REFINING NATURE:

STANDARD OIL AND THE LIMITS OF EFFICIENCY, 1863-1920

by

JONATHAN JOSEPH WLASIUK

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Ted Steinberg

Department of History

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

January, 2012

ii

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of

______Jonathan Joseph Wlasiuk______candidate for the______Doctor of Philosophy______degree*.

(signed)______Ted Steinberg______(Chair of the committee)

Dan Cohen (Committee member)

Peter Shulman (Committee member)

Jessica Green

(Committee member)

(date)____September 26, 2011____

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

iii

Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Joseph Wlasiuk

All rights reserved iv

For Anna, who did the heavy lifting.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... vi

Introduction...... 1

1 Improved Earth...... 29

2 Fire...... 63

3 Water...... 97

4 Air...... 127

5 Efficient Earth...... 163

Conclusion...... 195

Bibliography...... 224

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Refining Nature: Standard Oil and the Limits of Efficiency, 1863-1920

Abstract

by

JONATHAN JOSEPH WLASIUK

Refining Nature: Standard Oil and the Limits of Efficiency, 1863-1920

My dissertation analyzes the social and ecological changes resulting from the production of illuminating oil. Using the cities of Cleveland, Ohio, and Whiting, Indiana, as case studies, I examine how the economic success of the Standard Oil Company was predicated on a new, corporate relationship with the environment and society. As

Standard Oil concentrated new industrial pollutants in urban areas, municipal governments responded by building unprecedented public works infrastructure as a technological alternative to vital ecological systems. Although municipal governments and Standard Oil succeeded in providing citizens and customers with new levels of material comfort through applied science, they failed to anticipate the environmental consequences of their triumph. Technological replacements (sewers, water works, kerosene) for inefficient natural systems funneled new industrial hazards into the urban environment. As critics discovered that the geography of urban health aligned with spatial class divisions, a new critique of capitalism infused ecological observations into the reform movements that emerged from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

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INTRODUCTION

Refining Nature: The Environmental Costs of the Kerosene Age

Historians have long studied the tension between public and private control of resources.

Few entities embody this political and social conflict as dramatically as the private corporation. Even Adam Smith, the thinker most associated with describing the vicissitudes of early capitalism, warned of the danger of organized private wealth.

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” Although corporations founded

America, the London Company and Massachusetts Bay Company were bound to communal goals and aristocratic privilege. By law and custom, individual pursuit of wealth was subservient to the goals of the church, crown, and colony. Following the

American Revolution, these legal and communal checks withered as the liberalism of the revolution became a full-fledged ideology in the early republic. John F. Kasson, an historian of the early market revolution in the United States, argues that American desires for industrial independence from Europe trumped the republican conception of the ideal, always agrarian, citizen who curbed private interests that might endanger social harmony.

Kasson writes, “For Americans to import finished goods instead of making their own was thus a violation of the economy of nature, a rejection of her beneficence, and a flouting of

America’s destiny.” American republican ideology was recast to view any impediment to private enterprise as a danger to the American political project. This new ideology

significantly altered Americans’ relation with the material world. Thomas C. Cochran has

written that “Under the pressure of lawyers the courts became distinctly favorable to

entrepreneurial action” and the “protection of contracts against state interference were 8

post-Revolutionary stimulants to investment.” The anti-developmental bias of common law eroded under these new interpretations that made the courthouse an instrument in the colonization of the North American environment.1

The Standard Oil Company emerged at the turning of this ideological tide and owes it success to this altered republican ideology and the revolution in legal orthodoxy it precipitated. The rise in power of both corporations and the federal government define the modern era but scholars often underestimate the role of the corporate form by isolating its agency to the realm of economics. By uncovering the corporate relationship with the environment this study connects larger trends in society (urbanization, industrialization, the rise of Progressivism) to the material changes wrought by corporate action. As such, the methods of environmental history provides a new critical perspective to the rise of the corporation in the modern era that challenges the familiar discourses on the role of the corporation in society that tend to ignore the connections between

1 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Arch. Constable and Company,1806):177. The very first scholarly investigation of the Standard Oil Company focused on the tension between what Henry Demarest Lloyd identified as wealth and commonwealth, a central theme for many fin de siècle “muckraking” journalistic and scholarly investigations: see Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1894). A growing historiography centered on the subject of corporations has emerged in the past generation most notably in the works of Alfred Chandler, Jr. and Alan Trachtenburg, which sought to uncover, in Trachtenburg’s words, "the emergence of a changed, more tightly structured society with new hierarchies of control, and also changed conceptions of that society, of America itself”: see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982): 3-4; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1977); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., ed., The Coming of Managerial Capitalism (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1985). Since we cannot talk about these changes without a grounding in the shifting legal landscape that endowed private corporations with extraordinary rights and privileges toward the close of the nineteenth century legal history has emerged as a necessary companion to the study of corporations. Morton J. Horwitz’s two volume history of American law from the Revolution to the 1960s has established a narrative and periodization for historians, which historians interested in the development of environmental law have used as a framework for their own work: Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976); Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992); examples of legal histories that focus on environmental issues include Celia Campbell- Mohn, ed., Environmental Law: From Resources to Recovery (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1993); and Ted Steinberg, Slide Mountain: Or, the Folly of Owning Nature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996); Thomas C. Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1981): 9. 9

economy, environment, and community. With its successful drive to eliminate costs through technology and scientific management, the Standard Oil Company became a

model for the modern industrial corporation in the twentieth century. It emerged at a time

when public checks on private power withered and dissecting its internal logic and

relationships with both society and nature informs our understanding of an essential condition of modernity—the corporation as the totalizing feature of daily life, a source of subsistence and a consumer of labor for billions worldwide. Although this dissertation focuses on the material reality of corporate action, its impact on air quality, fish populations, land ownership patterns, communal health, and its influence on political bodies, the late nineteenth-century republican ideology that envisioned a stark choice between environmental health and material wealth not only sustained its growth but lay deep roots in the culture at large. Historians of Standard Oil and the Gilded Age have echoed many of these post-Revolutionary perspectives. The dominant narrative, appearing in general high school textbooks and academic monographs, documents

Standard Oil’s participation in questionable business practices but focuses on how John

D. Rockefeller’s genius in eliminating costs through the vertical integration of the

petroleum industry laid the foundation for American industrial superiority in the coming

twentieth century.

Naturally, members of Standard Oil itself first articulated this interpretation. In an

1893 address to Syracuse University, chief counsel of the Standard Oil Company, S.C.T.

Dodd outlined the corporatist ideology that envisioned the oil giant as a necessary step

toward organizational perfection. Employed by the company to beat back a wave of

litigation and to revolutionize American law in the interest of private corporate rights, 10

Dodd painted a picture of humanity “prior to the days of the introduction of machinery,”

where the “people were as savage as Indians.” “Half-naked women chanted wild measures, while the men with brandished clubs danced a war-dance,” a time when “food was peas, black bread, fern roots and the bark of trees.” To this stark image of pre- industrial savagery, Dodd offered a picture of the contemporary industrial

transformations. “Men began to experience the luxury of being warm. Beds with bolsters

took the place of the floor with logs. Clean wood floors and even carpets appeared

instead of vermin-infested and filthy rushes.” What had brought about these happy

changes? Business had been liberated from “the sorry mess…government made of it” and

finally allowed to “regulate itself on honorable lines,” Dodd answered. The choice he

offered the students of the University on that day was simple: “stop co-operation of individuals and aggregation of capital…[and] arrest the wheels of progress…stay the march of civilization”; or, recognize that “Capital is the force which vitalizes society” and make “all nature subservient to the human race.” Although Dodd’s main concern lay

in liberating the corporation from government regulation, the ideology he offered was

predicated on the prosaic choice between human comfort and environmental health. For

Dodd, the corporation served as a promethean liberator from the limits of nature.2

Although Dodd’s ideology appears strident and self-serving to the modern, cynical reader, the underlying positivism of his narrative remains embedded in the culture despite mutations. The classical Marxian definition of “ideology” as a false cultural projection of the material world exists with or without our consent— as Marx stated,

“they do not know it, but they are doing it.” Unfortunately, the corporate-environmental

2 S.C.T. Dodd, Trusts (New York: Self-Published, 1900): 4-34.

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ideology as articulated by Dodd (material comfort as legitimation of private domination

of nature) has corrupted much of the scholarship on the Standard Oil Company and

precluded an understanding of the corporation on its own terms. Marx sought to

demystify the ideological mask of capitalism in order to reveal the structural limits and

contradiction of capitalism; especially that labor, not capital, represented the wellspring

of all wealth. His disciples in the twentieth century amended this heuristic with the

analytical tools of psychoanalysis, sociology, and linguistics but abided by his fountainhead of labor. Although the sociologist John Bellamy Foster has labored to rehabilitate an ecological Marx by highlighting brief mentions of, for instance, “the

metabolism between man and nature,” Marx valorized the power of human labor to

transform raw materials into commodities and the mechanisms by which capitalists

created surplus-value. Environmental history seeks to resist the anthropocentric bias of

such models by revealing the inherent shallowness of anthropocentric value theories.

Marx himself, enlightened by Justus von Liebig’s scientific analysis of “the destructive

side of modern agriculture” altered his labor theory of value in a key passage at the close

of chapter fifteen of Capital when he discovered that capitalist production undermined

“the original sources of all wealth–the soil and the worker.” Marx realized a complete

understanding of the manufacturing corporation would be impossible without recognizing

its primary function of converting nature into commodities. John D. Rockefeller,

ignorant of the developing science of ecology, viewed nature as a neutral background to

the stage of human history and the struggle for subsistence. A critical question posed by

this study asks how agents reacted when nature defied such anthropocentric worldviews.3

3 For Marx, ultimate value came in the form of “congealed labor time” and capital as “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour.” See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political 12

With the above schema in mind, the task of the historian lies in properly

identifying the subjects in their historical context and revealing the material and

ideological forces that altered the relationships between these subjects over time. The

histories of Standard Oil and its architect, John D. Rockefeller, have thus far failed to do

so. Ida Tarbell’s two-volume The History of the Standard Oil Company, first published in

1904, while critical of Rockefeller’s actions in restraint of trade devoted an entire chapter

to “The Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company.” The centerpiece of the

chapter is Tarbell’s explanation of how Rockefeller’s desire to “pay a profit to nobody”

lead him into the barrel, tin can, and pipeline businesses and down the road to vertical

integration. Tarbell compared his business acumen to the military genius of her previous

historical subject. “He saw strategic points like a Napoleon, and he swooped on them

with the suddenness of a Napoleon.” In fact, vertical integration as saving grace of Gilded

Age business has become a standard trope of every history following Tarbell. Allan

Nevins, DeWitt Clinton Professor of history at Columbia University, published four

volumes dedicated to the corporation’s founder in two separate works—John D.

Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise (1940) and Study In Power: John D.

Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist (1953). As the first professionally trained

historian to study the petroleum giant, Nevins cemented the image of Rockefeller as an

Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990): 130, 342. For Marx's admission of the primacy of nature in the creation of wealth see especially Ibid, 636-639, 638 fn. 49. Entire encyclopedias exist to describe Marxist theory. Tom Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983); David Macey, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2000). Likewise, various monographs and journals have focused on the connection between Marxian ideology and nature, John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Joel Kovel, ed., Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology (New York: Routledge). However, my description of ideology is borrowed directly from Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) and Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). On pre- modern nature aesthetics see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1963). 13

efficient captain of the industry. “In internal administration,” Nevins wrote, “the Standard

was faultless.” “Rockefeller,” Nevins continued, “abhorred waste, and believed with Lord

Kitchener that one secret of success was attention to details.” Nevins made John D.

Rockefeller synonymous with vertical integration, and in the process linked the business

practice to American destiny, revealing the ideology embedded in his study. “Had our

pace been slower and our achievement weaker, had we not created so swiftly our

powerful industrial units in steel, oil, textiles, chemicals, electricity, and the automotive

vehicles, the free world might have lost the First World War and most certainly would

have lost the Second,” Nevins concluded.4

Historians replicated the association between Standard Oil and American power

throughout the literature in the following decades so that the Gilded Age often appears as

a labor pang necessary for the birth of the modern corporation structured on

standardization and the elimination of costs, often referred to as “waste.” Charles and

Mary Beard, whose work usually revealed underlying materialist structures that guided

America’s past, confirmed the individuality of Rockefeller’s genius in their A Basic

History of the United States (1944). Vertical integration and efficiency were immutable personality characteristics for a man who had shrewdly “hoarded his earnings as a clerk and small merchant,” which allowed him to “invest in the construction of oil refineries.”

Henry Bedford and Trevor Colbourn’s The Americans: A Brief History (1976) echoed

Tarbell’s apologetic chapter by highlighting how Rockefeller “cut costs, developed new marketing techniques, and sold a product that was in fact standard—a uniform product

4 Ida M. Tarbell, The History of The Standard Oil Company, vol II (London: William Heinemann, 1912): 231-255; Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940): 682-683; Allan Nevins, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953): 33, viii-ix. 14

that compared favorably in quality with the output of competitors.” “There were,” the historians concluded, “legitimate economic reasons for Standard’s domination of the industry.” While this statement holds merit in the context of the “economy,” offering such an analysis without examining the prerequisite cultural assumptions embedded in these values remains a troubling trend in the historiography of Standard Oil and capitalism in the American context at large. A century of scholarship has presented a picture of John D. Rockefeller as a shrewd, if ruthless, genius who fathered the modern

American economy by eliminating unnecessary costs and standardizing the production process so he could pass these savings on to the consumer. This body of scholarship, however, operates on a single level of analysis—the internal operation of a company and its relation to competitors and alternative business models. Absent from these studies are the necessary descriptions of the corporation’s relationship to communities or the environmental source of its wealth.5

The modern scholarly consensus was cemented with the business historian Alfred

D. Chandler, Jr., who took necessary steps toward revealing the source of Standard Oil’s

power. By arguing that large corporations, such as Standard Oil, were predestined to dominate the Gilded Age marketplace because their use of economies of scale and the elimination of waste made “Existing market mechanisms” unable to “coordinate

[resource] flows effectively,” Chandler has crystalized an “efficiency model” that legitimizes the prior consensus on purely functionalist grounds. Simply stated, the

Chandlerian thesis argues that in a free market economy, firms that succeed in eliminating waste in the conversion of nature into commodities earned higher profit

5 Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, A Basic History of the United States (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1944): 308; Henry F. Bedford, Trevor Colbourn, The Americans: A Brief History, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1976): 289. 15

margins and gained market share over their competitors. Human agency is meaningful in this model only in its exercise of cost cutting through the organization of labor and

resources. A growing number of sociologists have challenged efficiency theory for its

naïve myopia. William G. Roy has particularly analyzed the role of power to alter market

conditions, in essence to change the rules upon which the efficiency game is played. Roy

argues that efficiency theory’s fatal flaw resides in the caveat ceteris paribus—that is,

efficiency operates as an explanatory model only in a perfect environment of economic

parity. For Roy, “things are almost never equal.” Even the first scholarly investigations of

Standard Oil understood, for all the cost-saving Rockefeller innovated, his empire’s growth depended heavily on favorable transportation rates from railroad companies that drove many of his competitors to cave in to merger agreements. Roy therefore expands the traditional definition of power as not only the ability to exert one’s will on others, but also the circumstances that structure individual agency. “[S]tructural power,” Roy explains, is “the ability to determine the context within which decisions are made by affecting the consequences of one alternative over another.” For Roy, Standard Oil’s efficiency rested on exerting political and economic power to ensure ceteris paribus never emerged in the petroleum economy.6

Standard Oil’s “structural power” issued not only from the corporation’s influence in the political and economic context, but also from its dominion over nature, the source of all wealth. This dissertation diverts from the traditional scholarship on the corporation by focusing on the role of nature in the early history of the Standard Oil Company. Aside from the “structural power” critique, the orthodox image of Standard Oil as an efficient,

6 Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1977): 484; William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton: Princeton Univ Press, 1997): 8-14. 16

waste-abhorring machine for producing profits simply does not mesh with the historical record. After reading decades worth of newsprint, city reports, and first-hand descriptions of late nineteenth century Cleveland, I was left with many questions concerning the disconnect between the historical record and the dominant narrative that describes

Standard Oil’s rise to prominence. If academic scholars depict Standard Oil and John D.

Rockefeller as obsessed with efficiency and the elimination of waste, why are contemporary descriptions of the industry filled with evidence to the contrary? Why did

Clevelanders use language more appropriate for describing a privy vault than a well-oiled machine? A self-described “SUFFERER” living downwind of Standard Oil’s Cleveland refineries reported the “odor is so strong that it often brings on cases of severe vomiting.”

One creative Clevelander even penned a poem, “Song of the Sick Water-Nymph” to describe how the city’s water supply had become tainted by industrial waste:

Faugh! What a smell! How can I be well? Stinking again, Small pipe and main, Even large reservoir Yields to its power!....

Petroleum, slaughter-house gore, To say nothing of acid Sulphuric, and how many more In our waters placid….

When asked by a passenger “What kind of place is Cleveland?” a captain of a lake steamer simply responded, “Good enough place; ’[o]ily, though.” Contemporary images

of Standard Oil’s vast refineries also betray the historical narrative of efficiency. How

can we understand this contradiction?7

7 The Cleveland Leader, 1880. July 30, pg 6; Cleveland Leader, 1868. Song of the Sick Water-Nymph. February 13, pg 4; Constance F. Woolson, “Round by Propeller,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol 45, Issue 268 (September 1872): 518-533. 17

Part of the problem has been in the framing of historical questions. Previous

historians mined the relatively tidy environment of accounting books, legal cases, and the

personal correspondence of corporate executives. They have not thought to, in the words

of environmental historian Donald Worster, get their shoes dirty and find out the

environmental consequences of the most significant corporation in an industry defined by

environmental destruction. The index of the most recent study of Rockefeller, Ron

Chernow’s 800-page Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1998) lacks a single

entry for “pollution” or “fire”; yet it contains dozens on “philanthropy,” including twelve separate sub-headings. Historical silence shapes political discourse. In the past fifty years,

historians have sought to recapture the silenced voices of women, slaves, Native

Americans, and even children in an effort to present a complete narrative and to inform present politics. Environmental historians have gone a step further and amended the history of the closing decades of the nineteenth century to include changes in rivers, wildlife populations, and chemicals in the human body. In short, they have argued that the environment also underwent industrialism and its role in history can emerge if historians ask the right questions. This dissertation is an answer to the as yet unasked questions: What was the Standard Oil corporation’s relationship with the natural world; how did it shape the environment and what role did nature have in the decisions made by the company?8

John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil viewed the environment with the same eyes that sought efficiency in the economy. Efficient forests produced staves for barrels.

Efficient wells produced pure, free flowing petroleum. Efficient rivers carried away

useless by-products. They sought an idealized, uniform landscape that produced

8 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998). 18

predictable results and expanding wealth for their investors. Theirs was the accountant’s view from the ledger book, in short, the modernist ideal applied with unprecedented economic and technological power. This dissertation shows what happened when nature did not fit into these standardized plans, when efficiency confronted ecology. Lake ice channeled petroleum waste directly toward water-works intake cribs at both Cleveland and Chicago. Cyclical floods washed over property boundaries and mixed fire with water.

Air currents channeled caustic smoke into neighborhoods. Kerosene lamps spontaneously combusted. Industrial production, in short, produced cascading effects within nature’s economy that blurred elemental lines as rivers caught fire, soot became airborne, and bodily sickness infested the seat of material wealth in some of the richest cities in human history. Standard Oil did not account for these environmental effects because they transcended property boundaries, which served as the horizon of their worldview.

What served the interests of Standard Oil’s profits, earning it a reputation for efficiency, often came at the cost of the environment and human health. Standard Oil’s business was predicated on the refinement of nature. In the early years of the industry,

Standard Oil was able to convert as much as 65% of Pennsylvania crude petroleum into kerosene for the market. The remaining fractions of gasoline, tar, as well as charges of sulfuric acid used to cleanse the oil of impurities had no market, and therefore no use to the company. Rockefeller calmly recounted his use of gasoline before the advent of the internal combustion engine. “We used to burn it for fuel in distilling the oil....and thousands and hundreds of thousands of barrels of it floated down the creeks and rivers, and the ground was saturated with it, in the constant effort to get rid of it.” Gasoline represented a fire hazard and insurance liability. Rockefeller’s drive to eliminate costs 19

and the absence of laws against polluting waterways doomed surrounding communities.

Even when laws stood in the way of profits, Rockefeller favored his wallet as long as the consequences were trifling. Although Congress had legislated that all illuminant oil must pass a fire test of 110º Fahrenheit in February of 1867, Rockefeller stretched his kerosene stock with unsalable fractions of gasoline to increase his profits by integrating a waste product into his primary commodity supply. In April of 1868 an internal correspondence between members of Standard Oil revealed that recent tests “of our oil” had shown a fire- point “burning about 113…110[degrees Fahrenheit].” Although already at or near the federal limits, the letter writer revealed Rockefeller’s desire to squeeze as much money as possible out of his otherwise worthless gasoline supplies. He writes, “John think can

[illegible] cut down a little,” adding “but be careful and not cut it down too much.” The fire test became a business opportunity. Rockefeller could now dilute his stock that tested above the new standard to as close to the 110° limit as possible. In 1868, when

Rockefeller advised his engineers to meet the fire test standard set by Congress,

Cleveland experienced 149 fires, four attributed to lamp explosions. Twenty-eight years later, Cleveland’s fire department responded to 1,000 fires, 124 of which were the result of gasoline or kerosene, including twenty-six cases of exploding lamps. Standard Oil’s market was much larger than Cleveland and exploding kerosene lamps resulted in as many as six thousand deaths a year in the decade following Rockefeller’s decision to test the limits of efficiency.9

9 Chernow, 101; RAF to AR&F, April 15, 1868, Book 394, Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler, RAC; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1868 (Cleveland: Leader Book and Job Office, 1869): 67. This internal memo cited two results of internal testing, “113...110,” which reveals that Standard’s highest officers saw an opportunity in the hazy constructed boundary of the congressional test limit between safe and hazardous products; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1896 (Cleveland: The Cleveland Ptg.. & Pub. Co., 1897): 806-810; Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992): 50. 20

These environmental changes represent a largely unexplored arena of social

struggle in an age defined by conflicts. Traditional histories of the Gilded Age have

focused attention on the struggle between workers and management over pay, reformers

and capitalists over corporate sovereignty from government control, and competing

narratives between the “Gospel of Wealth” and “How the Other Half Lives.” In one of

the first penetrating studies of Standard Oil, the journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd argued

that the Ohio company’s illegal efforts to undermine competition threatened the

foundation of free enterprise and was the clearest example of concentrated “Wealth

Against Commonwealth” in an age of unprecedented corporate power. Laissez-faire economic policy represented a concession of power by government to private industry at the expense of economic justice, but, as this study reveals, it also signaled disaster for the urban environment. Standard Oil enjoyed free reign to dump sulfuric acid and other petroleum by-products into the Cuyahoga River, saturate Cleveland’s air with choking carbon monoxide and corrosive sulfur dioxide, and fill the homes of consumers the world over with sub-standard kerosene. Rockefeller’s drive to eliminate costs created social problems that shaped the course of Cleveland’s history as plant life withered, drinking water was compromised, and affluent residents fled the city core for more salubrious suburbs. Standard Oil’s treatment of the natural world and Cleveland’s efforts to secure clean air and water for its residents transformed the environment into a political battleground.

This dissertation examines Standard Oil’s relationship to the environment by focusing on industrial changes to four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Chapter one examines how changes in the way Cleveland viewed and used the land played a 21

significant role in the early success of John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller inherited a

merchant’s mindset because Cleveland served as a touchstone between the frontier farms

of the Ohio interior and the Atlantic market at the end of the Erie Canal. Standard Oil

became a central actor in the critical shift from animal to machine power within the city,

completely reorganizing the relationship between Cleveland and the surrounding

environment by eliminating inefficiencies that cut into corporate profits. Rivers were made straight and deep, roads were replaced with railroads and later pipelines, and

Cleveland became the heart of this technological system that existed to convert petroleum into kerosene in the most efficient, cost-conscious method possible to the company.10

Chapter two examines how the process of converting rock oil to kerosene created a new landscape of environmental hazard for both workers and consumers of Standard

Oil’s products. Even without human intervention, crude petroleum emitted flammable vapors and the early oil fields of western Pennsylvania became infamous as one of the most combustible landscapes during the first oil boom. By refining crude into volatile fractions including gasoline, Standard Oil’s refineries became a minefield of explosive liquids that only required a lit match, static spark, or at times spontaneous combustion to convert passive nature into an explosive shower of fire. Fire, too, came to the Cuyahoga as early as 1868 in far more spectacular fashion than its infamous burns during the twentieth century. Standard Oil’s primary refining complex—the worldwide home of the petroleum industry at the time—burned to the ground twice, unleashing a river of fire upon the land and down the Cuyahoga that tested the wills of the entire Cleveland fire

10 Several studies have explored the relationship between rural farms and urban energy requirements. Hay farms, which emerged to feed the urban horse population, would disappear following the transition to gasoline powered vehicles. See Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1985); Marc Linder, Lawrence S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1999). 22

department and turned night to day in a way the company had not anticipated when they

proudly proclaimed their product “the light of the world.” The smaller, more frequent

fires that resulted from exploding kerosene lamps burdened public infrastructure as fire

departments and hospitals battled the consequences of producing, at times, below-grade kerosene. The combustive properties of petroleum embodied the devil’s bargain of industrialism. When controlled, nature served humans as an illuminant to brighten the night. When business failed to respect the power of petroleum in order to pursue bigger profits, that power scorched the soil, rivers, and human bodies.11

Chapter three reveals how decisions made by Standard Oil altered Cleveland’s

relationship to water. In the 1850s the city of Cleveland chose to modernize its water

supply, moving from a decentralized system based upon local wells and springs to a

centralized, government-run water-works system that supplied the population with clean

water from Lake Erie. Although Cleveland’s population was growing exponentially, the

move to centralize the delivery of water was not a response to inadequate water supply.

The traditional well sources provided more than enough water to the city, but after

decades of cholera epidemics that periodically swept over the North American continent

Cleveland’s city government viewed wells and springs as a public health threat because

of their proximity to privy vaults and cesspools. In 1856, after two years of labor, the

city’s source of drinking water shifted from a mosaic of questionable sources to the

mouth of a fifty-inch pipe located 800 feet from the shore under Lake Erie. Technology,

it appeared at the time, had rescued the city from its environmental circumstances. In

11 The last dramatic burn, which captured the attention of the nation, took place in 1969. The first fire occurred as early as August of 1868 when waste oil ignited on the river’s surface near downtown, although the first major fires did not occur until the 1880s. See John Stark Bellamy, The Killer in the Attic: And More True Tales of Crime and Disaster from Cleveland’s Past (Cleveland: Gray & Company, 2002): 200. Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2000); S.C.T. Dodd, Trusts (New York: Self-Published, 1900): 69. 23

concentrating their source of drinking to a single, fifty-inch opening, the city of

Cleveland wagered that the 800 feet of water between the water-works crib and the mouth of the Cuyahoga River would serve as a better environmental buffer than the decentralized system of wells it replaced. The gamble paid off for a full decade until the

Cuyahoga River connected the industrial effluent of John D. Rockefeller’s nascent petroleum business to the drinking taps of the entire city. This represents perhaps the most startling illustration of Rockefeller’s zeal to eliminate waste and increase efficiency.

The company dumped thousands of barrels of gasoline, sulfuric acid, and petroleum sludge into the Cuyahoga to eliminate the burden from Standard Oil’s ledger books.

While this eliminated costs for the company—which avoided the construction of storage tanks, the payment of higher insurance rates, and the invention of a market for their use— it reveals how the efficiency and cost savings of one corporation must be understood in the context of its effect on the health of entire community, including the surrounding environment.

Chapter four examines the costs created for the entire city of Cleveland as the atmosphere was filled with the by-products of fossil fuel combustion. The industrial poisons released into Cleveland’s air profoundly altered the city’s growth and created a political conflict between advocates seeking government control of industry and defenders of laissez faire during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Many histories of industrialism have noted the early positive association of air pollution with prosperity.

Clevelanders seem to have developed a different aesthetic. By burning and refining petroleum, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide entered the atmosphere, choking workers and destroying plant life. As early as 1870, the air that blew off Lake Erie was filled with 24

the “rancid, suffocating breath of the oil tanks,” according to the editor of the Cleveland

Leader, who found the smoke “so dense in the lower part of the city that persons whose

lungs are at all delicate find it next to impossible to sleep.” Clevelanders fled the neighborhoods downwind from the refineries like animals before a wildfire. Cleveland’s affluent fled to suburban settlements, often of their own creation, where they could enjoy clean air and social isolation. John D. Rockefeller was again at the interface of environment and society during the last decade of the nineteenth century as a member of the moneyed exodus to suburban environments. After he relocated his estate six miles east of the city center, he joined several other industrialists in donating hundreds of acres of land along Doan Brook, the only environmental barrier between eastern suburbs and the city. Several citizens cried foul, arguing the creation of the parks along Doan Brook represented a boondoggle for real estate settlements financed by the same “philanthropic” donors to the park system. John Zangerle, a lawyer and leader of the critical Park Board

Reorganization Association, discovered that many of the park donations came with riders that required the city to expend specified funds to improve the land or the “gifts” would return to their original owners. The park board, which at this time was not elected by the public, drew these funds from the municipal taxes of Cleveland, whose borders ended at the manicured lawns of the distant suburbs. Businesses sued Standard Oil for economic losses sustained and by the opening years of the twentieth century air pollution had obliterated most of the trees in the “Forest City,” including its last stand of old-growth forest. Although Standard Oil endured periodic inspections and petty fines, Rockefeller’s desire to “pay a profit to nobody” included the atmosphere, which absorbed the untallied costs of the kerosene industry.12

12 The Cleveland Leader, 1870. June 28, pg. 2. 25

Standard Oil, hounded by state and federal anti-trust investigations and flummoxed by proto-Progressive resistance to its power in Cleveland, retreated from the

“Forest City” in the 1890s. Chapter five examines the company town it established in

Whiting, Indiana on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. Although preceded by

Pullman, Illinois, Whiting served as a model for the industrial suburb of the early

twentieth century and was surpassed in ambition only by Henry Ford’s megalomaniac

corporate fiefdom Fordlandia in the heart of the Amazon. John D. Rockefeller, frustrated

by the environmental and social limits on his power in Cleveland, entered the sleepy

farming and fishing community of northwest Indiana, purchased hundreds of acres of

swampland, imported his own labor force, and molded the environment and society to

align with the goals of his corporation. Fecund marshland that had sustained a rich diversity of flora and fauna was leveled, drained, and canalized to serve as a Cartesian base for the largest oil refinery on the planet. The community, made up almost exclusively of his employees, elected Standard executives to positions of political power, effectively eliminating the specter of democratic control of his empire. When land became scarce, Rockefeller turned to engineering technology to create new shoreline, at places extending several miles into Lake Michigan and completely altering what had been a stable ecosystem. This chapter reveals the lessons Standard absorbed from its experience in Cleveland and implemented throughout its global network of property. It also stands as a private exception to James C. Scott’s argument in his popular monograph

Seeing Like a State that “the combination of the universalist pretensions of epistemic knowledge and authoritarian social engineering” that ignore local knowledge “all but guarantee their own practical failure.” Nothing could be further from truth as the oil

26

refinery at Whiting enters its 120th year of continuous operation. Standard Oil wriggled

out of the self-destructive tendencies of modernist schemes by pushing the environmental

costs of kerosene production onto the commons.13

***

During the closing days of 1874, the future president and Ohio politician Rutherford B.

Hayes pondered the changes his state had witnessed during the preceding century in preparation for a Phi Beta Kappa oration. Hayes, who had been born fatherless on the

Ohio frontier in 1822, had a particular appreciation of the nation’s history. Growing up in

the village of Delaware, Ohio, named for the Lenape people who had lived in the location

only a generation before his birth, Hayes distinguished himself in his studies and earned

acceptance to Harvard law school, graduating at the age of 23 with a future as promising

as the young republic he hoped to serve. His budding legal career was postponed by the

outbreak of the Civil War. An advocate of anti-slavery, Hayes served the Union throughout the war, having four horses shot from under him and receiving five wounds he would carry with him the rest of his life. A decade removed from the personal and social consequences of the conflict, Hayes ruminated on nearly a century of American history. Unlike the “golden age” of “our fathers and the first generation of their descendants,” Hayes confessed in his diary that the contemporary world was an “iron age, the age of petroleum, of coal...of mines, of railways, of great fortunes suddenly acquired; smoke and dust covering, concealing, or destroying the lovely landscapes.

Coarse, hard, material things.” The golden luster of America’s early-nineteenth-century

13 Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 1998): 340. 27

promise had eroded to a thin gilding, which only served to conceal the deeper, structural

problems the country faced as it emerged from ruins of the Civil War. Rather than engage

this narrative of environmental and moral declension, Hayes declined the invitation so he could “pursue my pet studies” of less troubled topics such as “the Wyandots, notes on the

Sandusky Valley, and on the defense of Fort Stephenson in 1813.” Another generation would pass before journalists and scholars would delve into the social and political consequences of the “the age of petroleum” and longer yet before scholars would begin to understand the environmental and social costs produced by a production system predicated on increasing profit by passing on costs to nature.14

The Gilded Age represents an ecological watershed in the history of the United

States. For republican idealists like Hayes, the Gilded Age came at the cost of young republic’s innocence. Americans had opened the nineteenth century in awe of the seemingly endless continent before them. By the close of the century Americans grew anxious of despoiling the dwindling natural wealth they had acquired. Along the way they felt, in the words of Henry Demarest Lloyd, they had favored “Wealth Against

Commonwealth” and turned their backs on values that had distinguished them from their corrupt European homeland. In this dissertation, I pick up where President Hayes left his unfinished study by arguing that nature also underwent industrialization during the nineteenth century. Standard Oil’s drive to eliminate “waste” and “not pay a profit to anybody” resulted in the deterioration of the urban environment and exacerbated many of the social dislocations of the Gilded Age because rivers, lakes, and air currents unified the urban landscape. Rockefeller’s genius in understanding and mastering the rules of the

14 Charles Richard Williams, ed., Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, vol. III (Columbus: The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1924): 260-263. 28

market failed to extend to the environment, which he viewed as a chaotic waste in need

of human intervention or, at worst, a “sink” for the inconvenient costs of refining crude

oil. When the oil patriarch met an economic challenge to the profitability of his

corporation, he had tools at his disposal that could bend the rules of the market.

Rockefeller used persuasion, innovation, and finally outright crime to change the market

environment. Nature, however, operates according to rules that humans cannot alter.15

15 I use “sink” as a term borrowed from the urban environmental historian Joel A. Tarr, whose decades of work has moved the field to a reconsider heavily populated landscapes. See especially, Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron: The Univ of Akron Press, 1996). 29

CHAPTER ONE

Improved Earth

The 1830s represent an important crossroads in the history of the American economy.

Freed from the restrictions imposed by the British colonial relationship that relegated the colonies to a producer of raw materials and consumer of finished British goods,

American entrepreneurs turned their energy to refining the North American environment.

In a conscious effort to import the industrial revolution, American capitalists initiated a reorganization of labor and natural resources to secure their independence from European manufactured goods. Born in 1839, John Davison Rockefeller entered this changing landscape in the same decade that saw the birth of fellow industrial giants Andrew

Carnegie (1835), Jay Gould (1836), J. P. Morgan (1837), and Philip Danforth Armour

(1832). The cornerstone for their empires had already been laid by Thomas Jefferson’s

Land Ordinance of 1785, which transformed the young nation’s territory into a

checkerboard of legally imperishable, measurable property integrated into a growing

commodity marketplace. After his famous nine-month tour of the nascent republic in

1831, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville documented the changing economic relations in Democracy in America by highlighting the “prodigious industrial expansion

that everyone notices in the United States.” As western historian Patricia Nelson

Limerick has argued, the push toward developing the nation’s natural resources

constituted “not a simple process of territorial expansion, but an array of efforts to wrap

the concept of property around unwieldy objects.” These “unwieldy objects,” whether in

the form of subterranean oil reserves, veins of iron and coal, flowing water, plants and 30

animals would become mere commodities for the cohort of young industrialists born into a culture defined by acquisitive capitalism. An environmental history of Standard Oil is ultimately the story of establishing control over nature through the creation of a new legal and economic framework. Through incorporation of the Standard Oil Company, John D.

Rockefeller constructed a legal structure for the private capture of nature. This chapter explores the cultural, environmental, and economic conditions that structured the personality of John D. Rockefeller and the industrial organization he created.1

Although historical developments certainly structured the decisions leading to the establishment of Rockefeller’s oil empire, they did not determine it. In the 1960s and

1970s academics sought to unmask the hidden structures of history. Scholars loosely identified with new schools of thought (structuralism, poststructuralism, etc.) organized under the umbrella of postmodernism eschewed arguments predicated purely on Marxist materialism or the advancement of a superior western civilization. Nevertheless,

American scholars produced influential historical models that presented the development of the industrial revolution in the United States along functionalist lines as the ascendency of superior organizational forms. Although the modernization theory spearheaded by Richard D. Brown quickly fell out of favor with American historians, a similar interpretation argued by the business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. in The

Visible Hand has remained the dominant reading of the industrial revolution in the United

States. Chandler argued that the corporate form outperformed its competitors because its particular management structure controlled the “coordination and integration of the flow

1 The 1830s witnessed the rise of the great textile manufactories in cities such as Lowell, Massachusetts. See Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Amherst: Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1991): 65. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings, trans. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009): 67; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987): 71. 31

of goods and services from the production of the raw materials….more efficiently than

did market mechanisms.” In short, the hierarchy of control over resources and labor

ushered in by managerial capitalism allowed corporations to capture the technologically

sophisticated markets of the late nineteenth century while the traditional, family-

structured business forms stagnated or declined as new transportation and communication

technologies expanded markets from decentralized “island communities” to the

international scene.2

The problem with the dominant interpretation of the rise of big business in the

United States is that its proponents never attempt to understand the corporation on its own terms and instead view it as a progressive step toward a future ideal form of perfect organizational efficiency. Embedded within this is the naïve assumption of historical evolution of business from simple to complex forms in which the story of American enterprise began with home production, came of age in cottage industries at the community level, and graduated into regional and national factory systems. This conception of history as economic teleology has reduced the historical profession to simply revealing the inevitable stages of the ascent of homo economicus. Without accepting the contingency of history we not only deny agency to its actors, who become

one-dimensional witnesses to the inevitable unraveling of the chosen grand narrative, but

2 For an introduction to postmodernism see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989); David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). For an introduction to modernization theory see Richard D. Brown, “Modernization and the Modern Personality in Early America, 1600-1865: A Sketch of a Synthesis,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Winter, 1972, vol. 2, no. 3: 201-228. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977): 11. For an historical description of “island communities” see Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967): xiii. 32

ignore the possibility of declension.3

The purpose of this chapter is to reveal the historical circumstances that structured

the rise of John D. Rockefeller’s knowledge of business and to present an interpretation

centered on an understanding of power divorced from the inevitability of the

manufacturing corporation present in other works. Standard Oil certainly succeeded in

developing a complex, efficient system of industrial production but its control of as much

of 90% of the petroleum business was predicated on creating and maintaining power over

social, economic, and especially environmental agents. Resistance to its plans took

multiple forms, from lawsuits by adjacent property owners, labor strikes, “muckraking”

exposes of malfeasance, an alliance of petroleum producers against the tyranny of the

“octopus,” to the 1911 dissolution of the corporation by the United States Supreme Court.

If Standard Oil represented a superior economic form according to the Chandlerian

thesis, how can scholars account for the cacophony of dissent against its ascendency?

Either contemporaries critical of the corporation failed to appreciate the efficiencies it

brought to bear on the economy because of ignorance or their own self-interest, or the

thesis itself poorly describes the ascendency of Standard Oil over its competition. The

former certainly manifested itself as competitors fell to the petroleum giant—Ida Tarbell,

who produced an early critical history of the company, was born into the family that

scraped a living from the independent Pennsylvania fields that felt the pinch of the company’s control of the industry; however, that fact only proves Standard’s actions cost

3 Although Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx and others all describe the functions of a faceless human in the economy, the term “Economic Man” emerged in the late nineteenth century critics of John Stuart Mill. See Joseph Persky, “Retrospectives: The Ethology of Homo Economicus.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring, 1995), pp. 221-231. For a modern meditation on historical declension, see Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005). 33

competitor’s an independent livelihood.4

Nature, too, resisted Standard Oil’s plans to capture it as property and control it through engineering technology. In this sense, Standard Oil’s dominance can only be

partly explained through market mechanisms. In fact, its ability to exert power over

communities, workers, and nature allowed it to create diseconomies that flushed

competitors out of markets and quelled public resistance. This power produced

unprecedented costs that the corporate form allowed it to shift to third parties at will as

what economists describe as externalities. Few histories of Standard Oil bother to dwell

on these hidden costs of economic supremacy but they are central to our understanding of

the truly radical changes wrought by industrialism.

In the past twenty years, sociologists have articulated a new conception of social

power that challenges the Chandlerian efficiency model. They have expanded the

definition beyond Max Weber’s original formulation that equated power with the ability

of social actors to realize their goals despite opposition from others. In this dissertation, I

argue that Standard Oil achieved not only this classical definition of power but also, in

the words of sociologist William Roy, “determine[d] the context within which decisions

are made by affecting the consequences of one alternative over another.” Standard Oil’s

power, in this expanded sense, was predicated on its reorganization of the natural world.5

As the source of material wealth and social health, nature was “refined” to serve

the goals of the Standard Oil company through 1) private ownership and 2) the use of

4 In writing about Standard Oil’s secret dealings with Pennsylvania railroads Tarbell confessed in her autobiography “Out of the alarm and bitterness and confusion, I gathered from my father’s talk a conviction to which I still hold—that what had been undertaken was wrong.” Original emphasis. Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003): 25. 5 As quoted in Harland Prechel, Big Business and the State: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformation, 1880s-1990s (Albany: State Univ of New York Press, 2000): 4. For Roy’s take on Chandler’s efficiency theory see William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton: Princeton Univ Press, 1997). 34

nature as a damper for the absorption of private costs. Standard Oil’s ability to capture nature through outright possession or by dumping effluent in public commons severely diminished the environment’s ability to serve multiple users. With private property, these relationships are patent. Less apparent is the destruction of fisheries, the safety of public drinking water, or complex ecosystems that provide subsistence for the public at large.

The unintended consequences of these changes eliminated the viability of depending on the natural world to supplement household income or survive off the land and hastened the legitimization of industrial wage labor through the elimination of alternatives. In this sense, industrialism represents a continuation of the enclosure movement that originated in the British market revolution. In short, industrialism represented not only a change in economic and social relations but also in the way Americans viewed the natural world.

Before John D. Rockefeller could achieve such mastery, however, we must understand the origin of his conception of nature.6

Fire and Ice

By the time Moses Cleaveland scrambled up the banks of the Cuyahoga to establish the city of his namesake in 1797, the land bordering Lake Erie had become a vast demilitarized zone—long stripped of its valuable beaver pelts and resting between three colonial powers and displaced Amerindian communities. Between the Iroquoian

“Mourning Wars” of the seventeenth century and significant white settlement in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the land bordering Lake Erie enjoyed a resurgence in

6 On enclosure see Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). I am heavily indebted to Ted Steinberg’s conception of the relationship between emerging market capitalism and nature in his history of the Boston Associates. See especially Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Amherst: Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1991): 11. 35

biological diversity unseen since the entry of humans at the close of the Pleistocene.

Merchant George Croghan reported in the mid-eighteenth century that the country on the banks of the Ohio and Scioto rivers “abound[ed] with buffalo, bears…and all sorts of wild game in such plenty, that we killed out of our boats as much as we wanted.”

Charged with making peace with the Susquehanna refugees that poured into Ohio country following a century of war and disease, Croghan’s party took comfort from a storm at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River and “found several Indians of the Ottawa Nation hunting” the land’s ample game.7

Such natural abundance made Ohio country a prize for the new American

republic. Recent studies seeking to provide an Amerindian perspective on the formation

of the United States have established that the hunger for Native land beyond the British

Proclamation Line on the Appalachian ridge was one of many factors that propelled

colonists to sever their bond with England. Benjamin Franklin, renowned for his efforts

to overthrow colonial tyranny, believed the rich environment of the Great Lakes, if

settled by enterprising pioneers, would form the foundation of a new American empire.

His utilitarian descriptions of the land prefigured the material capitalist perspective of

Rockefeller even though his goals were democratic.

The great country back of the Apalachian [sic] mountains, on both sides the Ohio, and between that river and the lakes; is now well known both to the English and French, to be one of the finest in North America, for the extreme richness and fertility of the land; the healthy temperature of the air, and mildness of the climate; the plenty of hunting, fishing, and fowling; the facility of trade with the Indians; and the vast convenience of inland navigation or water-carriage by the lakes and great rivers many hundred of leagues around. From these natural advantages it must undoubtedly (perhaps in less than another century) become a populous and powerful dominion; and a great accession of power, either to England or France.

7 Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, Vol. I, “The Journal of George Croghan (1750-1765)” (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904): 131-2, 133; “George Croghan’s Journal, 1760-61,” 107; Richter, 168. 36

To secure its new inland empire for the American republic, Franklin believed two forts

should be erected—one “at the mouth of the Hioaga [Cuyahoga], on the south side of

lake Erie, where a port should be formed, and a town erected, for the trade of the lakes.”

Franklin studied nature in the hopes of eliminating human dependency on each other,

which early republicans believed would poison a democracy of citizens who would vote

with their stomachs instead of their cultivated ideals. He demonstrated this notion of

public virtue when he famously refused to patent a wood-burning stove in order for the

technology to spread quickly and benefit all. As a student of the scientific revolution and

the Enlightenment, however, his utilitarian view of nature was divorced from any

political notions concerning the organization of society. The power made possible by

observing, studying, and manipulating nature as a collection of disembodied, machine

parts could be harnessed for democratic or authoritarian means. The early republican zeal

to exercise power over the continent engrained the utilitarian conception of nature into

the creation myth of the American Midwest.8

Early republicans were neither proto-capitalists nor ascetic idealists. It would be anachronistic to bend history and paint the founding generation of republicans as the evolutionary predecessors to either a Henry David Thoreau or John D. Rockefeller. Their ambivalence toward the relationship between political equality and economic power produced both. Although Thomas Jefferson famously urged Americans to forswear large-

scale manufacturing in his Notes on the State of Virginia to prevent the corrupting

8 Although the impact of Bacon’s Rebellion on colonial society has become a set piece of early colonial histories, far less attention is granted the entirety of the trans-Appalachian Native/colonist frontier following the Seven Years War and the establishment of the Proclamation Line in 1763. For the frontier’s impact on the American Revolution see especially Richter, 189-236 and Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1995). Robert A. Wheeler, ed., Visions of the Western Reserve: Public and Private Documents of Northeastern Ohio, 1750-1860 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2000): 15-17. 37

influence of rigid social classes, the historical circumstances of the revolution injected a

recusant individualism into dominant republican ideology. Although American historian

Joyce Appleby has argued that free enterprise “provoked anxiety” and the first evidence

of the emergence of stratified social classes caused “great bitterness” among Americans,

Drew McCoy has also shown that “many of the Revolutionaries viewed traditional

restraints on their trade as symptoms of British corruption.” Tench Coxe, the lesser- known co-author of the first Report on Manufactures to the U.S. Congress, turned

Jefferson’s logic on its head by arguing for the aggressive development of the young nation’s natural resources as a vital pillar of economic independence from Europe. Thus, when Americans turned to the Ohio Valley following the revolutionary war, it was with a complex understanding of the relationship between nature, the economy, and politics.9

Although the Treaty of Paris granted to the new republic all lands east of the

Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes, the individual states scrambled for control of

these western lands. The federal government granted Connecticut—which ironically cited

its royal charter granted by Charles II as claim on the latitudinal boundaries from its state

to the Pacific Ocean—over three million acres of land on the south shore of Lake Erie to

help defray war debts. The Connecticut Land Company formed in 1795 to relieve the

state of the burden of surveying and selling the enormous allotment, and charged Moses

Cleaveland, a fellow company director and Revolutionary War veteran, with leading the

9 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1853): 176; John F. Kasson, “Republican Values as a Dynamic Factor,” in Problems in American Civilization: The Industrial Revolution, Gary J. Kornblith, ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998): 10; Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York Univ Press, 1984): 9, 11; Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina Press, 1980): 76. Likewise, in his classic study of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood argued that republican ambivalence contributed to the creation of the bi- cameral legislature. See Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: The Univ of North Carolina Press, 1969): 220. 38

first surveying expedition. By mid-summer, 1796, Cleaveland and his party arrived at the

banks of the Cuyahoga and initiated permanent American settlement of the Great Lakes

region by demarcating a ten-acre public square at a bend in the river close to the lake

shore to serve as the center of a “capital city” for the republic’s new inland empire.10

Dreams of a “powerful dominion” met the harsh realities in the first generation of

frontier settlement. The white settlers inherited a landscape dominated by thick deciduous

forest, which initial survey records suggest covered as much as ninety-five percent of the lands in Ohio territory. A visitor to the Western Reserve took note of the use white settlers made of their new environment, remarking on the “vast quantities of sugar and molasses…produced” from the sap of maple trees and “bee-hives containing from 100 to

200 pounds of honey.” The forest fed their livestock as well, for “Many kinds of nuts also grow here in great abundance; and the swine in the woods are very numerous.” These pastoral visions often ignore their primary goal for the land—converting it to marketable agriculture.11

“Would it be practicable?”

With Native claims extinguished through war or theft, the emerging American empire

drew the lands of the Northwest Territory into the market as a commodity with a fixed

price even before citizens arrived to settle the country. White settlement of the Old

Northwest represents an important historical example of planned colonization. Fearing

10 Harlan Hatcher, The Western Reserve: The Story of New Connecticut in Ohio (Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1966). 11 Michael B. Lafferty, ed., Ohio’s Natural Heritage (Columbus, OH: The Ohio Academy of Science, 1979): 276-7; Oliver D. Diller, “Ohio’s forest resources, progress report based on a survey conducted during 1939-1943 and a recommended long-range forestry program for Ohio” (Agricultural Experiment Station, Wooster, OH) Ohio Department of Forestry Pub. No 76 (1944): 2. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, vol VIII, “Estwick Evans Pedestrious Tour of Four Thousand Miles, 1818,” (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904): 191, 193. 39

the chaos of overlapping claims to territory and the development of an urban underclass,

Thomas Jefferson developed a land ordinance he believed would provide adequate farmland to settlers, discourage dense urban agglomerations, and ensure public education by setting aside 640 acres of every township for such purposes. The replacement of

Amerindians with white settlers represents the last significant change in the relationship between humans and the environment of the Great Lakes region before the advent of the

Industrial Revolution out of which the Standard Oil Company would emerge.

The dreams of Jefferson and many emigrants met harsh frontier realities. Those who followed Moses Cleaveland into the promised land and purchased land from the

Connecticut Land Company searched in vain “for the extreme richness and fertility of the land; the healthy temperature of the air, and mildness of the climate” that Benjamin

Franklin promised. An early settler to the Western Reserve reported “for four Weeks our people who kept about did little else than take care of the sick.” Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, the first US Commissioner of Patents, took away an unfavorable view of the Cuyahoga

River. The Cuyahoga proved “not navigable but with small boats,” adding, the general

“unhealthyness of Cleaveland will be a great hindrance to its settlement.” The mouth of the Cuyahoga, believed by many the perfect location for settlement for its access to lake and river trade, was a tangled mess of driftwood, sandbars, and decomposing plants. John

Melish, a traveler from Scotland who visited the struggling city of Cleaveland in 1811, reported the “mouth of the river is choaked up by a sand-bar, which dams up the water.”

The Cuyahoga, he continued, “stands in a deep pool, two or three miles long; and the water being stagnant, and contaminated by decaying vegetables, afflicts the inhabitants on its margin with fever and ague….for the smell was almost insufferable.” These 40

circumstances only reinforced utilitarian notions of perfecting an inefficient nature by

reorganizing the environment and engendered a belief among the early settlers that

nature’s order served as an obstacle to their plans.12

By 1800, three years after its initial survey, so many pioneer families abandoned

the settlement that only three U.S. citizens remained. The population grew to only fifty-

seven by 1810, betraying the hopes of both early settlers and hopeful republicans in the

core metropolis to the east. John Melish nearly wrote off the settlement in his journal.

“There is little trade in salt, and sometimes a little in flour, pork, and whiskey,” Melish

wrote, “but the whole is trifling, and will continue so, until a harbour be formed.” George

Washington, too, saw the advantage of “improving” the environment of the region as far

back as 1788. In a letter to Richard Butler, the first president asked “Would it be

practicable (and not very expensive) to cut a canal between the Cayahoga and either of

the above rivers so as to open a communication between the waters of lake Erie and the

Ohio?” So long as the population of the region remained insignificant, such

improvements would prove useless to a land producing little more than its inhabitants

could consume themselves. If nature had predestined Ohio to commercial greatness, it

would need a helping hand.13

The Big Bang

The city of Cleaveland and the State of Ohio owed their growth to events on the opposite side of the globe. Mount Tambora, located on the island of Sumbawa in the present-day

12 As quoted in Wheeler, 62, 109, 118-119. Historian Alan Taylor has established the effect of seemingly abundant natural resources settler attitudes toward the land during the early republic. See Alan Taylor, “’Wasty Ways’: Stories of American Settlement,” Environmental History, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Jul., 1998): 291- 310. 13 William Donohue Ellis, The Cuyahoga (Dayton: Landfall Press, Inc., 1975): 53; Hatcher, 55. As quoted in Wheeler, 120, 51. 41

archipelago of Indonesia, exploded in 1815. Twelve cubic miles of ash and dust erupted

twenty-five miles into the atmosphere in a matter of days. The eruption, perhaps the largest of the past 15,000 years, produced prodigious amounts of ash. The sun, obscured behind an atmospheric blanket of volcanic ash, delivered only a fraction of its energy to the Earth’s surface, which caused average temperatures to drop by as much as 4.6°C during the summer of 1816. New England and Europe lost entire crops to freeze, frost, and sometimes snowfall during the spring and summer of 1816. Frosts ravaged New

England farms in June, July, and August. The following winter proved one of the worst in memory. An English vicar recorded the changed world about him: “During the entire season the sun rose each morning as though in a cloud of smoke, red and rayless, shedding little light or warmth and setting at night behind a thick cloud of vapor, leaving hardly a trace of its having passed over the face of the earth.” Their fields ruined and with starvation rampant, farmers in the British Isles and Atlantic seaboard escaped the depredations of “the year without a summer” by seeking less-populated land. Although few places escaped agricultural collapse, settlers rushed into Ohio with a desperate hope the ample land could support them.14

This environmental event helped supply Ohio with the laborers necessary to

“improve” from a state of nature to a productive interior colony. Cleaveland grew from

its meager early population to 606 in 1820. By the mid-1820s, a recent emigrant observed

the rough-hewn appearance of the frontier city, noting “the Public Square was begemmed

with stumps,” recently cut to create “its crowning jewel, a log courthouse.” “The eastern

border of the Square,” the hopeful pioneer remembered, “was skirted by the native forest

14 Robert Evans, “Blast from the Past,” Smithsonian (July 2002); Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000): 54-5, 170; Hatcher, 57. As quoted in Fagan, 170. 42

which abounded in rabbits and squirrels and afforded the villagers a ’happy hunting ground.’” In the 1830s, when the city’s name took on its current form, Cleveland’s population nearly doubled to 1,075 and supported two newspapers, several churches, and a public market. This influx of population to Ohio elected a growing number of representatives to the U.S. Congress, who in turn made Franklin and Washington’s dreams reality by approving legislation to dredge the Cuyahoga of its snags and sandbars, create a safe harbor for lake transportation, and construct the Ohio and Erie canal to connect lake and river commerce to oceanic markets.15

These early Ohio settlers, with the experience of “the year without a summer”

behind them and the promise of a growing market for their produce, converted the

woodland environment of the region to arable farmland at a rapid pace. Although settlers

possessed many strategies for clearing the dense woodland on their property, fire served

as the quickest remedy to nature’s obstacles. The same early settler to the Western

Reserve, who “did little else than take care of the sick” for four weeks, immediately

“Burnt the Brush on about nine Acres” once the illness passed. Fire, not a commercial

lumber industry, aided settlers in reducing the ninety-five percent of Ohio lands covered

in forest to a mere five percent by the close of the nineteenth century.16

15 As quoted in Edmund H. Chapman, Cleveland: Village to Metropolis (Cleveland: The Press of Western Reserve Univ., 1964): 21. Population figured taken from Campbell Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990,” US Census Bureau (June 1998). Accessed from (http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/twps0027.html), 26 September 2008. 16 As quoted in Wheeler, 62. Lafferty, 276-7. That European settlement, whether in Australia, North America, or Africa, relied on fire as its chief means to dispose of forest cover has led some climatologists to suggest that the Little Ice Age ended prematurely due to the exponential rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce by the world-wide conflagration. In his environmental history of the twentieth century J.R. McNeill argues that deforestation represented as much as a fifth of total carbon dioxide emissions. See J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000): 109. 43

Animals, too, served as obstacles to settlement and the dreams of market success.

Wolves, bears, and wildcats made easy prey of the domesticated animals that

accompanied settlers. A tavern owner near the mouth of the Scioto River reported only a

few years after the flood of settlement in 1816 that bears “devour many hogs and sheep.”

Depredations increased during the late summer and fall as bears, in preparation for

hibernation, gorged themselves for up to twenty hours a day. William Faux, an English

farmer who explored Ohio between 1818 and 1820, reported, “It is no uncommon sight to

see hogs escape home with the loss of a pound or two of living flesh.” Bears likewise

made easy meals of the fruit trees, maize, berry patches, and bee colonies that settlers had

assiduously nourished and maintained. The Eden that early Ohio residents hoped to craft

from the forest was being consumed by the country’s original inhabitants. This would not

be the last time that natural forces—be it in the form of a hungry bear, a wind current, or

a flowing river—would fail to respect private property boundaries.17

If fire served to remove unproductive vegetation, firearms secured the frontier

settlements from predatory animals. Bounties existed on mountain lions and wolves early

in the state’s history, but expired with the animals, who vanished by the 1830s and 1840s.

When bounties failed, local governments and private organizations coordinated large

hunts to win a territory over for market production. Having lost as many as 100 sheep in

one night, settlers of Hinckley Township to the southwest of Cleveland organized a “war

of extermination” against the animal threat. After spreading word among their neighbors,

and assigning former army officers leadership positions, 600 men assembled for the so-

17 Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, Vol. IX, “Flint’s Letters From America, 1818-1820” (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904): 116; Thwaites, Vol. XI, “Part I (1818-1819) of Faux’s Memorable Days in America, November 27, 1818-July 21, 1820” (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904): 228. 44

called “Great Hinckley Hunt” in the autumn of 1818. Armed with muskets, knives and

axes, the hunters formed a human line and encircled the forest. A slaughter ensued in

which three hundred deer, twenty-one bears, seventeen wolves, and hundreds of turkeys,

foxes, and raccoons perished. The victors sustained only a single casualty, a minor

buckshot wound earned in the fog of war. In a single stroke, the township of Hinckley

had been secured from the primeval forces that threatened to break a farmer’s fence,

consume a winter store of grain, or mutilate livestock. Environmental writer Daniel

Quinn has called this particular form of subsistence totalitarian agriculture because,

unlike mixed subsistence systems such as horticulture and hunting and gathering, it

replaces complex ecosystems with (often) a single crop. Aside from the most basic

natural systems—sun, oxygen, soil minerals, precipitation—nature’s fecundity is a nuisance that frustrates mastery over domestic plants and animals. This ethos of totalitarian agriculture was reinforced during the early republic period and would inform the actions of the first industrialists, such as Rockefeller.18

These events weigh heavily on the history of the petroleum economy as it

developed in industrial Cleveland during the second half of the nineteenth century. In

them, we see the development of a frontier culture, born in a time of desperate want,

which sought to clear any obstacle in the path of material progress. By the late nineteenth

century, when Cleveland came closest to fulfilling the aspirations of early settlers, this

same frontier experience explains in part why many in business and government failed to

respect the movement to abate urban pollution. A few belching smokestacks not only

seemed a trifle compared to previous subsistence crises but were easily associated with

18 Lafferty, 10, 12-13; Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004): 123; Daniel Quinn, The Story of B: An Adventure of Mind and Spirit (New York: Bantam, 1997): 247. 45

liberation from previous environmental limits. J.R. McNeill’s global environmental

history of the twentieth century includes numerous examples of early celebrations of

industrial pollution, including the anthem of the Japanese steel town of Yawata:

Billows of smoke filling the sky Our steel plant, a grandeur unmatched: Yawata, O Yawata, our city!19

Organizing Nature

The eruption of Mt. Tambora and the resulting subsistence crisis in New England supplied the struggling village of Cleveland with a labor force, but the canal connecting the Cuyahoga with the Ohio River brought that labor into the service of the developing

Atlantic market. Work began on the canal in 1825 and within two years it linked the navigable mouth of the Cuyahoga at Cleveland with the booming mill town of Akron, forty miles to the southeast. By 1832, merchants could ship their wares from Cleveland, through Akron, and on to the Ohio River, giving them access to trade with the growing nation’s interior and the entrepôt of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi.

William Bullock traveled from New Orleans to New York entirely by river in 1827 and found the canal path “already fully developed, in its whole line, crowded with boats of considerable size, laden with the various produce of the western and northern states.”

This link with the Atlantic economy served as a catalyst for further growth of Cleveland, perfectly positioned at the intersection of Lake Erie and the canal path. Bullock noted a flood of emigrants seeking the new opportunities created by the canal in his journal. “It was really surprising to see the number of poor emigrants,” wrote Bullock, “thus proceeding to their destination (many of them were Irish, and on their way to the Ohio),

19 Mcneill, 59. 46

induced to try their fortune with their countrymen.”20

The canal insured not only the growth of Cleveland, but also a system of surplus

production for a global economy. As mentioned earlier, Amerindians participated in

continental trade before European settlement but the advent of market production in the

Great Lakes region meant that, for the first time, most of the food, timber, and animal

flesh produced in the area would be consumed by humans living elsewhere. This

separation of production from consumption would continue to yawn wider with the

development of transportation technology and marked the most significant change in the

relationship between humans and the land since the arrival of “Old World” plants and

animals in the colonial era. In 1827, a canal from Cleveland to Portsmouth, Ohio on the

Ohio River opened to traffic. By 1836, four years after completion of the Ohio and Erie

Canal, the city of Cleveland alone collected $60,583.36 in canal tolls, a significant sum

that reflects heavy traffic and the realization of the dreams of Washington and Franklin.

At midcentury, the figure peaked at $90,874.20, trailing off with the entrance of the

railroad and the advent of all-season travel (shallow canals froze during winter). Entering

the city in 1851, the Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati Railroad would only be the

first of several lines to link the city to the continental market and effectively capture the

canal trade. These dramatic changes are evident in canal receipts in the decade straddling

the advent of rail transport. Cleveland’s canal exports dropped precipitously from 1851 to

1861, from 656,000 to 455,000 barrels of flour, 2,142,000 to 912,000 barrels of wheat,

and 905,000 to 146,000 barrels of corn. On the eve of the civil war, canal shipments for

20 Ted Steinberg has documented the various ecologic push and pull factors leading to the westward migration. See especially Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 2009):46-50. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, vol XIX, “William Bullock’s Journey from New Orleans to New York, 1827” (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1905): 151. 47

these three commodities dropped to a tenth of their pre-railroad levels (4,174,000 barrels in 1851 vs 459,000 in 1861). The population of the frontier village, which had hunted game in the forest surrounding Public Square in the 1820s, grew sixteen fold (1,075 –

17,034) in the generation between the completion of the canal in 1832 and the mid- century mark. On the eve of the Civil War, the city’s population had more than doubled again to 43,417.21

Frontier Finance

John D. Rockefeller entered the bustling frontier market after it had already been

transformed by a generation of infrastructure improvements and an exploding population.

His family contributed to this latter phenomenon by migrating from the burned-over

district of western New York to Cleveland in the early 1850s. Before his move to

Cleveland, young John learned about finance through firsthand experience of managing

his family’s meager wealth. His father, William Rockefeller, eschewed the nascent wage

labor economy by making a living as a peddler before its full incorporation into the

capitalist economy in the twentieth century as the “travelling salesman.” “Big Bill” won marksman contests, peddled questionable botanical medicines, faked his way into people’s pockets by posing as a deaf-mute, and some biographers contend married John’s

mother in a bid for her family’s wealth. His commercial jaunts separated him from

the family for extended spells, but he groomed John in money matters. Bill sent John to purchase wood for the family house and imparted an early sense of economy. “My father

21 For a general history of the planning of the Erie Canal see Gerard Koeppel, Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2009). Ernest Ludlow Bogart, Internal Improvements and State Debt in Ohio: An Essay in Economic History (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924): v. Canal toll figures in Chapman, 37. Canal recipt cited in Harry N. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820-1861 (Athens: The Ohio Univ Press, 1969): 321. 48

told me to select only the solid wood and the straight wood and not to put any limbs in it

or any punky wood,” John recalled later in his life. Bill gave his children lessons in

bookkeeping important to a transient life that required a careful calculation of profit and

loss and imparted these teachings in his own idiosyncratic way, allegedly claiming that “I

cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make ’em sharp.”22

John absorbed these lessons and employed them at an early age. “To my father I

owe a great debt in that he himself trained me to practical ways,” Rockefeller

remembered in his autobiography. He expanded on the lessons imparted from father to

son, “He was engaged in different enterprises; he used to tell me about these things,

explaining their significance; and he taught me the principles and methods of business.

From early boyhood I kept a little book which I remember I called Ledger A—and this

little volume is still preserved—containing my receipts and expenditures as well as an

account of the small sums that I was taught to give away regularly.” Young John bought

candy in bulk and sold it individually at a modest mark up, began saving his overhead, and at age seven stole eggs from a wild turkey nest and began a small but profitable livestock trade. Even at an early age, John knew the value of taking advantage of nature’s fecundity. As a child, John displayed an instrumentalist understanding of the natural world that would later prove foundational to his business success. A product of his time,

Rockefeller’s childhood was marked by the complete absence of any recognition of nature as the source of wealth with its own rules. Instead, he viewed the environment as a

22 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998): 6-25, JDR as quoted on 25. William Rockefeller as quoted in Grant Segall, John D. Rockefeller: Anointed With Oil (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 2001): 15-16; John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909): 28-29. For the historical transformation of peddling into the sales profession see Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 49

mere setting, which humans could manipulate to better themselves. This penchant to alter

environments, which would later manifest itself in polluted skies, dredged rivers, and

man-made lakefront real estate had its own foreshadowing in frontier New York. “I

remember when I was hardly more than a boy,” Rockefeller wrote in his autobiography,

“I wanted to cut away a big tree which I thought interfered with the view from the

windows of the dining-room of our house.” Although some of his family objected, he

felled the tree before breakfast to avoid their interference. “So it turned out,” a reflective

Rockefeller concluded.23

With the family uprooted and beginning anew in the bustling canal town of

Cleveland, John applied these lessons and quickly earned a reputation as an able

bookkeeper for local produce firms that connected Cleveland’s agricultural hinterland to

the Atlantic market. After several years of growth with the help of the young talent, the

grocer Maurice Clark accepted Rockefeller’s offer to enter a partnership to connect the

grain and meat of Cleveland’s frontier with hungry urban populations. The partnership,

brokered in 1859, would become the foundation of Standard Oil’s empire. Rockefeller

made the gamble of a lifetime by investing the entirety of his life savings in the venture.

What likely would have been a modest but reliable source of income became a jackpot of

riches with the start of the Civil War a year later. By mastering environmental

improvements built in the previous generation to connect produce of the frontier with an army of hungry stomachs, Rockefeller and Clark’s business raked in no less than $17,000 each year of the war.24

23 Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events : 28-29, 33; Chernow, 17. 24 Thomas G. Manning, The Standard Oil Company: The Rise of a National Monopoly (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1960): 1. 50

Rockefeller’s acuity for delivering resources through a system of railcars, canal boats, and wagons to merchants hundreds of miles away emanated from a profound understanding of the landscapes surrounding him. The transportation network constructed during Ohio’s settlement divorced human settlements from the limits imposed by nature.

Whereas Amerindian and early frontier communities confronted the stark choice between migration and starvation if they consumed more than the land could produce, transportation technology liberated the increasingly urban population of nineteenth- century America from these previous limits by connecting them to the totalitarian agriculture that was replacing the eastern woodland with a checkerboard of crop and pasture land. The price mechanism replaced natural limits by reflecting the relative scarcity of natural resources. As many environmental historians have demonstrated, the coming of capitalism to North American ecosystems represents one of the most significant changes in the relationship between humans and their environment.

Although Rockefeller is most well-known for birthing the modern petroleum industry, he cut his teeth during the market revolution when the North American continental environment was transformed into a collection of commodities in the American mind.25

Few Americans understood this transformation better than agricultural jobbers

like John D. Rockefeller and Maurice B. Clark. The system linking productive landscapes

to increasingly distant consumer markets was legible to minds able to reduce an entire river valley to a collection of goods assigned fluctuating prices. Thus, when a new resource entered this bustling market in the late summer of 1859, a mere eighty miles to the east of Cleveland, Rockefeller wasted little time incorporating it into his enterprise.

25 See especially Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): xi; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983): 161. 51

Rock oil, or petroleum, had long oozed from the hills of western Pennsylvania.

Entrepreneurs bottled the dark green liquid on their travels through the region and

proscribed libations of it to frontier settlers as a cure-all for ills as diverse as cholera, bronchitis, and consumption. One Pittsburgh resident, Samuel Kier, established a business to peddle “Kier’s Petroleum or Rock Oil,” advertising the bottles of crude oil as

“Nature’s Remedy Celebrated for its Wonderful Curative Powers.” Kier penned a poem

to market his product that reflects the hopes connected to the new commodity:

The Healthful balm, from Nature’s secret spring, The bloom of health, and life, to man will bring; As from her depths the magic liquid flows, To calm our sufferings, and assuage our woes.26

Ironically, in its early commercial life petroleum would have been better suited to

the business acumen of William rather than John Rockefeller. It remained little more than

a trifling, quack medicine and a nuisance to the salt mines of western Pennsylvania until

the middle of the nineteenth-century.

Illuminating the Darkness

The rise of petroleum cannot be understood in the absence of a history of the resource it

replaced—whale oil. The European whaling industry likely began with Basque fishermen

prowling the Bay of Biscay along the Atlantic coast of Spain and France. Although a

single whale produced hundreds of pounds of meat and bone, these early seafaring

hunters prized the whale’s fatty blubber. A host of manufactures emerged from the

26 Ida M. Tarbell, The History of The Standard Oil Company, vol. I (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1963): 5. As quoted in Henry H. Townshend, New Haven and the First Oil Well (New Haven: Privately Printed, 1934): 2. 52

whaling industry. Whale bones, for instance, were crafted into combs and other luxuries,

or reinforced cultured notions of feminine beauty by providing the rigid support of

corsets and hoop skirts. The trade in whale oil, however, proved the most valuable and

significant by-product of the industry for European societies. By extracting the thick layer of cetacean blubber and boiling it, whalers produced a spectrum of products from

soap to lubricants by converting their ships into floating refineries. In Moby Dick,

Herman Melville captures the visceral labor required to mine the veins of spermaceti and ambergris from whale carcasses.

One day the planks stream with blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale’s head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems a great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening....The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil.

The highest grade of whale oil distilled in these primitive stills produced a brilliant light

and little smoke when used as an illuminant in lamps and lanterns. By the fourteenth

century, European whalers ventured as far as the coast of Newfoundland—predating

Columbus’s “discovery” by more than a century.27

By the sixteenth century a merchant writing to Richard Hakluyt, the staunch

British advocate of American colonization, reported the attraction of the Newfoundland whaling fishery to England’s competing empires. “[T]here were generally more than one hundred sail of Spaniards taking cod,” the traveler wrote, “and from twenty to thirty killing whales; fifty sail of Portuguese; one hundred and fifty sail of French and Bretons, mostly very small; but of English only fifty sail.” In fact, in 1614 Captain John Smith

27 J. T. Jenkins, A History of the Whale Fisheries (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1921): 64. Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or, The White Whale (Boston: C. H. Simonds Co., 1922): 401-404.

53

delayed his mission to Jamestown on account of whales—lured by the bountiful fishery

off the New England coast. While not as significant as tobacco or sugar, whale oil fueled

England’s colonial economy during settlement, particularly in New England. All along

the New England coastline—from the tip of Long Island to Maine—whaling

communities emerged to profit by linking the copious bounty of the northern Atlantic

with the lamps and lanterns lighting the European metropolis. By the end of the

seventeenth century, the British royal agent Edward Randolph took note of the

burgeoning industry in his appraisal of colonial trade. Although “beaver and peltry fayle

us,” Randolph reported back to the English crown, “New Plimouth Colony have great

profit by whale killing.” “I believe,” Randolph concluded, “it will be one of our best

returns.”28

Randolph’s letters to London urged the crown to control colonial trade through taxation by employing the economic system modern scholars describe as mercantilism.

By the time the American republic tore itself away from its colonial parent at the close of the eighteenth century, the new economic freedom led to a boom in whaling communities like Sag Harbor, New York and Nantucket Island. Thomas Jefferson, ever obsessed with converting the North American wilderness to marketable commodities, grasped the economic importance of the American whaling industry. “Whale oil enters, as a raw material, into several branches of manufacture, as of wool, leather, soap: it is used also in painting, architecture and navigation,” wrote Jefferson in 1788. “[I]ts great consumption,” the future third President observed, “is in lighting houses and cities.”29

28 As quoted in Jenkins, 74, 224; 223. 29 As quoted in Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906 (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997): 342. 54

Whale oil lubricated the buzzing spindles at Lowell and burned in the headlights

of the first railroad engines to pierce the continent’s interior. As the nation developed its

industries, the demand for whale oil boomed; however, the trade also decimated cetacean

populations. As early as 1791, Nantucket whalers rounded Cape Horn and entered the

Pacific for the first time, the Atlantic herds too diminished to profitably hunt. In 1820, the

whaling fleet searched as far as the Japanese coast. By 1848, Sag Harbor whalers sailed

through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Circle in search of their prey. When Herman

Melville published his romantic tale of the struggle between Captain Ahab and Moby-

Dick in 1851, the whaling industry peaked as the fifth-largest American industry before

entering a period of permanent decline. New England whalers lost entire crews to the

gold mines of California as vessels resupplied in Pacific ports during the 1850s. In the

Civil War, Union commanders employed thirty-eight New England whaling vessels in

the war effort by loading them with ballast, sailing them into Charleston Harbor, and

scuttling them in the hopes of blockading the Confederate port. Markets demanded more than nature could supply, leading to the collapse of an entire industry and, more importantly, the ecological base that supported it.30

As fewer barrels of whale oil returned to New England ports, the value of whale

oil priced it out of use for all but the rich. By 1862, oils derived from animal fats replaced

whale oil in American lighthouses, and aspiring entrepreneurs struggled to improve the

quality of lard illuminants by experimenting with lamp designs and diverse chemical

combinations. Supplies began to dry up for Midwestern jobbers even earlier, as Atlantic

urban markets drained much of the diminishing oil. Advertisements like the one W. Lyon

30 Ibid, 348, 351. Jenkins, 232-235, 242. Peter Applebome, “They Used to Say Whale Oil Was Indispensible, Too” The New York Times, 3 August 2008. 55

& Company purchased in the Cleveland Morning Leader in 1854, announcing “15

b[arrel]s winter bleached Whale Oil…Just rec[eive]d and for sale,” became increasingly

rare and would have caught the attention of the city’s enterprising merchants.31

“Oildorado”32

The petroleum age was born of commercial curiosity when the geological science requisite to fully comprehend and exploit the new resource was still separating

speculation from observation. Paul Lucier, a historian of science and technology, has

called attention to the tension between the ideals of the scientific enterprise and the

exercise of scientific authority for personal gain that emerged as the young industry

attempted to fully understand the material properties of its commodity. “Nowhere was the

corruption more spectacular than in the new petroleum industry” as scientists traded

accusations of fraud and perversion of data for self-serving ends. By the mid-1850s, two

New England professionals with land holdings in western Pennsylvania decided to explore the combustive qualities of the mysterious green fluid that oozed onto the surface of their property. J. G. Eveleth and George H. Bissell collected samples of the crude petroleum and paid Benjamin Silliman, Jr., professor of chemistry at Yale, to run a series of experiments on the fluid and prepare a detailed report. Silliman burned the samples delivered to him in a variety of lamps and recorded the amount of smoke produced and, using a photometer, the luminosity of the flame. “I cannot refrain from expressing my

31 Davis et al, 356. Cleveland Morning Leader, 16 March 1854: 3 32 Early drillers applied such names to oil fields and journalists applied similar names in the absence of romantic imagery that recalled the gold and silver booms in the US West previous to the advent of the petroleum industry. The title of Brian Black’s recent study of the early oil economy borrows from this naming tradition. “Journalists created headings such as “Oildom,” “Oildorado,” and “Petrolia” to include each aspect of life in the Oil Creek valley that went into making up the myth of the oil industry.” See Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2000): 65. 56

satisfaction at the results of these photometric experiments,” Silliman wrote in his report,

delivered on 16 April 1856. “[T]hey have given the Oil of your Company a much higher

value as an illuminator than I had dared to hope.” By subjecting the samples to variations

in temperature, Silliman discovered additional uses for petroleum. “As this oil does not

gum or become acid or-rancid by exposure…as well as…its wonderful resistance to

extreme cold,” Silliman believed his experiments demonstrated petroleum’s “important

qualities for a lubricator.” Bissell and Eveleth could not have received better news. They

secured a charter from the Connecticut legislature in November of 1856, and formed the

Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company to manufacture and distribute petroleum from their land

in Venango County, Pennsylvania. They enticed other New England merchants to join

their enterprise and reorganized the company in 1858 as the Seneca Oil Company,

initially capitalized with $300,000 worth of subscriptions divided into 12,000 shares.

Petroleum stepped out of its role as curiosity and into the modern market.33

With the scientific viability of harnessing the new resource to the market

established with Silliman’s report and having secured a legal framework with the joint -

stock company, only one obstacle remained before the group of New England capitalists

could actuate their enterprise. No efficient method had yet been devised to deliver the

petroleum that bled from their land to markets. The contemporary method of ladling by

hand oil from surface pools into containers would never satisfy the millions of lamps in

the Atlantic market. The company charged Edwin Drake, a New Haven dry goods

merchant and majority investor, with realizing the aspirations of the joint stock company.

33 As quoted in J. T. Henry, The Early and Later History of Petroleum, vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1873): 53; Townshend, 18. Paul Lucier, “The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America,” Isis 100 (2009): 699-732. 57

Granted capital to lease lands and purchase equipment, Drake believed that salt-boring

technology stood the best chance of tapping the subterranean roots of petroleum fields.

Wild theories swirled about the origins and distribution of petroleum at this time.

With the study of geological science still coming to terms with the works of Charles

Lyell, the only applicable knowledge rested in the mining industry. Underground veins of

coal or metals were fundamentally different, however, from the subterranean geology of a

liquid. Diviners, oil smellers, and other spiritualists flocked to the oil regions, at times

commanding fees as high as $100. Drake too claimed a preternatural knowledge of the

Allegheny subsurface, declaring that visions of the underground deposits of crude oil

came to him in dreams.34

When Drake’s gamble of drilling paid off on 27 August 1859 (covered in more

detail in chapter 2) his fellow investors in the Seneca Oil Company had already judged

the enterprise impractical. Days after Drake’s bit bored into a pocket of crude sixty-nine feet below the Pennsylvania earth, he received a final stipend of $500 and instructions to abandon the enterprise and return to New Haven. Although the strike reversed the short term fortunes of the Seneca Oil Company, environmental realities eventually caught up to them. The company held several tracts of land but petroleum, like subsurface water, did not conform to such legal contrivances.35

Within a year’s time, an “Oil Rush” came to the western Pennsylvania fields.

Local landholders leased their land to anyone able to pay inflated rates and begin drilling

immediately. Lands near producing wells were gobbled up by fortune seekers and

businessmen in the hopes of repeating Drake’s discovery. Less than a year after the first

34 Harold F. Williamson and Arnold R. Daum, The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Illumination, 1859-1899 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1959): 90-91. Townshend, 15. 35 Ibid, 22-23. 58

successful strike, no fewer than twenty-one wells began operations surrounding Drake’s

well. As wildcat drillers sunk more holes into the field, they discovered they had to drill

ever deeper to extract a diminishing quantity of crude. Thus, the early, hardscrabble days

of the petroleum industry were marked by misinformation, experimentation, and waste.

Legal rulings reinforced this trend by applying the Rule of Capture, which declared the

“owner of a tract of land acquires title to the oil and gas…though it may be proved that

part of such oil and gas migrated from adjoining lands.” The Rule of Capture evolved

from case law—Pierson v. Post (1805) and Acton v. Blundell (1843)—for first animal

then water resources that moved across property boundaries. Although it became

formally established in regards to petroleum when in 1889 the Supreme Court of

Pennsylvania established that “If an adjoining, or even distant, owner, drills his own land,

and taps your gas, so that it comes into his well and under his control, it is no longer

yours, but his” the law merely reflected decades of practice.36

Despite organizing a scientific, legal, and technological basis for the petroleum

industry, the Seneca Oil Company operated under a deficit by 1862. In the spring of

1864, the investors agreed to sell all assets, settle all debts, and close their enterprise. The

early years of the petroleum industry did not portend its future success as a replacement

for whale oil.37

Standardization

36 Williamson and Daum, 92-93, 101. As quoted in Celia Campbell-Mohn, ed., Environmental Law: From Resources to Recovery (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1993): 700. Westmoreland & Cambria Natural Gas Co. v. Dewitt 18 A. 724 (Pa. 1889). On the informal use of the Rule of Capture see Celia Campbell-Mohn, ed., Environmental Law: From Resources to Recovery (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1993): 700; David O. Whitten and Bessie E. Whitten, The Birth of Big Business in the United States, 1860-1914: Commercial, Extractive, and Industrial Enterprise (Westport: Praeger, 2006): 138. 37 Townshend, 29. 59

Observing the birth of this new industry from his dry goods commission in Cleveland,

John D. Rockefeller perceived a business opportunity. Later in life, Rockefeller described

the Pennsylvania oil regions as a “mining camp” run by “wild mining men.” Rather than

purchase producing land or try his hand at a speculative lease, Rockefeller understood

that a steady supply of crude petroleum created a situation in Cleveland unavailable in

western Pennsylvania. By focusing on adding value to the resource by refining it into

kerosene and industrial lubricants, Rockefeller could exercise both control over the

resource and apply his acuity in supplying markets at low cost and maximum profit.38

Rockefeller, together with the Clark brothers as equity partners, entered the

petroleum market by building an oil refinery at the confluence of the Cuyahoga and a

tributary, Kingsbury Run, in 1863. The refinery, bordered by the river and the Atlantic

and Great Western Railroad, was perfectly situated to capitalize on the region’s

overlapping transportation infrastructure via lake steamer, railroad engine, or canal barge.

The Clark brothers brought in a fellow Englishman, Samuel Andrews, a chemical

engineer who successfully refined some of the first crude petroleum into kerosene in

Cleveland, to make a science of the alchemy of converting crude oil into profits.39

Faced with, as he called it, “ruinous competition,” Rockefeller fell upon the

“principles of centralization” to capture the kerosene trade. Rockefeller integrated as

many factors of production as possible within the Kingsbury Run works. For example,

the primary method for transporting crude petroleum were hooped wooden barrels—still

the standard of measuring oil commodities despite their obsolescence. Rockefeller

38 David Freeman Hawke, John D. Rockefeller Interview: 1917-1920 (Pocantico Hills: Rockefeller Archive Center, 1984): 43. 39 Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940): 178. 60

demanded not only the construction of a cooperage at the Kingsbury site, but also

acquired tracts of forest to supply it. Although they questioned Rockefeller’s need to extend the debts of Clark, Andrews, and Company, the Clark brothers eventually softened to the young clerk’s desires. After all, with twenty refineries in Cleveland, the price of barrels soared as high as $2.50 a piece at a time when the crude petroleum it carried demanded thirty-two cents a gallon, or 18% of the value of a full 42-gallon barrel.

As a commodity merchant, Rockefeller fully understood the economy of natural resources—the closer one brings consumption to production, the less waste one incurs.

Like the builders of the canals and railroads, Rockefeller understood that nature’s unconformity could produce waste, and waste begot further costs. His father’s woodlot lessons had fully matured in his own mind into a rational system of eliminating costs by controlling every possible stage of production, including nature itself.40

When Rockefeller’s coopers organized for fair wages, he locked them out and

eventually replaced them with machines operated by unskilled Czech immigrants. When

the economy soured in the mid-1870s, Rockefeller cut the wages of his Czech coopers from twelve to nine cents per barrel, which resulted in a general strike of all laborers making less than a dollar a day throughout Cleveland. Like the canal-builder, Rockefeller straightened the crooked whims of his environment and produced barrels at a cost of ninety-six cents while his competitors purchased them at more than twice that amount.

Rockefeller is best known for vertically integrating his industry and, as a result, maximizing profit by eliminating waste. His zeal for vertical integration was merely the

40 Hawke, 87; William Donohue Ellis, The Cuyahoga (Dayton: Landfall Press, Inc., 1975): 154. On number of refineries see Nevins, John D., 178. On barrel and petroleum costs see Allan Nevins, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953): 33, 21. 61

industrial application of the same principles that helped him capture the dry goods

market. Nature was reorganized to concentrate wealth in his hands and transfer waste or

costs outside of the legal framework of his business.41

With the close of the Civil War, Rockefeller had invested himself wholeheartedly

in the petroleum industry. He purchased the remaining shares of the Clark brothers, who

had grown weary of Rockefeller’s constant desire to expand and incur debts, for $72,500.

Rockefeller retained Samuel Andrews to run his refinery, which by the close of 1865 was the largest in Cleveland with a capitalization of $200,000. Still five years away from the incorporation of the Standard Oil Company, Rockefeller focused on consolidating his share of the market in Cleveland.42

Conclusion

During the decade in which Rockefeller emigrated from New York and won a place

among the merchants of Cleveland, the city’s population exploded from 17,034 in 1850

to 43,417 by 1860. The technological alterations of their environment—the canal, river

dredging, railroads, and steam propulsion—allowed the metropolis to burden the land at

the mouth of the Cuyahoga with more people than it could support alone. Rockefeller’s

growing control of the petroleum industry that began in 1859 represented a new

relationship between Americans and their environment. The system of intensive

agriculture brought to the forests of northeast Ohio in the early nineteenth century earned

the new settlers the freedom to inhabit the same land throughout the year, for their

surplus harvest traveled over a network of canals and railroads to feed growing urban

41 Cleveland Leader, 24 April 1877: 7. Cleveland Leader, 21 April 1877: 8. Nevins, Study in Power, 33-34. 42 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1992): 35; Nevins, Study in Power, 37. 62

populations. Rockefeller built the capital to enter the petroleum trade in America’s

frontier market economy by not only imagining the natural world as a collection of

commodities in need of a market but in constructing a rationalized system to eliminate as

many costs between producer and consumer as possible.

The petroleum industry built upon the frontier network of natural “improvements”

shattered apparent ties to the land. Where Amerindians and American subsistence farmers

had calibrated their year to the cycles of food production, capitalists at the close of the

nineteenth century began to transgress even the daily cycle of the sun as millions of

kerosene lamps brightened the night. It is telling that, in an era when Americans

increasingly associated food with urban stores rather than farms, petroleum would cause

a second sun to rise every night with little thought of the millions of years or geology

required to produce a single drop of kerosene.43

A visitor to Cleveland captured these changes in a brief description of the

industrializing metropolis. “The old pasture grounds of the cows of 1850 are now

completely occupied by oil refineries and manufacturing establishments; and the river,

which but a generation ago flowed peaceful and placid through green fields, is now

almost choked with barges, tugs, and immense rafts…the view, though far from beautiful, is a very interesting one.” Nature had been reorganized to fit human goals of commodity production.44

43 Although his work focuses primarily on electrification, historian Wolfgang Schivelbush’s history of artificial light parallels the cultural impact of kerosene illumination during the nineteenth century. See Wolfgang Schivelbush, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1995). 44 As quoted in Thomas F. Campbell and Edward M. Miggins, eds., The Birth of Modern Cleveland, 1865- 1930, Harold C. Livesay, From Steeples to Smokestacks: The Birth of the Modern Corporation in Cleveland (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1988): 61. 63

CHAPTER TWO

Fire

In late March, 1877, Peter G. Golden had an accident. While Golden removed weights atop a boiler plate at the Standard Oil Works in Cleveland, Ohio, his supervisor ignited trays of gasoline placed below the plate without knowing Peter remained in harm’s way.

In a flash, Golden became engulfed in flame. By the time he was removed from the fire,

Golden’s face, hands, and body had received terrible burns. The incident rendered

Golden unable to return to his craft of boiler making and in early autumn he filed suit against the Standard Oil Company in the Court of Common Pleas for $10,000 in damages. His counsel argued that Golden’s supervisor had failed to notify his employees of the imminent flames and the careless use of the explosive fluid by the company rendered Standard Oil liable. As the Standard Oil Company grew from a modest start along the banks of the Cuyahoga River in 1870 to controlling a global monopoly over the refining, marketing, and retailing of illuminants in 1890, a lot more accidents and accusations were in the making as profits and convenience superseded worker and consumer safety. “[C]onflagrations were symptomatic of the overall priorities with which the oil industry viewed the entire landscape,” petroleum historian Brian Black argues. His assertion that “Americans were fully willing to write off” fire losses in Pennsylvania’s producing regions “if it could provide them a steady supply of valuable crude” found dangerous parallels in refining and consumption of kerosene. Standard Oil and an anti- regulatory environment encouraged a moral system based on caveat emptor that assigned 64

fire as another cost of affordable illumination.1

Having no market for gasoline, the Standard Oil Company sought any profitable

use for the fluid. By employing a boilermaker and utilizing the dangerous vapor as a fuel

for molding boiler plates, Standard at once eliminated the need to store the flammable

nuisance and brought yet another level of production under their control. Peter Golden’s

fate was entangled within the logic of vertical integration that Standard Oil championed,

the industrial capitalist desire to control the flow of its commodity from the derrick to the

consumer. Victims such as Golden failed to enter the calculations of Standard’s owners.

“We had set ourselves the task of building up as rapidly and as broadly as possible the

volume of consumption,” recalled John D. Rockefeller years after the corporation made

him the richest man in the world. “I am convinced,” Rockefeller wrote of the corporation

he helped midwife into the world, “it has done well its work of supplying to the people

the products from petroleum at prices which have decreased as the efficiency of the

business has been built up.” The “equation of freedom with limited government and

laissez-faire economics,” as the American historian Eric Foner has written, meant the

Gilded Age workplace was dominated by the rule of personal liability even in cases of

hazards created by management in an effort to squeeze profits from otherwise worthless

waste products.2

The foundation for the dominant efficiency model of the rise of the managerial

corporate form advocated by Alfred D. Chandler rests on the simple premise that

business giants, such as Standard Oil, rose to capture Gilded Age markets by

1 Peter G. Golden vs. The Standard Oil Company, Annals of Cleveland Court Record Series, Vol. X, 1875- 1877 (Cleveland: 1939): 222-223. Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2000): 81. 2 John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909): 57-58; Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998): 120. 65

overwhelming their rivals by delivering superior, low-cost products cheaper than the decentralized, traditional enterprises of the nineteenth century. The story of gasoline, naptha, and other by-products of kerosene production explodes this tidy argument by revealing the public costs that lie behind the mask of efficiency. Refining petroleum into kerosene became a corporate gambit in the laissez faire regulatory environment of the

Gilded Age in which the corporation wagered public safety in order to reap higher profits. As the company watered down its kerosene stock the costs were shifted to the public in the form of explosive, below standard illuminating oil. While kerosene offered consumers a low-cost, highly luminous alternative to animal and plant-based illuminants, its volatility represented a new industrial danger its comparatively inert alternatives lacked. As consumer casualties mounted and petroleum industrial corridors literally exploded, the anti-regulation environment of Gilded Age America failed to balance public safety and corporate rights in reacting to the new communal burden. In the end, corporate rights prevailed with minor concessions that served as the limits of capitalist power. Standard Oil achieved market dominance through efficiency and brute force, but the untold story of how the petroleum giant eliminated wastes by passing them on to the consumer in the form of exploding lamps and public taxes to fund a municipal fire department exposes a severe flaw in the Chandlerian thesis. This chapter exposes the concealed costs of efficiency in the production of petroleum illuminants by telling the story of what happened once this flammable fluid emerged from its subterranean home, flowed through the alleyways of Gilded Age commerce, and found itself in the factories, barns, and bedsides of millions of Americans.

66

Production

Although petroleum had been observed and used since ancient times, the Drake well strike of 1859 and the Standard Oil Company’s refining and distribution apparatus developed in the following decades made oil and its products cheap and ubiquitous by the

1870s. An energy revolution ensued in which renewable animal and plant based illuminating and lubricating products—tallow, lard, whale oil, turpentine, vegetable oil— lost favor to cheaper petroleum derivatives—kerosene, gasoline, Vaseline, and tar. What once took months or years to grow in forests, seas, and the range could be had with a simple salt-bore, steam engine, and a little luck. Although inexpensive, crude petroleum and its derivatives proved far more dangerous—boilermakers like Peter Golden were accustomed to using wood or coal as fuel for molding steel. While certainly dangerous, the renewable fuels petroleum replaced burned less intensely and remained relatively immobile once aflame.

Getting at the crude petroleum deep within the western Pennsylvania earth presented its own dangers. Some pockets of crude oil, heated by the pressure and friction of the surrounding layers of rock, partially refine in situ, creating an array of vapor, gas, and liquid that produces the intense internal pressure termed a “gusher” once penetrated.

Many wells, however, require active pumping of gas or water into the petroleum pocket to create pressure to draw the dark green liquid to the surface. Edwin Drake employed a five-horsepower steamboat engine at the first well in Titusville, Pennsylvania to draw his first barrel from the earth in 1859. The single-stroke engine gave a loud report every revolution and the boiler required fresh wood to keep running. All of the equipment utilized in the infant industry, in fact, had been built for some other use: the drills for 67

boring salt; the stills, which refined the crude, were the same as those which produced

whiskey; the wood barrels, which transported the crude, were picked up second hand

after holding whiskey, beer, turpentine, cider, vinegar or molasses.3

The combined result of this patchwork of American industries produced a stark

landscape. Barrels and holding tanks leaked, soaking the soil black. Greasy rainbows

swirled in the muddy puddles and wagon-wheel tracks in the streets in Titusville, Oil

City, and Pithole, Pennsylvania. To stand on the banks of Oil Creek in the decades after

Drake’s strike would require an observer to cover one’s ears, the cacophony of thousands

of derricks firing in unison drowning out the sound of the flowing water and the rustle of

leaves. The pungent smell of oil and boiler fires burned the nostrils of those in the valley

and large natural gas flares pierced the dark of Allegheny nights.4

The wildcatters who scrambled to the Oil Regions, however, pumped more than

just crude oil from the ground. Not two months following his famous strike, Drake’s well

exploded magnificently and burned to the ground on the night of October 7, 1859. The

well’s engineer had carried a lantern into the engine house to inspect the works. Gas had

slowly leaked from the well and saturated the surrounding atmosphere. When the gas met

the open flame of the lantern, it ignited in a flash. The nephew of Captain Townshend,

Drake’s sponsor and representative of Connecticut investors, reported that the blast “blew

everything to pieces, and started a fire,” destroying the pump and derrick. The explosion

ruined the head start Drake secured in the nascent industry, and he watched the hills

around his little well grow loud with the sound of steam engine pumps as he rebuilt the

3 Harold F. Williamson and Arnold R. Daum, The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Illumination, 1859-1899 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1959): 137, 168. 4 John T. Flynn, God’s Gold: The Story of Rockefeller and his Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932): 120. 68

works. Three years later the Seneca Oil Company ran into debt. On 7 March 1864, the company Drake helped found went under, not five years since he lifted the first bucket of crude from the Pennsylvania soil.5

In the decade following Drake’s strike, fires and explosions became such a serious threat in western Pennsylvania that some well owners posted signs that cautioned

“Smokers Will Be Shot.” Despite such efforts, the underlying fact remained—bringing oil to the surface required fire in the bellies of nearby engines and lanterns. As the rest of the nation mulled the repercussions of a coming war five days after the fall of Fort

Sumter, a spectacular strike near Titusville resulted in one of the first true “gushers.” At twilight, the city emptied as residents made their way to witness the spectacle of a fountain of oil reaching sixty feet into the sky, a black lake forming at its base. As the astonished crowd circled the dark geyser, it ignited from an unknown source and exploded with violent force. As the black fountain transformed into a pillar of flame, burning oil splashed on the crowd of spectators who tried in vain to extinguish their oil- soaked clothing. Ten people died and eleven more were severely burned. The fire raged for three days until it was smothered with a mixture of soil and manure.6

While the gusher fire of 1861 ignited from an unknown source, the particular flammable properties of petroleum render it prone to ignition from any source that raises it to its burn point, or temperature at which it combusts. Crude oil can alight with a little heating and direct contact with a flame, however, its refined by-products require far less.

Twentieth century industry safety texts list a panoply of phenomenon to avoid—lit cigarettes, hot boilers, friction, lightening, and static electricity rank among the more

5 Henry H. Townshend, New Haven and the First Oil Well (New Haven: Privately Printed, 1934): 24, 29. 6 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998): 101; Flynn, 103-104. 69

common culprits. Even spontaneous combustion can produce misfortune. Oily rags, left

in a pile and cutoff from circulating air will undergo spontaneous heating as the carbon- based fibers slowly oxidize. If enough time transpires without disturbance, the temperature will eventually rise to the oil’s flashpoint and a mound of discarded rags will become a ball of flame.7

Storing crude oil proved just as dangerous as drawing it to the surface. In the first

decade of the industry, most storage tanks for crude were made of wood and placed in

close proximity to one another. They leaked incessantly and were prone to spectacular

accidents. In 1866, such an accident occurred on the Bennehoff Run in the oil regions of

western Pennsylvania. During a thunderstorm, lightning struck a metal pipe and ignited a

nearby storage tank, which exploded and sent a torrent of burning crude into the stream.

As the burning slick made its way down the Run, it set fire and destroyed no less than

twenty derricks and associated storage tanks. At the bottom of the Run, the wave of fire

finally surrounded a 3,000 barrel storage tank. One of the only tanks made of iron, it

survived the flames and spurred producers to replace wood with hardier materials.8

The new iron tanks, when they did catch fire, however, required inventive

techniques to extinguish. The jumble of technology in the nascent petroleum industry

appropriated the tools of war to fight the menace of fire. With the Civil War just

concluded, former soldiers turned wildcatters heard the familiar report of cannon

whenever an iron tank caught fire. Cannonballs fired into the metal tanks proved handy in

letting out the excess oil of a storage tank that would otherwise burn for days. From these

7 George Armistead, Jr., Safety in Petroleum Refining and Related Industries (New York: John G. Simmonds & Co., 1950): 251. 8 Williamson and Daum: 193. Following the Bennehoff Run fire and other conflagrations of the 1860s, producers also spaced between storage tanks (350-400 feet instead of 200 or less), see Ralph W. Hidy and Muriel E. Hidy, Pioneering in Big Business: 1882-1911, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955): 82. 70

experiences, it was clear that even in its most stable form petroleum carried inherent

natural dangers that required patience and experience to master.9

Transportation

Transporting petroleum presented a host of dangers for the young industry. Not until

1869 did production of a cylindrical railroad tank car for petroleum familiar to modern

eyes emerge from the hodgepodge of technologies extant. To move crude oil from the

regions to the refining centers of New York, Pittsburgh and Cleveland meant either

loading it in several dozen 42-gallon wood barrels or in a few open-air wooden tubs perched on railroad flatcars. Both methods proved costly—the former required a large

quantity of hand-crafted barrels, made scarce by the oil boom. Both leaked fluid and gas

and were prone to loss from evaporation.10

Before the penetration of railroads, the cheapest method of transporting crude oil

was via scow or barge down the Allegheny River to Pittsburgh. Although the river

remained shallow throughout most the year, shippers established a complex organic

machinery to confront the inadequacies of nature. In 1862, the producers appointed a

superintendent of shipping who paid the owners of local sawmills to coordinate the

release of freshets from their milldams and collected apportioned fees from the shippers

who rode their barrel-laden barges down the river on these human-induced floods. As one

mode of production helped usher in the next in the Pennsylvania backcountry, the

9 Ibid; Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1894): 162. 10 Albert Z. Carr, John D. Rockefeller’s Secret Weapon (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1962): 32. 71

proximity of human and flame remained close.11

During a spring freshet in 1863, a lantern on a barge filled with un-barreled bulk

crude overturned, transforming the vessel into a floating pyre. The flames spread from

boat to boat in the choked river until nearly a hundred craft carrying no less than 8,000

barrels burst aflame along with a bridge that spanned the Allegheny. Carrying oil by

railroad car was hardly safer. After a particularly costly fire, the general freight agent of

the Pennsylvania Railroad stated “I would rather carry anything else than oil in tanks.”

And with good reason, a fire caused when several tank cars crashed and released burning

oil into a nearby sewer where it flowed, still aflame, into and overflowed a canal, resulted

in $500,000 dollars in damage to surrounding property, a kingly sum for even Gilded Age

captains of industry. Oil, the freight agent continued, was “worse than powder to

carry.”12

In unloading crude at transshipment points and refineries, laborers confronted

many of the same, often unseen dangers present at the well and storage tank. On a warm

July morning in 1873, a shipment of Pennsylvania crude arrived at the Standard Oil

Works on Forest Street in Cleveland. The morning sun lay below the horizon and Charles

McFarland, Robert McDowell, and Chris Osterland set about unloading the tank cars by

lantern light. The oil, sealed in the iron tank car for the entirety of its trip, released gas

when the men attempted to transfer it to Standard’s storage tanks. Upon meeting the flames of their lanterns, the gas ignited. A Cleveland Police Sergeant rushed to the scene after hearing the explosion only to find his efforts to help the three men in vain. The three men “had been baptized by fire” and “roasted alive,” according to a Cleveland Plain

11 Williamson and Daum: 165. 12 Ibid, 168; Lloyd: 138-139. 72

Dealer reporter.13

Ignorance of the invisible dangers associated with petroleum combined with a

careless landscape of inadequate technology permitted such accidents to revisit the

property and bodies of American oil producers for decades following Drake’s strike. As production increased and the Standard Oil Company streamlined the refining and distribution process, carrying lamp kerosene into the dark corners of the earth, the cost of illuminating the night proved quite dear in the fifty-year window between the introduction of renewable illuminating oils and the rise of electricity. Not until the twentieth-century did a legal basis emerge in U.S. courts for workmen’s compensation for industrial accidents that served as the first step toward integrating these costs in the production process.14

Refining

The process of converting crude petroleum into marketable products was similar to distilling alcohol. All one needed was a metal tank capped with a gooseneck nozzle, some

piping, and a good fire. As the fire heated the crude oil, the more volatile, or lighter,

hydrocarbons vaporized, rose to the top of the still and escaped out the gooseneck. The

vapor then descended a long, usually spiraled, pipe called a “worm” cooled with water.

The lowered temperatures of the worm condensed the vapor into a distillate, which then

dripped into an awaiting tank below. Different grades of oils distilled out at varying

temperatures, but a primary distillation yielded an average of 20 percent gasoline, 70

percent kerosene, and 10 percent of wax, grease, coke, asphalt and other heavy residuum.

13 The Cleveland Plain Dealer, 23 July 1874: 3.

14 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998): 247-266. 73

The distinction between the grades was illusory, however. Light kerosene, that is

kerosene with lower flash and fire points, is no different from heavy gasoline. The words represented a human invention for a vague range of properties where nature made no distinction.15

Because of the democratic nature of such knowledge, it was easy for anybody

with the ability to boil water and access to equipment to startup a backyard refinery in the

infant industry. However, refining capacity, throughput, a zeal for expansion, and low

unit costs determined who could exercise power (legal or otherwise) over competitors

and control the industry. After the incorporation of the Standard Oil Company in 1870

and following its acquisition of every large refining interest in Cleveland over the

following two years, the corporation controlled the destiny of nearly every barrel of oil

that made its way through Cleveland. The Standard’s refineries required ready access to

the Cuyahoga watershed for both manufacturing purposes and access to the European

market. The refineries and tank yards crowded the Kingsbury and Walworth runs that

emptied into the Cuyahoga, drawing water off to distill kerosene that would leave by rail

or float downstream via steamer to Lake Erie and points east. Cleveland’s refining

capacity skyrocketed during this period. While the entire country produced but 2,000

barrels of crude oil in the year following Drake’s strike, in 1871 the mayor of Cleveland

boasted his city alone refined and sold 1,500,000 barrels of kerosene, just as Rockefeller

and Co. were in the process of buying out their competitors.16

15 R. J. Forbes, More Studies in Early Petroleum History, 1860-1880 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1959): 117. 16 Ida M. Tarbell, The History of The Standard Oil Company, 2 vols (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1963): 19; James G. Speight, The Chemistry and Technology of Petroleum, 3rd ed. (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1999): 7; “Annual Message of the Mayor of Cleveland, Hon. Stephen Buhrer, to the City Council, April 11th, 1871,” Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1871 (Cleveland: Leader Book and Job Office, 1871): 8. 74

As owners bought out competitors, and managers ensured low labor costs, all

united against the common enemy: fire. Rockefeller, disgusted with waste, became

obsessed with containing fire to the boilers. “I was always ready, night and day, for a fire

alarm from the direction of our works,” said Rockefeller. When the inevitable accident

occurred, as it did four times between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 1873, Rockefeller

“dashed madly to the scene of the action” and, if finding the blaze beyond control,

“would have my pencil out, making plans for the rebuilding of our works.”17

Standard maintained its own private fire-fighting equipment, but relied heavily on the municipally-funded Cleveland Fire Department for all but the smallest blazes. Early in Cleveland’s history, the citizens of Cleveland deemed a fire-fighting force too essential

to its survival to be left up to the whim of the market and apportioned city taxes to its

maintenance. Private and volunteer fire departments had proven a disaster for public

health. Other cities that experimented with several companies haphazardly rushing

through the streets to arrive first at a fire, found that accidents and even fistfights or gun

battles among the competitors proved as deadly as the flames crews rushed to extinguish.

The public fire department was a nineteenth-century marvel, merging martial

organization with the latest technologies. As early as 1829 a volunteer firefighting force

patrolled Cleveland and in 1863 Cleveland’s City Council authorized a force of 53 men

organized by a chief engineer and paid by and responsible to the public. At the close of

the Civil War, Cleveland’s fire chief could boast a public infrastructure of five steam fire

engines that could draw on 167 hydrants supplied by 50 reservoirs, all at an annual cost

of $63,904.11. Mayor H. M. Chapin reserved a section of his annual message to heap

17 Chernow, 101; for the fires of 1873 see The Cleveland Leader, 24 November 1873: 4; 1 December 1873: 4; 15 December 1873: 4; 25 December 1873: 4. 75

praise on the department. “Our steam Fire Department is justly the pride of our citizens,

and for efficiency and good management, is probably not excelled in the world,” he

beamed. Although the department “is expensive, and adds to our taxes,” the mayor

assured a frugal city council “the decreased cost of insurance because of their use,

annually returns to tax payers more than threefold the cost of sustaining this system.” By

1879, the fire department maintained 161 fire alarm boxes, installed by and shared with

Western Union, including a new box at the Standard Oil Works on Kingsbury Run.18

Necessity guided the development of a public infrastructure as the business of

converting Pennsylvania crude on the banks of the Cuyahoga led to epic fires, requiring the services of the entire municipal firefighting force. The telegraphic fire alarms used to summon the force were remarkably simple. At the outbreak of fire all one had to do was swing open a protective panel, grab hold of a large knob and pull it down a grooved track. As the knob slowly made its way back to its original position, an automated telegraph transmitted the number of the box to the fire department telegraph officer who

then alerted the appropriate fire engine crew.19

At three in the afternoon, on Monday, February 23, 1880, the busy box at the

main Standard works transmitted an alarm after the bottom of a still suddenly gave out,

releasing 3,000 barrels of crude, which “ignited and spread in all directions.” The

rationalized design of the distillery, packed with dozens of stills, quickly became

engulfed in flames as the fire spread from still to still, growing in size as each

18 Robert Chester, Manufacturing Danger: The Perils of Place, unpublished dissertation (Univ. of California, Davis): 22. In author’s possession; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1865 (Cleveland: Leader Company, 1866): 69, 85, 83, 7-8; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1879 (Cleveland: Wiseman & Harvey Printers, 1880): 505. David D. Van tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987):232-233. 19 “Directions and Instructions for Fire Alarm Telegraph,” Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1872 (Cleveland: Waechter am Erie Printing Co., 1872): 231. 76

successively exploded and contributed its contents to the conflagration. As workers fled

the wave of fire, the burning oil spread to two further Standard distilleries and, following

the grade of the land, flowed into the Kingsbury Run, “which ignited, and the current

threatened to carry destruction to other works lower down the run.” A reporter from the

Cleveland Leader marveled at the efforts of the firefighters who dumped streams of water

on the flames and, failing to halt the burning river, “engaged in building dams to stay the progress of the water.” Although the Standard Oil Company met with “the worst conflagrations it has ever experienced,” the efforts of the Fire Department saved the bulk of the Works and contained the burning slick to a small stretch of the Kingsbury Run.

The City of Cleveland and the Standard Oil Company’s good fortune would not last forever, however.20

Late winter was always a precarious time for the lower Cuyahoga. Snow melt, a

saturated water table, and frequent storms led the river to spill into its natural floodplain,

a process climate and geology established since the retreat of the last glacier. The

commerce of the Gilded Age, however, required a different landscape. The floodplain of

the Cuyahoga was choked with mills, breweries, and oil refineries that used the river as a

source of water, commercial highway, and sewer. Unlike the river, the infrastructure of

capital proved immobile. On 4 February 1883, the particular hydraulic system of

northeast Ohio reclaimed some of its lost real estate. The front page of The Cleveland

Leader stated simply, “The rain fell, and the ice thawed, and the floods come.” Cleveland

awoke to a horrifying, altered landscape. Lake Erie appeared to have disobeyed its

boundaries and invaded the Cuyahoga’s course, turning the industrial corridor of the Flats

into “an immense lake,” “dimpled as a laughing baby” with hundreds of whirlpools and

20 The Cleveland Leader, 24 February 1880: 8. 77

eddies. The Kingsbury Run ballooned to twenty times its normal size and engulfed a leaky still of the Standard Oil Works. In its flow, it carried petroleum (in all its various states) downstream with it. This freight of mud, water, and oil reached the refinery of the

Great Western Oil Works downstream. A cannon-like report shattered the morning air as

Standard’s oil, loosed by the river, met the boiler fires of the Great Western Works and exploded at six a.m. Fire crews rushed to the scene, but found their efforts frustrated by rushing water. “There was no use trying to put the fire out, so it was allowed to burn until the oil was exhausted,” a writer for The Cleveland Leader reported.21

The firefighters busied themselves with extinguishing the swelling river, which eventually entered the Standard Works proper, forcing them to rush back upstream. As leaking oil ignited yet again and made its way downstream from the Standard Works, firefighters raced the burning slick downstream, where a wooden track belonging to the

New York, Pennsylvania & Ohio Railroad lay in its path. The firefighters attempted to raise a floodgate and halt the burning river, but the force of the water proved too much, and the men established themselves at the base of the track with the goal of preventing its destruction. As the noon hour passed, stills and storage tanks at the Standard Works exploded, releasing their oil into the flood, turning the sky black with smoke. The occasional explosions, whirling smoke, and burning river led the Leader reporter to biblical metaphors—the “combination of noises, together with the roaring of the fire and the weird shadows thrown upon the surrounding streets and buildings, competed what might justly be termed a true picture of the infernal regions.”22

21 The Cleveland Leader, 5 February 1883: 1, 6. 22 Ibid. 78

Thousands of people, lured by the sound of exploding tanks and the rising column

of smoke, crowded around the perimeter of the Works. The pyrotechnics created by the

commingling of petroleum, water, and fire entertained and threatened the crowd, who had

taken to the tops of rail cars for a better view. When the intense heat finally buckled and

melted the exterior of a large storage tank, water rushed into its belly and carried away a

wave of burning oil, causing the crowd to flee in terror. As the day wore on, Standard Oil

and generous citizens donated coffee, food, and tobacco to the firefighters. By 9:30 that

night, the massive explosion of a 16,000-barrel holding tank caused residents living in

earshot to throw their valuables into horse carts, ready to flee the flames.23

From the first explosion and fire at the Works, fire crews gathered the rubble from

the destroyed yards and pitched them into the Run to corral the flames. By 3 a.m., the

extent of destruction was of such magnitude the Run was nearly plugged. The crews

worked throughout the morning and into the next afternoon. Two firefighters had to leave

the scene after sustaining injuries. The Standard Works, in the end, was completely

destroyed, but the efforts of the municipal force contained the damage to a relatively

small area on the run. No less than sixty thousand barrels of petroleum—crude, kerosene,

and gasoline—fueled the two-day fire. At least two businesses benefited from the

inferno—the streetcar companies found their tracks flooded with spectators and a saloon

adjacent to the Works “was running full blast… three bar-tenders being kept busy dealing out drinks and poor cigars” to the throng of onlookers.24

In the end, the blaze spared the greater part of the city, a fear on the minds of

many in the wake of the great fires of Chicago and Boston of the previous decade.

23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 79

Despite the hazards created in bringing petroleum from the ground to the banks of the

Cuyahoga, the river bound its flammable consequences to the industrial corridor. Once refined, packaged, and sent to retailers, however, kerosene left the concentrated productive landscape and spread across the globe, insinuated into every darkened room a human wished to illuminate.

Consumption

On their way to Illinois from New York in the early 1870s, women’s rights advocates

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony passed through Cleveland in the middle of the night. They woke from their slumber as the illuminated city filled the windows of their railroad car. Rockefeller and company had succeeded in expanding the market and distribution of kerosene. The consumption of kerosene had grown from just under a million barrels at the time Rockefeller purchased his first refinery in 1863 to nearly seven million barrels in 1873, when the Standard Oil Company refined a plurality of world kerosene. By 1880, they refined 90 percent of all American crude petroleum. Stanton and

Anthony, stunned by the glowing city, questioned the train’s conductor who informed them the inexpensive fuel in Cleveland permitted women to work long into the night to accomplish the unfinished tasks of the day. From its advent, the rising of this second sun proved far more problematic than boosters claimed.25

In her largely autobiographical novel, Quench the Lamp, Alice Taylor recalls her childhood in rural Innishannon, Ireland during the 1940s before electricity had made its way to farming communities and replaced kerosene. Her memoir suggests that even

25 Williamson and Daum: 290, 471; William Ganson Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1950): 362. 80

under the best conditions and the use of a paraffin oil-lamp required constant maintenance and care to avoid injury.

Earlier in the day the globe of the lamp had been washed with lukewarm soapy water and polished with a soft cloth or newspaper. The base had been filled with paraffin oil and the wick had been trimmed. All was done in readiness for the night because leaving these jobs till the natural light had gone could lead to breakages in the dusk, to overflowing oil and to frayed tempers as a consequence. The top of the wick, which had been burned black the night before, was trimmed off with a sharp scissors, and if the wick had burned out the new one had to have time to soak up the oil before being lit. Sometimes it was put down into the bowl of the lamp on the last night of the old wick. The paraffin oil itself was brought regularly in an oil can from town, and if it was forgotten the neighbours could always be depended on to come to the rescue. At first the wick was kept down low after lighting to give the globe a chance to warm slowly, because sudden heat could crack it. A hairpin was sometimes hung on top of the globe to prevent this happening. Gradually the wick could be turned up, changing the soft yellow to a white glow, and then the shade was put on, softening the glow and diffusing the light evenly around the room from its position in an iron basket attached to the wall.

Taylor’s memoir confirmed Anthony’s observation—that the lighting technology became a gendered responsibility for women in itself.26

Although kerosene clearly brightened Gilded Age cities, stunning observers such as Anthony and Stanton, its use did not represent a revolution in technology. Just as the drilling and refining stages applied pre-existing technologies to the new industry, consumers burned kerosene in lamps that had changed little over the centuries. Oil lamps existed since ancient times. Any non-permeable substance that could hold vegetable oil or animal fat could light a room when floated on the surface of the reservoir and lit. At the close of the eighteenth century, Genovese inventor Francois Pierre Ami Argand had advanced this design by separating the wick from reservoir and surrounding the lighted wick with a glass cylinder to improve luminosity by regulating the oxygen draught over the flame. This new design increased luminosity and insured stable combustion, but required the regular cleaning of the lamp chimney and introduced more movable, and

26 Alice Taylor, Quench the Lamp (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990): 110-111. 81

therefore, breakable parts.27

Kerosene’s price advantage over renewable illuminants made it a natural choice

for most consumers—two and a half gallons of kerosene provided the same luminosity as

37 pounds of sperm-oil candles and did so at a seventeenth of the cost. Standard’s

business strategy left nothing to chance in their drive for market domination, aside from accidental fires that remained the responsibility of consumers in the absence of a tradition of consumer product safety. From its incorporation in 1870, Standard controlled distribution and marketing interests in Cleveland and east coast markets. By the mid-

1880s, they held marketing firms in every major market and its 313 bulk stations grew to

3,573 by 1906. Many wholesalers signed exclusive contracts, agreeing to carry only

Standard products in exchange for a guaranteed profit so wholesalers could undersell

Standard’s competitors and grow their market share.28

Yet, as Standard easily filled the lamps of the world with their kerosene, they

struggled to find a market for the more volatile gasoline. Gasoline, a by-product of refining and 20 percent of every refined barrel of crude, proved worse than dead weight, sitting in storage tanks at refineries, waiting for the inevitable accident. Standard quickly organized a “Gasoline Stove Department,” headed by proven marketing experts and released fifteen hundred advertising agents into the American market to extol the virtues of gas stoves to American housewives, distribute pamphlets, and flood newspapers, trolley cars, and magazines with advertisements. While this quarter of a million dollar ad campaign convinced insurance companies to not charge higher rates for properties equipped with gas stoves, demand for gasoline failed to strip refineries of the product

27 Forbes, 108-109. 28 Ibid, 130-131; Allan Nevins, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist, Vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953): 45, 47. 82

until the turn of the twentieth century, and the rise of the internal combustion engine.29

In the thirty-year window between the incorporation of Standard Oil Company and the advent of electricity, the company rose to dominate the petroleum illuminant industry almost completely on the sale of kerosene. While the price advantage of

kerosene captured nearly all the attention of consumers and commentators, its chemical

properties put it at a significant disadvantage in one significant respect—an overturned

tallow candle or whale oil lamp, while dangerous, lacked the explosive nature of

kerosene. A kerosene lamp, if upset, could easily douse the surrounding area with

burning kerosene, while only the wicks of animal and plant-based lamps and candles remained lit upon a spill.

Nineteenth century urban landscapes proved ripe for large conflagrations even in the absence of kerosene. Chicago had burned in an epic fire in 1871, amid a dry and windy autumn, ending in the destruction of $200 million in property damages, and leaving a third of the population (100,000) homeless. The beginning of the 1870s revealed many of the environmental limits Americans breeched. The Great Chicago Fire along with a firestorm in the timberlands of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which spawned a tornado of fire, led commentators to dub 1871 the Black Year. A year later, a fire raged through Boston, destroying 776 buildings in the process.30

Fire, and its causes, captured public attention just as kerosene emerged as the

predominant lamp illuminant. Mirroring the era’s laissez faire attitude in economics,

Cleveland Fire Department Chiefs, believed fire, like disease, emerged in an atmosphere

29 Hidy and Hidy: 297-299. 30 Margaret Hindle Hazen and Robert M. Hazen, Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American Culture, 1775-1925 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992): 74; Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002): 65-66. 83

of loose morals. The fire commission in Cleveland believed the wooden hovels of the

poor immigrants represented a fire menace and “equivalent to putting on kindling

preparatory to a large fire.” The editors of the city’s Republican paper, The Cleveland

Leader, laid blame for the Chicago fire on a “bummer government…. made up of

Germans, Irish and the whisky drinking portion of the native born population,” whose

“costly steam engines might as well have been in the hands of schoolboys.” The editorial

broadside, entitled “Paying the Piper,” ended on a grim note, stating if “the majority of

Chicago voters prefer free rum and Sunday revelry to efficient government and a well

managed fire department, of course it is their funeral, not ours.” Only a small but

increasingly vocal segment of the population looked to the new lamp fuel as the source of

the combustible urban landscape. The majority of the press and city officials relied on

familiar scapegoats by highlighting racial and class stereotypes instead of confronting

structural fire regimes exposed to increasingly combustible technology. “So long as cities

continued to rebuild themselves on the same pattern and with similar materials,”

environmental historian Stephen Pyne has argued, “they experienced the same kinds of

fire.”31

Cleveland fire chiefs documented the increasing occurrence of kerosene lamp

fires in their annual reports. The City of Cleveland suffered from only 56 fires in 1865,

before the ubiquity of kerosene fueled lamps (although two of those fires started at

refineries). Nine years later, in 1874, of the 249 fires that the city’s department responded

31 Charles Rosenberg’s history of cholera documents the evolution in understanding of the disease in nineteenth century America that mirrors the development of a rational understanding of fire. Initially believed to originate in places of low morals, by the 1860s observers had abandoned this view and adopted sanitary reforms that attacked the disease at its true source of transmission. See Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962); Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1878 (Cleveland: Wiseman & Harvey, 1879): 471; The Cleveland Leader, 17 July 1874: 4. Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History (Seattle: Univ of Washington Press, 2001): 114. 84

to, eleven came from exploding oil, five from spontaneous combustion, and thirteen from

exploding kerosene lamps. These numbers no doubt under-represent actual figures, for

many fires began in the absence of a human witness. In this same year, fire crews

responded to 100 fires of undetermined cause. What is surprising is that not a single fire

was attributed to either candles or whale oil lamps, kerosene’s competing illuminants,

suggesting kerosene represented a novel consumer hazard. Even children playing with

matches caused more fires than either of the standard illuminants of the pre-kerosene

era.32

The extreme volatility of kerosene produced sudden, dangerous blazes in the

eventual occurrence of an “accident.” Three weeks before the Leader editors laid the

cause of Chicago’s misfortune on drunk and careless firefighters, a servant girl at

Cleveland’s City Hotel, performing her night duties by kerosene lamp, burnt herself

severely when she accidentally upset the vessel. Of course, lamps did not always require

jostling or overturning to cause disaster. As the midsummer sun set on Cleveland in 1872,

Mr. and Mrs. Hofshild lit a kerosene lamp. A short while later the lamp exploded,

showering the couple with burning kerosene. Mr. Hofshild’s sister extinguished the

flames, but not until the couple and their rescuer had been severely burned and $1,000

worth of property destroyed.33

Contemporary observers of the petroleum industry grew aware of the explosive

threat of kerosene lamps. British petroleum scholars Captain J. H. Thomson and

32 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1865 (Cleveland: Leader Company, 1866): 89; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1874 (Cleveland: Co-operative Printing Company, 1875): 353. Often, if a human actor was involved in the cause of the fire, regardless of its source, the fire department recorded the source of such blazes as “accidents” or the result of “carelessness.” Thus, an October 30th fire at the Standard Oil Works in 1874, which “did little damage….was caused by carelessness.” See The Cleveland Leader 31 October 1874: 7.Children playing with matches caused two fires in 1865 and ten in 1874. 33 The Cleveland Leader, 27 June 1874: 8; The Cleveland Leader, 29 July 1872: 4. 85

Boverton Redwood recorded 129 fatal lamp accidents, per year, in England during the

1880s and 1890s (the Society of Chemical Industry of Great Britain put the figure at

“about three hundred deaths a year” for England and Wales). They remarked on the many variables that gave rise to these numbers. “[S]mall glass lamps which are sold for a penny, and on which the burner is fitted without proper attachment” easily spilled their contents when upset. These and other lamps could become incendiary bombs if the vapor content of their reservoirs inched up to two or four percent, breaking the brittle glass and showering the surroundings area in burning fluid.34

Of course, if discriminating consumers chose a strong lamp they could still become victims if the kerosene they purchased to fill it had been made “light” by the addition of gasoline. In February of 1867, the U.S. Congress established a fire test of 110º

Fahrenheit for all petroleum illuminants—requiring, in essence, all kerosene to burn only at temperatures above 110º Fahrenheit. Five years later the General Assembly of the State of Ohio adopted the 110º test, making manufacturers and retailers liable for damages to property and persons. Yet, the state law appropriated no funds for inspecting illuminating oils and capped fines at a maximum of $1,000 or 20 days jail. Thus, the sale of below test illuminants continued. The problem became exacerbated because, in passing the 1867 ordinance, Congress adopted a “fire” and not a “flash” test. The difference is important because illuminants that burn at 110º Fahrenheit can form ignitable vapors, or “flash,” at temperatures much lower. In a study endorsed by the Board of Health of the city of New

York following the passage of the law, a chemist, Dr. C. F. Chandler, was commissioned to research the chemical properties of illuminants and found that oil passing a fire test of

34 Captain J. H. Thomson and Boverton Redwood, Handbook on Petroleum (London: Charles Griffin and Co. Limited, 1901): 175-179; Lloyd: 409. 86

110º F often flashed, or formed explosive vapors, at temperatures as low 70º F, or the

background temperature of a warm spring day. The findings led Chandler to judge the

federal fire test “as worthless” and recommend a more appropriate flash test of no lower

than 100º F.35

In the early months of 1872, the city council of Cleveland appointed a “Non-

explosive Committee” to investigate the city’s illuminating oils following the rise in fires

resulting from kerosene lamps. After the committee tested various illuminating oils from

vendors throughout the city, they found “not one was up to the legal standard of fire

test.” The results led the usually pro-business editors of the Cleveland Leader to urge

regulation in their columns: “some legislation is imperatively demanded for the

protection of the community against these dangerous illuminating fluids.” By 1875

knowledge that manufacturers and retailers regularly adulterated their kerosene with

more volatile fluids had become widespread. Newspapers reported “that peddlers are

buying coal oil of proper test and mixing benzine [sic] or naptha with it, thus making a

spurious and dangerous article,” and linked the “many lamp explosions recently

reported…to this poor oil.” Petroleum, which required a trained and patient hand even in

its most innocuous form had been thrown into an explosive environment—an unregulated

market that rewarded cost-cutting and a popular culture that eschewed corporate responsibility with the attitude of caveat emptor.36

By 1876, four years after the Ohio legislation and nearly a decade since the U.S.

Congress established the 110º burn test, the continued rise in fires associated with

35 For the federal fire test standard and Dr. Chandler’s study see Stephen Farnum Peckham, Report on the Production, Technology, and Uses of Petroleum and its Products (Washington: Gov. Printing Office, Department of the Interior, 1885):236-237; Hidy and Hidy: 99; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1873 (Cleveland: Press of Fairbanks, Benedict & Co., City Printers, Herald Office, 1874): 236. 36 The Cleveland Leader, 9 January 1872:1, 4, original emphasis; February 1872: 2.The Cleveland Leader, 7 January 1875: 8. 87

exploding lamp oil (22 that year in Cleveland alone) and the failure to implement an

inspection mechanism led citizens to take up the mantle of inspection in the public

interest. S. Buckland and his son wrote in to the Cleveland Leader after testing “a large

number of samples sold at retail in this city” and found that “it flashes below 100, and

ignites below 110.” At a meeting of insurance companies in Glasgow, Scotland, tests run

on Scottish, American, and Russian kerosene revealed a flash point of 69º F for the

American oil, confirming European beliefs that American self-interest was turning

European lamps into time bombs. Even the Cleveland fire department, which always

sought to blame the human closest to the source of the blaze, admitted that “some” of the

22 fires caused by exploding lamps in 1876 “were undoubtedly from the use of an

inferior grade of oil.” Yet, they repeated the refrain “’People cannot be too careful with

fire’…an injunction which many are apt to forget.” With such low flash and fire points,

illuminating oil became a quiet danger as temperatures rose in summer and rickety lamps

leaked explosive vapors.37

Even friction and static became dangerous catalysts. Cleveland resident Cora B.

Gage received severe burns to her hands and arms while cleaning her family’s picture

frames with benzene. The fluid rose to its flash point by the friction of cleaning or a static

charge “burst into flames and ignited her clothing.” Thomas Fela, a worker at a Cleveland

steel mill, received a similar surprise as a “coal oil can he was filling from a barrel

exploded” without apparent cause, “burn[ing] his arms, hands, and back.” A fire at the

Standard Oil works in late 1873 illustrated the pervasive danger of a world filled with

37 Exploding lamps were responsible for 22 of 224 fires of known causes. See Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1876 (Cleveland: A. W. Fairbanks & Company, 1877): 159; The Cleveland Leader, 26 February 1876: 7; Lloyd: 410; “Fire Commissioner’s Report, Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1876 (Cleveland: A. W. Fairbanks & Company, 1877): 160. 88

petroleum illuminants. Investigators traced the blaze back to a box of “oiled rags and

sweepings from the floor” that had spontaneously combusted without cause. The writers

at the Cleveland Leader reported the incident with little interest as it was “pretty well

established that this thing is possible, and this is not the first fire in Cleveland which has

been traced to this cause.”38

Accidental Landscape

Three years after receiving debilitating burns, the boilermaker Peter Golden accepted an

out of court settlement from the Standard Oil Company. After the company argued

Golden “had neglected to follow directions” and “[a]ll injuries sustained by him were due

to his own carelessness” the testimony of a co-worker and witness, Frank Shulte, sunk any chance of having the case dismissed. Shulte testified that Golden’s supervisor, Jacob

Hummel “without looking, set fire to the gasoline.” We will never know how much the company offered Golden to avoid an official judgment, but in settling out of court, the company preserved their status as an unaccountable party. Thus, the story of Peter

Golden, like the story of so many lamp fire victims, became obscured in history behind the words “careless” and “accident.”39

It need not have been so. In Victorian France and Great Britain, where

governments more actively took on the onus of protecting public health, the advent of the oil age elicited immediate response. In France, strict guidelines regulated the storage of kerosene to cool, ventilated lots at least 45 meters from residential areas. The Conseil

38 The Cleveland Leader, 12 May 1876: 7; The Cleveland Leader, 10 June 1876: 7; The Cleveland Leader, 15 December 1873: 4. 39 “Peter G. Golden vs. The Standard Oil Company,” Annals of Cleveland Court Record Series, Vol. X, 1875-1877 (Cleveland: 1939): 223. 89

d’hygiène et de Salubrité publique de la Seine created and distributed to the public a pamphlet, approved by the police commissioner, on how to safely handle and maintain kerosene and lamps on 29 June 1864, only five years after Drake’s strike and the beginning of the kerosene age. Two years later the pamphlet’s recommendations were enacted into law, structuring the entire landscape of petroleum production on the

Continent in stark contrast to the United States.40

Despite regulatory laws, a popular knowledge of the risk of petroleum

illuminants, and the outcry of citizens, federal and local governments failed to regulate

the petroleum industry in the United States. “Some measures,” Cleveland Fire Chief

James Hill urged, “ought to be taken to prohibit the sale of oil which is not up to the

standard…. to better protect the lives and property of our citizens and their families” after

a rash of lamp fires and several deaths. Despite a “general impression…in the

community…that the annual revenues of the city were insufficient to carry on its

government properly,” the Chief Auditor of the city reported in 1874, a debt of

“$1,822,000 paying an annual interest of $127,540.” With the wide acceptance of the

public to provide funds for fire security, the city governments of Cleveland in the closing

decades of the nineteenth century refused to appoint a city inspector of petroleum

illuminants to enforce the federal and state lamp oil laws.41

In defending a low, 15 percent tax rate—ten percent of which supported a fire department that more than returned the taxes of Cleveland oil refiners in reduced insurance and fire abatement—the mayors of this era (1870-1890) argued for “the most

40 Forbes, 139. 41 “Seventh Annual Report of the Chief Engineer of the Cleveland Steam Fire Department, for the Fiscal Year, Ending March 31st, 1871,” Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1871 (Cleveland: Leader Book and Job Office, 1871): 85; “City Auditor’s Report,” Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1874 (Cleveland: Co- operative Printing Company, 1875): 9-10. A year later the city’s debt would reach $5.1 million, see Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1875 (Cleveland: Co-operative Printing Company, 1876): xiv. 90

rigid economy” and “retrenchment in expenditures rather than…any addition to the tax

levy.” After serving as mayor of Cleveland during the turbulent year following the great

labor riots of 1877, R. R. Herrick used the platform of his inaugural address to elevate the

laissez faire ideals that gave the Gilded Age its name. Although the “rapid growth of this

city during the past fifteen years, has called for large expenditures for improvements in

order to keep pace with the increase of population,” he argued that “[t]axation is

burdensome and to a certain degree oppressive…at this time.” “Nothing,” Herrick

concluded, “so effectually strangles manufacturing and all business enterprises as a high

rate of taxation.” Herrick carried the city into the eighth decade of the nineteenth century

on a philosophy of government that based the public welfare on faith in an unregulated

economy. Herrick articulated a perspective that would gain traction in the Gilded Age

and lead to a nationwide “race to the bottom” as state after state sought to lower taxes and

gut regulations in order to attract business:

Capitalists in seeking a location in which to invest their money in business enterprises look as much to the rate of the tax levy at that place as to any other one thing, and will shun a city where the rate of taxation is excessive. It should therefore be our aim, kept constantly in view, to cut down and keep down the rate of taxation in this city as much as is consistent with its best interests.

That year the municipal Cleveland fire department responded to 333 fires, a nearly five- fold increase over the number fifteen years previous at the close of the Civil War.42

Lawmakers guided by Gilded Age notions of government oversight created state

inspection teams; however, such guardians of the commonweal received remuneration

from the companies they inspected, not the public they were charged with protecting. By

42 “Inaugural Address of Hon. N. P. Payne, Mayor of Cleveland,” Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1874 (Cleveland: Co-operative Printing Company, 1875): xxv; “Inaugural Address of Hon. R. R. Herrick, Mayor,” Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1878 (Cleveland: Wiseman & Harvey, 1879): 56-57; “Mayor’s Annual Message, R. R. Herrick,” Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1880 (Cleveland: Home Companion Publishing Company, 1881): 13; N. S. Cobleigh, The Manufactures, Trade and Commerce of Cleveland, 1880-81 (Cleveland: Short & Forman, 1881): 21. 91

the late 1880s, Standard Oil and its affiliates paid oil inspectors as much as skilled

tradesmen, their wages falling between those of carpenters and coopers. Although placing

the cost of regulation on the corporations that necessitated it can be seen as a way of

forcing companies to internalize the cost of their actions, the absence of intermediaries between inspectors and their corporate paymasters created a dangerous conflict of interest. Although tax-fearing city officials applauded the free-market regulation, others vested with protecting the public welfare suspected quid pro quo. In 1888, after a particularly combustive year in Boston where a tenth of all fires resulted from exploding kerosene, the Fire Marshal collected samples of oil and sent them to chemists at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While the state oil inspectors declared similar samples above standard, the professors found all the samples sent to them below the state test. In 1890, a deputy inspector in Iowa wrote a formal charge to the governor against his fellow lamp oil inspectors, accusing them of abandoning their posts and leaving their official state stencils with the various companies. The governor demanded the inspector produce witnesses, which killed the investigation before it began, and sealed the documents relating to the case from public scrutiny until he left office. However, a year later the Committee on Illuminating Oils of the Minnesota Senate affirmed testimony against its state inspector, which charged that the inspector let oil company employees use his official stencil to brand kerosene as they saw fit. In his testimony, the inspector defended his actions with the simple declaration, “I am under no obligation to the State of

Minnesota. The Standard Oil Company paid me.”43

In the event a suit was brought against the company following an explosion, as a

Michigan man did in 1905 (Stowell v. Standard Oil Co.), Standard’s lawyers relied on the

43 Hidy and Hidy, 592. Lloyd, 411, 413-414. 92

absence of enforcement to create a fog of uncertainty as to the quality of their own oil.

The company’s legal counsel argued that “no recovery could be had in the absence of a showing that the defendant had actual knowledge of the inferior quality of the oil” and noted that such knowledge was impossible because the “oil inspector was extremely lax in his methods and his inspection fell far short of compliance with the statute.”

Fortunately for Mr. Stowell, whose flesh burned when Standard’s adulterated oil exploded, the presiding judge held the company liable for the damages sustained to his person and property.44

After reviewing the trade in 1885, Stephen Farnum Peckham, the special agent

tasked by the United States Department of the Interior with investigating the petroleum

trade, recommended the creation of a special committee to test and oversee the sale of

petroleum products and enforce a more vigorous test with stiff penalties “making the

selling of dangerous oil a misdemeanor in all cases, and manslaughter when death is

occassioned [sic] by its use…and also providing for the recovery of damages for all

losses to either persons or property.” No such committee emerged in the anti-regulatory

environment of the kerosene age (roughly from 1859 to 1900), passed without a

centralized apparatus to audit the manufacture and sale of illuminants in any meaningful

way. Despite a kaleidoscope of local and state laws intended to ensure public safety and

consumer protection, the Standard Oil Company easily avoided the consequences of

producing below standard illuminants.45

Rockefeller’s drive to eliminate costs and improve profits for Standard Oil meant

shifting the explosive consequences of petroleum production to the public. In a reflective

44 Michigan Law Review, Vol. 3 No. 6, April 1905, 494. 45 Peckham, 237.

93

moment, he openly admitted to the reckless use of higher fractions of petroleum. “We

used to burn it for fuel in distilling the oil,” he stated, “and thousands and hundreds of

thousands of barrels of it floated down the creeks and rivers, and the ground was

saturated with it, in the constant effort to get rid of it.” Even when laws stood in the way

of profits, evidence suggests Rockefeller may have favored his wallet. Congress had

legislated that all illuminant oil must pass a fire test of 110º Fahrenheit in February of

1867, Rockefeller stretched his kerosene stock with unsalable fractions of gasoline to

increase his profits by integrating a waste product into his kerosene stock. In April of

1868 an internal correspondence between the highest-ranking members of Standard Oil revealed that recent tests “of our oil” had shown “burning about 113…110[°F]” (ellipses in original). Although already a shade above the federal limits, the letter writer revealed

John D. Rockefeller’s desire to squeeze as much money as possible out of his otherwise worthless gasoline supplies. He writes, “John think can [illegible] cut down a little,” adding “but be careful and not cut it down too much.” The fire test became a business opportunity. Rockefeller could now dilute his stock that tested above the new standard to as close to the 110° limit as possible. In 1868, when Rockefeller advised his engineers to meet the fire test standard set by Congress, Cleveland experienced 149 fires, four attributed to lamp explosions. Once Standard Oil’s products became commonplace in

American cities in 1896, Cleveland’s fire department responded to 1,000 fires, 124 of which were the result of gasoline or kerosene, including twenty-six cases of exploding lamps. Standard Oil’s market was much larger than Cleveland and exploding kerosene lamps resulted in as many as six thousand deaths a year in the decade following

Rockefeller’s decision to push the limits of efficiency.46

46 Chernow, 101; RAF to AR&F, April 15, 1868, Book 394, Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler, RAC; 94

Conclusion

At the Paris Exposition of 1867, a gas engine patented by the Belgium-born engineer,

Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir, captured the attention of the audience by safely harnessing

the explosive force of petroleum. As internal combustion engines transitioned from a

curiosity to a legitimate source of motive power, the Standard Oil Company found a market for the nuisance fluid just as coal-powered electric power stations made their

dangerous kerosene lamps obsolete in urban areas around the world. Kerosene lamp oil

had already helped birth a new mode of production into existence—the modern era would

forever be tied to the fate of inexpensive, often dangerous non-renewable resources. John

D. Rockefeller succeeded in his goal of “building up as rapidly and as broadly as possible

the volume of consumption” of petroleum illuminants the world over. In 1870, the year

Standard incorporated, the U.S. exported 97.9 million gallons of kerosene. Fueled by the

aggressive marketing and distribution of the Standard Trust, that figure skyrocketed to

740 million gallons at the apex of the kerosene age in 1900. Moreover, with each gallon

of kerosene, purchased in the interest of saving money and extending productive time,

Standard and its affiliates externalized the costs of raising a second sun from the

Pennsylvania earth onto the public via an increase in fires extinguished, hopefully in

time, by municipal fire departments.47

Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1868 (Cleveland: Leader Book and Job Office, 1869): 67; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1896 (Cleveland: The Cleveland Ptg.. & Pub. Co., 1897): 806-810.Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992): 50. 47 Nevins: 106-107, 111; See J. R. McNeill’s, Something New Under the Sun (New York: Norton, 2000): 297-298 for the emergence of the “Motown Cluster,” or oil-driven mode of production that marked the twentieth century human relationship with nature; Rockefeller, 58. 95

Years after his conquest of the industry was complete, Rockefeller recalled with pride how the trust had defeated what he called the “tariffs…local prejudices, and strange customs” that marked the pre-oil age.

In many countries we had to teach the people — the Chinese, for example — to burn oil by making lamps for them; we packed the oil to be carried by camels or on the backs of runners in the most remote portions of the world; we adapted the trade to the needs of strange folk. Every time we succeeded in a foreign land, it meant dollars brought to this country, and every time we failed, it was a loss to our nation and its workmen.

Rockefeller, ever mindful of his manners, thanked the efforts of people in positions of power that shared the laissez faire mindset of Cleveland mayor Herrick: “One of our greatest helpers has been the State Department in Washington….Our ambassadors and ministers and consuls have aided to push our way into new markets to the utmost corners of the world.” Laissez faire policies of government non-interference in the Gilded Age also subsidized corporations by standing between reformers who sought to connect business to the costs they created for the public.48

With the partnership between business and government, Rockefeller could declare, “the corporation in form and character has come to stay” and “[t]he day of individual competition in large affairs…past and gone.” “[Y]ou might just as well argue that we should go back to hand labour and throw away our efficient machines,” he wrote in response to critics. Reflecting on the rise of the vertically integrated corporation,

Rockefeller naturally valorized efficiency despite the troubling ethical questions of the social and environmental costs of Standard’s hegemony. The drive for efficiency pioneered by Standard Oil accelerated industrialism at the end of the nineteenth century, in part, because government non-intervention in the economy incentivized the

48 Rockefeller, 63. 96

exploitation of common resources. Masked by low commodity prices, “efficiency” came at the cost of a competitive marketplace and consumer safety.49

49 Ibid, 65. 97

CHAPTER THREE

Water

On a February day in 1874, Cleveland’s City Council gathered at City Hall to inaugurate the recently completed water works tunnel below Lake Erie. The council dressed themselves with old, ragged clothes and waterproof coats for an inspection tour through the subterranean artery they had authorized and purchased. A Cleveland Leader reporter took note of the humor in their curious act, noting, “they looked more like a lot of bummers bent on having a spree than a dignified body of city officials.” After a brief carriage ride to the shore station, the strangely attired crew slipped, shuffled, and fell over each other as a light rain challenged their footing. These men were not accustomed to work clothes.

Once inside the station, the men uncomfortably took seats in “small cars used for transporting the dirt excavated from the tunnel” and were conveyed by way of mule train through the fabricated cave’s mile and quarter length. With only the small lanterns they carried to light their way, the gang sang “Down in the Coal Mine” in a bid to lighten their spirits. At the end of the track, the men disembarked from their cars, forced to walk (as true miners would) bent over at the waist in the four-foot tube the final stretch to the lake intake crib, where a tug awaited to carry them home. The tunnel proved “distressingly small to these of ample proportions.” One council member gave up and “sat down in a foot of water, and nothing but a graphic description of the horrors of remaining there over

Sunday could shake his determination not to take a step further.” Once up a crude ladder to the lake platform and safe aboard their waiting tug, the crew erupted in all manner of 98

cheers, proclamations, and song. One “prominent citizen officiated at the whistle and

blew long and loud, in utter defiance of the whistle ordinance” once they reached the

safety of the Cuyahoga. Their journey under the lake and return atop it was the Gilded

Age equivalent of space travel because it permitted them to journey to a place previously

unreachable with existing technology.1

Surviving the experience, the council could declare to their constituents that,

despite the cost and prolonged wait, clean water would soon flow through their taps. The

old intake source, located but three hundred feet from the lakeshore, could now be shut

and with its passing, so too—the council hoped—would cease the complaints of the

entire city concerning the quality of the water they drank daily. Yet these technologies

did not emerge in an historical vacuum or for their own sake. The technology of

municipal engineering represented an extension of Standard Oil’s corporate infrastructure that began in producing fields, funneled petroleum to the banks of the Cuyahoga River, and dumped its effluent into the local water system. Although costly, the decision to refine Cleveland’s water system to hasten the removal of industrial wastes and separate sources of drinking water from sinks of industrial pollution proved the most politically expedient fix for an embattled city government confronted with complaints about industrial effluent in the city’s water supply. Unwilling to police the manufactories that made Cleveland a capital of industry, and imbued with a sincere faith in human mastery over the natural world, American cities chose to construct massive engineering systems

(water works, sewers, refuse collection) to confront the ecological quandary of collecting pollutants in an ecosystem calibrated to processing a much smaller waste burden.

1 Cleveland Leader. 1874. “Through the Tunnel.” February 23, pg 8.

99

Municipal services are public responses to private failures and the Standard Oil Company

was the largest private entity in Gilded Age Cleveland. As a result, the corporation

structured much of the city’s municipal history.

The industrial boom of Gilded Age America authored a new relationship between

humanity and the hydrology of the Great Lakes and sanitary engineering played a key

role in its creation. In addition to facilitating this environmental change through the

development of ersatz water systems, the new engineering infrastructure transformed

social relationships as well. The Standard Oil Corporation, by no means alone in

contributing pollution to the Cuyahoga River during this time, achieved in Cleveland

what the modern corporation has mastered the world over—pushing the private costs of

capitalism onto the public. Despite community unrest, public officials continuously chose

engineering schemes instead of containing pollution at its source: the factories, refineries,

and slaughterhouses that lined the Cuyahoga. Thus, every culverted stream, gravity

sewer, and water works pumping station represented a public expenditure to avoid private

wastes. Although populations are often confronted with natural limits that force the

construction of systems to supply the necessities of life, this chapter looks at cases in

which engineering works stood in as first resort solutions to industrial problems. A

progressive metanarrative has situated the creation of such urban infrastructure as a

rational response to unprecedented urban growth and its attendant thirst for an expanding

water supply. Much of Cleveland’s water works were not built to supply the city with water. They were built to supply the city with water free of acid and petroleum.

Water Pollution in America 100

Dirty water existed before the Industrial Revolution, even in Cleveland. The Cuyahoga

River’s mouth, choked with sandbars and timber snags, smelled of rotting vegetable

matter and bred swarms of mosquitoes in the summer. The Erie Indians preferred the

clear water upstream, before the swift flowing stream became a slow, at times stagnant,

river. The American settlers met their water needs by tapping ample subsurface water

with wells and by venturing to the lakeshore for pails of clean lake water. However,

during the decade of the 1840s when the city’s population nearly tripled from 6,071 to

17,034, the maze of subterranean water wells, privy vaults, and cesspools, drained and filled by the ever-growing population threatened the public health during a decade of cholera and typhoid outbreaks. An ample supply of clean water offered a simple solution at a time when other cities required elaborate systems to tap far-flung water sources.

Drawing water from Lake Erie required little more than the laying of pipe beneath its surface, the construction of a pumping station to provide the necessary pressure to draw it to shore, and a maze of pipes and reservoirs to distribute it to the public. After two years of labor, a fifty-inch pipe laid 800 feet northwest of the Cuyahoga’s mouth went online in

1856, supplying the burgeoning metropolis with clean lake water.2

Like many American rivers at this time, the Cuyahoga served as a crucible of

industry. Various breweries, tanneries, rolling mills, and slaughterhouses were drawn to

the twin attractions of water transport and a convenient flowing sink for their industrial

refuse, the Cuyahoga River. Residential waste also entered the river via runoff from

2 For an early social history of disease, see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962); For a history of New York City’s efforts to tap its hinterland watershed to serve a burgeoning urban population see Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton: Princeton Univ Press, 2001); Daniel D. Jackson, “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Cleveland Water Supply on the Probable Effect of the Proposed Changes in Sewage Disposal and on the Various Sources of Typhoid Fever in Cleveland,” (Cleveland: City of Cleveland, 1912): 13. 101

streets and tributaries. Despite the use of the river as a general sewer, people continued to

bathe in its waters and the new water system, with its intake pipe a short distance from

the Cuyahoga’s mouth, remained pure.

Only with the advent of the young petroleum refining industry within the city did

the troubles really begin. On the heels of the Drake well strike of 1859, small refining

enterprises rose on the river’s banks. In 1863, Rockefeller decided to dive into the

refining business, attracted by the profit potential of converting a green subsurface fluid

into a cheap illuminant. Purchasing the refining interest of his partners in 1867, John D.

Rockefeller organized the predecessor to the Standard Oil Corporation with the help of

the British chemist Samuel Andrews and the well connected grain merchant Henry

Flagler. With a zeal for cost-cutting through the total integration of the productive

process, Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler operated the largest refinery in Cleveland on

the south bank of the Kingsbury run—a tributary of the Cuyahoga just south of

downtown. The enterprise expanded rapidly by owning and operating an on-site barrel

cooperage, a private forest to supply lumber, and by pushing aside competition through

the infamous agreements hammered out with Pennsylvania’s railroad corporations. In

1865, Cleveland boasted thirty refineries—Rockefeller’s the largest—with the capacity to refine 2,000 barrels of crude a day.3

Crude oil flowed into Cleveland from Western Pennsylvania and kerosene,

lubricants, and asphaltum flowed out. However, inside the black box of the petroleum

refinery, the distillation of petroleum required a wider array of inputs and outputs than

previous histories have disclosed. Crude oil, greenish sludge in nature, must be treated

and cleansed of a wide array of impurities. Sand, dirt, salt, sulfur, and anything else

3 Ida M. Tarbell, The History of The Standard Oil Company, 2 vols (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1963): 39. 102

buried with it must be extracted to prevent uneven combustion, foul odors, or a smoky

burn. In the first significant publication detailing the refining process, the chemist

Abraham Gesner described how crude petroleum enters a tank called an “agitator” at a

refinery, where various “charges” of sulfuric acid, soda ash and lime would be mixed in

with the crude oil. After each cycle, fresh water would be let into the tank, agitated into a

caustic soup, where it would gather the spent acids, settle to the bottom of the agitator

and easily siphoned off into public waterways. If the crude contained a high level of

sulfur, an alkali solution of lead oxide would also make its way in and out of the agitator.

No standard formula guided the quantities used; only the acquired knowledge of the

refiner determined when a batch was ready for the still and distillation. By the middle of

the twentieth century, once many of the inefficiencies of the refining process had been

overcome, a barrel of crude required between ten and fifteen pounds of sulfuric acid to

cleanse, or about 200 gallons for every 1,000 barrels of crude. By 1872, Standard Oil

commanded a daily refining capacity of 10,000 barrels a day, producing as much as 2,000

barrels of sulfuric acid. The acid, once it fulfilled its purpose, was dumped directly into

the river. For Standard Oil, the Cuyahoga served as both a source of pure water to cleanse

their crude and as sink for wastewater and acid.4

Gilded Water

After a decade of supplying the city with pure lake water, the Cleveland water works became the subject of numerous newspaper articles and public discussion. In 1866, the

4 Abraham Gesner, A Practical Treatise on Coal, Petroleum and other Distilled Oils, second ed. (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968): 158, Maxcine J. Japour, Petroleum Refining and Manufacturing Processes (Los Angeles: Wetzel Publishing Co., 1939): 54; Allan Nevins, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953): 136. 103

drinking water of the city darkened and tasted strongly of petroleum. The city council

hired J. Lang Cassels, a Professor of Chemistry at Cleveland Medical College to analyze

the city’s drinking water. The subsequent report, which found the city’s water compromised but disguised the chemical danger with indecipherable chemistry jargon, failed to quiet public anger. The editors of the Cleveland Leader turned public anger

away from the refining interests and focused it instead on the city government. In an

editorial response to a modest call by the Cleveland Herald demanding the oil refiners

burn their refuse rather than let it into the common water of the city, the Leader editor

“object[s] to this most decidedly,” declaring “There is nothing unhealthy about the refuse

benzene.” Bringing attention to the other possible sources of pestilential organic pollution

from slaughterhouses and brewers, the editor pleaded, “By all means let the oil refineries

alone.”5

As 1866 drew to a close with the city’s water still contaminated with the runoff of

Cleveland’s many refineries, the editor of the Leader suggested a solution to appease all parties. The city of Chicago—regularly mocked as a pedestrian, drunken circus—had

solved its water needs by boring a large tunnel under Lake Michigan. The metropolis

shared many affinities with Cleveland. It also sat on the shore of a large lake. The

Chicago River, like the Cuyahoga, “is the great central sewer of the city, where all the

offal and filth…is discharged immediately into the lake.” The editor of the Republican

Leader viewed the tunnel from the perspective of temperance, calling the engineering

works a “sensation” in freeing Chicago from dirty lakeshore water that might lead the

5 The Cleveland Leader, “The Water We Drink” (20 December 1866): 4; The Cleveland Leader, “Our Beautiful Drinking Water” (6 March 1866): 2. 104

inhabitants to replace their “rye juice” with the new beverage.6

A year passed in Cleveland with little action. By November of 1867, the Leader

declared the “matter is becoming a serious one,” pushing the city to act by announcing,

“It is high time that the city government examine into this matter.” In fact, the city

government was well occupied. As far back as March of 1866—a month after the initial

complaints of the petroleum taste—the Superintendent and Engineer of Cleveland Water

Works, Joseph Singer, delivered a special report on the quality of Cleveland’s drinking

water to the trustees of the Water Works. In it, Singer disclosed that lake ice had plugged

the river’s normal discharge into the lake during winter months, causing it to flow

westward toward the intake crib. In concluding, he offered two possible solutions to the

problem. The city could, through “the strictest enforcement of the existing city

ordinances, against the pollution of any stream or water-course tributary to the Cuyahoga

river, and compelling the…oil refineries…and other factories, which use these streams

now as a sewer, to dispose of their waste in some other way.” Otherwise, they could

sacrifice the river’s health as a fait accompli and spend “about $500,000.00 for the

construction of a tunnel under the lake, similar to that in progress of construction in

Chicago.” Singer argued for the former solution, citing the ease of drafting a strong

ordinance and the desire to avoid the “necessity of doubling the indebtedness of the city”

through the construction of such a massive system.7

The trustees, wasting no time, wrote the mayor the next day echoing Singer’s recommendations. The City Council, on their advice, passed an ordinance prohibiting

6 Cleveland Leader. 1866. Chicago and Her Tunnel. December 3, pg 2. 7 The Cleveland Leader, “The Claims of our Vessel owners vs. the Oil Refineries” (7 November 1867): 2; .Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, Special Report of the Superintendent and Engineer upon the Quality of the Water of Lake Erie at the Present Time, 1866 (Cleveland: Fairbanks, Benedict & Co., Printers, Herald Office, 1867): 129-32. 105

petroleum refiners from dumping refuse into the watercourse under the threat of a fine.

Amazingly, the ordinance excepted “spent acid and alkali” from control, insuring the

problem would continue.8

In the context of American legal philosophy, these actions appear less strange.

English common law had a strong tradition of protecting landholders along a waterway

from injury caused by upstream neighbors. The legal historian Morton J. Horwitz

explained the origins of this anti-developmental interpretation of the law in early

America:

The premise underlying the law as stated was that land was not essentially an instrumental good or a pruductive [sic] asset but rather a private estate to be enjoyed for its own sake. The great English gentry, who had played a central role in shaping the common law conception of land, regarded the right to quiet enjoyment as the basic attribute of dominion over property….[I]nterferences with the natural flow of water, including both diversion and obstruction, were illegal ’without the consent of all who have an interest in it.’

Although inherited from the English, the relatively unexploited North American

environment helped erode the anti-developmental tenor of the law in the American

context. An 1810 case argued before the New York Supreme Court saw this mindset fully

employed when the court defended a landowners’ exploitation of resources by arguing,

“what would in England be waste, is not always so here.” Since their state-granted

charters recognized American corporations as public servants, courts often ruled

“development” of a watercourse as “beneficial to the public” despite the increasingly

private nature of corporations in the late nineteenth century. Beginning with the advent of waterpower in New England, American courts chipped away at the common law protections of downstream and upstream stakeholders so that by the end of the Civil War

“a gradual acceptance of the idea that the ownership of property implies above all the

8 The Cleveland Leader, “The Oil Nuisance” (13 February 1868): 4. 106

right to develop that property for business purposes” became American legal orthodoxy.

Aggrieved Clevelanders who might turn to nuisance law found similar protections for

capital before the legal shift precipitated by the Progressive Movement at the end of the

nineteenth century. Nuisances—including manufacturing waste, noise, or the general

disruption of the landscape—became protected under the developmental orthodoxy of

American jurisprudence. By the Gilded Age, as Horwitz points out, “the essential

attribute of property ownership was the power to develop one’s property regardless of the

injurious consequences to others.” Thus, the courts mirrored the stance of public officials

in Cleveland who equated the success of corporations with that of the public and refused

to interfere with development in most cases. Party politics played an insignificant role in

an era where both democrats and republicans promoted urban prosperity by managing

public resources while asking little of business. Of the seventeen mayoral terms between

1863 and 1900, democrats held office seven times, republicans nine, and an independent

served once. Not until the election of the reform-minded Tom Johnson in 1901 did the

office serve as a platform for significant changes between business and the public.9

The death of lovely Lurline

In November of 1867, a year after the council’s ordinance, the owners and operators of

the steam and sail vessels utilizing the port of Cleveland presented an extraordinary

petition to the City Council. It stated the acidic waste in the river not only stripped the paint from ships but also disintegrated the oakum caulk used to seal wooden hulls, which

9 Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ Press, 1977): 36, quoting Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court in Cary v. Daniels, 41, Jackson v. Brownson court comment as quoted on 55, case on the public nature of corporations, 49, on nuisance law, 99. For an environmental history centered on the relationship between the law, nature, and private capital in New England see Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Amherst: Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1991). 107

led to dangerous leaks. The petition urged the city government to bar refineries from dumping their waste acid into the river and create a special committee of five to investigate the claim and suggest possible remedies. The Leader responded by confirming the putridity of the “infernal Cuyahoga water” but turned their attention toward their preferred remedy of an engineering fix.10

After a tirade against the “immense number of dead horses, cattle, dogs, cats, rats, the thousands of tons of offal of our slaughter houses and packing houses…the decayed animal matter of our soap and candle and glue factories, the contents of the tens of miles of our sewers, consisting mainly of the excrement of a population of 80,000…[and] the droppings of all our shipping,” the editors at the Leader again claimed the “refuse of the coal oil refineries is not, properly speaking, filthy.” “Instead of taking steps to have the inlet pipe removed from the filthy neighborhood of the mouth of the Cuyahoga to a point, say, three miles west, or to have a tunnel similar to that of Chicago,” the Leader concluded, “[the City Council] are simply trying to remove the indicator of the presence of filth, by ordering the coal oil refineries not to empty their refuse matter into the river, and thus keep our people in blissful ignorance of the fact that they are drinking the most horrible filth.” Their concern about organic pollutants should not be dismissed during a century of urban cholera epidemics; yet, the caustic petroleum waste, which was literally eating away the hulls of ships, was for the Leader a benign chemical canary in the water works system.11

For nearly a year, the committee contemplated a remedy that would satisfy the

10 The Cleveland Leader, “The Oil Question Again” (7 November 1867): 1; The Cleveland Leader, “The Oil Nuisance” (14 November 1867): 2; The Cleveland Leader, “ The Oil Question Again” (7 November 1867): 1; The Cleveland Leader, “Our Filthy Drinking Water” (23 December 1867): 2. 11 Ibid. 108

community, the shipping interests, and the refining industry. In the late winter of 1868, a

Clevelander expressed the helplessness of the situation in “Song of the Sick Water-

Nymph,” a poem which appeared in the Leader. In it, the river siren Lurline—who appeared in many contemporary poems and even an opera—finds her river water replaced with petroleum and animal wastes as business profits and an impotent city government fails to protect the public good:

Faugh! What a smell! How can I be well? Stinking again, Small pipe and main, Even large reservoir Yields to its power!....

Petroleum, slaughter-house gore, To say nothing of acid Sulphuric, and how many more In our waters placid….

Resolutions, reports, ’Close your retorts!’ ’Our acids are spent.’ On money intent— Runs the stench to the river, Or rises to heaven forever!

Sisters! Think ye summer’s warmth and airs Will give freedom and release from all our cares! The rising sun that thaws our covering o’er, But looses filth in floods from shore to shore. The oil that in garish days shimmers By gaslight ever glimmers. If sweet water from outermost sea By chance in the summer day cheer you and me, We remember it only as what has been. For shortly again It will be all azuline, 12 The death of lovely Lurline.

A municipal committee organized to investigate the nuisance of the Walworth Run, where a Standard Oil refinery was erected, reported that water pollution posed an additional risk to the city for “water thus poisoned also runs through an ice pond, from

12 The Cleveland Leader, “Song of the Sick Water-Nymph” (13 February 1968): 4. 109

which hundreds of loads of ice are annually taken and dispensed to customers throughout

the city.” Once released from factories, waterborne waste entered the city’s urban

metabolism in unexpected ways and found its way to residential water taps.13

Refining the River

In April of 1868, the Council ordered the John Vial, the Chief Engineer and

Superintendent of Cleveland’s water works, to meet his counterpart in Chicago and inspect their new tunnel. After assessing Chicago’s tunnel, Vial announced it a success and estimated that Cleveland could build a similar works at a hefty sum of $296,000.

Although he warned that Chicago’s new two-mile tunnel furnished water that “is not at all time clear,” the Council moved, without further study, to put a loan for the purpose of constructing a similar tunnel on the ballot. By September of 1868, ten months after the initial petition from the city’s shipping interest, a mass citizen assembly met at the Board of Trade and left with a petition in response to the council’s ordinance. In it, they noted the additional fire hazard of petroleum waste upon the water surface and called on mayor

Stephen Buhrer “to take immediate and efficient measures by which to suppress the further deposit, the refuse, or dregs, or any inflammable matter from the petroleum refineries.” The City Council ignored such concerns, preferring to abandon the river as a wasteland and focus on extending the water works beyond the reach of industrial pollution. At the beginning of 1869, Mayor Stephen Buhrer proudly announced the passage of the issue by public vote.14

During the nearly five years required to build the tunnel, complaints from the

13 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1873 (Cleveland: Press of Fairbanks, Benedict & Co., City Printers, Herald Office, 1874): 269. 14 Ibid; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1868 (Cleveland: Leader Book and Job Office, 1869): 125-127, 8. 110

public continued to mount. Not wishing to impede business, the Republican Leader

attempted to quell the public’s passion for a more stringent ordinance by defending the

refiner’s claim that they “would be obliged to suspend operations entirely unless allowed

to permit this [acidic] water to escape.” Despite having echoed the public’s disgust at the

state of the city’s drinking water, the Leader reasoned “it is certainly better that an oily

taste should occasionally get into the drinking water than that any course should be taken

which would seriously impede the oil interest of the city.” For those waiting for the

completion of the lake tunnel, they suggested in a front-page editorial the “best course for

the people to pursue is probably to ’grin and bear it,’ and endure” the poisoning of their

communal water source.15

The final cost of the tunnel is lost, but subsequent governments found themselves

straddled with ever-increasing debt. In 1870, when the tunnel excavations had just begun,

the city’s debt stood at $2,009,000. By the time of the tunnel’s completion five years later, it ballooned to $5,160,000. By 1875, mayor Nathan Payne admitted the debt had become an “embarrassment” and “urge[ed] greater economy in expenditures.” However, it proved an ill-fated time for the city to plunge into debt.16

Republican Water

Following the economic depression in Europe, the United States entered what became known as The Panic of 1873. Banks closed, nearly a quarter of the country’s railroads went bankrupt, and the unemployment rate soared to fourteen percent. Businesses survived by reducing labor costs through cutting wages or laying-off workers. John D.

15 The Cleveland Leader, “Our Drinking Water” (16 February 1872): 1. 16 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1875 (Cleveland: Co-operative Printing Company, 1876): xiv; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1874 (Cleveland: Co-operative Printing Company, 1875): ix. 111

Rockefeller retained his labor force in Cleveland but cut costs by employing them only

half-time. When the price of oil plunged to new lows in the spring of 1877, he responded

by cutting the piecework wage of his coopers from twenty to ten cents per barrel. A

walkout provoked by an announcement of a further wage cut from ten to nine cents per

barrel later that year. The coopers, consisting primarily of Czech immigrants, demanded a

resumption of their already slashed wages, which amounted to less than a dollar a day

when work could be had.17

When Rockefeller and Standard’s management refused to negotiate, the coopers

began a months-long general strike by laborers in the city of Cleveland making less than

a dollar a day. Carpenters, masons, and rolling mill laborers, “dropp[ed] their tools and

refus[ed] to work in various parts of the city, showing that the feeling is contagious.”

This “revolt against their employers,” as the Republican Leader termed the strike,

eventually succeeded in raising the labor standards for every group but the coopers.

Rockefeller refused to concede, and when the coopers’ strike eventually broke, Standard

Oil forced a further humiliating concession on them—they could no longer bring their

sons to labor with them, a source of additional family income and a dying vestige of an

apprentice craft economy. The workers had failed, in the words of their organizer

František Skarda, to “equalize the differences between labor and capital” through “self-

government of trades…that they be not dependent on their employers, but shall be their

own employers.”18

17 For a comprehensive history of this moment see M. John Lubetkin, Jay Cooke’s Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, The Sioux, and the Panic of 1873 (Norman: Univ of Oklahoma Press, 2006); The Cleveland Leader (26 April 1877): 4; Winston Chrislock, “Cleveland’s Czechs,” David C. Hammack, et al, eds., Identity, Conflict, and Cooperation: Central Europeans in Cleveland, 1850-1930 (Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 2002): 101. 18 The Cleveland Leader, “The Workingmen” (25 April 1877): 4, 8; The Cleveland Leader (141May 1877): 8. 112

Although Standard Oil avoided the violence that spread throughout the nation during the summer of 1877 that historians identify as the Great Railroad Strike, the labor tumult of the late 1870s and the economic downturn had captured their attention at a critical moment for the health of Cleveland. The creation of the new tunnel was seen as the panacea for the city’s social as well as environmental woes. With the perennial return of the lake ice, the population devised a number of schemes to clear the river mouth of the obstruction in the hopes of regaining clean drinking water. One Leader article described the use of powder explosives deposited into drilled holes in the ice as a solution. An inventive Clevelander suggested he “fit up a sled with a boiler and a steam engine, connected with two circular saws, six feet in diameter, placed six feet apart” to serve as an ice-cutting machine. One fed-up citizen believed all-out war against the ice necessary and even called for the use of the city’s artillery. In the end, however, the filthy water reached the new tunnel because the City Council believed they could engineer fresh water rather than ordain it through prohibitive legislation.19

Only one officer patrolled the river to enforce the already toothless dumping ordinance. The refineries easily circumvented even this pathetic attempt at enforcement.

When the patrolling officer was recalled to police court for five days in July of 1875, the citizens watched as oil was “allowed to run from the refineries into the river.” The Leader editor offered an apologia by stating that “the oil refineries grew careless” during the officer’s “absence.” Wanting what they saw as effective government, the workers of

Cleveland took the issue into their own hands. When a new refinery was proposed for the seventh ward of the city in the summer of 1875, a confederation of laborers petitioned and won the support of the Board of Health in opposing its construction, arguing it

19 The Cleveland Leader (24 February 1875): 7; The Cleveland Leader (19 February 1875): 8. 113

“would endanger the health of the people.” A week later, they delivered their petition to

the City Council and effectively blocked the refinery’s construction.20

Who Pays?

Following the violent summer of 1877, institutions charged with the protection of the

public interest such as the Leader and city government of Cleveland dramatically

changed tenor, supporting what they viewed as capitalism under siege. The Leader,

which had at first sympathized with the Czech coopers in their strike against the Standard

Oil Company now defended freedom of contract. The editors regarded labor strikes as

“defiance of the rights of property, a violation of the plainest, most fundamental

provision of human government,” adding “The country cannot be ruined that [laborers]

may gain ten per cent. in their wages,” conveniently forgetting that the same laborers had

already been stripped of 65% of their wage in a single year. A decidedly pro-business

administration took power in 1878. Mayor R. R. Herrick, who inherited the growing debt

of his predecessors, used his inaugural address to lambast the very notion of taxation.

“Nothing so effectually strangles manufacturing and all business enterprises as a high rate

of taxation,” he argued, adding, “our resources are unlimited, and idleness cannot be long

maintained.” In this way, contemporaries grasped the connection between social

problems and business, even if they shied away from making politically inconvenient

associations.21

20 The Cleveland Leader (28 July 1875): 7; The Cleveland Leader (18 August 1875): 7; The Cleveland Leader (25 August 1875): 8. 21 The Cleveland Leader (30 July 1877): 4; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1878, “Inaugural Address of Hon. R. R. Herrick, Mayor” (Cleveland: Wiseman & Harvey, 1879): 11-12, 57. 114

An anonymous writer to the Leader pointed out the discrepancies between public

cost and private benefit. After reading the annual report of the City Engineer, the writer

noted, “three-fourths of the expense [of dredging the Cuyahoga] will be incurred above

upper Central way bridge.” “Everyone knows,” the writer observed “that no one uses the

river above the upper Central way bridge except [Standard Oil].” Even Mayor Herrick’s

own health department issued a report detailing how the “slow but continued

contamination of our lake and streams of water from sewerage renders all additional

deposits in them more objectionable.” Despite such cries for the city government to force

business to bear the burden of their own costs, Mayor Herrick refused to act. Instead, he

retrenched by using his position to advocate the creation of a private army, “subject to the

call of the Mayor only,” with its own fortified armory in downtown Cleveland where it

could defend capital against “cases of riot or insurrection” from the laboring classes. Cost

was no barrier to defense of private property.22

By 1880, the city government under the direction of Mayor Herrick served as

little more than a tax-slashing organ of the Chamber of Commerce baldly declaring

“Capitalists in seeking a location in which to invest their money in business enterprises look as much to the rate of the tax levy at that place as to any other one thing, and will shun a city where the rate of taxation is excessive.” “[O]ur aim,” Herrick explained, was

“to cut down and keep down the rate of taxation in this city as much as is consistent with its best interests.” The Health Department of the city, according to its new chief, “was placed in the hands of a Board composed of Medical men…from education” who, instead of hunting down the sanitary abusers in industry, used their new station of legitimacy to

22 The Cleveland Leader (14 May 1875): 7; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1879. “Report of the Health Department,” (Cleveland: Wiseman & Harvey Printers, 1880): 428; Ibid, “Mayor’s Annual Message, R. R. Herrick,” 44. 115

initiate a witch-hunt against midwifes, whom they deemed “ignorant pretenders” of their

own academy-earned education. In a meeting to address public outrage against the

continued pollution of the city’s water by industry, W. B. Rezner , the lone sanitary

officer on the board, voiced his frustration. “If all the smell must be banished then the

Standard Oil Company must move their works,” Rezner argued. “I am in favor of

regulating these concerns, and if the proprietors will not allow regulation, why I say abate

their factories; but the board must give me power to do it, so that I will have something to

fall back upon.”23

The city government of Cleveland found itself in the dilemma of the Gilded Age: the very forces that built the city up from its modest frontier beginnings was poisoning its water and threatened to push society to the verge of class warfare. The solution each successive administration chose for this problem illustrates an abiding desire to accomplish two contradictory goals—protect the public welfare while not violating industry’s sovereignty from government control. These conflicting goals were achieved

by refining nature through engineering feats they hoped would minimize the

environmental costs of allowing Standard Oil to go about its business of concentrating

nature’s wealth.

To Flush a River

Not wanting to raise taxes, the city governments of the late nineteenth century continued to borrow funds in an effort to build ever-greater engineering systems in an elaborate attempt to deliver their citizens clean water. The chief civil engineer during Mayor

23 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1880. “Mayor’s Annual Message, R. R. Herrick,” (Cleveland: Home Companion Publishing Company, 1881): 12-13; Ibid, “Annual Report of the Health Department,” W. B. Rezner, M.D., 453-456; The Cleveland Leader, “Awful Offal” (24 February 1880): 8. (emphasis added). 116

Herrick’s term, B. F. Morse, believed he found a solution to the city’s woes. In his 1881 report to the City Council, Morse outlined an elaborate technological landscape for the city’s future health. Aside from an underground grid of interconnecting sewers, Morse entertained two possible systems for cleansing the Cuyahoga River. The first was a dam,

“at some point above the city” that could “hold a large body of water,” periodically released, so “the river can be flushed out occasionally.” The second plan, which Morse believed more feasible, consisted of a “tunnel or conduit…constructed from the lake, under the city, to some point up the river,” where the “lake water…discharging into the river at the upper end of the tunnel” would increase the river’s natural flow and its ability to process wastes. “In this way the river could be flushed out,” Morse concluded.24

Over the next decade, special committees met, drafted plans, and disbanded while

the city continued to drink its toxic water. Only a typhoid fever outbreak in 1890 spurred

the city government to propose any meaningful change to the hydrology of the region.

The outbreak struck in summer, low-water season for the river, and coincided with “a prolonged supply of muddy water.” The Health Department suspected infectious waste had circulated through the city’s water works. After all, they reasoned, “Other substances

which are carried by river and sewers to the lake certainly come back to us in this way,

and why not the virus of infectious diseases?” The city fathers’ miracle tunnel, long

supplementing the city diet with petroleum waste, now had an active hand compromising

the health of the very citizens it sought to defend. Given the total breakdown in the water

system, it is interesting to note the haste of the City Council in replicating their previous

mistake. By 1892, the Council, with the backing of their health division, proposed a

24 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1881. “Civil Engineer’s Report, B. F. Morse,” (Cleveland: Home Companion Publishing Company, 1882): 201-202. 117

further extension of the lake tunnel. Meeting with a cacophony of questions and criticism,

the Health Department used the occasion of its annual report to denounce the “opposition,

even ridicule, from certain parties…to a measure so essential to the health of our people.”

Unwilling to contemplate any course other than the implementation of the rational,

technological tools at their disposal, the health officers declared that opposition to their

plans “implies a degree of stupidity unworthy the present enlightened age.” The conceit

of their authority evidenced itself when they blamed the plan’s detractors for their own

failing, stating boldly “To oppose therefore the extension of the tunnel farther out in the

lake, is virtually to advocate and encourage the exposure of the citizens of Cleveland to

infectious diseases.” Indeed, in 1896 the city’s food inspector discovered the “tap water of the city contains from 300 to 2,000 families of bacteria per cubic centimeter” and found “without the question of a doubt, the presence of sewage matter” in all samples of the city’s drinking water.25

By 1895, the city government commissioned a study by three expert engineers to

consider the manifold projects of an intercepting sewer system, extension of the lake

tunnel, and a river flushing tunnel. The expert commission delivered three conclusions in

their special report to the mayor and city council. First, any future water intake in the lake

25 The Report of the Health Department during the 1886 term acknowledged the “inexhaustible” nature of the Lake water, but pointed to the “increasing amount of excrementitious material” entering all the lakes from various rivers and port cities, challenging the myopic planners to consider the possibility of confederated action. See Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1886. “Report of the Health Department,” (Cleveland: Peerless Printing Company, 1887): 780-781. A year later the Health Department hired professor A. W. Smith of the Case School of Applied Science to conduct a thorough study of the lake water quality. The dangers outlined in the report were soft-pedaled by the department, which declared “the public water supply…[is] of excellent quality,” downplaying the “rare” “exceptions.” See Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1887 (Cleveland: The Cleveland Printing & Publishing Co., 1888): 9-10. The River and Sewer Commission, according to the Civil Engineer’s report of 1887, gave “earnest attention” to the “question of the pollution of the Cuyahoga river,” who promised “a satisfactory solution of this great problem may be confidently expected within a reasonable measure of time.” See Ibid, “Report of City Civil Engineer,” 391; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1892 (Cleveland: The Cleveland Printing & Publishing Co., 1893): 774- 775; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1896. “Chas. J. Wheeler, Food Inspector,” (Cleveland: The Cleveland Ptg.. & Pub. Co., 1897): 778. 118

“should not be less than ten miles” from the mouth of the Cuyahoga to avoid

contamination. Second, the combined waste dumped into the river from citizens and

industry had combined to create a subsurface “sludge, which in warm weather becomes a

powerful agent in still further polluting the river by putrefactive fermentation,” and

“becomes perceptible by the gas bubbles on the river surface…and by an offensive odor when the water in time of drought has become black in color and saturated with filth.”

Last, the expert panel recommended that the “only course left…is to supply the deficient

flow [of the river] by pumping [water] through a tunnel from the lake to the nearest point

on the river.” Fortunately for the taxpayers of Cleveland, the flushing tunnel—estimated

in 1897 to cost $1,000,000—never made the transition from pipe dream to reality.26

John D. Rockefeller, known primarily to American historians for his zeal to

minimize costs through vertical integration, could have avoided the entire episode by

displaying a modicum of his famous parsimonious character. The acid-laden water his

refineries loosed into the lake via the Cuyahoga could have been recovered. In response

to charges leveled against the acid manufacturers of the city, owners of the Acid

Restoring Works wrote in to the Leader as early as January of 1868, describing their own process of recovering used acid. “The acid used in discoloring petroleum oil is afterwards run into lead-lined tanks,” they wrote, “instead of being run into the river as formerly;

from these tanks we convey it in a tank wagon to the works” where they describe a

simple system of separating the petroleum remnants from the acid, which is finally

recovered in pure form after allowing water to evaporate in the open air. That Rockefeller

26 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1895. “Report on the Proposed Extension of Water Works Tunnel, Intercepting Sewerage System and River Flushing Tunnel, presented by Rudolph Hering, George H. Benzenberg, and Desmond Fitzgerald, Expert Engineers to the Mayor and Council of the City of Cleveland, February 4, 1896,” (Cleveland: The Brooks Co., 1896): lx-lxviii; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1897. M. E. Rawson, Chief Engineer, (Cleveland: The Brooks Co., 1898): 504-505. 119

did not avail himself of either their services in restoring acid or in constructing his own

recovery works—at least to such degree that rendered the city’s water drinkable—

presents a significant challenge to the traditional image of Rockefeller as a champion of

reducing waste through vertical integration and efficient management. Standard Oil

would eventually begin such recycling efforts toward the close of the nineteenth century

for its own internal ledgers revealed that, on a year-to-year basis, acid cost more than labor. In Cleveland, the river, the lake, and ultimately the citizens of Cleveland proved a far cheaper method of disposing his waste than constructing the proper recovery equipment, at least in the short term. In the long term, the savings accrued through recycling his acid would have partially offset the initial investment in a central recovery station or in site-specific works located at each refinery.27

Water, Water Everywhere

The increased water supply created a new culture of water consumption in the closing

years of the nineteenth century. When the first water works opened in 1856, the city

contained a population nearly equivalent with its daily consumption in gallons—

38,000—or one gallon per person, per day. Many citizens still relied on their own wells

or barreled lake water for their needs. Some still bathed in the Cuyahoga and other area

streams. However, the introduction of the bountiful lake water, made instantly available with the flush of a toilet or twist of tap, introduced what one water historian has called

“dis-economies” of water consumption. During the summer of 1885 consumption

27 The Cleveland Leader (24 January 1868): 4. Standard’s ledger for the Bayonne refinery in 1902 show that outlays for acid cost the company $169,486.77 while labor costs over the same period amounted to $139,953.95. See “Analysis of Business of Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, Bayonne for 12 months ending December 31, 1902,” Box: 2.207/K100C, Folder: Bayonne & Bayway, 1899-1911, ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 120

exceeded supply, forcing several factories to close temporarily. Cleveland’s Board of

Councilmen, noting the prodigal use of water for such extravagances as “the sprinkling of

streets and lawns,” asked the city Commissioners to enforce immediately a water

ordinance.28

With every new water works extension in the search for clean water, the city’s

engineers unknowingly calibrated the city’s population to ever-higher levels of

consumption. The water works that had distributed 38,000 gallons a day in 1856

delivered 3,746,907 gallons in 1871 or nearly 40 gallons per person, per day. Twenty

years later, although the city’s population had nearly tripled—from 92,829 in 1870 to

261,353 in 1890—daily water usage exploded by a factor of 8.7, rising from a daily

consumption of 3.7 million gallons in 1871 to 32.2 million gallons in 1891. A year later,

the city’s water works commissioners noted the yearly increase in consumption of 1892

over the previous year proved more than the “entire consumption for the year 1871.” The

search for a technological fix to the problem of water pollution in Cleveland set the city

down a course of supplying prodigious quantities of water to citizens and businesses

willing to find ever more uses for it while doing little to address the initial cause for

concern—quality.29

The City Council offered Cleveland the final, costly solution to water pollution at

the turn of the twentieth century. Despite the expert panel’s previous warning against

28 Jamie Benidickson, The Culture of Flushing (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007): 7; The Cleveland Leader (22 July 1885): 5. 29 Water works figures can be found in Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1892 (Cleveland: The Cleveland Printing & Publishing Co., 1893): 165. It should be remembered that the daily consumption figures represent an average of the yearly total. Actual figures fluctuated with weather and seasonal use. For instance, summer months saw far higher daily rates than these figures suggest. Public works officers recorded daily consumption rates as high as 48 million gallons during the summer months of 1890, a full two years before the average daily consumption reached 32.2 million gallons. See Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1891 (Cleveland: The Cleveland Printing & Publishing Co., 1892): 42. 121

building a lake intake within ten miles of the Cuyahoga’s mouth, the council authorized construction of a massive, nine-foot diameter tunnel in 1896. Completed in 1904, the tunnel extended four miles into the lake. By 1906, the debt for the continued expansion of the ineffectual water works system stood at $4,266,000 and would grow six fold over the next quarter century.30

Standard Oil, while not alone in contributing water pollution to Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie, had necessitated the expansion of the water works system at the close of the Civil War. Rockefeller himself failed to contribute a dime in taxes to its maintenance, preferring to flee to the tax havens of streetcar suburbs. When Cuyahoga County threatened a suit against the $310,000,000 in property he possessed at his estate on

“Millionaire’s Row,” he fled the county for an East Cleveland suburb and built a second, larger estate on the same avenue at Forest Hill. These events would still stir him years later. In his famous interviews with William O. Inglis during the late 1910s, Rockefeller referred to tax collectors as “blackmailers.” Rockefeller’s legacy of philanthropy, in fact, should reinforce this image of a Gilded Age culture that held individuals responsible for their own success and misfortune. Rockefeller and those sharing his ideals believed public welfare was a burden for those in society with the ability and virtue to support it, an unnecessary corruption of the natural order of the market that allowed the strongest to excel. It appears, however, Rockefeller had no objection to the taxpayers of Cleveland bearing the costs for his refusal to recycle his own acids for more than a generation.31

30 Willis E. Sibley, “Water System,” in David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington: Indiana Univ Press, 1987):1029-1032. 31 Ella Grant Wilson, Famous Old Euclid Avenue of Cleveland, Vol. II (1937): 146; David Freeman Hawke, John D. Rockefeller Interview: 1917-1920 (Pocantico Hills: Rockefeller Archive Center, 1984): 905. 122

Simultaneous with the extension of public infrastructure to bear the private costs

of industry was the further retrenchment of capital in the Forest City. Following another

prolonged economic depression in the mid-1890s, business again cut labor costs, which

resulted in an organized boycott of local industry by Cleveland’s labor movement. The

Chamber of Commerce, contemplating the use of their private army against organized labor, served as a meeting place of capitalists in late summer of 1899. “The object of the meeting” according to the observing Leader reporter “is to take steps to crush the boycott.” Collecting 312 endorsements from local business owners, the meeting complained that the boycott was “restraining citizens and business men by intimidation from exercising their individual liberty,” concluding “such a condition is un-American, as well as detrimental to the good name of our city. A day later, the meeting drew 500

“citizens” who, “Almost without exception…were men of prominence in the business community.” At this second meeting, J.G.W. Cowles—a contributing editor of the

Leader and manager of Rockefeller’s real estate interests—was elected chairman and helped raise subscriptions to arrest striking laborers.32

No subscriptions were raised, however, against the city government or

commercial interests of the city when a broiler fire ignited the temporary wooden crib

used by workers excavating the new tunnel two years later. No one denounced the threat

to individual life and liberty when the fire burned to death five men in its flames, while

the lake claimed four others seeking to escape. In all, thirty-seven workers died

32 The Cleveland Leader, “The Business-men’s Meeting to be Held Today” (9 August 1899): 10; The Cleveland Leader, “Against the Boycott and Mob Violence” (10 August 1899): 1. For brief biographies of John Guiteau Welch Cowles see The Book of Clevelanders: A Biographical Dictionary of Living Men of the City of Cleveland (Cleveland: The Burrows Bros. Company, 1914): 64.; William C. Barrow, The Euclid Heights Allotment (Cornell Univ., MA Thesis, 1996); and Joseph P. Smith, ed., History of the Republican Party (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Co., 1898). 123

delivering the city government’s tunnel by the time it opened in 1904.33

Even after the city shifted to a Progressive mindset of reining in corporate

sovereignty with the election of mayor Tom Johnson in the first half of the twentieth century, it remained committed to a water infrastructure predicated on the logic of the

Gilded Age. In a report on the water quality of the city’s new crib in 1905, the Sanitary

Engineer George C. Whipple noted that although rates of, for instance, typhoid dropped

with the transition to the new crib in 1904, traces of pollution still found its way into the

city’s water supply and the lake tunnel would prove only a temporary solution to the

city’s water woes. By 1913, rates of infectious disease increased (typhoid rates jumped

from 5.9 per 100,000 residents in 1912 to 13.5 per 100,000 a year later) and the Secretary

of the filtration committee, R. Winthrop Pratt, reported, “the public water-supply of

Cleveland has been continuously very objectionable.” The city’s response was to treat the

water with hypochlorite of lime, set aside $1,000,000 for an expanded intercepting sewer

to dump wastewater directly into the lake rather than the Cuyahoga, and plan for the

construction of a sewage treatment plant and water filtration works. These decisions set

the city on a course of managing the region’s hydrology that became a hallmark of the

modern city in the twentieth century. Largely, the technological infrastructure became a

necessity as the population topped a half million by 1910, making some form of

technological intervention requisite, as the system of wells that supplied the antebellum

city of a few thousand residents would be inadequate. However, by electing to dump

industrial and municipal waste into the city’s source of drinking water, the city hitched its

destiny to developing and maintaining an elaborate sanitation infrastructure. To some

extent, the city’s dedication to its water infrastructure also represented what economists

33 Samuel Orth, A History of Cleveland, Vol. I (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Pub. Co., 1910). 124

and game theorists term the “sunk cost fallacy.” The fallacy describes an individual or

group that seeks to avoid waste by continuing to use a resource or service it has expended

time or resources to acquire even if the original motive is removed. The economist

Richard Thaler offered the example of a man joining a tennis club at a yearly $300

subscription who develops tennis elbow after two weeks yet continues to play in pain on

the basis of not wasting his $300 investment. Historian of technology, Thomas P. Hughes

has argued that technologies requiring heavy investment of capital and maintenance costs

initially are determined by social goals but soon acquire their own momentum and even

have the power to determine the infrastructure of entire cities—acquiring their own

“technological momentum.” From an ecological perspective, the further down the road to

artifice a technology carries a culture, and Cleveland’s water system certainly carried it

far down that path, the more alienated from the immediate environment the culture

becomes. Thus, by dedicating itself to cleaning up private costs with public infrastructure

in the Gilded Age, the municipal government of Cleveland unknowingly committed the

city to a techno-social system that would produce grim environmental problems in the

twentieth century.34

Cleveland’s water history in the last half of the nineteenth century illustrates

historian James Scott’s critique of modernist, state planning. Every technological fix

envisioned and implemented by Cleveland’s capable sanitary engineers carried the

34 R. Winthrop Pratt, “Sewage Disposal Investigations at Cleveland,” Engineering News, vol. 69, no. 7 (February 13, 1913), R. Winthrop Pratt, “A New Move for Water Filtration at Cleveland, Ohio,” Engineering News, vol. 69, no. 21 (May 22, 1913): 1078; The Ohio Public Health Journal, vol. 5, no. 6 (June 1915): 784; George C. Whipple, Report on the Quality of the Water Supply of the City of Cleveland, Ohio (Cleveland: Division of Water Works, 1905); 7-11; Richard H. Thaler, “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 1, no. 1 (1980): 39-60; Thomas P. Hughes “Technological Momentum,” in Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, eds. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994): 101-113. 125

community further away from the source of its water woes and nature itself and into a

realm of artifice. Northeastern Ohio’s hydrological order, relatively unchanged since the

last glaciation 10,000 years ago, became a rationalized system of canals, pumps, and

subterranean sewers that replaced the natural irregularity of the landscape and further

alienated people from the problems inherent in the city’s water cycle. Unlike Scott’s examples, Cleveland’s problems were created by the marriage of convenience between an exploitative, developmental corporate mindset toward the local environment, a municipal government unwilling to check the private power at the source of its economic prosperity, and a cadre of sanitary engineers eager to wield the instrument of modern technology. It was a rational solution founded on irrationality, for the cure was intended to treat the symptoms rather than the disease. By implementing technological fixes to a social and political problem, Cleveland’s municipal government put faith in technology to remedy problems they lacked the political will to tackle on their own—namely, to prevent the city’s drinking water from becoming a sink for private waste. In the end, the expansion of

Cleveland’s water system operated in much the same way an empty bucket kicked under a leaky ceiling eliminates the symptom of a problem without addressing the structural basis that created it in the first place.35

Standard Oil’s impact on the water history of northeast Ohio was the result of an

intersection of historical interests: a conscious plan by industrialists to avoid safe disposal

or reclamation of refuse; the refusal of public officials to regulate business; the

emergence of civil engineers and sanitarians armed with technological solutions to

ecological problems and the legitimacy of university training; and a legal environment

35 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 1998). 126

that reaffirmed legal orthodoxy of the “naturalness and necessity of decentralized

institutions” such as corporations, free from state control. In the end, these Gilded Age

developments contributed to the creation of the twentieth-century industrial metropolis.

Interlinked with its surrounding ecosystem through a technological system

comprehensible to only a small class of specialists, Cleveland entered the twentieth-

century unable to supply its burgeoning population with the clean water that lapped at its

coastline. As urban historian Martin Melosi has argued, technological reforms created

both short- and long-term effects. In the short-term, technological systems solved

immediate problems, whether political or environmental in nature. “In the long run,”

according to Melosi, “the emphasis on project design rather than careful planning often focused attention on the most immediate goals of implementation rather than the potential resilience of the system or its capacity to adapt to the pressures of growth.” Despite the construction of a centralized water system maintained by sanitary engineers, technology failed to deliver the city from the social costs of industrialism. For Clevelanders at the end of the kerosene age, the lament of the Ancient Mariner was a familiar one.

Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, 36 Nor any drop to drink.

36 Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crises of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 4, 66; Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2000): 10; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (New York: Harper and Bro., 1877). 127

CHAPTER FOUR

Air

W. H. Foster, manager of Standard Oil’s No. 2 works, found himself in a peculiar position in 1898. Foster was arrested for doing his job—operating a refinery. Of the 192 notices served in 1898 to various industries by James McLaren, Cleveland’s public smoke inspector, only those issued to Standard Oil precipitated further visits and, as Mr.

Foster knew all too well, a single arrest. On the back of a growing civic concern over the quality of air in the industrial metropolis, Cleveland’s city council reformed the relationship between business and government with an aim to curb excess pollution and sate public anger. However, their search for progressive reform ultimately prevented radical solutions that elites argued would drive enterprise from the Cuyahoga’s banks. In the search for a solution to please both suffering citizens and a corporation known for its disregard of even mild regulation, the city government of Cleveland turned to municipal engineers and sanitary officers to incorporate nature into the city through the construction of elaborate water works and a growing park system. In the end, the city’s air remained dirty, at times even dangerous to breathe. As the rich fled to suburbs, leaving the city’s working communities alone to live with the environmental consequences of industrialism, workers attacked the municipal government’s laissez faire attitude as supporting anti-American notions of social privilege, even class warfare. In Cleveland,

the environment served as an early battleground for the social struggles that historians

associate with the beginning of the reforms of the Progressive Era. 128

The struggle over Cleveland’s park system sheds light on the role nature,

specifically atmospheric pollution, played in the development of the streetcar suburb

critical to the history of urban environments and the interconnection of the corporation

and the growth of cities. Air quality was rooted in land ownership patterns through the

early battles over municipal taxes and erupted in a social conflict that propelled

Cleveland into the Progressive Era. Although the plan failed in Cleveland, the 1890s

represent a new era of power for Standard Oil and the corporation in American history.

The corporation sought to not only exert its will upon its competitors but also determine

its own social environment. The impulse to control the social conditions of an entire city

manifested itself throughout the Standard empire, meeting setback and outright failure in

Cleveland but success in locations where the corporation constituted the entirety of the

economy, as we shall see in the coming chapter. Cleveland’s transition from a dense

urban core to developing a pinwheel of streetcar suburbs was initially driven by an elite

desire to escape industrial pollution.1

The battles over sub-urban land originated in the foul air of the city core.

Managers like W. H. Foster held a pragmatic and mechanistic view of nature, which

sought solutions to the problems of acquiring raw materials and organizing laboring

bodies to convert them. The same obsessive ethos of the capitalist to control all means of

production and eliminate every drop of wasted capital and labor extended to waste as

well as production, particularly to the disposal of the unsalable by-products of refining

1 Historian Sam B. Warner, Jr.’s Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 remains the authoritative history of the development of the early suburb, which Warner attributes to development of electricity and the reduced cost of affiliated materials. His thesis pertains to Boston but fails to account for the “push factors” of deteriorating environmental health that lead many affluent Clevelanders to find solace in bucolic sub-urban real estate. See especially Sam B. Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962): 28; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbinization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 285. 129

petroleum—soot and smoke. The sky was a convenient recipient of the necessary waste

of petroleum refining; thus, the atmosphere was incorporated into the production process

as a recipient of airborne fossil fuel pollution. These hidden costs of converting

Pennsylvania crude into profitable kerosene were inflicted on the trees, lungs, and property of the communities surrounding Standard Oil’s refineries. This chapter tells the story of a culture of free-market public health, where individual wealth, not public goals, determined health. The rich fled to pastoral suburbs and the poor, cloistered in dirty, factory-bound ghettos, were forced to petition the municipal government for relief. It is a story that begins with pollution from Mr. Foster’s refinery, continues with the executive action of James McLaren and the creation of a publicly funded and often-impotent oversight apparatus, and ends with the public demand for democratic control of nature in the form of municipal parkland. By the turn of the twentieth-century, the refining of petroleum led to the refining of nature and society into a machine to absorb the costs private industry refused to pay.

“The incense burning on the altar of industry”2

The coming of air pollution to the American urban landscape was at first welcomed as a

sign of material progress. At the close of the Civil War, when so much of the nation’s

wealth had been mobilized or destroyed in a half-decade of carnage, the aesthetics of production naturally served as a positive focus for a war-scarred nation. In the final year of the war, Cleveland Mayor George Senter mentioned with pride the “gratifying fact that

2 This quotation originates with Chicago booster, W. P. Rend, who associated air pollution with prosperity. “Smoke is the incense burning on the altars of industry. It is beautiful to me. It shows that men are changing the merely potential forces of nature into articles of comfort for humanity.” See J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000): 59. 130

the manufacturing interests and the carrying trade…are rapidly enlarging themselves.”

Industry served as balm, even a rebirth from the largest setback the young republic had

yet faced. In the hundred years spanning the birth of the nation to the end of

Reconstruction, the people of the United States poured out of the Atlantic seaboard and

into the Great Lakes states and trans-Appalachian South, stripping newly-independent

Mexico of half its territory, reaching the Pacific and finally the Arctic Circle with the acquisition of Alaska from the Russian Tsar. American culture became imbued with a

“legacy of conquest,” in the words of historian Patricia Limerick, in which the land’s

former inhabitants and the vast, often dangerous natural elements became obstacles in the

celebratory narrative of the early Republic. Thus, it is not surprising that Chicago

industrialist W. P. Rend wrote in 1892 of the smoke that belched from the Windy City’s

factories as “the incense burning on the altars of industry.” After a century of struggle

with an untamed environment, Rend saw in Chicago’s pollution a signal “that men are

changing the merely potential forces of nature into articles of comfort for humanity.”3

With the Civil War ended, many took comfort in a resumption of America’s

Manifest Destiny to remake their corner of the world over in a cultured image of Eden.

Cleveland businesses refocused their war spirit by dredging the Cuyahoga, laying railroad trunk lines, and building a viaduct over the river to connect downtown Cleveland to Ohio

City. Already a center of commerce because of the canal connecting it to the Ohio River

3 The classic text on the culture of Western conquest is Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ Press, 1950). For an introduction to the New Western history see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), Clyde A. Milner, ed., et al, Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: Univ of Kansas Press, 1991), and Richard Slotkin’s trio of books on the West as myth, but especially The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (Norman: Univ of Oklahoma Press, 1998). .Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1864. “Hon. Geo. B. Senter, Annual Message,” (Cleveland: Fairbanks, Benedict & Co., City Printers, Herald Office, 1865): 6; As quoted in J. R. McNeil, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000): 59. 131

and the Great Lakes, Cleveland industry flourished in the years following the Civil War

as new enterprises in paint (Sherwin Williams, 1866), iron-ore (M. A. Hanna Co. and

Globe Iron Works, mid-1860s), and petroleum refining (Standard Oil Company, 1870)

sprung up along the banks of the Cuyahoga.

Cleveland’s Chimney Forest

However sweet the smell of industry was to Cleveland’s industrialists, it was certainly

not good for them. The primary fuel source for Cleveland’s growing industry following

the Civil War, bituminous coal, released a potpourri of toxic vapors when combusted in

the boilers below oil stills, in smelting furnaces, or in domestic stoves. Although their

chemical properties were not fully understood until the middle of the twentieth-century in the wake of several fatal industrial accidents, Cleveland citizens did not require an official report to understand that the air they breathed was harmful.4

The two most severe by-products of burning fossil fuels—sulfur dioxide (SO2) and carbon monoxide (CO)—work against biological systems in maliciously complementary ways. Sulfur dioxide, when released into the atmosphere, oxidizes and binds to water molecules to create sulfuric acid. In high concentrations, the acid is absorbed through the stomata of leaves and causes the plant cells to at first deactivate,

4 A weather inversion causing the air pollution from the American Steel and Wire Company in Donora, Pennsylvania to accumulate for a period of four days during October, 1948 killed twenty people and caused severe respiratory tract illness among 42% of the city’s population. The incident lead the State of Pennsylvania to call on the US Public Health Service to conduct a thorough investigation within two months of the disaster, the first of its kind in the United States. An army of public health nurses canvassed the population door-to-door, the local hospital’s health records were reviewed, blood, teeth, and urine samples were taken from residents and animals in the area, and autopsies were performed on the bodies of several of the incident’s victims. Although the American Steel and Wire Company defended itself in court by claiming the disaster was “an act of God,” the event and the subsequent study provided scientists and public health officials with the most thorough data concerning the adverse health affects of air pollution to date. See Harry Heimann, “Effects of air pollution on human health,” World Health Organization, Air Pollution (New York: Columbia Univ Press, 1961): 159-220, and, for quote see McNeil, 70. 132

turn yellow then brown, and eventually burst—robbing the plant of the ability to photosynthesize. Sulfur dioxide, when inhaled by animals, causes respiratory irritation, increased mucus production and, when present in high concentration in the atmosphere causes any watery membranes—such as the eyes—to become inflamed. With the combustion of large amounts of fossil fuels, such as that witnessed in the industrial belt of Gilded Age America, sulfur concentrations become so high as to cause a regional change in atmospheric acidity commonly referred to as “acid rain,” which not only destroys plant life but even melts away the façades of stone buildings and statues.5

Carbon monoxide works against animal health by attaching to the oxygen-bearing protein, hemoglobin, in their blood stream, thus robbing tissues of oxygen in proportion to the level of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere. In high enough concentrations, the body lacks enough oxygen to perform simple brain functions or operate organs, leading to loss of consciousness, brain damage, and even death.6

Cleveland’s industries—especially the coal-consuming iron mills and oil

refineries—emitted these pollutants in prodigious amounts during the industrial boom

that endured trhoughout the century following the Civil War. Harper’s New Monthly

featured a travel narrative of the novelist Constance F. Woolson that captured these

changes in September of 1872. Beginning in Buffalo, Woolson toured the Great Lakes in

the vessel Columbia and reached Cleveland’s shores soon after and painted her impression of the Forest City in striking tones. “Presently the spires of Cleveland came into sight, a cloud of smoke resting over the city coming from iron-mills and oil-

refineries crowded together on the marshy flat of the Cuyahoga Valley.” The ship’s well-

5 See Moyer D. Thomas, “Effects of air pollution on plants,” World Health Organization, Air Pollution (New York: Columbia Univ Press, 1961): 234; Heimann, 187. 6 Ibid, 194. 133

heeled passengers crowded the deck of the Columbia to catch a glimpse of the city and

inquired of the skipper “What kind of place is Cleveland, captain?” “Good enough place;

’[o]ily, though.” The remainder of the Captain’s interrogation, whose Irish accent

Woolson retained, continued as the vessel docked on the banks of the Cuyahoga:

“Captain, what are the contents of those barrels?” inquired the Utica school-mistress who presided over the band of school girls. “Ile, marm.” “Captain, pray what is this disagreeable odor?” said Mrs. Peyton, taking out a vinaigrette. “Ile, marm.” “What makes the water look so funny?” said Curleylocks, one of the school-girls, gazing over the side. “Ile, miss.”7

Given until sunset, the passengers disembarked to visit the city. Many wished to

tour Euclid Avenue, “where the big houses are,” but one passenger in Woolson’s carriage

demanded they first visit the refineries. Despite pleas to not “go near that oil; it will give

us all headaches,” Morris—the recalcitrant passenger—insisted, stating they “could see

residences anywhere, but Cleveland is a great oil place: you may call it ’highly refined.’”

Fortuitously, the touring carriage convinced a passenger, Major Archer, who “had a

friend in the business,” and the tour began.

The flat was crowded, odoriferous, and smoky, with lumber, oil, and iron; but the oil predominated. Blue barrels met our eyes on every side, huge tanks rose from the ground like fortifications, and a network of pipes, elevated high in the air, ran hither and thither, while over, under, and throughout all the pungent petroleum made itself felt in every breath we drew. On we went, and the smoking chimneys grew into a forest.

Major Archer’s friend was undoubtedly a member of the Standard Oil Company for blue barrels were the calling card of the company until pipelines and bulk transport made them obsolete later in the century. The group concluded their tour of the refinery—one of the

few descriptions of the interior of Standard’s Cleveland Works of the time—and made

7 Constance F. Woolson, “Round by Propeller,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol 45, Issue 268 (September 1872): 518-533. 134

their way toward Euclid Avenue, where the industrialists of the city called home. The

party, astonished by the contrast with the bleak Cuyahoga, marveled at the “velvet lawns,

conservatories, shrubbery, statues, and fountains of these fine residences.” Even the

“noble trees” of the Forest City earned their praise as they watched the sunset on the

lakeshore and repaired to their ship to continue their trek.8

Unlike the affluent passengers of the Columbia, the people of Cleveland could not abandon the artificial atmosphere created in the industrial flats. In the half-century after

the advent of the kerosene age, the city of Cleveland awakened to a new ecology that,

like so much of Gilded Age America, favored the rich over the poor.

“That Stink”

As Clevelanders opened their windows during the hot summer of 1870, more than the relief of the night breeze entered their homes. “The rancid, suffocating breath of the oil tanks again makes the hot nights a burthen to us,” the editor of the Leader announced in late July 1870. “Soon after dusk the foul vapor comes pouring down the valley of the river, and…it is so dense in the lower part of the city that persons whose lungs are at all delicate find it next to impossible to sleep.” Although journalists at the Leader came to industry’s defense when labor unions and progressive city governments sought to exert more democratic control over business, the stink that wafted into their bedrooms at night led writers to call on the City Council to immediately “come to the rescue of the community.”9

After early reports suggested the chemical manufacturers as the source of the

8 Ibid, 522, 524. 9 The Cleveland Leader (28 June 1870): 2. 135

stench, Leader reporters discovered that, following a previous outcry, “the Acid

Restoring Company [had] been removed eight miles away.” In its absence, however,

“certain oil refiners within the city limits have undertaken the process which creates the

stink.” The Leader dispatched a reporter to hunt down the source on an overnight trek.

During his journey, the reporter “could hear the slamming down of windows by disgusted

residents of Euclid avenue, as the stench penetrated within and aroused the sickened

occupants from sleep.” His overnight adventure would include several acts of

trespassing—a bold case of investigative journalism and a testament to the severity of the

problem. His journey ended at the Walworth Run where the “the rank oil smells and the

sharp flavor from the acid works” mingled with the noxious “perfume” of the tributary.10

The Leader alternated between suggesting abatement would cause Cleveland to

get “laughed at by all her sister cities” and calls for fresh air no matter the cost. “It is

probably desirable to some of our citizens to have the acids refined,” the Leader stated after their nocturnal investigation, “but it is not the just privilege to suffocate their fellow beings in accomplishing that purpose.”11

Cleveland’s government had acted as early as February of 1860, less than a year

after the Drake Well strike, to ban the refining of coal oil within city limits, an action the

Leader opposed at the time. By 1870, however, the Leader was merely echoing a much

louder public sentiment against the oil refineries. Forced to locate outside the city’s limits, the refineries sprang up along the shores of two tributaries of the Cuyahoga—the

Kingsbury and Walworth runs. Located on opposite sides of the river, these streams soon became known for their filthy atmosphere. The Leader dipped into literary imagery by

10 The Cleveland Leader (31 July 1880): 4. 11 The Cleveland Leader (30 June 1870): 2. 136

calling the Walworth Run “The Slough of Despond.” The people forced to live in the

neighborhoods around these industrial sinks responded through civic action. Upon

hearing of plans for a new oil refinery, laborers of the city’s seventh ward circulated a

petition against its construction and passed it on to the city council in the summer of

1875. Dr. Thayer, of the Board of Health, lent his support to their cause, “believing that

[the refinery’s] fumes would endanger the health of the people.”12

Despite these localized events, no comprehensive plan guided the city

government, which preferred to address problems as they materialized on a case-by-case basis. By the late nineteenth century, their inaction as the size and scale of refineries grew in the city became apparent to everyone. The complaints of a few impoverished wards now spread to the entire metropolis as the city’s air refused to stay within the bounds of property lines or city ordinances and a few concerned citizens challenged the fundamental defense made by business. “They talk about driving capital out of the city if these nuisances are forced to abate,” T. H. Lamson wrote in to the Leader in 1880.

“More capital is kept out than is invested in all of them; and further, the desirability of

Cleveland as a place of residence is seriously endangered.” Lamson’s words proved prophetic as Cleveland’s legacy of pollution crystallized into negative images of the

“Mistake on the Lake” during the twentieth century.13

Death of the Forest City

12 The Cleveland Leader (30 June 1870): 2. Somewhat ironically, the pro-business Leader demanded at the time that the “action be spiked at once” lest business flee the city. See Edmund H. Chapman, Cleveland: Village to Metropolis (Cleveland: The Press of Western Reserve Univ., 1964): 116; The Cleveland Leader, 1874. The Slough of Despond, November 14, pg 7; The Cleveland Leader (18 August 1875): 7; Ibid (25 August 1875): 8. 13 The Cleveland Leader (2 August 1880): 5; Philip W. Porter, Cleveland: Confused City on a Seesaw (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1976): 3. 137

Only when the trees that gave Cleveland its nickname began to die did the city council take notice. No amount of pressure from their constituents or the trained medical doctors at their own board of health spurred as much action as a few dead shade trees. Nowhere in the official reports do they declare how the general crisis was first recognized. The poor neighborhoods had been denuded long before, if not by the violence of pollution, most certainly by cold hands searching for fuel. Only Public Square, the few parks, cemeteries, and of course the verdant pastoral estates of Millionaire’s Row contained ample trees. What is certain is that by 1891, the death of the Forest City’s trees moved the city council to elicit a study and recommendation from the

United States Department of Agriculture.

As Chief of the Forestry Division of the USDA, B. E. Fernow—the “father of

American forestry”—penned one of two reports to Cleveland’s City Council. In his investigation of the “rapid decline and death” of the “shade trees of the city,” Fernow and

J.C. Arthur, Professor of Botany at Purdue University, found that “such cause is to be found in the smoke from the large manufacturing establishments, and especially from the oil refineries.” Although they lacked the equipment to measure air quality, Arthur and

Fernow confirmed, “from the well-known abundance of sulphur in American soft coal and crude petroleum, there can be no reasonable doubt that it occurs in sufficient amount to largely or wholly account for the destruction of trees.” After his visit to Cleveland,

Arthur “found the trees of the city in a really deplorable condition,” and the “largest trees in the central part of the city…without exception, greatly enfeebled and slowly but surely dying.” As workers removed dead or dying trees from parks and Public Square, Arthur had the opportunity “to examine the roots, interior of the trunks and the highest branches 138

of some of the largest trees in the last stages of the injury.” “I am fully convinced,”

Arthur concluded, “that the chief difficulty with these trees arises from the befouled

condition of the atmosphere.”14

Fernow’s visit to the city gave him confidence in simply stating, “Death occurs

from acid poisoning,” concluding, “the sulphurous acid [was] desiccating and destroying

the tissue of the leaf.” Arthur pinpointed the various source points of the potpourri of

toxins that residents had correctly suspected even if they lacked the Latin vocabulary to

name the menace:

The great amount of soft coal used for heating and in the production of power by the large manufacturing establishments, and of crude petroleum burned at the refineries, gives rise to enormous quantities of smoke which darkens the atmosphere and covers trees, buildings and other objects with a thick coating of soot. In addition to the soot, the burning of coal and crude petroleum gives rise to a number of gases, such as carbon monoxide, sulphurous acid and arsenious acid. The chemical works located near the heart of the city also give off gases, particularly nitrous oxide and hydrochloric acid.

Toward the end of his report, Fernow offered the City Council two possible paths to take:

“either to prevent the escape of the noxious gases or else to plant only such trees as are

exempt, or partially so, from ill effects of the gases.” However, he made clear to the

Council that only one true choice lay before them, for in suggesting hardy tree species he

sounded a pessimistic tone, stating “it may be said that where the smoke nuisance is

excessive none will survive.” Even if “effective measures were taken at once to suppress

the smoke nuisance,” it would only be “possible to save, by judicious pruning, such trees

as are not too badly affected, and have retained vigor for reproduction.” “The City of

Cleveland,” Fernow concluded his report “beautiful and attractive through its verdure of

luxuriant trees, may well be alarmed at her loss and stand ready to guard her trees with

14 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1891. “Report issued by Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, Edwin Willits, 25 September 1891,” (Cleveland: The Cleveland Printing & Publishing Co., 1892): 55-63. 139

jealous care.” The response from the Council would serve as a rare experiment in public

oversight of industry in the Gilded Age.15

Pollution Police

Through all the strikebreaking maneuvers, underhanded railroad deals, charges of

perjury, collusion, vote buying and numerous counts of restraint of trade, no member of

the Standard Oil Company served a single day behind bars until W. H. Foster was

collared by James McLaren in 1898. McLaren’s action did not occur without precedent.

The city council passed a smoke ordinance as early as 1882 and John Vandevelde—the

first smoke inspector—policed Cleveland’s sky a year later. In his first year, Vandevelde

kept busy, making 1,163 visits to follow up on nuisance complaints and serving 535

notices to polluting factories. His job was an unenviable one. “So great was the prejudice

against it,” Vandevelde wrote in his first annual report, “and so strong the belief that it

was impracticable, that an effort was made to repeal the ordinance.” It is easy to sense

how unpopular the new smoke inspector was in Mayor John H. Farley’s annual message

to the City Council. “[W]hile much care should be taken to keep the city as clean and

healthy as possible,” Mayor Farley wrote, “care should also be taken to protect the people

from the wiles and dilusions [sic] of hygienic cranks.” Unlike Vandevelde or the

sanitarians in the city’s Department of Health, Mayor Farley had to answer to the

businesses that fell under the new regulation and the affluent citizens who protested any

increase in taxation.16

15 Ibid. 16 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1884, “Report of the Smoke Inspector,” (Cleveland: Peerless Printing Company, 1885): 457-9; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1884, “Mayor’s Annual Message to the City Council,” (Cleveland: Peerless Printing Company, 1885): xx. 140

Vandevelde and subsequent smoke inspectors urged polluters to experiment with

a bevy of filters, flues, sprinkler systems, and chimney designs in an effort to clean the

city’s air. In his first year of work alone, Vandevelde was able to convince Standard Oil,

“with their hundreds of furnaces,” to try “most all the appliances in the market.”

However, after a decade of experimentation, ineffective devices or a lack of diligence in

their operation left Cleveland’s skies dirty as ever, as their dying trees testified. By 1893,

the new smoke inspector, George F. Leick, wrote in his annual report to the City Council

that the “market is flooded with numberless devices for consuming and preventing

smoke; the great majority of these contrivances are absolutely worthless.” Even more

troubling, Leick reported to the Council that the toxic air of Cleveland was taking a toll

on more than just the city’s trees. People were dropping in the streets where carbon

monoxide levels concentrated to dangerous levels. “During the past year,” Leick wrote,

“this department paid out $1,057 to various hospitals for treatment of emergency cases

picked up by the policemen on the streets.” Doubting any abatement in the smoke

nuisance, Leick believed the only responsible course lay in providing public relief for the

waste of private industry by “the addition or setting aside of a ward in the City Hospital

where this class of cases can be treated.”17

Such a hospital already existed just downwind from the Flats industrial region. St.

Alexis Hospital, founded in 1884 was located only a few thousand feet to the southeast of

the main Standard Oil works and served victims of industrial accidents and respiratory

cases. By the mid-1920s, when the first study of Cleveland’s sootfall was conducted by

students of Case School of Applied Science, the measurements taken from the roof of the

17 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1884, “Report of the Smoke Inspector,” (Cleveland: Peerless Printing Company, 1885): 457-9; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1893, “Department of Police, Health Division, Dr. Geo. F. Leick, Health Officer,” (Cleveland: J. B. Savage, Print, 1894): 663-4. 141

hospital revealed the highest levels of atmospheric pollution in the city. The hospital

averaged a stunning 2,038 tons of soot per square mile per year—four to eight times

higher than the average of the British industrial cities of Leeds and Manchester (240-539

tons/sq. mi./yr.)—and even topped the worst areas of America’s air pollution capital,

Pittsburgh (1,950 tons/sq. mi./yr.). At that rate, the smokestacks from the upwind smokestacks belched out and dumped over an acre-foot of soot on the square mile around the hospital every year.18

By the 1890s, the foul Kingsbury and Walworth Runs had been saturated with

waste to such an extent that they contributed to the air nuisance, as the slurry of slop

fermented and released vapors into the atmosphere. The Board of Health conveyed the

urgency of the problem to the public. “All along [Walworth Run] the banks are

necessarily soaked with [industrial waste], undergoing decomposition, and must be

unhealthy.” As early as 1873, a special committee “prepare[d] a careful report, embracing

the causes which operate to render Walworth Run an obnoxious and filthy nuisance” and

concluded the “refuse from seven oil refineries, offal from eight slaughtering

establishments, two soap factories, one stock yard, two city sewers, one distillery, two

woolen mills, four breweries and two tanneries, any one of which is, in our opinion,

sufficient to contaminate and pollute the water.” Although the committee specifically

noted that such dumping “is strictly forbidden by the State law of Ohio,” they could not

18 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1893, “Department of Police, Health Division, Dr. Geo. F. Leick, Health Officer,” (Cleveland: J. B. Savage, Print, 1894): 663-4; Ralph E. Chapman and George G. Cummings. 1924. A Study of the “Sootfall” in the City of Cleveland, Ohio. BS thesis, Case School of Applied Science. Cleveland.: 23-24; “St. Alexis Hospital Medical Center,” Willis E. Sibley, “Water System,” in David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington: Indiana Univ Press, 1987): 85.; Angela Gugliotta, “Hell with the lid taken off”: A Cultural History of Air Pollution—Pittsburgh (unpublished dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2004); L.A. Richards, ed., Diagnosis and Improvement of Saline and Alkali Soils (Washington: U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1954): 158. 142

but help to view the problem with the guiding ethos of laissez faire culture. “But to

prevent the various manufacturing and other establishments from discharging their refuse

water into the Run,” the special committee concluded “would be a great injustice, as it

would virtually cause them to close their business, and throw out of employment a large

body of mechanics.”19

Their solution was to refine, rather than work with, the ecology of the Cuyahoga

watershed. “We would therefore recommend,” the committee concluded, “that the

stream…be allowed to remain (for the present) ’in statue quo,’ and that a closed sewer be

constructed so as to occupy a place in the valley and receive the refuse matter from those

establishments and sewers now draining into Walworth Run.” Given their reaction to the

fouled waters of the Cuyahoga and Lake Erie, the Council’s response was not

surprising—both the Kingsbury and Walworth Runs would be culverted at great public expense (the Walworth sewer alone cost an estimated $730,000) and transformed into

subterranean sewers to trap the stench on its journey to the river.20

In 1875, long before construction began on the Walworth Run sewer, the Board of

Health reported to the City Council that much of the organic “offal” dumped into the

Walworth and Kingsbury Runs “is usually carted away by farmers or the fertilizing

companies” to enrich the soil of the garden farms that ringed the metropolis. By 1878, the

Board of Health urged that the “proper way would be to send teams to the various

provision houses to carry all waste animal and vegetable matter direct to the country,” but

they anticipated the reluctance in dedicating funds to “such an arrangement” because it

19 The Cleveland Leader (31 July 1880): 5.

20 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1873, “Report of Committee on Walworth Run Nuisance,” (Cleveland: Press of Fairbanks, Benedict & Co., City Printers, Herald Office, 1874): 269-70; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1897 (Cleveland: The Brooks Co., 1898): 499. 143

“would involve increased expense, and that the city is evidently not in favor of.” Because

of the city government’s unwillingness to subsidize such recycling efforts, the Board of

Health “recommended that every household burn as much as possible of its kitchen

garbage when other means of disposal are not at hand,” further burdening the city’s

atmosphere. The death of the feedback loop between local farms and the city’s waste

represents one of the many unheralded casualties of the kerosene age.21

As far as the waste contributed by the Standard Oil Company, the previous

chapter outlines the ease of recycling acid rather than continuously dump the caustic

wastes into Cleveland’s drinking water. The methods existed even if the will to act did

not.

Retrenchment

It should come as little surprise that those with an interest in low production costs

abhorred the threat of municipal oversight. As citizens protested the continued

contamination of their atmosphere, Cleveland’s industry found ways to battle the rising

tide of public interest in their emissions. Finding the prohibitive ordinances lacking

severe penalties, most industries simply ignored them—applying the business logic that if

the costs of non-compliance with the law proved lower than cleaning up their operation,

they had an obligation to their shareholders to take the path of least resistance. In 1880,

Health Officer W. B. Rezner expressed frustration at the lawless nature of Cleveland

industry during a public meeting concerning the stench from a local slaughterhouse,

Rezner exclaimed:

21 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1875 (Cleveland: Co-operative Printing Company, 1876): 698; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1878 (Cleveland: Wiseman & Harvey, 1879): 388. 144

[H]ow under the sun am I to abate them. I served a notice on them this morning, and have given them twenty-four hours to cease manufacturing smells. If I find them still creating a nuisance tomorrow I shall swear out a warrant and have them arrested. Judge Young can impose a fine, and they can go on their way rejoicing. I am powerless to proceed differently.

When the meeting turned to oil refineries, Rezner revealed the modest goals of his office

that nevertheless had been opposed. Rezner understood the concerns of industry, stating

that if “all the smell must be banished then the Standard Oil Company must move their

works and Walworth run from end to end be devastated of manufactories.” However, a

complete elimination of pollutants was never the goal of the smoke ordinances. “I am in

favor of regulating these concerns,” Rezner stated, “and if the proprietors will not allow

regulation, why I say abate their factories.” Yet, Rezner pointed to the true source of

inaction, “but the board must give me power to do it, so that I will have something to fall

back upon.”22

As was the case with their reaction to water pollution, the City Council chose

solutions to the air nuisance that gave them the appearance of acting in the public’s

interest (authorizing ordinances and establishing the office of smoke inspector) but failed

to invest their actions with sufficient force to produce meaningful results. Although the

air remained toxic with the smoke inspector on the beat, the Council could dismiss any

discontent as impatient, radical dysphoria or simply lay blame on the smoke inspector himself. Some residents, like the anonymous “A SUFFERER,” wrote to newspapers calling for an end to the posturing by business and the city government alike.

A great deal has been said about the rights of capitalists lately, and taking away thousands of dollars capital from our city, but very little about the rights of the property holders who are obliged to submit to this nuisance to the detriment of their health, and the depreciation of the value of their property. During the hot weather lately, night after night, when the air was close and stifling, have we been awakened from a sound sleep by inhaling the noxious odors from these rendering establishments, and been obliged to close every window to keep, if possible, some of it out, and remain for hours with the

22 The Cleveland Leader (24 February 1880): 8. 145

house hermetically sealed. The odor is so strong that it often brings on cases of severe vomiting. This, too, in a city that claims to be, and from its natural advantages should be, the healthiest in the United States….Do our health officers understand that the people are looking at them anxiously to have it abated? They are paid salaries for the performance of their duties, and if they have not got the nerve and backbone to fulfil [sic] them, let them step out and others go in that will.23

By the beginning of the twentieth century, little had changed for residents within

the city’s boundaries. Even the office of the smoke inspector shriveled in the face of several court challenges. During the 1890s, as capitalists in the Forest City utilized the

power of the chamber of commerce to beat back a surge in labor unionism, local judges

challenged the authority of the city government’s meager attempts to regulate business.

In 1895, Judge Ong declared Cleveland’s smoke ordinance unconstitutional, forcing the

city to respond by winning passage of a bill in the state legislature “granting to

municipalities the power to declare what is a nuisance and giving it power to abate the

same.” Without it, not only would the city be unable to act against polluters but the police

force might find itself on shaky legal ground in enforcing a range of laws. Two years

later, again the smoke ordinance was thrown out in court when Judge Fielder, “declaring

that it was a prohibitory ordinance and that the State conferred no such powers on the

City Council, but gave them power to regulate and not to prohibit.” The mission of

Cleveland’s Office of the Smoke Inspector could change overnight on the interpretation

of a single verb by a county judge.24

When John Krause assumed the position of chief inspector in 1902, decades of

business resistance and court challenges forced him to focus on “education rather than

coercion.” He spent his tenure in the smoke inspector’s office delivering public lectures,

23 The Cleveland Leader (30 July 1880): 6. 24 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1896 (Cleveland: The Cleveland Ptg.. & Pub. Co., 1897): 749; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1898 (Cleveland: The Cleveland Ptg. & Pub. Co., 1899): 806. 146

meeting with smoke inspectors from throughout the country, and attempting to work with

business. His actions did little for the city he was charged to patrol, however. The editor

of the Cleveland Tribune lashed out against Krause for “patting himself on the back too

much and allowing the city’s air to remain smoky.” In the end, the smoke inspector was

only as good as the legal climate supporting him and many decision-makers in Cleveland

viewed its air and water quality as an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice for material

wealth. “Cleveland is a manufacturing center,” Dr. Martin Freidrich, a contemporary of

Krause and fellow health officer, stated in 1902. “The smoke that annoys us has made the

city what it is, the metropolis of Ohio.” The frontier ideology associating the domination

of nature with progress died hard in Gilded Age America.25

Suburban Air

“Pure air is good food” declared health officer G. C. Ashmun in his report to the City

Council in 1881. After spending countless summer nights trapped inside their spacious homes on Euclid Avenue, the affluent residents of Millionaire’s Row moved to the

suburbs rather than breathe air that, at times, caused them to become ill. T. H. Lamson’s

warning in 1880 that “the desirability of Cleveland as a place of residence is seriously

endangered” came to fruition. Samuel Andrews, the English chemical engineer who

managed Standard’s stills through their formative years, built a thirty-three room castle

on Euclid Avenue, stocked with furniture and carpets custom-made in England and

maintained by an army of a hundred servants. However, Andrews and his family

25 As quoted in R. Dale Grinder, “The Battle for Clean Air: The Smoke Problem in Post-Civil War America,” Martin V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930 (Austin: Univ of Texas Press, 1980): 99, 98; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1902 (Cleveland: The A. S. Gilman Printing Company, 1903): 941. 147

abandoned it after living there for only thirteen years, shuttering the Victorian mansion in

1898.26

Rockefeller himself abandoned his relatively modest residence on Euclid Avenue

where he lived close to his business partner Henry Flagler, whom he “met and walked to

the office together” daily. He moved six miles east to a several hundred-acre Forest Hill

estate, far removed from the bustle and stench of the city. On a hill commanding a view

of the city and Lake Erie, Rockefeller built a stately Victorian mansion originally planned

as a health resort, which he named “The Homestead.” When not at work, Rockefeller

committed his energy to controlling every aspect of his new estate. He planned pathways,

flower gardens, and even selected individual trees at his new suburban home. “Of all the

profitable things which develop quickly under the hand,” Rockefeller wrote after retiring

from the oil industry he built, “I have thought my young nurseries show the greatest

yield.” Like many conservationists at the turn of the century, Rockefeller viewed open

spaces as essential to the health of city dwellers, even directing the then 13-year old John

D. Rockefeller, Jr. to rest in the fresh atmosphere of Forest Hill during a battle with

sickness in 1887, revealing his understanding of the connection between health and

environment. “Be sure to take good care of your health. This is of the first consideration,”

the elder Rockefeller directed his namesake often throughout a half century of

correspondence. It should come as little surprise that in his report to the City Council, B.

E. Fernow stressed the “desirability of having the tree planting in the streets and public

grounds superintended and carefully directed by competent men.” Ironically, few people

in Cleveland would have been as qualified as Rockefeller himself, who delighted in

26 Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1881, “Report of the Health Department,” (Cleveland: Home Companion Publishing Company, 1882): 421; The Cleveland Leader (2 August 1880): 5; Ella Grant Wilson, Famous Old Euclid Avenue of Cleveland, Vol. II (Cleveland, 1937): 1-2. 148

managing several tree nurseries.27

As Standard Oil relocated their home office to the eastern seaboard, the

consequences of their endeavors became inscribed in the very geography of cities like

Cleveland. The urban core retained heavy industry saddled by ethnic enclaves with

names like Whiskey Island, Little Cuba, and Dopetown, while the affluent retreated to

suburbs at the edge of the city. In some cases, the parklands created by the new suburban

residents served as a barrier between the suburbs and the urban blight they fled. The

efforts of a handful of wealthy residents of Cleveland’s young east-side suburbs lead to

municipal ownership of parkland stretching from the lakeshore to Shaker Heights—a six-

mile strip of nearly uninterrupted park land. The strip was completed in 1896 when

Rockefeller gifted 276 acres of land along Doan Creek, connecting Gordon Park on the

lakefront with the interior chain a hundred years to the day of the founding of the city by

Moses Cleaveland on July 22, 1797. In a letter to the City Council, Rockefeller explained

his motivation as his “love for, and gratitude to, the city which has always shown me

kindness…and…has afforded me much pleasure to make this contribution to her welfare

and prosperity.” The city marked the centennial by celebrating the vanquished frontier

and the barriers to material prosperity. The Women of the Early Settlers Association held

a reception at a replica of the first cabin constructed on the banks of the Cuyahoga, the

recently elected United States President and former Ohio Governor William McKinley

praised the city’s pioneers and the centennial was announced with a hundred-gun salute

by the Cleveland Light Armory. The event was punctuated with the announcement by

27 John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909): 12-13, 26; Annual Reports, City of Cleveland, 1891, (Cleveland: The Cleveland Printing & Publishing Co., 1892): 58; Joseph W. Ernst, ed., “Dear Father”/”Dear Son”: Correspondence of John D. Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (New York: Fordham Univ Press, 1994): 1, 2, 19. 149

John D. Rockefeller’s real estate agent and president of the Cleveland Chamber of

Commerce, J.G.W. Cowles, of the industrialist’s 276-acre gift and $300,000 to complete a boulevard through the line of new parks along Doan Brook from the lakeshore to the

Shaker Lakes Park seven miles from downtown. With Rockefeller’s contribution the city could now boast of owning an entire river—Doan Brook—as an idyll replacement for the fallen Cuyahoga.28

Rockefeller’s philanthropy was followed by vigorous municipal development of

the park corridor and immediately garnered the attention of a suspicious public. The new

parkland was strictly patrolled by “Keep off the Grass” signs and an army of

groundskeepers, some brought in from as far away as Boston. Citizens soon discovered

that $30,000 of municipal taxes had been earmarked for park police to patrol suburban

parkland far beyond the Cleveland’s city limits. A critical editor of the Cleveland

Recorder noted, “numerous policemen [are] kept away out in the barren country about

the old Shaker place, where no one except an occassional [sic] squirrel hunter ever goes,

and where the park commission is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, improving

an allotment for Mr. John D. Rockefeller, at public expense.” It became apparent that the

new parks were intended for the class of people who came to the parks to view their

aesthetic grandeur rather than working people who simply needed a place to stretch their

legs and get lost in the foliage after a day spent in the acrid Cleveland air.29

Within months of Rockefeller’s gift in 1897, public opposition to the park commission culminated in the formation of the Park Board Reorganization Association,

28 John D. Rockefeller (JDR) to Cleveland City Council, October 29, 1897, Letterbooks, vol. 46, pg. 78, Record Group 1 John D. Rockefeller Papers (JDR Papers), Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC; William Ganson Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1950): 573. 29 The remainder of newspaper citations refer to the page number associated to the article within the 135- page album compiled by the Cleveland Park Board Reorganization Assocation in 1898 and held at the Cleveland Public Library. The Cleveland Recorder (9 November 1897): 29. 150

which sought to make the parks accessible to the urban poor. The association won the sympathy of the urban population by drawing attention to the fact that the new parks, while drawing their revenue from the general city fund, raised the property value of the rich who fled urban pollution (with their tax dollars) to the suburbs. Several citizens cried foul, arguing the creation of the parks along Doan Brook represented a boondoggle for real estate settlements financed by the same “philanthropic” donors to the park system.

John Zangerle, a lawyer and leader of the critical Park Board Reorganization Association, discovered nearly all the land donations that constituted the swath of suburban parkland were presented to the city with the stipulation that the park board expend funds, precise figures often stipulated, to improve the land and maintain it in perpetuity. If the city failed to live up to these conditions the land would be forfeit to its original owners. In gifting the city 278 acres of land covered in ponds and swamp, for example, the Shaker

Heights Land Company inscribed considerable control over how the land would develop.

Paragraph five of the deed states the “grantor, its successors, and assigns, for the period of ninety-nine years from the date of this conveyance [10 April 1896], shall have the right and privilege to open streets through the abutting lands and connecting with said park drives, such streets to be opened and connected at such intervals and in such manner not to impair the usefulness of said park driveways.” The following paragraph ensured the creation of this infrastructure by demanding the expenditure of no less than $150,000 within six years. In essence, the strip of suburban parks used the legal power of the deed to siphon urban taxes into suburban pleasure grounds.30

The park board, appointed by a sinking fund commission that itself served indefinitely, drew these funds from the municipal taxes of Cleveland, whose borders

30 The Cleveland Leader, 29 December 1897: 43. 151

ended at the manicured lawns of the suburbs. The connection between public gift and

private gain was often striking, as when it was revealed that Rockefeller’s beneficent gift

of $50,000 worth of parkland allowed his real estate bonds in the neighboring Euclid

Heights allotment company to appreciate in value of $1,000,000. Philanthropy had

become a wise business decision. The lawyers that headed the Park Board Reorganization

Association uncovered the economic and political horse-trading that made such schemes

possible. As a member of the Park Board, L. E. Holden—a mining capitalist and

president of the Cleveland Plain Dealer with real estate holdings surrounding Western

Reserve University where he was a trustee—directed city funds to improve land he either owned personally or increased the property value of nearby tracts he had personal interest in. A representative of Cleveland’s other major newspaper, J. G. W. Cowles—editor of the family-owned Cleveland Leader—had also entered the real estate market of the city during the late nineteenth century when the inventor Charles Brush and John D.

Rockefeller chose him to manage their land holdings in the Forest City. The geographic consequences of filling the city’s air and water with industrial waste were just beginning to materialize.31

Toward the end of 1897 the independent Cleveland media—the Leader and Plain

Dealer were controlled by J.G.W. Cowles and H. E. Holden, respectively—began to trace

the money trail between the new parklands, local banks, and Cleveland’s park board. The

Cleveland Recorder discovered many people associated with the park board, through

either service or philanthropy, held positions at the Union National Bank of Cleveland.

The clerk for Cleveland’s park board held the same position at the bank before his

31 The Cleveland World (10 February 1898); Ibid, (15 February 98): 6; James Harrison Kennedy, A History of the City of Cleveland: Its Settlement, Rise, and Progress, 1796-1896 (Cleveland: The Imperial Press, 1896): 513. 152

appointment by the city. The Cleveland Park Commissioner’s brother served as a director

for the Union National and the park board funds were kept in its vaults. Andrew White, a

member of the sinking fund commission that appointed the park board, simultaneously

served as attorney for the Union National, thus helping to ferry his own associates from

the bank to the park board. It is fitting that the Union National Bank was headed by the

famous Cleveland Republican Mark Hanna. Recently appointed as Ohio Senator, Hanna

summed up the extent to which the economy and politics had become entangled by the

1890s, challenging notions of a pure laissez faire mindset that characterized the era.

“There are two things that are important in politics,” the famed Republican suggested.

“The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.” In Cleveland, wealth

also determined the geography of environmental health.32

The opponents of the Cleveland Park Board turned their attacks toward the

deeded land and the antidemocratic nature of the board itself. To ensure the expenditure

of the stipulated amounts required in the deed or to reward partisan friends, the park

board spent exorbitant sums that caught the attention of its critics. Shortly after the

centennial announcement of the park gift, the Cleveland Recorder argued, “hundreds of thousands of dollars have been worse than wasted.” “In many instances,” the paper continued, “the law has been openly violated by not advertising for the lowest bids in the letting of contracts, and in almost all the small things the most expensive, instead of the most economical, methods have been employed.” The Cleveland Press focused on the

“Nearly $150,000 spent for park [b]ridges which are characterized as being an offense to good taste and grossly extravagent [sic],” citing the opinions of “leading Cleveland

32 Cleveland Recorder (9 November 1897): 29. As quoted in William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 2008): 237. 153

engineers” who denounced “the 24 bridges…as being inartistic and failures.” The criticism could very well have been legitimate or a form of professional territorialism by the Cleveland engineering community for the Park Board hired a Boston engineer and landscape architect, Ernest W. Bowditch, at a salary of $1,200 per month to oversee the work normally done by local engineers for as little as $3 an hour. The Board already had forty-two engineers on its payroll at the time, further raising suspicions of intentional waste and mismanagement of public funds.33

By the beginning of 1898, the press received further condemnation of the Park

Board by its own employees. Edward Pfaff, a park policeman who patrolled the 276-acre

Rockefeller gift, confessed to the Cleveland Press “that there were 60 engineers and

assistants kept on during the entire winter.” The Press discovered these “engineers and

assistants spent their time in playing pedro….[and] had a pair of boxing gloves and

would spar and shot at a mark to kill time.” Opposition to the Park Board reached new

heights as reports of waste and abuse leaked out. By February 1898, the Park Board

Reorganization Association boasted 7,000 members and no fewer than 82 clubs within

the city “declared against the present management of the park system and passed

resolutions asking for a change in the management.” Even leaders of Cleveland’s

religious communities voiced their concern at the abuse of charity to enrich the affluent.

Moses J. Gries, rabbi of The Temple at Central Avenue and East 55th street, addressed the

Cleveland Chamber of Congress, arguing “the park commissioners ought to be

responsible to the people, and that parks should not be four or five miles away from the

houses of the poorest, but just across the street.” As the geography of health aligned with

33 The Cleveland Recorder (16 August 1897): 18; The Cleveland Press (16 September 1897): 19; Ibid (20 September 1897): 19; Ibid (20 September 1897): 21. 154

that of wealth in the city, the vocabulary associated with Progressive reform manifested in the fight over control of the city’s Park Board. Charles E. Bolton, soon-to-be mayor of suburban East Cleveland, initially attempted to negotiate affordable access to the new parks through favorable street rail rates but resorted to attacking the Cleveland’s Park

Board as an anti-democratic tool of the city’s rich when this compromise was rejected.

“Every time the people sought swift passage, from Case avenue to Erie street, to the

Square, the trust used its money and said “Keep off” and threatened to remove the railway from Case avenue to Wade Park.” “We, the citizens of the East End, do heartily favor swift, cheap, direct, and commodious transportation.” Bolton continued by couching his demands in the iconic Progressive phrase, “The greatest good to the greatest number in Cleveland and country will be accomplished by completing from Erie street to

Case avenue the electric railway.”34

As public apathy eroded and community leaders organized an articulate critique

of the Park Board, its advocates in the press and Chamber of Commerce sought a last

ditch effort to stave off democratic reform. With J. G. W. Cowles as editor, the The

Cleveland Leader warned of mob rule if the “present board will be destroyed and in its

place will be created a board or a single director under the absolute control of the mayor;

the patronage of the parks will be used for the strengthening of the City Hall machine,

and the big contracts for park and boulevard improvements can be used for the promotion

of political interests rather than the welfare of the city and its people.” Instead, the Leader sought to characterize the present Park Board as constituted by successful men motivated by noblesse oblige. “We believe the members of the present Park Board have been

34 The Cleveland Press (6 January 1898): 57; Ibid (18 February 1898): 10; The Cleveland Recorder (28 September 1997): 23; The Cleveland World (22 December 1897): 38; The Cleveland Leader (1 February 1897): 30-31. 155

inclined to do what was fair and just,” concluding that it “is not every man that possesses the ability to spend large sums of money in the way that will get the most of it.” Mayor

Robert McKisson responded to the Leader in an editorial appearing in the Cleveland

World by arguing that democratizing the appointment of the Park Board “will not increase my power politically. It will do just the reverse. Anyone who knows anything about politics will tell you that the greater the number of appointments a man has to make the more enemies he will have.” The Park Board Reorganization Association took the opportunity to paint the defenders of the status quo as antithetical to the founding beliefs of the American system of government and advocated immediate reform. “The park board must go,” the PBRA urged. “It is a system of taxation without representation, and a removal of the whole business from the people and placing of it in the hands of those who are as far removed from the taxpayers as possible.” The strongest argument against the board was the revelation of the exceptional nature of the present board. The PBRA revealed that a “careful inquiry in 44 of the most important cities in the United States shows that everywhere…park commissioners are either elected by the people or appointed by officials or bodies that are elected by the people.” Furthermore, the PBRA suggested the board itself might well have been “either wittingly or unwittingly, …a party to a huge real estate deal in so far that it agreed to put through the vast improvements” stipulated by the land deeds it accepted throughout the decade.35

By early 1898, advocates of the Park Board made a final attempt to preserve the status quo by falling back on the rhetoric that had served them throughout the Gilded Age in defending business from government regulation. James H. Hoyt, a prominent

35 The Cleveland Leader (14 February 1898): 3; Ibid (12 December 1897): 38; The Cleveland World (15 February 1898): 5; The Cleveland Recorder (15 February 1898): 3; The Cleveland Press (27 December 1897): 41; The Cleveland Leader (29 December 1897): 43. 156

Cleveland lawyer and general counsel for the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, helped

organize the Non-Partisan Park Board Association to attack the claims of the PBRA and give the appearance of public support for the present board. At the first meeting of the

board, he asked:

Would you, who are richer in this world’s goods than I, be willing to make any donation to the park system of Cleveland if it were managed by those who are willing to engage in city politics? I deny that the Park Board is un-American. It is good business. Nothing is un-American that is good business.

The defense was too late, however, as the PBRA hammered the final nail in the coffin of

the Park Board by revealing the disproportionate use of funds by the sinking commission.

The parks located at the eastern extremity of the city garnered $1,707,352 in city funds

by the beginning of 1898 while all other city parks received only $583,437. After

residents from the city’s west side petitioned the Park Board for modest improvements to

Edgewater Park west of downtown and were disregarded, the dye had been cast for the

majority of the city to overthrow what they saw as a tool of eastside real estate interests.

A. G. Daykin, President of the Western Improvement Association, argued in the city’s

press that the parks “were given to the citizens of Cleveland and not merely to the

citizens of one section of the city,” citing the geography of wealth in the city where the

“population within one and a half miles of the [Public] Square is more congested than

any other section of the city.” Finally, even the business community splintered in

defending the board as evidenced by an anonymous writer to the Recorder in February of

1898. “It is simply disgraceful the condition that some of our business streets are allowed

to remain in while money is being spent by the hundred thousand in contracting pleasure

grounds and pleasure drives for the rich of our city.”36

36 For a biography of James H. Hoyt see George Irving Reed, ed., Bench and Bar of Ohio: A Compendium of History and Biography, Vol. II (Chicago: The Century Publishing and Engraving Company, 1897): 206- 157

Cleveland’s Park Board Reorganization Association serves as a reminder of the

class boundaries inscribed in the early conservation movement. Their attack on the

policing of cultured notions of recreation provides us with a new dimension to the history

of conservation at the turn of the twentieth century. By focusing narratives on battles over

whether or not parkland should be created, historians have overlooked the struggles in

cities such as Cleveland that illuminate the relationship between urban pollution and

suburban recreation. “Parks are for the enjoyment of the people,” the PBRA declared in a

press bulletin at the height of the battle over Cleveland’s Park Board. “There should be

no restrictions upon the enjoyment of the very things for which people go to the parks,

namely, wandering at will through the fields and forests and over the grass and lawns.”

Yet the PBRA noted that the goals of increasing adjacent real estate values ran counter to

these simple pleasures. “The large police force and numerous ’Keep off the grass’ signs serve to make a visit to the Cleveland parks one of anxiety rather than pleasure,” concluding that “even now, of the 1,200 acres of pleasure grounds the people may eat their lunches in [only] three spots selected by the board.” Such elite forms of conservation proved so unpopular that by 1900 the Park Commission had been abolished and the city embarked upon reform in government that characterized the nationwide

Progressive Movement. A year later, with the election of populist mayor Tom Johnson— who campaigned on a platform of “home rule, 3-cent fare, and just taxation”—the “Keep off the Grass” signs were removed and the new Division of Parks and Boulevards dedicated much of its time to building urban playgrounds and installing ball fields over the landscaped grounds of their suburban parks. Like the conservation movement as a

208; The Cleveland Leader (6 February 1898): 96; Ibid (13 February 1898); The Cleveland Recorder (15 February 1898); Ibid (14 February 1898). 158

whole at the close of the nineteenth century, John D. Rockefeller’s response to the environmental crisis was more about establishing class goals through replacement ecology than restructuring the relationship between business and the environment.37

Life in the Sacrifice Zone

Thomas Gavagan, a native of Ireland, gives modern city dwellers a view into the life of

the poor neighborhoods in the industrial core of Gilded Age Cleveland where the

majority of the population lived. Pushed into a meeting of the Board of Health by friends

and neighbors, Gavagan complained of the industry that robbed him of his peace. “[T]he

shtame and the stink is so bad I have to close me kitchen windys. The machinery shakes

the house and make the childer sick an’ I can’t slape a wink when I worruk nights.” Even

fellow businessmen rankled at the deteriorating environment, which was driving away

their customers. The abstract of the suit brought against Standard Oil Company by

William Macey shows how the business community veered away from the post-Civil

War association of industrial smoke with prosperity. Macey operated two tenements on a rise overlooking the debouchment of the Kingsbury Run into the Cuyahoga. In the decade after he purchased the property, the Standard Oil Company would fill the land between

Macey’s tract and the river with the largest oil refinery in the world, Standard’s No. 1

37 The Cleveland Leader (20 January 1898); Carol Poh Miller, Cleveland Metroparks, Past and Present (Cleveland: Cleveland Metroparks, 1992); Peter Witt, labeled an anarchist by opponents, attacked even Johnson insiders who failed to practice the reform they preached. See Hoyt Landon Warner, Progressivism in Ohio: 1897-1917 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ Press, 1964): 65-66. Carol Poh Miller, “Parks,” in David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington: Indiana Univ Press, 1987): 752-754. Several environmental histories of the early conservation movement focus attention on the class dimensions of Progressive reforms. See Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); Louis Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 1999); Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of the American Conservation Movement (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 2003). 159

Works and its forest of smokestacks. Macey claimed the “noisome exhalations, acid

fumes and vapors of the products of coal tar, caustic and sulphuric acid and other

substances in countless degrees of combinations” filled the air and settled on his property.

First, the trees perished. Then the vegetation shriveled and died. His tenants moved out

and his family grew sick and suffered from sleeplessness. Claiming, “he was prevented

from the enjoyment of his property,” Macey sued for $4,000 in damages in the Cleveland

Court of Common Pleas. As in so many other cases, Standard’s lawyers settled the case

out of court, thereby avoiding legal precedent and publicity.38

It is important to remember that Cleveland represented but a small snapshot of a

corporation that operated refineries throughout the world by the 1890s. The relationships

forged between industry, environment, and community repeated themselves in similar

fashion anywhere the petroleum mode of production converted crude oil into kerosene.

After surpassing Cleveland’s No. 1 Works with the construction of a massive refinery in

Bayonne, New Jersey, residents of Staten Island voiced familiar concerns. In 1908, the

New York State Commissioner of Public Health reported that Standard’s operations threatened “the comfort, repose, health and safety of a considerable number of persons in the County of Richmond,” forcing Standard to install smoke abatement scrubbers in their towers.39

Conclusion

38 The Cleveland Leader, (31 July 1884): 5. William Macey vs. The Standard Oil Company, Aug. 5, 1872. Annals of Cleveland Court Record Series, Vol. VIII, 1871-1872 (Cleveland: 1939): 263. 39 As quoted in Ralph W. Hidy and Muriel E. Hidy, Pioneering in Big Business, 1882-1911 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955): 434. 160

However the affluent tried to escape the toxic air and water of the urban core the wind would eventually catch up with them. In 1904, despite all the efforts of reclamation ecology by Rockefeller and after dismissing warnings from public health officers— including the chief forester of the US Department of Agriculture—Cleveland approached a grim milestone in its environmental history. In his annual report to the City Council, the

City Forester reported a mass death of trees within Gordon Park—the lakeside jewel of the five-mile emerald ribbon of parkland. Decades of struggle to enforce even modest abatement measures lead the forester to the conclusion that “a continuance [of smoke] means the entire destruction of the nice bit of natural woodland, which is the last fragment of native forest in this locality inside the city limits.” The city of Cleveland, which entered the Gilded Age with an almost embarrassing amount of woodland, emerged from a quarter century of industrial growth unable to bequeath to the twentieth century a single tree that stood when Moses Cleaveland disembarked with his crew of surveyors at the mouth of the Cuyahoga and founded the city in 1796.40

The most popular reclamation ecologist of the late nineteenth century, Frederick

Law Olmstead, called trees “the lungs of the city.” Olmstead and the conservation movement that peaked during the Progressive Age with the establishment of the National

Park and Forest Services established reclamation ecology as the cornerstone of an emergent environmentalism that would flourish in the twentieth century. Although not until late in the century—with experiences such as those at Love Canal—would a full- fledged philosophy of “environmental justice” confront the racial and class boundaries of industrial pollution, Cleveland’s history demonstrates a latent consciousness that connected American notions of fairness to environmental health. By then, however, the

40 The Cleveland Leader, 1904. March 2, pg. 10. 161

problem took on global dimensions as the affluent industrial world developed a consciousness of the problem only after their major industries had relocated to cripplingly impoverished countries bereft of even the tepid environmental protections found in the first world. Total alienation from the destruction of industrial life marked the globalized economy once the affluent industrial core of America converted to a service industry and the price of polluting another country was transformed into a few pennies of shipping costs on a consumer’s receipt.41

The story of the battle over Cleveland’s air and parkland is a direct challenge to the Chandlerian thesis because it demonstrates the effort of capital to organize, even conspire, to determine the conditions of the social and economic environment. For Alfred

Chandler, the agency of capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller was one-dimensional, cloistered to the daily affairs of operating a nationwide business empire. This chapter of the corporation’s history shows, however, the desire and ability of the corporation to determine the rules under which the game was played that strikes at the foundation of his organizational thesis. The lesson that Rockefeller and Standard Oil took away from their defeat in Cleveland was simple: as only one of many industries, their argument equating business interests with those of the community foundered. Standard Oil was but one fish, albeit a big one, in the business community of Cleveland. The last chapter in the kerosene age would see them create a city whole cloth where there could be no mistaking that the boundaries of corporate control were conterminous with those of civil society.

Rockefeller amassed his empire through vertical integration, thrift, and delegating power over his expanding petroleum business. He would secure it by ensuring that the

41 As quoted in Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2000): 1. 162

gatekeepers of the communities in which his laborers lived recognized Standard Oil and not the public as their authority.

163

CHAPTER FIVE

Efficient Earth

Despite his portrait as a man born with a yen for efficiency, John D. Rockefeller achieved

mastery of the petroleum trade by managing the diseconomies of the environment and

government action in Cleveland. Although the bulk of historiography on the Standard Oil

Company focuses on the realignment of capital pioneered by the 1882 trust agreement,

the Gilded Age’s premier petroleum corporation initiated an equally novel reorganization

of the environment in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The consolidation of

Standard’s business empire prior to the 1880s was predicated on four goals: acquiring property, refining technology, and purchasing competitors for the purpose of agglomerating experienced labor and, of course, eliminating competition. The creeping realization of existing environmental limitations—particularly the declining control it exerted over the diminishing Pennsylvania oil fields and the restraints of its power over the politics and environment in its Cleveland home—led the corporation to a new, almost totalitarian, perspective toward its relationship with labor, politics, and the environment.

This realignment emerged on the southern frontier of suburban Chicago, amid the sand dune marshes of Lake Michigan’s Indiana shoreline.1

By the mid-1880s, Rockefeller’s Standard Works No. 1 in Cleveland no longer

1 Examples of Standard Oil’s competitive goals abound in both the primary documentary record and constitute the bulk of the secondary literature on the corporation. Its earliest attempt to consolidate power, in the South Improvement Company scheme, while unsuccessful was followed by a rash of acquisitions in the 1870s and 1880s that brought into the organization a core of competent business managers as well as skilled refiners. By buying out its competition Standard Oil succeeded also in increasing its market share, borrowed proven technology, and eliminated or reorganized inefficient refineries. For an informative summary see Ralph W. Hidy and Muriel E. Hidy, Pioneering in Big Business: 1882-1911, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955): 3-38; Albert Z. Carr, John D. Rockefeller’s Secret Weapon (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1962): 28-35; Allan Nevins, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist, vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953): 133-136. 164

shipped its products to the Atlantic coasts—recently annexed refineries in Brooklyn,

Bayonne, and Philadelphia now served the Atlantic market. Instead, the Cleveland

Works, once the largest in the world and Rockefeller’s stepping stone to market

domination, was reoriented to serve only the domestic market. Much of the refining

capacity of Cleveland’s works was transferred to a refinery rising among the Indiana sand

dunes on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. In many ways, the move was

predetermined by natural limits. Rockefeller had already consolidated all the refining

properties in Cleveland, most of which bordered his own massive No. 1 Works on the

steep banks of the Kingsbury Run. Cleveland’s industrial flats had long been filled by steel mills, lumberyards, and other manufactories, leaving only marginal lands left to expand upon. What Rockefeller desperately needed to achieve his dreams of efficiency through economies of scale was large tracts of contiguous, flat land oriented between the new producing fields, lake and rail transportation, and blossoming continental markets.

The petroleum industry also learned its first lesson in the finitude of oil. In 1869, the

Petroleum Producers’ Association was organized in the Pennsylvania fields to limit production in the hopes to both boost crude prices and postpone the eventual decline of the field. Regardless, crude production in the western Pennsylvania oil fields leveled off by the late 1880s and peaked at just over 36 million barrels in 1900.2

2 Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., “The Standard Oil Company—Combination, Consolidation, and Integration,” Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., ed., The Coming of Managerial Capitalism (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1985): 349, 354, 360; Three years after its discovery, Lima crude accounted for a staggering 35 percent of American crude production. Standard Oil, able to acquire producing lands and storage early, sought to break the power of independent Pennsylvania producers by using Lima crude as much as possible. For instance, its Bayonne refinery in New Jersey had exclusively refined Pennsylvania crude prior to 1885. By 1898, 7.1 million barrels of its annual 8 million barrel throughput originated from the Lima field. See Gerald T. White, Formative Years in the Far West: A History of Standard Oil Company of California and Predecessors Through 1919 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962): 195; Ralph W. Hidy and Muriel E. Hidy, Pioneering in Big Business, 1882-1911 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955): 286; Harold F. Williamson and Arnold R. Daum, The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Illumination, 1859-1899 (Evanston: Northwestern Univ Press, 1959): 606. For the Pennsylvania producers’ 165

Standard Oil was the first company to perceive that control of the industry would be predicated upon the control of new producing fields, the ability to connect such fields to existing transportation networks, and the construction of high capacity refineries at strategic node between markets and transportation infrastructure. Although it controlled

92 percent of the oil flowing from the Appalachian fields as late as 1880, the strong producers’ union ensured that Standard could not dictate prices for its crude supplies at will. At the Lima field—which lay beneath the Black Swamp bordering the Maumee

River in Northwestern Ohio—Standard sought complete control of nature by purchasing land and leasing its own producing fields. Few competitors thought to enter the field because the high sulfur content of its oil produced foul odors when burned. With their ears to the ground early, Standard learned that a talented, German-born chemist and vice

president of a competing Canadian oil firm had developed a process using metal oxides to

cleanse sulfur from Lima crude and threw enough money at him in the summer of 1886

to bring him into the Standard family. A year later, Herman Frasch, the inventive young

chemist, filed papers with the U.S. Patent Office for his cleansing process, which became

property of the Standard Oil Company and effectively delivered them the technology to

unlock the commercial potential of the vast Lima field.3

The discovery of the new field in western Ohio occurred at a critical time in the

company’s history, just as the lessons of its first generation of refineries fully manifested

themselves along the banks of the Cuyahoga. Despite the proximity of the new field to its

association see Gilbert Holland Montague, “The Later History of the Standard Oil Company,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 17, no. 2 (Feb. 1903): 302-303. For Cleveland’s manufacturing limitations see Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, vol. I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940): 182-83; Allan Nevins, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist, vol. I: 49. For figures on peak production see Report of the Commissioner of Corporations on the Petroleum Industry, Part II: Prices and Profits (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907): 103. 3 Williamson and Daum, 614-619; Hidy and Hidy, 165. 166

largest refineries in Cleveland, Standard Oil applied the experience gained in Cleveland

upon a blank slate. These lessons were three-fold: 1) anticipate and dampen environmental risks through the construction of a controlled and rationalized landscape;

2) build downwind from (and outside the tax jurisdiction of) major population centers; 3) dictate the social contract in order to avoid government regulation and community discontent by building a company town completely dependent on the corporation. The area Standard selected to build its new refinery lay amid the Lake Michigan sand dunes, a mere mile east of the Indiana-Illinois state line. The village of Whiting’s Crossing (later shortened to just Whiting) was composed of little more than fifty farming families centered on a single school and post office station. By 1886, Standard had organized a pipeline company to connect the Lima field to Chicago, allowing it to pump petroleum products from the two largest producing regions to any of its primary refineries between

Lake Michigan and the Atlantic seaboard. The corporation was about to shock the sleepy community into economic modernity that would bring profound environmental changes.4

John in Wonderland

When representatives of the Standard Oil trust entered northwest Indiana in the winter of

1889, one of the most dynamic ecosystems left in the Great Lakes region awaited them.

When the last of the continental glaciers retreated, they left the region a diverse mixture

4 As early as the 1870s Rockefeller sought to eliminate the ever present fire hazard by reorganizing storage methods but found that some refineries lacked the necessary land resources to safely store petroleum products. As revealed in his correspondence, the inefficiencies and lack of control frustrated Rockefeller and prefigured the push for total control of environmental risks that would materialize at Whiting. See especially Allan Nevins, Study in Power, vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953): 2-4, 34; White, Formative Years in the Far West, 195; Paul H. Giddens, Standard Oil Company (Indiana): Oil Pioneer of the Middle West (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1955): 10, 13; Williamson and Daum, The American Petroleum Industry, 612. For info on the Buckeye Pipeline Company see Moodys Manual of Railroads and Corporation Securities, Industrial Section, vol. II (New York: Poor’s Publishing Co., 1921):1431. 167

of prairie, wetlands, forest, and sand dunes bordered by Lake Michigan to the north and

drained by the Calumet River system. The glaciers also carved out Lake Michigan in a

basin composed primarily of igneous and metamorphic rock, highly resistant to leaching,

that would allow the lake to collect few nutrients and high levels of oxygen. These

features, when combined with its broad, shallow southern terminus, would make Lake

Michigan a stable (some marine biologists called it “conservative”) system, that together

with the kaleidoscope environment of its southern shore, afforded the region

extraordinary biodiversity. We know mastodon and mammoth survived the birth of the

lake and wandered its shores, perhaps attracting the first Paleoindians, who likely stayed

for the spring spawning runs of Lake Trout, Whitefish, and Burbot along the rivers and

shoals of Lake Michigan.5

Although the Chicago Tribune described the Calumet region as a “sandy waste”

when Standard entered northwest Indiana, the dune lands harbored a stunning array of

microclimates as dunes, some as high as 200 feet, shifted as much as fifteen feet a year.

This simultaneous destruction and creation of new ecotones established a fecund

environmental foundation for the region. Inhabited at various times by species more

suited to swampland, desert, or forest, the dune lands of southern Lake Michigan

harbored over 1,300 species of plants including prodigious quantities of grape vines,

strawberries, cranberries, wild rice and over 300 varieties of birds. Before Standard Oil

came, affluent Chicagoans were drawn to the open air and hunting prospects so close to

the city. They rented quarters from local farmers and built several grandiose lodges in the

5 Great Lakes Basin Framework Study, Appendix 8: Fish (Ann Arbor: Great Lakes Basin Commission, 1975): 83-85; John Rousmaniere, ed., The Enduring Great Lakes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979): vii; Eugene F. Stoermer, “Bloom and Crash: Algae in the Lakes” in Ibid: 13-19; Powell A. Moore, The Calumet Region: Indiana’s Last Frontier (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1959): 7. 168

fertile country. In 1873, the Tolleston Club rose on the banks of the Little Calumet River and would control over five thousand acres, counting many of Chicago’s greatest industrialists as members, including J. Ogden Armour, Marshal Field, John W. Gates, and

Albert G. Spaulding. Although members became legendary for their hunting records— one killed 189 ducks between sunrise and ten AM one morning—many came to enjoy a break from the city by indulging in lavish dinners, high-stakes poker games, or a quiet stroll over the club’s ample grounds. Like so much of the Middle West, northwest

Indiana became a hinterland of Chicago. Its use as a sort of recreational colony for affluent industrialist merely prefigured its conversion to an industrial park.6

The citizens of the region bristled at this early encroachment. Hunting clubs fenced their land, patrolled it with game wardens, and, in essence, enclosed the land for their own exclusive use. Local farmers had long depended on nature’s economy to supplement their agricultural lifestyles with animal skins and meat. By the 1890s violence, likely spurred on by industrial changes, boiled over into outright warfare. Social conflict in the murder of two private game wardens by a local hunter, Albert Looker, manifested the environmental tensions of the era. Looker, acquitted of the murders by a jury, became a folk hero for a region angered over the encroachment of interlopers from the big city. A former postmaster from the region immortalized Looker in song, viewing him as a defender of the region’s sovereignty in his poem “The Tolleston Tragedy”:

All glory to Looker, let every one sing The praise of a man that would do such a thing. The Calumet marshes will miss their soft tread, For the terrors of Calumet Township are dead.

6 “Greatest in the World,” The Chicago Tribune (September 22, 1889): 9; Powell A. Moore, The Calumet Region: Indiana’s Last Frontier (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1959): 14, 19-21, 100-101, 104- 109, 186-187; “Club Life at Calumet Heights,” The Chicago Tribune (July 22 1894): 10. 169

Even a Standard official, never shy about pointing out nature’s need for improvement,

called the environment of the region a “veritable wonderland” of biological diversity

when Standard began construction of its refinery. From the beginning, the Calumet’s rich environment served as a bloody battleground as historical agents struggled to negotiate

the multiple uses demanded of the landscape.7

Standard Oil Company Embodied in a Town

The company implemented their modernizing plan in the dune lands of northeast Indiana

with the brightest managers from their largest existing refineries. In late winter of 1889,

the veteran superintendent of the Cleveland Works, William P. Cowan, surveyed the

country and initiated the secretive purchase of over 300 acres of land through the owner

of the local general store, Henry Schrage. Although the secret measures allowed Standard

to acquire the first acres for $150, the community quickly learned the identity of the true

buyer and the last acres fetched ten times those prices. Cowan used his own name to purchase construction materials and ensure modest prices. Cowan also organized the initial work crews, manned by experienced laborers from its refineries in the East, under

the control of the company’s managers. Symbolic of Standard’s new totalitarian business

model was W. A. Barstow, son of former Vice President of Acme Oil-turned-Standard

Director Frank Quarles Barstow. Through annexation, the corporation had acquired the expertise of a competitor and now, though nepotism, his son initiated the groundbreaking of its new refinery. On May 5, 1889 the newly arrived laborers, under the direction of the

7 “Calumet Region Sewage,” The Chicago Tribune (February 16, 1896): 38; “How Chicago’s Suburbs Were Planned and Named,” The Chicago Tribune (March 4, 1900): 37; “A Town of 350 Houses Built Near Chicago in a Year,” The Chicago Tribune (December 7, 1902): 53; Moore: 104-107; U. G. Swartz, “Some Early Days of Whiting Refinery,” Stanolind Record, vol. iv, no. 9 (July, 1923): 12; Giddens: 12-13. 170

younger Barstow began to clear the trees and brush from the newly acquired property that

would be home to the largest oil refinery in the world. From the beginning, the lessons

Standard learned in Cleveland dovetailed with their plans for Whiting.8

The company immediately dismantled the prevailing ecological order to create a

landscape suited to their needs. Lake Michigan and coastal Indiana became divorced

from their ecological functions and arranged to service industry by supplying it with

water, a flat apron for industrial facilities, and, as in Cleveland, a sink for industrial

waste. Cowan imported his own labor force from refineries at Cleveland and Buffalo and

set them to work leveling sand dunes and filling marshes with excess sand and earth until

the site was rendered level. Although the first workers at times required the use of boats

to travel about storage tanks, the water table for the area was purposely lowered through

the construction of an elaborate sewer system and the surrounding wetlands became

level, desiccated property for the company. With plenty of land at their disposal, Standard

spaced their massive storage tanks an ample five hundred feet apart from one another, a

luxury unavailable in the crowded industrial Cuyahoga valley. Workers constructed sand

levies around storage tanks initially to help drain the land but later reinforced them to

serve as spill reservoirs to contain the threat of fire.9

8 Moore, The Calumet Region, 192-194; “Big Standard Oil Works,” The Chicago Tribune, (May 11 1889): 4; Giddens, Standard Oil Company (Indiana), 13; “Greatest in the World,” The Chicago Tribune (September 22, 1889): 9; Swartz, “Some Early Days of Whiting Refinery,” Stanolind Record, vol. iv, no. 9 (July, 1923): 13-14; Hidy and Hidy, vol. 1: 478; “Frank Q. Barstow Dies on a Train,” The New York Times (August 21, 1909). 9 Moore, The Calumet Region, 192-194; “Big Standard Oil Works,” The Chicago Tribune, (May 11 1889): 4; Giddens, Standard Oil Company (Indiana), 13; Swartz, “Some Early Days of Whiting Refinery,” Stanolind Record, vol. iv, no. 9 (July, 1923): 13; Moore, 194; Giddens, 16, 20-21, 37; U. G. Swartz, “Some Early Days of Whiting Refinery,” Stanolind Record, vol. iv, no. 10 (July-October, 1923): 14-15; Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration (Indiana), The Calumet Region Historical Guide, reprint edition (New York: AMS Press, 1939): 230-231; F. Lawrence Babcock, The First Fifty: 1889-1939 (Chicago: Standard Oil Company (Indiana), 1939): 10; Edward A. Zivich, From Zadruga to Oil Refinery: Croation Immigrants and Croatian-Americans in Whiting, Indiana, 1890-1950 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990): 30. 171

Perhaps the largest natural obstacles to the company’s plans of achieving a level, rationalized landscape were the many lakes that dotted the Calumet region. The larger lakes Wolf, George, and Berry—geologic reminders of Lake Michigan’s former expanse—in particular stood in the way of the corporation’s dreams. The company constructed an elaborate sewer system for its emerging refinery and accompanying town to deliver wastewater to Lake Michigan. In the process, natural systems became obstacles

to efficiency for Standard Oil’s management, who applied a cost-benefit analysis to the

landscape and decided that Berry Lake would serve the company’s interest more by

vanishing altogether. The location of the most desired hunting grounds prior to the

coming of the corporation, Berry Lake slipped through the new sewer pipes and reunited

with Lake Michigan. By 1891, Berry Lake had become a memory as the local population

waded into the remaining pockets of water with buckets to haul back a terminal fish

harvest. Once the last of the lake vanished, the rotting carcasses of thousands of fish and

the emerging neighborhood of “Berry Lake” served as the only reminders of the

location’s former fecundity.10

To supply the massive refinery and the growing community of workers with

water, the corporation sunk a five-foot diameter tunnel under the vacant bed of Lake

Berry nearly a half-mile out into Lake Michigan in January of 1890. Cowan played coy with reporters from Chicago who questioned him about the works saying only “You see, we just thought we’d put a pipe in and find out what there is down there.” In reality,

Cowan and the company knew exactly what they were doing. With the completion of the sewer system and the water works tunnel the Calumet region’s hydrology had been

10 U. G. Swartz, “Some Early Days of Whiting Refinery,” Stanolind Record, vol. iv, no. 10 (July-October, 1923): 14-15; Giddens, 20-21; Moore, 186-187. 172

completely remade to suit the industrial needs of Standard Oil. The water works also

furnished the community of Whiting with tap water, making the town’s largest employer

also its lone source for water service. By 1891, the Whiting refinery had been connected

to Standard’s headquarters in New York City via telegraph wire, ensuring centralized

control, and became operational, converting over five million barrels of crude into

petroleum products a year.11

With the refinery up and running, Standard secured a key Chicago-to-Whiting

railroad trunk line through its proxy the Wisconsin Central Railroad Company in the

summer of 1890. Although its pipeline network allowed it to move petroleum products

throughout the continent, the trunk line ensured cheap transportation of building supplies

for the refinery and nascent Whiting harbor. By 1892, the community initiated a

campaign to incorporate the city of Whiting, now a bustling industrial town of several

thousand souls. The Standard Oil Company blocked the move, fearing a loss of control

and higher taxes. After all, the corporation provided all the services of an incorporated

municipal government, including four fire departments, a police force, streetlights, and water and sanitation services for the thousand-acre community. By 1895, however, with other industries following Standard’s lead and establishing factories amid the sloughs and sand dunes of the Calumet region, Standard relented and encouraged its workforce to vote for incorporation of the city of Whiting lest competing company towns annex valuable real estate. Standard’s point men, William Cowan and Jacob Forsythe, observed the vote for incorporation in the summer of 1895, which resulted in only two souls out of

687 objecting to the corporation’s plans. When Whiting conducted its first election in the

11 “Greatest in the World,” The Chicago Tribune (September 22, 1889): 9; Moore, 194; Giddens, 20-21, 31, 33; Swartz, no 10, 14-15. 173

following September the local newspaper, the Whiting Democrat, essentially endorsed

Standard Oil’s own candidates by proclaiming “Everyone who knows anything about the

Standard Oil Company knows that it does what it does well and economically. It follows,

therefore, that the town will be well and economically conducted.” The election resulted

in the superintendent of the refinery, W. S. Rheem, winning a seat on the board of

trustees, earning a quick promotion to president of said board. Within a decade, company

officials effectively controlled the government from the board of trustees up to the town’s

first mayor, William E. Warwick, also the assistant superintendent of the Whiting

refinery. By the opening of the twentieth century, a visiting journalist from Chicago

could declare without exaggeration, “Whiting is the Standard Oil company embodied in a

town.” Over the next generation the same could be said for the entire Calumet region as

other industries followed Standard’s pioneering example into northwest Indiana, united in

a common mission to refine nature into an experimental landscape of corporate

efficiency.12

Enter the Copycats

Once word got out that Standard Oil had constructed the largest refinery in the world in what had previously been considered an uninhabited wasteland, other industries followed its example. In 1893, Inland Steel constructed a massive works just east of the Standard refinery on the lakeshore and Carnegie steel interests ringed Whiting from Hammond in the south to the famous works located at Gary to the east. By 1896, the Chicago Tribune

boasted that the “manufacturer has recognized in the Calumet region a location after his

12 “Standard Oil Gets It,” The Chicago Tribune (June 7, 1890): 9; The Whiting Democrat as quoted in Moore, 204-208; Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration (Indiana), The Calumet Region Historical Guide, reprint edition (New York: AMS Press, 1939): 230; Giddens, 37. 174

own heart,” noting with pride that the region accounted for no less than 20 percent of the

nation’s total steel production and that the tonnage of lake vessels had doubled to

2,213,698 tons in the previous year. Not only did the construction of these mills

necessitate further leveling and draining of the landscape, but the industrial interests

conspired to reshape the Calumet River through the construction of the massive Indiana

Harbor and docks between Whiting and what would become the city of Gary. Indeed,

even the great packing houses of Chicago—Armour, Swift, and Morris—upset with the

fees charged by the Union Stock Yard, contemplated moving to the future site of Gary,

Indiana a year after Standard’s Whiting refinery went online, setting off a speculative real

estate firestorm, but eventually decided to remain in the Windy City.13

Although John D. Rockefeller was seen as pioneering the industrial suburb, he

was also responsible for the coming of the steel mills. During the economic panics of the

1870s, his fellow Clevelander and steel baron, Samuel Mather, encouraged him to buy up the ore-bearing Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota. Now he controlled a fleet of vessels to connect the Mesabi ore to every mill on the Great Lakes and northern Indiana

proved an ideal middle ground to manufacture the raw material into commodities that

could be easily distributed by ship or rail to the entire continent. Although Standard could

distribute its petroleum products through its continental pipeline network, the steel mills

required traditional methods of steamship and railroad cars to effectively deliver raw ore

and ship finished steel. With northern Indiana lacking natural harbors, industrialists

decided to create them.14

13 50 Years of Inland Steel: 1893-1943 (Chicago: Inland Steel Company, 1943); “Calumet Region Sewage,” The Chicago Tribune (February 16 1896): 38; Moore, 131-132. 14 Chandler, The Visible Hand, 422; William Donohue Ellis, The Cuyahoga (Dayton: Landfall Press, Inc., 1975): 193-197. 175

Attention was first directed at the Grand Calumet River, which was more a collection of connected swamps than a true stream. This dream quickly met environmental reality as it was found that the Calumet marshes had served as a dumping ground for Chicago’s southern suburbs in addition to the refuse from industry in Whiting and nearby Hammond, Indiana. At the close of 1895, a Chicago firm charged with clearing the slough for navigation reported that although 248,516 cubic yards of earth had been dredged from the river, the “work has been worse than useless, as the channels have been filled in by the deposits from slaughterhouses, manufacturing establishments, and sewers in the vicinity of Hammond.” To make matters worse, the mass of industrial refuse from Indiana and residential waste dumped in the river from Illinois found its way to Lake Michigan at the river’s mouth in South Chicago, leading Congressman L. E.

McGann to report soberly that the “Calumet district is sending more sewage into the lake right now than did the Chicago River when the city had 750,000 inhabitants.” In 1895, the Secretary of War authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to nullify its contracts for dredging of the Calumet, forcing the region’s industries to turn to other avenues for transportation.15

A 160-foot wide canal was dug from the Grand Calumet River to the Lake

Michigan shore at Whiting in 1901. With a depth of twenty-two feet, the canal was able to support the largest lake steamers but avoid federal control, which began at depths beyond twenty-three feet. The Lake Michigan Land Company, which organized the canal, offered land adjacent to the canal and lake harbor to the Inland Steel Company and within days the land to the east of Standard’s refinery at Whiting attracted a thousand laborers to construct the new mill ready to receive ore shipments from Laura Iron Ore

15 “Calumet Region Sewage,” The Chicago Tribune (February 16, 1896): 38. 176

Mine in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range. The Chicago Tribune marveled at the sudden

creation of Indiana Harbor and presented its readers with colorful directions to the new

place of industry through its association with Whiting’s chief industry. “In going,” the paper reported, “you should begin to pick up your baggage just at the moment when through the car windows comes an overpowering smell of gasoline, petroleum, Vaseline, coal tar, kerosene, coal oil, paraffine, and other 187 smells that belong to the Standard Oil company; for that is Whiting, Ind., and Indiana Harbor is only a few yards beyond the most pungent and nauseating of these odors.” The writer concluded, “Whiting is all right in its way, but most people will continue to prefer the Chicago stockyards.” The mills at

Indiana Harbor and Hammond were merely a prelude to the total industrialization of the

Calumet region that materialized with the foundation of Whiting’s sister city of Gary in

1906.16

Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire quickly followed Rockefeller into the Calumet

region. Soon after organizing the U.S. Steel Company in 1901 by joining resources with

J. P. Morgan, Carnegie built a massive mill opposite Inland Steel at Indiana Harbor for a

sum of $2,000,000. The mill employed 800 men and paid $300,000 for riparian rights to

both the harbor and the Calumet canal, still in process of construction. Indiana Harbor

continued the environmental reforms begun at Whiting. The town employed seventy-five

men to clear and grade land and an additional 250 men to dig sewers to drain the

wetlands and provide a sewage outlet into Lake Michigan. U.S. Steel, however, was only

getting started. They sought to build their own Whiting and in 1906 began construction of

not only the largest steel mill in the world but of an entire city just east of Whiting and

16 Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration (Indiana), The Calumet Region Historical Guide, reprint edition (New York: AMS Press, 1939): 68-69; “A Town of 350 Houses Built Near Chicago in a Year,” The Chicago Tribune (December 7, 1902): 53. 177

Indiana Harbor near the source of the Grand Calumet River. Named after the founding

chairman of U.S. Steel—Albert H. Gary—Gary, Indiana extended the industrial transformation of the Calumet region begun at Whiting a full ten miles from the Illinois-

Indiana border. In constructing the massive Gary Works, U.S. Steel moved the Grand

Calumet River a half mile to the south and straightened its banks with steel bulkheads

and slag from its mill. It cut yet another canal from this new channel and created the

region’s second artificial harbor to allow the mill access to lake traffic. The corporation

also forced the Calumet to flow less like a swamp and more like a true river by expelling

several million gallons of wastewater into its new bed every day.17

By 1908, most of the changes to the Calumet region occurred on a relatively

narrow spit of land between the lakeshore and the Grand Calumet River. In that year the

battle to make nature conform to productive industrial plans entered a new era when

Randall W. Burns, who owned 1,200 acres of marshland, began a decades-long effort to

reclaim the Calumet Marsh from nature. The historian of the region, Powell A. Moore,

compared the project to the famous draining of the Pontine Marshes in Italy. The canal

system, dubbed “Burns Ditch” after its architect, redirected the Little Calumet River and

some tributaries east of Gary at Ogden Dunes, the new frontier between industrial suburb

and the untrammeled dune lands of the Calumet region. The project created over 20,000

acres of drained marshland that would soon become a desiccated apron for steel mills,

farmland, and residential development. With the completion of Burns Ditch in the 1920s,

the entire Lake Michigan shoreline from the Illinois border to Gary and extending inland

to the Little Calumet River in the words of a University of Chicago geographer, “is

17 “A Town of 350 Houses Built Near Chicago in a Year,” The Chicago Tribune (December 7 1902): 38; Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration (Indiana), The Calumet Region Historical Guide, reprint edition (New York: AMS Press, 1939): 56, 69-70; Moore, 12. 178

almost completely industrialized, except for a few very small parks.” The Calumet

region, in little more than a generation beginning with the founding of Whiting by the

Standard Oil Company, had been transformed from a diverse ecosystem, supporting only

a limited economy centered on hunting, fishing, and farming, to one of America most

significant industrial hearths. However, as exploitable land disappeared, the corporations

that remade the region turned to Lake Michigan to create land.18

Atlantis, in Reverse

Even the shifting sand quickly became a commodity, fully divorced from its previous role

as creator and destroyer of the landscape before Standard Oil arrived. It now went to fill

the marshes that frustrated the plans of foremen building refineries and steel mills and

even served as fill for Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. In 1898, as many as 300

railroad cars of sand left the dune lands every day. As the dunes disintegrated,

industrialists turned to their source—the lake. Lake vessels and steam “sandsuckers”

scoured the lake bottom near the shore and sold the reclaimed land. Inland Steel and the

other factories resting around Indiana Harbor laid their foundations on this reclaimed land

as the artificial harbor reached out nearly two miles from its original shore into Lake

Michigan. The region became so crowded with industry by the first decade of the

twentieth century that companies sought to permanently convert lake bottom into

valuable real estate. Every major industry with property on the shore dropped either steel

bulkheads or boulders into the lake to create artificial piers and filled the area with sand

18 Moore, 12-14; Harold M. Mayer, “Politics and Land Use: The Indiana Shoreline of Lake Michigan,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 54, no. 4 (December 1964): 508-523. 179

and ash to raise the lake floor to the surface.19

Residents, upset with the wholesale destruction of the regions dune beaches

fought these actions by forming associations and challenging the legal basis for private

interests to convert waters held in common by the state into a private commodity.

Although they won stringent protection of public riparian rights in Illinois, industry

proved far more influential in Indiana, where the General Assembly passed an act in 1907

declaring “the owner…of land bordering upon the waters of Lake Michigan shall have

the right to fill in, reclaim and own the submerged land adjacent to and within the width

of his land…and may build docks, wharves and other structures thereupon for

industrial…purposes.” The land had been severed from its ecological role and remade into crude construction fill as “sandsuckers” belched out the former lake bottom onto the nascent industrial shore.20

The industrial suburbs exploded after 1890 around Chicago and throughout the nation. Although the Gilded Age is noted as a time of intensive urbanization, the census reported that the new industrial suburbs drew population away from the urban core and doubled in size in the first decade of the twentieth century while cities grew at a still vigorous but less rapid rate of 40 percent. In the first study of this new industrial phenomenon, which focused in particular Chicago’s suburbs, the scholar Graham

Romeyn Taylor noted in astonishment “Towns made to order entirely.” Although company towns had certainly existed to varying degrees at Lowell, Massachusetts,

Patterson, New Jersey, and nearby Pullman, Illinois, the industrial suburbs pioneered by

19 Moore, 100-101. 20 Moore, Ibid.; 50 Years of Inland Steel: 11; “Unite to Save Lake Front,” The Chicago Tribune (September 11 1899): 2; Laws of the State of Indiana, 1907 (Indianapolis: Wm. B. Burford, 1907): 126; For the more stringent Illinois law see Theodore K. Long, Report to the Mayor and the City Council of the City of Chicago by the Lake Shore Reclamation Commission (Chicago: Barnard & Miller, Printers, 1912): 304- 305; “Case Involves Riparian Rights,” The Chicago Tribune (November 19 1895): 3. 180

Standard Oil at Whiting were different because they emerged after the nation had

converted to a wage labor economy and possessed the technological power to alter

ecosystems on a regional scale.21

As industries poured into the Calumet region, land speculators followed in their

wake in an attempt to convert swampland into residential neighborhoods for the throngs

of workers. An ambitious Chicago real estate man, Franklin H. Bierbach, purchased a

large tract of land just south of Standard’s Whiting works five years after its founding. In an effort to better market his land for sale to building companies, Bierbach decided to

borrow a familiar name that evoked a hopeful future for the mosquito-ridden marsh.

“Rockefeller Park” was chosen for the particular odor of the air that wafted in on the lake

breeze from the nearby refinery. Although Standard’s lawyers sued to defend

Rockefeller’s name, Standard’s presence was only just beginning to author environmental

changes that no amount of legal help could dismiss.22

Devil’s Bargains

The history of the industrialization of the Calumet district is ultimately the story of an

extraordinary devil’s bargain, a social arrangement in which the integrity of the regional

environment was sacrificed in exchange for economic security. Postmodern criticism has

justly forced scholars to unpack troubled terms like “environmental integrity.” The

people who made their homes in the Calumet region identified the migration of

sustenance from nature (the swamps, lakes, and dunes) to the factory (wages and salary)

21 Graham Romeyn Taylor, Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1915): 5-6, 11; Most company towns had been organized around extractive industry, particularly in the American West. See James B. Allen, The Company Town in the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966). 22 “Can’t Use John D. Rockefeller’s Name,” The Chicago Tribune (August 5, 1895): 3. 181

with a spectrum of emotions ranging from anger, thankfulness, and reluctant fatalism.

The historical record discloses a growing anxiety among the residents of the Calumet

region as the subsistence transition from ecology to economy took the appearance of a

one-way street. In writing the first company history thirty years after the founding of the

refinery, Whiting journalist U. G. Swartz captured the reaction of the local community to

these vast environmental changes:

Those who had sold their places to the Company not only had to leave their homes and land, but they had to stand by and see all that they cherished throughout demolished. Gardens and woodlands were uprooted, orchards and shrubbery were swept away and all was confusion and desolation. There is small wonder that these people, many of whom were pioneers who had lived for a long time in their homes built in the primeval forest, felt that everything was ruined, and that some were never satisfied with the changes and unfamiliar conditions. It was a sort of home-sickness which they could not get over. They preferred hunting and fishing and the genial tasks of their contented lives to the paths which might lead to more active scenes and busier days and the fruits of a sturdier life.

Chicago residents who had come to Whiting to hunt or escape the bustle of the city for a

quiet afternoon picnic also bristled at the loss of their refuge. As construction of the

refinery proceeded, rioting broke out at the picnic grounds near the Lake Shore and

Michigan Southern Railway station between Chicago campers and Standard Oil

construction workers, with the conflict ending only once the corporation’s police officers

arrived and superintendent Cowan secured the cessation of these train services.23

After a generation of environmental change, it became evident that environmental

fecundity and industrial development were inversely related. As early as 1906, visiting

journalists from Chicago reported on a region in environmental free-fall. A writer for the

Chicago Tribune dubbed Whiting “The dead city of the dead” and reported on how the air pollution from the refinery was transforming Whiting’s environment.

“Why don’t you plant things in your front yard?” is asked of a big boned woman who stares steadfastly. “Deh smoke,” she says. She is quite right. It would be a waste of time

23 U. G. Swartz, “Some Early Days of Whiting Refinery,” Stanolind Record, vol. iv, no. 9 (July, 1923): 11, 12. 182

to try to grow things for beauty in that atmosphere. In spots there is grass, but it is smudged and blackened from the smoke.

The region’s posh hunting clubs, once the catalyst for environmental power struggles,

withered as drainage schemes dried up the surrounding wetlands and the waterfowl with

them. The Gary Country Club sold much of its land, which was converted into a golf

course. Other lodges, such as the Tolleston Club, served as an ironic intermediary

between the former hunting paradise and the coming industrialism when they sold their

land to the very industries dismantling the local environment. The Calumet Gun Club

even rented its hunting cottages out to engineers of the U.S. Steel as sleeping quarters.

Most hunting lodges simply vanished along with the wetlands and game that initially

attracted them. A Chicago industrialist purchased one club, named after the Kankakee

River at the southern border of the Calumet region, after quarry left its lands for greener,

or in this case, damper pastures. William Cameron tried to manufacture his own game

preserve by re-flooding the 135-acre tract with irrigation ditches fed from the Kankakee

River. Despite Cameron’s Quixotic obsession, the environmental trend for the Calumet

district was toward a totalitarian landscape of fungible, desiccated real estate that

harbored far fewer plant and animal species than the mosaic of dunes, marsh, and lakes it

replaced.24

Making the Calumet Marsh safe for industry produced only the initial wave of

changes to the environment. The second, more familiar changes emerged once the

consequences of converting raw materials into commodities spilled out into the

environment. Although the Frasch Method had allowed Standard Oil to crack the

problem of high-sulfur Lima crude oil, the slurry of chemicals did more than cleanse

24 “The Heart of the Octopus: Whiting, Indiana,” The Chicago Tribune (June 3, 1906): D8; Moore, 108-9, 127. 183

petroleum. During distillation hydrogen sulfide vapor would form, which not only posed

a dangerous explosive hazard but also could kill a man in a single breath in high enough

concentrations leading the British military to deploy it as a chemical agent during the

First World War. Although the exact records are lost, many workers and horses lost their

lives amid the maze of stills and pipes of Whiting’s refinery. The works became so hazardous that the company eventually resorted to the use of canaries as indicators of dangerous concentrations of the gas. The copper oxide treatment and the caustics of the acid works corroded both flesh, metal, and turned the hair and skin of the men and draft horses green. Some wives forced their husbands to undress on the porch before entering the house and families stocked up on woolen clothing because, as one former Standard employee noted, “wool clothes, wool pants would last about maybe a month and a half, two months….[b]ut regular cotton pants they wouldn’t last no more than two weeks….[a]nd maybe only one day if you get sprayed with acid or something, it was gone.”25

The company, after a quarter century of complaint in Cleveland, built the

necessary infrastructure to reclaim its acid at Whiting. Ironically, the acid works where

the company burned the petroleum residuum to recapture its acid, was the greatest

nuisance to the city of Whiting as the caustic smoke corroded the paint on house and

25 Charles Howard Foulkes, “Gas!” The Story of the Special Brigade (London: W. Blackwood & Sons, Ltd., 1934): 105; Agnes & John Dvorscak interview, by John Bodnar, 14 May 1991, call number 91-021, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 17; U. G. Swartz, “Some Early Days of Whiting Refinery,” Stanolind Record, vol. iv, no. 11 (July-October, 1923): 12; “How Kerosene is Made,” The Chicago Tribune (June 21 1896) 18; Giddens, 26-28; Edward A. Zivich, From Zadruga to Oil Refinery: Croation Immigrants and Croatian-Americans in Whiting, Indiana, 1890-1950 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990): 38; John J. Marcisz interview, by John Bodnar, 3 March 1992, call number 91-152, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 15; John M. Jancosek interview, by David Dabertin, 9 February 1991, call number 91-014, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 33. 184

vehicle exteriors, disintegrated home furnishings, and drove citizens into respiratory fits.

Although the company had taken responsibility for reclaiming its used acid, the reform

merely shifted consequences from the region’s water system to its atmosphere. As early as 1899, botanists from the University of Chicago’s Hull Botanical Laboratory discovered that the smoke and soot from the refinery had “injured or destroyed” the coniferous forest near Whiting. The nuisance became so troublesome that the company was forced to remove an entire residential neighborhood of its own workers in the former location of the now-drained Berry Lake. Refining high-sulfur Lima crude also produced

prodigious amounts of petroleum coke residuum, which the company was able to market

to Whiting workers as a fuel for their home coal boilers and contributed to the

community’s air pollution problem. The mountains of petroleum coke the company could

not sell were dumped into Lake Michigan at the company’s pier near Whiting Beach.

Some went to form a breakwater, although much of it was simply dumped in the open

water, causing bathers to scrape their feet on the jagged lumps of residuum.26

Although old stock American skilled workers specifically imported by the

company did the initial construction of the refinery and residential areas, Standard Oil

sought new immigrants, particularly eastern European Slavs, to serve as a low-cost labor

force once the plant was operational. The great majority of this new labor force

composed of peasants seeking temporary employment in the United States in order to

help their family or communal farms acquire additional land, were far more familiar with

26 Joseph Gresko interview, by John Bodnar, 14 May 1991, call number 91-023, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington: 11-13; George Jancosek interview, by David Dabertin, 28 January 1991, call number 91-017, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington: 2. Henry Chandler Cowles, “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan. Part I. – Geographical Relations of the Dune Floras,” Botanical Gazette, vol. 27, no. 2 (Feb., 1899): 110. 185

the landscape that was quickly vanishing than the industrial world of wage labor taking

shape on the outskirts of Chicago. Many were drawn to the few remaining common lands

in an effort to supplement family income through hunting, fishing, and foraging. Children

of the immigrants in particular stood at the crossroads between nature’s economy and the

human economy. One Whiting resident recalled the “hunting paradise” of Wolf and

George Lakes, where he would trap muskrat and sell their skins to Sears Roebuck in

Chicago. “And it was nothing for us to see kids going out with shotguns under their arm,”

Joseph Novosel, Sr. recalled, “When the duck season began, at seven o’clock in the

morning the Standard Oil whistle would blow, and all the shooting would start out there.”

By the time historians from the University of Indiana caught up with Novosel, Sr. in the

Autumn of 1990, he pessimistically reflected back on the century of changes that had

converted Whiting from a paradise to an industrial zone, concluding “that’s what happened to our community, we had a lot of these people that came in here, made a fast buck, polluted, tore up the place, but they didn’t do it like overnight. They did it like a spoon at a time, so you never noticed it.” Joseph Gresko echoed these sentiments and linked Whiting’s social contract to environmental degradation. “You know, like Standard

Oil, OK, that’s my bread and butter, still is today, they raped the city of Whiting. You take a look at our lakefront over there. Take a good look at that lakefront. That is a disaster area.”27

27 Delores & William J. Curosh, Michael & Bertha Deluca interview, by John Bodnar, 2 March 1992, call number 91-151, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 29-30; Julia & Michael Pukac interview, by John Bodnar, 2 March 1992, call number 91-153, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 33-34; Betty Gehrke interview, by John Bodnar, 28 September 1990, call number 91-004, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 21; Clarence & Betty Gehrke interview, by John Bodnar, 11 October 1991, call number 91-142, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 48; 186

Many other long-time residents voiced similar stories. Whiting Beach, which had been one of the last remaining stretches of dune land in the community, was a rare communal meeting spot for fairs and became a popular destination for teenagers seeking refuge from the smoke and din of the town. Like most of the southern shore of Lake

Michigan, shallow waters extend far out into the lake from the beach. By the middle of the twentieth century, the actions of the sand suckers, the dumping of refuse slag from the refinery, slicks of ballast “slop oil” dumped from the company’s lake vessel fleet, and the proximity to the company’s sewer outlet combined to make a simple swim into a nightmare. Many residents complained of swimming amid oil refuse that stained their skin and floating human excrement dumped from the company’s nearby sewer outlet.

Others discovered the land had become so saturated with petroleum as to make the act of constructing a beach fire a harrowing experience. One resident remembered how “when I was like ten, eleven, and I recall digging a hole, putting a match in that hole, and guess what? Catch on fire.”28

Giddens, 27; In his study of Whiting’s Croatian immigrants, Edward Zivich found that of the 30,682 immigrants who left Croatia-Slavonia for North America between 1900 and 1903, 22,741 listed their occupation as “Peasant.” One Croatian teacher remarked “It is hard to till the fields for there are no workers to be had. Whoever has strength and youth is at work in America.” See Edward A. Zivich, From Zadruga to Oil Refinery: Croation Immigrants and Croatian-Americans in Whiting, Indiana, 1890-1950 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990): 7, 25; Joseph Novosel, Sr. interview, by David Dabertin, 15 October 1990, call number 91-002, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2-4, 31; Joseph Gresko interview, by John Bodnar, 14 May 1991, call number 91-023, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington: 12. 28 Although separators were eventually installed so the ballast could be cleaned before dumping, the practice was prevalent in the early twentieth century. For instance, the U.S. Coast Guard reported twenty eight oil spills from ships in Lake Michigan in 1967, with the majority still occurring in the Calumet region. In 1910 Standard Oil’s own Lighterage Department’s handbook on “Rules and Regulations” demanded that any “waste oil” not burned under the boiler be “thrown overboard” to avoid fire hazards. See Standard Oil Company of New York, Lighterage Department, “Rules and Regulations” (May 1, 1910): 5, Box: 2.207-H58B, ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. “Keeping the Water Clean,” The Vacuum Oil News, (March 1929), Vacuum Oil Co., New York, 9; Great Lakes Basin Framework Study, Appendix 7: Water Quality (Ann Arbor: Great Lakes Basin Commission, 1975): 88; Joseph Gresko interview, by John Bodnar, 14 May 1991, call number 91-023, 187

The changes to Whiting Beach were but a local manifestation of what had become

a regional problem as the petroleum refuse made its way to the water works intake cribs

scattered around the southern edge of the lake. By the 1930s, no fewer than four million

people relied on the large water works tunnels tapping the lake’s water. The presence of

oil in municipal drinking water proved far more problematic in Lake Michigan than it did

in Lake Erie because Chicago and its suburbs relied on chlorination to sanitize their water

supply. The oil concentrated at times of high ice or with changing currents at the intake

cribs to such levels that the hydrocarbons reduced or neutralized the chlorine, which in

1923 resulted in a typhoid outbreak that struck 227, killing twenty-three Chicagoans. In

the subsequent decade, the engineers for a single crib found that the effectiveness of

chlorination had been reduced on 155 separate occasions due to petroleum contamination.

Although Chicago’s sanitary engineers identified the refineries at Whiting and the

Indiana Ship Canal as the source of the waste, the Indiana Legislature, at the urging of the

State Board of Health, passed a bill prohibiting the pollution of any stream or lake but

tacked on a special provision that exempted Lake Michigan and any streams flowing into

it. As long as Standard provided employment for their constituents, Indiana lawmakers

averred faith in the corporate social contract.29

The most profound changes could neither be seen nor smelled. The alterations to

the lake front ecosystem from generations of scouring the lake floor, the encroachment of

new lands, and the witches’ brew of water pollution now pouring into the waters of

northern Indiana delivered a dramatic shock to life within Lake Michigan. While

“Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 10. 29 Arthur E. Gorman, “Survey of Sources of Pollution,” Civil Engineering, vol. 3, no. 9 (September 1933): 519-522; John R. Baylis, “Effect of Certain Industrial Wastes,” Civil Engineering, vol. 3, no. 9 (September 1933): 522-524; “Report of an Investigation of the Pollution of Lake Michigan in the Vicinity of South Chicago and Indiana Harbors,” Public Health Reports, vol. 42, no. 35 (Sept. 2, 1927): 2201. 188

Standard Oil was but one polluter on the lake in a ring of industry from Milwaukee to

Gary, its location at one of the prime spawning areas at the shallows of southern Lake

Michigan magnified its damage to the ecosystem. US Steel, for instance, moved the

Grand Calumet River a half mile through the use of slag and masonry and turned its once

placid waters into a torrent of poison as it dumped millions of gallons of industrial and

municipal sewage directly into the man-made canal. Entire species of fish disappeared from the lake in the first fifty years of Standard’s Whiting Works. Fishermen noted how high-value but environmentally sensitive species such as Lake Trout and Whitefish fell from representing just over half of the annual catch at the turn of the century before crashing to 4.4% of the harvest by the late 1950s. These changes had a significant impact on the regional economy. The Lake Michigan catch represented as much as half of the total commercial fishing harvest in the entire United States at this time.30

Although untangling the variables causing these changes is complex if not impossible for a system as large as Lake Michigan’s 22,400 square miles, the changes wrought by Standard Oil certainly favored some species over others. For example, the parasitic sea lamprey prefers warm streams for spawning and was delivered such conditions as the entire riverine ecosystem of northwest Indiana was stripped of its forest cover, leveled and drained of its sustaining wetlands, and burdened with industrial and residential effluent that decomposed and helped to raise water temperatures that began a domino effect throughout the entire lake ecosystem. When finally measured in the middle of the twentieth century the former wetland landscape of surrounding Lake County had the highest erosion rate of any county bordering the Great Lakes, losing an astounding

30 On Calumet River changes see Moore, 12; For changes to Lake Michigan’s fish population see Great Lakes Basin Framework Study, Appendix 8: Fish (Ann Arbor: Great Lakes Basin Commission, 1975): 5, 19, 17-18. 189

8.3 tons of soil per acre every year and revealed that industry fully dismantled the water and soil retention effects of its wetland ecology. Because of their lack of a commercial use, sea lamprey populations were never recorded with any accuracy, but they can be loosely ascertained through their impact on the populations of species who compete for the same resources. Lampreys also preyed on the high value Lake Trout and Whitefish, which together accounted for nearly 40% of the catch in the early 1940s when the lamprey began to garner attention. A decade later Lake Whitefish accounted for less than half of a percent of the catch and trout had entirely disappeared from the commercial catch. The Alewife, which had followed the sea lamprey from the Atlantic coast to the

Great Lakes via the Welland and Erie Canals, now free of predation from the Whitefish and Trout, took advantage of these changes during this same period. Not even present in the commercial records as late as the 1950s, they exploded in population until they represented 63.7% of the commercial harvest in the mid-1960s, having essentially replaced the now maladapted species. In the summer of 1967, the changes to the lake, particularly the increased nutrient load dumped from residential and industrial sources, caused the alewife population to peak as it feasted on a booming zooplankton population.

Through a combination of disease, lack of food, or terminal oxygen levels, the species suffered a Malthusian decline and died in spectacular fashion as hundreds of millions washed up on Lake Michigan shores. Representing 4.5% of the world supply of freshwater, Lake Michigan, which had been since the retreat of the glaciers what one marine biologist called a “conservative system,” had been remade into an aquatic reflection of the boom/bust cycle of consumer capitalism.31

31 Great Lakes Basin Framework Study, Appendix 18: Erosion and Sedimentation (Ann Arbor: Great Lakes Basin Commission, 1975): 29, 86; William M. Holden, “Hot Water: Menace and Resource,” Science News, 190

Worse still, state governments shifted these costs to national taxpayers as marine biologists took responsibility for managing the lake ecosystem through chemical controls for invasive species and stocking the lake and rivers with favored species. By the early

1960s, Michigan’s Department of Conservation chemically treated nearly 100 streams to beat back the lamprey invasion and began stocking Lake Michigan with Coho salmon from the Pacific Northwest in an effort to check the alewife boom. Although environmental management is often associated with the rise of the science of ecology and the budding environmental movement, the history of Lake Michigan requires a re- contextualization. The power of businesses such as Standard Oil and its post-1911 affiliates to avoid regulation stemmed from the conscious decision to author the social contract by creating an industrial suburb completely dependent upon them. As such, the creation of state- and region-wide environmental management authorities during the twentieth-century must be understood in the context of the technological reform efforts that developed in nineteenth-century Cleveland and early twentieth-century Whiting.32

vol. 94, no. 7 (Aug. 17, 1968): 164-166; Stanford H. Smith, “Pushed Toward Extinction: The Salmon and Trout,” John Rousmaniere, ed., The Enduring Great Lakes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979): 42, 45. For a recent history including a discussion of the impact on fish populations wrought by the industrialization of Gary, Indiana’s see Andrew Hurley, Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana: 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995): 34-35; “Prescription for a Dying Lake,” Science News, vol. 93, no. 7 (Feb. 17, 1968): 159; “Dead Fish by the Ton,” Science News, vol. 92, no. 1 (1 July 1967): 9-10; William M. Holden, “Hot Water: Menace and Resource,” Science News, vol. 94, no. 7 (Aug. 17, 1968): 164-166. It should also be noted that Lake Michigan, at 10,000 years old, is geologically young when compared to lake systems, such as Lake Baikal in Russia (fifty million years old), thus making it more susceptible to disruption from invasive species as the endemic plant and animal species have had less time to evolutionarily acclimate themselves. See Eugene F. Stoermer, “Bloom and Crash: Algae in the Lakes,” John Rousmaniere, ed., The Enduring Great Lakes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979): 15-16, 18-19; Peter H. Gleick ed., Water in Crisis, A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 120; the rise in stream and lake water temperatures has been documented throughout the Great Lakes, see especially H. A. Regier and W. L. Hartman, “Lake Erie’s Fish Community: 150 Years of Cultural Stresses,” Science, vol. 180 (1973): 1248. 32 Luther J. Carter, “Lake Michigan: Salmon Help to Redress the Balance,” Science, New Series, vol. 161, no. 3841 (Aug. 9, 1968): 551-555; Robert E. Lennon, “Control of Freshwater Fish With Chemicals,” Proceedings of the 4th Vertebrate Pest Conference (1970) posted at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska – Lincoln (http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/vpcfour/25); “Lamprey on the Run,” Wisconsin Conservation Bulletin, vols. 29-30 (1964). 191

Although some residents in Northern Indiana quietly complained about the

changes wrought by Standard Oil to the region’s ecology, the company could count on

social discipline from its workers. It paid 67% of the taxes in Whiting and company

executives dominated the city government well into the twentieth century. Most Whiting

residents interviewed following the community’s centennial agreed with local historian

Betty Gehrke who said, “everybody noticed the odors but we’d always say it was our

’bread and butter,’ ’don’t knock it.’” For nearly a century, the owners and management of the Whiting refinery avoided both government regulation and public anger because the devil’s bargain of economic prosperity at the cost of environmental health allowed them to implement their vision of the ideal city. As early as 1906, a reporter for the Chicago

Tribune marveled at the control the company exercised over Whiting:

The ease with which one man might with a stroke of his pen snuff out a whole community, however, is a lesson in social economy. Those who have are the masters. Nothing is simpler, or of more importance. “Whom do you work for?” “Standard.” “Whom do you get your provisions from?” “Standard.” “Suppose the Standard should go out of business? “Standard go out of business?” The grin that accompanies the question is a satisfied one. The Standard go out of business! It is to laugh.

“Thus,” the Tribune writer concluded, echoing the sentiment of Whiting residents some

eighty years later, “every soul in the place looks to the Standard Oil company for bread

and butter, or cake and ice cream, or wealth, just as the case may be. The Standard Oil

company is interested in oil. It is quite natural, therefore, to find the town interested in the

same commodity.”33

33 For the election of Standard officials see Moore, 205-208; for tax figures see Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration (Indiana), The Calumet Region Historical Guide, reprint edition (New York: AMS Press, 1975): 5 and Moore, 207; for Whiting residents on the social quietude achieved through economic dominance see Betty Gehrke interview, by John Bodnar, 28 September 1990, call number 91-004, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History 192

Requiem for the Dunes

Not everyone agreed with Standard Oil’s sanguine lawyer, S.C.T. Dodd, and his desire to make “all nature subservient to the human race.” In 1915, after years of promising graduate study, Alice Mabel Gray withdrew from her courses, boarded a train in Chicago and headed to the dwindling dune country east of the band of industrial suburbs that stretched from Chicago to Gary with only a few provisions, a blanket, and two rifles. She was in many ways the product of Rockefeller’s success. Gray used her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago (founded by John D. Rockefeller) to acquire a position as one of the first women “computers” at the U. S. Naval Observatory in

Washington, D.C. before her desire for further study brought her back to Chicago to pursue a graduate degree. After four years, her dreams soured however. Although eager journalists theorized that her desire to flee civilization for the dune country emerged from a disappointing love affair, it appears her studies led her to adopt a naturalistic perspective that alienated her from her peers. For Gray, Chicago was the “child of Lake

Michigan in a more poetic sense” and its greatest treasure was not its manufacturing establishments but its “rich black soil.” After setting herself up in an abandoned cabin,

Alice became a curious specter in the dune country, bathing in the lake and sustaining herself on the abundant waterfowl she could bring down with her legendary aim and through bartering with local families for what the dunes failed to provide. After a year, the Chicago press heard rumors of a “nymph” that had abandoned civilization for the vanishing wilderness of the lake country and gave her the moniker “Diana of the Dunes”

and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 21; Joseph Gresko interview, by John Bodnar, 14 May 1991, call number 91-023, “Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993,” Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington, 12; “The Heart of the Octopus: Whiting, Indiana,” The Chicago Tribune (June 3, 1906): D8. 193

in reference to the Roman goddess of the hunt. If Rockefeller’s goal was to drag

Americans into an industrial future, Alice Gray was confidently marching in the opposite direction.34

The Chicago Press sought Gray out and offered her an opportunity to voice her

anti-modern perspective. For Gray, the contrast between nature’s economy and that

created by culture had proved too much. Gray argued her work in Chicago at best

produced “little of importance” and at worst amounted to “a prostitution of my powers.”

In short, Gray’s perspective was the absolute obverse of Dodd and Rockefeller’s: “The life of a salary earner in the cities is slavery, a constant fight for the means of living,” and she angrily lashed out at Chicago’s residents for doing nothing to prevent the dune country from “being Garyized.” In the end, Gray’s romantic idealism ended in tragedy.

Although she befriended local housewives and fishermen, even entering a romantic relationship with a transient furniture maker, Gray’s decision to reject the wage economy and a traditional gender role lead to rumors of thievery and immoral activities. When locals discovered a murdered corpse near her home in 1922, Gray and her shady beau became immediate suspects. A confrontation with a drunken sheriff’s deputy left Gray with a cracked skull and her boyfriend, Paul, shot in the leg. Although the couple recovered from the incident and were released from police custody, they returned to find their cabin ransacked. Three years later, exhausted by fighting a losing court battle against the Chicago press for libel, Gray died in Gary, the source of much of her scorn.

Her last wish, to be cremated and her remains spread from the top of Mount Tom, a 200 foot-tall dune in the heart of her wild sanctuary, was spurned by her family who trumped

34 Janet Zenke Edwards, Diana of the Dunes: The True Story of Alice Gray (Charleston: The History Press, 2010): 41, 45, 46; Moore, 602-604. 194

her wishes and demanded she be interred in city she saw as the most immediate threat to her dune lands.

By 1923, with the completion of Dunes Highway, the new icon of the petroleum age had already penetrated the heart of dune country. Gary traffic officers marveled as over 20,000 vehicles made their way from Chicago to the dune lands in the opening weekend, marking the full transition of experiencing nature as a source of sustenance for the mind and body to a mediated consumer phenomenon, safely absorbed from the comfort of a touring sedan fueled by petroleum. By then the Lima field accounted for only 2.3% of total domestic output of crude, down from its high of just over 34% in 1899.

Now the great mid-continent fields and those in California supplied over 75% of the industry’s needs and as the petroleum frontier moved into new regions the environmental consequences of refining moved with it.35

35 Moore, 602; Edwards, 48-49, 87, 92, 96, 98, 101, 142; Williamson and Daum, 17. 195

CONCLUSION

“A River Burns Through It”

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1906)

The Gilded Age witnessed many limits to American power. This seems counterintuitive

for an age that represents the emergence of the United States as an economic and military

world power. Through ideological dedication to beliefs in Manifest Destiny and the

promethean promise of scientific progress, Americans settled the North American

continent and developed an intensive, industrial economy to convert the landmass into a

spectrum of commodities. In the process, they built powerful, multinational corporations

and exerted military power in a century-long war of dominion that began on the

Appalachian frontier and reached the jungles of the Philippines. Science and technology, too, made astounding leaps, most profoundly in the transition from animal power to fossil fuels. Standard Oil and its champions placed it in this progressive narrative and deservedly so. The corporation pioneered the organizational strategy of vertical integration, developed countless technological breakthroughs for refining petroleum, and made the transition to the internal combustion engine seamless through its centrally organized empire. Yet, as the name implies, the Gilded Age masked many warning signs.

Historians have well documented the social dislocations produced by the mountains of wealth that seemed to betray the egalitarian ethos of the American 196

Revolution against social privilege. For the continent’s non-human species the price of material wealth came at the cost of environmental health and, for some, extinction.

Outside of the fields of Western and Environmental history, few scholars have dwelled on the environmental limits of American power that first surfaced in the Gilded Age except as footnotes to the political history of the Progressive Age. Perhaps the non- human subjects of this Gilded Age tragedy rightfully fail to provoke the same level of pathos as their human counterparts that perished at the Wounded Knee Massacre, went hungry through one of the period’s many economic crises, or faced the violence of anti- immigrant sentiment or the racial lynch mobs that betrayed the rhetoric of the age. What are a few bison and passenger pigeons, after all, compared to the bounty provided by continental economic development? It is my hope that this dissertation answers this question by revealing the social consequences of environmental degradation. Just as the near extinction of the American bison signaled the destruction of Amerindian independence from the wage economy and the erosion of their culture, the deterioration of the urban environments realigned power within cities and made the laboring population dependent upon the municipal power structure for preserving the viability of common ecological systems. Power for some begat dependence for others. The great fortunes that disguised growing levels of poverty behind a thin “gilding” of conspicuous consumption found their parallel in the environment. The kerosene that illuminated the wilderness also darkened the skies of urban America. Above all, the Gilded Age was a time of environmental and social frustration. In the language of Hegelian dialectics, during the Gilded Age the “thesis” of wealth and the “antithesis” of poverty coexisted without producing a meaningful “synthesis” beyond mild reform.1

197

The Gilded Age also remodeled classical liberal notions of personal freedom,

stripped of revolutionary notions of communal responsibility. The market became a new

realm of contest and capital succeeded in challenging the communal perspective of labor unions by advancing an atomistic view of the individual struggle against one’s neighbors.

Despite working peoples’ effort to overcome it, capital advanced this ideology of individualism through outright violence at Pullman, Patterson, and Ludlow, or through quiet control at corporate fiefdoms at Whiting and Fordlandia. Despite resistance, the marketplace was organized on the ethics of the merciless frontier, best captured in the cowboy song “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo, Git Along, Little Dogies”—where the dislocations of the Gilded Age met the response, “It’s your misfortune and none of my own.” The ironies of this development are legion. Just as contemporary commentators, like Standard’s

S.C.T. Dodd, proclaimed the arrival of a civilized America out of the brutal wilderness, capital adopted the “law of the jungle” as an organizing principal. Dodd and others spoke out of both sides of their mouth, however, by championing the individual at a time of the highest concentration of wealth in the nation’s history. For Rockefeller, the corporation itself served as the only legitimate arena of cooperation. “[T]he corporation in form and character has come to stay,” he proclaimed, and “[t]he day of individual competition in large affairs…past and gone.” “[Y]ou might just as well argue that we should go back to hand labour and throw away our efficient machines.” Yet individual competition remained for those wishing to join the ranks of privilege as reflected in the sober statistics

1 Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Dan Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” Journal of American History, 78 (1991): 465-85; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).

198

of unemployment and levels of poverty.2

During the closing years of the Gilded Age, capital also met the limits of its

power. At the apex of its control in the 1880s, the Standard Trust would perish a

generation later. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 provided the legal foundation for an assault on Rockefeller’s consolidated business model, overturning a legal orthodoxy convinced “that only a decentralized political and economic system could increase wealth by maintaining freedom,” according to legal historian Morton Horwitz.3

Gilded Reforms

By the time of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Standard Oil had successfully

developed new products to complement its sale of kerosene. In the 1880s, Vaseline—a

high-quality petroleum grease—earned a popular market as a cure-all for cuts, burns, and chapped skin. Similarly, paraffin began to replace tallow in the manufacture of candles, matches, and chewing gum. Various chemical distillates of petroleum were used in the manufacture of paints, dyes, varnishes, paint-removers, and astringents—replacing plant- derived products like turpentine. By the turn of the century, Standard’s products illuminated buildings, greased train axels, cleansed and dyed fabrics, and protected baby bottoms from diaper rash. The corporation’s products had insinuated themselves into every nook of the American market. The company’s aggressive agents were able to give away lamps and stoves, knowing the monopoly’s hold on the market left consumers with

2 John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Macmillan, 1948). John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909): 65. 3 Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1992): 66. 199

few options on how to fuel them.4

Many of these products were not produced by Standard Oil itself, but by a

growing number of affiliate companies that Standard controlled under its trust system.

Created on January 22, 1882, the Standard Oil Trust Agreement created a centralized

body composed of forty-four trustees, who effectively owned the entirety of Standard’s

corporate stock and shares of its ownership in dozens of other companies. The trust form

was essential to circumventing state laws—and Standard’s original Ohio charter of

incorporation—that prohibited private corporations from owning (even fractions) of

another company. A year prior, John D. Rockefeller’s closest business associate, Henry

Flagler, instructed the company’s chief counsel, S.C.T. Dodd, to inquire into “the

feasibility of organizing a corporation for the purpose of holding stocks of corporations in

various states and making the business of such local corporations subsidiary to the

business of the Central Corporation.” Dodd’s response noted the “the difficulty of

obtaining a charter which confers the necessary powers…[i]t being against the policy of

the law for one corporation to hold or deal in the stocks of another.” Dodd noted the

“great power which a Legislature has over corporations of its creation,” and suggested the

trust form as a temporary solution before an appeal to favorable legislatures on the east

coast for obtaining such a charter could be organized. In the meantime, the trust form

insulated the company from taxes levied on out-of-state properties. Every state in which

Standard operated, a separate company was incorporated under the state’s laws, yet controlled by John D. Rockefeller and his associates, using the trust agreement as a legal firewall. Finally, the trust agreement created two new companies, Standard Oil of New

4 Allan Nevins, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist, Vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953): 12; Ralph W. Hidy and Muriel E. Hidy, Pioneering in Big Business, 1882- 1911 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955): 116. 200

Jersey and Standard Oil of New York, the latter of which became the base of the

corporation’s organization. With the signing of the trust agreement, Standard Oil’s headquarters effectively transferred from Cleveland, Ohio to 26 Broadway in

Manhattan.5

In 1889, the state legislature of New Jersey, wishing to attract business, planted

unprecedented corporate concessions in its state constitution. The new incorporation law

allowed businesses incorporated in New Jersey to own other corporations operating in

separate states, set the maximum franchise tax at one-tenth of one percent of issued stock,

required only one company director to hold residence in the state, freed stockholders

from liability for corporate debts, and waived the responsibility of the company to issue

annual reports. Most significantly, the 1889 legal changes and subsequent acts passed in

the following decade allowed New Jersey corporations to act as holding companies,

effectively legalizing Standard’s secretive trust form. By the turn of the century, Standard

Oil and a host of America’s largest trusts—including the much larger U.S. Steel

Corporation—officially transferred their headquarters to New Jersey addresses in one of

the largest flights of capital in world history. At the dawn of the twentieth century, New

Jersey Standard openly owned shares in forty-one companies, previously held illegally in

trust. Its power, as in so many other locations, was the pocketbook, the changes in the law

5 “Standard Oil Trust Agreement,” Box: 2W30, Folder: Standard Oil Company: Founding and Governance Documents: Trust Agreement, 1879, n.d., ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Hidy and Hidy, 46, 49; August W. Giebelhaus, Business and Government in the Oil Industry: A Case Study of Sun Oil, 1876-1945 (Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press Inc., 1980): 4-5; Manns, 20; Joel Bakan has shown that following the Dodge v. Ford decision in 1916, corporate owners were legally bound to prioritize investor profit before any other consideration. See Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004): 36-7. S.C.T. Dodd to Flagler “Relative to plan of organizing a Corporation for purpose of holding Stocks of Corporations in various States etc.” and SCT Dodd to Flagler “Opinion relative proposed dissolution of the SOCo as a Corporation existing under the Act of Legislature of the State of Ohio,” July 23, 1881, Box: 2W30, Folder: Standard Oil Company: Founding and governance documents: S.C.T. Dodd opinions and abstract, 1881, n.d., ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 201

allowed the state of New Jersey to fund its government entirely through modest corporate taxes.6

Many of the companies within the Trust specialized in distributing Standard’s products to available markets. By 1878, Standard Oil opened a sales office in San

Francisco, which marketed oil north to the border of Canada, south to the border of

Mexico, and west to the Hawaiian kingdom. Indeed, foreign markets accounted for no less than fifty percent of Standard’s annual kerosene sales. Although the company had initially dealt with export merchants in coastal entrepôts like New York to deliver products to foreign markets, by the late 1870s Standard began eliminating or controlling such intermediaries. Standard bought interests in Meissner, Ackermann & Company, a consortium of export merchants and invested heavily in a refinery in Austria-Hungary. It owned majority shares of significant German and Italian distributing firms and began buying up shares of a Danish firm with an eye toward expanding its share of the

Scandinavian market in 1888. By the 1893 Columbian Exposition, Standard Oil’s agents pushed their products in Montreal, Manchester, Frankfurt am Main, Paris, London,

Barcelona, Hamburg, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Milan, Constantinople, Beirut, and

Bombay. A year later, Standard opened an office in Yokohama, Japan, despite the country’s protective attitude toward foreign trade. Within a few years, offices in Kobe and Nagasaki received shipments by sail vessels that in the pre-Panama Canal era endured a six-month voyage via Cape Town from Standards refineries in Philadelphia.

By 1900, Standard had captured a third of the petroleum market in the Meiji Empire and operated a truly global trade network. Despite its success in entering new markets,

6 Hidy and Hidy, 308. Ralph and Muriel Hidy found that New Jersey granted an average of 2,172 corporate charters annually between the years of 1899 and 1901 alone, Hidy and Hidy, 309. Giebelhaus, 5. Horwitz, 84. 202

familiar challenges met the company. In the spring of 1879, Standard’s chief agent for

Asia, William H. Libby, wrote from the Hawaiian kingdom to their New York firm,

Charles Pratt and Company, that a “recently enacted statute prohibits importation under

100° flash.” This rare internal memo revealed Standard’s attitude toward what it saw as a

barrier to its products. Libby arranged an audience with the island nation’s Minister of

the Interior to discuss the matter and even met with the Police Marshall who oversaw

inspection “to whom I have endeavored to give a few ’points’ which apparently have

been well received.” Among other things, the memo reveals that Standard officers

understood its products would fail such tests but could succeed in changing the law by

appealing to the interests of a few officials.7

By the time Henry Demarest Lloyd published Wealth Against Commonwealth in

1883, communities across the United States had begun to resist the efforts of Standard

Oil’s total domination of the petroleum trade. Lloyd’s book contains two chapters that tell the history of two community boycotts of Standard’s marketing efforts. The U.S.

Congress, pressed by the public uproar created by Lloyd’s works and Standard’s action, passed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 to ban railroad corporations from practicing rate discrimination and established the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to investigate business to ensure the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment applied

to individuals as well as corporations. Three years later, Congress passed the Sherman

7 H. J. Haynes, Standard Oil Company of California: 100 Years Helping to Create the Future (New York: The Newcomen Society in North America, 1980): 9. Hidy and Hidy, 42, 126, 151. For a modern look at Standard Oil’s overseas empire and its relationship to United States political goals see Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). F. S. Cooper, Jr., The Flying Red Horse in Japan (notes), June 2, 1961, 2.207-E174, Folder: Asia, Japan, 1879-1993, ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. William Libby to Charles Pratt & Co., New York, April, 9th, 1879, Box: 2.207/J24, ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 203

Antitrust Act to criminalize monopolies found in restraint of free trade. Although popular distrust of corporations ran deep because of the works of Lloyd and Tarbell and the general American distrust of concentrated power, Standard Oil was viewed by some as the model trust. From the passage of the ICC, American laissez faire attitudes waned as the federal government took on an increasing role in the economy, placing Lloyd’s work among a select few books that precipitated immediate government action. Indeed, when the U.S. Supreme Court dissolved Standard Oil into thirty-four independent companies in

1911, it cited the Sherman Act of 1890 as the legal foundation for its radical action. The decision was the product of a significant reversal in American legal culture that had viewed monopolies as impermanent nuisances. By the turn of the century, the transformation in the law of New Jersey and the sustained onslaught of corporate abuses of free trade made inaction impossible and led to the Progressive legal reforms culminating in anti-trust cases.8

Although Standard would suffer its greatest defeat at the hands of the Supreme

Court, changes in the economy, technology, and environment delivered long-term challenges to its many subsidiaries in the twentieth century. The age of kerosene, which built Standard to its imposing heights, would slowly end. The development of electricity beginning with Thomas Edison’s first demonstration of the incandescent light bulb at

Menlo Park, New York on New Year’s Eve, 1879, ushered in a new regime of illumination that would prove far more efficient and cost effective than kerosene.

Electricity’s high initial capital investments, however, would give kerosene a half-century window before closing for good. Although the electric light would require ample coal power and carried its own consequences for nature and society, economically it proved

8 Horwitz, 80-93. 204

far more convenient than kerosene lamps, which stank, required constant refilling and

cleaning, and could easily become incendiary bombs. Kerosene lamps persisted well into

the twentieth century, but the product would no longer serve as the lifeblood to Standard

Oil’s survival. After 1903, kerosene sales entered a period of decline as the electric light

devoured Standard’s primary market, effectively ending the age of kerosene’s dominance.9

Standard suffered other setbacks at the turn of the century. Although it had

obliterated its competition in the previous generation, its power over nature could not

prevent the earth from revealing new sources of petroleum to competitors. By the 1880s, oil fields near Baku on the Caspian Sea came online with heavy investment from the

Rothschild and Nobel financial dynasties. Refined in Fiume, on the Adriatic coast,

Russian oil immediately posed a challenge to Standard’s overseas sales. It was cheaper to produce and distribute domestically than Standard’s products and the Rothschilds and

Nobels successfully petitioned European governments to levy a tariff on American petroleum in order to support continental production. Historians Ralph and Muriel Hidy estimate Standard held a virtual monopoly on the world petroleum trade in 1882; however, with the help of a heavy tariff in 1887, Russian oil had captured twenty-two percent of the world market by 1888. Three years later, Russian oil represented twenty-

nine percent of the world trade, eating into Standard’s foreign sales.10

Russian oil precipitated an industrial war between Rockefeller and the

Rothschilds. Rockefeller aggressively expanded his business into foreign states with

gusto in the 1890s. Standard penned agreements with refiners in France, Spain, and

9 Hidy and Hidy, 452. 10 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991): 60-63, 132, 153. 205

Fiume, and purchased shares in Italian, Austrian, and Danish enterprises to compete for

the European trade. In 1896, Standard entered the Brazilian market by purchasing a

seventy percent share of Empreza Industrial de Petroleo, which was constructing a

refinery in Rio de Janero. In the summer of 1898, Canada’s largest oil firm, Imperial Oil

Company, Limited, agreed to sell Standard a seventy five percent share of its business.

The tentacles of the Standard octopus moved swiftly, but it was meeting the limits of its

control when confronted with the discovery of new petroleum fields on the global scale.11

Standard’s opposition multiplied with every passing year. Its hold over the

dwindling kerosene trade took its biggest hit ten days into the twentieth century, when a

producing well situated atop Spindletop Hill just south of Beaumont, Texas drilled into a

pocket of pressurized crude oil, causing a spectacular gusher. Overnight, the well tripled

American oil production and would lead to the creation of a cadre of domestic

competitors, including Gulf Oil and Texaco. On the eve of the 1911 Supreme Court

decision to dissolve the Standard Oil Company, the sun appeared to have set on the

petroleum giant’s empire.12

Resilience

Chief Justice Edward Douglass White delivered the Supreme Court’s majority opinion on

15 May 1911 after decades of litigation:

[T]he facts established that the assailed combination took its birth in a purpose unlawfully to acquire wealth by oppressing the public and destroying the just rights of others and that its entire career exemplifies an inexorable carrying out of such wrongful intents, since it is asserted that the pathway of the combination from the beginning of the time of the filing of the bill is marked with constant proofs of wrong inflicted upon the

11 Ibid, 151, 242, 258, 256-257. 12 Ibid, 84-87. 206

public and is strewn with the wrecks resulting from crushing out without regard to law the individual rights of others.

The words confirmed the sentiments of many Americans, from the horribly burned Peter

Golden to William Macey, who had suffered “sickness and loss of sleep” from years of

life downwind from Standard’s Cleveland refineries. The court decision was also a

victory for the independent producers of Pennsylvania’s oil fields, for it confirmed more than a generation of illicit practices that had left them with but a single customer for their product. Although the dissolution of the Standard Oil Company commenced an era of reform in American politics that would see the creation of both the Federal Income Tax by constitutional amendment and the Federal Reserve System two years later in 1913, the language of the decision did not repudiate the standing ideology of the industrial republic.

That ideology, in Chief Justice White’s words, “that freedom to contract was the essence of freedom from undue restraint on the right to contract” prohibited monopoly power but retained the core relationship between communities and corporations. The Progressive push to root out restraint of trade among corporate trusts would do nothing for victims such as Golden and Macey who bore the costs of a corporation founded on the ethos of profit. Likewise, no amount of anti-trust action would reclaim blighted rivers, lakes, forests, and the atmosphere that had long bore the consequences of concentrated wealth.

As such, the Supreme Court’s decision failed to address the orthodox American legal doctrine that viewed corporations as decentralized checks on concentrated power that would otherwise destroy individual freedom and corrupt republican notions of universal equality. What the decision had done was to make the Supreme Court the final arbiter between good and bad trusts. Bigness, in itself, did not die with the 1911 decision. In his history of the Progressive Age, Richard Hofstadter wrote, “big business that grew big 207

through superior efficiency was good; only one that grew big by circumventing honest

competition was bad.” This understanding allowed the leading politicians of the day

(Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt) to sidestep the issue. “[N]o one could be

sure,” Hofstadter wrote, “that there was any real working difference between the

distinction T. R. made between good and bad trusts and the distinction Wilson made

between free and illicit competition.” On the issue of concentrated wealth, voters had but

one choice—its reformed continuation.13

According to legal scholar Morton Horwitz, the liberal New Jersey incorporation

laws initiated a radical realignment of power among the people, their government, and

corporations. For the first time, “the entire expenses of the state of New Jersey were paid

out of corporation fees,” inducing a “race to the bottom” as “state legislatures during the

1890s outbid each other in passing ever more ’liberal’ corporation laws that removed many of the remaining legal barriers to consolidation.” With its modest reforms, the

Federal Government followed in the footsteps of Cleveland’s municipal government in attacking the problem of corporate power at the branches rather than the roots.14

Leviathan Reassembled

The “baby” Standards weathered the Progressive reforms. The centralized control over

information and organization that had united them dispersed and metastasized among the

new companies with ease. With the stock shares among the severed kin of Standard

13 Los Angeles Times, 16 May 1911. “Supreme Court Rules Standard Oil Company Is Illegal Trust.” “William Macey vs. The Standard Oil Company,” (Aug. 5, 1872), Annals of Cleveland Court Record Series, Vol. VIII, 1871-1872 (Cleveland: 1939): 263. Los Angeles Times, 16 May 1911. “Supreme Court Rules Standard Oil Company Is Illegal Trust.” Hofstadter, 248. 14 Horwitz, 84. 208

evenly distributed to its investors, the conservative bookkeeping of Rockefeller’s empire had vastly underestimated the value of its capital and the individual corporations saw their value increase following the decision. Less than a year after the court action, share prices in most of the companies had doubled. Rockefeller, who had refused to sell any of his shares in the company he helped birth, saw his personal wealth skyrocket to

$900,000,000, making him the richest man in history. On the eve of the Great

Depression, the “children” of the Standard Trust, which was valued at just under a billion dollars prior to the 1911 breakup, represented four of the top ten wealthiest American corporations. By 1929, those four companies (Standard Oil of NJ, IN, NY, and CA) held

$3,930,000,000 in assets, an astounding 13.79% of all corporate wealth in the country.15

As the century marched on, these four corporations would remain among the ten

largest businesses in the United States despite world wars, economic booms and busts

and even changes in their surface identity. To claim their independence from their

tarnished mother company, the new corporations adopted new logos and monikers. The

New Jersey branch became Esso (a thinly veiled reference to “S.O.,” or Standard Oil),

then Exxon. The New York company, became Socony (Standard Oil Co., New York),

then Mobil. Standard’s Indiana branch became Amoco, for American Oil Company,

which it acquired in the 1920s in order to produce its own fields and break its dependence

on oil supplied to it by its New Jersey sibling. Standard Oil of California renamed itself

Chevron in a moment of chest-thumping following a merger with former Rockefeller

rival Gulf Oil, which had grown into an oil giant in its own right on the Spindletop

gusher. Although the twentieth century began with the dissolution of famous trusts, it

15 Yergin, 113; “Financier’s Fortune in Oil Amassed in Industrial Era of ’Rugged Individualism.’”The New York Times, 24 May 1937. A. D. Kaplan, Big Enterprise in a Competitive System (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1964): 144. 209

would witness far more corporate mergers than anti-trust dissolutions, including the

merger of Exxon and Mobil, Standard’s largest children, in 1998. When the merger

finally passed all legal hurdles in 1999, the newly formed company not only became the

largest corporation in the world, but its very existence nullified the spirit of the 1911

Supreme Court decision. The remnants of Standard, however, were merely mirroring the

larger trends within the American economy as a whole. When Adolf Berle, Jr. and

Gardiner Means compiled their economic and legal analysis in The Modern Corporation

and Private Property in the midst of the Great Depression, they soberly commented that

“[t]he principles of duopoly have become more important than those of free

competition.” “The economic power in the hands of a few persons,” they concluded, “is a

tremendous force which can harm or benefit a multitude of individuals, affect whole

districts, shift the currents of trade, bring ruin to one community and prosperity to

another.” Despite economic downturns and the growth in power of the federal

government, the corporate form became a permanent force in the twentieth century.16

Although much of the success these offshoots of Standard Oil enjoyed in the

twentieth century can be attributed to the rise of the internal combustion engine and all

manner of craft it propelled, the experience earned during the company’s early history proved invaluable. As this dissertation has shown, Standard Oil, sought control over labor, the environment, government, and even its public image. The company’s relocation of refining capacity from Cleveland to Whiting and headquarters from the

Forest City to the Atlantic seaboard was predicated on this urge to control both social and

16 “The Exxon-Mobil merger: hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power of the Committee on Commerce,” House of Representatives, One Hundred Sixth Congress, first session, March 10 and 11, 1999, Volume 4. Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Shaped (New York: Viking Press, 1975). Adolf A. Berle, Jr. and Gardiner C. Means, The Corporation and Private Property (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1934): 45, 46. 210

environmental conditions to achieve maximum profitability. In many ways, the Supreme

Court’s 1911 decision fractured the company along many pre-existing divisions.

Although some of the upstarts became briefly dependent on their siblings for different

levels of production, the mother company had succeeded in imprinting the gospel of

vertical integration among its splintered limbs. Those companies lacking a critical level

of production between well and filling station, such as the Indiana branch that could no

longer charge the largest and most efficient refinery in the world with its own oil, were

nonetheless staffed with veterans of the kerosene age. These men had learned the lessons of both vertical and horizontal integration for many were former competitors of

Rockefeller who had been annexed into the oil empire.

On the spit of land that separates Newark and New York Bays known to geographers as Bergen Neck and to New Yorkers as “Jersey,” Standard established a franchise refinery in 1877. It is entirely possible that the corporation merely wanted to acquire a cheap frontage to New York Bay and the beckoning Atlantic market for the oil it purchased from the fields of western Pennsylvania. In the first few years, crude arrived via railroad tank cars, then subsidized through favorable (and patently criminal) rates from the region’s rail corporations. Two years later, the first pipelines arrived and ushered in a new era for the land of Bergen Neck. The small oil still that had originally employed twenty men bloomed into one of the largest refineries in the world—at times

overtaking the capacity of the Whiting Works. The nearby farming and mill town of

Bayonne exploded into an industrial city within a generation, growing from just under

4,000 people in 1870 to nearly 33,000 by the first year of the twentieth century. The tip of

Bergen Neck, known as Constable Hook, permitted a few farms amid the marshes that 211

made the nearby Meadowlands famous and tidal streams offered a natural power source

for water-driven grain mills, which attracted farmers from nearby Staten Island. The changes to the landscape proved relatively minor in the days before the Standard Oil sought to play god with nature’s logic by fortifying the coast with metal bulkheads to beat back the encroaching sea and draining the marshland into a dry apron of Cartesian habitat for their expanding refinery. By the early twentieth century, company histories boasted that the “steady march of industry has wiped out the meadows, the farms and the orchards for which the ’Hook’ was famous.” Although the company viewed these changes as progress, the consequences of these transformations soon visited the region.

On the night of July 4, 1900, the citizens of the greater New York metropolis were treated to a spectacular combustive performance when atmospheric tension in the form of a lightning bolt smote a large holding tank at the Standard Works. A river of fire washed over the refinery, drawing curious observers to the smoky industrial peninsula including a team of photographers who captured the scene of panicked residents fleeing the licking flames with an experimental motion camera developed at the nearby Edison laboratory.

The fire reduced the company’s refinery to smoldering ruin, burned for six days and, according to company historians, “could be seen fifty miles away while a newspaper could be distinctly read at midnight in any part of Bayonne.” In a bit of historical irony, the fleeing residents took shelter in the remaining salt meadows, which the company’s

definition of progress had all but purged from the land. A history focused on this refinery

could well reveal further aspects of the company’s relationship with nature. However, the same logic that allowed Standard Oil to replicate its industrial success on the tidal marshes of Bergen Neck also duplicated the consequences of treating nature as a machine 212

for producing wealth, unifying the discrete environments under the company’s control in ways not captured in a ledger book. Despite the destruction of its refinery, the company took the loss in stride. A month after the fire, the corporation disappointed few investors in announcing its expected dividend of 10% would be set at 8% of its stock price to offset the $1,500,000 worth of damages.17

Standard Oil expanded aggressively into the New York City region during the

1870s to ensure efficient trade with Europe. In addition to the Bayonne works, Standard

acquired the enterprises of Clark, Payne & Co., Long Island Refining Co., Devoe

Manufacturing Co., Charles Pratt & Co., and Sone & Fleming Work in the 1870s. All

located in Brooklyn, these new properties would refine oil or manufacture cases and cans

to hold kerosene for the Atlantic trade. The corporation also bought the Elizabethport

Acid Works in nearby Elizabeth, New Jersey to supply the refineries with caustics to

cheaply process crude. Reorganized under the trust agreement of the early 1880s, the

company, with additional acquisitions in Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore, effectively

surrounded the Pennsylvania oil regions with manufacturing hubs connected by an

impressive network of pipelines. Following the 1911 decision, Standard of New York

found new producing and refining properties in East Providence, Rhode Island and Texas

as the nearby producing fields went dry. The New York branch of the company clearly

shared the internal logic that propelled its predecessor to success. In fact, the parallels

between the construction of its refinery in East Providence, Rhode Island and those made

17 Ernest F. Hoyer, “Yesterday and Today: A Short History of Constable Hook,” The Messenger (December 24, 1920), Standard Oil Company (New Jersey). Burning of the Standard Oil Company’s tanks, Bayonne, New Jersey, New York. United States: Destruction of Standard Oil Company’s plant at Bayonne, N.J., by fire on July 5th, 1900. From Library of Congress, Early Motion Pictures, 1897-1920. Edison films catalog, no. 105, July 1901, p. 53. “Other Interesting Incidents in the City’s Early History Recalled,” Bayonne Times (October 3, 1934): 42. “Standard Oil Dividend,” New York Times (August 8, 1900): 8. “Serious Petroleum Fire at Bayonne,” Oil Paint & Drug Reporter (July 9, 1900): 7-8. 213

by its predecessor at Bayonne and Whiting betray a common knowledge of converting

nature into corporate wealth. Like Whiting and Bayonne, East Providence served as a

bucolic hinterland for the nearby metropolis. Wealthy residents had colonized the region

with summer cottages to enjoy the suburban comforts of distance from industry. A rocky

ledge, licked by waves from Narragansett Bay, spelled the southern terminus of the

region that supported a golf club, truck gardeners, and small pasture farms before a sharp

tree line emerged in the north and separated the affairs of humans from a thick

underbrush and peat swamp. An eerie, abandoned amusement park stood on the

landscape when Standard Oil entered in 1918. Named Vanity Fair after the city in John

Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in which commerce lures the faithful away from their path,

the park had been abandoned following a recent fire. The company wasted little time

dismantling the hinterland relationship between Providence and the land. A team of

jobbers leveled the golf course and amusement park, replacing them with metal storage

tanks. Standard of New York also erected a 300-foot dock on Narragansett Bay, blasting

the rocky ledge separating earth from water to accommodate a rail line linking the shore

with the refinery rising behind it. The company suffered little waste as the refuse from

blasting the ledge was used as fill for the lowlands and marsh, efficiently fulfilling the

Old Testament cry of Isaiah:

Every valley shall be exalted And every mountain and hill brought low; The crooked places shall be made straight And the rough places smooth; The glory of the Lord shall be revealed.18

18“Refineries Purchased Prior to 1882,” Box: 2W29, Folder: Standard Oil Company: Operations: General, 1872-1907, ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. C. W. Shaeffer, History of East Providence Refinery (New York City: E.M. Applegit, Publications, 1950), Box: 2.207-F90, Folder: Mobil Corp.: Subj. Files: Refining: Facilities: US: Rhode Island: East Providence, 1919-1980, ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. “Standard of New York to Build New Refinery,” New York Times (April 13, 1918): 2. Isaiah. 40:4-5 New King James Version. Later, historians alleged that John D. Rockefeller himself chose the site of the refinery 214

The company hedged its bet that the citizens of Providence would not see their

refinery as the Lord’s plan by including in its 1,200-acre holding several residences, the occupants being replaced with company officers less inclined to complain about the consequences of progress. Within a few years, the so-named Vanity Fair dock had extended to 1,100 feet, and new coastland extended twenty-five acres into the bay as fill

converted water into lebensraum. Charles Millard Pratt, the eldest son of the Brooklyn

refiner who sold out to Rockefeller in the 1870s, oversaw the continued modification of

the landscape as an executive of the New York company, striving to achieve complete

vertical integration of the trust’s New York limb. The construction of a network of canals

and intercepting sewers in 1919 quickly drained the remaining swamp. Pratt built eight

pipelines to ferry petroleum products between storage tanks, refining stills, and the docks,

and even constructed an artificial lake and cofferdam at the docks to receive and purify

wastewater before it entered Narragansett Bay. The company dammed the nearby

Runnins River, which fed the disappearing marshland, to supply the refinery’s stills with

fresh water to flush out impurities loosed by acid treatment. Soon the refinery began

operating at full capacity, converting crude from Texas, Mexico, and Venezuela into

gasoline. The company’s new relationship with the environment, however, caused

friction with locals who depended on the stability of the surrounding ecology. For the

oystermen and clamdiggers of Narragansett Bay, more than good intentions flowed down

the Runnins River and out through the Vanity Fair docks. They petitioned the state

for the East Providence Refinery after a 1916 visit to the area and commissioned a study to appraise real estate values of the region as early as 1912. See Daniel Hackett, “An oil refinery in R.I.—So what’s new” The Providence, R.I. Sunday Journal (June 16, 1974), Box: 2.207-F90, Folder: Mobil Corp.: Subj. Files: Refining: Facilities: US: Rhode Island: East Providence, 1919-1980, ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 215

legislature to little effect in response to declining catches that followed in the wake of

New England’s largest oil refinery.19

In the decade following the 1911 decision, the sundered tentacles of the oil

octopus had reorganized themselves in the image of their parent; growing new limbs in

the process that sought to replicate the relationships pioneered by its ancestor. The legacy

of acquisition in men like Charles Pratt helped carry the lessons of vertical integration

and domination of the environment, which ensured investor profits and further growth. It

was during this generation following the 1911 decision that the children of the trust

sought to control every aspect of its business with both scientific management and the

emerging tool of public relations.

The Limits of Control

C. W. Schaeffer, a representative of Standard of New York, wrote a history of the East

Providence refinery richly colored with the frontier rhetoric long championed by

Rockefeller and his legal bulldog, S. C. T. Dodd. “It is noteworthy,” Schaeffer wrote,

“that as the once valueless swampland was transformed into tax-producing property, not

a penny of municipal funds was spent at any time within the tract for streets, sewers or

other improvements which a municipality usually provides….[l]ikewise, the refinery has

practically no need for fire or police protection because personnel for these purposes is

maintained by the refinery itself.” Schaeffer’s tone differs from previous defenses of the

corporation for it is pre-emptive of expected criticism. As such, it reflects an

19 C. W. Shaeffer, History of East Providence Refinery (New York City: E.M. Applegit, Publications, 1950), Box: 2.207-F90, Folder: Mobil Corp.: Subj. Files: Refining: Facilities: US: Rhode Island: East Providence, 1919-1980, ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. “Making Providence Biggest Oil Port,” The Providence Sunday Journal (February 23, 1919), Ibid. 216

understanding of a subject that did not exist in the kerosene age—public relations. The loss of control manifested in the 1911 decision capped a generation-long movement of public opinion against the oil giant that began with disgruntled competitors and producers in the 1870s, was stoked by the muckraking histories of Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida

Tarbell, and ended in a raft of anti-monopoly legislation including the Sherman and

Interstate Commerce Acts. As his company weathered the rough seas of public opinion,

John D. Rockefeller believed that prudence dictated silence and left his corporation undefended in the court of public opinion. This stance slowly wavered in the twentieth century.20

Shunning nearly every opportunity to make public statements, both in courts and with the press, Rockefeller reversed his policy with the publication Random

Reminiscences of Men and Events in 1909. The light, conversational writing style of

Random Reminiscences offered a blunt, but personal defense of Rockefeller’s character and Standard Oil’s business practices. It gave voice to the founder of the corporation, who had allowed his enemies to define him and the corporation he founded for decades.

Following the breakup of the company, the Rockefeller family hired Ivy Lee to handle the family’s public image following the massacre of 21 miners and their families at

Ludlow, Colorado, in a strike against mining corporations controlled by the John D.

Rockefeller, Jr. After Lee’s advice helped rehabilitate the image of John, Jr. in the aftermath of the national tragedy, the family heir urged his father to take Lee’s counsel and go on the offensive. The elder Rockefeller gave his reluctant assent and authorized the writing of a historical biography in 1915. Lee interviewed William O. Inglis, a reporter for the New York Evening World, and invited him to interview the patriarch and

20 Ibid. 217

write a “friendly biography.” Over three years (1917-1920), Inglis intermittently lived

with Rockefeller and compiled over 1,500 pages of notes and transcripts from his almost

daily interviews. However, when Inglis completed the first volume of his history in

1923, a three-journalist panel selected by John Jr. to review the piece before

publication—which included Ida Tarbell—panned the piece as hagiography and it never

went to the presses. The Rockefellers wanted a sympathetic pen, but one that would pass

muster with its critics.21

Ivy Lee, along with Edward Bernays, pioneered the public relations industry by

applying the principles of scientific management to public image. In a 1914 speech to the

American Railroad Guild, Lee presented the philosophy behind this new enterprise. “The

people now rule,” he argued. “This new sovereign has his courtiers, who flatter and

caress precisely as did those who surrounded medieval emperors.” Lee considered the

early muckrakers such “courtiers,” and saw an opportunity to use public persuasion to

defend their targets. The Rockefeller family wholly endorsed Lee’s recommendations. In

the trial resulting from the Ludlow incident, Lee advised John Jr. to enter the court

through the front entrance to appear open, with nothing to hide. John Jr. followed his

advice, shaking hands with several of his public enemies including Mother Jones. Lee’s

counsel to the elder Rockefeller has had the deepest legacy, however. On Lee’s advice,

the family’s philanthropic adventures became featured in newsprint along with

humanizing articles on the elder Rockefeller’s golf game and participation in his local church. Lee was a master of persuasion and earned the family invaluable newsprint by occasionally permitting access to the patriarch—a reasonable price for a favorable media

21 John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909). David Freeman Hawke, ed., John D. Rockefeller Interview, 1917-1920 (Westport, CT: Meckler Publishing, 1984): 2, 6-7. 218

message. Although likely apocryphal, Rockefeller’s famed penchant for handing out

dimes to children was likewise attributed to Lee’s counsel and derided as a cheap “stunt” by his opponents. The family also sought to overturn the image of Standard Oil established by the works of Lloyd and Tarbell by underwriting a professional history

Inglis failed to deliver. John Jr. and John D. Rockefeller III organized the search for a viable historian and approached Allan Nevins, DeWitt Clinton Professor of history at

Columbia University, to deliver a serious, scholarly defense of the company and the pater familias. After initial meetings, John Jr. wrote his father a in 1935, assuring the patriarch

“We all feel [Nevins] will do a good piece of work and are glad at last to have the matter

under way.” Nevins’s, given unfettered access to the Rockefeller Archives and the Inglis

interviews, published two, two-volume histories dedicated to the corporation and its

founder—John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise (1940) and Study

In Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist (1953). His efforts, while

met by some historians as an annotated apologia, represented the first legitimate histories

to utilize sources both internal to the company and of public record in accordance with

the discipline expected of the historical profession and established the efficiency

narrative later championed by Alfred Chandler, Jr. to describe Standard’s rise to power.22

22 Edward N. Akin, Flagler (Gainesville: Univ Press of Florida, 1992): xi. In a review of contemporary scholarship dealing with business history, Oscar Handlin, while allowing that Nevins “On points of detail…is thoroughly reliable,” argued “the work is essentially apologetic.” In the review, Handlin lumps Nevins’s Study in Power with the F. A. Hayek’s anthology Capitalism and the Historians in asking “the wrong questions” of “whether the captains of industry were moral or not.” Instead, he found Nevins and Hayek equally guilty of “obscure[ing] the much more vital issues of the means by which ’capitalism’ transformed the economy, the forms it took, and its effects upon the whole society.” See “Capitalism, Power, and the Historians: An Essay Review,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1. (Mar., 1955): 99-107. Ray Eldon Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd: The Story of Ivy Lee and the Development of Public Relations (Ames: Iowa State Univ Press, 1966): frontis, xi, 97, 104, 114-115, 119, 131-134. Joseph W. Ernst, ed., “Dear Father”/”Dear Son”: Correspondence of John D. Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (New York: Fordham Univ Press, 1994): 201. Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2008): 8. 219

The Standard family of corporations soon adopted this practice of open, aggressive public relations. From an objective perspective, many of the changes it publicized materially improved both working conditions and environmental quality around its properties. The “baby” Standards founded Refinery Loss Committees and assigned special engineers as Loss Coordinators to reduce the frequency and amount of oil lost through spills and evaporation. Loss Coordinators, in addition to other activities, were responsible for comprehensive inspections as early guidelines suggest:

1. Sample effluent streams and maintain records of pH and oil or chemical content. Also trace source of losses. 2. Inspect lines and tankage for leaks and follow up on reported leaks. 3. Check units—including drains, bleeders, lines, pumps, and equipment—for losses. 4. Observe equipment cleaning procedures, and submit recommendations for improving methods. 5. Follow up on recovery of barometric slops; check chemical treatment and disposition of waste. 6. Follow up on disposition of desalter waste. 7. Follow up on line repairs when waste is involved, and designate methods of recovery. 8. Inspect entire refinery, dock area, and drain ditches for any type of waste. 9. Suggestions relative to disposition of chemical wastes, and emulsions. 10. Inspect sanitary and industrial sewers for oil losses. 11. Suggestions relative to disposition of tank cleanings, sludges, etc. 12. Discuss problems and methods of reducing losses with operating personnel.

Although it is easy to note the economic incentive behind such reforms, these changes served as one of the first examples of the Standard empire taking responsibility for one aspect of its environmental impact. The companies popularized these reforms through

“motion pictures, posters, and painted signs” as much to educate its workforce as to assuage public concerns. Standard also pioneered the use of white paint on storage tanks after a study it commissioned revealed that “the use of white paint reduced gross evaporation from a tank by 20 per cent” and installed technological innovations in both its sewer systems and storage tanks—such as floating roofs and special flumes—that 220

prevented, at a single refinery, the release of “40,000 to 60,000 barrels of hydrocarbons

annually” into the soil and atmosphere.23

Standard companies also endeavored to instill an understanding of the

corporation’s public image in its employees. Mobil went so far as to issue a booklet to its

travelling representatives entitled “Press Relations for the Mobil Traveler.” In it, the

company warned its employees “What you say will be taken by many readers to be what

the company and America says. You can’t get out of it by saying ’These are my own views and not those of my company.’” In order to not “embarrass you and damage the reputation and business relationships of the company,” they provided a list of appropriate behavior and strict guidelines for interviews and casual conversation. The company took its public relations seriously, going so far as instructing its management to evaluate an employee’s “poise,” “tact,” and whether or not they were “a good member of the community in which we live” in personnel reviews. The company’s desire for control was totalizing, enlisting its entire workforce in the construction of an image of the corporation as a responsible member of the community.24

The biggest public relations coup, however, came with the philanthropic

endeavors of the Rockefeller family. John Jr., who increasingly took control of the

family’s business and public image, became an ardent supporter of the growing

conservation movement in the first half of the twentieth century. The heir to the

Rockefeller family fortune provided public funds and real estate donations for the

23 Activities of the Refinery Loss Committee: Baytown Refinery (Baytown, TX: Humble Oil & Refining Company, 1952), ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. “Into Thin Air,” The Lamp, June-September 1948, Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), New York, Ibid. 24 “Instructions for the Rating of Professional Laboratory Employees,” Box: 2.207-E39, Folder: Human Resources: Employee Relations, R&D Supervisor’s Manual, c.a. 1950, ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 221

creation of Acadia, Great Smoky Mountains, and Shenandoah National Parks and was

active in the fight to preserve Redwood groves in the West. In July of 1926, on a family

jaunt to Yellowstone National Park, Rockefeller met with the superintendent of

Yellowstone and future director of the National Park Service, Horace Albright, who

personally guided the family through northwestern Wyoming. Albright, who believed the

park service should preserve the ecological integrity of the land it protected, took his

entourage on a detour through the Snake River Plain south toward Jackson Hole,

Wyoming. Albright informed John Jr. of the need to expand parkland into the region,

which was under heavy commercial development and grazed by ranchers, to preserve

vital forage for Yellowstone’s roaming wildlife. The fate of Yellowstone’s fauna,

Albright pleaded, was bound to the environmental health of the Snake River watershed.

Rockefeller surprised his host by assenting and, using the tools familiar to the

corporation, quietly established a proxy—the Snake River Land Company—to secretly amass nearly 35,000 acres that were eventually incorporated into a greater Grand Teton

National Park.25

By the middle of the twentieth century, the Standard Oil empire and the

Rockefeller family had achieved their complementary goals of rehabilitating a tarnished

public image and maintaining growing profits.

Sacrifice Zones, Large and Small

Embedded within the Rockefeller family’s environmental philanthropy was the logic that

private charity served as a leveler for the ills of private wealth and industrialism. It also

25 Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, 4th ed. (New York: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2010): 105, 107,114, 128-30, 134. Dyan Zaslowsky and T. H. Watkins, These American Lands: Parks, Wilderness, and the Public Lands (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994): 30-31. 222

served as a conservative response to government regulation and interference in the

economy. Private interests created wealth and could clean up the mess they made, the

logic seems to run. As in many other instances over its history, the environmental legacy

of Standard Oil came full circle along a river in the summer of 2011. On July 1, 2011, a

pipeline operated by reconstituted Standard offspring ExxonMobil began to leak toxic

chemicals into the Yellowstone River near Laurel, Montana. Of the many historical

ironies involved, few seemed as bewildering as the fact the spill came as Senator John

“Jay” D. Rockefeller IV, an heir to the Rockefeller family fortune, was advocating the

passage of a pipeline safety bill. The location of the spill of nearly 1,000 barrels of toxic

waste in the Yellowstone River is no less ironic. The Yellowstone River finds its

headwaters in the Absaroka Range before flowing through the national park and

plummeting over what is one of America’s signature natural wonders, Yellowstone Falls

at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone before meandering into southern Montana and

into the Missouri River. Norman Maclean tapped into the American belief in the spiritual

rebirth one can experience on those lonely stretches of Montana’s ample watercourses in

his best-selling A River Runs Through It. Those same watercourses are now stirring up

the legacy of efficiency in both its capitalist and conservationist forms as engineers

scramble to prevent the Yellowstone River from pushing this toxic freight into the Father

of Waters, the Mississippi, before flowing into the sea.26

This dissertation reveals deep roots to the modern environmental legacy of the

petroleum industry, which emerged as the fusillade of the Civil War still echoed across

26 “Exxon exec says doesn’t know Montana spill’s cause,” MarketWatch.com, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network (14 July 2011) Accessed: 15 July 2011 (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/exxon-exec- says-doesnt-know-montana-spills-cause-2011-07-14?reflink=MW_news_stmp). Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 223

the American landscape. This most recent spill also reveals the illusory nature of our contrived dichotomies between economy and environment, industry and wilderness, and even philanthropy and malfeasance. Nature, as the source of wealth and prime mover of the economy, unifies what human law and custom has attempted to sever into discrete parcels of property and social divisions of race, class, and gender. If there is a social lesson in the environmental history of petroleum, it is in the recognition that we are all downriver. Begat by temporary affluence, the blighted sacrifice zones of modern industry are intimately tied to our illusion of comfort. Our technology largely succeeds in alienating us from the consequences of our wealth. But gravity still engenders in water an urge to reconnect with the sea, differences in temperature summon mighty gales, and the sun will continue to power the biosphere in all its wondrous imperfection long after the last drop of petroleum has been squeezed from stone. When we least expect it, nature disrupts the best-laid plans of humanity to refine it and in the process reminds us that it operates according to its own rules we ignore at our peril.

224

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS

Cleveland Public Library, Special Collections. ExxonMobil Archives, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Hawke, David Freeman, John D. Rockefeller Interview: 1917-1920 (Pocantico Hills: Rockefeller Archive Center, 1984). Library of Congress, Early Motion Pictures Collection, 1897-1920. Edison Films Catalog. Rockefeller Archive Center, Rockefeller Family Archives. Sleepy Hollow, New York. RAC. Western Reserve Historical Society, Special Collections. Whiting, Indiana: Generational Memory, 1991-1993, Center for the Study of History and Memory, Indiana University, Bloomington.

NEWSPAPERS

Annals of Cleveland Court Record Series. 1871-1872, 1875-1877. Applebome, Peter, “They Used to Say Whale Oil Was Indispensible, Too” The New York Times, 3 August 2008. Bayonne Times. The Chicago Tribune. 1889-1906. City of Cleveland. Annual Reports. 1860-1920. Cleveland Leader. 1860-1920. Cleveland Morning Leader. The Cleveland Plain Dealer. 1860-1920. The Cleveland Press. 1897-1898 The Cleveland Recorder. 1897-1900. The Cleveland World. 1897-1900. Hoyer, Ernest F., “Yesterday and Today: A Short History of Constable Hook,” The Messenger (December 24, 1920), Standard Oil Company (New Jersey). The Lamp. Los Angeles Times. 1911. Moodys Manual of Railroads and Corporation Securities, Industrial Section, vol. II (New York: Poor’s Publishing Co., 1921). The New York Times. Oil Paint & Drug Reporter. Swartz, U. G., “Some Early Days of Whiting Refinery,” Stanolind Record, vol. iv, no. 9 (July, 1923). The Providence, R.I. Sunday Journal. The Vacuum Oil News. 225

The Whiting Democrat. Woolson, Constance F., “Round by Propeller,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 45, No. 268 (September 1872): 518-533.

BOOKS

50 Years of Inland Steel: 1893-1943 (Chicago: Inland Steel Company, 1943). Akin, Edward N., Flagler (Gainesville: Univ Press of Florida, 1992). Allen, James B., The Company Town in the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966). Andrews, Thomas G., Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2008). Appleby, Joyce, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York Univ Press, 1984). Armistead, Jr., George, Safety in Petroleum Refining and Related Industries (New York: John G. Simmonds & Co., 1950). Babcock, F. Lawrence, The First Fifty: 1889-1939 (Chicago: Standard Oil Company (Indiana), 1939). Bakan, Joel, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004). Beard, Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, A Basic History of the United States (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1944). Bedford, Henry F., and Trevor Colbourn, The Americans: A Brief History, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1976). Bellamy, John Stark, The Killer in the Attic: And More True Tales of Crime and Disaster from Cleveland’s Past (Cleveland: Gray & Company, 2002). Benidickson, Jamie, The Culture of Flushing (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007): 7; The Cleveland Leader (22 July 1885). Berle, Jr., Adolf A., and Gardiner C. Means, The Corporation and Private Property (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1934). Black, Brian, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2000). Bogart, Ernest Ludlow, Internal Improvements and State Debt in Ohio: An Essay in Economic History (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924). Bottomore, Tom, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983). Calloway, Colin G., The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press, 1995). Campbell-Mohn, Celia, ed., Environmental Law: From Resources to Recovery (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1993). Carr, Albert Z., John D. Rockefeller’s Secret Weapon (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1962). Chandler, Jr., Alfred D., ed., The Coming of Managerial Capitalism (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1985). ———, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1977). 226

Chapman, Edmund H., Cleveland: Village to Metropolis (Cleveland: The Press of Western Reserve Univ., 1964). Chernow, Ron, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998). Cobleigh, N. S., The Manufactures, Trade and Commerce of Cleveland, 1880-81 (Cleveland: Short & Forman, 1881). Cochran, Thomas C., Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1981). Coleman, Jon T., Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (New York: Harper and Bro., 1877). Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). Davis, Lance E., Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906 (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997). Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005). Dodd, S.C.T., Trusts (New York: Self-Published, 1900). Edwards, Janet Zenke, Diana of the Dunes: The True Story of Alice Gray (Charleston: The History Press, 2010). Ellis, William Donohue, The Cuyahoga (Dayton: Landfall Press, Inc., 1975). Ernst, Joseph W., ed., “Dear Father”/”Dear Son”: Correspondence of John D. Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (New York: Fordham Univ Press, 1994). “The Exxon-Mobil merger: hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power of the Committee on Commerce,” House of Representatives, One Hundred Sixth Congress, first session, March 10 and 11, 1999, Volume 4. Fagan, Brian, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Flynn, John T., God’s Gold: The Story of Rockefeller and his Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932). Foner, Eric, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). Forbes, R. J., More Studies in Early Petroleum History, 1860-1880 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1959). Foster, John Bellamy, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). Foulkes, Charles Howard, “Gas!” The Story of the Special Brigade (London: W. Blackwood & Sons, Ltd., 1934). Frank, Alison Fleig, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). Friedman, Walter A., Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Gesner, Abraham, A Practical Treatise on Coal, Petroleum and other Distilled Oils, second ed. (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968). 227

Giddens, Paul H., Standard Oil Company (Indiana): Oil Pioneer of the Middle West (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1955). Giebelhaus, August W., Business and Government in the Oil Industry: A Case Study of Sun Oil, 1876-1945 (Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press Inc., 1980). Gleick, Peter H., ed., Water in Crisis, A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Gottlieb, Robert, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993). Grandin, Greg, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). Great Lakes Basin Framework Study, Appendix 7: Water Quality (Ann Arbor: Great Lakes Basin Commission, 1975). ———, Appendix 8: Fish (Ann Arbor: Great Lakes Basin Commission, 1975). ———, Appendix 18: Erosion and Sedimentation (Ann Arbor: Great Lakes Basin Commission, 1975). Habermas, Jürgen, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989). Hatcher, Harlan, The Western Reserve: The Story of New Connecticut in Ohio (Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1966). Haynes, H. J., Standard Oil Company of California: 100 Years Helping to Create the Future (New York: The Newcomen Society in North America, 1980). Hazen, Margaret Hindle and Robert M. Hazen, Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American Culture, 1775-1925 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992). Henry, J. T., The Early and Later History of Petroleum, vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1873). Hidy, Ralph W. and Muriel E. Hidy, Pioneering in Big Business: 1882-1911, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955). Hiebert, Ray Eldon, Courtier to the Crowd: The Story of Ivy Lee and the Development of Public Relations (Ames: Iowa State Univ Press, 1966). Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). Horwitz, Morton J., The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976). ———, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). Hurley, Andrew, Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana: 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995). Isenberg, Andrew C., The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750- 1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Jackson, Daniel D., “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Cleveland Water Supply on the Probable Effect of the Proposed Changes in Sewage Disposal and on the Various Sources of Typhoid Fever in Cleveland” (Cleveland: City of Cleveland, 1912). Jackson, Kenneth T., Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbinization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 228

Jacoby, Karl, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of the American Conservation Movement (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 2003). Japour, Maxcine J., Petroleum Refining and Manufacturing Processes (Los Angeles: Wetzel Publishing Co., 1939). Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1853). Jenkins, J. T., A History of the Whale Fisheries (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1921). Kaplan, A. D., Big Enterprise in a Competitive System (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1964). Kennedy, James Harrison, A History of the City of Cleveland: Its Settlement, Rise, and Progress, 1796-1896 (Cleveland: The Imperial Press, 1896). Koeppel, Gerard, Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2009). Lafferty, Michael B., ed., Ohio’s Natural Heritage (Columbus, OH: The Ohio Academy of Science, 1979). Laws of the State of Indiana, 1907 (Indianapolis: Wm. B. Burford, 1907). Limerick, Patricia Nelson, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987). Linder, Marc, and Lawrence S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1999). Lloyd, Henry Demarest, Wealth Against Commonwealth (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1894). Lomax, John A., and Alan Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Macmillan, 1948). Long, Theodore K., Report to the Mayor and the City Council of the City of Chicago by the Lake Shore Reclamation Commission (Chicago: Barnard & Miller, Printers, 1912). Lubetkin, M. John, Jay Cooke’s Gamble: The Northern Pacific Railroad, The Sioux, and the Panic of 1873 (Norman: Univ of Oklahoma Press, 2006). Macey, David, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2000). Maclean, Norman, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Manning, Thomas G., The Standard Oil Company: The Rise of a National Monopoly (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1960). Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990). Melosi, Martin V., The Sanitary City (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2000). Melville, Herman, Moby Dick; or, The White Whale (Boston: C. H. Simonds Co., 1922). McCoy, Drew R., The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina Press, 1980). McNeill, J. R., Something New Under the Sun (New York: Norton, 2000). Miller, Carol Poh, Cleveland Metroparks, Past and Present (Cleveland: Cleveland Metroparks, 1992). Milner, Clyde A., ed., et al, Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: Univ of Kansas Press, 1991). 229

Moore, Powell A., The Calumet Region: Indiana’s Last Frontier (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1959). Nevins, Allan, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, vols. I-II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940). ———, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist, vols. I-II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953). Orth, Samuel, A History of Cleveland, Vol. I (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Pub. Co., 1910). Peckham, Stephen Farnum Report on the Production, Technology, and Uses of Petroleum and its Products (Washington: Gov. Printing Office, Department of the Interior, 1885). Polyani, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). Porter, Philip W., Cleveland: Confused City on a Seesaw (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1976). Prechel, Harland, Big Business and the State: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformation, 1880s-1990s (Albany: State Univ of New York Press, 2000). Pyne, Stephen J., Fire: A Brief History (Seattle: Univ of Washington Press, 2001). Quinn, Daniel, The Story of B: An Adventure of Mind and Spirit (New York: Bantam, 1997). Reed, George Irving, ed., Bench and Bar of Ohio: A Compendium of History and Biography, Vol. II (Chicago: The Century Publishing and Engraving Company, 1897). Report of the Commissioner of Corporations on the Petroleum Industry, Part II: Prices and Profits (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907). Richards, L.A., ed., Diagnosis and Improvement of Saline and Alkali Soils (Washington: U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1954). Rockefeller, John D., Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909). Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Rose, William Ganson, Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1950). Rosenberg, Charles E., The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962). Rousmaniere, John, ed., The Enduring Great Lakes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979). Roy, William G., Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton: Princeton Univ Press, 1997). Runte, Alfred, National Parks: The American Experience, 4th ed. (New York: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2010). Safire, William, Safire’s Political Dictionary (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 2008). Sampson, Anthony, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Shaped (New York: Viking Press, 1975). Santiago, Myrna I., The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 230

Scheiber, Harry N., Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820-1861 (Athens: The Ohio Univ Press, 1969). Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 1998). Segall, Grant, John D. Rockefeller: Anointed With Oil (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 2001). Shaeffer, C. W., History of East Providence Refinery (New York City: E.M. Applegit, Publications, 1950). Slotkin, Richard, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (Norman: Univ of Oklahoma Press, 1998). Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Arch. Constable and Company, 1806). Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ Press, 1950). Smith, Joseph P., ed., History of the Republican Party (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Co., 1898). Speight, James G., The Chemistry and Technology of Petroleum, 3rd ed. (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1999). Steinberg, Ted, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 2009). ———, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Amherst: Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1991). ———, Slide Mountain: Or, the Folly of Owning Nature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996). Tarbell, Ida M., All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003). ———, The History of The Standard Oil Company, vols. I-II (London: William Heinemann, 1912). Tarr, Joel A., The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron: The Univ of Akron Press, 1996). Taylor, Alice, Quench the Lamp (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). Taylor, Graham Romeyn, Satellite Cities: A Study of Industrial Suburbs (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1915). The Book of Clevelanders: A Biographical Dictionary of Living Men of the City of Cleveland (Cleveland: The Burrows Bros. Company, 1914). Thomson, Captain J. H., and Boverton Redwood, Handbook on Petroleum (London: Charles Griffin and Co. Limited, 1901). Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed., Early Western Travels, vols. I-XIX, (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904, 1905). Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings, trans. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009). Townshend, Henry H., New Haven and the First Oil Well (New Haven: Privately Printed, 1934). Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 231

Van Tassel, David D., and John J. Grabowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington: Indiana Univ Press, 1987). Warner, Hoyt Landon, Progressivism in Ohio: 1897-1917 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ Press, 1964). Warner, Jr., Sam B., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). Warren, Louis, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth- Century America (New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 1999). Wheeler, Robert A., ed., Visions of the Western Reserve: Public and Private Documents of Northeastern Ohio, 1750-1860 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2000). Whipple, George C., Report on the Quality of the Water Supply of the City of Cleveland, Ohio (Cleveland: Division of Water Works, 1905). White, Gerald T., Formative Years in the Far West: A History of Standard Oil Company of California and Predecessors Through 1919 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962). Whitten, David O. and Bessie E., The Birth of Big Business in the United States, 1860- 1914: Commercial, Extractive, and Industrial Enterprise (Westport: Praeger, 2006). Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). Williams, Charles Richard, ed., Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, vol. III (Columbus: The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1924). Williamson, Harold F., and Arnold R. Daum, The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Illumination, 1859-1899 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1959). Wilson, Ella Grant, Famous Old Euclid Avenue of Cleveland, Vol. II (Cleveland, 1937). Wines, Richard A., Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1985). Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: The Univ of North Carolina Press, 1969). Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration (Indiana), The Calumet Region Historical Guide, reprint edition (New York: AMS Press, 1939). Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Zaslowsky, Dyan, and T. H. Watkins, These American Lands: Parks, Wilderness, and the Public Lands (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994). Zivich, Edward A., From Zadruga to Oil Refinery: Croation Immigrants and Croatian- Americans in Whiting, Indiana, 1890-1950 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990). Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

Baylis, John R., “Effect of Certain Industrial Wastes,” Civil Engineering, vol. 3, no. 9 (September 1933). Brown, Richard D., “Modernization and the Modern Personality in Early America, 1600- 1865: A Sketch of a Synthesis,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Winter, 1972, vol. 2, no. 3: 201-228. Carter, Luther J., “Lake Michigan: Salmon Help to Redress the Balance,” Science, New Series, vol. 161, no. 3841 (Aug. 9, 1968). 232

Chandler, Jr., Alfred D., “The Standard Oil Company—Combination, Consolidation, and Integration,” Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., ed., The Coming of Managerial Capitalism (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1985). Chrislock, Winston, “Cleveland’s Czechs,” David C. Hammack, et al, eds., Identity, Conflict, and Cooperation: Central Europeans in Cleveland, 1850-1930 (Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 2002). Cowles, Henry Chandler, “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan. Part I. – Geographical Relations of the Dune Floras,” Botanical Gazette, vol. 27, no. 2 (Feb., 1899). Crohurst, H. R., and M. V. Veldee, “Report of an Investigation of the Pollution of Lake Michigan in the Vicinity of South Chicago and Indiana Harbors,” Public Health Reports, vol. 42, no. 35 (Sept. 2, 1927). “Dead Fish by the Ton,” Science News, vol. 92, no. 1 (1 July 1967). Diller, Oliver D., “Ohio’s forest resources, progress report based on a survey conducted during 1939-1943 and a recommended long-range forestry program for Ohio” (Agricultural Experiment Station, Wooster, OH) Ohio Department of Forestry Pub. No 76 (1944). Evans, Robert, “Blast from the Past,” Smithsonian (July 2002). Flores, Dan, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” Journal of American History, 78 (1991): 465-85. Gorman, Arthur E., “Survey of Sources of Pollution,” Civil Engineering, vol. 3, no. 9 (September 1933). Grinder, R. Dale, “The Battle for Clean Air: The Smoke Problem in Post-Civil War America,” Martin V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870- 1930 (Austin: Univ of Texas Press, 1980). Handlin, Oscar, “Capitalism, Power, and the Historians: An Essay Review,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1. (Mar., 1955): 99-107. Heimann, Harry, “Effects of air pollution on human health,” World Health Organization, Air Pollution (New York: Columbia Univ Press, 1961): 159-220. Holden, William M., “Hot Water: Menace and Resource,” Science News, vol. 94, no. 7 (Aug. 17, 1968). Hughes, Thomas P., “Technological Momentum,” in Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, eds. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994): 101-113. Hurley, Andrew, “Creating Ecological Wastelands: Oil Pollution in New York City, 1870-1900,” Journal of Urban History, 20 (May 1994): 340-361. Journal of the Senate of Minnesota. March 1891. Kasson, John F., “Republican Values as a Dynamic Factor,” in Problems in American Civilization: The Industrial Revolution, Gary J. Kornblith, ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998). “Lamprey on the Run,” Wisconsin Conservation Bulletin, vols. 29-30 (1964). Lennon, Robert E., “Control of Freshwater Fish With Chemicals,” Proceedings of the 4th Vertebrate Pest Conference (1970). Livesay, Harold C., “From Steeples to Smokestacks: The Birth of the Modern Corporation in Cleveland,” Thomas F. Campbell and Edward M. Miggins, eds., The 233

Birth of Modern Cleveland, 1865-1930, (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1988). Lucier, Paul, “The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America,” Isis 100 (2009): 699-732. Mayer, Harold M., “Politics and Land Use: The Indiana Shoreline of Lake Michigan,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 54, no. 4 (December 1964): 508-523. Michigan Law Review, Vol. 3 No. 6 (April 1905): 494. Montague, Gilbert Holland, “The Later History of the Standard Oil Company,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 17, no. 2 (Feb. 1903). Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1963). Persky, Joseph, “Retrospectives: The Ethology of Homo Economicus.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring, 1995): 221-231. Pratt, R. Winthrop, “A New Move for Water Filtration at Cleveland, Ohio,” Engineering News, vol. 69, no. 21 (May 22, 1913). ———, “Sewage Disposal Investigations at Cleveland,” Engineering News, vol. 69, no. 7 (February 13, 1913). “Prescription for a Dying Lake,” Science News, vol. 93, no. 7 (Feb. 17, 1968). Regier, H. A., and W. L. Hartman, “Lake Erie’s Fish Community: 150 Years of Cultural Stresses,” Science, vol. 180 (1973). Smith, Stanford H., “Pushed Toward Extinction: The Salmon and Trout,” John Rousmaniere, ed., The Enduring Great Lakes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979). Stoermer, Eugene F., “Bloom and Crash: Algae in the Lakes,” John Rousmaniere, ed., The Enduring Great Lakes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979). Taylor, Alan, “’Wasty Ways’: Stories of American Settlement,” Environmental History, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Jul., 1998): 291-310. Thaler, Richard H., “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 1, no. 1 (1980): 39-60. Thomas, Moyer D., “Effects of air pollution on plants,” World Health Organization, Air Pollution (New York: Columbia Univ Press, 1961). The Ohio Public Health Journal, vol. 5, no. 6 (June 1915): 784.

UNPUBLISHED THESES AND DISSERTATIONS

Barrow, William C., “The Euclid Heights Allotment.”M.A. thesis, Cornell Univ., 1996. Chapman, Ralph E., and George G. Cummings, “A Study of the ’Sootfall’ in the City of Cleveland, Ohio.” B.S. thesis, Case School of Applied Science, Cleveland, 1924. Chester, Robert, “Manufacturing Danger: The Perils of Place.” Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of California, Davis, 2009. Gugliotta, Angela, “’Hell with the lid taken off’: A Cultural History of Air Pollution— Pittsburgh.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Notre Dame, 2004.

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