Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 by David Stradling (review)

to the statistics about how many people migrated, from where, to where, as well as when, how, and why they migrated. As a result, Berry presents a full description of the migration for the reader. Yet Berry seeks to do more than just describe this neglected topic, he also attempts to dispel some established notions concerning the migration and migrants, such as the misnomer of this group as "Appalachians" since white southerners came "from the lowlands as much as the highlands ."(6) Yet Berry makes no real distinction between those from the mountains and those migrating from further west in the upland South. Indeed, Berry is as much at fault in limiting the scope of this migration as he claims previous studies have been by limiting his study to white southerners from the border states of Tennessee and Kentucky, and to a lesser extent West Virginia and Arkansas. While people from these states did make up a large segment of white southerners who'left the South for the urban North, their proximity to the industrial towns and cities of Ohio Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois, made the move less an exil~ than someone from the deep South (both in terms of geographical distance and cultural difference). Berry also successfully dispels common stereotypes about southern migrants-namely those media-driven images of displaced southerners living on welfare in urban ghettos, drinking excessively and procreating at phenomenal rates-by illustrating the degree to which these transplants achieved economic success. In general, the conflicts exposed by Berry's narrative seem to bc rooted nat so much in regional differences between the South and North as in cultural differences between rural and urban (namely, the friendliness of neighbors , the simplicity of life, and freedom of "down home" compared with the coldness of city dwellers, the complexity of urban life, and the restraints of wage work). These stereotypes can be categorized as rural ("white trash" would be today's equivalent) and not just southern, which would place Berry's work in the larger context of national urbanization and not just internal migration. Indeed, Berry's study could explain more than the migration of rural southerners to northern urban centers by emphasizing the idea that this migration was one of the ways that Americans ambiguously coped with modernization. The hearts which Berry describes as divided between the economic rewards of the North and the "deeper, more spiritual values of home, family, and community"(?) of the South were also divided between the lives they had known and the lives that they led, a condition shared by most Americans throughout the twentieth century. Despite the lack of a larger context! Southern Migrants, NOl'thern Exiles does provide an added dimension to the study of internal migration In the United States. Charles J. Shindo Louisiana State Univel'sity Spring :1001 David Stradling. Smolzestacks and Pl'Ogl'essives: Environmentalists, Engineexs, and Air Quality in Amel'ica, 1881-195I. Baltimore. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 312 pp. ISBN: 0801860830 (cloth). $42.50. Thick smoke hung over turn-of-the-century American cities, signaling industrial power, soiling buildings , clothes, and merchandise, and contributing to poor health. Progressive reformers tried to clear the air, just as they tried to ameliorate other conditions of city life by regulating construction, financing sewers, paving streets, and building parks. In his book, David Stradling links turn-of-the-century smoke to its characteristic fuel, the all-but-forgotten world of anthracite and bituminous coal, hard and soft grades of varying prices, used by industries and residents alike. Elite and middle-class women's clubs began to protest the nuisance in the 1890s, establishing smoke as a problem. of health, cleanliness, and aesthetics that affected morality. Businessmen's clubs, engineering societies, and doctors soon followed suit, and in the new century urban governments entered the fray. But Progressive-Era municipal regulations had little power and little effect. Smoke classified by color set visual, not hygienic criteria, and intermittent exhaust made it difficult to identify problem chimneys. In the 191OS, engineers (often employees of smoky businesses such as railroads) took up the issue with new vigor, and Stradling finds that they seized control from the women's clubs and other...