Newark: The Nation's Unhealthiest City, 1832-1895.
Galishoff, Stuart., Newark: The Nation's Unhealthiest City, 1832-1895. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988, Pp. xii, 260. Tables, maps, index. $38.00 (U.S.).The United States Census of 1890 designated Newark as the unhealthiest city in America. It had the highest death rate for cities with over one thousand in population and led the country in the rate of infant mortality and deaths from scarlet fever. Newark also stood among the top ten for communicable diseases such as malaria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and diphtheria. "Once noted for its handsome thoroughfares and majestic elms," Galishof observes, Newark had become "a vast cesspool of human and animal excrement and industrial wastes." What had induced this ill-fated transition?
Rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century had changed the face of Newark. Unbridled business expansion, a swollen population, and lack of planning had combined to create major problems. By 1860, a private company upon which Newark had relied for its water supply clearly had failed to meet the needs of the growing metropolis. Newark's leaders decided to draw water from the Passaic River only to find that it too had become filthy with refuse from several nearby New Jersey communities. Finally, city officials abandoned the Passaic and purchased water from a new and cleaner source. When Newark eliminated its contaminated cesspools and wells, it replaced them with an underground sewage system which proved haphazard, badly designed, and inadequate. As late as 1919, Newark, like several other American cities, still had not discovered a satisfactory method for garbage disposal.
Galishoff points out that an elite class of businessmen generally formulated civic policy and controlled public agencies. In his concluding chapter, he appears to give it credit for spearheading reforms and cites Daniel J. Boorstin's observation that society had produced a singular American type of business and community leader whose "starting belief was the interfusing of public and private property." In the body of his work, however, Galishoff makes it quite clear that businessmen favoured improvements only when they appeared to foster their own interests. Because they needed so much water in their manufacturing plants, Newark's businessmen sponsored improvements in the water supply system; the easy access to water which the new scheme provided also helped to reduce the cost of their fire insurance. Board of Health regulations required property owners to tap into the municipal sewage system, but politically powerful slumlords were allowed to ignore the law in Newark's poorer sections. Business leaders waged relentless war against cholera which theatened people of all ranks. In the case of smallpox, however, Newark's upper and middle classes protected themselves by vaccination while the poor remained afflicted by the disease for several decades. Denial of adequate funding by business-minded city administrators not only hindered the effectiveness of the police and fire departments but also rendered the Board of Health ineffectual for twenty years. Change came only when it protected or enhanced business.
Yet, the masses also contributed to Newark's insalubrity. Most of the city's poor opposed the removal or regulation of cesspools and wells since they viewed them as harmless; equally, they resisted compulsory vaccination against pestilential diseases. Poor people generally welcomed clean water but many fought against other hygienic measures when they failed to grasp the connection between lack of cleanliness and disease.
Politics in Newark tended to obscure health issues; tension developed between native Anglo-Saxon Protestants and the new Irish and German Catholic immigrants. Issues such as "blue" laws, beer gardens on Sunday, prohibition, and public support for parochial schools took precedence over sanitation, drainage, and disease control. A weak city government used agencies such as the Board of Health chiefly as an instrument for patronage; those who lacked the ability for police or fire department employment regularly found jobs on the Board's staff.
Newark did not stand alone. By his careful research and skilful analysis of the interplay of political, economic, and cultural forces, Galishoff presents this New Jersey city as a microcosm of urban evolution in 19th century America.
Graham Adams, Jr.
Department of History
Mount Allison University
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| Author: | Adams, Graham, Jr. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Urban History Review |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Feb 1, 1990 |
| Words: | 674 |
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