Tacoma’s War on Rubbish
The Anti-Compulsory Vaccination society leads a citywide cleanup campaign, deputizing police to hunt down vacant-lot litter.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Tacoma Anti-Compulsory Vaccination society has awarded a $1 prize for reporting the number of tin cans on a vacant lot to Miss Olive Bums, who counted between 600 and 800 old cans on a lot at 505 South I Street. The society is waging a campaign for cleanliness as a means of preventing disease, believing that this is a better and safer preventative of smallpox than vaccination. As a result of this agitation, the city council has ordered police to assist in cleaning up the city. Officers are now tasked with reporting all rubbish and ordering property owners to clean up their lots, concluding that it is folly to pay special sanitary inspectors to do work that patrolmen can easily perform while walking their beats.
“The council has concluded that it is all folly to pay special sanitary inspectors to do work which the policemen, whose main duty is to walk around, can easily perform.”
This 1908 effort to tie urban aesthetics and public health to the 'police power' of the city remains a familiar theme in Tacoma's ongoing challenges with property maintenance and neighborhood cleanliness. It reflects an era where civic groups—rather than bureaucratic departments—often dictated the city’s environmental agenda.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.