Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
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Название: Beyond Rust

Автор: Allen Dieterich-Ward

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Техническая литература

Серия: Politics and Culture in Modern America

isbn: 9780812292022

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СКАЧАТЬ he declared caustically “This is a disappearing city; it would be cheaper to abandon it.” In short, as Lawrence later put it, “the city’s rescue was a close thing.”15

      Smoke and Water

      The new public-private partnership, symbolized by the pragmatic relationship between R. K. Mellon and David Lawrence, united a strong political base behind many of the environmental initiatives first proposed decades earlier. As early as 1907, Pittsburgh’s Chamber of Commerce had appointed a Flood Commission that urged “the expenditure of no less than $20,000,000 in the construction of [storage] reservoirs in as near a future as possible,” only to face thirty years of disappointment. Five years later, another report found that the smoke problem was “the greatest single obstacle to progress.” But it was not until 1941 that the city passed a meaningful abatement law, only to have it put in abeyance by the onset of World War II. Clearing the skies and damming the rivers became powerful markers of the region’s commitment to postwar revitalization and important tools for mobilizing residents behind subsequent public policy decisions. Without addressing these issues, Lawrence explained, “it was clear that the economic revival of the city could not be accomplished.”16

      It has become a cliché that the dominant interpretation of smoke in industrial America was, as James Parton put it, “a blessing” that indicated economic vitality. However, for a brief period in the late nineteenth century, natural gas overtook bituminous coal as Pittsburgh’s main fuel source and many residents bemoaned the return of smoky skies when the local gas supply ran out in the early 1890s. Over time, skilled workers voiced republican demands for smoke reduction as a benefit of their position, while some professionals, retail merchants, and other property owners complained of the negative effects of smoke on property values and urban consumer culture. In the wake of the landmark 1912 Pittsburgh Survey, reform-minded businessmen and women’s club members often accepted the need for environmental cleanup even as they reacted defensively against working-class demands for better hours, wages, and conditions by focusing on the effects of smoke on the health of women and children.17

      Even by the 1890s, the city of Pittsburgh began to specialize in corporate administration, financial services, higher education, and other economic sectors that, while intimately related to heavy industry, provided an economic foundation separate from the production process itself. Though the elite Mellon family invested early in Frick’s coke empire and controlled the Pittsburgh Coal Company, for example, they also oversaw oil, aluminum, and banking interests that extended far beyond the Steel Valley. This partial detachment from the region’s iron and steel industries, coupled with the family’s investments in downtown real estate, meant that the Mellons had a financial stake in pursuing smoke abatement. As a consequence, the family was among the region’s most important advocates for smoke control through their sponsorship of the University of Pittsburgh Mellon Institute Smoke Investigation (MISI) beginning in 1911. In the twenties and thirties smoke actually became somewhat less of a concern in Pittsburgh, owing in part to the industrial contraction of the Great Depression, with relative gains compared to St. Louis and Cincinnati. But the pollution problem roared back with the buildup to World War II, and in 1941, the year smoke control legislation finally passed, Pittsburgh received only one-third as much sunshine as nearby areas and had the highest rate of pneumonia of any city in the nation.18

      Much of the smoke problem in the city itself came not from industry but from domestic sources, and so the major problem confronting the postwar public-private partnership was how to force changes in individual fuel use behavior in the name of the greater public good. Despite the support of Mellon and the Allegheny Conference, Lawrence thus took a major political risk when he agreed to support an ordinance requiring the substitution of “smokeless” coal and furnaces for domestic use beginning in October 1947 due to the potential hardships it imposed on low-income families. The implementation of smoke control regulations set the model for the city’s future public-private partnerships, with an emphasis on volunteerism and cooperation, and arrests “kept to a minimum.” Despite these measures, Lawrence recalled a dramatic scene from the 1949 mayoral primary, when his challenger “told the voters that I had become too friendly with the Mellon interests, too neutral in labor matters and that I was pressing the smoke program on them and that it was going to be expensive.” “It was a close shave,” Lawrence concluded, and if he had lost, “the political constellation which had developed the new Pittsburgh would never have become a reality.”19

      The support for regulation by politicians and industrialists was based on the assumption that smoke abatement would not exact significant costs to businesses and would, in fact, provide further economic opportunities. Between 1946 and 1955, smoke in the city was reduced by nearly 90 percent. “Statistics and the shirt collar both proved that Pittsburgh had become as clean as the average American city,” Lawrence proclaimed. “The victory over smoke [was] the signal for a concentrated attack on the entire range of community problems. It was Pittsburgh’s breakthrough from the landing beaches; the other triumphs came in an accelerating rush.” However, there are limits to this triumphal narrative. First, coal operators and miners based their support for smoke control on projections that new technologies for creating smokeless coal would actually expand markets for bituminous coal. Backers of the smoke ordinance were thus able to gain the acquiescence of both Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal and local UMW president Patrick Fagan. In reality, low priced natural gas piped in from the American Southwest increasingly became the dominant fuel for domestic use even as emissions regulations hastened the ongoing switch to diesel engines by the railroads. Consequently, smoke control actually contributed to the severing of Pittsburgh’s economy from that of its rural hinterland, and, theoretically, exacerbated unemployment in the region’s bituminous coal mines.20

image

      FIGURE 3. View of Downtown Pittsburgh, c. 1945. The South Side is on the far right and the North Side on the far left. The University of Pittsburgh Cathedral of Learning is visible at the center top, separated from downtown by the Hill District. Smoke Control Lantern Slide Collection, ca. 1940–1950, AIS.1978.22, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.

      The debate over extension of smoke control laws to Allegheny County suggested that the economic calculus that facilitated broad support for regulation within Pittsburgh did not necessarily extend to the Steel Valley as a whole. While regulating domestic users had been the primary concern in the city, controlling industrial polluters was the key in the rest of the region. The railroads were the largest consumers of bituminous coal in the region and the Steel Valley’s trains hauled more tons of coal than any other product. The largest rail lines were transitioning to more efficient and less polluting diesel engines, but the attempt to create enabling legislation for a countywide ordinance raised objections from the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had a strong voice in state politics. Delaying actions by the railroad’s lobbyist in Harrisburg threatened legislative authorization for a county smoke control ordinance and required the direct intervention of R. K. Mellon, a Pennsylvania Railroad director, and U.S. Steel president Benjamin Fairless. While the railroad eventually backed down and allowed state authorization for county smoke regulation to pass, the episode foreshadowed decades of conflict over air pollution in the region.21

      In short, the political economy that allowed Pittsburgh elites to mobilize successfully around a vision of regional prosperity based on clean skies in the metropolitan core was in part dependent on continued pollution in the regional periphery. Outside downtown Pittsburgh, industrialists were more concerned about keeping production costs low than about real estate values and quality of life issues. Wheeling residents, for example, were unable to muster the political will to tackle the smoke problem in even a preliminary way until the mid-1950s. As public concern about air pollution gradually extended beyond mere smoke control in the wake of the Donora Smog and other events, the volunteerist model favored by the public-private partnerships of the Pittsburgh Renaissance broke down in favor of a stricter regulatory framework that depended less on the argument that clean air was actually good for the economy. By the early 1970s, citizens groups, often indirectly СКАЧАТЬ