Down These Mean Streets

When Winthrop, the pint-sized, lisping cherub of Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man (1957), belted out his ode to that “home sweet home” of Gary, Indiana, he said more than he knew: “I will thay, without a moment of hethitathyun, There it jutht one plathe, that can light my fathe — Gary, Indiana....” Light was plentiful in that grim industrial city, the source of which, its then-contemporary residents could have informed Winthrop, flared from the many open-hearth furnaces in operation at its massive U.S. Steel plants. Out of those flames came not a burning faith, but a devastating array of little understood public health problems, including a nasty set of pulmonary diseases. The body politic was also poisoned by toxic residues that polluted the ground, and then seeped into its aquifers and waterways. Like the mythical river city in Meredith’s play, this real one, sandwiched between the Grand and Little Calumets, “Got Trouble.”

Sorting out the nature of these troubles is the complex task Andrew Hurley has set himself in his solid, compact book Environmental Inequalities. He chose to study postwar Gary because its history of environmental degradation would enable him to explore the impact that politics, class, and race had on the community’s discovery that it was living in an unsafe place, and the manner in which it then responded to the dangers around it. “It is no coincidence that the age of ecology was also an age of environmental inequality,” he writes in the book’s first sentence, an inequality that neither organized labor nor the civil rights movement nor liberal politicians were able fully to correct, whatever their intentions, and despite the emergence in the 1960s of a spate of federal environmental legislation. This was so, Hurley concludes, because “the political process and the dynamics of the marketplace gave industrial capitalists and wealthy property holders a decisive advantage in molding the contours of environmental change.” The poor of all colors, and African Americans of all classes, “found themselves at a severe disadvantage, consistently bearing the brunt of industrial pollution in virtually all its forms: dirty air, foul water, and toxic solid wastes” (pp. viii-xiv). Social boundaries and racial distinctions determined what Americans breathed, drank, and smelled.

This is an old argument. One need but trudge with Jacob Riis through the pestilential housing or slip down the putrid streets of New York City’s Lower East Side in the late nineteenth century to recognize the enormous social fault lines, and innumerable environmental disasters, that the Industrial Revolution spawned, and that modern historiography has confirmed, again and again. It is not shocking, therefore, when in chapter 2, “The Perils of Pollution,” Hurley conducts a thorough tour of the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, from the Coke Ovens to the Merchant Finishing Mills, and finds its labor pool was drawn from the vast flood of impoverished eastern Europeans who came to the United States in the decades before World War I, or that corporate management consciously “produced an occupational hierarchy built around racial and ethnic divisions,” or that these divisions further insured that those with the least skills endured the greatest amount of “environmental exploitation” (pp. 24–25). Gary, Indiana, was one town of far too many.

Yet Hurley’s contribution to the historiography of the urban environment lies not so much with the establishment of the facts on the ground, but in his meticulous rendering of the varied human response to those facts. This is especially true of the book’s central core, a series of engaging chapters that probe the differing environmentalisms of Gary’s middle and working classes, and of its African-American citizens, differences derived from their social, economic, and racial situations; he then makes a cogent case for why attempts to bridge these distinctions proved ephemeral.

For those in the largely white professional middle class, for instance, many of...