The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880-1970

1. The Age of Smoke

1 Smoke was the most severe air pollution problem of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wherever coal was used in major quantities , smoke and soot, the typical by-products of incomplete combustion, infested the local atmosphere, provoking countless complaints and attempts at abatement. But this fact alone conveys an inadequate sense of what it meant to live in the age of smoke. The key characteristic of smoke was its pervasiveness: one did not simply live with the problem of smoke, but literally in it. In urban areas, smoke was everywhere: in cities large and small, in industrial and residential areas, in rich and poor neighborhoods. Almost all urban agglomerations were struggling with the smoke nuisance, from Berlin to Chicago, from scenic Heidelberg to industrial Pittsburgh. Smoke was a constant companion of urban life, a pollutant that every city dweller was inevitably breathing on a daily basis. Smoke stuck to facades and monuments , making for the pervasive gray so typical of late nineteenth-century cities. It entered homes, besmearing rugs, curtains, and anything else that was not safely tucked away. The faces and clothes of urbanites carried smoke’s hallmark, and in some of the worst cities it was customary for white-collar workers to bring a second shirt to work, since the first was usually soiled by midday. In fact, many saw smoke as more than a material problem: smoke was the modern city’s halo, a darkish cloud that was often the first thing visitors saw. Smoke was the symbol of urban gloom, a word that rhymed with doom, and not only for prophets of cultural despair. Of course, urban pollution problems were not in themselves new: they are likely as old as cities themselves. But two factors made the smoke nuisance particularly awkward. The first was the stupendous growth of cities during the nineteenth century. Both Germany and the United States saw 1 The Age of Smoke 2 The Age of Smoke the rise of vast urban agglomerations, many of which comprised more than a million people by 1900, along with a concentration of energy-intensive industries that had no precedent in the history of either country. The second was the sheer pervasiveness of coal use, specifically the use of soft coal, which was prone to creating smoke during combustion. With coal replacing wood as the dominant fuel during the nineteenth century, and with the per capita use of energy on a sharp upswing, coal was practically everywhere in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities. It was used in homes and in industry, in transportation and power generation, for the production of electricity and as the basis for a burgeoning branch of industrial chemistry . Regions rich in coal deposits were thriving economically; regions distant from such deposits complained bitterly about their misery and often made frantic efforts to secure a reliable supply. Some cities were fortunate: for instance, New York City lay close to the only large anthracite deposits in the United States and thus had easy access to a type of fuel that was much easier to burn without smoke than soft coal. But most cities were not so lucky, with some suffering further if valley locations made them prone to inversions and poor ventilation. Smoke problems had thus become the rule in most German and U.S. cities by 1900, a constant reminder that modern society’s dependence on coal came at a price. The smoke nuisance challenged authorities nationwide, in both Germany and the United States. Many people agreed that fighting smoke had to be the key goal of contemporary air pollution control, the problem that regulatory agencies simply had to solve if they wanted to make any legitimate claim at environmental protection. But at the same time, existing laws and procedures quickly proved inadequate for an effective antismoke drive. American nuisance laws, as well as traditional German regulations, were cumbersome and complicated instruments that saw pollution as an isolated incident, not as a universal feature of modern life. As a result, discussions arose in both countries around 1880 over what to do about smoke, with input from industrialists, engineers, physicians, public health officials, and an enraged public. By the early 1900s, the U.S. air pollution debate of the Progressive Era—and its equivalent in Germany—had reached a degree of intensity that would remain unmatched until the 1960s. Coal smoke, however, was not the first industrial air pollution problem. In Germany, sulfur emissions from copper smelters had been a political...