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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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”
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.
Historians have looked at bylaws like this and considered
them to be part of a broader effort to control the working class.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
