Toronto became part of a North
American-wide battle against the drinking cup in 1911. It also, as I’ve
discussed elsewhere, joined the
war on flies. At the heart of this effort to
eradicate what had been an every day part of life, nearly every fountain used
at the turn of the twentieth century, was a new theory about how disease could
be transferred. Germs were now seen as the conduit for transferring disease and
that meant that every surface touched by potentially germ laden people was a
potential threat to healthy people. But getting that theory of disease control
out and enacting its implications for how society should order and conduct
itself was an uneven process. Local proponents, and a range of supportive lobby
groups, helped the new medical discourses articulate themselves at the local
level. As the new notions of medical health gained acceptance across North
America, they gained a momentum and a feeling of inevitability. They became a
way a community, or, more precisely, particular people within that community,
could frame themselves as modern.
With respect to cups and flies,
Toronto walked into a discussion that was already underway. This discussion
informs us of how knowledge moves, is deployed and through what conduits;
indeed it suggests who is able to act as a conduit, because participation was
not equally available. We can look to the local articulations of these battles
over the acceptance of new medical discourses, these battles over concepts of
modernity itself, to see the uneven process through which the modern subject
and the modern city was constructed. The very unevenness of the process, who
was able to become modern and who wasn’t, which built upon pre-existing
hierarchies no doubt aided the modernization process. The presence of losers gave
the winners something to produce themselves against.
In 1910 Toronto’s newspapers and
civic leaders were already having discussions about the public drinking cups. The
cupless drinking fountain, which featured an arc of water, much as we know
fountains today, was starting to make inroads into Toronto. But opinion was divided
on its necessity. In a Jan. 12, 1910 article Park Commissioner Wilson was
listed as a strong supporter of installing drinking fountains that didn’t
require a cup to use. Seven had been installed the previous year and Wilson
recommended more be installed in 1910. But the same article noted that City
Engineer Rust was ambivalent about the fountains and said they might amount to
no more than a fad. “I have never been afraid to drink from a cup after other
persons have been drinking … I really don’t think the practice is unhealthy,”
Rust was quoted as saying. Practice was in a state of flux. Rust noted that
some railways had removed the public drinking cup and required patrons to bring
their own while some health resorts still had people drinking from a shared
cup. Dr. Charles Sheard, Toronto’s medical health officer, was aware of the
discussion elsewhere and recommended care with the public drinking cup, but
wasn’t in a hurry to see it removed entirely, suggesting “that there was little
danger of spreading disease through the drinking cup, provided the cup is
washed out well.”
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At the beginning of the Twentieth Century most fountains came with a cup. But all that was a about to change. (“Drinking fountain at College Street and Spadina Avenue,” Fonds
200, Series 376, File 2, Item 49, date of creation, April 26, 1899, City of Toronto
Archives) |
But Sheard stepped down in 1910
and Dr. Charles Hastings stepped into the position of medical health officer. On
the potential danger of public drinking cups, he and Sheard disagreed. The
drinking cup joined the fly, poorly packaged milk, and crowded housing on
Hastings’s hit list; all of them brought together by new theories on how germs caused
disease and could, in turn, be transferred from person to person through
contact but also informed by conservative views on class and ethnicity that
rendered the urban landscape and the bodies that inhabited it a potential
threat.
In January, 1911, Hastings
announced plans to get rid of the public drinking cup. “On the edges of public drinking
cups have been found the germs of tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other dread
diseases,” Hastings told
The Star. He
went on to frame the discussion in a way that would be repeated often over the
next couple of years: “A public tooth brush would be just as logical as a
public drinking cup … No sane person would think of using the same tooth brush
that hundreds of other people use, and yet unquestioningly they go on drinking
out of the same germ-laden cups.”
Wilson, who had been friendly to the idea in 1910, backed Hastings’s plan, and
the article noted that Property and Street Commissioner Harris was onside.
Initial plans called for sanitary, or cupless fountains, in the city’s parks
and bracket fountains in city hall. There’s a neat little shift that takes
place in the toothbrush comparison. The consumption of water shifts from being
a public communal activity to a private intimate activity. Of course the water
would still be consumed in a public setting, but whereas the medium of
consumption had been public as well, a cup passed from one person to another,
the medium now became a private intimate matter. The dinner plate, silver ware
and the tea cup were also pulled in to make the same argument.
But if the public cup was to go,
what would replace it? Initially, Hastings preferred disposable cups; they
could be purchased from a machine for a penny—the number you could get for that
penny varied—and disposed of after use. Hastings suggested such machines could
be installed in all civic buildings. The new system would replace the public
cup with a private cup. The shared aspect of consumption would be lost, but the
familiar process—the embodied experience—of drinking from a cup would remain. But
the fountain as we know it today was already being installed at public parks in
Toronto and Hastings included it as a possibility for how people would consumer
water in the future. The article was careful to describe how the fountains
expect to be installed in Toronto’s parks would work—“a little stream of water
rises six inches or more from the mouth of the pipe, and flows sufficiently
slow to permit of any person stooping slightly and drinking his or her fill of
water”—and that the fountain would have spouts at six different levels so that
every one, from a child to a man, could drink at a comfortable height.
The description of how to drink suggests how people had to be trained to use
the new fountains, or, at least, spoke about concerns that surrounded making
people comfortable with the new fountains, which entailed a different bodily
experience of something as mundane as drinking water. The focus on providing a
height for every potential drinkers seems like more than just a courtesy; it
seems like an effort to match the convenience of the public, or even private,
drinking cup.
Using the new technology was
challenging.
The Globe reported that
an American doctor had pointed to problems with the new fountains, suggesting a
health hazard as children bumped heads whilst getting a drink thereby “vermin
is spread from a dirty child to a clean one.” If disposing of the public
drinking cup was meant to cut the potential for the contact spread of disease
between people, in this case hair lice, the replacement couldn’t manage that if
people, such as anxious kids bumping heads, didn’t use it properly.
There was an ongoing effort to train people in how to use the new drinking
fountains. Into 1916, the
Health Bulletin
published an extended note on how to “Bite the Bubble” which stated that when “
improperly constructed or improperly used,
the bubbling fountain may become almost as dangerous as the common drinking
cup.” The Health Bulletin noted that
an inspector had taken a seat in a railway station and observed people coming
and going from a fountain, of the 47 people observed, nearly everyone of them
was not drinking properly by making physical contact with the drinking spout
and thus potentially depositing or collecting germs. The Bulletin added, “In using the bubbling fountain the rule should be
“bit the bubble.” The lip should not touch any part of the fountain, and under
no condition should the fountain be used for rinsing the mouth or for
expectorating.”
Hastings initial edict on the
drinking cup targeted city hall and city departments, but he was clear that his
end game was to remove the shared drinking cup from all areas; whether civic,
school, or private business. On April 12, 1911 Hastings sent a letter to the
Board of Education that read:
“Inasmuch as human saliva and
expectoration are the principal media through which the germs of such diseases
as tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid fever, and other communicable diseases,
are spread, it must be apparent that the public drinking cup or glass is a
frequent source of the spread of the aforesaid diseases. Its use is,
consequently, prejudicial to public health, and it therefore becomes my duty,
under the Public Health Act, to ask your board to see that the aforesaid public
drinking cup or glass be removed from the schools under your jurisdiction, and
sanitary fountains or sanitary drinking cups substituted therefore at your
earliest convenience”
Here, we see the power of the new
medical discourse. Because humans carry potentially deadly germs, and because
germs could be dispersed by touch, items that people touched were now liable to
control by the public health act. Under that logic, very little was not under
the control of the public health act. In Foucauldian terms, the potential
germiness of the human body enabled the power of the state to stretch across
the extent of the human body and any thing that it might touch. It was a
process aided by the very real health concerns that Hastings was trying to
address in an expanding urban environment.
|
The problem wasn't just drinking fountains. Most public water supplies relied on a shared cup for consumption. This spigot and cup were photographed by the health department and capturing the cloudy condition of the cup was likely the goal behind the photo. (“Common drinking cup,” Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 32, Item 719, date of creation, July 4, 1923, City of Toronto Archives) |
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What lurks in the cup? The health department knew and even if images of bacteria didn't mean much to the general public they were probably a useful scare tool. (“Bacteria on common drinking cup,” Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 32, Item 133, date of creation, April 22, 1912, City of Toronto Archives) |
How the Board of Education got
rid of the public drinking cup was up to them, Hastings told
The Star, although he still preached the
convenience of the sanitary drinking cup. The article noted that the public
health department at City Hall was sporting a new sanitary fountain but that
none of the other departments had come onside yet. At the Board of Education,
Hastings’s order was met with a grim view towards compliance. As
The Star noted, the school board was
“inclined to admit” that Hastings had the power to abolish the public drinking
cup. But the challenges of carrying out that demand made the board hesitate. Individualizing
the drinking experience was an expensive and complicated process. Supplying the
individual disposable cups that was challenging in a school division that
hosted 40,000 students.
At the end of April trustees were still discussing the issue and estimated that
supplying cups would cost $5 per day at some schools. Finally the board settled
on working towards installing sanitary fountains and asking that kids bring
their own cups in the meantime. However Trustee Hiltz pointed out, “You would
find they would be lending cups to each other.”
In other words, and this was a challenge that Hastings was well aware of, it
wasn’t enough simply to remove the public drinking cup physically, you had to
remove the acceptability of it as well. That’s why a public education campaign
was so critical. Fear and shame were a critical part of getting people to give
up the public cup. But they couldn’t be forced. This new way of drinking had to
be sold to the public, not just mandated. While Hastings pushed the new
approach, he also knew that punishing people for not obeying wouldn’t work. As
he told
The Star in 1912, as the
campaign to end the drinking cup wore on, pushing enforcement would only
“provoke resentment” and make reform more difficult.
Far better, Hastings argued, to educate the public about the
potential dangers.
The
newspapers were one tool.
The Health
Bulletin, inaugurated under Hastings, was another with the bulk of the
issues being distributed to the schools. As he had with the war on flies,
Hastings hoped to win over the children to help influence the parents.
In the same edition that noted
the school board’s discussion,
The Star
also reported that Hastings planned to extend his public cup ban to “every
business office, every factory, and every little store” and demand its
replacement with a fountain or supply of disposable cups.
The Star noted that even if people could buy two or three
disposable cups for a penny, they could still end up paying five or ten cents
to meet their water needs on a hot day. “The price of a glass of liquor,”
Hastings countered.
But he
expected (probably naively) that employers would either supply the disposable
cups for their workers, or that they could use their only collapsible cups. There
was a potential monetary upside to privatizing the drinking experience, which
was not lost on businesses in Toronto. Indeed, the monetary upside of replacing
the public cup helped create momentum against it. Hastings was probably not so
devious as to appreciate what this ambivalence about how a new system of
drinking should work—private cup or cupless fountain?—but continuing to promote
the private cup, whether supplied by machines or personal collapsible cups,
brought private business on side. Savvy business people advertised their own
alternatives to the “Dangerous Public Drinking Cups.” Public health, and the
business upside of getting everyone using their own cup rather than sharing a
communal cup, had business upside.
But the advertisements also carried deeper meanings. For example when the
Julian Sale Leather Goods Co. Limited pitched its private drinking cup it
pointed out that “it is a thousand times more safe and sanitary to carry your own
cup along with you.”
The safety
argument should render the sanitary discussion redundant. But by being
“sanitary” people would be meeting new expectations of behavior; it was a code
word for class and social expectations and a reminder of how seemingly benign
advertisements link with official discourses surrounding behavior.
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Danger could be good for business, and some companies were quick to jump on the public drinking cup ban bandwagon. ("Folding Drinking Cups," The Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, April 19, 1911, Page 13) |
That a number of Toronto’s
residents couldn’t afford his solution for getting rid of the public drinking
cup, has to have occurred to Hastings although it doesn’t seem to have troubled
him; his efforts were primarily aimed at the moneyed middle-class. Get them in
line and the rest of the city would follow. Hastings comments within the Health
Bulletins, about the behavior of the “foreign born,” and the precise
categorizing off all non-anglo-Canadian people found within the areas covered
by Toronto’s 1911 slum report suggests that Hastings divided Toronto into two
groups of people; the anglo citizens of Toronto would could be educated to
change their ways and the non-anglo “foreign-born” who would learn by watching
their betters but were not expected to be part of the discussion.
The Star and
Globe would
periodically joke about Hastings’s campaign against the public drinking cup and
they enjoyed tracking his frustrations. But generally, they functioned as a
complaint media throughout the campaign, followed Hastings lead and backed his
view that he had the authority under the public health act to carry out his
public drinking cup ban. It helped that Toronto wasn’t the only place involved
in such a campaign. Indeed, Hastings was merely the local representative of a
battle of public drinking cups that was playing out across North America.
The Star published a map illustrating as
much in its April 29, 1911 edition: ten states had already enacted legislation
against public drinking cups and 11 more had legislation pending. In joining
this campaign Toronto could imagine itself on the cutting edge of health
protection in North America.
There may be a pattern to where the anti-cup campaign was having its success,
but it doesn’t appear clear to me. Michigan, Illinois, New Hampshire,
Louisiana, and Idaho all had bans by 1911. More bans were pending in Texas,
California, and New York. I believe the bans had more to do with a successful
frontman for the campaign in particular areas than with cup concerns being
indigenous to those areas. The public drinking cup ban would likely have come
to Toronto eventually, or the city would have transitioned away from the cup
more slowly, but that it came in 1911 was entirely due to Hastings commanding
role. But the success of the campaign was made possible because Hastings could
point to efforts that were underway elsewhere. At a certain point of critical
mass, the campaign against the cup became a benchmark of the modern city.
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The public drinking ban swept across the United States, but in a very uneven pattern, ("Abolishing the Drinking Cup," The Toronto Daily Star, Saturday, April 29, 1911, Page 6.) |
The theme that becoming modern
meant adopting these practices was something that was repeated often by
Hastings. In 1911 he was quoted in
The
Star as stating that, “The public drinking cup is one of the most filthy
habits tolerated by civilized man”
and in
The Globe as commenting that
“It is remarkable that civilized communities continue the common use of
drinking cups,” Hastings told the Globe.
Similarly the
Health Bulletin noted
in 1912, “The common drinking cup is rapidly disappearing, like many other
unsanitary things…The bubbling fountain has become so universal that even now
the toleration of the common drinking by a city is an indication that it is
away behind in the game of progress.”
Progress didn’t always move as
quickly as Hastings might have liked and his efforts reveal the conflict
between unelected civil servants moving ahead with what they feel to be correct
and elected officials dealing with the political ramifications of those
decisions. With respect to getting rid of the public drinking cup the city’s
parks, Ald. Yeomans argued on June 9 that the city needed to hold off until an
alternative was available.
“The Public Health Act cannot be
ignored,” Hastings replied in an exchanged printed in The Star, reminding us once again of the power held by the public
health act by a city official willing to wield it and a society prepared to
allow him.
Ald. Yeomans: “But the law should
be enforced intelligently, and some other means of drinking should be given
before the cups go.”
Dr. Hastings: “How long will it
take to provide some substitute? I notified the Board of Control that the cups
be removed, and some substitutes be provided, as far back as April 10.”
Ald. Yeomans: “It hurts the
children more to do without a drink on a hot day than to drink from a common
cup.”
Dr. Hastings: “The cup is twenty
times as great a danger as doing without a drink for a couple of hours. In
fact, the latter is merely an inconvenience.”
Hastings clearly didn’t concern himself with answering to the parents of
thirsty children, but elected officials did and council demanded and received
the return of the cup in public parks in 1911. Hastings would still have his
way, but it would take at least another year.
Hastings found some of his most
obstinate cup users at city hall.
The
Star noted, with some amusement, that while listening to Hastings rail
against the public cup on June 10, city controller Ward penned a poem with
President-of-Council Spence and Hastings as its subject:
“Hurrah for the Doctor of Spotless
Town,
He spotted a germ on Spence’s
gown,
It would not be meet, for justice
sake,
To burn the President at the
stake,
But he’ll go behind the bars, we
hope.
Bars of what? Why, bars of soap!”
But on June 20 the tempest in the
drinking cup came to a head at city hall; with Property Commissioner R.C.
Harris on his side, Hastings instructed the Board of Control that all workers
at city hall must start toting their own cups. Acting-Mayor Spence put the
question to Hastings, “Supposing, doctor, that somebody drinks out of my
private cup, can I have him sent to jail?”
“Everybody, is supposed to look
after his own cup—our duty is to abolish the common drinking cup,” Hastings
replied. The Board, a handful of men, pointed out that at most there would only
be four people sharing a cup, but Hastings was having none of it, arguing that
even among the four, one person might be carrying disease. It could be any one
of them and they wouldn’t even know.
The Star did a survey in 1911 of the Central Prison, house of Industry,
Girls’ Home and city missions to see whether they had abolished the public
drinking cup. They hadn’t, at least, not yet. Part of the problem was
practicality, a mission representative was quoted as saying, “The men who come
here will certainly want a drink of water; we can’t supply them with separate
cups, and I am sure the men won’t themselves.”
It was expected that the lower classes would be slow to adapt to the new
system. There were practical reasons; a cup did cost money after all. But the
expectation went beyond that; a narrative that
The Star spelled out after a discussion with an official at the
Central Prison. The Central Prison staff member joked at first that, “we’re
going to install individual silver goblets” before going on to say that there
were no plans to change a system of shared cups that had been in use for 45
years.
The Star seemed to expect this
and added, “It is only a rumor, but the story is going around that an attempt
was made in another penal institution in the city to provide the prisoners with
tin cups of their own, which they were to carry in their pockets, and use when
they wanted a drink. Such violent opposition arose that the order had to be
rescinded.”
The story of prisoners revolting
over the loss of their beloved drinking cup may well have been true—or it may
have been a colorful rumor—but in either event, it neatly fit The Star’s narrative for how prisoners
were expected to feel about the cup:
“Prisoners, as every one knows,
are very sensitive people. They thought it rather a reflection upon themselves
to be compelled to use their own cup. Some men also objected on the ground that
it was an attempt to make them “genteel,” and if there is anything a prisoner
does not want to be it is an aristocrat. He is a man of the people, and does
not want to be transplanted to a higher social sphere. At any rate, it is said
that the old system was restored, and now the fellows drink together from one
or two granite cups in the corridor, and are happy as clams once more. The
natural conservatism of the prisoner has reasserted itself.”
The Star may have been poking fun at the board of control, because
it ran its prison narrative right next to a story on city council, in which
acting-mayor Spence was objecting to the common cup being removed from the
mayor’s office: “There are only four persons in the office,” was the protest
from Spence. Countered by a lecture from Hastings that any one of those four
could be carrying germs.
Read next to the prison article, it would be fair to ask if the Board of
Control members were being every bit as conservative as the prisoners in the
face of a new logic on how people should interact with one another. Huddled
around their shared cup the Board of Control members seemed as happy as clams.
There are probably several
meanings we can take from this discussion. I think there was a homosocial bond
that went with the public drinking cup. We see it in the Board of Control,
where the genteel middle class men are content to keep sharing a common
drinking cup as they go about the business of running the city. The cup was a
touch point in maintaining that space.
The
Star, intentionally or not, is suggesting that same homosocial shared space
is at work around the city council table as in the prison hallway. Presumably
in the gendered landscape of 1911 Toronto the same homosocial atmosphere would
have existed among women, but
The Star’s
quote from the Girls’ Home is simply, “Oh, mercy, we couldn’t do that here! The
girls are all right as they are” with no sense that it was the collective
experience of drinking together that was the impediment to change.
The Star’s class discussion around the behaviour of the prisoners
seemed to provide several unstated lessons for readers. It elevated the
individual cup to a status of modernity. The shared drinking cup is a
retrograde conservative element. It assumes that rejection of the public
drinking cup is a mark of genteel middle class society. Indeed, Hastings’s
efforts to get rid of the public cup seem to have been directed at the middle
class; other classes would follow or be left by the wayside. The portrayal of
the prisoners also shows them to be behind the times, indeed, perhaps incapable
of adapting to this new society and thereby likely to be left behind. In that
sense the private drinking cup, or rather eschewing the public drinking cup was
a mark of modernity in turn of the century Toronto. It represented embracing
the medical discourse that was filtering through North America at the time. It
also meant that the permeability between people, between men, that was expected
by the prison inmates was no longer acceptable in a modern, genteel society.
Part of creating a modern subject meant being trained in how to embrace the new
urban landscape and what it entailed.
There were other voices that
disagreed with the effort; or were, at least, skeptical about how critical it
was to get rid of the drinking cup. A letter from H.C.M. asked if the city
wasn’t being alarmist in calling for an end to the common drinking cup. H.C.M.
didn’t discount germ theory but he did wonder how large a concern it really
was; suggesting that people probably came in contact with more germs while out
with a stroll than through a rinsed public cup. He also recounted his
experiences as a youth;
“When I was a boy I attended a
country school. Once or twice a day two of the pupils would take a wooden pail
and fill it at the nearest farmer’s well. With a tin dipped in it the pail
would be carried around and each pupil given a drink. The pail, seldom if ever
cleaned, would be used until it fell to pieces, and the dipper until it was red
with rust, became leaky, and lost its handle. Contrast this method with a tap,
running water, and a cup thoroughly rinsed after each time of using. Yet we in
that country school did not die off like flies in a frost.”
Skepticism about the real threat
of the public cup is the principle argument here. But there is also subtle
counterstatement. The pail toted around from student to student was a
collective form of drinking. It was a shared experience and that was a part of
what was remembered by the letter writer as he or she weighed into the public
cup discussion.
The effort to abolish the public
drinking cup had its supporters and the groups often saw themselves as avatars
of modernity and reform. Interestingly, the examples gleamed from The Star and the Globe were also female groups. It’s a trend worth exploring. The
most obvious rationale seems an effort to hitch themselves what was perceived
as the modern approach, be it drinking or gender relations. But how gendered
was the discussion of the public drinking cup? Did it represent a symbol of a
particularly masculine public space with the expectation that it would be men
sharing a drink with the public cup? Was its removal part of a broader effort
to create a more heterosocial public space; a process that in and of itself
required a far less permeable relationship between gendered bodies. In other
words if men and women were going to share space within the public sphere, did they
need to take one step back from one another. Sharing a public drinking cup was
far too intimate.
The Local Council of Women took it
upon themselves to respond to H.C.M.’s letter. Passing along an extract from
“Public Health,” a quarterly publication issued by the Michigan State
Department of Health” which offered the medical reasons for supporting the
abolition of the public drinking cup. The extract noted that “It is known that
disease-producing bacteria may be in the mouths of healthy persons. A considerable
number of well persons have been found to harbor in the saliva the germs
causing pneumonia, meningitis, grippe, bronchitus, diphtheria, mumps,
tonsillitis, etc.” The report added that germs have been detected on public
drinking cups and that an outbreak of disease had been traced to a public
drinking cup in New York.
Under germ theory bodies became
seething collections of potentially communicable germs. The body became a
threat and some bodies more so than others. Concerns about race, class boundaries,
and gender boundaries at the beginning of the twentieth century collided with
this new scientific view of the human body that rendered its permeability a
threat. The potential of bodies to host and pass along communicable diseases
underlay Toronto’s and other cities concerns about the Slums, holding thousands
of bodies teeming with germs and threatening to break out. Slums had probably
always held a threat based on race, ethnicity or class, but the promotion of a
scientific theory that seemed to validate those concerns rendered that threat
even more powerful. The ramifications of this change included an increased
focus on controlling human bodies. Every “body” needed to be hermetically
sealed to protect other bodies. How far could we take this? The Star offered
some light hearted suggestions: “That chronic nuisance, the man who always
borrows his neighbor’s paper is shaking in his shoes these days. Toronto’s
Medical Health Officer has demanded individual drinking cups, and may order
individual newspapers almost any day.”
In a long, and soundly argued,
demand for the enfranchisement for women, Margaret Gordon, president of the
Toronto Suffrage Association, concludes by arguing the issue isn’t whether
every women or even the majority of the women are demanding the vote but rather
the rightness and the progressive attitude that lies behind them receiving the
vote. She argues that the suffragettes are making the equivalent of demanding
pure water at a time when most people were happily drinking “anything that
flows from a tap, using a common cup without objection and bearing the
consequences.”
The
suffrage movement, clean water, abolishing the public drinking cup and
knowledge of why you should, sit neatly on the modern side of this discussion,
dirty water, inequality, sharing germs and an ignorance of proper hygiene sit
on the other side proving a neat recipe on how the modern subject was expected
to be created with a mix of behaviour, technology and knowledge. Gordon, and
Rose Rambler, who penned a letter for the Household Economic Association,
noting her group’s support for the medical inspection of schools and the
abolishion of the public cup,
and
others like them oriented themselves in leadership roles within this
discussion.
The discussion was taking part
across Canada and the United States. The Halifax Echo had this to say, “ With
the public drinking cup out of the way and the common horsefly (it may have
meant housefly) on the road to extinction, we thought that the limit had been
reached. The bacteriologists should take a holiday; the garden variety of man
has enough trouble without having to boil his toothbrush before and after
using.”
Becoming a modern subject was exhausting business, keeping up with the latest
benchmarks was challenging and there was always a question of just how far this
training of people could be taken.
A lover of Cleanliness wrote into
the Star to show his or her support for Hastings. The letter listed off all
parts of Hastings vision of the city, which included capping building heights
and fighting against narrow streets. The letter went on:
“And we admire Dr. Hastings for
his strong, manly stand against unhealthy crowding of street cars, the common
drinking cup, the common towel, and the “common” fly. Why just imagine a broad
clean city, a seat in the street car, our little folding drinking cups, a
flyless restaurant, providing small individual towels, why it makes us hold up
our heads and walk straighter just to think of it. The better element are with
you, doctor. The others must be awakened to their privileges of citizenship.”
Masculinity, or more correctly the notion of appropriate masculinity, is often
deployed to support one’s argument. In this situation, Hastings was masculine
both in his efforts to effect change against what seemed at times staunch
resistance from some quarters, evidenced by the delays he encountered while
enacting his pubcli cup ban and the truculence of the city council, and also in
the sense of what the new modern masculine was supposed to entail. The modern
man knew enough about proper hygiene not to share his drinking cup and we
recall Hastings’s earlier comment about how the cost of disposable cups one
might use throughout a hot day would surely come to no more than a glass of
beer; a genteel middle class comment that speaks to the need to prioritize ones
spending habits and a critique of the lowly beer drinker.
Hastings’s cup ban had started
with city hall and civic departments and moved on to the school division. On
March 4, 1912 he officially extended the ban to the rest of the city with an
ordinance that read, “any public place, or in any public institution, hotel,
theatre, factory, public-house, or public or private school, collegiate
institute, or college, and all other educational institutions, or any railroad
station or ferry house within the City of Toronto or any boat or ferry plying
in Toronto Harbor, or the furnishing of such common drinking cup or receptacle
for use in any such place is hereby prohibited.”
Despite the tough talk, progress was uneven; at city hall councilors were in
1912, as the Star gleefully pointed out, still doggedly sticking with the
common drinking dump.
Special sanitary cup machines were brought in from New York for the Exhibition,
but the public also had the option of using the public cup.
The schools had indeed followed Hastings edict and removed the public cup, but
in nothing had replaced it; leaving students to their own devices. Some brought
cups of their own, others simply drank from the tap, leaving school officials
to fret that the germs they were depositing on the tap when they did so were as
dangerous as those they had shared through the public cup.
Within the Health Bulletin, the discussion around the public cup continued for
the rest of the decade, indicating that turning the public against it, while
ultimately successful, did not happen over night.
“Why not
advocate public plates , too?,”
The Globe,
Friday, July 14, 1911, Page 9.
Health
Bulletin, August, 1911, Vol. 1, Page 2, Fonds 2, Series 60, Item 1981, Box
225028, Health Bulletins, City of Toronto Archives.