Preface

Our story begins with a river catching fire in June 1969. The Cuyahoga, prone to oil slicks and accumulating debris and, it turns out, to catching fire, burned for about half an hour on a Sunday morning. Two days after the fire, the Plain Dealer newspaper ran an editorial under the headline, “Cleveland: Where the River Burns,” foreshadowing what would happen over the next couple of years. More and more Americans came to associate Cleveland, a once wealthy and mighty industrial city, with the environmental crisis and rapid urban decline. The burning river ran through the stories and the jokes Americans told about the “mistake on the lake.”

The fire became notorious but not well understood. Over the last few decades, all kinds of people—politicians, scholars, journalists, and average Clevelanders—have told the story of the fire, usually quickly and with little detail, but always with the conclusion that this little fire had a big impact. To this day, the Cuyahoga fire plays a prominent role in the story many Clevelanders tell about their city. It also plays a prominent role in the story environmentalists tell about polluted America, about devastated industrial landscapes in the pre-regulatory era. In some versions of this story, the fire led directly to the Clean Water Act in 1972; in others it was simply a watershed moment, when Americans began to realize just how polluted their environment had become.

Since almost no one has even attempted to explain why this event took on so much meaning, we set out to write a history of the Cuyahoga, leading up to its burning and then following the role of the fire through the passage of the Clean Water Act and perhaps beyond, to the river’s eventual (and partial) cleansing and Cleveland’s eventual (and partial) rebirth. In essence, we set out to write a biography of the Cuyahoga, one that centered on the river’s long and troubled relationship with the industrial city it helped create. Along the way, we made several discoveries that spoiled this plan.

When the river caught fire that June, most Clevelanders seemed not to care a great deal, the Plain Dealer editorial notwithstanding. A minor blaze—no one hurt, only a couple of railroad trestles damaged, no photos, no film—it wasn’t a big story at the time, certainly not a national one. Cleveland’s two daily papers, the Cleveland Press and the Plain Dealer, published photos of the damaged trestles the following day, but coverage of the fire was thin and matter-of-fact. Far too many problems plagued the city for residents to get hung up on a little fire that damaged two railroad bridges that most people never saw and couldn’t find on a map. And as many Clevelanders surely knew, the Cuyahoga had caught fire numerous times before. So locals understood that the ’69 fire didn’t represent the culmination of an abusive relationship between a city and its environment. It was simply another sad chapter in the long story of a terribly polluted river. And the river was just one of many places in Cleveland that had been shaped or sacrificed to meet the needs of industry and commerce. Indeed, most locals were more concerned about polluted Lake Erie, with its closed beaches and declining fisheries, and air pollution, which enveloped central city neighborhoods and even threatened distant suburbs. Also, because so many American waters were appallingly polluted, Congress didn’t talk much about the Cuyahoga as it debated and passed the Clean Water Act. Dwelling on one foul river simply wasn’t necessary.

Since the river fire wasn’t Cleveland’s central concern in 1969, we decided our work couldn’t remain so narrowly focused. So our project evolved, inspired mostly by Carl Stokes, the mayor of Cleveland at the time of the fire. Raised by a single mother in a Cleveland public housing complex, Stokes overcame his childhood poverty and, after a rapid rise in local politics, became the first black mayor of a major American city. He took office in November 1967, at an inauspicious moment in Cleveland’s history. Circumstances forced Mayor Stokes to put out many fires, as it were, in a city that was rusting, decaying, and burning its way through what he called a “crisis in the urban environment.” Stokes’s expansive agenda—controlling water and air pollution, building public housing, improving public safety and public health, desegregating and improving schools, enlivening downtown with economic development—has inspired a broader agenda for our work. Stokes understood that the environmental crisis existed well beyond the river, even beyond the sootfall from the industrial smoke plumes. Stokes realized that the environmental crisis was inseparable from the broader decay of his city.

The story of the struggle to stem Cleveland’s decline informs our thinking on many critical topics, including the civil rights movement, civil unrest, suburbanization, industrial pollution, environmental activism, liberal reform, and the urban crisis broadly conceived. This story offers a critique of postwar liberalism, which encouraged activist government at the local and federal levels but did nothing to address the inequalities of investment across the metropolis that ensured the creation of concentrated poverty and central city decay. The story also reveals the limits of the environmental movement, which for lack of vision or energy accepted the continued decline of American cities even as policy changes brought improvements elsewhere. And as we watch Stokes work to remake Cleveland, to build a more livable city, we learn a great deal about why the urban crisis deepened even as government increased efforts to find solutions. Because each of these storylines is so useful, we decided not to press just one theme throughout the book.

Still, one argument draws the many threads of this story together. As cities worked to solve basic environmental problems, especially to curb air and water pollution, ecological thinking spread rapidly. This thinking encouraged the breaking down of barriers, a heightened awareness of the connectedness of places and people, and an understanding of the connections between environmental and social problems. By the late 1960s, urban politicians, including Carl Stokes, recognized that just as municipal boundaries could not delimit environmental problems, they could not contain fundamental social problems either, including the persistence of poverty in an increasingly wealthy nation. But political boundaries—and the boundaries of race and class which they often amplified—could prevent the implementation of successful solutions to pressing problems. In the end, the persistence of racial and political boundaries prevented the development of fuller solutions to the crisis in the urban environment.

This story concerns the physical city, but people are at its heart. Stokes was hardly the only person to recognize the crisis in the urban environment, and he didn’t work to solve Cleveland’s problems by himself. He filled his administration with a diverse group of talented, but ultimately overmatched, men and women. Among them was Bailus Walker, who came from Dayton to run a rat control program and improve environmental health in the city. Cleveland native Ben Stefanski, a young and inexperienced administrator, became the director of public utilities and handled the city’s effort to control water pollution. Many other Clevelanders outside the administration were just as dedicated to solving Cleveland’s problems, including the Cleveland Press’s Betty Klaric, one of the nation’s first environmental beat reporters, and David Blaushild, a Chevrolet dealer from suburban Shaker Heights who became one of the region’s most effective environmental activists. Politicians outside the administration, including Louis Stokes, the mayor’s brother and a congressman from the city’s East Side, also played pivotal roles in the effort to solve the city’s problems.

We interviewed several of these figures, getting their sense of this moment in Cleveland’s history and of the specific events that are described in this book. While these people and many others appear in Where the River Burned, at the center is Carl Stokes, a man who attracted national, even international, attention as he served his city but who has gathered too little recognition since he left office. Unfortunately, Stokes died in 1996, before we began this project, but he left behind an expansive archive of his mayoral papers, held at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Those papers were essential to the construction of this book.

These two different kinds of sources—interviews and archives—speak to our different approaches as authors. David is an academic historian, and Richard is a long-time journalist. Indeed, Richard was drawn to the Cuyahoga fire in 1998 as a journalism graduate student at Ohio State University, where he assessed the shifting press coverage of the many Cuyahoga fires. David joined the project, believing that Richard had uncovered an underexplored and important story in urban and environmental history, his two areas of concern. Although we came to this project with different professional backgrounds, we have similar relationships with Cleveland. We grew up (brothers) in Cleveland’s Ohio antipode—Cincinnati. As children, we knew Cleveland mostly in contrast to our home: it was northeast to our southwest, a lake city rather than a river city. Cleveland made steel; Cincinnati made soap. It was solidly Democratic, and Cincinnati leaned Republican. In Cleveland they eat pierogies and corned beef, while in Cincinnati we eat chili and goetta. In other words, in economy, history, and culture, these two Ohio metropolises are very different kinds of cities. Despite this, some similarities are unmistakable. Most important, both places experienced the urban crisis; both struggled with job loss, racism, white flight, and a deteriorating core, all this mostly in our lifetimes. It is this mix of the familiar and the foreign that has kept us fascinated with Cleveland over the last fifteen years, as we made dozens of trips to explore the city through interviews, in the archives, and, most enjoyably, on foot, as we walked through the neighborhoods about which we have written.

This book is based largely on the documents created by the Stokes administration and on the myriad other primary sources that concern Cleveland in this era. But we would not have been able to construct this narrative without the guidance of the rich literature written by generations of scholars. To improve readability we confine our discussion of secondary works to the bibliographical essay. Of course, knowledgeable readers will surely recognize the contributions of dozens of scholars throughout the book.

A quick word on terminology: we decided to use the term “riots” to describe the outbursts of civil disorder in the 1960s. Some historians prefer broader terms, such as “uprising,” or even “rebellion,” both of which place the disorder in the broader context of the black freedom struggle. The African American uprising of the 1960s consisted of much more than periodic street action, however, and so we use “riots” to refer to the discrete violent events of the Long Hot Summers, to distinguish those events from the broader struggle and from the persistent civic disorder in impoverished African American neighborhoods. This brings us to another politically loaded term: “ghetto.” We use this word to describe Hough and surrounding neighborhoods largely because it reflects the language and interpretation of the day. As Kenneth B. Clark so powerfully described in Dark Ghetto (1965), impoverished African Americans were trapped by more than just poverty in their degraded neighborhoods.

Finally, we should offer an explanation about a word we do not use: “environmentalist.” Although what follows is very much a story about the rise of the environmental movement, this book does not trace the growing influence of environmental interest groups. Nearly everyone who appears in this book expressed concern about Cleveland’s environment, but very few of them would have self-identified as an environmentalist. This includes Carl Stokes. Since our intention is to show how widespread environmental concern had become, how broadly ecological thinking had pervaded American culture, we spend little time describing the actions of national environmental organizations, such as the Izaak Walton League and the Sierra Club, both of which were active in Cleveland in this era. Nor do we stress the role of local environmental groups, such as the Air Conservation Committee. By analyzing the broader political discourse, we find a pervasive environmentalism in the rhetoric of many Clevelanders—politicians, the media, schoolchildren, citizens.

IN the many years we’ve been working on this book, we have received considerable help and accumulated many debts. Richard began researching the Cuyahoga River under the guidance of Jim Neff, former director of the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio State University. Many people aided our work by agreeing to be interviewed, including Betty Klaric, Ben Stefanski, Bailus Walker, Louis Stokes, David Zwick, Steve Tuckerman, and Patrick Conway. Dave Wollman and Donald R. Inman, of the Beaver County Industrial Museum, shared their collection of Jones & Laughlin materials. David received research help from University of Cincinnati students Daniel Baum, who researched Tremont, and Ryan Nagel, who helped with mapping and census data. We will never forget the kindness of Anita Weaver, who gave David a tour and an impromptu oral history of the Liberty Hill Baptist Church.

Most of the research for this book took place in a handful of libraries. The Ohio Historical Society holds important government documents, and we thank its professional staff. At Case Western Reserve University’s Special Collections, Eleanor Blackman was equally helpful. Meghan Hays helped us locate useful materials in the Shaker Heights Library. We had helpful conversations with Paul Nelson, historian at the Western Reserve Fire Museum, which holds documents from the fire department. Conversations with Bill Barrow at Cleveland State University Special Collections helped us find useful resources at his institution and at others around the city. Later Bill was instrumental in our acquisition of images.

We owe special gratitude to everyone who makes research at the Western Reserve Historical Society a joy, especially Ann Sindelar, Vikki Catozza, and George Cooper. They provide an invaluable service to the people of Cleveland and to scholars from around the world.

Our work was much improved by close readings by the urban historian Mark Souther, the environmental historian Adam Rome, the Boston Globe editor Felice Belman, and an anonymous reader for Cornell University Press. This work also benefited from David’s participation in a river-themed conference at the Rachel Carson Center, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich.

At Cornell University Press, Michael McGandy worked with us from nearly the beginning, offering encouragement and consistently good advice as we framed the book and expert editing once words were on the page. Thanks to Max Richman and Ange Romeo-Hall for shepherding the book through production, and to Kim Vivier, our expert copyeditor. We owe special thanks to Jenn Hales for her wonderful stylized map of Cleveland, and to William Keegan for his map of metropolitan Cleveland circa 1970.

Through the years we have benefited from the encouragement and friendship of a group of fine Cleveland scholars, including Todd Michney, Mark Tebeau, Dan Kerr, and Norm Krumholz. At the University of Cincinnati, David has been surrounded by supportive colleagues, including Michael Griffith, Arnie Miller, Jana Braziel, Jeff Timberlake, and participants in the Kunz Urban and Race workshop. In the Department of History, Maura O’Connor, Mark Raider, Willard Sunderland, and David Ciarlo (now at the University of Colorado) were especially generous with their support, as were three department emeriti: John Brackett, Roger Daniels, and Zane Miller. Former students Aaron Cowan, Rob Gioielli, David Merkowitz, Feay Coleman, and Charlie Lester, and current doctoral students Brittany Cowgill, Alyssa McClanahan, Nate McGee, and Angela Stiefbold, have all helped create a lively intellectual community. Substantial financial support for this book came from the Taft Research Center, without which humanities research would be nearly impossible at the University of Cincinnati.

Finally, we are grateful to our families—Jodie, Sarah, and Nina; Leanne, Sydney, and Ben—for their patience and support. This book is dedicated to them.