Bay Cities and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and Oakland (review)

Bay Cities and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and Oakland. By Sarah S. Elkind. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. Pp. viii+246. $35.

From the 1880s to the 1930s, soaring demand for pure water and sanitation ignited an urban crisis that restructured American cities. Voters increasingly turned to special districts with regional jurisdictions. Metropolitan in scope, regional districts promised an end to the graft in public construction that enriched political bosses. Regionalism, said its defenders, would break the urban machine and challenge private monopolies. Elevating government, regional managers would be scientific professionals above the partisan fray. But regionalism, Sarah K. Elkind explains in this superb comparative study, fostered and financed the public networks of drains, reservoirs, aqueducts, and sewers that transformed rural landscapes in unexpected ways.

Vexed by the stench of urban sewage and unreliable water supplies, Boston and Oakland took different roads to the same political destination. Bostonians adopted regional government in the name of conservation at a time when muckrakers denounced the boss-style machine. The city suffered from permeable soil that absorbed sewage into ground water. The solution to that problem was a gleaming new delivery system that filtered water and restricted pollution upstream. Boston's Metropolitan Water Board, created in 1895, weighed in with germ theory and the fear of disease as small towns abandoned local projects and the control of headwaters shifted away from the farm. Doctors joined sanitary engineers on regional water commissions--an early example of medical expertise employed in the service of policymaking. "A cleaner, orderly city would breed a healthier more law-abiding and moral population," writes Elkind, explaining the mind of the water experts. "Of course, regional water and sewerage could not meet these inflated expectations, but they did transform urban politics and environments" (p. 161).

Oakland saw the promise of regionalism through another set of inflated expectations. Whereas reformers in Boston decried squalor and filth, East Bay regionalists exploited fear of rapacious capitalism. Private water utilities, said the advocates of regional systems, were in league with the hated railroads. Driven by rate hikes and short-term profits, water capitalists were seldom visionary enough to anticipate urban sanitation and growth. In 1907, for example, the Oakland Board of Health ruled that tap water in the public schools was dangerously polluted. A drought three years later aggravated the pollution and spread gastroenteritis. But the California courts and agricultural interests discouraged regional districts. Not until 1923 did voters in Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, and neighboring townships endorse the tax-supported East Bay Municipal Utility District. Not until 1929 did the district tap a reliable supply of fresh water with an aqueduct to Pardee Reservoir on the Mokelumne River, a tributary of the Sacramento. Another fifteen years passed before voters approved a regional sanitation authority. As regional agencies blurred municipal boundaries, they robbed resources from the farm and sapped the political autonomy of outlying townships. "Rural activities and economies were sacrificed for urban prosperity," Elkind concludes (p. 155).

Bay Cities and Water Politics is the rare historical study that speaks directly and intelligently to the policy implementation concerns of municipal managers and engineers. Public works professionals will appreciate the tightly focused case studies and the straightforward prose. Historians of technology will better understand an era of public construction when the politics of regionalism wove rural America into the fold of metropolitan life.

Todd Shallat

Dr. Shallat is professor of history at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.

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