Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950

5. Disciplining the City: Everyday Practice and Mapping Risk, 1875–1900

c h a p t e r f i v e Disciplining the City: Everyday Practice and Mapping Risk, 1875–1900 Infected by the culture of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism and emboldened by its discovery of actuarial method, the fire insurance industry pursued a marketoriented solution to the problem of fire in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. With a few notable exceptions, most companies paid little heed to preventive measures until late in the century. Indeed, as late as 1894, the leading industry trade association argued that it was “not the province of the insurance companies to regulate fires,” but rather that of ordinary citizens. The industry claimed that it recommended methods for preventing fire, but ultimately, insurers could “make our profit out of these conflagrations, for we can figure them up, and assess them to the public.” Gathering information and managing it properly became increasingly crucial to understanding how fire affected company risk portfolios. Toward this end, underwriters developed standard administrative procedures and forms, created classification systems to order risk, and used representational technologies , such as maps and statistics, to organize everyday practices. Through common routines the industry sought to develop a unified self-discipline that would produce economic security for firms and policyholders.1 The industry argued that security from fire would increase only if it developed standard practices of inspecting and rating properties and then applied them in an unvarying fashion. Such consistency would encourage the long-term process through which safety would be “burnt in” to the landscape, to borrow industry leader J. B. Bennett’s phrasing. As Bennett phrased it shortly after the Civil War, “experience prompts improvements everywhere, and substantial edifices of stone, brick, and metal, gradually replace the hastily and cheaply erected buildings of pine.” Bennett further argued that property owners would build safely and draw lessons from the “science of insurance” in order to reduce their expenses and exposure to danger. However, he noted emphatically that this would happen only if the insurance industry was united in its method of apprehending and rating fire risk—if, for instance, firms within the industry followed the unilateral policy of leveling large premiums on badly constructed property. According to industry leaders, then, setting high rates and maintaining them would diminish losses, raise profitability, and even encourage the spread of safe building practices. In addition, many firms advocated insuring less than the full value of property and goods, usually three-fourths of the total. Throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century , C. C. Hine, J. B. Bennett, and other experts warned against “overinsurance.” Although not new in the 1870s, this emphasis took on new significance because of the industry’s attitudes about safety. In short, underwriters believed that laying part of the financial responsibility for loss directly on the insured would provide property owners with additional incentives to prevent fires.2 Even as the industry eschewed direct responsibility for fire public safety, it remade itself by extending the business strategies developed by industry leaders in the 1850s. Between 1870 and 1900, the industry forged a common set of practices and management procedures by increasing the intensity, extensiveness, and depth of its surveillance of the danger of fire. Underwriters implemented more detailed administrative routines, used statistical principles to calculate insurance costs more accurately, commissioned ever more expansive and detailed maps of the built environment , and continued to create elaborate systems of classification to bind each of these technologies together. These dynamic activities—managerial, actuarial, representational, and classificatory—cannot be dissociated from the broader system of administrative technology being worked out within the fire insurance industry . Indeed, as underwriters took a risk, they used each of these technologies to objectify and analyze danger. Embedded in these knowledge-gathering technologies lay a set of interlocking safety standards, which thoroughly demystified fire risk. Information technologies had helped to make fire danger routine, and the fire insurance industry had begun to reimagine a safe city, at least from the vagaries of this one environmental hazard. Equally important to fostering unity of purpose and procedure was the estab170 Water Everyday Practice and Mapping Risk 171 lishment of industrywide administrative associations. Formed by the industry’s largest and most influential companies in 1866, the National Board of Fire Underwriters (NBFU) became the most important (though by no means only) such organization formed within the industry. Building...