Soap is an article whose commonplace presence and obvious necessity we take for granted at the dawn of the twenty-first century. For most of American history bath soap, however, was a luxury product. This paper explores the confluence of the cultural and technological changes that led to its transformation into the ubiquitous and well-used object it is today. We pick up the timeline for the development of soap in the early American republic when soapmaking was a householder's task and soap use was generally limited to laundering clothes. We then trace the rise of the American cleanliness movement and correlate this rise to the increased manufacturing capabilities of the nation's large soapmakers. This technological forward movement included improvements in producing alkalis as well as the inception and growth of the oleochemicals industry. Additional growth agents were the development of market analysis, advertising campaigns, and factory-scale hydrolysis of fatty acids from their parent fats.