Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
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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
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 associated with Pittsburgh’s universities and hospitals, aggressively sued industrial polluters in southwestern Pennsylvania to force emissions cuts. At the same time, Steubenville gained a national reputation as “America’s Dirtiest City” as its steel corporations and coal-fired electrical power producers lobbied forcefully on the state level to prevent the implementation of stricter national standards.22
If air pollution was the Steel Valley’s most pervasive problem on the eve of World War II, periodic flooding constituted its most potentially devastating environmental concern. The Pittsburgh Renaissance and especially the redevelopment of the downtown Golden Triangle could not have happened without the confidence of investors that urban real estate would be protected from flooding. As with smoke, it is important to understand for whom floods were a problem and how those groups mobilized in a way that made effective flood control possible. The region’s first recorded inundation occurred in 1762, with 115 additional significant floods between then and 1936. Nevertheless, the principal concern over the region’s rivers remained making the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio navigable at Pittsburgh. It was not until three major floods in 1907–1908, which caused $6.5 million in losses, that the Chamber of Commerce created a flood commission with industrialist H. J. Heinz as president. The commission, closely associated with the city’s elite-led reform organizations, eventually recommended construction of seventeen reservoirs above the city on the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and their major tributaries, without which “the relief from the destruction caused by floods would be only partial and local.”23
Flood control required a massive exertion of political control by urban interests to reshape the environment of rural areas far from the cities themselves. Between 1936 and 1953, the Army Corps of Engineers completed eighteen flood control reservoirs on the tributaries of the Ohio River that reduced peak flood levels by more than ten feet. The building of the Youghiogheny Dam south of Ohiopyle, for example, started in 1939 with five hundred men working around the clock, though the project stalled after U.S. entry into World War II. The main purpose of the dam was flood control, but the Corps of Engineers listed the added benefits of “discharge regulation for industrial and domestic water supply and for pollution abatement,” a clear acknowledgment of the serious problem of acid mine drainage. The same prominent voices that lined up behind smoke control also lent their support for dam construction. One type of public works was a “must” on any construction program, proclaimed the Pittsburgh Press in a 1943 editorial that shared the page with a column on the economic benefits of smoke control. “Build These Dams!” When workers completed the Youghiogheny Dam later that year, the Press declared, “Today the great dam stands as a monument to the ingenuity of Army engineers.”24
The development of federal and state flood control programs had major repercussions in the rural communities in which they were built. As with surface mining, justifications for dam construction often emphasized the low value of the Steel Valley’s steep hillsides for agricultural production. The construction of the Youghiogheny Dam resulted in the seizure and complete destruction of a local landscape, including farms, the river itself, and two small towns, Somerfield (population 142) and Selbysport (population 150), to serve the distant interests of urban capital. While prices paid for properties were relatively low ($55 to $100 an acre for farmland, $35 for woodland, and $600 for town lots), the financial exigencies of the Great Depression meant that many residents quickly sold out and left. On the other side of the region, the creation of Piedmont Dam north of Barnesville, Ohio, in 1936 was the first big blow to the farming hamlet of Egypt Valley, which later was subsumed by an enormous surface mine. Unlike the Youghiogheny Dam, however, there is evidence of resistance to the forced eviction of Egypt Valley residents, perhaps due to the higher quality of local agricultural land. Emma Major was nicknamed “The Lady of the Lake” because of her strident opposition to the forced abandonment of her farm in the Piedmont flood area, for which she was offered only $1.97. Though many rural residents fought the sale of their homes, with the waters lapping at their door, they had little choice but to leave. “They drowned me out,” Major’s son John later recalled. “You couldn’t live in the water. In there were people farming. They had raised corn you know and had it cut up in shocks and the first thing I remember [was] that water coming up in their shocks of corn. They were floating on top of the water.”25
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