Trash

It's an activity more than it is a category, so it should be understood as a dynamic category rather than as the thing or a kind of thing. And my name is Susan Strasser. I am the Richards Professor Emerita of American History at the University of Delaware, which just really means that I'm retired from the University of Delaware. And I'm the author of Never Done, a History of

American Housework. Second book was called Satisfaction Guaranteed, The Making of the American mass Market and Waste and Want a Social History of Trash. If we were to see the way most people in the United States lived before eighteen nine, it wouldn't look familiar to us at all. By twenty things would look old fashioned to us, certainly, but they

would look familiar. And what that is about is the creation of the mass market, the creation of industrial products that per meated domestic life, and that really got fundamentally transformed during those decades around the turn of the twentieth century, people related to material goods in very, very different ways. The likelihood was that almost everything that you wore, or eight or sat on were created by yourself, or by somebody in your family, or by somebody that you knew.

Soap and candles were industrialized pretty early in the cities, but they were not necessarily industrialized in the country because they were made of leftover materials. You make soap from ashes, the ashes make lie, and from spare fat. When you're butchering, you're gonna have spare fat to use. Bottles were very valuable. Commercial glass manufacturer was pretty slow compared to other industries,

so bottles were refilled. Housekeeping manuals advised people when they're clearing the table to check and see what can be eaten again. And there was not a lot of shame apparently involved in taking things off people's plates and keeping it to feed people later, and across the social hierarchy, people knew how to sew. Rich women sewed, poor women sewed,

middle class women sewed, All women sewed. If you could afford to, you might hire somebody to make your fancy dresses or your coat, But even wealthy women sewed their underwhere their nightgowns, kids clothes. The idea that you just get rid of things when they're torn, or when they're broken, or when they're dirty was just unknown, and that was partly because people understood the value of the labor that

went into making them. This is at a point before there were very many general stores, and even if there were general stores, how do you get to the general store. An average farmer might have a horse, but the horses working on pulling the plow. The horse is not free to go into town because somebody decides that they want something, So in a primarily agricultural society, they don't go to town.

The way people got stuff was that people came around selling stuff, and they came around in the countryside peddler's door to door salesman, slipping both new goods and material for reuse. We're an integral part of a newly developing economy.

The kinds of things that the peddlers would carry would be just basic things to live with, things to cook with, things to build with, little things that we would not even think of, sewing pins, hairpins, nails, the kind of stuff we would think you would buy in a hardware store. There was another kind of peddling that was organized by

tin manufacturers. Tin was used for small metal goods, stuff like funnels, watering cans, and tin manufacturers would organized peddlers to go out in the countryside and sell their tin wear. All of these people took stuff in trade two either sell back to the person who had sold them the tinware, or in some cases the tinware manufacturer might have hired someone. I had the really great opportunity to look at the papers of tin manufacturer, and he was called a master peddler.

His name was Marillo Noise. My father was a peddler. His name he was your no and he hired peddlers to sell his tin and to bring stuff back. You don't want to do what manufacturers now do, which is to pay for stuff to just go one way. So Marilla Noise got really interested in what he could collect from the households where his peddlers were going that he could then sell. And he collected paper, rags, rubber bones, and he collected metal. He had these little booklets that

would fit into his pocket. In those booklets he would say things like, oh, so and so told me about a manufacturer in New Jersey who's using old leather. So then he goes to New Jersey and he visits the manufacturer and he finds out what kinds of old leather the manufacturer can use and he's using, and then he can give his peddlars instructions to be bringing back that

stuff as well. He would send the peddlers out to sell the stuff that he had loaded the wagons with, but he also expected them to come back with full cards, so that the price of keeping the peddler and the horse alive would be distributed over both directions. The expansion of peddling signals an important shift in American society towards a culture of consumerism. The development of consumer culture requires people to come to believe that stuff can come to

them and that we can get what we want. If the peddlers hadn't been able to take stuff back, then there wouldn't have been as much peddling, there wouldn't have been as much new manufactured stuff out in the countryside. It literally brought that system that was a two way system and brought things, brought goods, brought stuff into people's lives.

I feel like I could see the workings of a nineteen entree recycling system that so many things that could not be used in the household did get sent back to factories to be used again to make other things. Metal is an obvious thing because it can be melted down.

But rags, for example, we're used in papermaking. Before the Revolution, there wasn't a lot of paper made in the United States, so there was a lot of energy put into creating domestic paper manufacturers and saving rags cotton rags and linen rags for making paper. That's recycling, that's making something out of something that's previously manufactured. It's really difficult for us

to imagine the spareness of life. The very idea to get a tea kettle, something that will boil your water, that's a separate object from the pot you're cooking your beans in. Those very ideas were really new for most people, especially given that the houses that survived the ones that we tour as tourists, or the houses of the most fabulously wealthy people in America, even they were sitting in the dark at night. Whale oil, which was the major

source before kerosene, it was expensive. Candles were expensive. There's a French saying I've seen it translated in a lot of nineteenth century books, about something being not worth the candle. Is this book good enough for me to pay for the candle that's gonna light my ability to read it? Or am I going to put it away and go to sleep and maybe look at it tomorrow. Yeah, it's not like people were lighting up their lives the way

we light up our lives. And I think we have a hard time imagining just how spare life was for everybody. In the late eighteen hundreds, there was a wave of migration in the United States away from the countryside and towards cities. It became possible to feed the country with fewer people and jobs in factories looked attractive, and city life looked attractive to a lot of people, and that's why they went in the countryside. It's much easier to figure out what to do with stuff if you don't

want it. There's some corner of the farm where you can dump things. There's just a lot more ability to get rid of stuff, to the extent that you even want to get rid of stuff, because there's also more ability to use things. The example of making soap is a good one in the city. If you're living in an apartment, you may have ashes, you may have fat, but where are you gonna make soap. You may not have the space to use things, and you certainly don't

have space to dump things. So it becomes more and more an issue for people living in cities as to what they're gonna do with things that they don't want. There's lots of written evidence about people throwing stuff out windows, But what are you going to do with things? Vary it, burn it, throw it in a ravine if there's a ravine nearby, throw it in a body of water. Those were the choices. With more people in their trash packed

together in tighter spaces, came increasing risks of disease. The whole question of public health starts to become salient as there's this huge series of epidemics yellow fever, cholera in city after city throughout the nineteenth century, and people don't yet have the germ theory of disease. They don't quite yet know about viruses and bacteria, but they do start developing an understanding that filth has something to do with disease, that bad water has something to do with disease, that

filth has something to do with bad water. More people got sick where people were crowded in that they could see They could see it perfectly clearly. In the early twentieth century in cities, there were sewers, but there were also out houses. There were people living in tenements where the one flush toilet would be in the courtyard. Sewers and water were the things that created the whole notion of what a municipal concern might be about infrastructure and

about public health. These concerns would be addressed by a major advancement that we all too often take for granted today, municipal trash collection. What it looked like was those same people who had campaign to get sewers and water into cities started campaigning to get municipal trash collection. We're talking about the nine these in the biggest cities, New York because it was the biggest city. The problem was the biggest and it kind of led the way in municipal

services for collecting waste. Now, what they did with the trash ones that was collected, we may not have such happy feelings about. In New York, it was put on barges and taken out into the ocean and dumped in the ocean. It was used to create landfill. The ashes, particularly, but also other kinds of trash were used for landfill. The thing is trashes then and now hard to get rid of the most obvious things to do with stuff you don't want just to burn it, to bury it,

or to dump it. Those are the big three that you can do on your farm, or you can do in a big way in a big city. But if you're burning all the trash for a big city, then you need some kind of fancy incinerator. You can't just do it in the backyard. They were not attractions that people wanted to have in their midst So facilities were built on the edges of town, and facilities were built where people were too poor to effectively complain about the

hazards to their health. We're here today on a march to the Detroit incinerator Um, and we're calling for clean air, particularly for the communities that are close to the incenterator and are particularly affected by the particular from the burning trash. And I should say that in those early municipal household trash collections, there was separation of different kinds of trash

to be used for recycling. The same kinds of things that people had been recyclinging for many decades were separated out. Do people start thinking about their materials in a different way because of trash collection. Once you have a municipal trash collection, then throwing something away becomes a possibility. Before municipal trash collection, you either store it in your house or you somehow or other get it out of your house.

And if you're going to get it out of your house, you have to figure out where out of your house. And municipal trash collection gives you a brand new option, which is just get rid of it. It makes it a black box. Before then you've got to figure out what to do with it. And if you're gonna take it down to the river and dump it in the river, you're going to dump it in the river, and you're gonna know that it went in the river. If you put it in the can and you take the can

to the curb. Who knows what happens to it. It's gone. There's not the sense of reciprocity about it. There's not the bargaining about I mean, when the peddler comes around and you've got your bit of rags and your bit of rubber and your bit of metal, and you are looking at the tea cattle and the pins and some nails, there's a whole bargaining process that's going to go on between you and the peddler to figure out who gets what and what gets exchanged. Once you have municipal trash collection,

there's no exchange. It's literally about getting rid of stuff. These new systems of disposal dovetail not coincidentally with major developments and mass manufacturing. It simply became possible to buy a lot of stuff that hadn't been possible to buy before. And some of it is because there's more and more stuff being manufactured in factories, and some of it is

because there's all kinds of new distribution methods. Even people in the countryside can buy things from the Sears catalog and the Montgomery Ward catalog and get them shipped to their houses. What are you reading these years catalogs. That sounds exciting, you'd be surprised. The Post Office actually made it possible for things to be shipped to your house even if you lived in the country Rural Free Delivery RFD, so you didn't have to come into town and pick

something up at the train station. It would be shipped to your house suddenly, and really it was sudden. All of the goods of the new manufacturing were available to consumers if they used these companies, and they did use those companies, and they used those companies for the same reasons that people use Amazon, because everything was available and

it was easy to get. In the nine twenties, lots and lots of appliances started to be produced, and many of these had been patented earlier, but it wasn't until the nineteen twenties and the relative prosperity of the nineteen twenties that the large numbers of people started to buy these things. At first, it was small appliances, things like toasters and irons. By the end of the nineteen twenties, refrigerators were available to wealthy people. Everything in its place.

That's easy with my printed air cold pantry. Even after the depression, started. They were sold on the installment plan with the promise that you could save money. You could buy things on sale and keep them longer in your refrigerator. We think of the depression as a time when nobody had anything, but if there's a twenty unemployment rate, that

means of the people have jobs. It's not like more people had lots and lots of money, but they did have some money, and both refrigerators and radios were appliances that became big during the thirties. Another consumer good flooding the market in this era was, of course, the automobile. Henry Ford, who not only introduced the assembly line and a certain new kind of manufacturing in that respect, he also introduced a theory of employment that he called the

five dollar day. He wanted to pay workers well enough that they could buy automobiles, but not everybody has a million dollars to ride the economy is what they want. He envisioned a time when it would not just be rich people, and over the course of the twenties, automobiles got cheaper and the used automobile market started to develop, So by the end of the twenties it's fair to say that there are large numbers of people brought in cars with this version, and consumer culture came an onslaught

of disposable goods. At the beginning of the twentieth century, paper cups starts to be the first big thing because people are out in cities more and they're drinking publicly. She knows that dickte cups, they were a lot of extra glasses to waste. She knows that dicknecup means there's less of breaking glasses. And you know too that drinking from a Dicte cup is more sanitary because everyone has

his own individual cups. Again, there's this concern about public health as the germ theory starts to be accepted, So there's the introduction of paper cups for sanitary purposes. Other kinds of paper goods and disposable goods are being introduced, but they're not super popular. They really require a whole different mindset. The idea that you have something, you use it once, and you throw it away. That's like a

brand new idea. And there are certain kinds of disposable things like bottles, caps and razor blades that we don't think of. But starting in the eight nineties, bottle caps and razor blades, start to give people the idea that this one time used then toss it might be a good way to live your life. In a moment of changing attitudes around creation and disposal, everything got ratcheted up during more time. One of its is to remember about World War One is that the United States was not

in it for very long. The Republic must awaken, the people must understand our safety lies in pull realization. The faith of the nations and the safety of the world will be decided on the western battlefront of Europe. The United States didn't get into it until nineteen seventeen, and the war was over in nineteen eighteen. They were instituting programs, but they never really got a chance to get that far.

World War two they were full blown. Only men went to war, so there was a huge amount of propagandizing around various kinds of what we would call recycling drives that were called scrap drives at the time. I want to report about another great American army and rolling one in every four American the Army of organized education, boys and girls collect crap to build up our national stockpiles.

There were school curricula that we're developed if this many pots and pans can make this many airplanes, then how many part you know that kind of word problem. They organized kids in their scout troops to collect materials, and they militarized the talking about it. Practically all of us have fats. Fats make ncroistans for shows. My father, who was a physicist, during World War Two he served as

an army research facility. He said that he didn't really think that the kinds of explosives that the household fats could be used for actually were very common kinds of explosives, so he, even during the war, thought that that fat collection thing was mostly for propaganda purposes. More than a million people are crowded into Washington in wartime, say, with a peacetime population of half a million. The city was never planned to accommodate such a huge, ever growing army

of workers. But Washington in wartime is people, people intent on contributing their personal effort, people seeking information and advice and sometimes papers others to see history in the making. It was a way of mobilizing the whole population to be behind the war effort as much as it was a way of collecting materials that could be used to

advance the war effort. You couldn't buy a new washing machine or a new car during the war because the factories that produced washing machines and cars had been converted for war production. So people were experiencing these kinds of shortages. And this was after ten years of depression. So now people have money. They have money because they're working in the war factories. The economy is amped up, but there's not stuff to buy, and the propaganda is saying you

should buy war bonds. The presidents now have the added burden of printing billions of dollars worth of war bonds and steps to pay for the planes, hips and guns that our defenders must have. Your husband's and your brothers and your uncle's are off there in Germany and Japan and doing their part, and you've got to do your part. And your part is to not buy stuff and give your medal to the government and not complain about it. Saving is as easy as squandering. You'll give us the scrap.

We will turn it into tanks, we will turn it into plane we'll turn it into jeeps, we'll turn it into guns. Then our fighting men will have enough and on time. The American consumer economy brought with it a new buzzword, convenience. The twentie century promises life is going to be easy for everybody. When we think about it, it's really about the physical body. We shouldn't have to work very hard, we shouldn't have to use our muscles very much. We should live like the kings and queens

of old. That's what convenience is about. We should be able to exchange money for this feature of goods that will make our lives easy. The products are going to make it that way, and disposable products are particularly going to make it that way. If something is disposable, you don't have to wash it, you don't have to clean it, you don't have to worry about it. You can toss it away. Where is a way? Nobody knows where a way is. A big part of this shift in thinking

was demonstrated and how manufacturers began packaging their products. Manufacturers stop selling you a thing, and they start selling a new kind of product, which is that thing in its package. From their standpoint, the advantage of selling ivory soap in a wrapper is that you can write ivory on the outside of it, and then the consumer is going to go to the store and ask for Ivory soap, and the retailer has to get it from Procter and Gamble,

especially when it comes to personal size. Ivory so white looks pure, even smell pure, my pleasure loving side a door did in the bath. So that's the reason why that new kind of product comes into being, because the product in a package can be branded, and the product

outside of a package cannot be branded. Woven into these trends was the concept of fashion, fashion and material goods suggests that there's something beyond the way that the product does its job that you should be paying attention to. Luxury is a warm towel gently touching your skin, making you feel soft, special, even a little bit spoiled. There's a lot of introduction of things that used to be available in black or in white, and now they're available

in color. No longer do you have to have just white towels. Now you can have towels and a whole lot of different colors. And it may be the fashion this year to have blue towels. So it becomes a way of selling more goods by making things that are not yet rags, but they're out of fashion, they're no

longer good see these two portable radios, Well watch this letter. Sorry, Brandy, you old file portable to have to go, But look at our new r C A Victor portable radio tangled up with fashion is a term you hear a lot today. Obsolescence the idea that the product, for various reasons is destined to become obsolete. The idea that obsolescence is baked into the product really comes from all of us living lives that are surrounded by products of technological processes that

are beyond on what we can understand. Phones when they were originally introduced, were made to last. Then Bell Systems started introducing fashion phones and different princess phones, different kinds of phones. Now there's this proliferation of options, and it's possible to understand that you have a funky old phone or you have the newest and fanciest phone. There's such a range of phone possibilities that literally didn't used to exist.

Contrary to what you might imagine, not every manufacturer was greedily rubbing their hands behind the idea of planned obsolescence. Henry Ford was really opposed to the notion of changing models. To change the model of an automobile requires changing the whole auction process. Every change is going to mean a change not just in what gets sold, but a change in how it's made. So General Motors gets this idea

of having an annual model change. That new model can be advertised and people can get excited about the new model. There he comes now and his very old mobile. It's a futuramic Goals mobile with the newest push button features, automatic windows, automatic top, just pull a handy control and before you've had time to admire the smooth, blowing futuramic lines of this real post War Olds mobile, the top

is down automatically. And furthermore, they start producing cars in colors and Ford is just still chugging along, producing a Model T that gets technologically better. As the years go on and Ford starts losing market share and General Motors is gaining it. By the end of the nineteen twenties, Ford realizes he can no longer do this, and he closed down his auto plants to produce the new model

A Ford. Now he's producing in color, and he's got several different models, and it becomes the model for everything else too. When is Apple going to reveal its new computers and it's new iPhone, there's like all this hub around the introduction of all the new stuff. One of the biggest takeaways from Waste and Want, Susan's book on the History of trash is that all of this production, consumption,

and disposal is inextricably connected. You can't separate trash in a consumer culture from the production process, from the distribution process. It's all of a piece. My major interest is in the relationship that we in our private lives have with the economic system and the production system, and the advertising and marketing systems. And now there's a new camera by Code Act. It's just the nicest one I know to

have around the house. And the distribution system and the system is not just about the parts that we see. In the same way that we don't see what happens to our trash after it goes away, we also don't see where our stuff came from before it got to the store or to the website. It's not like we're incapable of starting to imagine that the stuff we use

gets produced. We kind of know it, But the whole business of production, unless we happen to know people who work in the factory, it's like a black box to us. It's like something we just don't know about. On the other end, once we take it to the curb, we see the guys come by, we see them put it in that truck, and then what happens. We don't know it's gone. So stuff comes, stuff goes. Do we make

more trash now than we used to? Certainly we must write we make much more trash than we used to, the whole world of packaging and disposals for starters, But also we have so many more technologically complicated goods in our lives. Appliances, communications, things, computers, phones, all of that stuff. What happens to our trash now? It varies from place to place. Baltimore has a big incinerator that is a

waste to energy incinerator. Landfills are becoming problematic in the United States because there isn't space for them without places that are close to the largest metropolitan areas, So the stuff has to be shipped long distances to get to places where there are landfill facilities. Literally, what happens to stuff depends on where you are in the time leading up to writing this book, What were the attitudes conversations

about trash and the environment? You sort of remember in your site, guys, trash is kind of a foreboting topic. When I first told people I was writing a book about trash, most of them laughed, and people still laugh.

It's a little hard for me to feel that my life's work is so funny, But I think that it's precisely my life's work to take these issues of daily life that are regarded as private and as trivial and bring them out into the light and examine them in ways that help people to understand that they're not private at all, and that therefore, by definition, they are not trivial.

My only other question, it's just about hope. Like sometimes you've walked down the street, you look at all the trash everywhere, at least I live in a city, you know, like it's full of track, it's real trashy, overflowing trash cans,

litter everywhere, under bridges in streets. And then also like just being in the time in place that I grew up, and just position in the middle of this consumer world where I feel like I'm being Everything is branded and I'm being sold to all the time, and I'm always being told that I need new products and different products. And then I got to change this product for that product. It can feel like overwhelming and I don't know you're responsible.

What do you use to not feel hopeless in that situation? Like what grounds you to uh make smart decisions about consumption and waste. The study of history, it's sort of like traveling. You go to a foreign country and you discovered that there are other ways to be human. And I feel that way about the study of the past as well, that there are other ways to be human than the ways that we live in the twenty one century.

And frankly, the environmental issues that go way beyond climate change, that have to do with pollution of various kinds, that have to do with the eradication of so many species. We have to find other ways of being human than the ways that we have because this one isn't working. This one is destroying the planet that we live on. This one is eating our launch. We're not going to go backwards in time. We're not going to live the way people did in the nineteenth century. We don't want to,

and we have been raised in the first centuries. Can't We don't know how. But for me, the study of the past suggests that there will be other ways to be human in the future. This episode of Ephemeral was written and assembled by Max and Alex Williams, with producer Trevor Young, and special thanks to our friend Sarah Wasserman.

Susan Strasser is the author of Never Done, a History of American Housework, Satisfaction Guaranteed, The Making of the American mass Market, and Ways and Want a Social History of Trash. Find them wherever books are sold and learn more about everything she's up to over at susan strasser dot Net, links and more on our website ephemeral dot Show. If you like this episode, share it with a friend, rate and review us wherever you listen, and shoot us a

comment on social media at ephemeral Show. It just maybe the thing that keeps us from getting thrown in the trash and For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.