CHAPTER 3

THE OLDEST
PROFESSION
The Rise and Fall
of a Prejudice

IN CHARLES DICKENS’S NOVEL BLEAK HOUSE, THE rag-and-bone man named Mr. Krook is “short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk sideways,” his head and throat “gnarled with veins and puckered skin.” Signs on his window read BONES BOUGHT and WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT and LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Dirty bottles frame the doorway of his filthy warren, on whose floor loll “second-hand bags,” bundles of women’s hair, and a “litter of rags.” He is, we learn, “a dealer in cat-skins among other general matters.” Greeted by Krook, whose thin hands are “like a vampire’s wings,” the narrator “naturally drew back.”

Naturally.

Such scenes have been repeated in art and literature countless times: the scavenger as physically foul and psychically sinister.

For millennia, the loathing that humans have felt for scavenger animals has extended to human scavengers as well. From hunter-gatherers to ragpickers to Untouchables to junkmen to Dumpster divers and beyond, human scavengers have traditionally been relegated to the lowest social rungs. In this chapter we’ll probe the reasons for this revulsion—tracing how society has scorned and shunned scavengers from prehistoric times onward—and we’ll offer a glimmer of hope that this prejudice is finally beginning to disappear.

 

 

 

AT WHAT POINT did early hominids stop being animals and start being humans?

Of course there are those who insist that we’re still nothing more than animals, and, conversely, those who insist that mankind was recently created out of thin air in the image of God. But the mainstream contemporary view is that sometime in the far-distant past, our primordial ancestors were some kind of animal; and that now, as humans, we have a “soul” or at least an ineffable spark of self-awareness that marks us as distinct from every other organism on the planet. What marked the transition from one state to the other? What distinguished that “evolutionary Adam” from his apelike parents?

 

 

 

IT’S A DIFFICULT QUESTION, one that has bedeviled our greatest thinkers and philosophers since earliest recorded history. And while the answers have been many and varied, a common thread through them is this: that it is not our biology but our behavior that distinguishes us from other creatures. “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more,” wrote William Shakespeare in Hamlet, encapsulating a long-standing view that persists to this day: first, the assumption that being akin to an animal is a bad thing; and second, that acting like an animal, and doing the things that animals do, is what brings us down to the level of beasts. Hamlet listed spending all day sleeping and feeding as distinctly animal-like, but there are more specific animal behaviors that are forbidden by our civilized social mores, and it is these prohibitions that make us human. First: Don’t kill indiscriminately, the way animals do. Second: Don’t have sex indiscriminately, as animals often do. In short: Resist our animal urges, our animalistic nature.

As discussed in the previous chapter, one of our basic evolutionary traits as humans is the urge to scavenge. And although the prohibition against scavenging is not usually spelled out in humankind’s various religious texts and philosophical treatises, neither are other basic animal behaviors explicitly discouraged or prohibited, even though we know to avoid them anyway: don’t deposit feces and urine at random whenever you get the urge; don’t run around naked, and so on. Over time, in almost every corner of the world, a generalized credo arose: the less you act like an animal, the better. While that has long been noted by social historians, what has not been noted is that scavenging counts as “acting like an animal” too, since it is one of our basic instincts, one shared by many of our fellow omnivores. And this is partly at the root of why scavengers have been shunned by human society since the dawn of recorded history, just as have killers, adulterers, and thieves: because their behaviors (and scavenging) make us “no better than beasts.”

So the answer to the question posed earlier in this chapter, many would say, is that we started becoming humans when we made the conscious decision to stop acting like animals. And that includes our species-wide consensus to pretty much stop scavenging. Remember that the earliest Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago were biologically almost indistinguishable from modern man; yet those early humans, many would say, were not quite humans at all, since they still lived like animals and acted like animals and showed little if any evidence of complex thought. Hovering in the background behind our society’s inchoate disapproval of scavenging is the vague feeling that if you scavenge, you risk losing your soul. Because it’s not the shape of your body that makes you a human being, but the nature of your behavior. Which means: Stop that scavenging and get a job.

HUNTERS AND GATHERERS

Precivilizational humans were nomadic, often following game animals as they migrated, or moving from one area to another during different seasons in search of food. Those tribes lucky enough to live in tropical areas with sources of nutrition available year-round usually stayed in one region permanently. But in the vast majority of early hunter-gatherer societies, one constant appears virtually universal: men did most or all of the hunting, and women did most or all of the gathering. And in this context, “gathering” is just a euphemism for “scavenging”: collecting fallen fruit, finding and digging up edible roots and tubers, gleaning berries, collecting firewood, garnering seeds or wild grain, and so on.

This hunter-gatherer lifestyle continued for thousands and thousands of years, so it’s easy to see how scavenging—the “gatherer” half of the equation—became associated with women’s work, since women were the gatherers. When some human populations began transitioning to agriculture around twelve thousand years ago, gathering was replaced by farming, which men and women did equally. This shift was not instantaneous: agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers lived side by side for millennia, often competing for land and resources. Over time, the agriculturalists became ascendant and drove the hunter-gatherers into the mountains and forests and other peripheral areas. Xenophobia against the hunter-gatherers arose as farmers and, later, city dwellers looked down on them as primitive and backward.

This prejudice also manifested as derision toward anyone who acted like those “primitives.” And although hunting continued to be practiced by farmers and urbanites, scavenging for its own sake was for the most part abandoned—scorned as “women’s work,” effeminate, too reminiscent of the hungry, dirty, bad old days. And so this, too, was a contributing factor to the growing bias that was held against scavenging in male-dominated societies: scavengers were like animals, scavengers were like primitives, and scavengers were like women. Scavenging was effeminate. And that made it inferior.

Thus a deep-seated prejudice against scavenging became part of human culture around the world and endured throughout history, up to the present day.

This ancient bias is still with us, as we lug around anachronistic cultural baggage from one epoch to the next. But at this stage in human development, what purpose does this prejudice serve anymore? We in the modern world no longer compete for resources with spear-wielding hunter-gatherers. We no longer look down on “women’s work” as inherently substandard or less valued. We no longer try to pretend that we don’t have evolutionary traits that connect us to our mammalian relatives. The fundamental rationale for our rejection of scavenging has long since expired. The time has come to put the baggage down, to unburden ourselves of unnecessary self-loathing (which is what antiscavenging feelings essentially are, since we are scavengers whether we accept it or not), and move forward with a light step and a lighter footprint.

And roomy pockets for toting whatever we find.

THE MORAL CODIFICATION OF ANTISCAVENGER BIAS

The collection of books we now call the Old Testament has for thousands of years been one of the cornerstones of Judeo-Christian civilization, the original font of the moral philosophy upon which so much of the Western worldview is based. And of those Old Testament books, the most important one in many ways is the first: Genesis, which spells out our culture’s creation myths. And right there near the beginning of Genesis we find a primal rejection of the migratory hunter-gatherer lifestyle—and by extension, scavenging.

Because this is so key to our understanding of the antiscavenging bias, let’s examine the passage in full. The New King James Version translates Genesis 4 thus (with relevant passages in italics):

Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, “I have acquired a man from the LORD.” Then she bore again, this time his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in the process of time it came to pass that Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground to the LORD. Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat. And the LORD respected Abel and his offering, but He did not respect Cain and his offering. And Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.

So the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.”

Now Cain talked with Abel his brother; and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.

Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?”

He said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”

And He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground. So now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. A fugitive and a vagabond you shall be on the earth.”

And Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Surely You have driven me out this day from the face of the ground; I shall be hidden from Your face; I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, and it will happen that anyone who finds me will kill me.”

And the LORD said to him, “Therefore, whoever kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the LORD set a mark on Cain, lest anyone finding him should kill him.

Then Cain went out from the presence of the LORD and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden.

Now, these lines, needless to say, are among the most famous ever written. And they’ve been analyzed countless times from countless points of view. But for our purposes, let’s adjust the lens and look at Genesis 4 from a scavenging perspective.

Adam was the first human being, but he was sort of a wild man, living naked in nature until he was banished by God. However, his first son, Cain, was “a tiller of the ground,” meaning that he was the Bible’s first nonmigratory agriculturalist, the original farmer. Cain represents our transition from savagery to civilization, from being merely biologically human, as was Adam, to being behaviorally human.

But after discovering that Cain has committed a grievous sin, how does God punish him? By sentencing him to once again become a “vagabond on the earth,” for whom the ground “shall no longer yield” crops. In other words, God punishes Cain by forcing him to become a migratory hunter-gatherer, wandering forever in search of food and a place to rest, since he is no longer allowed to grow crops. Turned into a scavenger—the worst punishment of all.

Because of modern linguistic confusion, the phrase “land of Nod on the east of Eden” is now often mistaken to mean a place of dreams, where you “nod off ” to sleep. But it actually has nothing to do with slumber. In this setting, “Nod” comes from the Hebrew word for “wandering.” Thus the phrase “dwelt in the land of Nod” is really just a poetic way of saying, “lived a migratory lifestyle.” There was no actual place called Nod.

We can see from Genesis that, even at the very dawn of our culture, having a stable agricultural life was the preferred state of being, and the worst thing that could happen to you was having to subsist as a scavenger. Thousands of years’ worth of Judeo-Christians ask: If God says so, who are we to argue? Even in our civilization’s founding myth, scavenging is regarded as a curse. How can we escape a prejudice that deep?

CASTES AND OUTCASTS

Social hierarchies are an inescapable feature of human culture. Nearly every society or civilization that has ever been studied has official or unofficial social classes based on wealth or tradition or profession or race or religion or some unknown factor lost in the mists of time. Yet a common feature shared by most of those at the bottoms of hierarchies, wherever in the world they happen to be, is that they end up living as scavengers. The only mystery is: Were scavengers assigned the lowest social status merely because they were scavengers to begin with—or did people trapped by birth in low social standing become scavengers because no other employment was open to them? Either way, all around the world, scavenging is traditionally associated with the lowest rung of society.

India’s caste system is perhaps the best known of all hierarchical social systems; and even though it was officially abolished when India became an independent nation, old customs die hard and many of the caste-based prejudices live on today. The lowest caste are known in English as “Untouchables.” (There is a drive to replace that term with a name that doesn’t sound like such a put-down: some prefer the word “Dalit.” But other such alternatives have come and gone, and the term “Dalit” is still not universally used, so it’s not clear if it will ever become the “official” name for this caste. For now, we’ll stick with “Untouchables.”) In his 1935 novel Untouchable, Mulk Raj Anand—now known as “India’s Charles Dickens”—revealed the shocking treatment allotted to these pariahs. While sweeping up trash in a temple’s courtyard, the hero Bakha is startled by the congregation, who at the very sight of him shout, “Polluted, polluted, polluted,” and surge away to escape his contaminating presence. “A thumping crowd of worshippers rushed out of the temple,” Anand writes. Among them is the priest, a Brahmin who leads the chant “Polluted, polluted, polluted!” as a larger and larger crowd “took the cue and shouted after him, waving their hands, some in fear, others in anger, but all in a terrible orgy of excitement.” One member of the crowd can be heard above the others:

“Get off the steps, you scavenger! Off with you! You have defiled our whole service! You have defiled our temple! Now we will have to pay for the purification ceremony. Get down, get away, you dog!” Adds another: “A temple can be polluted according to the Holy Books by a low-caste man coming within sixty-nine yards of it, and here he was actually on the steps, at the door. We are ruined.”

The reason Untouchables were given their unflattering sobriquet is that they were once legally forbidden to touch anyone of a different caste. This rule was so severe that even the shadow of an Untouchable was considered taboo, as was the ground he or she had walked on and objects he or she had handled. Why? Untouchables were considered irrevocably unclean, both hygienically and ritually, because of their occupations, which often involved death, discards—and scavenging. Untouchable groups typically worked cleaning up roadkill and other dead animals, carting away the carcasses of dead cows, the carrion of which they would eat before making the hide into leather. They also worked as street cleaners, toilet cleaners, and garbage collectors, picking through other people’s discards for usable material. Some present-day Untouchables live in or near dumps, scavenging for recyclables. Though scavenging is not universal among Untouchable occupations, it is a fairly common feature and raises the question: Over time, did the scavenging professions become classified as the lowest caste? Or was Untouchability an inherited social ranking, and if you were born within it you had no choice but to engage in the kind of work higher castes refused to do? It’s a chicken-or-egg conundrum that probably has no definitive answer. Most likely the two options coexisted simultaneously and worked in tandem to create a mutually reinforcing social loop from which there was no escape.

A sect of Hindu ascetics known as the Aghori voluntarily scavenge human corpses floating down the Ganges, drag them ashore—and eat the rotting flesh. They also drink from human skulls and sometimes even eat animal droppings that they find. You might think this disproves the theory that all cultures have a negative outlook toward scavenging. But it actually confirms the theory even more: the Aghori don’t do these things because they are proscavenging. Quite the opposite. They believe that the fastest way to achieve enlightenment is to intentionally violate the most forbidden Hindu taboos, to consciously reject all social customs. So they purposely engage in the most extreme scavenging behavior because it is the most unacceptable possible lifestyle. The Aghori’s bizarre customs only serve to prove that scavenging ranks as the least acceptable occupation in India.

 

 

JAPAN ONCE had its own version of the Untouchable caste, though it is much less known around the world than India’s version. The burakumin (sometimes called just buraku or, in early Japanese history, eta) comprised a virtual parallel society in medieval Japan, living in segregated villages and performing many of the same tasks as India’s Untouchables—dealing with corpses, dead animals, cleaning and garbage collection, ragpicking, and begging. For centuries, the government officially discriminated against them, effectively rendering the burakumin a permanent underclass who were in part scavengers. In this case it was Shinto customs, not Hindu theology, that marked them as ritually impure. Even though the discriminatory laws were lifted in 1871, when Japan entered the modern era, lingering revulsion and distrust of burakumin remain to this day in Japan, where worried parents sometimes hire private investigators to find out whether their children’s prospective spouses have buraku ancestors—which would still be considered a shameful mark on the family heritage.

And so it was in other societies around the world. Although most hierarchies were not as clearly delineated as the official systems in Japan and India, it remained true that most cultures were stratified, and that scavengers, where they existed, were at or near the bottom rung of society. But there were reasons for this other than prejudice. Keep in mind that prior to the industrial era, and the mass production that came with it, scavenging was necessarily a subsistence occupation. It was pretty much impossible to become wealthy, or even economically comfortable, as a scavenger. Until recently, scavenging was a do-or-die lifestyle, not a hobby or a choice, as it is for many of us in the modern world. Medieval ragpickers in Europe scavenged discarded clothing to resell in order to gain a few coins to buy food and survive; by contrast, the ragpickers of twenty-first-century America for the most part prowl flea markets and thrift shops searching for funky decor and cool cheap clothes—by choice and for fun. In the modern world, we have endless seas of manufactured goods to pluck through. In the pre-mass production, preindustrial era, objects were all made individually. Thus each object was considered precious and less likely to be discarded. Scavengers faced slim pickings in those days, which is why only the most impoverished resorted to scavenging—and why it was almost always only a survival tactic.

THERE WERE of course exceptions to the negative cultural associations toward scavenging. The ancient Egyptians worshipped deities that were the personifications of scavenger animals. Anubis, god of the afterlife, was a jackal. Nekhebet, goddess of rebirth, had a vulture as her totem animal. Khepri, the sun god, was depicted as a dung beetle. So did ancient Egyptians have an entire scavenging-themed religion? Actually, no. Most of their other deities were associated with animals that weren’t scavengers: Hathor was a cow, Bastet a cat, Wadjet a cobra, Sekhmet a lioness, and so on. The Egyptians didn’t uniquely worship scavengers to the exclusion of everything else; the best that can be said is that they had no prejudice against these animals, which at least put them one step ahead of other cultures in tolerating scavengers. The reasons for this are not entirely clear. Perhaps because the Egyptians lived in harsh desert conditions where scavenging animals are a more prominent part of the visible ecosystem, the local people became more accustomed to them.

GLEANING

“Gleaning” is not a word you hear much these days, but in early agricultural societies, gleaning was one of the primary forms of scavenging, and sometimes served as an important social-welfare mechanism by which the poor survived. Ancient Jewish society in particular observed this custom, and it was even spelled out as an inviolable law in Leviticus 19:

And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corner of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleaning of thy harvest. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather the fallen fruit of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and for the stranger: I am the LORD your God.

Deuteronomy 24 spells out a similar prohibition:

When you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow, in order that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat your olive tree, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow. When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not go over it again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to do this thing.

In other words, farmers and orchardists and vintners were forbidden to harvest their fields thoroughly, and were expected to leave unharvested vegetables, grains, and fruit for poor scavengers to come along and “glean”—which means to gather unwanted and forgotten farm produce at the end of the season for personal use. The system is taken to the extreme every seventh year, known as the shmita, or “sabbatical year,” during which all produce is to remain unharvested and left for scavengers to collect for free. This system to some extent is still observed today by religious farmers in modern Israel, though many have found the antiquated law too financially burdensome, and various mechanisms have arisen to sidestep it—such as temporarily selling one’s land to someone else every seventh year.

Through these ancient Jewish gleaning laws, we can see that scavenging was recognized by the ancient Hebrews as a significant survival strategy for the downtrodden. These biblical regulations are among the very few proscavenging laws of the premodern era.

UNBUILDING EMPIRES

Few people who travel today through Italy and Greece to admire the ancient ruins realize that they are seeing the handiwork of scavengers—or, to be more precise, their destructive handiwork. The ancient Romans, in their heyday, went on a centuries-long building spree covering much of Europe with impressive structures made of marble, stone, and cement. When the Roman Empire fell, Europe descended into the so-called Dark Ages. At that time, there was no longer any central government to maintain the thousands of public buildings, aqueducts, city walls, and temples. Most of these buildings would have survived intact through the millennia were it not for local scavengers, who treated them essentially as quarries, ancient Home Depots, handy hardware stores for free construction materials. The most visible example, Rome’s Colosseum, was never damaged in war. The only reason it isn’t in better condition today is that over the centuries, bit by bit, scavengers broke off loose parts of the structure or carted off stones loosened by earthquakes to use as the building materials for their own homes. The same is true with nearly every ancient ruin you see in Europe.

Medieval scavengers unbuilt the glorious empires of ancient Greece and Rome.

ON THE ROCKS

One of the most notorious of historical scavenging lifestyles is that of the “wreckers.” Made famous by Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn, wreckers were a class of professional beachcombers who lived in various coastal regions but most famously in Cornwall and Scotland. Starting in the seventeenth century, Great Britain became a global maritime power, and ships of all sorts were constantly coming and going in and out of British ports. But the British coastline was famously treacherous, and in the era before radar and GPS and foghorns, ships would frequently run aground or get dashed on the rocks—particularly in Cornwall and Scotland. Their cargo was often so valuable that local fisherfolk opportunistically turned to scavenging the washed-up wreckage at every opportunity. The villainous Cornish characters in du Maurier’s story took it a step further, intentionally causing shipwrecks by displaying deceptive lights on- and offshore, luring treasure-laden ships to their doom. Though this tale was fictional, it is thought to be based on factual incidents. In her 2005 book about maritime scavenging, The Wreckers, Bella Bathurst calls them “pro-active beachcombers.”

At their worst, these wreckers were rumored to deliberately let crew and passengers drown in order to gain unimpeded access to those unfortunates’ possessions and the ships’ cargo. Over the years, such shocking stories inflamed the negative public perception of beachcombing scavengers in the English-speaking world. Although modern technology makes it impossible to trick ships into wrecking, and although former wrecker communities have turned to fishing and tourism for their livelihood, we still get occasional glimpses of how it once must have been. In January 2007, the container ship MSC Napoli partly sank and then ran aground off the southern English coast. More than one hundred of its gargantuan shipping containers fell into the English Channel and shortly thereafter began washing up on beaches in Devon. Within a matter of hours, word spread across the region that an astounding variety of new consumer goods was being strewn in massive quantities along the shoreline. The BBC reported: “Over the last two days scavengers have descended on the beach, taking away goods that included BMW motorbikes, wine, face cream and nappies,” as well as barrels of liquor, shoes, hair-care products, steering wheels, exhaust pipes, gearboxes, foreign-language bibles, and much more. The BBC also noted that a nearly forgotten law especially created to stop the wrecker subculture in earlier centuries was cited to halt the frenzy: “The ‘despicable’ behaviour of scavengers has forced the authorities to invoke ancient legislation to stop raids on cargo on a Devon beach. Powers not used for 100 years will be used to force people to return goods recovered from the stricken container ship MSC Napoli.” Despite the legal threat, most of the modern-day wreckers escaped with their booty undetected.

RAGPICKERS AND JUNKMEN

After the Diaspora, when Jews were compelled by circumstance to live in countries where they were tiny minorities, they were often forbidden to practice most trades and ended up in unpopular professions such as money lending and tax collection. But those positions were open only to Jews who were somewhat well educated and could demonstrate business acumen. A substantial number of lower-class Jews ended up becoming itinerant scavengers—known as rag-and-bone men in England, strazzaroli (or stracciaroli ) in Italy, and so on. Today the generic term “rag-picker” is often used, but such scavengers were not always limited to just rags. As Dickens showed us in Bleak House, rag-and-bone men would collect households’ leftover bones to be sold to glue factories; they also collected scrap iron and lead to be melted down, rags and discarded clothes to resell or to be shredded and made into paper or second-generation fabric, and hair to be made into wigs. And more: they also collected bottles, animal skins, paper, and anything else that could be recycled or repaired.

In his memoir The Old Home Town, Izhak Ze’ev Jonis describes the Polish shtetl of his youth, where in the yard of a leather tanner

lived the rag-pickers with their wives, children, horses and carts. When the farmers’ field work ended, the peddling season began. The old rag-picker Avrum Hersch, and his sons, Shmuel, Meyer Nusen, Michael and Yerahmiel, as well as his sons-in-law, Aron, Menashe and Elia, each set out on a different road with wagons laden with all sorts of goods. They carried chinaware, plates with floral designs, pots, glass beads of various colors, decorative pins made of tin resembling gold, buttons, needles, thread, safety pins and many other items. These would cause farmers and their wives eagerly to search every nook and cranny of their homes for scraps of iron, rags, bones, copper and brass. Trade with the village was based on barter. The rag-pickers paid with the pretty items they brought with them from town [where they had scavenged them from wealthier districts]. For many years the shacks [of the scavengers] were full of old rags, iron and other metals, and bones. Women and children with red, pus-encrusted eyes, skin covered with boils and with swollen bellies, ran back and forth rummaging through these piles and sorting them out.

Needless to say, ragpickers in whatever country, Jewish or not, were considered the bottom of the social pecking order.

They were a common sight in poor New York neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side, where an entire underclass of impoverished scavengers scoured the urban landscape for anything of value. In How the Other Half Lives, his book about New York City slums, the social reformer/photographer Jacob Riis included his now famous 1888 photograph “Home of an Italian Rag-picker.” It shows an exhausted-looking woman with a baby in her lap, hemmed in by barrels, buckets, and what look like overstuffed duffel bags. Her mouth is turned down at the corners and her eyes gaze upward, as if seeking relief. Italian immigrants were then the city’s main scavengers, Riis wrote:

There is money in New York’s ash-barrel [that is, trash barrel] but it was left to the genius of the padrone to develop the full resources of the mine that has become the exclusive preserve of the Italian immigrant. Only a few years ago, when rag-picking was carried on in a desultory and irresponsible sort of way, the city hired gangs of men to trim the ash-scows before they were sent out to sea. The trimming consisted in levelling out the dirt as it was dumped from the carts, so that the scow might be evenly loaded. The men were paid a dollar and a half a day, kept what they found that was worth having, and allowed the swarms of Italians who hung about the dumps to do the heavy work for them, letting them have their pick of the loads for their trouble. To-day Italians contract for the work . . . sorting out the bones, rags, tin cans and other waste that are found in the ashes and form the staples of their trade and their sources of revenue. . . . Whenever the back of the sanitary police is turned, he will make his home in the filthy burrows where he works by day, sleeping and eating his meals under the dump, on the edge of slimy depths and amid surroundings full of unutterable horror. The city did not bargain to house, though it is content to board, him so long as he can make the ash-barrels yield the food to keep him alive, and a vigorous campaign is carried on at intervals against these unlicensed dump settlements; but the temptation of having to pay no rent is too strong, and they are driven from one dump only to find lodgement under another a few blocks farther up or down the river. The fiercest warfare is waged over the patronage of the dumps by rival factions.

Although the profession slowly died out and/or transitioned to “junkman” by the middle of the twentieth century, the prejudice remained. The 1950 Academy Award-nominated comedy film Born Yesterday featured as lead characters a boorish nouveau riche millionaire and his uneducated girlfriend arriving in Washington, D.C., to bribe politicians. The girlfriend eventually wises up and turns the tables on her blustery beau, but much of the comedy derives from the supposedly hilarious fact that the corrupt millionaire made his fortune as a junkyard owner. The very idea that a junk dealer could become a millionaire social climber sent audiences across America into hysterical laughter. Could anything be more absurd? Everyone knows junkmen are the scum of society; how ridiculous to show one becoming rich off his junk! Naturally the scriptwriters depicted the junkman millionaire as monstrous, greedy, and sneaky.

Naturally.

 

 

ALTHOUGH professional scavengers have mostly vanished from Western societies, they still abound in many Third World countries, where they focus on modern-day recyclables such as plastic bottles. Now, as ever, they occupy the lowest socioeconomic rung and endure persecution—often motivated by the general public’s revulsion at the mere sight of them. Typical was a new law that took effect in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, in 2008, doubling the penalties against scavenging. Under the new law, scavengers—just for being scavengers—could be rounded up, arrested, and jailed for up to two months or forced to pay a fine of up to 20 million rupiah. That’s the equivalent of around $2,100. The average scavenger earns the equivalent of $2 a day. To enforce the new law, the number of “public order agents” deployed to apprehend scavengers quadrupled.

“There’s no other job for me but to be a scavenger,” a homeless Sumatran immigrant told an Agence France-Presse reporter soon after the law took effect. “What I earn today is only enough to buy food. There’s nothing left for renting a room.” While his wife and toddler slept in a wood-and-tin cart, the Sumatran slept on a mat. By day he collected cardboard, paper, and plastic cups. “Nobody wants to lead this kind of life,” he told the reporter. “But it’s far better than being a loser like a beggar. It’s more shameful—they don’t have any pride or make an effort in life.”

Another scavenger described her humiliation upon having been arrested:

“My cart was demolished in front of me,” she recalled. After spending her prison sentence being forced to work in the garden of a government office, she fled back to Jakarta as soon as she could, she told the reporter, preferring her freedom as a scavenger. She specialized in scavenging the refuse left behind after parties. “I love a party,” she told the reporter. “If any house has a party, I just wait there outside until the party is over to pick up the garbage.”

THE GOLD RUSH: SCAVENGING HYSTERIA

While urban nineteenth-century America still looked down on scavenging, at the same time on the wild frontier it was a different matter altogether. Having arrived with only whatever essentials they had been able to transport via covered wagon, frontier dwellers were compelled to constantly improvise.

Frontier-style scavenging went into overdrive in 1848.

While building a sawmill on the American River in California, a local man named James Marshall found a few yellow pebbles under the clear water. After a few quick tests confirmed that the pebbles were actually gold nuggets, the news immediately spread to his workmen and others in the vicinity. Marshall allowed them to go scavenging for nuggets themselves in the river. The first few months were delirious: nuggets could be had for the taking. Just poking around on the riverbed or in adjoining creeks yielded nuggets galore. Poor laborers became wealthy in a matter of days.

Within months word had reached the outside world, and the California Gold Rush was on. Much has been written about the forty-niners, who descended on California from every corner of the world in 1849 by the tens of thousands looking for quick riches. But the smart ones were in fact the forty-eighters—those who went looking for gold in 1848, before that huge crush of humanity arrived. The forty-eighters had it easy because they were the scavengers: the gold was just lying around, waiting to be picked up. In fact it was this detail that caused the California Gold Rush in the first place. What attracted the hordes wasn’t merely the news that gold had been discovered, but that it could be scavenged effortlessly. Plenty of other places had gold, but it was hard to find and harder to extract. What made California’s gold so attractive was that all you had to do was bend down and pick it up. Or so the rumors went. And went and went—from Scandinavia to Chile to China. Sailors heading around Cape Horn sang a chantey:

Blow, boys, blow, for Californ-i-o . . .
Oh, there’s plenty of gold, so I’ve been told,
On the banks of the Sacramento.

Soon enough, all the surface nuggets had been found. Then prospectors took it to the next level, scavenging more aggressively by “gold panning”—that is, digging under the mud at the bottom of the creek beds and sifting out the nuggets in the flowing water. It took a bit more effort, but it was still scavenging, a comparatively easy way to accumulate riches. But after the main wave of forty-niners arrived and swarmed over the landscape, even the panning opportunities diminished sharply. Within a couple of years, California’s gold was scavenged out. By the early 1850s, new arrivals began engaging in more extreme and labor-intensive methods—diverting entire rivers, washing away hillsides with high-powered water jets, and eventually following the gold back to its source in the mother lode, where the only way to get at it was with pickaxes and dynamite. This wasn’t scavenging anymore. This wasn’t fun anymore. This was work. Lured by tales of easily scavenged gold, countless treasure seekers arrived over the following decade and ended up doing hard labor for little recompense.

In a letter to her sister back east, a pioneer described her cobbled-together California home: “The fireplace is built of stones and mud. . . . The mantel piece—remember that on this portion of a great building, some artists, by their exquisite workmanship, have become world-renowned—is formed of a beam of wood, covered with strips of tin procured from cans, upon which still remain in black hieroglyphics, the names of the different eatables which they formerly contained.” The letter writer, who had grown up in a plush home, now joked: “How shall I ever be able to content myself to live in a decent, proper, well-behaved house, where toilet tables are toilet tables, and not an ingenious combination of trunk and claret cases, where lanterns are not broken bottles, book cases are not candle boxes, and trunks not wash stands.” With very little available for sale—and with just about everything besides beans priced sky-high—pioneers scavenged for food as well, gathering wild berries and brewing tea from foraged mint and mock “coffee” from ground acorns. Of course, they hunted wild game as well.

The old prejudice against scavenging vanished on the frontier since everyone was doing it.

Nonetheless, the California Gold Rush transformed American culture. It not only populated the American West, but it also did a lot to raise the reputation of scavenging. The notion of being able to simply find treasure sitting on the ground if you look diligently enough still lingers in the American psyche. Some say it fuels the characteristic American optimism, the spirit of adventure that spawns latter-day “gold rushes” such as the dotcom boom.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

They say that once you learn how to ride a bicycle, you never forget. Prompted to ride again after decades spent never touching a bike, you suddenly find yourself pedaling like a triathlete before you even realize you’re doing it.

It’s the same way with scavenging. Say you’ve never scavenged before in your life. Say you’ve always enjoyed the comforts of consumer retail culture as far back as you can remember. But then—uh-oh!—circumstances change. Suddenly you’re homeless, say. Suddenly you’re starving. Suddenly you’re poor. Desperation takes over, and those scavenger skills that our species acquired over millions of years of evolution—and which you’ve never accessed even once before in your life—automatically kick in.

That’s what happened on a wide scale in the early 1930s when the Great Depression plunged millions of ordinary people in Western nations into harrowing poverty. For years, Americans had been steadily moving away from scavenging as an occupation. By 1928, it was practically erased from the collective memory. Then suddenly . . .

Times of crisis restart—and kick-start—the scavenging instinct. History has shown again and again how wars and disasters turn even the laziest, most shopping-addicted consumers overnight into foragers. At such times, anyone who is already a scavenger or who possesses scavenging skills such as vigilance and tolerance is way ahead of the game. But when survival is at stake, everyone scavenges.

During the Great Depression, tens of thousands of displaced and newly homeless people gathered together for protection and created scavenger settlements. Nicknamed “Hoovervilles” after then President Herbert Hoover, these shantytowns sprang up from coast to coast, from Central Park and Brooklyn to Seattle’s tidal flats, comprising shacks made of rocks, scrap metal, lumber, cardboard, and wooden crates. Scavenged newspaper used as bedding was dubbed “Hoover blankets,” and “Hoover leather” was scrap cardboard placed inside shoes whose soles were worn through. Hooverville dwellers ate food scavenged from wherever it could be found, which was usually urban trash cans. At its height, Seattle’s Hooverville had more than two hundred shacks, housing unemployed World War I veterans and laborers from the failed fishing, logging, and construction industries. The shape and state of each shack depended on the skills of the scavenger who had built it. Archival photographs of the Seattle settlement—which stood on the grounds of a former shipyard a few blocks south of what is now Pioneer Square—show tidy, slant-roofed scrap cottages as well as slapdash asymmetrical shelters whose doorways are gaping rough-edged holes. A resident of Pittsburgh described his local Hooverville as “one of the most unusual sights we’ve ever seen in any city. Here you will find men living in homemade ‘houses’ constructed of box wood and lumber, begging description. Many curious folks come out to ‘Shantytown’ and a guide eagerly shows one around with explanations as to who is who and what is what in ‘Shantytown.’ Any donation you may give is part of the community chest and shared by all the dwellers.” In the 1936 film My Man Godfrey, nominated for six Academy Awards, a wealthy young socialite on a “scavenger hunt” ventures into a Hooverville and meets an actual scavenger—whom she aims to bring home. The camera pans the dark city dump where tumbledown shacks perch against slopes of garbage. Smoke rises from a cook fire around which we see derelicts warming themselves.

Whether or not they lived in Hoovervilles, new population sectors emerged during the Great Depression. The suddenly unemployed homeless American eager to work—to do any chore or job—in exchange for goods, food, or money was known as a hobo. But any suddenly unemployed American not eager to work, who relied instead on scavenging, became known as a tramp or a bum. Making the rounds in those days was a folk song called “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” which went in part:

Oh, why don’t you work
Like other men do?
How the hell can I work
When the skies are so blue?

Taking its title from the song, the 1933 film Hallelujah, I’m a Bum stars Al Jolson as Bumper, the unofficial mayor of New York City’s bums, who with his African-American sidekick Acorn presides over a group of charismatic scavengers who frankly admit that they’d rather scavenge than work. One can only wonder how the truly poor—who couldn’t afford cinema tickets anyway—felt about this slap-happy musical in which a Marxist trash collector nicknamed Egghead exults about the coming revolution, and Jolson sings a song titled “What Do You Want with Money?” Made during the stark depths of the Depression, the film actually celebrates the scavenging lifestyle, portraying bums as jolly and genuine, even heroic: Bumper saves a suicidal woman from drowning herself in Central Park. For all its grit and squalor, these bums prefer their rough-edged authentic lifestyle to the slick duplicity and daily grind of the “straight” world. Tellingly, the film is sometimes screened with the alternative title Happy Go Lucky.

Even those whom the Depression didn’t render homeless and jobless had to learn how to scavenge. Throughout their lives, the parents of both of the authors of this book have told stories about their youths spent scrounging, saving, recycling, and reusing: about sheets of newspaper and writing paper used over and over for various purposes, about hand-me-down clothes collected from better-off relatives, about old sweaters unraveled so that the yarn could be knitted into socks, mittens, and more. Learned in childhood, such practices turned out to be lifelong lessons not just in terms of survival but also of philosophy. Like those who live through wars and natural disasters, those who suffered through the Depression learned to scavenge but also learned to transcend shame. They learned the value, literal and figurative, of money not spent. “Save your pennies,” Anneli’s Aunt Bessie—who died in Florida in 2006, aged ninety-three—used to advise, “and your dollars will take care of themselves.” Heard enough times, such maxims sink in. Although both of us were raised in middle-class environments, both of us are and have always been scavengers because Depression-era values were passed down to us.

As un-PC as it sounds, living through the Depression ended up raising our forebears’ self-esteem, because all that scrimping and saving made them realize that they could survive under any circumstances. Suddenly straddling the bicycle of necessity before they could even doubt themselves, they were riding like the wind.

 

 

SCAVENGERS-BY-CIRCUMSTANCEcontinue to surface during crises of all kinds. During the 1992-1996 siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serbs, many urbane Sarajevans were seen collecting firewood and foraging in dumps and trash containers.

Will a day come when that crisis befalls your town, your family, you? How would you build your Hooverville?

THE ACTUAL OLDEST PROFESSION

Deep down inside, we remain scavengers at heart, scavengers in our genes. Scavenging, not prostitution, is the oldest profession. As recently as a few decades ago, the public viewed with admiration the rugged miner who dug iron ore from the ground to make steel—yet the same public eyed with pity and disgust the homeless tramp who collected cans to resell for pennies a pound at the scrap yard. But really, we now realize en masse, the miner and the tramp do exactly the same thing. Both provide us with the raw materials for steel. Cans are ore. As we stride now into what is proving to be the “Recycling Century,” it’s hard to imagine on what basis anyone ever imagined that the miner was morally superior to the can collector. And can it be that the prejudice has already started to swing the other way? The miner, many might say now, despoils the environment, whereas the can collector cleans up our garbage. But again, we should be wary of substituting one prejudice for another. Unless we are willing to revert to anarcho-primitivism, living wild in the woods, we must always remind ourselves that the raw material of civilization has to come from somewhere, and without the miners of the world and the lumberjacks and the farmers and the factories, we’d have nothing to scavenge to begin with. The time has come to treat scavengers as equals.

And equal is good enough for us.