A Cincinnati Neighborhood Organized For Better Health. Were They Really Bolsheviks?

For a few years before 1920, a Cincinnati neighborhood served as a laboratory to reimagine democracy. By all accounts, the experiment succeeded admirably, until Cincinnati’s mayor launched a smear campaign.The experiment grew out of concerns that America’s cities were growing so large that really important, vital needs were overlooked and often ignored. This was especially true regarding the health and safety of residents. Sanitation was barely satisfactory in any American city, infant mortality was tragically high, tuberculosis thrived in the crowded tenements of the urban core. Clean water and pure milk were almost nonexistent.To address this plague of societal weaknesses, a Harvard-educated New Yorker named Wilbur C, Phillips conceived a plan. Phillips recognized that attacking only one symptom at a time – tainted milk, for example – disregarded the social infrastructure of poverty and ignorance that permitted such ills to flourish. Based on his experience with the New York Milk…