George Edwin Waring, Jr. [ 357 ] pal virtues and encourage their adoption by the citizenry. Thus, clean streets could induce a higher level of personal cleanliness, especially in immigrant districts; and nonpartisanship in municipal agencies might foster similar attitudes among the electorate. Because street- cleaning operations involved public participation the reformers saw an opportunity to enlarge the areas of cooperation between public officials and the citizenry. Civic groups, including the Ladies Health Protection Association, City Club, City Improvement Society, and Street Cleaning Aid Society, had already taken an active interest in street-cleaning operations; many more were prepared to do so should Department officials openly invite such assistance. Although advocates of governmental economy, the reformers were less critical of expenditures for street cleaning, and thus the reform program, temporarily freed of its budget-cutting proclivities, could appear in its most attractive form. Finally, it is worth noting that historians have yet to recognize fully the connections existing between the reform impulse and sanitation improvements. Cleanliness and proper sanitation seemed to many reformers to be the answer to a host of moral and social problems that afflicted urban America. Cleanliness, godliness, and good government, in their minds, reinforced one another to produce the good society. The reformers thought their program was comprehensive and internally consistent, though hardly self-generating. Its execution depended on the elevation of the "good" man to office—an individual technically equipped for, and morally committed to, the methods of reform. Mayor Strong, sensing the benefits street-cleaning improvements would bring to the reform movement, determined to appoint such a man as the Department's commissioner. Largely on the suggestion of Mrs. Francis Kinnicutt of the Street Cleaning Aid Society and after careful deliberation, he chose Colonel George Edwin Waring, Jr., to preside over the revitalization of New York's street-cleaning services.3 The choice of Waring is noteworthy considering that he was not a New York City resident. While Tammany rarely appointed nonresidents to office, the reformers were not at all reluctant to look outside the city for talent. 3Richard W. G. Welling, As the Twig Is Bent (New York: 1942), 69; New York Tribune, September 16,1897.