Spit take

Meet Bylaw 4358, passed by Toronto’s City Council on April 11, 1904: A Bylaw to prevent spitting on sidewalks, and in public buildings and street cars.

The bylaw stated, “No person shall spit upon any public sidewalk which is upon a highway, or in any passageway, stairway or entrance to any building used by the public, or in any room, hall or building to which the public resort, or in any street car or other public conveyance, except into a proper receptacle.”

It went on to list charges of $1 for each offence or up to three days in the common goal of the City of Toronto. While the bylaw was passed in April, people were given until June 1 to get ready for the new spitting regime.

Full disclosure; I giggled when I first came across this in the Toronto City Council minutes. (Most of the information that follows can be found directly in the City Council minutes/appendices, but I have to thank James Fraser, an archivist at the Toronto City Archives who, about 30 years ago, put together a file of the relevant city council entries and communications surrounding Bylaw 4358. Fraser called the file “Great Expectorations” and my sense is that he had a giggle too when he was putting it together.) Other people who have looked at bylaws around spitting have typically taken a similar light-hearted view, including this openfile.ca blog.

But as it turns out there’s nothing unusual about creating bylaws to police spitting and the practice isn’t limited to the early twentieth century. The city of Kenora was discussing adding spitting regulations to its bylaws in 2010.[1] And Toronto’s bylaw isn’t just a chuckle worthy look into the past. Revised and adjusted most recently in 1994, it’s still on the books as bylaw 1994-0706 and similar bylaws exist across Canada.

The official move towards regulating spit, or expectoration as they called it, appears to have started on Jan. 12, 1903 when Ald. Noble moved that the city petition the Ontario Legislature for power to enact a bylaw “prohibiting expectoration on sidewalks, street cars and other public places.”[2] The province came through with the amendment on June 27, 1903; granting cities, towns, and villages the ability to prohibit spitting on “sidewalks and pavements, and in the passage ways, stairways, and entrances to buildings used by the public, and in rooms, halls, buildings, and places to which the public resort, streets cars, public conveyances and in such other public places as the council may by such by law designate.”[3] Toronto and other communities across Ontario now had the critical tools they needed to deal with spitting. The amendment appears to have given communities the ability to outlaw spitting entirely within their boundaries and the use of the term “pavement” suggests a neat little built form/natural environment divide for where spitting might be allowed and where it would not be. However, Toronto and other cities that adopted such bylaws were a little more nuanced in where they restricted spitting.

Armed with the new legislation, Toronto introduced its spitting bylaw on Jan. 25, 1904, and from there it worked its way through the system of committees and council meetings before being passed in April.[4]

Watching the conversation about spitting in Toronto, Ormsby Graydon, London’s city engineer took it upon himself to suggest that the city give people a chance to get acquainted with the new law and hand out warning cards to violators to tell them that charges could follow.[5] Graydon noted that in London, Ontario, the police and street car conductors doled out the cards in advance. Toronto’s council approved similar cards which read, “Please to not spit on the sidewalks, in street cars or in any public building. City bylaw no. 4358 forbids this”[6]  London’s cards listed a potential $50 fine. When Toronto was drafting its bylaw the city council did consider a similar $50 fine or up to six months in jail but then reduced the fine to a more modest $1 or three days.[7]

Historians have looked at bylaws like this and considered them to be part of a broader effort to control the working class.[8] We certainly get hints of that from the bylaws supporters. The Toronto branch of the National Council of Women of Canada threw its support behind the spitting bylaw in a letter penned April 15, 1904. In a two-paragraph summary of its support the group listed sanitary concerns, called “expectoration”—they wouldn’t even write the word “spitting”—an “offensive habit” and hoped “other municipalities will follow this commendable example in the effort to extirpate the objectionable practice from our cities.”[9] The group’s eyes seem focused on the people doing the spitting rather than simply the act of spitting itself.

Writing on behalf of the Toronto Medical Society in a letter dated April 9, 1904, Dr. A. McPhedran led off with a look at the health issues involved in spitting: “The danger from spitting on the side-walks is much greater than the general public have any conception of. The material adheres to ladies’ dresses, and to everyone’s boots, is carried into homes, there becomes dry and is shaken into the atmosphere, and is a dangerous means of infection to all in the household, and all households, no matter how well kept, are liable to this danger.”[10] Spittle was a working class product that could make its way into the most well kept of homes. McPhedran goes on to add, “The practice of spitting in such places is a very objectionable one from any point of view, and the public only need to be educated in order to have it stopped.”

Not everyone was enamored with the city’s efforts to control spitting or as convinced about the medical soundness of the rationale for doing so. In a letter published in the Star on April 6, 1904, William Haslam of 573 King Street, critiqued the impending bylaw as both impracticable and an “extreme degree of police interference with habits necessary to individual comfort and cleanliness.” Haslam went on to write that the bylaw was being based on a shoddy medical interpretation of the hazards of microbes in spit but even if the spittle held such a threat, he argued that forcing people to swallow their expectoration ad nauseum might harm them by filling them with filth.[11] Haslam’s letter amounts to a defence of people’s freedom of embodiment and a skeptical rebuttal of McPhedran’s medical suggestions.

As the advice from London suggests, Toronto wasn’t the only place to take on spitting. Montreal, Hamilton, and Brantford, to name a few, were all discussing spitting or passing bylaws to prohibit it.[12] And London, which had passed its bylaw in the spring of 1904, was already starting to charge people; three people were hauled into court on July 5 and while the judge let them off with a warning, he said the next batch in front of him would face fines.[13]

Australian pianist Charles R. Sweet was playing in Toronto about a month after the spitting bylaw had been passed and joked about it with the crowd between sets, noting, “that in Melbourne, Australia, the by-law requires the pedestrian not to “expectorate” on the “footway,” whereas at Sidney(sic) it says, “Do not spit on the sidewalk.” So that … if you want to expectorate, you have to go to Sydney, but if you only want to spit, you have to go to Melbourne.”[14] Sweet sets up a fun little hierarchy for the terms.

Clearly concerns about spitting were not limited to North America; it was a (not surprisingly, I suppose) global issue. But lest we think that Toronto was a laid back spitting sort of town, the term “expectorate” was used while the bylaw was working its way through council and only turned into “spitting” when the bylaw itself was written. It seems it was one thing to legislate against “spitting” but quite another to debate the matter using such an uncouth term.

By July the bylaw was being enforced in Toronto, although no one had actually been charged yet and police said they would warn people and only target aggressive spitters who persisted in the habit. An unnamed police inspector interviewed by the newspaper said, “Haven’t you noticed the difference already? … The by-law had a good effect, and the sidewalks are much cleaner than they were formerly. This is especially noticeable on Sundays.” Another officer went on to add that the bylaw was successfully redirecting spit from the sidewalk to the street, where spitting was still legal.[15] The latter point raises an interesting question regarding spitting bylaw enforcement; presumably the issue was where the spit landed not where it was produced. One could spit from the sidewalk provided the spittle landed on the street. The city was spatializing spit or, dare I say, creating zones for it. I find that interesting because during the same period the city was creating a bylaw to regulate residential and industrial zones.[16]

By 1908, the anti-spitting regime seemed to be well entrenched in Ontario. A Toronto Star story noted that two men, named Larshelle and Dixon were caught spitting in Port Arthur, Ontario, and charged: “They pleaded guilty in court and were given the choice of paying costs or spending ten days in jail. They hadn’t the cash and to jail they went.”[17]

As I noted, historians have seen efforts at class control as being at the heart of such legislation. Larshelle and Dixon probably felt there was a class aspect at work when they were shunted off to jail after not being able to pay their fine. And in the very same report looking at spitting the city’s Board of Health was also recommending the city ask the province for permission for “the regulation, and inspection at any time, of lodging houses, tenements, laundries, etc., the attention of the Board having been directed by the Medical Health Officer to the much over-crowded and unsanitary condition of certain premises, and the necessity in many cases of a night inspection to properly determine the conditions.”[18] So we have to read these as being part of larger concerns about the risks involved with urban bodies, whether from how they lived to how they behaved, to what they did as they strolled down the sidewalk. There’s no reason to believe that things have changed; class, race and ethnicity are in play whenever behaviour is regulated as this 2001 story from Now Magazine, in which a black man relates an encounter with police after spitting into the street, suggests.

But I don’t think we need to end the discussion there. While it’s never clearly stated, I’d suggest part of the incentive for the spitting bylaw was probably the popularity of chewing tobacco at the time. We get hints of this potential rationale in the bylaw’s wording when it clarifies, “except into a proper receptacle” by which, I would suggest, they meant a spittoon. The appreciation for the cleaner streets expressed by Toronto’s police could also have mean that they were seeing fewer gobs of tobacco on the sidewalks. In that sense, the spitting bylaw could be considered a predecessor to our current smoking bylaws; the difference being that people were expelling spit rather than smoke.

Technology also has an impact in this discussion; putting so many people together on the streetcar pushed issues like spitting into, no pun intended, the public eye. Street cars and public transit are one of the primary focal points of this legislation and are held up as the measure of its success.

Gender matters as well. The Toronto Local of the National Council of Women of Canada weighed in, putting its moral authority behind the project. McPhedran specifically mentioned the likelihood of women dragging spit into buildings as one of the rationales for the bylaw; a statement that suggest both that women shouldn’t have to deal with spit on the ground and that they were out in public moving around in such a way as to be at risk of encountering it. Similarly when Toronto’s police commented on the effectiveness of the bylaw, they held up cleaner sidewalks on Sunday as being one of its accomplishments. I would suggest the unspoken beneficiaries were couples or families out for a promenade; an example of class and gender working together. McPhedran’s comments also suggest the growing power of the medical authority, though Haslam’s counter comments also indicate how that authority did not come without doubt or criticism.

And, of course, I love the spatial nature of this. Spitting isn’t meant to disappear entirely, but we’re now zoning where it can and should take place; just as we zone where people should go to the washroom, where they should bathe or where industry should go.

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[1] Reg Clayton, “Spitting ban bylaw,” The Kenora Daily Minor and News, Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2010, 8:56 a.m. (Accessed on Saturday, Nov. 17, 2012.) http://www.kenoradailyminerandnews.com/2010/08/04/spitting-ban-bylaw

[2] Toronto City Council Minutes 1903, Item 74, Page 20, Jan. 12, 1903. See also Toronto City Council Appendix A, Board of Control Report No. 4, March 6, 1903.

[3] Ontario Statue 3 Edward VII Chapter 10 Sec. 110, amending Section 553 of the Municipal Act, Item 12, Great Expectorations file, Unusual Bylaws, Vertical File, Toronto City Archives.

[4] City Council Minutes 1904, Item 113, Page 31, Jan. 25, 1904, Toronto City Archives.

[5] Ormsby Graydon, city engineer, London, Ont., letter dated March 20, Great Expectorations file, Unusual Bylaws, Vertical File, Toronto City Archives. The letter is mentioned in the City Council Minutes, 1904, Item 249, Page 94, April 11, 1904.

[6] City Council Minutes, 1904, Item 274, Page 102, April 11, 1904, Toronto City Archives.

[7] City Council Minutes, 1904, Item 236, page 86, March 28, 1904. Also see, James Fraser, Great Expectorations file, Unusual Bylaws, Vertical File, Toronto City Archives.

[8] Helen Boritch and John Hagan, “Crime and the Changing Forms of Class Control: Policing Public Order in "Toronto the Good,"1859-1955,” Social Forces, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Dec., 1987), pp. 307-335. Page 325. I mention Britch and Hagan because they touch on Toronto and spitting directly, but there’s a large historiography that deals with issues of urban reform at the turn of the century, including Mariana Valverde’s ridiculously good The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925.

[9] Margaret E. Riddell, Toronto Local Council letter to city council, April 15, 1904, Item 17, Great Expectorations file, Unusual Bylaws, Vertical File, Toronto City Archives.

[10] Dr. A. McPhedran, April 9, 1904, Item 12, Great Expectorations file, Unusual Bylaws, Vertical File, Toronto City Archives.

[11] William Haslam, “The Spitting Bogie,” The Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, April 6, 1904, Page 6.

[12] “The Spitting Nuisance,” The Toronto Daily Star, Monday, July 21, 1902, page 8. “To Stop Spitting,” The Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, June 7, 1904, page 6 (The Hamilton story specifically mentions that the bylaw will be targeted at spitting on streetcars.)  “Reforms in Brantford,” The Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, September 1, 1903, page 3.

[13] “No spitting in London,” The Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, July 5, 1904, Page 7.

[14] “Music and Drama,” The Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, May 31, 1904, Page 8.

[15] “Cleaner Sidewalks,” The Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, July 5, 1904, Page 2.

[16] Board of Control Report No. 21, June 24, 1904, City Council Appendix A, Page 697. Toronto City Archives.

[17] “Spitting is costly,” The Toronto Daily Star, Saturday, July 4, 1908. Page 18.

[18] Adam Lynd, M.D., chair, Board of Health Report #3, March 4, 1903. Toronto City Council Appendix A, 1904, Toronto City Archives.