Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 (review)

Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951. By David Stradling. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. x+270. $42.50.

David Stradling's Smokestacks and Progressives is a solid, well-researched, and insightful examination of how coal-related smoke-control movements in the United States changed over time, starting with the activities of reformers in the late nineteenth century and ending with the success of smoke abatement programs in the decade after World War II. During this period, important shifts took place in the social identity of reform leaders, in the ways reformers framed the smoke problem, and in the extent to which they used technology and government-enforced regulations as abatement tools. Stradling integrates these shifts into a coherent narrative that draws out general patterns without losing the texture of specific urban smoke-control movements.

Initially, Stradling's use of the word "environmentalists" in his subtitle struck me as ahistorical, given that nobody would have used that word in the period he examines. However, he shows that urban reformers in the late nineteenth century--often middle-class women--approached the smoke problem with what can be described as an environmental ethic. To these reformers, smoke represented an unacceptable violation of one's right to clean air and a soot-free home, and they sought to regulate industry through nuisance law. Writing enforceable regulations proved difficult, though, and issues of monitoring, measurement, and costs quickly came to the fore. One could not simply prohibit smoke. Urban boosters and industrial leaders actively opposed abatement efforts that threatened to make burning coal--the Gilded Age symbol of capital being put to productive use--more expensive.

Stradling explains that the magnitude of the smoke problem varied from city to city, with several factors accounting for most of the differences: the type of coal being burned, wind patterns, and the concentration of industry and railroad lines. The type of coal proved especially important, with anthracite from eastern Pennsylvania preferable to the soft and smoky bituminous coal mined west of the Alleghenies. Hence, New York and Philadelphia, having easy access to anthracite and with the luxury of sea breezes, had less of a smoke problem than Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, or St. Louis. Indeed, differences in the air quality of midwestern and eastern cities motivated reformers in both places. Residents of New York did not want their city to become like Pittsburgh, and reformers in Pittsburgh recognized that cleaner air was possible.

Early on, the potential for reducing smoke by regulating fuel type undermined any argument that the technology necessary to control smoke simply did not exist. One could--at some cost--switch fuels. In the early twentieth century, however, efficiency-minded engineers assumed leadership of many smoke-control movements and downplayed both the importance of fuel type and the role of regulation. Instead, they emphasized ways to burn coal more efficiently. Smoke became a conservation issue and remained one until the middle of the century. By that time, a combination of factors--innovations in combustion technology, the growing importance of natural gas and fuel oil, the development of diesel-electric railroad locomotives, the centralization of coal burning in large generating plants--reduced the magnitude of coal-related smoke problems. By the 1960s, Stradling notes, pollution from sources other than coal represented a greater air-quality concern in large urban areas.

Stradling leaves some gaps. For example, he devotes relatively little attention to the 1920s and early 1930s, racing through that period to focus on the successful smoke abatement movements in St. Louis and Pittsburgh in the late 1930s and 1940s. Hence one wonders: Did people in that middle period recognize that important changes were occurring in coal-burning patterns? And to what extent could engineers point to technological changes that justified continued faith in an efficiency-based approach to controlling smoke? I found myself wanting to know more about certain...