In her view, cleanliness has always been fundamentally about virtue, whether you’re an ancient Greek athlete scraping your skin with metal instruments after a workout or a modern consumer shelling out $50 for a toothbrush cover that emits germ-killing UV light. In her breezy book “The Dirt on Clean,” Katherine Ashenburg tries to explain how the United States came to be a society in which consumers spend more than $50 billion annually on cosmetics and toiletries.
The institute was short-lived but helped give birth to the shelves of deodorants, soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, mouthwashes, teeth-whiteners, douches and antibacterial lotions that fill our pharmacy shelves today. With ads asserting there was “self-respect in soap and water” and an aggressive school hygiene curriculum featuring a daily “Keep Clean” parade, the organization sought to convince Americans that they could never be too well-scrubbed. In 1927, worried that the advent of paved roads, automobiles and electric power would lead to a less dirty citizenry, America’s soap manufacturers banded together to create the Cleanliness Institute.
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