The Risk of Cholera and The Reform of Urban Space: Philadelphia, 1893

ABSTRACT. The fear of a cholera outbreak in Philadelphia in 1893 led to intense debate over how to manage the risk of an epidemic. Philadelphians largely agreed that the risk was spatial in nature, and that coping with the danger of cholera meant addressing the problem of the city's southeastern "slums." But the meaning of this space was contested. Some reformers viewed it as a den of immorality, while others saw it as a site of injustice. The city government ignored both views, instead undertaking a technical reform by repaving the neighborhood's streets with asphalt. The episode demonstrates how competing understandings of risk and urban space yielded competing prescriptions for urban reform, and why technical reform came to be preferred over moral or economic reconstruction in the Progressive Era. Contrary to previous interpretations, Progressive reformers cannot be understood as simply "confident" or "anxious," but as prioritizing certain risks while ignoring others. Keywords: cholera, Philadelphia, public health, risk, slums, urban space. In 1893, following a devastating outbreak of cholera in Russia and Hamburg the previous year, residents of Philadelphia debated how to respond to the risk of an outbreak in their own city. Many called for a spatially specific response targeting a swath of southeastern Philadelphia, a zone characterized by high population density, high mortality, and narrow, poorly paved streets. The area was home to many recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as African Americans from the southern United States. For some Philadelphians, the fear of disease provided an opening to blame the Jewish, Italian, and Black residents themselves for the unsanitary conditions in the neighborhood; for others, the risk of cholera prompted an outcry against abuses by landlords and employers. An ambitious social reformer launched a quasi-religious movement to "abolish the slums" in this neighborhood, arguing in a series of revival-style meetings that only by a comprehensive reform of living conditions would the neighborhood, and hence the city, be made safe. The fear of cholera in Philadelphia illustrates how risk was used to defame and to defend the city's immigrants and African Americans through competing understandings of the space they inhabited. To interpret this use of risk, I draw on the theoretical writings of anthropologist Mary Douglas, most notably Risk and Culture (with Aaron Wildavsky 1982) and Risk and Blame (1992). Risk, in Douglas's view, is a language of blame that defines insiders and targets outsiders. Those in power can use it to attack the unpopular and the powerless, while those on the margins may use it to solidify their own group identity in their resistance to power. In either case, Douglas argued, risk and pollution are bound up together as ways of identifying what lies outside the boundaries of acceptability, and of fixing blame on whoever or whatever threatens to disturb the equilibrium of the system. It is not a coincidence that Risk and Culture is largely concerned with the risk of environmental pollution, which in her view shares many commonalities with more figurative forms of pollution, such as sexual or dietary taboos. Douglas's writings have been criticized for what some see as a simplistic structuralism and functionalism, as well as for Risk and Culture's dismissive views of the environmental movement, though Richard Pardon has shown that the book's harshest critique of environmentalism likely was penned by Wildavsky, and bore little relation to Douglas's core theory (Fardon 1999). Yet despite its weaknesses, Douglas's argument is helpful in understanding how moral dangers were used in quite explicit ways by both the powerful and the relatively powerless in nineteenth-century Philadelphia to exploit social divisions. "It may be a general trait of human society," wrote Douglas, "that fear of danger tends to strengthen the lines of division in a community. …