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Type of Document Dissertation Author Gugliotta, Angela Author's Email Address agugliot@uchicago.edu URN etd-12152004-121352 Title “HELL WITH THE LID TAKEN OFF:” A CULTURAL HISTORY OF AIR POLLUTION – PITTSBURGH Degree Doctor of Philosophy Department History Advisory Committee
Advisor Name Title Christopher Hamlin Committee Chair Gail Bederman Committee Member Thomas Schlereth Committee Member Walter Nugent Committee Member Keywords
- Pittsburgh -- history
- environmental science -- history
- cultural history
- air pollution -- history
- urban history
- environmental history
Date of Defense 2004-11-30 Availability unrestricted Abstract Pittsburgh has been known for coal smoke since its founding. Yet no comprehensive studyexists of the meaning of smoke to the city. Urban pollution is usually discussed in terms of
problem and solution. Such narratives seldom do justice to the mixed losses and benefits
inherent in historical outcomes or to the ambiguous motives and capacities of historical
actors. This dissertation asks when, for whom, and why smoke became a problem in
Pittsburgh. More broadly, it examines the rich variety of roles smoke played in urban
history.
Pittsburgh began as a frontier settlement. The smoky spectacle described in
travelers’ accounts advertised its abundant coal and industrial promise. Valued for
economic potential rather than civic culture, Pittsburgh’s future seemed precarious.
Environmental sacrifice shored up its uncertain prospects.
Nuisance judgements and local newspapers characterized opposition to smoke as a
threat to economic necessity – arising from luxurious and vicious tastes of coddled and feminized elites. By the 1880s technological changes, especially the introduction of natural
gas, broke connections between particular production processes and economic success. For
skilled workers of Pittsburgh’s National Labor Tribune, and their employers, values like
cleanliness, previously regarded as antithetical to industry, became supportive of it. Natural
gas made better steel, iron and glass than bituminous coal. Changes in class structure and
social geography encouraged elites to reject provincialism and frontier exceptionalism.
From the 1890s on, interest in economic diversification justified smoke abatement
through values formerly seen as threats to economic welfare: leisure, consumption, and
domesticity, embodied in real estate and retail commerce. The Mellon Institute Smoke
Investigation and its successor studies (1911-1941) exhibit the interplay of such interests
with changing environmental, scientific and reform orientations. Despite such sustained
efforts, environmental attitudes fluctuated as depression and defense industry booms
reshaped civic hopes and fears.
Architects of Pittsburgh’s mid-twentieth century “Renaissance” would construct the
previous 150 years as an environmental Dark Age. Yet, Pittsburghers had no more
passively accepted smoke than they had unanimously resisted it. Throughout the period,
smoke had been put to varied political uses, serving diverse and shifting constituencies,
shaping and shaped by Pittsburgh’s social and cultural history.
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