The public drinking cup must go

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.”[1]

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.”[2] 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.[3]

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.[4] 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.[5] 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.”[6]

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”[7]

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)

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.[8] 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.”[9] 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.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12] 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.”[13] 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.

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.[14] 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.

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”[15] and in The Globe as commenting that “It is remarkable that civilized communities continue the common use of drinking cups,” Hastings told the Globe.[16] 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.”[17]

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.”[18] 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!”[19]

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?”[20]

“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.”[21] 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.”[22]

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.[23] 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.[24]

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.”[25]

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.[26]

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.”[27]

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.”[28] 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.[29]

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.”[30] 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.”[31] 

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.”[32] 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.[33] 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.[34] 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.[35] 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.

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[1] “Not Much Danger in Public Drinking Cup,” The Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 1910, Page 10.

[2] “Public Drinking Cup to be Abolished in Toronto,” The Toronto Daily Star, Saturday, January 7, 1911, Page 1.

[3] “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.

[4] “Public Drinking Cup to be Abolished in Toronto,” The Toronto Daily Star, Saturday, January 7, 1911, Page 1.

[5] “The Common Cup Spreads Disease,” The Globe, Friday, Feb. 3, 1911, Page 8.

[6] Health Bulletin, January, 1916, Vo. 6, Page 3, Fonds 2, Series 60, Item 1981, Box 225028, Health Bulletins, City of Toronto Archives.

[7] “Common Drinking Cup is Ordered out of Schools,” The Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, April 12, 1911, Page 1.

[8] “Fountains May Replace Cups,” The Toronto Daily Star, Thursday, April 13, 1911, Page 1.

[9] “Public Schools Will Not Close,” The Toronto Daily Star, Friday, April 28, 1911, Page 7. “Germ-laden Cup Leaves the School,” The Globe, Friday, April 28, 1911, Page 9

[10] “Civic Milk Depot is Next Says the Health Officer,” The Toronto Daily Star, Thursday, Nov. 7, 1915, Page 5.

[11] “No end to this Health Crusade,” The Toronto Daily Star, Friday, April 28, 1911, Page 13.

[12] “Dangerous Public Drinking Cups,” The Toronto Daily Star, Friday, May 12, 1911, Page 17.

[13] “Drinking Cups,” The Toronto Daily Star, Friday, June 23, 1911, Page 17.

[14] “Toronto’s Health,” The Toronto Daily Star, Saturday, April 29, 1911, Page 6. “The Public Cup,” The Toronto Daily Star, Saturday, April 29, 1911, Page 6.

[15] “A Filthy Habit Says Dr. Hastings,” The Globe, Thursday, April 6, 1911, Page 9.

[16] “The Common Cup Spreads Disease,” The Globe, Friday, Feb. 3, 1911, Page 8.

[17] Health Bulletin, October, 1912, Vo. 2, Page 3, Fonds 2, Series 60, Item 1981, Box 225028, Health Bulletins, City of Toronto Archives.

[18] “The Island Water’s Not to be Cut Off,” The Toronto Daily Star, Friday, June 9, 1911, Page 1.

[19] “At The City Hall,” The Toronto Daily Star, Saturday, June 10, 1911, Page 6.

[20] “Hastings, M.H.O., puts “Another One Over,” The Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, June 20, 1911, Page 1.

[21] “The Individual Cup Idea Brought Right up to Date,” The Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, June 21, 1911, Page 1.

[22] “The Individual Cup Idea Brought Right up to Date,” The Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, June 21, 1911, Page 1.

[23] “The Civic Cabinet Turned Down M.H.O. re Drinking Cup,” The Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, June 21, 1911, Page 1.

[24] “The Individual Cup Idea Brought Right up to Date,” The Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, June 21, 1911, Page 1.

[25] “No Much Danger in Common Drinking Cup,” The Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, April 26, 1911, Page 9.

[26] “Why Public Drinking Cup is Condemned,” The Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, May 30, 1911, Page 3.

[27] “Note and Comment,” The Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, June 27, 1911, Page 6.

[28] “Woman’s suffrage states its case,” The Toronto Daily Star, Friday, Nov. 3, 1911, Page 9.

[29] “Medical Inspection of Schools,” The Globe, May 10, 1911, Page 5.

[30] “The Canadian Press,” The Toronto Daily Star, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 1911, Page 7.

[31] “We love him and we tell him So,” The Toronto Daily Star, Monday, January 15, 1912, Page 8.

[32] “Common drinking cup to go after May 20,” The Toronto Daily Star, Monday, March 4, 1912, Page 8.

[33] “The Municipal Melting-Pot,” The Toronto Daily Star, Monday, June 24, 1912, Page 2.

[34] “Sanitary Cups at Exhibition,” The Toronto Daily Star, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1912, Page 2.

[35] “No drinking cups in public schools,” The Toronto Daily Star, Thursday, Sept. 12, 1912, Page 9.