The claim about snuff is doubtful, or at least exaggerated, but yes, cities did often stink. A modern urban dweller, traveling back in time, but remaining in the same place, might well be bowled over by the olfactory experience.

In 1494, a friar who accompanied Columbus on his 2nd voyage noted that the Indians they encountered used tobacco in two ways. The first was by smoking it through a cane pipe, the end of which they placed into their mouths. The second was by inhaling powdered tobacco through the pipe directly into their noses—“which purges them very much,” according to the friar. The European explorers took up both practices, of smoking and snuffing, and spread them simultaneously worldwide.

An anonymous poem published in London in Read’s Weekly Journal in 1761, entitled, “Six Reasons for Taking a Pinch of Snuff,” begins with the verse: “When strong perfumes, and noisome scents,/ The suf’fring nose invade,/ Snuff, best of Indian weeds, presents/ Its salutary aid.”

Popular medical theory of the day attributed many diseases to ill winds or “miasmas” of various kinds, so good odors in the nose, introduced by way of perfumed handkerchiefs, powdered wigs, incensed smoke, or scented snuff, were thought to be able to block or counter illnesses.

Despite this, the popularity of snuff was not due solely, or even primarily, to its usefulness in drowning out unpleasant smells. Users of the 17th and 18th century waxed particularly poetic about snuff’s own palette of scents, its ability to promote fellowship and sociability among friends and strangers, and the physiological effects consequent upon imbibing nicotine, but without the smoke.

Personal cleanliness has long been seen as a social virtue, as a way to be polite to others. Consequently, failure in this has been regarded as an offense against others. Steps toward cleanliness were also seen as steps toward gentility, as progressive steps advancing in social class, as distinguishing oneself from the lower classes. Until fairly recently, in urban America, washing one’s body, like washing one’s clothes, has been more fastidiously attended to the higher up the scale of social class in which one has found oneself. Keeping oneself and one's living space clean is easier, too, if one can hire servants to do the chores, and if one does not engage in heavy physical labor in order to make a living, and if one can afford a place to live that has indoor plumbing.

The considerable animus against immigrants that was especially strong in the 19th century led to a presumption that odorlessness would be one desired outcome of immigrants' assimilation into American society. The elimination of body odor was part of that, it also referred to exotic perfumes, as well as the smells of ethnic cuisine, especially its characteristic spices and aromatic vegetables, in various city neighborhoods.

The raft of related social reform movements that began in the U.S. at the beginning of the 19th century included hygiene, considering cleanliness as a kind of moral virtue, embodying the cleanliness of the soul, and purifying the body politic. The emission of body odors signaled a moral lapse, an assault on others’ privacy and personal space. The antidote was cold water, applied liberally to the system, inside and outside. In the 20th century, widespread military service introduced people to an enforced regimen of soap and water that they continued when they returned to civilian life.

Changing over time as well has been the conventional judgment of whether the larger society has the right or obligation to demand personal cleanliness, to purify those who offend against the nose, and even to exclude them from public places. Advertising for personal hygiene products demonstrates that the public was progressively sensitized, from about 1920 to 1960, to more stringent social stigmas attached to emitting body odors of various kinds, most especially underarm odor and bad breath. The basic message was that if you had such odors, you had no hope of landing a desirable mate.

City smells used to be a lot more pungent than they are today. Humans shared their space with populations of horses, pigs, cows, and chickens. Visitors to Cincinnati in the early 1800s, for example, often wrote about the omnipresence of semi-feral pigs that wandered through the streets, adding to the odor of the enormous pork processing industry of the city.

It was not until the early 19th century that many people had the notion that public cleanliness—as a measure against garbage in the street, offal, noxious effluvia from industrial processes going on right in the midst of the city, and polluting smoke—was something that civil authorities should attempt to police. This resulted in street paving, public water supplies to individual dwellings, municipal garbage collection, waste treatment plants, and industrial zoning regulations.

Nevertheless, civil authorities did not consider odor to be the prime offender to public peace. Metropolitan municipalities in the 19th century were spurred to clean up their cities in order to combat the spread of disease, especially at first in port cities such as New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New Orleans. These cities were periodically afflicted by cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, and typhoid. The abatement of odors was a byproduct, rather than a goal, of these efforts.

Pershing undoubtedly had complex views on race and American citizenship, probably not so different from his political ally and fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt. Given his command of African American “Buffalo Soldiers” in the 1898 Spanish-American War and his participation in the Wounded Knee Massacre of Lakota Indians just eight years earlier, it would seem that he held very contradictory views. To Pershing, blacks may have seemed like worthy soldiers, while Indians deserved genocide. On the other hand, as a military officer, Pershing was carrying out orders and we cannot assume these actions reflected his personal beliefs. Roosevelt, however, was in a different position. Unlike Pershing, who followed orders, Roosevelt gave orders and thus set the tone for race relations both in the military and in society at large. For example, Roosevelt was determined to see the cultural extinction of American Indians (while holding them up as “noble savages” nonetheless), but he also hosted black educator Booker T. Washington at the White House, a very controversial move, especially to white Southern Democratic politicians.

As the first two decades of the 20th century passed, the nation saw increased immigration from both Europe and Asia, as well as increased activism by African Americans, American Indians, and others who demanded equal opportunities and the end of discriminatory laws and customs. World War I was a watershed in these movements, as both African Americans and American Indians enlisted in the army. Blacks served in segregated units, but Indians did not. Indians had a highly ambivalent attitude about their senses of belonging to the American nation; after all, they belonged to tribal nations as well, nations which had long histories of government-to-government relations with the United States. Yet by 1918, the federal government had done a good deal to not only destroy Indian lives but to destroy that government-to-government relationship as well. Many Indians were resentful of these policies, but chose to join the military anyway. Why? Veterans have offered many reasons, one of which is that they believed that when America was threatened, their homelands were threatened. Many veterans saw themselves as warriors not only for their own tribal communities but for the U.S. as well. Despite their service alongside whites, there is no doubt that Indians experienced a high degree of discrimination in the military, as sensitively shown by Joseph Boyden in the novel Three Day Road. Both Indians and blacks sacrificed for the United States and felt that the country ought to treat them more fairly. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who had to maintain political support from southern white supremacist Democrats, vacillated on this issue (especially in his refusal to support anti-lynching legislation in Congress) and questions of African American integration in the military were essentially abandoned until after World War II. Wilson, like so many other policy makers, seemed to effectively ignore Indian concerns. Indians’ service with whites in the military might be explained by the emerging notion of “whiteness.” Whiteness is an analytical category that historians have used to explain the shifts in race relations created by immigration and industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We must remember that men like Roosevelt and Pershing talked about “race” in what today we would think of as ethnic or national terms—there was an English race, an Irish race, a German race, an Italian race, and so on. Today, we tend to think of these ethnicities as “white,” though that idea was hardly solidified in the early twentieth century. Instead, a long historical process created “whiteness” and a white population out of many different nationalities once perceived as incompatible and even threatening to Anglo-Saxon Americans.

Famously, Roosevelt believed in the “melting pot,” a phrase that we have come to associate with his belief in equality and the worth of all men, but which in actuality referred to his wish to see Americans with ancestry in Western Europe mix and marry one another. It was only those Americans who could jump into the melting pot—Asians, African Americans, American Indians, and others were explicitly excluded from Roosevelt’s vision of a strong American people. Yet, Indians were not segregated in military service, despite the fact that every American president had endorsed a policy that would essentially exterminate them. These policies had not wholly succeeded, but at the turn of the 20th century the American Indian population was at its lowest in human history. In this light, we can imagine that Indians were not perceived as a threat to whiteness in the same way that Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Asians, and African Americans were. By the 1920s, immigrants from places seen as undesirable to Anglo-Saxon policy makers had increased so much that Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Act. This act installed quotas on immigrants from certain countries; in general, the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia could not exceed 2% of those populations currently living in the US, as of the 1890 census. In other words, if, say, 100,000 people from China lived in the United States in 1890, then the US would admit no more than 2,000 people in a given year. Pershing, who was close to President Calvin Coolidge and had even considered a run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1920, was present for the signing of this bill, indicating his support for it and what it represented for policy-makers’ hopes about the future racial composition of the United States. Of course, we now know that this policy ultimately did not achieve its intended effect, however much “whiteness” is taken for granted today. Indeed, what this period shows is that the racial hierarchies we believe to have always been in place were in considerable flux even as recently as 100 years ago. Pershing, Roosevelt, Wilson, and Coolidge were at the forefront of maintaining white supremacy, but they could not ignore the consistent—and insistent—protest of non-white Americans, nor should we ignore the fact that within white and non-white communities, there are very distinct groups with different histories who possessed varied responses to their situations in the United States.