In the archives at UW-Parkside lies an annual report from the Board of Health of Racine from 1885 written by J.G. Meachem, Jr, M.D. The “City of Racine Annual Report.” This report details the projects of the developing Racine City completed in the year which pertain to sanitization and health. J.G. Meachem, Jr, M.D. was Chairman of the Board of Health in 1885. He resided in Racine, Wisconsin, in its developing years. He published some of his medicinal research and has a hand-written speech about hydrophobia in the UW-Parkside archives. Meachem’s father was a doctor as well (J.G. Meachem, Sr., M.D.). From his medical research and the “City of Racine Annual Report,” one can tell that Dr. Meachem, Jr., was a leader of his time who lived to serve the well-being of the city and its inhabitants through taking steps to understand and prevent contagious diseases. This is in stark contrast to much of the literature of the time, which concentrated on disease as an uncontrollable problem. Meachem was a realist who viewed Racine as a place where health was expected as opposed to the Romanticist expectation of disease in the city.
As per the Wisconsin State Laws of 1883, physicians were required under section 3, chapter 167 to report contagious diseases upon diagnosis (Meachem 4). Meachem collected all of the information from those reports throughout the year and presented the final numbers in the form of charts. The idea was not for the author to analyze the data, but to report it. However, a reader could easily analyze the information and come to many conclusions about Racine and aspects of its citizens’ lives (and deaths) in the late 19th century. The “City of Racine Annual Report” represents the opposite of Romanticism through realism and science in the city. Cities portrayed by Romanticist authors trend the same theme of Natureless, soul-sucking danger zones, respectfully. It’s no coincidence that Edgar Allan Poe’s “City by the Sea” sports a city of the dead, not a forest of the dead or even a lawn of the dead (Poe lines 1-5). The “City of Racine Annual Report” from 1885 does two important things: it gives the real data to challenge the imagined by opposing fiction and symbols with fact and perspective, and it makes Romanticism and realism personal. This is Racine, Wisconsin’s facts, not iron mills somewhere in America, or some wood on the East Coast fluffed with imagination and Romanticism. Meachem faces the facts and focuses on necessary changes.
J.G. Meachem’s report provides a little more context in the form of facts, not fancy. Interpretations will vary, but the hard facts will not change as they lend a new light to old ideas. Meachem reports “nine dead animals have been removed from the public streets. The usual cleaning of street and alleys has been done” (Meachem 3). Nine animals have died in the city, and the streets have been cleaned. Although Meachem does not explain what “usual cleaning of streets and alleys” entails, he does not hide any facts about problems pertaining to sanitation; nine animals have died in the past year and their bodies were in the public streets. Henry Thoreau might have pointed out that Nature cannot survive in the city—look at the nine dead animals. Later in the report when Meachem discusses how many human deaths have occurred and from what, he states that only 17.14 per thousand of 21 thousand—which is of the city’s population died, and that many were still births or old aged people (Meachem 5). This gives context to how threatening cites were and were not to human life through hard numbers rather than fanciful fears readers of Edgar Poe and Henry Thoreau encounter in their perusal. The report takes the overarching, intangible idea of Romanticism and applies a personal touch that a human can contextualize and think about in terms of a real place in the U.S. in the 19th century.
The report is split into seven parts in the following order: Complaints, New Work, Necessities, Circulars, School Teachers Assistance, Contagious Diseases, and Reporting Contagious Diseases. Meachem reports, “Two hundred and forty-seven complaints have been answered. Verbal order was sufficient to satisfy all but twenty-six which required written notices” (Meachem 2). The Health Officers answered a lot of complaints in the year with success. Meachem says that is how many “have been answered,” but never states how many complaints were submitted. Cities may ignore lower class complaints, but looking at the breakdown by ward of the complaints the biggest difference is by 21: the First Ward had 48 answered complaints, and the Sixth had 27. However, the numbers are pretty even across the board of wards as they range between 39 and 27 besides the First Ward’s 48. The First Ward also had twenty-four wagon loads of “refuse and waste” cleaned from its alleys, which may have been the cause of so many complaints.
The complaints all cover sewer waste and animals in the city; there were 20 cases of swine in the city and nine dead animals in the public streets along with sewer waste across the city. Meachem calls for “a general house to house inspection and thorough cleaning of all premises throughout the city” and “the removal of all refuse and waste…two or three times every week…in the thickly settled portions of the city” (Meachem 3). The Chairman of the Board of Health attempts to persuade the Mayor to allocate money to the prevention of diseases through these measures of sanitation. He asks specifically to focus on the heavily populated areas in order to prevent epidemics. This suggests that there exists no large socioeconomic discrimination in Racine in 1885 as it relates to health and sanitization.
Socioeconomic discrimination commonly appears in other texts of the 19th century. It was and is a problem in many places, but it seems not to be an early Racine problem. When juxtaposed to other works already in the Early American Literature canon, such as Life in the Iron Mills, a reader can only add to the inferences about cities. According to Rebecca Harding Davis’s account from Life in the Iron Mills, town life means “smoke” and air that is “thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings” (Davis 1). The narrator lives in a mill town filled with immigrants and ash smoke. “Town” means gross streets, difficulty breathing, “crowded human beings” breathing each other’s breath because they are so tightly packed in. It paints the Romanticist idea of the city as death ridden and spirit-crushing. However, when put next to the “City of Racine Annual Report,” this picture becomes one account of one city in America, not all cities of the 19th century. Racine seems more of a community with immigrants and Wisconsinites all living together and trying to stave off epidemics by working together to report and quarantine the few situations of the diseases whereas the mill owners are all simply trying to escape to the country. Sure sewage and stagnant water are problematic in Racine, but Dr. Meachem will help get the money from the Mayor to add drainage systems and more gutters and lime stone pavement so these problems cease. Dr. Meachem is the foil to Dr. May, who wanted to help the workers in the iron mills, but couldn’t actually be bothered to.
Romanticists romanticized the world around them to make it look better than it felt, rather than facing the reality that realists did. Thoreau, as an example, sat in the woods for a year without seeing it. He talks about his bean fields in Walden in terms of a child’s game of war. He says he had a “long war, not with cranes, but with weeds…Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead” (Thoreau 111). Thoreau cuts down foes on the battlefields of his weedy garden rather than simply weeding. Battling sounds cooler than weeding, and it is a pretty metaphor, but it is not what a realist sees. While realists face the facts to find solutions to problems, Romanticists hide behind pretty metaphors and cling to the hope of the healing Nature will bring to them if they get into the green foliage. Life in the Iron Mills ends with a non-solution: Deb gets out while the mills continue for countless others. Thoreau throws his hands up at the end of his experiment and says well that did not work so I’ll go back to town. Even Poe could not find a solution to his fears of being buried alive or the epidemic he hints at in “Mask of the Red Death.” Meachem’s facts and realist commentary in his report is not as pretty-sounding, but it shows the reader the facts of a typical city, and the changes that the people work together to accomplish in reality. It gives the century a fuller story than the war on weeds and sadness. It challenges some of the Romantic symbols.
The “City of Racine Annual Report” also validates the roots of Romanticism. It validates the fear of diseases like scarlet fever, cholera, and consumption. Meachem’s charts display the causes of death by month, age, gender, ward, disease, and nationality. The versatility of this information never ends. From April 1884 to April 1885, more men died in Racine than women did (Meachem 6). Romanticized sentimental fiction would like a reader to believe that women are more feeble and constantly closer to death than a man, but Meachem’s report disarms that myth. This report belongs in the 19th century American canon for that ability.
The “City of Racine Annual Report” provides more context to a time period and that not many college freshman and sophomores have had a chance to explore, and it helps prevent the idea that no city is good, which is a theme of Romanticism. This report takes overarching ideas in the canon, such as Romanticism and realism, and puts them to practice in a way that students and readers unused to the symbols of the time can think about and work with the texts they read. It gives readers perspective. The “City of Racine Annual Report" provides context to the 19th century and makes big, canonically-embedded ideas from the century, such as Romanticism and realism, more personal.
Work Cited
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron Mills; or, the Korl Woman. Feminist Press, New York, 1972. Kindle edition.
Meachem, J.G., Jr., M.D. “City of Racine Annual Report.” 1 Apr. 1885. Archives.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The City in the Sea.” PoemHunter.com, 19 Jan. 2012, www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-city-in-the-sea-2/. Accessed 29 Oct. 2016.
Thoreau, Henry. Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings. Edited by William Rossi, 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2008, New York.
Link to Meachem's "City of Racine Annual Report": https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3lF6vGSn_c-R1BZLVRXSVpoTWc
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