Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950

Notes

Notes Introduction: The Problem of Fire 1. Evening Chronicle, August 10–12, 1877; Record of Fires in the City of St. Louis, 1887, STLFD, STLCA; Proceedings of the NAFE, 1880, 76; “The Chicago Training School,” Fireman ’s Herald 24 (November 24, 1892); Proceedings of the NAFE, 1882, 45; Fire and Water 6 (1889), 62, 87; F & W 18 (1895), 477; St. Louis Firemen’s Fund, History of the St. Louis Fire Department (1914), 178; Proceedings of the NAFE, 1887, 65; Proceedings of the NAFE, 1888, 87. 2. Whipple’s Daily Fire Reporter, August 10–11, 1887. 3. Risk and safety have received much recent study; see, for instance, Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996); Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin, eds., Accidents in History (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1997); Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor, and Business in the Building of American Work Safety, 1870–1939 (Baltimore , Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); for insights into studying work and occupation, see Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); on technology as reflecting broad societal relations, see Bruno Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” in John Law, ed., A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination (New York: Routledge, 1991), 103–31. 4. For the classic study of fire and its relation to American society, especially in rural settings , see Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982). 5. October 3, 1851, Missouri Fire Company No. 5, Record of Fires, 1846–1855, STLVVFC, MOHS; David D. Dana, The Fireman: The Fire Departments of the United States . . . (1858), 358–65; Thomas Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County (Philadelphia: Everts and Co., 1919), 819 ff.; Missouri Republican, May 24, 1849; “Great Fire of 1849,” Folder 16, Box 1, STLVVFC; on the danger, see Amy Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 30–39; Andrea Stulman Dennett and Nina Warnke, “Disaster Spectacles at the Turn of the Century,” Film History 4, no. 2 (1990), 101–11; Thomas A. Edison, Inc., Spectacular Scenes during a New York City Fire (United States: Thomas A. Edison, Inc., 1905); Thomas A. Edison, Destruction of Standard Oil Company’s Plant at Bayonne, N.J., by Fire on July 5th, 1900 (United States: Edison Manufacturing Co., 1900); Thomas A. Edison, James White, producer, Morning Fire Alarm (United States: Edison Manufacturing Co., 1896). Evaluating fire loss, either relative to the population or the amount of property exposed is a dicey proposition. I have chosen to use data that emphasizes the dollar amount of fire loss, per capita and indexed for inflation and the total amount of property exposed; see Statistical Abstracts of the United States, 1879–1960; also, see National Fire Protection Association, Conflagrations in America Since 1900 (1951). For a different approach to evaluating how the threat of fire changed in the nineteenth century—which counts the number of major fires that destroyed “at least fifty houses” and then represents that number per capita, in terms of the populations of select major cities—see L. E. Frost and E. L. Jones, “The Fire Gap and the Greater Durability of Nineteenth-Century Cities,” Planning Perspectives 4 (1989), 333–47. 6. On fire as “good servant and bad master,” see, especially, Margaret Hindle Hazen and Robert M. Hazen, Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American Culture, 1775–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization (New York: Penguin, 1992), esp. 176–77; on changing fire environments and fire as metaphor, see Pyne, Fire in America, 20–33, 137–42; for a broader cultural view of fire as metaphor, see Robyn Cooper, “The Fireman: Immaculate Manhood,” Journal of Popular Culture 28, no. 4 (1995), 139–70; Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964); Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973); Amy Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); for an overview of city building in America, see Eric Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of Cities and Towns, 1780–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); on the nineteenth...