Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800-1950 (review)

Well before the development of effective breathing apparatus, firefighters in American cities adopted the tactic of fighting fires "from the inside." Instead of only playing water on exterior walls or through windows, they would enter burning buildings to "ventilate" them (allowing built-up smoke and heated gases to escape), apply water to the seat of the fire, and try to rescue those trapped inside. Even with protective masks and clothing, this practice was, and remains, difficult and dangerous, and the willingness to endure such conditions—to "eat smoke"—brought increased attention to firefighters as a special breed of men.

In Eating Smoke, Mark Tebeau presents two parallel narratives: the first examines how and why American firefighters adopted (or resisted) new tactics, equipment, and organizational innovations, and, in the process, created new roles and identities for themselves and in the eyes of their public audiences. In the second, Tebeau examines the strategies developed by fire insurance underwriters to maintain solvency and achieve profitability, and how their efforts complemented—and at times conflicted with—the efforts of municipalities and firefighters to suppress urban fires. Underlying the relationship between firefighters and underwriters was the contrast in how each group perceived fire risks: to firefighters these risks were physical; to underwriters, they were economic.

Both narratives are based on Tebeau's comparative study of firefighting in Saint Louis and Philadelphia; two major fire underwriters, Aetna and the Insurance Company of North America; and, to a lesser extent, the National Board of Fire Engineers and the National Board of Fire Underwriters, professional and trade associations that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Tebeau argues that "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," and that by the mid-nineteenth century American firefighters embodied both working-class character traits of "rough-hewn manliness" and middle-class values of professionalism, prudence, and rationality (pp. 127, 296). Tension between class notions of masculinity was evident, for example, in the image of the firefighter as a heroic figure. Even as firefighters promoted safety, they were aware that without danger and potential loss of life there could be no martyrs and only lesser heroes.

Tebeau chronicles the transformation of fire protection from a community-based responsibility to the specialized domain of firefighters, examining in particular the role of gender and class in the adoption of new technologies such as the fire-hose system and steam fire engines, and the professionalization of firefighting. Concurrently, underwriters were engaged in turning urban fire hazards into an economic commodity. A key problem for underwriters was estimating the true long-term costs of the insurance policies they sold. At first, they tried basing premiums on the construction of buildings to be insured and the character or "moral hazard" of the insuree; later, they used "mortality tables" of past instances of fire damage. Only in the 1850s did underwriters start to take an actuarial approach to assessing fire risks and develop sophisticated mapping techniques that included such factors as the use of buildings and their proximity to other fire hazards, to engine houses, and to water supplies. Not until the early twentieth century did underwriters significantly embrace fire prevention as a business strategy.

Masculinity was no less important to underwriters and policyholders than to firefighters, but its meaning derived from middle-class conceptions of manhood. For example, Tebeau shows how companies like Aetna moved away from price competition, which posed a serious threat to the stability of fire insurance generally, and created sales strategies in which safety became a "consumer product" and "customers did not just purchase protection against fire, they bought the knowledge that they were behaving as prudent middle-class men" (p. 101).

Eating Smoke invites both criticism and praise. It is frequently repetitious, contextualizes at every turn, overplays the roles of firefighting and underwriting in determining social order in American cities, and overstates the...