Perceptions of the burning river: Deindustrialization and Cleveland's Cuyahoga River

Environmental History

Volumn 13, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 515-535

  Stradling, David ^a   Stradling, Richard ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

BURNING; DEINDUSTRIALIZATION; FIRE HISTORY; PERCEPTION; RIVER;

CUYAHOGA RIVER; NORTH AMERICA; OHIO; UNITED STATES;

EID: 51049098517     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/13.3.515     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. Cleveland's rebirth received national attention. See "'Mistake by the Lake' Wakes Up, Roaring," New York Times, September 10, 1995, and "From Steel Mills to Museums, A City Rises Out of Disrespect," New York Times, October 3, 1997.
2. See, also, Barney Warf andBrian Holley, "The Rise and Fall andRise of Cleveland," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 551 (May 1997): 208-21.
3. See Steven M. Schnell and Joseph F. Reese, "Microbreweries as Tools of Local identity," Journal of Cultural Geography 21 (Fall/Winter 2003): 45-69.
4. Schnell and Reese call Burning River an "inside joke," which by now it may be. We think they underestimate the pride Clevelanders feel in the city's industrial history, however, both good and bad. Great Lakes began brewing Burning River in 1991.
5. Jack A. Seamonds, "In Cleveland, Clean Waters Give New Breath of Life," U.S. News & World Report, June 18, 1984, 68.
6. Jonathan H. Adler reports that he has read an article that appeared in the New York Times several days after the fire, but it apparently did not run in all editions of the paper and does not appear in the New York Times online archive, nor did it appear in the New York Times Index of 1969. The Times did run an editorial, "The Deteriorating Environment," just three days after the fire. The editorial did not mention the Cuyahoga, but instead featured the massive fish kill on the Rhine that began the day after the Cleveland fire.
7. (New York Times, June 25, 1969; see Jonathan H. Adler, "Fables of the Cuyahoga: Reconstructing a History of Environmental Protection," Fordham Environmental Law Journal 14 (Fall 2002): footnote 5.)
8. Columbus Dispatch, July 4, 1969; "The Cities: The Price Of Optimism," Time, August 1, 1969, 41.
9. "Pollution, Threat to Man's Only Home," National Geographic 138 (December 1970): 5-7.
10. Other early references to the Cuyahoga fire include David Zwick and Marcy Benstock, Water Wasteland: Ralph Nader's Study Group Report on Water Pollution (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971), 3;
11. Luther J. Carter, "1973: A Crisis Atmosphere: Environment: A Lesson for the People of Plenty," Science, December 28, 1973: 1324;
12. and Audubon, November 1969, back cover.
13. Theo Colborn and Richard A. Liroff, EPA Journal 16 (November 1, 1990): 5;
14. Randy Newman, Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman (Rhino, 1998), liner notes;
15. William Ashworth, The Late, Great Lakes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986),140;
16. Robert W. Gordon, "Environmental Blues: Working-Class Environmentalism and the Labor-Environmental Alliance, 1968-1985" (PhD diss., Wayne State University, 2004), 32. Gordon claims that the river "burned out of control for days."
17. Adam Werbach, CNN Morning News 9:00 a.m. ET, October 17, 1997, transcript #97101703V09, LexisNexis.
18. Chris Matthews, "Clean Water Good for Republicans as Well as Others," The Sunday Oregonian, June 11, 1995;
19. "Cuyahoga River's Cleanup Reclaims 'Hallowed Ground,'" Columbus Dispatch, October 8, 2002.
20. Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 239, 248;
21. Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), xi, 111-12;
22. Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 19.
23. Hal Rothman notes that the river had caught fire before, due to heavy industrial pollution, but frames the 1969 fire as a "direct challenge to the ethic of progress."
24. See his The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United State Since 1945 (New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998), 99.
25. In a recent monograph concerning Congress's role in the development of water pollution regulation, Paul Charles Milazzo pays appropriately little attention to the Cuyahoga fire, in Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, 1945-1972 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
26. Jonathan H. Adler, "Fables of the Cuyahoga: Reconstructing a History of Environmental Protection," Fordham Environmental Law Journal 14 (Fall 2002): 95, 108-12.
27. Adam Rome, "'Give Earth a Chance': The Environmental Movement and the Sixties," Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 525.
28. In his seminal work on the modern environmental movement, Samuel P. Hays notes, "Cities were the major source of the environmental movement," but he stops short of linking the urban and environmental crises. See Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 71.
29. On the important role of deindustrialization in the urban crisis of Detroit, see Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). The best monograph concerning an industrial city's struggle to control pollution in the postwar era is still Andrew Hurley's Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
30. Cleveland Plain Dealer, June, 23, 24, July 8, 9, 1969;
31. Cleveland Press, June 23, July 8, 1969.
32. Carl Stokes Papers, Collection 4370, box 75, files 1433, 1438, Western Reserve Historical Society [hereafter WRHS].
33. The literature on the campaign to save Lake Erie is extensive. Of particular value are William McGucken, Lake Erie Rehabilitated: Controlling Europhication, 1960s-1990s (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2000); and Terrianne K. Schulte, "Grassroots at the Water's Edge: The League of Women Voters and the Struggle to Save Lake Erie, 1956-1970" (PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2006).
34. See, also, Terence Kehoe, Cleaning up the Great Lakes: From Cooperation to Confrontation (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).
35. Carl Stokes Papers, Collection 4370, box 75, files 1433, 1438, WRHS.
36. Rivers and Harbors and Flood Control Act of 1970, HR 19877, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (December 7, 1970):
37. H 40150. Carl Stokes also spoke on the issue of water pollution in Washington in 1970. Before the Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, on April 28, Carl Stokes spoke in favor of a greatly expanded federal role in financing sewage treatment facilities. Stokes mentioned the Cuyahoga had caught fire and had become symbolic of polluted rivers. See Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Committee on Public Works, Water Pollution-1970, Part 2, 91st Cong., 2nd Sess., 1970, 412-13.
38. Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, August 29, September 2, 1868;
39. Cleveland City Council Proceedings, September 1, 1868, 303.
40. "A Great Oil Fire," New York Times, February 4, 6, 1883;
41. Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, May 2,1912;
42. Cleveland Press, May 2, 1912;
43. Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, May 3, 1912.
44. "Oil Barge Explodes, 5 Dead," New York Times, May 2, 1912. Generally fires on the Cuyahoga, or any of the other bodies of water that caught fire around the country, did not make the national news. Undoubtedly the loss of life attracted the attention of the Times in this instance. We cannot be certain how many times the river caught fire, as not every blaze made the city papers. One Cleveland Press article concerning shipping on the river noted a "recent fire," and yet the paper had run no story on the fire itself. i Press, March 17, 1941.]
45. New York Times, May 24, 1912; Interdepartmental Committee, Oil Pollution of Navigable Waters (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1926), 1;
46. William L. Andreen, "The Evolution of Water Pollution Control in the United States-State, Local, and Federal Efforts, 1789-1972: Part II," Stanford Environmental Law Journal 22 (2003): 223-25.
47. "Long-Feared River Peril Happens-Cuyahoga Burns," Cleveland Press, February 7, 1936. All of the referenced Press articles are found in the Cleveland Press clippings collection, Cleveland State University.
48. Cleveland Press, February 8, 9, 1948.
49. "River Oil Fire Perils Clark Bridge," Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 8, 1948.
50. Cleveland Press, February 20, 1948.
51. Ibid., July 29, 1948.
52. "Oil Slick Removal Methods are Studied," Cleveland Press undated clipping, summer 1948.
53. Plain Dealer, August 11, December 18, 1948.
54. Cleveland Press, August 12, 1948.
55. The Times even had a correspondent in Cleveland to cover a labor convention the day of the 1948 fire. i New York Times, February 9, 1948.]
56. Cleveland Press, March 17, 1941.
57. Perhaps the most famous of the non-Cuyahoga waterborne fires in the United States occurred in 1959, when gasoline on the surface of the Houston Ship Channel ignited by a passing tug engulfed a tanker, killing seven men: see New York Times, November 9, 1959.
58. Earlier that year, Onondaga Lake in Syracuse, New York, also caught fire, after an underwater line leaked oil. New York Times, April 14, 1959.
59. Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 13, 1951;
60. Cleveland Press, October 13, 1950; May 6, 1952.
61. Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 2, 1952.
62. Cleveland Press, November 4, 1952.
63. Columbus Dispatch, November 2, 1952;
64. "Cleveland Recovering From Steel Strike Effects, FRB Reports," Wall Street Journal, November 4, 1952.
65. T. J. Ess, "Jones and Laughlin... Cleveland Works," reprinted from Iron and Steel Engineer (February 1959).
66. Republic Steel Annual Reports, 1952, 1972, available through Proquest Historical Annual Reports. Due to the strike in 1952, Republic did not produce up to its capacity of 9 million tons, but it would in 1953.
67. Standard Oil of Ohio Annual Report, 1966, available through Proquest Historical Annual Reports.
68. See the fine summation of Cleveland's decline in Carol Poh Miller and Robert A. Wheeler, Cleveland: A Concise History, 1796-1996 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
69. Despite the city's comeback, it continues to lose population. It now has fewer than 478,000 residents. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/39/ 3916000.html;
70. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/39/3916000.html.
71. Marc E. Lackritz, The Hough Riots of 1966 (Cleveland: Regional Church Planning Office, 1968), 21, 40, 64.
72. See, also, Todd M. Michney, "Race, Violence, and Urban Territoriality: Cleveland's Little Italy and the 1966 Hough Uprising," Journal of Urban History 32 (March 2006): 404-28.
73. Saturday Evening Post, July 29, 1967, 38-49.
74. On the influence of the race on disinvestment, see Townsand Price-Spratlen and Avery M. Guest, "Race and Population Change: A Longitudinal Look at Cleveland Neighborhoods," Sociological Forum 17 (March 2002): 105-36.
75. "Downtown Cleveland's Gritty Gateway Just Outside City's Glow," Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 16, 1998.
76. "In Cleveland, Clean Waters Give New Breath of Life," U.S. News and World Report, June 18, 1984, 68;
77. "A River Reborn," Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 22, 1994;
78. "Brewery Suggests Burning-River Fest Would be Eco-Fun," Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 19, 2001.