Trash is a pervasive part of everyday life, though our burden is far lighter compared to the past. That we don’t find ourselves drowning in a torrent of garbage is to the credit of extensive trash collection and disposal systems. Trash is also political: whose waste merits collection, how it is disposed of, and who bears the burdens thereof are socially fraught decisions. Trash has long been of interest to activists and historians. The racial inequities evident in the placement of waste disposal sites spurred the Environmental Justice movement, while the challenges it poses to public health have been subject to extensive historical inquiry.¹

Collecting and disposing of trash at an industrial scale demands that municipalities construct physical infrastructure and individual compliance. The histories of water and of trash have always been tied together, a fact as real now as in the distance past. We flee from our trash-strewn cities to ‘clean’ lakes, rivers, and oceans, even as they serve as massive dumping grounds for our collective refuse. Efforts to regulate this form of trash disposal and its effects, such as the eutrophication caused by the mass-dumping of phosphates or pollution ruining downstream access to clean water, are projects that require intense coordination between municipal agencies and between state and citizen.²

With The Politics of Trash, Patricia Strach and Kathleen Sullivan have contributed to our understanding of how different municipalities approach building garbage collection and disposal infrastructure while highlighting the role that corruption plays in the political economy of trash. Corruption, and how it governed civic institutions, varied wildly between different cities. In some cases it was a benefit for public services, in other cases a hindrance, but everywhere it was endemic to municipal politics and thus structured everyday interactions with urban governance and the urban environment.

The governance of Gilded Age American cities was corrupt by nature, even if the form of corruption in government varied. Some cities, such as Pittsburgh and Charleston, had corruption regimes tied into municipal governance while others (St. Louis and New Orleans) were ruled through external corrupt regimes, where the regime was unaffiliated with city government or a larger political movement. American cities in the 19th century were also dealing with another dirty issue: the piles of offal, rotting fruits and vegetables, dead animals, and other forms of garbage piling up alongside their streets. Having sidelined the reformists proposing to use civic engineering and professional expertise to deal with the issue, municipal governments turned to their varying forms of corruption and social hierarchy as solutions. For cities lacking formal capacity or an institutional incentive to dispose of trash could find informal alternatives in corruption.³

In cities where the corruption regime was not attached to municipal governance, the monetary incentive to collect or dispose of trash did not translate into the capacity to do so cleanly or efficiently. Both St. Louis and New Orleans attempted to institute garbage collection services, but by the turn of the century had returned to dumping what little trash they collected into local waterways.⁴ Where corruption was tied into the political system of a city, as with Pittsburgh and Charleston, the profit that trash collection or disposal contracts promised translated directly into municipal capacity: such as building state-of-the-art reduction facilities or renting out enslaved labor. Neither service was without issue, but would have existed in a worse state, if at all, without political corruption.⁵

The authors close with an assessment of how municipal governments can use informal tools to enact policy: women’s organizations (the product of gender hierarchy in the public sphere) could be deployed in order to win compliance with municipal ordinances, blaming racial minorities for (racialized) failures in municipal services was a politically useful deflection, and corruption could effectively marshal private resources. These tools were, and are, an important part of the process of transforming municipal policy into household habits.⁶

How we collect, process, and dispose of trash is important to water historians because water will often serve as a dumping ground of first resort and because the challenge trash poses is the same as water pollution in general. Preventing (illicit) dumping, initiating, and sustaining cleanup projects, persuading the public to change its day-to-day habits, and addressing inequalities in access to clean water, are challenging issues. These issues are magnified in areas where the power of the state, as with 19th century America, is insufficient or patchwork. To better understand the intersection of these interconnected histories, we spoke with Kathleen Sullivan and Patricia Strach about their book and what would change if water was at its center.

The cities you use as case studies – Charleston and New Orleans, as coastal cities, and Pittsburgh and St. Louis, both closely tied to rivers – are all shaped by their proximity to water. How might the book differ if it began its analysis of these cities, their type of corruption, and their approach to managing garbage with a focus on their relationship to water?

Our book uses a method of analysis where we start with a problem that governments face, then we trace back to the resources that U.S. cities relied on to solve those problems when they established municipal garbage collection programs in the 1890s. The same approach can be used with water: In what ways was water a resource to 19th-century cities when they contended with trash? A focus on water would reveal it as a ready resource for disposal of waste. Prior to the establishment of formal municipal garbage collection programs, local scavengers made one-on-one arrangements with households to pick up their garbage. Waterways—whether nearby rivers or ocean—provided a ready dumping ground. Water was a resource for scavengers, and it allowed cities to remove waste prior to more modern methods. Lacking the ability to erect new buildings or landfills for dumping, they were likely to simply dump it in an empty lot or river, using a form of disposal that sanitarians classified as “primitive.” The easy access to these waterways allowed cities to maintain some form of garbage disposal that matched the capacity of entrepreneurial scavengers.

A focus on water could likewise emphasize the need to upgrade city services to more modern methods, because it reveals just how much of a health hazard household waste was. Prior to the establishment of municipal garbage collection programs, those householders who did not hire scavengers had to take care of their waste on their own. Some of them piled their trash behind their house or buried it in their old privies, or in an empty lot, or left carcasses in the streets. Rainwater washed that trash into water sources that the city used for drinking water. A focus on water could trace the physical movement of trash through a city. It would point to the interconnectedness of waste—food waste, human waste, animal waste, carcasses of dead animals—as well as the interconnectedness of city services—garbage collection, sewerage, and water provision. Such interconnectedness led to the development of the field of sanitary engineering, which provided experts trained in both public health and in city planning. These experts could consider the larger, connected design of infrastructure in order to keep those waterways clear. Late-19th century sanitarians pointed to this interconnectedness to make the case for cities to establish public works to provide clean drinking water, reliable sewerage systems, and garbage collection and disposal, to remove residents’ garbage from the waterways.

Both St. Louis and New Orleans failed to develop adequate garbage disposal systems, relying to varying degrees on dumping their trash into the Mississippi River. If the book focused on this practice and examined why different cities turned to the same solution, how might this inform an analysis of the role of corruption in the development of public utilities?

If we focused on waterways, then we’d more centrally position water as a resource of government, even after municipal garbage collection programs were up and running. In The Politics of Trash, we point to the resources relied on by municipal governments when they had to solve the problem of how to remove garbage from city centers, identifying the corruption of political machines, and racial and gender hierarchy. To that we could add water resources. Water continued to be a resource, even when cities turned to sanitarians to establish more modern methods of collection and disposal. Cities generally established municipal garbage collection and disposal programs in the late-19th century. These were formal programs and publicly funded, whether the garbage was handled by city employees or contracted out. Modern sanitation required significant investments to build infrastructure such as incinerators or reduction plants. Since these modern methods were capital-intensive, they often needed to be contracted out. Companies were eager to gain the city contract, but they were often unable to maintain a workable disposal plant. When these disposal plants became overwhelmed by city garbage, the use of waterways as waste repositories reemerged as an alternative.

Despite this development, the services themselves were not always done well. In St. Louis, the corrupt garbage contractor collected trash and disposed of it in a modern, sanitary way. But when city officials challenged the contract, they had no way to replace his reduction plant with another. As a last resort, the city dumped garbage on an island in the Mississippi River and sent hogs to eat it to try to keep down the volume of dumped garbage. Years later, still unable to maintain a functioning disposal plant, the city developed a garbage grinding system, in which garbage was grinded up, sent into the sewer pipes, and drained into the Mississippi River. New Orleans didn’t build a disposal plant, and, instead, the city relied on its position at the mouth of the Mississippi River to send garbage out on barges, to be dumped in the river and flow into the sea. Those barges were not well maintained, and they threatened to sink while sitting at the city docks. Water was an alternative to cities who failed to provide adequate garbage collection. They could dump the city’s waste while still maintaining the appearance of modern sanitation.

While both Charleston and Pittsburgh developed comparably effective infrastructure in handling trash, Charleston did so much earlier. Additionally, Charleston, similarly to New Orleans, used its garbage as landfill to expand into marshy areas. What would change in the methodology deployed in the book if it focused on using trash to reclaim marshland (or other forms of water) and traced this practice’s connection to the development of municipal trash disposal systems?

This question invites us to shift the focus from “What resources does a city government have to accomplish its goals?” to “What resources are available in a coastal or river city?” That leads us to think of the geography of the city before thinking about governing. In starting with physical place, we would think of garbage in terms of available space. Cities generally expanded into nearby rural areas as they grew, disposing of garbage in rural areas to keep it out of more concentrated urban areas. Cities like Charleston—which is a peninsula with a narrow neck connecting the land—had few directions to expand. Instead, it built out. Charleston was resourceful and made use of accumulating household waste to serve as fill, to expand the footprint of the city, into the harbor.

If you brought water to the center of your work and its analysis, do you think it would significantly change its form, argument, subject, or conclusion? If so, how?

The approach we use in our book–to look at seemingly ordinary policies like trash, and to see how governments address it, leaving the resources they use an open question–can be used similarly to address water, but it would alter the scope of our study. When we chose to study the question of how local governments relied on resources to solve problems, we almost studied water provision instead of garbage collection. Even if we had studied water provision, our methods would have been the same—we would have identified the problem of getting clean water to growing cities, and we would have identified the networks of political relationships that city governments relied on to make that happen. Your prompt asks us to center water, which invites us to consider cities geographically, spatially, with the interconnectedness of physical space, social conditions, and political power, in addition to the corruption and resource-based approach that we took. Our study of garbage collection could be immersed in an awareness of water, and would flow from there.

Library

Bullard, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: race, class, and environmental quality. Third edition. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2000.

Melosi, Martin V. Garbage in the cities: refuse, reform, and the environment. Rev. edition. 1 online resource (xvi, 302 pages) : illustrations. vols. History of the urban environment. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10853031.

———. Water in North American environmental history. 1 online resource (ix, 293 pages) : illustrations (black and white). vols. Themes in environmental history (Routledge (Firm)). New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003041627.

Schwab, James. Deeper shades of green : the rise of blue-collar and minority environmentalism in America. San Francisco : Sierra Club Books, 1994. http://archive.org/details/deepershadesofgr0000schw.

Strach, Patricia, and Kathleen S. Sullivan. The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890-1929. 1 online resource (247 p.) vols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023. https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6885062.

1. See, Schwab, Deeper shades of green, Bullard, Dumping in Dixie, and Melosi, Garbage in the cities.↩︎

2. For example, see Melosi, Water in North American environmental history, Ch. 17↩︎

3. Strach and Sullivan, The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890-1929, pg. 25-30↩︎

4. Strach and Sullivan, ibid, pg. 85-88↩︎

5. Strach and Sullivan, ibid, pg. 102; 106-111↩︎

6. Strach and Sullivan, ibid, pg. 171-174↩︎