Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950

4. Muscle and Steam: Establishing Municipal Fire Departments, 1850–1875

c h a p t e r f o u r Muscle and Steam: Establishing Municipal Fire Departments, 1850–1875 In May 1855 over fifty thousand Philadelphians braved a torrential downpour to watch a contest between muscle and steam that symbolized the broader conflict over the provision of fire protection in the United States. Crowding the streets in front of Dr. Wadsworth’s Church, throngs gathered in windows and on rooftops along Arch and Tenth Streets. They witnessed a philosophical and technological trial arranged by the Philadelphia City Council, pitting a steam engine manufactured in Cincinnati against Philadelphia’s top hand-pumped fire engines. The steam engine was tested first. Viewers waited for over eight minutes, as engineers lit the engine’s furnace, and then were treated to fifty-seven minutes of action. The engine threw continuous streams of water up and down Tenth Street, further drenching the crowd. Twice engineers turned the hose upward to the church steeple, obtaining a height of 120 feet. After the engine had been fully tested, the steam was let off and the “grate skwirt” was taken from the grounds. A hush came over the crowd as thousands of eyes anticipated the work of firefighters. Philadelphians especially turned their eyes toward the Diligent engine, the pride of the city, and they were not disappointed. A full complement of volunteers pumped furiously on the engine’s brakes, quickly developing pressure and expelling a steady stream of water from its pipes. The men worked with great resolve and twice Establishing Municipal Fire Departments 127 sent streams of water shooting above the church steeple, attaining a height of 133 feet.1 The competition exposed conflicts that lay just beneath the surface of American life in the middle of the nineteenth century. Across political, economic, and cultural domains, Americans reconsidered the best methods for organizing society , including the provision of public fire safety. At the broadest level, the debate over firefighting pitted the interests of business and the incipient middle class against the interests of urban working-class and immigrant communities, but the street-level battle to control firefighting reveals a more complex portrait. Although firefighters often emerged victorious in ongoing contests with insurers and the middle class, they ultimately embraced many of the same values espoused by their opponents. Volunteers, for instance, claimed to be specialists in firefighting, with distinctive claims to the public trust. They worked to increase their efficiency and, as firefighters reorganized their labor, they moved inexorably closer to establishing firefighting as one of many specialized occupations in America’s industrializing economy. And, although firefighters sometimes argued with underwriters and merchants about the merits of using new technologies, such as steam fire engines, just as frequently they did not debate the usefulness of innovation. Rather, they debated who would control the new instruments. As a result, steam engines did not remake American fire departments; firefighters did. Ultimately, volunteers dictated the pace of departmental reform. They seized opportunities presented by debates about fire protection to lead and direct fire departments that formally compensated them for what had been an avocation. Then, volunteers deployed new machines and management strategies to assert their authority over the revised organizations. The newly reorganized fire departments did not jettison the principles that had guided volunteer fire companies, however. Rather, firefighters built upon the previous organizations’ ideals of manhood, technology, and service. They especially continued a trend that volunteers had begun earlier in the century—the process of specializing and reorganizing firefighting. Volunteer firefighters, then, did not fade away simply as a result of some broad shift in community values. To the contrary , firemen led the charge to make public fire safety more bureaucratic and the purview of specialists. They reorganized firefighting as paid labor directed by skilled experts and organized departments under municipal control. This transformation did not signal an end of a mythical era as much as it indicated a revision in how firefighters approached their service to the community. More broadly, the creation of municipal fire departments reveals how public safety, the expansion of city governments, and the process of urbanization were each shaped by attitudes about manhood and technology. Movement away from volunteer firefighting occurred at a time when cities began to extend their administrative capacities, to create more specialized programs of public safety, and to employ...