Werner Troesken, Water, race, and disease, Cambridge, MA, and London, MIT Press, 2004, pp. xviii, £22.95, $35.00 (hardback 0-262-20148-8).

Abstract

In 1971 a group of African Americans living in Shaw, Mississippi, sued their town for failing to meet the standards of the fourteenth amendment of the US Constitution (which requires equal protection of the laws for all Americans). The plaintiffs argued that since 20 per cent of black homes lacked access to sanitary sewers and only 1 per cent of white homes were similarly bereft, a clear pattern of racial discrimination in government services existed. Further, the pipes supplying water to black homes were narrower than those to white dwellings, creating much lower water pressure in black neighbourhoods. The African American citizens group won the case, and civil rights activists hailed it as a watershed decision, of the order of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed discrimination in school assignments. Commentators expected a flood of similar discrimination suits about water and sewer rights to follow. But, as it turns out, they were wrong. Shaw did not set a huge precedent precisely because the town's water and sewer pattern was highly unusual. In fact, as Werner Troesken argues in this tightly reasoned and deeply researched monograph, discrimination with regard to these civil services was rare, and even from the early twentieth century blacks received comparable water access. Most public water and sewer systems were installed in American cities during the nineteenth or early twentieth century. During that period cities in the US were far less segregated than is the case today, as both working and affluent classes lived in town, with poor dwellings interspersed with more elegant establishments. This proximity made it easier to engineer uniform systems serving both races than to segregate pipes by household colour. Further, there was considerable fear of “spillover” disease, contagion from the poor to affluent, especially with regard to typhoid fever. These two factors meant that municipal water and sewer systems installed in the two to three decades on either side of 1900 rarely discriminated, and even in the more segregated towns, black access lagged behind white by only a few years. The result was of great benefit to black citizens. Typhoid rates dropped 55 per cent among black people after water filtration equipment was installed, for example; this contrasted to a decline of 16 per cent in whites. The author explains this discrepancy by pointing out that the poverty of black citizens had prevented them from taking measures of protection open to whites, such as buying bottled water, or having the education, time and fuel to boil water for drinking. Troesken argues that black life expectancy rose from 30 in 1900 to 44 in 1940 mainly because of the impact of water-borne disease reduction. He also finds that in some southern towns black malaria rates dropped remarkably with the introduction of water purification systems, suggesting that typhoid had often been misdiagnosed as malaria among the black population. Troesken supports his theses with statistical and econometric methods, a style of argumentation somewhat out of favour among historians of late. Troesken asks clear questions of his data, and offers interesting answers. He finds that the Shaw case was important because it was so atypical; although schools, hospitals, churches and other institutions had been rabidly segregated in the Jim Crow south, water supplies and sewers had not. Any historian who would challenge his findings will have to meet data with data, eschewing the random quotation or text analysis for maps, vital statistics, and records of public improvements. This is a landmark book which speaks directly to the Thomas McKeown controversy—to paraphrase a catch line from the 1992 US Presidential election, “It was the water, stupid.”