| In the 1890s middle-class women, physicians, and businessmen began to organize against the coal smoke nuisance in several industrial cities. Arguing that smoke was harmful to health, aesthetically disastrous, filthy, and immoral, these anti-smoke crusaders forced the issue onto municipal agendas in Chicago, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and other, mostly Midwestern cities. These activists understood the importance of coal to their cities and did not pine for some pre-industrial society. Rather, they hoped their activism would force proprietors to purchase "smokeless" equipment or hire more skilled engineers and firemen.;Municipalities responded to this environmentalist movement with highly flawed ordinances. Vague and often unconstitutional, these early laws did little to abate the smoke. During the next decade, however, city councils in dozens of cities improved their laws against dense smoke emissions. By the second decade of the 1900s, many anti-smoke ordinances created smoke departments led by trained engineers. Armed with the authority to enter the premises of any violating stack, these engineers could dispense expertise and arrest warrants.;As engineers gradually came to dominate the anti-smoke movement, through their position in city governments, their anti-smoke research in the Bureau of Mines, and participation in the International Association for the Prevention of Smoke, the emphasis of the crusade shifted. The environmentalist movement concerned with beauty, health, cleanliness, and morality, made room for a conservationist movement concerned with economy and the efficient use of coal.;Although the anti-smoke crusade of the progressive decades did achieve some limited success, when the economy geared up for World War I, industrial cities suffered under dense smoke pollution, in many cases worse than they had ever witnessed before. In a nation concerned almost exclusively with production rather than conservation, smoke abatement lost its currency. In the end, permanent abatement would await larger societal changes in fuel use, as the nation moved toward cleaner natural gas, electricity, and oil. |
