Nightmen and the Labor History of Shit in the City

• In Event: Shit Work, Neurasthenia, and Dead Horses: Reconsidering Urban Sanitation in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

Using newspapers, court records, trade and medical journals, and municipal reports, this paper reconstructs the lives, work, and politics of the counter-cyclical urban workers known as "nightmen" or "night scavengers," who, until the end of the nineteenth-century, were responsible for removing human waste from American cities, nearly none of which had functioning sewer systems until after the Civil War. Often employed directly or indirectly by city governments, nightmen became important figures in the nineteenth-century politics of what a modern city should look like, what kind of work was necessary to achieve such an urban environment, who should do that work, and how that work should be organized. Nightmen’s work was dangerous and often deadly, and sometimes it uncovered evidence of crimes, with bodies and stolen goods sometimes being hidden or disposed of in privy vaults. This paper builds on important scholarship about nightmen by Joel Tarr and Peter C. Baldwin, with a greater focus on the work and workers themselves. One particularly understudied aspect of nightmen’s experiences was how the organized themselves collectively as workers and how they understood their work and place in the city. This paper will piece through the archive to reconstruct this history of organization while also exploring how such "unclean" work performed by a largely Black and immigrant workforce shaped discourses of race, citizenship, and public goods.

Author

• Jeremy Zallen, Lafayette College