Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950

Conclusion: Fighting Fire in Postwar America

Conclusion Fighting Fire in Postwar America By the 1920s, the insurance industry had established broad authority over matters of fire safety, and the Insurance Company of North America introduced a new icon of fire protection—the White Firemen, who in a broad advertising campaign promised to protect American society in a way no firefighter ever could. Instead of reacting to danger, the White Firemen removed fire hazards proactively. As consultant to municipalities, the White Fireman, representing the insurance industry and the power of “paper,” made fire protection more efficient and effective by providing expertise. He embodied the industry’s new ethos, especially its claims to promoting public safety by sheltering urban centers, businesses, and individual residences from the problem of fire. Through this idealized image, the insurance industry recast itself as heroic; the standards produced by underwriters symbolically replaced firemen. Businessmen, not firemen, saved the day.1 Of course, the industry did not really want to replace firemen. After all, fire- fighters occupied a critical position in the fire-protective infrastructure and fire departments were financed publicly and managed by municipalities. Rather, the advertisements reflected the industry’s aggressive prevention agenda, which was based in the standardization of underwriting practices, safety engineering, and the industry’s surveillance of the landscape—all of which were developed during the nineteenth century. The loss-prevention engineer inspected property, researched fire hazards, and advised society about safe building practices. According to a feature in the Underwriters’ Review, the loss-prevention engineer “studies manufacturing processes, and wherever practicable, suggests the substitutions . . . of lower inflammability.” His work extended to the most mundane aspects of prevention, as he searched for ways to reduce the cost of insurance and fire loss. His heroism derived from his rationality, expert knowledge, and selfless protection of the economy .2 Symbolically, as the red fireman placed his arm around the white firemen, he passed the torch of public fire safety from virile, working-class men to rational middle -class men—from one set of specialists who confronted physical danger to experts that battled risk with financial tools. The first step in this process had been taken in the 1850s when control over firefighting had moved from specialized associations of volunteers into the hands of paid experts. As the heroism of firemen was being etched in the popular imagination during the 1880s, insurers focused on mundane business issues and profited from the problem of fire. However, they met with mixed success, as hundreds of companies went bankrupt in the face of escalating fire danger. Nonetheless, the industry developed an alternative standard of safety as it represented fire danger as an abstraction, using statistics and maps. By the twentieth century, insurers began to realize the fruits of their approach to risk, but only after they became advocates for fire prevention. The industry supported improving public safety by promulgating building codes and behavioral values that defined safety as the responsibility of consumers, who purchased safety for their families and community by obtaining insurance. Like underwriters, firemen promoted the drive for more regimented fire protection. Despite making their work more routine and implementing formal administrative procedures, firefighters maintained their identities as heroes, negotiating the contradiction between the bureaucratic and the exceptional. Although the White Fireman did not signal the demise of the heroic fireman, he did reflect a reorientation toward the bureaucratic , systematic, and rational; the locus of control had shifted from local communities to groups of professional experts. Moreover, just as middle-class manhood had gained hegemony over American society more broadly, businessmen acquired authority over the nation’s fire safety.3 The advertising campaign also reveals the broader shift in the societal responsibility for fire safety from experts to individuals. The insurance industry pushed a new standard for safety—one embodied in legal building codes and prevention behaviors . The White Fireman advertising campaign proposed a somewhat contradictory message that touted the importance of safety engineers, but also under328 Conclusion Fighting Fire in Postwar America 329 scored that safety was everyone’s responsibility. As the campaign phrased it, “He wears citizen’s clothes and rides in an ordinary car. He doesn’t answer alarms—he prevents them.” If the choice of language suggested that anyone could perform such work and that everyone should do so, it nonetheless connected the new expectations about fire safety to the accumulated expertise of underwriters and engineers. The...