From teeth-whitening strips to hand sanitizer, why are Americans so obsessed with cleanliness today?
I think it’s a continuation of something that started with the Civil War, when the Americans had surprising success with this thing called the Sanitation Commission, which was headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Central Park. It achieved an enormous success in limiting deaths just by washing the patients, their linen, the walls of their rooms. It drastically cut into the deaths by disease and infection. Before the war Americans had been just as dirty as Europeans, and they came out of the war thinking cleanliness is democratic because it doesn’t cost much money. It’s progressive. It’s forward-looking. It has wonderful results. They quickly thought this is yet another way in which life in the New World is so much better than life in the Old World. The invention of modern sophisticated advertising, which began in America at the end of the 19th century, achieved an enormous success, often by advertising things like toilet soap and deodorant. Advertisers want to find more par
