Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness by Matt Wray

Author:Matt Wray [MATT WRAY]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The rapturous language of the crusade. A poster (ca. 1910) from the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission’s hookworm eradication campaign in North Carolina. From The World’s Work (1912).

Chasing Dirt: The Sanitarians

Empirical discoveries in germ theory certainly helped fuel the hookworm crusade, but anxieties about and obsessions with cleanliness and sanitation derived from other, less scientific concerns (Tomes 1990). The middle-class compulsion to “chase dirt” went well beyond what sanitation science called for, answering a need for a way to differentiate and separate the healthy from the sick, the worthy from the unworthy, and the “American” from the “un-American.” In effect, the sanitary codes of the early twentieth century functioned much like the biblical dietary laws in Mary Douglas’s classic analysis of Leviticus—they modeled the forming of the national body through close attention to and regulation of the physical body.17

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