Dogs and the Making of the American State: Voluntary Association, State Power, and the Politics of Animal Control in New York City, 1850–1920

Journal of American History

Volumn 98, Issue 4, 2012, Pages 998-1024

  Wang, Jessica ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANIMAL; ANIMAL DISEASE; ANIMAL WELFARE; ARTICLE; DOG; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; GOVERNMENT; HISTORY; LEGAL ASPECT; PUBLIC HEALTH; PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE; RABIES; UNITED STATES;

ANIMAL DISEASES; ANIMAL WELFARE; ANIMALS; DOGS; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; LOCAL GOVERNMENT; NEW YORK CITY; PUBLIC HEALTH; PUBLIC HEALTH ADMINISTRATION; RABIES;

MLCS; MLOWN;

EID: 84866901327     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: 19452314     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jar566     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. “Dr. Goldwater Aims to End Dog Dangers,” New York Times, July 24, 1914, p. 7; “Muzzles the Dogs All the Year’Round,” ibid., July 29, 1914, p. 6.
2. Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel, eds., Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands (London, 1998); Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York, 2005); Terrence J. McDonald, “The Burdens of Urban History: The Theory of the State in Recent American Social History,” Studies in American Political Development, 3 (1989), 3–29, esp. 26; Ira Katznelson, “‘The Burdens of Urban History’: Comment,” ibid., 30–51; William Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review, 113 (June 2008), 762, esp. 765. On Max Weber’s conception of the bureaucratic state, see Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (2 vols., Berkeley, 1978), II, 956–1001.
3. Historians have been quicker to recognize the fluidity of the public-private boundary prior to the Civil War. See Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Ithaca, 1983); and William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996). On the period since 1870, the literature has largely neglected voluntary organizations’ statist functions. Histories concerning the policing of sexual activity and its cultural representation, for example, often refer to voluntary organizations but have generally devoted little sustained analysis to citizens’ groups’ exercise of state power. See, for example, Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York, 1987); and George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of a Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994), 131–49. In Prurient Interests, Andrea Friedman acknowledges the status of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice “as a private organization granted law-enforcement responsibilities,” but her overall emphasis on “democratic moral authority” reinforces an analytical separation between civil society and the state. Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909–1945 (New York, 2000), esp. 133. For an important exception, see Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, 2001), 83–88, 102–12, 144–57, 176–78. For an examination of child and animal protection organizations’ use of police power in terms of the private exercise of state power, see Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2011), 3–4, 17–20, 137–84, esp. 158–62, 177–84. I did not have access to Susan J. Pearson’s book until this article was nearly complete, and I am gratified by the parallels between her analysis and my own, as well as Pearson’s scholarly generosity in critiquing earlier drafts of this essay. Other reconsiderations of the relationship between voluntary associations and state power include Theda Skocpol, Marshall Ganz, and Ziad Munson, “A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Voluntarism in the United States,” American Political Science Review, 94 (Sept. 2000), 527–46; William J. Novak, “The American Law of Association: The Legal-Political Construction of Civil Society,” Studies in American Political Development, 15 (Fall 2001), 163–88; and Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants YOU: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York, 2008).
4. William J. Novak, “Public-Private Governance: A Historical Introduction,” in Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy, ed. Jody Freeman and Martha Minow (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 23–40, esp. 25–26.
5. “Dogs Rampant—To the Rescue,” New York Daily Times, July 11, 1856, p. 8. Population figures are drawn from Campbell Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990,” June 1998, Population Division Working Paper No. 27, U.S. Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/twps0027.html. On struggles over how to regulate city life, see, for example, Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).
6. Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (Baltimore, 2003), 17–18, 42, esp. 17. On pigs in cities, see “Reforms and the Pound,” New York Daily Times, June 30, 1854, p. 4; John Duffy, A History of Public Health in New York City, 1866–1966 (New York, 1974), 21, 33; Jones, Valuing Animals, 19; and Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review, 4 (July 1985), 899–935. On cows in urban backyards, see Jones, Valuing Animals, 21. On permits and unsanctioned animals in New York City, see Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Calendar Year 1913 (New York, 1914), 23. The Board of Health was already issuing permits for keeping poultry and livestock as early as the 1870s. See Minutes of the Board of Health, Oct. 23, 1872, in Minutes of the Board of Health, Health Department “B,” Aug. 2, 1871–Oct. 30, 1872 (microfilm: Minutes of Board of Health, reel 5), “Board of Health Minutes 1871/1872–1877, 1879–1882 (Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Records, New York). For restrictions on poultry, see “Dr. Goldwater to Remain: Mayor Praises Him and Indorses Dog Muzzling Ordinance,” New York Times, Sept. 29, 1914, p. 9; and Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Calendar Year 1914 (New York, 1915), 35.
7. For statistics on stray dogs, see “The Slaughter of the Dogs,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 29, 1877, p. 4; “The Merry Hydrophobia and the Cur,” ibid., July 14, 1879, p. 2; “Luxuries for the Dogs,” New York Sun, July 16, 1899, p. 3; and “The Fight against Hydrophobia,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 19, 1908, News Special section, p. 1. In 1908 New York’s human population was perhaps a third larger than what it had been in 1899, a fact that casts doubt on the accuracy of statistics that suggest the number of owned dogs more than doubled in the same period. On the widespread nature of pet ownership, see Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Orlando, 2006), 15. Specific cases that suggest dog ownership among the poor and the working class are found in “Irish Fauna,” New York Sun, Aug. 1, 1908, p. 5; “27 Dogs in a Tiny House,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 1, 1908, p. 13; and “Boy Bitten by Bulldog,” New York Evening World, Aug. 20, 1908, baseball and racing edition, p. 6. For a discussion about “civilizing” the dog, see Grier, Pets in America, 97–100, 107–8.
8. Hartog, Public Property and Private Power, 63, 132; Duffy, History of Public Health in New York City, xx; Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), 3; James F. Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York, 1970), 23–81; Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, 1998).
9. On human dread of rabies, see, for example, Philip M. Teigen, “Legislating Fear and the Public Health in Gilded Age Massachusetts,” Journal of the History of Medicine and the Allied Sciences, 62 (April 2007), 144–46; and Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 167–70. New York City’s dog ordinances remained seasonal throughout the nineteenth century, even though an 1856 study by the American Medical Association demonstrated that rabies could appear at any time of the year, and in subsequent decades experts and editorialists frequently protested that summer dog ordinances made little sense when statistics showed rates of rabies were as high or higher at other times of the year. Thomas W. Blatchford, Hydrophobia: Its Origins and Development, as Influenced by Climate, Season, and Other Circumstances; Being the Report of the Special Committee Appointed by the American Medical Association, and Read at the Meeting in Detroit, Michigan, May, 1856 (Philadelphia, 1856); “Minor Topics,” New York Times, June 20, 1867, p. 4; “Dogs in Trouble,” ibid., June 13, 1874, p. 8; “Dr. Russel on Hydrophobia,” ibid., March 2, 1881, p. 8; First Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Department of Health of the City of New York, April 11, 1870, to April 10, 1871 (New York, 1871), 238. The opening of New York’s first city pound is discussed in “City Dogs,” New York Daily Times, June 26, 1857, p. 8.
10. On the creation of a new middle-class identity centered on the family, see Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, Eng., 1981). On anxieties surrounding urban anonymity, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1982). On the evolution of working-class identities in the mid-nineteenth century, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (1986; Urbana, 1987); and Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, 1990). Elite identities remained in flux, but a cohesive, self-identified urban bourgeoisie would emerge by the early 1890s. See Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993). For the common-law distinction between livestock and pets, see Sentell v. New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad Company, 166 U.S. 698, 701 (1896). On the relationship between middle-class domesticity, Victorian sentimentality, and the changing status of pets, see Grier, Pets in America, 161–233; and Jennifer Mason, Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900 (Baltimore, 2005), 13–18. On the founding of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (aspca) and the early history of institutionalized animal-welfare advocacy in the United States and around the world, see Diane L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens, Ohio, 2006), 40–58; Mason, Civilized Creatures, 27, 100; and Pratik Chakrabarti, “Beasts of Burden: Animals and Laboratory Research in Colonial India,” History of Science, 48 (June 2010), 125–51. The aspca’s official publication, Our Animal Friends, devoted regular space to chronicling the activities of spcas around the world, a fact that testifies to animal-welfare advocates’ awareness of their participation in a global cause.
11. “That Dog Pound—Onslaught of the Canines,” New York Daily Times, June 26, 1855, p. 8; A Citizen, “The City’s Dog Catchers: They Steal Dogs Walking Quietly with Their Owners,” ibid., June 12, 1892, p. 11. On children and the street trades, see Stansell, City of Women, 204–6; and Timothy J. Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 2006), 23–24, 27–28.
12. “Concerning Dogs,” NewYorkTimes, Sept. 27, 1868, p. 4; Henry Bergh to Mr. Marriott, Pound-master, June 16, 1874, in “Local Miscellany: The Dogs,” ibid., June 17, 1874, p. 8.
13. “General City News: About the Dog-Pound in the Dog-Days,” ibid., July 26, 1860, p. 8; “Local Intelligence: The Pound of Dog-Flesh,” ibid., Aug. 3, 1867, p. 8; “An Importunate Candidate,” ibid., Aug. 18, 1874, p. 4; “The Dog Ordinance in New York,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 18, 1874, p. 4.
14. “To Catch Dogs Politely,” New York Times, March 11, 1894, p. 3; ibid., July 24, 1883, p. 4. On the elite targets of the aspca, see Edward P. Buffet, “Bergh’s War on Vested Cruelty,” typescript, 7 vols., [1929?] (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, New York, N.Y.). The aspca also consistently defended the value of pet ownership regardless of class—for example, it opposed efforts to limit dogs to single-family households. “To Fight Decree of Banishment for Dogs,” New York Times, Nov. 8, 1902, p. 7. The early literature in animal studies placed a strong emphasis on social control, but recent works have favored more nuanced approaches. See, for example, Pearson, Rights of the Defenseless, esp. 5–8, 173–74; and Mason, Civilized Creatures, 119–56, 173, esp. 121–24.
15. Bernard Oreste Unti, “The Quality of Mercy: Organized Animal Protection in the United States, 1866–1930” (Ph.D. diss., American University, 2002), 473–78. On increased reform activity in the 1890s, see, for example, Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment (Pittsburgh, 2005), esp. 48–65, 88–100.
16. As the historical literature documents, the depiction of urban politics as morality play was complicated by the periodic ability of urban reformers to win concessions from machine governments more easily than from reform mayoral administrations. Not infrequently, the aspca found a more receptive audience in Tammany Hall than from New York’s reform mayors. See, for example, Buffet, “Bergh’s War on Vested Cruelty,” vol. 5, Progress toward an A.S.P.C.A. Shelter and Hospital folder. On the intermingling of public and private power, see Novak, People’s Welfare. Comstockery and state power is discussed in Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 83–88, 102–12. On the aspca’s police work, see Henry Bergh, “Mr. Bergh on the Dog Question,” letter to the editor, New York Times, July 2, 1874, p. 5; Unti, “Quality of Mercy,” 475; and Pearson, Rights of the Defenseless, 152–63, 173–74.
17. “Annual Meeting of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: Address of President Haines,” Our Animal Friends, 27 (Feb. 1900), 122. On the image of dogcatchers, see, for example, “Brooklyn Dogs and Dog Catchers,” New York Times, Aug. 20, 1894, p. 9.
18. On Louis Pasteur’s development of preventive rabies vaccination, see Gerald L. Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton, 1995), 177–256. On the American reception of Pasteur’s vaccination procedure in the context of public excitement over germ theory, see Bert Hansen, “America’s First Medical Breakthrough: How Popular Excitement about a French Rabies Cure in 1885 Raised New Expectations for Medical Progress,” American Historical Review, 103 (April 1998), 373–418. A full account of the New York Pasteur Institute’s history has yet to be written, but newspaper coverage from the 1890s makes clear its central role in introducing rabies vaccination to New York City.
19. On the centrality of public health to nineteenth-century governance, see Novak, People’s Welfare, 191–233, esp. 193–97; and Hartog, Public Property and Private Power, 71–76, 131–32, 201n71, 208. On the establishment of public health boards and their travails in New York City and elsewhere in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago, 1962), 192–212, esp. 210–12; Duffy, History of Public Health in New York City, 1–90; Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 17–41, esp. 27–28, 35–41; Judith Walzer Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton, 1982), 44–73; and Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1842–1936 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 54–73. For background on germ theory and the expanded authority of public health boards from the 1890s to the 1910s, see, for example, Duffy, History of Public Health in New York City, 91–111, 238–80; Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State, 97–127; and Evelynn Maxine Hammonds, Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, 1999). For works that have placed greater emphasis on the continuities between the sanitary science of the mid-nineteenth century and germ theory but that have also indicated an important shift with the microbe as a new focus of disease prevention, see Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). For early insights in this direction, see also Leavitt, Healthiest City, 153–54, 243–45.
20. C.-E. A. Winslow, The Life of Hermann M. Biggs, M.D., D.SC., LL.D., Physician and Statesman of the Public Health (Philadelphia, 1929), 69–70; Wade W. Oliver, The Man Who Lived for Tomorrow: A Biography of William Hallock Park, M.D. (New York, 1941), 141, 148, 150; “Dr. Anna Wessels Williams,” National Library of Medicine: Changing the Face of Medicine, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_331.html; “Experts in Research: Women Doing Important Work in Study of Medicine,” Washington Post, Nov. 15, 1908, p. E11; Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Department of Health in the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1905, vol. II (New York, 1906); Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1906, vol. II (New York, 1907).
21. Hermann M. Biggs to William H. Park, July 19, 1896, in Man Who Lived for Tomorrow, by Oliver, 149–50. Unfortunately, William H. Park’s personal papers have disappeared, so scholars must rely instead on Wade W. Oliver’s study.
22. Oliver, Man Who Lived for Tomorrow, 173; Annual Report of the Board of Health of the City of New York for the Calendar Year 1913 (New York, 1914), 102.
23. On the health department’s canine-related animal inspection work, consult the Board of Health’s annual reports for the years 1907 to 1917. For the specific statistics cited here, see Annual Report of the Board of Health of the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1907 (New York, 1908), 51; and Report of the Board of Health of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Years 1910 and 1911 (New York, 1912), 63. The procedures of the veterinary corps for dealing with dog-bite complaints are detailed in Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1909 (New York, 1911), 62.
24. “Champion for ‘Mad Dogs,’” New York Times, July 17, 1896, p. 11; “Rabies and Hydrophobia,” ibid., July 7, 1897, p. 12. For the quotation, see “Rabies (Not) on Staten Island,” Our Animal Friends, 26 (May 1899), 194.
25. “Another Midsummer Madness: The Muzzle,” Our Animal Friends, 29 (July 1902), 243–44; “Rabies and ‘Hydrophobia,’” ibid., 30 (May 1903), 193–95.
26. “Notice to the Owner of Dogs,” ibid., 31 (Aug. 1904), 575. Our Animal Friends republished the notice about the new ordinance and its implications for dog owners in every subsequent issue until the journal ceased publication in 1906.
27. Eugene W. Scheffer, Secretary, Department of Health to George B. McClellan, Mayor, City of New York, Jan. 28, 1908 (two letters) (microfilm: reel 49), Office of the Mayor, McClellan, George B. Administration, Department Correspondence, 1904–1909 (Municipal Archives); “No Rabies in This City,” New York Times, April 7, 1908, p. 6; Minutes of the Board of Health, June 17, 1908, in Minutes, Board of Health, vol. 1908FF, Jan. 8–July 8, 1908 (Municipal Archives). The source of the department’s hydrophobia mortality data for 1907 is unclear, since its annual report for 1907 documented only 14 human rabies deaths. Combined with 8 rabies deaths the previous year, however, 1907 did mark a significant spike in deaths from rabies. Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1907, 789.
28. “Unmuzzled Dogs Now Shot on Sight,” New York Times, July 30, 1908, p. 1; “Dog Slaughter Stirs S.P.C.A. to Protest,” ibid., July 31, 1908, p. 12; Minutes of the Board of Health, Aug. 5, 1908, in Minutes of the Board of Health, vol. 1908GG, July 16–Dec. 30, 1908 (Municipal Archives); “Making a Shambles of the Streets,” New York Times, July 31, 1908, p. 4; Walter A. Dyer, letter to the editor, ibid., Aug. 1, 1908, p. 6.
29. “Charges Brutality in Dog Killing,” New York Times, Aug. 7, 1908, p. 12; “Prosecutes One Policeman,” ibid., Aug. 12, 1908, p. 2.
30. “Dog Shot at Theatre Door,” ibid., Aug. 11, 1908, p. 5.
31. “Threat to Dr. Bensel,” New York Tribune, Aug. 6, 1908, p. 1; “Dr. Bensel Threatened Again,” ibid., Aug. 11, 1908, p. 4; “Dr. Darlington Laughs at Threat to Kill Him,” New York Evening World, Aug. 17, 1908, p. 6; “Beware! Dr. Darlington!,” New York Sun, Aug. 18, 1908, p. 1; “Dr. Bensel Threatened Again,” New York Tribune, Aug. 25, 1908, p. 8. For the quotation about the rumored rescission of the shoot-to-kill policy, see “Health Board May End the Dog Killing,” New York Times, Aug. 12, 1908, p. 2. For the Thomas Darlington quotation, see “Slaughter of Dogs Is to Be Kept Up,” ibid., Aug. 13, 1908, p. 2. In response to critics, Darlington also claimed publicly that praise for the board’s actions far outpaced hate mail. “Letter of an Amiable Lady,” New York Sun, Aug. 7, 1908, p. 5.
32. “Health Board Ready to Smile at Decree,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 1908, p. 4; “Dr. Darlington’s Bughound,” Washington Post, Sept. 6, 1908, p. SM7; Annual Report of the Board of Health of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Year Ending December 31, 1908, vol. 1 (New York, 1909), 369. The aspca belittled the health department’s claims and countered that the society destroyed dogs more efficiently and humanely, and in far greater numbers, than the Board of Health’s special police squad. “S.P.C.A. July Death Record 27,597,” New York Tribune, Aug. 9, 1908, p. 5; “S.P.C.A.’s July Killings,” New York Sun, Aug. 9, 1908, p. 2.
33. “No ‘Dogless City’ for New Yorkers,” New York Times, Aug. 22, 1914, p. 15; Department of Health, “Press Bulletin No. 305,” issued for release on Sept. 16, 1914 (microfilm: reel 40), Office of the Mayor, Mitchel, John P. Administration, Departmental Correspondence Received, 1914–1917 (Municipal Archives).
34. S. S. Goldwater, Commissioner, Department of Health, to Mrs. A. J. Wells, Sept. 4, 1914 (microfilm: reel 40), Office of the Mayor, Mitchel, John P. Administration, Departmental Correspondence Received, 1914–1917; Goldwater to B. deN. Cruger, Sept. 4, 1914, ibid. On bureaucrats’ creation of constituencies to support their autonomy, see Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy. On Sigismund S. Goldwater’s successful tenure, see Duffy, History of Public Health in New York City, 266–72.
35. For Goldwater’s explanations of the health department’s rationale, see, for example, Secretary to the Commissioner to Dr. Hyatt Lyke, Sept. 19, 1914 (microfilm: reel 40), Office of the Mayor, Mitchel, John P. Administration, Departmental Correspondence Received, 1914–1917; Secretary to the Commissioner to Baroness Gertrude de Graffenreid, Oct. 21, 1914, ibid.; Secretary to the Commissioner to Mr. Elmer De Pue, Oct. 19, 1914, ibid.; and Secretary to the Commissioner to Miss Nina E. Mills, [Nov. 1914], ibid. For Goldwater’s public statement, see Department of Health, “Press Bulletin No. 305.”
36. “Dr. Goldwater to Remain”; “Sanitary Code Amendments,” New York Times, July 30, 1914, p. 8; “Praise Muzzling Rule,” ibid., Dec. 3, 1914, p. 14.
37. Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Calendar Year 1915 (New York, 1916), 50; Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Calendar Year, 1916 (New York, 1917), 22, 27, 58–59; “Hear of Quaker War Work,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 1917, p. E3; Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Calendar Year 1917 ([New York], [1918]), 28; Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Calendar Year 1918 (New York, 1919), 61.
38. Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905). On the limited reach of Lochner v. New York, see Christopher Tomlins, “The Supreme Sovereignty of the State: A Genealogy of Police in American Constitutional Law, from the Founding Era to Lochner,” in Police and the Liberal State, ed. Markus D. Dubber and Mariana Valverde (Stanford, 2008), 49–51.
39. Fox v. Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society, 165 New York 517, 526–28 (1901), esp. 526.
40. “The Shelter Law Amended,” Our Animal Friends, 29 (May 1902), 193; “Legal and Constitutional Status of the A.S.P.C.A.,” ibid., 30 (Jan. 1903), 98–102, esp. 100; aspca, Thirty-Ninth Annual Report for the Year Ending December 31, 1904 (New York, 1905), 143–58.
41. “Attacks S.P.C.A. Methods,” New York Times, Feb. 28, 1906, p. 5. In its annual report for 1913, the Department of Health also complained that New York City’s canine animal-control policy granted “to a private corporation . . . functions which properly belong to the health authorities.” Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Calendar Year 1913, 103.
42. “The Tale of a Dog as Told by Coler,” New York Times, Feb. 1, 1908, p. 3; “Dog License Knocked Out,” ibid., Oct. 16, 1908, p. 12; “Hasn’t Got His Dog Despite Injunction,” ibid., Oct. 17, 1908, p. 16; Coler v. aspca, 122 N.Y.S. 549 (1908).
43. Coler v. aspca at 549, 552. On the police power, the salus populi, and nineteenth-century jurisprudence, see Novak, People’s Welfare. The reader should also note that under New York’s judicial system, the state supreme courts are, in fact, trial courts.
44. Coler v. aspca at 552. On the trend that stressed individual rights over state action and formally constituted political authority over a fluid public-private relationship, see Novak, People’s Welfare, 237, 241–45; and William J. Novak, “Police Power and the Hidden Transformation of the American State,” in Police and the Liberal State, ed. Dubber and Valverde, 69. For a classic critique of the Lochner era and formalistic readings of law, see Roscoe Pound, “Liberty of Contract,” Yale Law Journal, 18 (May 1909), 454–87. For a standard reading in the recent literature of Lochner and legal formalism, see Sandra Ruffin, “Legal Process,” in Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States, ed. David S. Tanenhaus (5 vols., New York, 2008), III, 161–62. One should acknowledge, however, that legal scholars have hotly debated the historical status of legal formalism and the extent to which it existed independently of its Progressive critics. For competing points of view, see, for example, Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (Oxford, 1992), 9–32; Anthony J. Sebok, Legal Positivism in American Jurisprudence (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 48–75; and Neil Duxbury, Patterns of American Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1995), 9–64.
45. Minutes of the Board of Health, Jan. 22, 1908, in Minutes, Board of Health, vol. 1908FF, Jan. 8–July 8, 1908; “Hasn’t Got His Dog Despite Injunction.”
46. “No Warrants for S.P.C.A.,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 1910, p. C4; The People ex rel. Westbay v. Delaney, 1911 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 462 (1911).
47. “Dog Bill in Effect Today,” New York Times, July 1, 1917, p. 13; “New York Dogs Still Safe,” ibid., July 2, 1917, p. 7.
48. Nicchia v. People of the State of New York, 254 U.S. 228 (1920). See also Sentell v. New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad Company.
49. For complaints that continued to emphasize inappropriate delegation of power, see, for example, “Janitor’s Dog Back in Form of an Issue,” New York Times, Feb. 6, 1930, p. 15; “City Again Dooms Unleashed Dogs,” ibid., Aug. 11, 1944, p. 16; “A.S.P.C.A. States Its Case,” letter to the editor, ibid., March 1, 1945, p. 20; and “Stebbins Defends Dog License Bill,” ibid., March 4, 1945, p. 35. On the complex institutional arrangements behind canine animal control in the 1970s and 1980s, see “The Only Way to Fund the aspca,” letter to the editor, ibid., Aug. 16, 1980, p. 20; “New York’s Dog Deal,” ibid., Nov. 27, 1981, p. A26; Dorothy J. Gaiter, “Deal on Deficit Reached by City and aspca,” ibid., June 2, 1982, p. B3; “A Better Deal for Dogs and Cats,” ibid., Nov. 11, 1985, p. A18; and “A $22.8 Million aspca Expansion,” ibid., Sept. 24, 1989, p. R1. On the aspca’s termination of its animal control responsibilities, see Marion S. Lane and Stephen L. Zawistowski, Heritage of Care: The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Westport, 2008), 41–47; Jonathan P. Hicks, “aspca Plans to Stop Killing Strays,” New York Times, March 26, 1993, p. B1; and Francis X. Clines, “A Society Spurns Death for Animals,” ibid., Jan. 8, 1995, p. 25.
50. On quasi-governmental bodies and public authority, see Gail Radford, “From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise,” Journal of American History, 90 (Dec. 2003), 863–90. Judith Walzer Leavitt uses the term “semi-municipal” to describe the public health work of Milwaukee’s Child Welfare Commission in the early twentieth century; her choice of terminology indicates the lack of a basic vocabulary for describing voluntary organizations’ governmental functions in 1980s historiography. Leavitt, Healthiest City, 223. Matthew Lassiter made his observation at the round table “Governing Out of Sight: An Enduring Pattern of American Political Development,” Policy History Conference, Columbus, Ohio, June 3–6, 2010 (notes in Jessica Wang’s possession).
51. Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants YOU, 12.