Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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      Each step of the production process also produced solid, liquid, and airborne wastes that quickly found their way into the natural environment, including the bodies of workers and nearby residents. At the base of the production process, coal is composed of water, carbon, and smaller amounts of other materials, including hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur. When mining disrupts natural groundwater systems, the interaction of water and air with coal generates sulfuric acid that is carried off through gravity drainage or pumped out of shafts. Because the Ohio River watershed is naturally alkaline, the region’s streams diluted pollution from early mining operations. As coal production increased in the late nineteenth century, however, the self-purification capacity of streams and major rivers was overwhelmed. Changes in water color revealed the first signs of acid degradation as streams became deep red or brown from the iron oxide. By 1900, several Ohio River tributaries, including the Monongahela and Youghiogheny that flowed near the Leith Mine were “usually acidic” and increasingly endangered aquatic life.⁸

      But the most visible byproduct of the mining process in the Connellsville region was the smoke from the coke ovens. “It takes a fine summer morning to see what the … valley is like,” reported one resident. “Uniontown [is] sprawled in the flat in the foreground, Leith ovens smoking busily in the fields to the right … and the long ranks of Continental No. 1 ovens far away in the middle.”⁹ Coke production was a dirty business, with the frequent moving and handling of coal dispersing large amounts of dust. Furthermore, even a well-built beehive oven converted only 70 percent of each ton of coal into coke. This meant that the other 30 percent of suspended carbon particles, tars, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide escaped from the ovens in the form of smoke and noxious fumes. When workers doused the baked coal with water to stop the chemical process, the resulting steam lifted tiny coke particles into the air, while the used water containing coke residue, ammonia, and phenol drained into nearby streams. After World War I, as coke production moved from beehive ovens at the mine mouth to by-product ovens at the mills, the environmental effects of coke production moved from the rural periphery to the industrialized river valleys and U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works earned a reputation as one of the largest contributors to the region’s air pollution problems. “All that is left is this desolation,” declared Duquesne University biologist Emmanuel Sillman while standing on a barren hillside overlooking Clairton in 1971. “The killer is sulfur dioxide.”¹⁰

      As imposing a presence as mines and mills were on the Steel Valley’s landscape, the railroad had an even more widespread, immediate, and intimate impact on the region’s residents. Transportation infrastructure was omnipresent, particularly in the narrow confines of the river valleys and central cities. “The railroads blanketed the city,” explained one recent study, “tunneling through the hills, bridging the rivers and ravines and usurping the riverbanks.” The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, was four-tracked throughout much of the region, combined with massive and strategically located freight and switching yards, roundhouses, and repair shops that employed many thousands of workers. Railroad exhaust was a major contributor to air pollution, particularly in those urban areas where trains idled for loading and unloading. This dense, acrid smoke helped create the “shabby, dirty and altogether unsightly” hillsides above many of the region’s communities that, according to Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., were contributing largely to the “slatternly conditions” in which so many of Pittsburgh’s working people were “compelled to live.”¹¹

      The lack of any sort of environmental regulation during the heyday of the Steel Valley meant that companies were largely free to dispose of industrial wastes as they saw fit, which created a legacy of environmental contamination extending throughout the region. As the introduction of byproduct ovens suggests, managers made decisions according to cost principles and, when corporations found it profitable, materials were recycled. Executives at Carnegie Steel were legendary for engineering waste disposal systems that maximized the use of each product. In one famous example at the Edgar Thomson Works, executive Henry Phipps found that flue-cinder and the tiny pieces of high-grade steel that were scoured off by rolling machines could be reused at another point in the iron-making process. In both cases, he ordered the “waste” to be recycled and purchased the unwanted material from competitors at a discount. On the other hand, when waste recovery was not economically valuable, plant managers allowed particulates, slag and gases to follow their natural course into the river, slag heap, or atmosphere. Of the total industrial waste produced by the mills, only a small portion went into landfills on company property as smokestacks and pipes dispersed pollution beyond the mill’s borders into the community’s air and water. Even offloading materials from barges and trains created vast amounts of dust around the huge stockpiles of coal and iron. When managers attempted to control the dust problem by wetting the piles, particles suspended in the water passed untreated into the environment.¹²

      Those most affected by industrial pollution were the workers themselves. Laborers encountered a wide range of work environments inside mines and mills: dust almost inevitably led to breathing problems and a lifespan often shortened by the dreaded black lung; coke workers faced blasts of thick smoke and fumes when they opened the doors to insert or remove materials; and mill hands in open-hearth furnaces sometimes had to fasten themselves together with rope to navigate their way through clouds of particulates. Whether through constant exposure to environmental hazards or tending “the monstrous crucibles of molten iron and steel, the fast-moving cranes, the great cutting machines, the locomotives and railroad cars,” industrial employment “was a natural place for injury and death.” In an age before occupational safety requirements, workers’ compensation laws, and social security benefits, employment in the region’s mills, mines, and railroads crystallized the relationship between social and environmental inequalities for contemporary social reformers. “Often I was told by workmen of forty and forty-five that they had been at their best at thirty years of age, and that at thirty-five they had begun to feel a perceptible decline in strength,” explained sociologist John Fitch in 1910. “The superintendents and foremen are alert to detecting weakness of any sort, and if a man fails appreciably, he expects discharge.”¹³

      The integrated system of coal, steel, and rail that formed the basis of the region’s economic life thus imperiled the lives of its inhabitants even as it generated enormous wealth. Boosters and industrialists, labor leaders and politicians, locals and visitors alike built layer by layer a cultural framework of human triumph over nature that paralleled the physical processes transforming minerals into finished goods and industrial pollution. The body of the “Man of Steel” as well as the numerous sites of production were symbolically recreated time and again, “held motionless,” in the words of one commentator, “while those who wished to understand Pittsburgh … charted its strengths and weaknesses.” This dynamic was captured perfectly by Reuben Gold Thwaites who found the essence of the region in the “whirr and bang of milling industries,” “black offal of the pit,” “sooty smoke belched from hundreds of stacks,” and amid it all “a ninety-cent [per hour] man working in a place … nearer to the mediaeval notions of hell … than anything imagined by Dante.” It was from this foundation that residents forged their individual and community identities even as the area’s natural and built landscapes constrained development in ways that would later complicate the region’s economic transition.¹⁴

      Forging Community

      The transformation of the Upper Ohio Valley into the Steel Valley reshaped the daily rhythms, identities, and demographics of the region’s residents, embedding the social structure of the Gilded Age in the region’s politics, economy, and environment. While corresponding in general to the sequence of city building in other communities, Pittsburgh had important differences that affected the timing and complicated the process of metropolitan development. At the same time, industrialists effectively wielded the power to shape the material and social environments in ways that limited the ability of workers to organize collectively and made many communities dependent on corporate benefaction for basic services. Following a long period of bitter labor strife, this unequal relationship resulted СКАЧАТЬ