In Pursuit of Silence (28 page)

War on noise was declared repeatedly in London in the 1920s and ’30s. Mussolini declared war on noise in Italy in 1933. (He’d been inspired by a cartoon in
Punch
depicting him in imperial toga proclaiming the achievements of his regime above a caption that read:
“Make Rome as Quiet
as It Is Great.”) I learned to my surprise that
my great-grandfather
James Jackson Putnam, a Boston neurologist and psychologist, had been part of an international congress of some five hundred physicians and lawyers convened in 1912 with the express goal of “abolishing noise” as a “barbarous” threat to civilization. The Germans launched a war on street noises in 1908. A “crusade for quiet” in New York City made headlines around the world in 1906.

The history of antinoise policy often reads like an enthusiastic chronicle of the reinvention of the wheel. Time and again, health experts have run studies revealing new findings about the damage caused by noise to our hearing, cardiovascular, and mental health. As fresh research on these problems is published, courts are persuaded to pass legislation. Police gamely charge out onto the streets to enforce the surprisingly strict new laws. Silence is finally beginning to get its due. And then, one day, someone wakes up and realizes, Hey, everything is louder than it’s ever been before.

It’s as if the distracting effect of noise renders us incapable of remembering the advances we’ve already made against noise.

So pervasive is this distraction that at times it even serves the cause of quiet. The most important antinoise regulation in American history, passed by President Nixon in 1972, is a comedy of cascading distractions.

During the late 1960s
, state and local governments launched
intensive efforts to control noise emissions from the rail and trucking industries, says Ken Feith, a civil servant who has been working on noise pollution for the Environmental Protection Agency since 1973. Lobbyists went to Capitol Hill to demand protection from the noise laws, making the argument that these were interrupting the free flow of commerce. Congress requested that the EPA investigate the effects of noise on public health and welfare. The study resulted in the Noise Control Act.
Russell Train, who served
as Nixon’s chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in 1972, told me that he thought the president’s chief motivation in enacting a broad platform of environmental measures was to distract public attention from the environmental agenda of his Democratic rivals, and that the only reason noise slipped into this package was because Nixon himself refused to pay attention to details of the legislation.

The Noise Control Act remains on the books to this day—and the EPA is legally obliged to enforce its provisions. (Among other things, it establishes strict noise-emissions standards for transportation vehicles and equipment, machinery, appliances, and other products of commerce, while declaring federal action “essential to deal with major noise sources in commerce control.”) But no one seems to remember that the act exists. Ever since the Office of Noise Abatement and Control was stripped of its budget under President Reagan, the progressive act has remained in limbo.

If we look at the history of the fight against other pollutants—smoke, for instance—the trend is generally upward. Ever since the first substantial air-pollution regulation was enacted, just prior to World War I, in response to studies of the long-term
consequences of working in mines and factories, the more that scientists have identified health risks, the more these emissions have been regulated. Yet with the exception of the very loudest sound offenders, a chart of the fight against noise would resemble less the progressive ascent to enlightenment than the graph of a wildly swinging stock market.

The easiest assumption would be that noise is simply a less-acute public-health threat than smoke. Relative to global warming, of course that’s true. But the overall risk to our health from road traffic noise is 40 percent
higher
than that from air pollutants, according to a 2008 World Health Organization report.
Dr. Rokhu Kim
, the head of the WHO’s noise-related task force, told me that while there’s a politically powerful consensus that particulate matter from combustion engines increases cardiovascular mortality, it’s still difficult to identify how those particles actually enter the body and jeopardize the heart. At this point, Kim said, “I think it’s fair to say that there’s a higher biological plausibility for noise as a trigger of heart disease than air pollution.”

When it comes to imperiling mental health, noise pollution of course wins hands down. Not only does it jangle nerves, it actually provokes people to murder. In August 2008, for example, a man by the name of Raymundo Serrato was shot to death in Pacoima, near Los Angeles, for playing his car stereo too loudly. A neighbor remarked that Serrato frequently came home in the early-morning hours, booming his stereo.
“So I guess he
[the shooter], just, probably, had enough,” the neighbor said. Noisemakers themselves have a long history of responding to complaints with violence. And even when noise doesn’t incite gunshots and
knifings, it can trigger ungovernable anger. The U.S. legal system is set up to pit noise haters and noisemakers against each other in an endless series of fight-to-the-bursting-point showdowns.

There are hard-won victories—yet they remain utterly localized triumphs, while noise, by definition, is a boundary buster. And the more rigorous a community antinoise law is, the more vulnerable is the ordinance itself. A perfect example is the legislation passed against boom cars in the city of Sarasota. As of April 2008, if one Sarasota officer could hear your sound system from twenty-five feet away, he could seize your car on a first offense. A year after passage of the new ordinance, I phoned Captain Stitler of the Sarasota Police Department to find out how the legislation was working. He talked to me at length about how strongly the community supported the law, and how effective it had been. I said that was great, and asked him how things were today. There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then Stitler said,
“Currently we have been
advised by the city attorney’s office that we’ve been challenged constitutionally on the ordinance and at this point we’ve suspended all enforcement until the litigation is stopped.” He is uncertain when, if ever, the law will be reinstated. And even when a community manages to pass antinoise legislation that is both rigorous and durable, local police rarely have the resources to enforce it with any consistency.

The more I thought about the problem, the more it seemed clear that only federal action would be effective. But the government gives noise a level of attention on a par with jaywalking: the EPA’s most significant recent action with regard to noise policy has been to conduct a multiyear project aimed at providing better
labeling for earplugs, earmuffs, and the like; there is talk of
using the Internet
to spread awareness.

It’s ironic that the only time when harsh legislation against noise really seems to stick is during
actual
wartime. Beginning one night in 1939, on the basis of a single document stamped by the king, everyone in England was forbidden from
“sounding within public
hearing any siren, hooter, whistle, rattle, bell, horn, gong or similar instrument” unless advised to do so by authorities as an air-raid warning. In June 1940, the order was extended to include the previously exempt churches, and for the first time in history their bells fell silent. The public understood that quiet was necessary in order for the war workers to rest, and that almost any extra noise might mask a warning signal crucial to the survival of the public or troops.

But surely something other than modern armed conflict could muster popular support for antinoise laws! I craved an upbeat, inspiring story. That’s when I recalled the extraordinary figure of Julia Barnett Rice, a society matron in the early twentieth century who managed to quiet New York City by narrowing the definition of noise.

Julia Barnett Rice, dubbed the “Queen of Silence” by the Parisian press, is one of the most remarkable heroines the pursuit of silence has ever produced. She started the Society for the
Suppression of Unnecessary Noise in 1906, the world’s first internationally renowned antinoise organization.

A drawing of Rice done around the time she founded the society reveals a woman with a square face, sad dark eyes, low brows, and a heavy crown of black hair. A New Orleans debutante of Dutch-Jewish ancestry, Rice became a musician and a classicist. She also
completed an MD
at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary. In 1906, she was a forty-six-year-old mother of six living in Villa Julia, an Italianate mansion with soundproofed rooms on Riverside Drive that her husband, Isaac, had named for her and which commanded
“the finest view
up the Hudson that is obtainable on Manhattan island.” Not only was Isaac a trained musician and composer; he made a name for himself in corporate law, earned a fortune as an inventor, and was a chess master who created a dauntingly convoluted opening maneuver dubbed the Rice Gambit. He perfected this move in a noiseless chamber he’d had carved out
of solid rock
deep underneath the foundations of Villa Julia, reachable only by special elevator. All in all, the Rices are testimony to just how much two people can accomplish who don’t have the distracting noise of the Internet to hum along with.

In the summer of 1905
, with the windows of Villa Julia flung wide so that the family could enjoy the river breezes, Mrs. Rice noticed a new acoustical blotch on the landscape. Though the tooting of tugboats had always been annoying, they had suddenly become so frequent that she was unable to sleep more than a few hours a night. She didn’t know the cause. Inspired by the adage “It is the worst sign of all when men submit to a torture because
it is general and not particular,” Rice hired a band of students from Columbia Law School to track the din.

The findings of the six students, whom she stationed at different points along the Hudson for a number of nights, were shocking. On a single night in early December, they recorded almost three thousand whistle blasts. At certain moments, her scouts confessed that they had tossed up their pens in defeat because the whistles were coming too frequently to register. Not only did Rice have the students strive to keep a tally of the toots; she had them note what she described as their “endless variety” from “the shrillest shrieks to the deepest of booming sounds,” and from split-second blasts to “long, ear-splitting shrieks.” In her report, she cited the psychologist James Sully to underscore the injurious effect of this random pattern: “When the sequence is wholly disorderly or arrhythmic, the mind is kept, so to speak, in a state of tip-toe expectation of every succeeding moment,” in an “imaginative preoccupation of the attention.”

Her final record ran to 33 dense pages covering a range of different weather conditions. Rice was able to show that even on a brilliantly clear Sunday night, the expansive captains had blasted their horns some 1,116 times. She commissioned another team of students to trot up and down the waterways on both sides of Manhattan collecting firsthand statements from policemen, watchmen, and regular citizens about the effects of this noise. To bolster her case, she also talked with some of the more candid captains themselves. Rice found that the vast majority of toots had nothing to do with warnings intended to prevent accidents. Often they were “fraternal”—the sonic equivalent of high-fives between boats. Other times they represented efforts to
rouse their besotted crews from the beer-sloshed sawdust of waterside saloons, or to send signals to servant girls cloistered in houses along Riverside Drive. In fact, far from demonstrating a greater emphasis on safe boating, the relentless blasts made it impossible to discern alarms that did matter.

Overwhelming evidence that the tooting was not just obnoxious but superfluous clinched Rice’s case. Charging that tugs “murder sleep and therefore menace health,” she declared war. From start to finish, it was a stunningly executed campaign.

After the New York City Department of Health absolved itself of responsibility by proclaiming the Hudson a national waterway, she turned to federal bodies charged with docks, ports, and steamboats. When these bureaucracies dawdled, Rice began talking to the police department, heads of medical institutions, and patients inside hospitals on the calamitous health effects of the tooting. In a short period of time, she had amassed statements attesting to the sufferings inflicted by the noise on thirteen thousand poor people. She continued to enlarge her efforts until she was able to bring her case to Washington. Speaking on behalf of all the hospitals in New York City, she was given a hearing at the Department of Commerce and Labor. Congressman William Bennet took up the torch for her. With Bennet’s steadfast support, ten months after that initial hearing, she had prevailed. The Board of Steamboat Inspectors in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia announced that all
“useless and indiscriminate
tooting of sirens and steam whistles” was to halt. When tugs violated the new legislation, they were aggressively fined. When the
occasional churlish skipper
sought to take his revenge on Rice by sneaking up late at night to points just beneath Villa Julia and
blasting off a few toots before swiftly gliding away, Rice hunted the boats down and had their captains hauled into court.