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  • Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950
  • Scott Gabriel Knowles
Mark Tebeau. Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xi + 425 pp. ISBN 0-8018-6791-6, $49.95 (cloth).

Urbanization and industrialization, the twin engines of American capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, created not only landscapes of profit but also landscapes of risk. Disease, market depression, and warfare took their toll, but one danger in particular haunted the imaginations, damaged the bodies, and ruined the [End Page 551] fortunes of the industrial metropolis: the fire menace. "No other environmental danger," explains urban historian Mark Tebeau, "jeopardized the entirety of the city-building process—encompassing human life, property, and the dreams of city boosters—in such a sweeping or intense fashion" (p. 4). In his ambitious and detailed new book, Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800-1950, Tebeau sets out to explain the role of two largely undocumented actors—firemen and insurance men—in analyzing, managing, and attacking urban fire. Racing to a blaze or "writing a risk," wrestling steam engines or actuarial tables, firemen and insurance men provided "an undeniable social good, extinguishing blazes, paying insurance claims . . . [as] physical rebuilding signaled not just the restoration of order but also the reassertion of particular regimens of political, economic, and social authority" (p. 5).

The rapid growth of cities like Philadelphia in the early republic demanded the increased specialization of urban skills, firefighting among the most critical. Volunteer fire companies, masters of novel technologies like fire hose and hand-pumped fire engines, assumed what once had been a broadly shared community responsibility. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the volunteer companies expanded their numbers, coming to represent a cross-section of the increasingly diverse ethnic and class mix of urban America. Though Tebeau dispels the popular idea of volunteer companies brawling as houses burned down behind them, he does develop a picture of a fiercely proud, masculine subculture that "fit well a society driven increasingly by individualism and a capitalist economy" (p. 35).

By mid-century, the volunteers faced a challenge to their authority, coming primarily from anxious middle-class urbanites who took to linking volunteers with street gangs and what they saw as working-class immigrant indecency and disrespect for property. Critics, including fire insurance companies, began to push for the establishment of professional fire departments, answerable to centralized state and municipal authorities. Rather than merely disappearing, though, the volunteers often took leadership positions in the newly organized professional departments. They were, after all, the experts. And, by the end of the century, firemen had made great gains in carving out a professional identity for themselves. They argued, through institutions like the National Association of Fire Engineers, that they were the best sources of local information on how to both prevent and extinguish fires in the complex and capital-intensive high-rise structures coming to dominate the city. Moreover, with a more dangerous infrastructure came more harrowing firefighting. Firemen now emerged as masters of both putting out fires and saving lives. The professional [End Page 552] urban fireman emerges in the twentieth century as one part technical expert and one part hero, able to size up a risk from systematic training and long experience, and "eat smoke," when called on to save people from a burning skyscraper.

While the volunteer firemen were busily courting the gratitude of their neighbors, fire insurance companies were courting profits. In theory, of course, writing profitable policies was a snap—insure well-built structures and reject hazardous ones—but in practice fire underwriting faced a host of epistemological and managerial problems. Aetna was one of the first underwriters to make rigorous data collection, risk-mapping, and statistical analysis central to insurance practice. "Aetna . . . sought to understand each risk intimately," a desire that unfortunately ran into difficulty when it came to doing business in distant cities, and sending field agents out to fit the particularities of risks as seen in person into boxes on standardized forms. One long-suffering Aetna executive expressed the problems inherent in turning risk-assessment into an objective science: "There is nothing like being...

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