23: Colonies for 'human wastage'
American charity and visions of a Christian colonial empire
I was reading Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, partly because it’s not a book about Geel or care work or the history of Belgium. But if you’re me, everything is about the history of care work.
Strasser provides a fascinating overview of the shift in how the better off provided goods to those in need, through the lens of how public health influenced municipal waste collection.
Before the widespread adoption of the refrigerator, households with extra food made use of it within the shorter time before it would spoil. This entailed saving grease, feeding chickens and pigs, and giving food that wouldn’t be eaten by the household to those in need. This could mean sending a plate of leftovers to a neighbor or it could mean giving it to beggars who would come to the back door.
Clothing, tools, and other objects were also used and reused until they could no longer be repurposed. Just like today, some people got by through the collection and sale of other people’s trash and donations. This might mean finding something that could be matched with a buyer or it could involve making repairs or extensive changes to an item.
Generally, I have an overwhelmingly positive opinion on the wave of public health measures at the turn of the 19th century. It brought clean drinking water into homes, cleared the street of sewage, and gets credit for a significant increase in human life expectancy. However, it also disrupted this system of redistributing food and items among neighbors.
Reading Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era had shown me how the same social workers and settlement houses that protected and provided for the poor also upheld and enforced capitalist, settler colonialist ideals. Strasser’s book further connected the dots, showing how municipalities used their methods of waste collection to redirect leftover food and objects from individuals to institutions.
It was no longer acceptable (or, often, legal) to give your excess food, clothes, and household items to someone you knew would want them or to leave them on the street for someone to take. Now, depending on your city, you needed to request municipal pickup or bring it to a licensed dealer in waste.
As a former dumpster diver, I knew it’s technically considered theft when I take something out of the trash. Cities are paid for their recycling, so collecting bottles from the streets to redeem the bottle deposit is stealing from the city. Taking sandwiches out of the trash after the coffee shop closes is likewise stealing. If I entered private property to pull something out of a dumpster, that’s both stealing and trespassing. Now I know these laws originate from a wave of public health regulations. The same concern for people’s wellbeing that removed the pigs and horse manure from New York City’s streets are the reason it’s illegal for me to pull something perfectly good (or repairable) out of the trash.
Of course, making it illegal to dump your trash in the street, feed it to your (now illegal) backyard farm animals, or give it to a neighbor does not make the waste go away. Charities emerged to fill this newly created void.
Now, instead of one neighbor giving things to another directly, the better off would give their excess to a charity. The charity would decide who deserved what and what they needed to do in order to get it. Where previously people had independently resold, repaired, and modified items, now people performed this work under the direction of charitable organizations like the Salvation Army and had the opportunity to buy donated goods at below market prices. Today, the Salvation Army is the largest non-governmental provider of social services in the US, with over 110,000 employees around the world.
The Catholic Church had managed beggars by regulating it. Only beggars who had undergone an exorcism were approved to beg, while those caught begging without authorization faced penalties. Charities like the Salvation Army cleared the streets of the beggars, ragmen, and scavengers by relocating them to their facilities and providing them with work in exchange for room and board.
Unlike some charitable institutions, the Salvation Army found work for all. Those with mental and physical disabilities were provided with housing and matched with tasks. What mattered was their willingness to work, not their skills or abilities. Public scrutiny about unpaid labor and subminimum wage pay has shed light on the high proportion of Salvation Army and Goodwill workers who were and are legally disabled.
The Salvation Army was founded by William Booth, a Methodist Minister, in 1865, four years before Ocean Grove was established as a Methodist Camp Meeting. The sorting, repairing, and selling of waste was moved out of sight to Salvation Army facilities. What the poor had previously done for themselves was now a series of charitable activities being done “for” them by an institution. As Frederick Booth-Tucker so charmingly put it, “The human wastage is employed in collecting, sorting, repairing and selling the material waste.”
Since charity was degrading, the poor were required to purchase things or trade their labor for the goods that had been donated. Peddlers and businesses competing with charities like the Salvation Army, Goodwill Industries, and the Society of St Vincent de Paul were put out of business, since charities could undercut the competition by selling donated goods using labor that was either unpaid or used subminimum wages.
The way the Salvation Army took the impoverished and isolated them was intentional. In 1890 Booth published In darkest England: and the way out, which outlined his vision for Salvation Army colonies that would provide room, board, and work to the needy. City colonies – known as Industrial Homes – would provide labor for the Salvation Army’s businesses. Industrial Homes were meant to be a temporary solution. Those who did not have gainful employment or supportive families to return to would “be passed onto the Colony of the second class.” This was the farm colony.
On the farm colony, the indigent poor would be trained in self sufficiency. From the farm colony, Salvation Army leadership would choose potential emigrants to populate their overseas colonies, which were in need of agricultural workers. The plan was far more comprehensive than just these three tiers of colonies. Booth had a grand vision for the Salvation Army:
“The Scheme, in its entirety, may aptly be compared to A Great Machine, foundation in the lowest slums and purlieus of our great towns and cities, drawing up into its embrace the depraved and destitute of all classes; receiving thieves, harlots, paupers, drunkards, prodigals, all alike, on the simple conditions of their being willing to work and to conform to discipline. Drawing up these poor outcasts, reforming them, and creating in them habits of industry, honesty, and truth; teaching them methods by which alike the bread that perishes and that which endures to Everlasting Life can be won. Forwarding them from the City to the Country, and there continuing the process of regeneration, and then pouring them forth on the virgin soils that await their coming in other lands, keeping hold of them with a strong government, and yet making them free men and women; and so laying the foundations, perchance, of another Empire to swell to vast proportions in later times. Why not?”
The first city colony was established in Whitechapel in 1889. A trial farm colony, Hadleigh Farm, was established in 1891. Ultimately, Booth didn’t carry out his specific vision of an empire consisting of city, farm, and overseas colonies. That’s hardly to say he failed at achieving his vision, as The Salvation Army has spread around the globe, operating in 120 countries. It is an empire operating quietly, without our noticing its vast reach and power.
By 1904 there were 49 Industrial Homes, in which 1,100 men and 70 “officers” lived and worked. The buildings contained a shop at the ground level, with offices, sorting facilities, repair workshops, communal facilities, and dormitories on the other floors. Industrial Homes that did not generate a profit were shut down. Today the Industrial Homes are known as Adult Rehabilitation Programs.
Hadleigh Farm was the only farm colony. It’s still operating today, including providing employment training for people with special employment needs.
The Industrial Homes corporation was one of a number of Salvation Army corporations, which included a bank, insurance company, an employment agency, and a uniform company. They issued publicly traded stocks and sought both investments and donations from the public. This financial power was the cause for scrutiny back in 1906, most notably in John Manson’s The Salvation Army and the Public. There’s also the Salvation Army William and Catherine Booth University College, which I passed several times while in Winnipeg without ever noticing. Once I asked, I learned it’s known for its School of Social Work.
By 1909, the habit of keeping a bag to accumulate unwanted clothes and household items for the Salvation Army had already been established among many American families. The rag man and his pin money was simply replaced by Boy Scouts collecting donations.
This donation bag was ever present in my house growing up and it’s something I’ve seen in many of the homes I’ve stayed in. I certainly didn’t think of the donation bag as funding a Christian Empire or the reeducation of ‘human wastage.’ I thought of it as a way to give away clothes I’d outgrown or simply didn’t like anymore. I’ve never bothered to look up information on the charity collecting clothes, instead choosing whichever has the most conveniently located drop-off location.
After writing this, I went to both the Salvation Army and Goodwill in hopes of finding a dress to wear for an upcoming party.
When I first realized that I had grown up in a place that could be the American Geel, I thought it was a bizarre coincidence. Then I started seeing the hallmarks of Geel everywhere. Rather than being a medieval tradition frozen in time, it is the product of a liberal colonial mindset. Far from being an organic expression of care, it’s the byproduct of rules and regulations. Far from being irreproducible, there are Geels wherever liberal colonial forces have left their mark. The Catholics and the Methodists – with their complex histories and impacts – have left quite a mark on our communities.
Funny how many Christian organizations have a history of kind of hate the poor.