The Glass City: Toledo and the Industry That Built It by Barbara L. Floyd (review)

Toledoans had grand visions for the swampy and disease-plagued area where the Maumee River connects with the far western edge of Lake Erie. Benefiting from the canal era, which captured the energies of Ohio’s Jacksonianera developers, Toledo was nevertheless another half century from realizing the promise of its early boosters. Ultimately, it was the plentiful deposits of natural gas exploited in the late nineteenth century by a burgeoning industry that established a city. That industry was glass manufacturing, which was just overcoming the limitations of relying on charcoal or coal to generate the intense heat necessary for production. But what distinguished Toledo from the scores of towns in the gas fields of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana were the entrepreneurs and inventors who made the city the center of twentieth-century glassmaking.

Much of the book is about the overlapping companies built by the business acumen of Edward Drummond Libbey and the inventiveness of Michael Owens. The two men could not have been more different. Libbey, the son of a small glass manufacturer, concentrated on marketing, promotion, and corporate innovation. He collected art and eventually built an estate in Ojai, California. Owens, a glassmaker who worked his way through the factories and craft unions in the industry, revolutionized the container and flat-glass portions of the industry through mechanical inventions that displaced his union brothers. Even as he facilitated the mass-production techniques that enabled a string of companies named for one or both of these giants to so dominate the markets for glass that they eventually faced anti-monopoly litigations, Owens always felt more comfortable with glassworkers than with executives.

While most of this early story was previously told by Warren Scoville, The Glass City goes far beyond the founders. The empire that Libbey and Owens created weathered the challenges of Prohibition and the Great Depression in part because the successor generation of corporate leaders recognized the need for constant product and technical innovation blended with promotional genius. Some of the best chapters explore the impact of World War II and the postwar surge of consumerism. Until the 1970s, the Toledo-based companies stayed atop the industry through mergers with competitors, the purchase of product lines that might compete with glass, and the development of new products like fiberglass. This is old-fashioned business history at its best, steeped in the rich corporate archives on deposit at the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections at the University of Toledo, where the author works.

What tends to get lost in the narrative is the city itself. After initially describing the factors that enabled the city to grow along with the glass industry, the immersion into company histories causes Toledo to fade. Yes, corporate headquarters remained there, but developments take us to the wide variety of places where Libbey, Owens, and their successors located production. When we return to a chapter specifically on Toledo, it is to the troubled and hollowed-out city of the 1970s, embarrassed by John Denver’s singing of the satirical “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio” on the Tonight Show (I am reminded of Randy Newman’s contemporaneous song about the Cuyahoga River). The chapter on Toledoans’ ultimately unsuccessful efforts to reclaim the optimism of the early nineteenth century is intriguing, but there is no context for how the city became so distressed while serving as headquarters to seven Fortune 500 companies, including the glass giants. There are hints that the corporations, while transforming America, actually neglected (if not exploited) their base by squeezing tax breaks and using their muscle, but I had many questions about their impact on Toledo. What were the spatial dynamics of glass industry capitalism? What was the industry’s impact on city services, environmental hazards, race and gender relations, and a host of other issues that go unmentioned for more than...