

11 R. Shpak-Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 189012 J. Cassedy, Charles V. Chapin and the Public Health Movement, Cambridge, MA, 1962,13 P. Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine, New York, 1982, 189–196; M.

Station, TX, 1981; J. Duffy, The Sanitarians: The History of American Public Health, Urbana14 N. Rogers, Dirt, flies, and immigrants: explaining the epidemiology of poliomyelitis, 19

Rogers, Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR, New Brunswick, N. J., 1992.15 American Civic Association, Fight the flies, National Geographic Magazine 21 (1910) 38

87.16 Rogers, Germs with legs (note 9).17 R. Doane, Insects and Disease: A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects May Spre

Its Natural History, Medical Importance, and Control, Ithaca, NY, 1951, 5.18 E. Hayward, The fly as a carrier of tuberculosis infection, New York Medical Journ

Department of Health, A Monograph on the Epidemic of Poliomyelitis in New York City in19 G. Kober, Report on the prevalence of typhoid fever in the District of Columbia, Rep20 W. Reed, et al., Abstract of Report on the Origin and Spread of Typhoid Fever in the U.

Diseases probably caused by flies, British Medical Journal (1893) 1154; E. Austen, The housuppression, British Museum Economics Series, 1913; V. Cirillo, ‘Winged Sponges’: houseflPerspectives in Biology and Medicine 49 (2006) 52–63.

21 E. Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from Worlentomology, American Entomologist 47 (2001) 236–243; G. Patterson, The Mosquito War

direct limited resources: at the bounds of domestic space, thevulnerable food supply, or the filth that bred flies in the first place?

In the years before health departments launched fly-controlcampaigns targeting domestic space, folk wisdom saw nothingwrong with homes permeable to these insects. As Rogers hasshown, popular knowledge of flies prior to the 1890s cast them aspleasant domestic companions, harmless and even entertaining tochildren and pets. Children’s literature portrayed flies as naturallyclean because they washed their faces with their forelegs andseemed to remove garbage and other organic matter.16 One ento-mologist, Luther West, called the nineteenth century ‘the Period ofFriendly Tolerance’ of house flies. Another, Rennie Doane, recalledthat ‘a few of them were nice things to have around, to make thingshomelike.’17 By 1920, however, laboratory research had linked flieswith diseases ranging from typhoid to tuberculosis, from polio toinfantile diarrhea.18

At its origins, medical entomology pointed to disease threatsinside and outside the home. Reporting on Washington, D.C.’s 1895typhoid outbreak, George Kober became one of the first US healthofficials to link flies and outmoded backyard privies with a specificepidemic.19 But suspicion of flies only became widespread onlyafter the US Army surgeon Walter Reed offered new – if circum-stantial – evidence. Reed, best known for confirming the role ofmosquitoes in yellow fever, argued in 1898 that flies carriedtyphoid germs from primitive camp privies to mess halls at a mili-tary outpost during the Spanish–American War. Reed and hiscolleagues asserted that soldiers who ate in screened areas neverfell ill; the outbreak eased as cold weather killed off the flies; andflies left tracks of powdered lime that they had picked up from theprivy pits, a visual proxy for the microbes that also clung to theirfeet.20 When Alice Hamilton decried injustices in Chicago, she sawa resemblance between conditions in the nineteenth ward and theclose quarters and lack of sanitary infrastructure in military camps.

Flies were not the primary targets of medical entomology in itsearly years; campaigns against other vectors also enrolled citizensas protectors of public and private space. Mosquito control in theUS, for instance, spanned wild, public, and private landscapes,wherever health authorities saw unmanaged water. Malaria controlcampaigns often applied state power to transform nature at a broadscale, taming wetlands where the vector Anopheles bred. EdmundRussell has shown that the state wrapped pest control in meta-phors of war. The state also made citizens into managers of waterbodies near their homes.21 New Orleans’s 1905 campaign against

olis, 2000; M. Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864,n, Berkeley, 1999; S.H. Washington, Packing them In: An Archaeology of Environmental

–1919, Chicago, 1989.93–109.Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment: 1880–1980, College, IL, 1990.00–1916, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 44 (1989) 486–505; N.

3–385; G. Kober, Report of the Committee on Social Betterment, Washington, DC, 1908,

ad or Cause Some of Our Common Diseases, New York, 1910, 57; L. West, The Housefly:

al (1904) 643–644; C. Brues, Insects as carriers of infection, in City of New York1916, New York, 1917.ort of the Health Officer of the District of Columbia, Washington, DC, 1895, 252–292.S. Military Camps During the Spanish War of 1898, Washington, DC, 1900; S. Moore,se-fly, its life history, importance as a disease carrier and practical measures for its

ies as carriers of typhoid fever in 19th- and early twentieth century military camps,

d War I to Silent Spring, Cambridge, 2001; H. Geong, Carving a niche for medicals: A History of Mosquito Control in Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2004.

D.D. Biehler / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–78 71

yellow fever similarly engaged the public in environmental reformat the small scale of backyards and streetscapes. Screening cisternsand removing stray vessels from private property became personalconduct necessary to eliminate the standing water that the vectorAedes preferred.22 Physicians and naturalists also applied the toolsof medical entomology to rodents like rats, whose ectoparasites –fleas, in this case – could carry forms of bubonic plague and typhus.Guenter Risse has shown that San Francisco made rat control intoan expression of community hygiene among white residents in1907–8, while Susan Craddock and Joanna Dyl demonstrate thatthe same city severely restricted immigrants’ use of domestic andpublic space because of their association with rodents.23 Thesuccess of campaigns against mosquitoes and rats supported effortsto rid cities of flies, efforts that like all of these animals also spanneddomestic and public spaces.

Medical entomology became a new way of understanding themovement of disease through space, a cause for refashioningrelationships among citizens, the state, and urban nature. NaomiRogers has shown how health authorities ‘remade’ the reputationof flies, at the same time giving the war on germs a visible target. Iargue, following Timothy Mitchell’s examination of mosquitoes,that beliefs about flies also led authorities to remake urban envi-ronments, even while nature and citizens resisted.24 Healtheducators tried to render homes less physically permeable to urbannature in their efforts to end residents’ ‘friendly’ tolerance. Sani-tarians and entomologists attempted to expedite the materialflows – of manure, human waste, garbage, food, and milk – that,when exposed to nature, bred, fed, and infected flies. How couldhealth authorities make the city fly-proof? In the first two decadesof the twentieth century, medical entomology demanded that boththe state and citizens shape their environmental conduct based onthe belief that flies created networks of interconnection betweendiseased and healthy places.

Fly-breeding landscapes and notions of interconnection

At a time when it was becoming possible for the state to isolatehuman carriers of disease, flies could instead reinforce the notion thatthe city still shared a single social body. If ubiquitous insects carrieddisease, then the city environment seemed far less discrete andcontrollable. Flies embodied cities’ unsanitary conditions, and madethose conditions mobile. Stables and streets, kitchens and backyardsall attracted house flies and abetted copious reproduction withfragrant organic matter. Fly-borne disease cried out for renewed stateintervention in civic and domestic spaces. Before we discuss theseinterventions, however, we must first examine how medical ento-mology reinterpreted urban landscapes, particularly the intercon-nections among urban people, and between people and nature. Theseinterconnections created sharp imperatives for the state to reshapethe environment through power over nature and citizens.

22 R. Boyce, Yellow Fever Prophylaxis in New Orleans, London, 1906; J. Carrigan, The sadissertation, Louisiana State University, 1961.

23 G. Risse, ‘A long pull, a strong pull, and all together’: San Francisco and bubonic plaguPlagues (note 10); J. Dyl, The war on rats versus the right to keep chickens: plague andCulture, Landscape, and Urban Space, Rochester, 2006, 38–61.

24 Mitchell, Rule of Experts (note 6).25 For discussion of these dynamics of health inspection, see T. Crook, Sanitary inspec

liberal governance, Social History 32 (2007) 369–393.26 Department of Health of the City of New York, Annual Report, 1895. For reviews of the

2007.27 For example, see J. Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House: with Autobiographical Notes28 The Hull House typhoid study documents Chicago’s privy situation. Hamilton, Gern29 H. Geong, Exerting control: Biology and Bureaucracy in the Development of Ameri

sin-Madison, 1999; Geong, Carving a niche (note 21).30 L.O. Howard, A contribution to the study of the insect fauna of human excrement, P

Medical entomology upheld sanitarians’ understanding of thecity as an environment rife with shared disease threats – many ofwhich had proven intractable to mitigation efforts. Health lawsencoded modernization of private stables, public garbage collec-tions, and privies, but in practice enforcement was subject tonegotiation with both nature and human interests.25 Most impor-tantly, cities would have to grapple with fly-breeding so long ashorses powered most urban transport. Hundreds of thousands oftons of manure accumulated in the stables where horses were keptand the streets that they traversed.26 In many cities, garbagecollections and street cleaning remained tenuous and uneven,neglecting especially the poorest neighborhoods, in spite of workby sanitary engineers.27 Backyard privies also persisted in manypoor districts, even as health departments endeavored to replacethem with sewage hook-ups. For instance, although Chicago led thenation in sewer installation before 1900, it only mandated modernplumbing in 1896. Even several years afterwards, illegal priviesmade up half of all facilities in poor districts like the nineteenthward.28 Fly-breeding landscapes spanned public and private spaceand were subject to state intervention, but inspections and infra-structure imposed order on them slowly and unevenly.

Given the dense network that flies wove between breeding sitesand other places, authorities questioned where to target municipalefforts to reduce disease. Should health departments prevent fly-breeding by enforcing laws aimed at horse manure, and by improvingsewage and garbage services? Or should they dispatch inspectors andeducators to ensure that homes were screened against outdoorswarms? These distinct approaches to fly control would requiredifferent deployments of power: broad police power to modernizematerial flows, versus the power to reshape domestic conduct. Theyalso assumed different degrees of permeability of boundaries withinthe city – the social boundaries among communities, and the physicalones between home and street. These questions remained unre-solved among health authorities and entomologists.

The US Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Entomology, anagency dedicated to researching, educating, and advising on insectcontrol, took the position that the state must assume control overorganic wastes to protect citizens in their homes.29 Bureau chiefLeland Ossian Howard pressed authorities to attack major breedingsites in the city at-large, an approach he claimed would renderhousehold-level control superfluous. Howard’s own researchrevealed that ‘of the flies that infest dwelling houses, both in citiesand on farms, a vast proportion come from horse manure,’ thougha few originated in privies or garbage. Flies’ secondary preferencefor human feces supported Howard’s call for further infrastructuremodernization.30 Fly-breeding in defective privies, though lessvoluminous than in stables, could prove perilous because flies thereeasily accessed human intestinal infections like typhoid andcholera. To protect the public would require stepped-up efforts atsewer construction; in places where sewers were far from

ffron scourge: a history of yellow fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905, Unpublished PhD

e, 1907–1908, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66 (1992) 260–286; Craddock, City ofthe paving of San Francisco, 1907–1908, in: A. Isenberg (Ed.), The Nature of Cities:

tion and the public sphere in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain: a case study in

role of horses in the city, see C. McShane and J. Tarr, The Horse in the City, Baltimore,

, Boston, 1999, 98–99, 152–155.on and Howe, An Inquiry (note 1). See also Platt, Shock Cities (note 3).can Entomology, 1870–1930, Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wiscon-

roceedings of the Washington Academy of Sciences 2 (1900) 541–604.

Fig. 1. In a cartoon from New York’s 1914 anti-fly campaign, a fly connects conditionsin a horse stable with baby’s milk – and baby gets involved in fly control. Courtesy:Library of Congress.

D.D. Biehler / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–7872

complete, the city should enforce fly-proofing of privies in theinterim – again according to Bureau designs. Garbage and animalcorpses, finally, though more minor breeding media, shouldnonetheless be incinerated wherever cities could afford thenecessary facilities.31 According to the Bureau, domestic spacewould be best protected if the state forcibly unclogged urbanlandscapes of their fly-breeding waste.

In advocating broad public protection against flies, the Bureauasserted flies’ ability to connect disparate people and places withinthe city. Entomologists referred to flies’ physiology to explain itstendency to spread disease rampantly. Musca domestica lackedpiercing mouthparts to extract a nourishing bloodmeal and musttherefore feed continuously, flitting with powerful wings fromdung heap to milk bottle (Fig. 1).32 The Bureau’s W. Dwight Pierce,who edited the text Sanitary Entomology – a title that evoked thebroad-based traditions of the old public health – contended thatflies could wander for miles, such that disease in any neighborhoodposed a threat to the entire city. Pierce advised civil engineers,‘Little by little it has sunk into the human consciousness that yourhealth and my health depend upon the health of every other livingcreature in our community.’33 Medical entomology thus evokedsanitarians’ social welfare stance, and backed it with knowledge ofinsect biology.

Hull House’s study of the 1902 typhoid outbreak also evokednotions of interconnection, in this case to enlist the sympathies ofaffluent Chicagoans in the cause of equalizing sanitary conditions.The poor Jews, Greeks, Italians, Poles, and Irish of the nineteenthward had not enjoyed the protection of Chicago’s expanding healthinfrastructure. Not only did health inspectors ignore defectiveprivies; the city had also rejected Hull House founder Jane Addams’bid to provide adequate garbage service. As Harold Platt has shown,Hull House had for years fought to bring this community sanitaryservices.34 Alice Hamilton dressed her arguments for state inter-ventions in the science of entomology. When Hamilton and her co-authors Maud Gernon and Gertrude Howe mapped the nineteenthward’s typhoid cases, they found no correspondence betweenhomes with sickness and those with defective privies. Theyconcluded, therefore, that health threats were not limited thoseimmediately exposed to filth; flies could carry germs alongunpredictable flight patterns to neighboring homes.35 It took onlyone corrupt landlord to support the flies that endangered the entirecommunity.

Like other advocates for the health of the poor, Hull Houseappealed to the self-protective impulse of affluent neighbors, andmedical entomology affirmed the sense that rich and poor weretightly connected.36 The authors noted that fruit and vegetabledeliveries that served the rest of the city originated near thenineteenth ward. ‘Occupants of property where there is the mostscrupulous compliance with sanitary ordinances cannot safeguardtheir own health or their lives if near them are such nuisances,’ theywarned. ‘The river wards cannot be isolated.’37 According to HullHouse, flies reduced the social distance between poor immigrants

31 L.O. Howard and F.C. Bishopp, The house fly and how to suppress it, Department of32 N. Cobb, The house fly, National Geographic 21 (May 1910) 371–380; N. Cobb, Notes33 W.D. Pierce, Why American cities must fight insects, American City (August 1919) 1434 Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (note 27); Platt, Shock Cities (note 3).35 Hamilton, Gernon, and Howe, An Inquiry (note 1).36 A. Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000, New York, 2001, 1637 Hamilton, Gernon, and Howe, An Inquiry (note 1), 18–19.38 Asks Hull House to bring proof, Chicago Daily Tribune (note 3); Platt, Shock Cities (n39 Howard and Bishopp, The house fly and how to suppress it (note 31).40 L.O. Howard, House-flies, in: L.O. Howard, C.L. Marlatt (Eds), The Principal Household

house fly and how to suppress it (note 31).41 M. Talbot, House Sanitation: A Manual for Housekeepers, Boston, 1913, 99–100.

and the wealthy. The report succeeded in using flies to make thenineteenth ward’s illness a city-wide problem, raising a publicoutcry that swept out corrupt inspectors.38

Improving inspections, extending sewers, and repairing defec-tive privies would require expenditure of public funds, and theBureau of Entomology had plans for making fly control a budgetarypriority. Under Leland Howard, the Bureau created propagandabased on the belief that a public well-informed of the perils ofurban flies would demand protection from the state.39 Howardcampaigned to replace the familiar name ‘house fly’ with ‘typhoidfly,’ and to expose the fly’s horrifying characteristics: its copiousreproduction, its habit of vomiting digestive juices to dissolve solidfoods, its coat of tiny hairs that increased the surface area to whichgerms could cling. But Howard was not primarily worried abouthouseholders’ own tolerance of flies. His purpose in stoking fear offlies was to rouse the public to pressure officials for expandedsanitation laws.40 Howard received some support from homeeconomists such as Marion Talbot, who urged readers to agitate forpublic garbage and sewage services. She wrote in 1913, ‘A smallproportion of the effort now expended in encouraging people to killflies, if devoted to training them to demand effective scavenging,would be much more likely to accomplish the end sought.’41 Talbotand Howard thus agreed that it was the power of the state, not theconduct of householders, that would best tame unhealthy urbannature. Fear of the ‘fly menace,’ however, became Howard’s best-known legacy, overshadowing the public advocacy that motivated

Agriculture Farmers’ Bulletin (1925).on the distances flies can travel, National Geographic (May 1910) 380–383.6–148.

3.

ote 3).

Insects of the United States, Washington, DC, 1896, 43–47; Howard and Bishopp, The

D.D. Biehler / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–78 73

his rhetoric in the first place. Even in his own time, Howard’sholistic ideal of sanitary cities was forgotten as other anti-flycampaigns used worries about flies to enroll householders asenvironmental stewards.

While the Bureau and Hull House evoked notions of intercon-nection to urge state intervention against the public peril of flies,other campaigns did so to urge residents to protect themselves. Theinterconnections created by flies became, for some experts,a reason to shore up the home’s defenses, rather than preventingflies as part of a collective, state effort. Clark University physiologistC.F. Hodge, for example, used Howard’s ‘typhoid fly’ moniker toassert that women must deploy domestic technology against flies.In popular magazines Hodge urged housewives to purchase flytraps and fly poisons as the ultimate barrier against the diseasedoutdoor environment. Hodge envisioned an urban landscape wherefly traps stood vigil by every front porch and back door; indoors,smaller traps and child-safe insecticides destroyed insects thatslipped past border defenses.42 Hodge’s efforts recall observationsby Nancy Tomes and Roger Miller that new domestic technologiescleaved the home from public space, and communicated that itwould fall to housewives to steward health and hygiene there.43

While the Bureau and Hull House set an agenda of broad envi-ronmental reform to eliminate the places where flies reproduced,Hodge believed that breeding sites were too intractable for publicintervention. He insisted that Howard’s idealism about publicinfrastructure was misplaced.

42 C. HFollette’Outlook

43 R. M(note 9

44 Hod45 S. H

1980, 17the Hist

46 Chi47 M.

Remove48 Chi

In the city, the miles of gutters and sewers specially con-structed to carry off filth, the public dumps and stray accu-mulations . and in the country the miles of roadsides andacres of barnyards and pastures, and the train-loads ofmanure from the cities, render attack upon the breeding-places of the fly utterly hopeless and impossible.44

Fig. 2. A 1916 cartoon from the Chicago Board of Health’s public newsletter illustratessimple domestic technologies for fly control and sanitation. Courtesy: ChicagoMunicipal Reference Collection.

According to Hodge, flies would always evade state control; thehousewife should therefore equip her home with small-scalemeans of killing insect invaders. The notion of interconnection,employed by Hull House in welfare rhetoric, could thus also be usedto produce householders as consumers and individualistic envi-ronmental subjects who patrolled the borders of domestic space.

Health departments and home economics instructors followedHodge’s lead, urging women to make the home impervious to theclouds of flies outside.45 The gendered task of disease preventiondemanded vigilant control of the borders of the home and flows ofdomestic waste; cycles of waste production and fly reproductionwere unrelenting. Chicago’s Board of Health advised in 1917 thateven in the dead of winter ‘every housewife should . go carefullyover her house to see that there is not a fly now living in it’46 (Fig. 2).A domestic advice columnist summed up the character of women’swork to eliminate infestation: ‘After all has been done to mitigatethe nuisance, the fact remains that eternal vigilance is the price ofimmunity from these and other household pests.’47 To protect the

odge, A practical point in the study of typhoid or filth fly, Nature Study Review 6s Weekly 3 (1911) 7–8; C. Hodge, How you can make your home, town, or city, fl(1911).iller, Selling Mrs. consumer: advertising and the creation of suburban socio-spa

).ge, How you can make your home, town, or city, flyless (note 42), 16. See also G.Soy, Municipal housekeeping: the role of women in improving urban sanitation pra3–198; Rogers, Germs with legs (note 9); N. Tomes, The private side of public heaory of Medicine 64 (1990) 509–539; S. Hoy, Chasing Dirt: the American Pursuit ofcago Board of Health, Clean Living, February 1917, 11.Harland, Helping hand, Chicago Daily Tribune (1916) 13. See also S. Elliott, HouseThem, London, 1938.

cago Board of Health, Clean Living, May 1916, 12.

family and avoid shame demanded that women unceasinglysteward the home as an edifice against the filthy public sphere.

In some ways, anti-fly education campaigns transmitted tocitizens a positive view of the city as a space shared and managedby neighbors near and far. The Chicago Board of Health, forexample, filled its newsletter with poems, cartoons, and stories thatstressed the connection of household to environment. A 1916 poemurged ‘Put cover on your garbage/Revamp the rusty screen/Driveout the rat and bedbug/The roach and fly obscene.’ The final coupletemphasized duty to the broader community’s health: ‘Look widebeyond the fences/The city is your home.’48 But campaigns alsorepresented the home as a space apart from the city that must be

(1910) 195–199; C. Hodge, A plan to exterminate the typhoid or filth-disease fly, Layless, Nature and Culture 3 (1911) 9–23; C. Hodge, Exterminating the fly, California

tial relations, 1910–1930, Antipode 23 (1991) 263–301; Tomes, The Gospel of Germs

. Graham-Smith, Flies in Relation to Disease: Non-bloodsucking Flies, Cambridge, 1913.ctices, 1880–1917, in: M. Melosi (Ed.), Pollution and Reform in American Cities, Austin,lth: sanitary science, domestic hygiene, and the germ theory, 1870–1900, Bulletin ofCleanliness, New York, 1995.

hold Hygiene, Chicago, 1905; L. Hunter, Domestic Pests: What They Are and How to

D.D. Biehler / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–7874

protected from fly incursions, turning flies into a stigma on placesand people. A brochure from the North Carolina Board of Healthscolded, ‘Are you a careless housekeeper? Be sure the flies will findyou out. If you want to keep your own self-respect and that of yourfriends and neighbors, don’t let anyone find your house full offlies.’49 Hygiene educators laid on fear and shame to reinforce thephysical line between urban nature and private space. Whetherthey stressed positive connection to community or negative stigma,campaigns aimed to produce subjects who imagined the health oftheir own homes as linked with the rest of the city.

As health departments allocated municipal resources to fightflies, notions of interconnection could work in two distinct andopposing ways. On the one hand, the Bureau of Entomology andHull House asserted that the state must apply its broad powers toreform urban landscapes that bred flies. At the same time, however,other entomologists and health experts called on householders,particularly women, to manage the hygienic borders of their homesagainst insects that spanned the city. As municipalities attemptedto eliminate fly-borne disease, knowledge of interconnectionmarked the policies that they imposed upon nature and urbancitizens.50

Manure and screens: fly-proofing urban ecologies

Depending upon health authorities’ interpretations of flies, theymight target urban ecological flows or the borders of the home forenvironmental reform. Here I examine two of the several fly-control strategies used by health departments, and the ways theymeshed with nature and householders. One of these strategies,regulating horse manure, illustrates the ways medical entomolo-gists and health officials aimed to rationalize the city’s materialflows. Manure was only one of many such flows that intermingledwith menacing insects; flies also bred and fed on human waste,garbage, milk, and food, and the state regulated these, too. Theother strategy, screening homes against flies, shows that healthauthorities and city dwellers, particularly immigrants, struggledover domestic practices. Controlling fly-breeding sites and disci-plining domestic space were not in theory mutually exclusiveactivities. But these approaches expressed quite different ways ofgoverning public and private space and urban nature.

Controlling fly-breeding sites required intervening in a basicelement of urban ecologies: the rich flow of nutrients, in the form ofhorse manure, between cities and nearby farms. Even decadesbefore germ theory emerged, authorities considered manurea miasmatic menace. New York, for instance, regulated stableconditions by the 1870s, but enforcement proved a perpetualproblem.51 At the turn of the century, new knowledge of flies’ rolein disease heightened the imperative to control not only stableswhere manure accumulated, but also the entire transport networkalong which it traveled. Networks of fly movement entangled with

49 North Carolina State Board of Health, Flies are a disgrace, Bulletin 21 (1914).50 J.C. Torrey, Numbers and types of bacteria carried by city flies, Journal of Infectious Dis

of bacteria carried by the common house fly in sanitary and insanitary city areas, JouPhiladelphia, 1908, 277.

51 R.A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: from Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation, Philadethe Formation of Modern Brooklyn, Iowa City, 1999, 44–51; Department of Health of the

52 W.D. Pierce (Ed.), Sanitary Entomology: the Entomology of Disease, Hygiene, and SanitatCity of New York Department of Health, Public Health Leaflet, undated (w1915).

53 Department of Health, Annual Report of the Health Officer of the District of Columbia84–85; Howard, The House Fly (note 5), 285, 290; L.O. Howard, Economic loss to the peopBulletin 78 (1909) 772; Pierce, Why American cities must fight insects (note 33); Pierce

54 Department of Health, ARHODC, 1907, 31.55 Department of Health, ARHODC, 1906 (note 53).56 Department of Health, ARHODC, 1908, 69; Department of Health, ARHODC, 1916, 29

these pathways. Entomologists viewed flies’ natural affinity forhorse dung as an imperative to tightly control the businesses thatmoved it – without, as the Bureau of Entomology insisted, wastingits value as fertilizer. The Bureau’s W. Dwight Pierce wrote, ‘Manureis a valuable product and every effort should be made to conserveand utilize it.’ But many feared manure’s slow and leaky flowthrough the city. Maggots matured as manure piled up at poorlyequipped stables, waiting for private haulers to remove it. Haulersferried manure – in horse-drawn trucks, of course – to train depotsor docks, and spills along the way allowed larvae to emerge ascarriers of death.52 Manure was a vital resource that nonethelessposed grave hazards to urban people along its chaotic coursethrough the city.

Influenced by local residents George Kober and Leland Howard,Washington took early steps to rationalize manure flows based onknowledge of flies. In 1906 the city ordered haulers to use routesthat minimized exposure in dense neighborhoods, and dictatedthat stables be surfaced with impervious materials and equippedwith fly-proof manure pits. Kober lamented Washington’s endlessstruggle with typhoid and blamed it in part on high temperaturesthat both sped and prolonged fly-breeding. Heat made it impera-tive to expedite and contain manure flows. In the warmer half ofthe year, when fly maturation proceeded most quickly, the pitsmust be emptied twice weekly. Howard and the Bureau promotedWashington’s ordinance as a model anti-fly law for municipalitiesacross the US; Pierce, along with colleague Frederick Bishopp,offered plans for sanitary stables.53 The new public orders informedby medical entomology aimed to render some of the most organicsites in the city inhospitable to flies through regimented transportand modern construction.

Yet just when Washington aspired to rationalize flows ofmanure, urban growth itself made this prospect more difficult, andpeople who kept horses in the city felt scrutiny from both the stateand their neighbors. A year after the new regulations, health offi-cials lamented that, ‘with the growth of the city, the volume ofmanure to be disposed of has increased, and the distances to whichit must be hauled in order properly to dispose of it have length-ened.’ The connections between Washington’s stables and theirhistoric manure sinks – rural farms – were stretched to their limits,as farmers declined to pay rising transport costs.54 Health author-ities, seeing the failure of their vision of rapid manure flows,unsuccessfully called for a tax on horses to support public fundingof manure collection.55 Meanwhile, as stable owners faced diffi-culty finding outlets for horse droppings, department agentsstepped-up enforcement under the new law, quadrupling inspec-tions in the first three years, and entering some two thousandstables in a new city registry.56 In addition to this new statesurveillance and the difficulty disposing of manure, horse ownersand stable-keepers, including many African–Americans recentlyarrived in Washington, faced heightened resentment from a public

ease 10 (1912) 166–177; G.L. Cox, F.C. Lewis and E.F. Glynn, The number and varietiesrnal of Hygiene 12 (1912) 290–319; E. Jordan, A Text-book of General Bacteriology,

lphia, 1985; M. Linder and L. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture andCity of New York, Annual Report (note 26), 30.ion, Boston, 1921, 153; H. Greeley, Various vermin which menace health and comfort,

(ARHODC), 1906, 40; Kober, Report of the Committee on Social Betterment (note 15),le of the United States through insects that carry disease, USDA Bureau of Entomology(Ed.), Sanitary Entomology (note 52).

.

Fig. 3. A New York stable before clean-up. From Flies and Diarrheal Disease.

D.D. Biehler / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–78 75

alarmed about both the danger of flies and also the treatment ofdraft animals.57 At the very moment when medical entomologydemanded modernization of Washington’s horse stables, theecological system that encompassed them was disintegrating, andthe people who kept horses in the city bore much of the strain andscrutiny. As much as medical entomologists wished to maintain theplace of stables in city ecologies, troubling knowledge of flies cameat a time when horses and their people were becoming ever moremarginal in cities.

Meanwhile, some entomologists had begun to consider alter-natives to speeding flows of manure: chemical treatment couldsever flies’ tight ecological relationship with dung. Researcherstested whether dousing manure with formaldehyde, the arsenic-based Paris green, or other chemicals could kill maggots, or eveneggs, before they matured and escaped from the pile. Although heperformed some of the early tests, Leland Howard insisted in 1909that ‘it will not be necessary to treat horse manure with chloride oflime or with kerosene or with a solution of Paris green or arsenateof lead’; cities should instead focus on controlling accumulations. In1913, however, after years of unsuccessful calls by the HealthDepartment to fund public manure collection, Howard becameresigned to using larvacides. He enlisted Bureau chemists, includingF.C. Cook, to discern which treatments would sever manure’sfertilizing properties from its capacity to nourish maturing flylarvae. Howard knew that disentangling the fly network from themanure network would be a delicate operation. Formaldehyde andParis green killed larvae effectively, but they also diminished themicrobes that helped make manure an effective fertilizer, a risk that

57 For examples of public resentment against stables, see Washington Times, Neighborhbox factory, 8 Nov, 1907; Washington Times, Stable a menace to public health, 15 Nov, 19horse-keepers, see John Heap, History of the Washington Humane Society, Records of thReport (1907). McShane and Tarr, The Horse in the City (note 26), 37–39, also shows the

58 F.H. Cook, et al., Experiments in the destruction of fly larvae in horse manure, Bulle(note 52), 154; Howard, Economic loss to the people of the United States through insec

59 Department of Health of the City of New York, Annual Report, 1915, 37. The newfly-breeding flows: human waste from the city’s remaining privies, and household refu

60 Greeley, Various vermin which menace health and comfort (note 52). There is eviBerkeley housefly campaign, California Journal of Technology 14 (1909). See also Linder anSink (note 6), 329–331; McShane and Tarr, The Horse in the City (note 26), 123–125.

prior researchers had failed to consider. Cook found that boroncompounds did the least damage to manure’s vitality, but these toorequired care in application. Stable-keepers too often overusedborax, and poisoned manure could kill crops. Managing manurehad long demanded constant vigilance from stable-keepers; withthe knowledge that flies served as agents of disease came newmethods for ordering the fecund environment of the stable, butthese also threatened cities’ ecological relationships with farms.Chemical controls manipulated manure’s very nature, rendering it‘unfit for flies’ while just barely preserving its capacity to supportcrop life.58

In 1915, shortly following the Bureau’s studies on larvacides,New York City revised its entire sanitary code, launching ‘a vigorouscampaign against prevailing conditions, in connection with [thefly’s] principal breeding place – manure.’59 Even more than DC,New York’s Department of Health aimed to contain the entiretransit of manure from urban horse to rural farm – and also toencourage those who handled manure to use borax against flies.Unlike in Washington, New York’s manure transport networkswere still largely intact, with railroads and barges continuing themovement and sale of urban manure to neighboring farmingcommunities. Thus, in addition to requiring immediate moderni-zation of stables and registration of thousands of stable-keepers,the department also intervened in other nodes of the manurenetwork.60 Surfaces of rail platforms and docks must be imper-vious, graded into drains, and cleaned on a daily basis. Followingaccusations by the city Merchants’ Association that human waste inthe rivers bred flies, the city also demanded that scows be edged

ood News: Eckington, 11 March, 1906; Washington Times, Complain of stable: under07; Washington Herald, The price of beef, 17 Jan, 1910. For examples of criticism of

e Columbia Historical Society 25 (1923) 57–67; Washington Humane Society, Annualassociation of horses with blacks and Irish in other cities.

tin of the US Department of Agriculture 118 (1914); Pierce (Ed.), Sanitary Entomologyts that carry disease (note 53).code also tightened regulations on what Leland Howard considered more minor

se.dence that stable owners resisted some of these new regulations. W. Herms, Thed Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County (note 51); Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate

Fig. 4. A modernized stable in New York. Note the stable-keeper ‘disinfecting’ manure in a pit with borax solution. From Flies and Diarrheal Disease.

D.D. Biehler / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–7876

with protective curtains to prevent horse dung from creatinganother fly-breeding hazard at the waterfront.61 So urgent was theneed to contain and speed manure flows that city council antici-pated manure build-ups during transport worker strikes. Untillaborers returned, health officers would apply borax to piles andspills at transportation depots.62 Even in cities well-connected withneighboring farms, medical entomology insisted on the need formanure to move quickly – and in a nearly sterile state – througha modernized transport network (Figs. 3 and 4).

At the turn of the twentieth century, entomologists like LelandHoward and health authorities in Washington and New Yorkbelieved that cities could be modernized while maintainingecological flows. Their approach to fly control – although some-times unsuccessful – was far more holistic and confluent withtraditions of sanitation than was discipline aimed at domesticconduct. It sought to reduce urban fly populations, rather thandevolving responsibility for health to the home’s hygienic borders.But far more than under miasma theory, the state would nowsubject manure to opposing imperatives. Leland Howard and thecity of Washington at first envisioned that expedited material flowsand modern construction would protect the public from fly-bornedisease. But when urban ecologies proved too slow still to halt fly-breeding, entomologists and health authorities used chemicaltreatments to not only manipulate the environments wheremanure accumulated and flowed, but also manure’s very capacityto support life.

Amid these efforts to tame manure, Washington, New York,and Chicago also attempted to reshape householders’ conductwith respect to insects. Health departments urged women to

61 D. Jackson, Pollution of New York Harbor as a Menace to Health by the Dissemination62 Greeley, Various vermin which menace health and comfort (note 52).63 Department of Health, ARHODC, 1912, 19.64 R. Lynes, The Domesticated Americans, New York, 1963, 129–132. Lynes offers ane

householders tolerated the presence of flies.65 McShane and Tarr, The Horse in the City (note 26), 125; E. Abbott, The Tenements of

avoid attracting flies by stewarding flows of garbage and main-taining a spotless kitchen. Washington, for instance, roused25,000 households to participate in one anti-fly crusade at nearlythe same time when Leland Howard finally put his supportbehind chemical treatment of manure – perhaps because thecity’s model law had proven so difficult to execute.63 Among otherdomestic interventions, window screens are notable as tools bywhich health authorities could assert subtle control over domesticspace. Architectural historians have described this simple tech-nology as a ‘humane’ innovation that shielded people frommosquito bites while allowing cool, fresh air to flow on porchesand through homes.64 But across US cities and towns, manywindows and doors remained unscreened. Health advocates whosaw the home as the ultimate defense against flies used educationand health codes to reform these gaping hygienic borders of thedwelling unit.

Chicago’s Board of Health made disciplining city dwellers athome the center of its anti-fly crusade, urging use of windowscreens more forcefully than it dictated conditions in stables. ClayMcShane and Joel Tarr have found that, dating to the days ofmiasma theory, Chicago’s stable ordinances and their enforcementwere weaker than those of other cities; a Hull House study at thetime documented uncovered manure accumulating in alleys inpoor neighborhoods.65 Meanwhile, Chicago’s Board of Healthemphasized domestic practices, particularly the use of window anddoor screens, as the main protection against fly-borne infections.Hull House in 1903 impressed upon Chicagoans the need for broad-scale sanitation to protect poor and affluent wards alike, but thecity dedicated much of its educational work to sealing off the home

of Intestinal Diseases through the Aagency of the Common House Fly, New York, 1907.

cdotes that contradict the remembrances of Rennie Doane and Luther West that

Chicago, 1908–1935, Chicago, 1936, 477–478.

Fig. 5. A sensational 1916 cartoon from the Chicago Board of Health’s public newsletterurges householders to take responsibility for their own contributions to fly-breeding.Courtesy: Chicago Municipal Reference Collection.

D.D. Biehler / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–78 77

from the city.66 In 1917 the city enacted fines against propertyowners who failed to screen all window and door openings.67

While inspections would help enforce the new law among land-lords – like those who had violated privy ordinances in 1902 –Chicago’s fly-control education campaigns also emphasized theimperative for individual families – in single-family homes, asshown in one cartoon – to protect their own households withscreens (Fig. 5). The Board of Health’s newsletter advised motherson the need for domestic hygiene to preserve health, featuringways of keeping vermin from entering the home. The Board ofHealth sought to make ‘revamping the screen’ a yearly ritual tomaintain the hygienic borders of the home against the dangers ofurban nature in the form of flies.

New York’s experience with screening, however, shows thatresidents did not passively receive this seemingly simple alteration

66 Chicago authorities accepted findings like those from Cornell and Liverpool that flieproblem of polluted areas. Chicago Board of Health, War on the Rat and Other Household

67 City Council of the City of Chicago, An ordinance requiring dwellings, tenement houChicago (1917) 319; City Council of the City of Chicago, An ordinance requiring stables(1917) 320.

68 Department of Health of the City of New York, Annual Report, 1912; Department of69 D. Becker, The visitor to the New York City poor, 1843–1920, Unpublished PhD disser

Association for improving the condition of the poor to child welfare, 1843–1939, Unpub70 D. Armstrong, The house-fly and diarrheal disease among children, Journal of the

Condition of the Poor (AICP), Flies and Diarrheal Disease, New York, 1914.71 AICP, Flies and Diarrheal Disease (note 70), 11.72 AICP, Flies and Diarrheal Disease, New York, 1915, 10.

of domestic space, and that Chicago’s vision of domestic spacereflected a failure to consider life in tenement buildings. When NewYork updated its own health codes, it contemplated makingwindow and door screens a central element of disease control.68 In1913, the city Department of Health supported a study by theAssociation for Improving the Condition of the Poor, testing theeffectiveness of a variety of fly-control strategies in reducinginfantile diarrhea. The Association’s usual activities aimed toreduce disease among the poor by educating mothers and sendingchildren to ‘fresh air’ sites. Like many Progressive-Era health andwelfare agencies, it subjected the bodies and domestic spaces ofimmigrants to surveillance by social workers and nurses.69 In thefirst year of trials, mothers on the experimental blocks – an Italiandistrict in Brooklyn composed mostly of tenements – receivedinstruction on domestic fly control, and Boy Scouts installedscreens in all doors and windows.70 The Association purported tofortify the home’s hygienic borders so that children would beprotected from flies even in the absence of watchful nurses.

Residents, however, considered screens unbearable limitationson the fluidity of domestic and public space. Investigators foundthat ‘during the warm weather’ – the moment when outdoornature most threatened children with teeming insects – ‘it waspractically impossible to keep the screens either in or closed. Notonly were they taken out, but they were torn out, and in some casesdestroyed.’71 The following year, the Association attempted torepeat the experiment in Manhattan, only for a new batch of resi-dents – this time mostly Polish and Russian – to resist as well.

s did nPests, C

ses, etc.to be scr

Health otation, Clished PAmeric

For the women of the lower East Side, a window possesses animportance of the first magnitude, and the suggestion ofscreening a window in such a way as to curtail ever soslightly its important social function will not readily beentertained. Even sliding screens, the installation of whichamounts to a very considerable sum, were found to be quiteimpracticable.72

The Association imagined unscreened windows as openingdomestic space to the diseased public realm. For residents,however, open windows and doors made the domestic realmpermeable for engagement with children and neighbors outdoors.The middle-class Progressives of the Association and the HealthDepartment failed to anticipate that screens would curtail the flowof civic life in tenement communities. The Association furtherconcluded that children old enough to walk spent so much of theirtime playing outdoors that any protection rendered by screens wasmeaningless. Although Chicago promoted screening vigorously,and New York’s Department of Health continued to recommend theuse of screens, the latter declined to require screens by law.

The Department of Health and the Association did, however,seek other ways to control tenement-dwellers’ exposure to fly-borne disease in domestic space. After women tore out windowscreens in the second year of the Association’s experiment, nursesintroduced nets for covering babies’ cribs and prams. Furthermore,

ot travel far from the places where they hatched, making them a localizedhicago, 1922, 7; Jordan, A Text-book of General Bacteriology (note 50).

, to be screened against flies, Journal of the Proceedings of the City Council ofeened against flies, Journal of the Proceedings of the City Council of Chicago

f the City of New York, Annual Report (note 59).olumbia University, 1960; R. Padernacht, The contributions of the New YorkhD dissertation, St. John’s University, 1976.

an Medical Association 62 (1914) 200–201; Association for Improving the

D.D. Biehler / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–7878

the Association asserted – based on analysis of infantile diarrheacases in households under surveillance – that if mothers werenegligent housekeepers and also refused both screens and netting,their babies were far more likely to suffer illness and possiblydeath.73 Health reformers were eager to install devices in thehomes of immigrants and the poor in order to protect infants’bodies from flies; screens and netting offered a means of extendingpower over environments managed by poor and immigrantmothers.

In spite of some reformers’ enthusiasm for screens as tools ofdomestic control, some entomologists objected to screens, chargingthat these costly fixtures did little to prevent insect invasions incities swarming with flies. Leland Howard condemned the waste ofresources expended to install screens; he estimated that the nationspent $10 million per year on window and door screens against fliesand mosquitoes when preventive measures would maintain citiesin a healthier, more sanitary condition.74 ‘The whole expense ofscreening should be an unnecessary one,’ Howard argued, ‘just asthe effort to destroy flies in houses should be unnecessary. Thebreeding should be stopped to such an extent that all these thingsshould be useless.’75 Instead of relying on screens or traps in eachhousehold, according to Howard, cities should address in a holisticway the reasons behind high urban fly populations.

Conclusions

The modern systems of manure removal adopted in Washington andNew York barely had a chance to take effect when automobiles beganto deliver on another modernist dream: that of a ‘horseless age.’Washington’s stables, for instance, began to close in great numbers in1917.76 Howard remarked that the air was clearing of flies as early as1911, attributing improvements to the rise of autos along with the lawshe helped promote.77 Some health authorities, furthermore, publiclyquestioned the role of flies in disease transmission.78 Even AliceHamilton retracted her conclusions about flies when officials laterrevealed a secret sewage spill that was the more likely source of the1902 typhoid outbreak.79 Although enthusiasm for them was short-lived, the anti-fly campaigns of the early-twentieth-century US showhow health authorities installed fixtures and systems throughouturban landscapes to manage people’s interactions with nature.

Medical entomology did not only remake a once-friendly andfamiliar creature into an ‘other’ to spark fear among city dwellers.The knowledge that medical entomology produced about flies alsobecame an imperative for the state to remake urban space itself. Butwhere and how to remake cities became a central controversy for theauthorities who embraced medical entomology, hinging on inter-pretations of flies’ ability to make connections among different partsof the urban environment, and authorities’ commitments to a civicvision of sanitation. Leland Howard and Alice Hamilton usedmedical entomology to update and maintain sanitarians’ ideal of

73 AICP, Flies and Diarrheal Disease (note 72).74 Howard, Economic loss (note 53).75 Howard, The House Fly (note 5), 534. See also W. Herms, The house fly in its relatio76 Department of Health, ARHODC, 1917, 29.77 Howard, The House Fly (note 5), 2.78 Cassedy, Charles V. Chapin (note 12), 101–102.79 B. Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: a Life in Letters, Cambridge, MA, 1984, 145–146.

broad state power exerted over the urban environment, includingmanure-related businesses, to protect social welfare. By modern-izing flows of manure, human waste, and garbage, the primebreeding-places of flies, these advocates believed they could makeflies rare in cities, and thereby protect the health of all humanresidents. Screening campaigns, by contrast, claimed that the city’sorganic flows and the flies that bred and fed in them were beyondecological control. Instead, the state should practice social control,severing citizens’ contact with flies by fixing and modernizing theborders of domestic space. Advocates of screening, like C.F. Hodge,the Chicago Board of Health, and initially the Association forImproving the Condition of the Poor, sought to bound off homes asthe ultimate havens from germs. Window screens not only con-tained but also created private space. When reformers promoted –and sometimes forcibly installed – this simple technology, theyimposed new order on domestic life, regardless of residents’preferred uses of space; in fact, tenement-dwellers’ uses of spacebecame deviant in light of pressure to screen. The distinctionbetween campaigns aimed at manure versus those aimed at screensshows that efforts to manipulate urban ecology were not monolithic,but were shaped by knowledge of urban nature that was, in turn,colored by the politics of social control and environmental reform.

Nor were these campaigns wholly successful at achieving theideal of a fly-free landscape. Those who favored regulation andtreatment of manure as well as those who called for universalscreening both found it difficult to tease apart networks of house flymovement from human environmental and domestic practices.Entomologists who favored controlling manure strived to maintainits flow from central cities to farms while severing the connectionbetween flies and horse dung. But this operation demanded rapidtransport, modern building materials, surveillance of stable-keepers, and, failing these, chemical controls that required theutmost care to divide manure’s fertilizing properties from itsnourishment of insect life. On the other hand, window screensseemed to enforce a home’s hygienic borders. But immigrantwomen resisted efforts to limit the function of windows and doorswith screens. So long as horses powered transport and windowsserved as portals for community, house flies remained tenaciouslyentangled with the material processes of the city.

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited greatly from the comments of its anony-mous reviewers and Felix Driver. Thanks to Graeme Wynn forcommenting on an earlier draft of this article, and to participants inthe Nature, History, Society lecture series at University of BritishColumbia for their feedback. Thanks also to the National ScienceFoundation (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant) and theAmerican Association of University Women for funding theresearch and write-up, respectively, of this project.

n to public health, Bulletin of the College of Agriculture [California] (1911) 215.