smoke of great cities: British and American efforts to control air pollution, 1860-1914, The

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Stradling, David, Thorsheim, Peter

Britain's relative decline in the late nineteenth century owed much to the United States' continuing rapid industrialization. Historians have argued that the dramatic changes associated with urbanization, increasing immigration from eastern and southern Europe, the closing of the Western frontier, repeated and intensifying panics and recessions, and uncertain and troubled labor relations in the new industrial economy all combined to cause an American psychic crisis in the 189os. But the stunning economic growth of the last decades of the century made the United States the world's largest economy and greatly expanded the middle class. It was with an assumption of future prosperity and growth that this middle class, often in cooperation with the more established upper class, undertook extensive reforms in governance and society in the following decades that were designed to make American cities more healthful, beautiful, and moral places to live. As Samuel Hays argues, many of those who supported reform were optimistic, thinking not of impending crisis, but of the application of science in the name of national progress. If Americans experienced a psychic crisis in the late nineteenth century, it was of a different nature than the British crisis, for the upper classes of the two nations were in very different moods."

Britain in the 1880s

Concerns about Britain's depressed economy in the 188os overlapped with fears of political and social disturbances, and smoke-filled air provided an apt symbol for people's inability to see what lay ahead. A contemporary article summed up 1879 as "a year of continuous gloom. Cheerless weather, bad trade, social discomfort, [and] unforeseen political disasters, have made up the staple of experience in the United Kingdom, with only here and there a bright interval to relieve it." The metaphorical darkness of the time was matched by the literal state of the atmosphere. December 1879 was London's foggiest month on record; on some days the fog was so dense that carriage traffic became impossible, and pedestrians had to grope blindly along the edges of buildings. After additional fogs covered London during the remainder of the winter, the Registrar General, responsible for compiling statistics of births and deaths, reported that mortality in London had risen 220 percent during the fogs, causing the premature deaths of about three thousand people.?

Two prominent reformers soon began independent efforts to combat the smoke problem. Ernest Hart, the editor of the British Medical Journal and the chair of the National Health Society, urged his organization to take action. The society, a quintessentially Victorian assemblage of upper-class men and women that focused on instilling "sanitary knowledge" in the working class, responded quickly to Hart's suggestion. Independent of Hart, the housing and open-spaces advocate Octavia Hill began work on the smoke issue through the Kyrle Society. This organization aimed to improve the lives of poor city residents by bringing nature and art into the slums. When Hart and Hill learned of each other's interest in attacking the smoke nuisance, they persuaded their respective societies to form a joint Fog and Smoke Committee. Despite the two groups' differences, they shared a common concern that coal smoke damaged the environment, human health, and morality. From the beginning, the committee viewed smoke's detrimental effects on health and the environment as significantly interrelated.'4