1 What Will Become of Cleveland?

On April 22, 1970, schoolchildren from around metropolitan Cleveland sat in their classrooms and wrote to Mayor Carl Stokes. Over the next few days, hundreds of letters poured into City Hall, where staffers read, sorted, and distributed them for responses. On some, they circled key words (pollution, in particular), and on others they scrawled numbers at the top, probably indicating which form letter should be sent out in reply. Many of the children asked for information about the city’s environmental policies; others asked for a photo of the mayor, who was, after all, quite famous. Despite the diversity of the letters sent on the first Earth Day—some came from the city, others from the suburbs; some from young children, others from teenagers—altogether they described an environmental crisis in remarkably familiar terms, and they tended to discuss what had become distressingly familiar topics. They described a city in which heavy air pollution threatened lives—children’s lives—and water pollution fouled Lake Erie’s beaches and killed its fish. For these children, the terrible pollution raised questions about the future of Cleveland and its residents, and even of the nation as a whole.

Most of the letters were short and to the point. For instance, all students in one second-grade class wrote the identical letter, which reads in its entirety: “We do not like dirty air. We want our air to be clean so we can be healthy. Please make our air clean.” Although they were practicing penmanship as much as participatory democracy, these students’ letters took on special meaning because they came from the Hodge School, on the East Side, just four blocks from the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company’s massive, coal-burning, smoky lakeshore power plant. These kids had good reason to worry about their own health, even in second grade. At other elementary schools, children wrote their letters on oversized paper with space at the top for drawings. Here the youngest students exerted some freedom of expression, and many made liberal use of black crayons; dark smoke curled out of factories and trailed behind airplanes. Some imagined solutions, including a great lid that could be lowered onto polluting factories, trapping the smoke—a poignant mix of childish fantasy and dead seriousness.1

The brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, Democratic senator from Wisconsin, Earth Day was a national event featuring teach-ins on college campuses, at schools, and in public parks. There were lectures, demonstrations, and opportunities to clean up green spaces, waterways, and schoolyards. An estimated twenty million Americans participated in Earth Day in some way or another, and the event became a watershed for the environmental movement, which was growing rapidly. A great range of environmental issues gained attention during Earth Day, but air and water pollution were the most important nearly everywhere, including Cleveland, where despite the fact that Mayor Stokes declined to participate personally, citizen involvement in what the city called “Environmental Crisis Week” was extraordinary. Residents of metropolitan Cleveland had long been acutely aware of their city’s pollution problems, but in case someone had missed the other clues—the smoke shroud, the fouled beaches, the burning river—on April 20, Monday-morning commuters on Interstate 71 were greeted by a banner hanging from the W. 25th Street overpass: “Welcome to the 5th Dirtiest City.”2

Figure 1. Many of the suburban children who wrote to Mayor Stokes complained about pollution as an urban phenomenon. The first-grader Michelle Landon used green and black crayons to contrast her beautiful middle-class home in Lyndhurst with the heavily polluted environment of Cleveland. Carl Stokes Papers, container 75, folder 1435, Western Reserve Historical Society. Used with permission.

The Earth Day letters reveal how well educated students had become on environmental issues. Fifteen-year-old Andrea Rady wanted Stokes to know that she and other students at suburban Westlake High School had “conducted several studies on the pollution problem in Cleveland.” Her letter discussed pollution broadly, but it mentioned just one example of the problem: the Municipal Light plant, a smoky, coal-fired power station on the city’s East Side lakeshore, not far from the Illuminating Company’s plant. As Rady put it, the plant was “both an eyesore and a health hazard to anyone coming within 1 mile of it.” Rather than fault Muny Light itself, Rady blamed the pollution on Stokes. “For the past four years, you and your officials have been arguing over petty legalities while pollution continues to strangle our city. To my knowledge, several solutions have been proposed, but none have gotten past your desk.” Rady’s portrayal of Stokes as the impediment to progress wasn’t accurate, but Muny Light was owned and operated by the city, and so she was right to claim that Cleveland officials deserved special blame for the plant’s smokiness. The pollution from Muny Light had earned attention from the press for nearly a decade, and the Stokes administration had been working on solutions. We might wonder, though, why Rady decided to single out the Muny plant. After all, she was not among the Clevelanders who lived within a mile of the plant, and given that she resided in a middle-class suburb to the west of the city, she wasn’t likely to come within a mile of it regularly either.3

Many students complained about Muny Light on Earth Day. Rady’s classmate Robert Tasse wrote Stokes with the understanding that the mayor was “not responsible for everything that goes on” in Cleveland, but he hoped to encourage action, as so many writers did. He asked Stokes to “pressure some (if not all) of the growing industries in Cleveland, like Republic Steel, Muny Light Plant and Edgewater Park”—a remarkable list, mostly because it didn’t include any actual “growing industries.” Despite a series of capital investments in new facilities in the postwar decades, Republic Steel hadn’t grown in years. Perhaps Tasse inferred that the mill complex along the river was growing because of the constant media attention to its incredibly smoky stacks and its heavy contribution to water pollution in the Cuyahoga. Edgewater Park was just that—a park along Lake Erie west of the mouth of the Cuyahoga and, perhaps more important, adjacent to the Westerly Sewage Treatment Plant. Edgewater included a beach that in recent years had featured signs warning against swimming due to high coliform bacteria counts. During the summer before Earth Day, the beach had gained significant press attention as the Stokes administration attempted to clean the shore and nearby waters, at least enough to allow safe swimming at the park. Like Edgewater Beach, the Municipal Light plant was consistently in the news in the late 1960s, the focus of concerted efforts to improve air quality in the city.4

Tasse’s letter confirms the obvious: students, like adults, learned about their environment from the news as well as their lives. Undoubtedly, discussions in school that week, which at Westlake occurred in both biology and English classes, affirmed this list of problematic places; Edgewater Park, Muny Light, and Republic Steel were well-established targets of environmental activism. But even the letters that include no specific target of concern confirm that for most students—for most Cleveland-area residents—the most pressing environmental issue was pollution, which they tied directly to industry. They also expressed a growing urgency concerning political action. Shannon Havranek, a junior in Maple Heights, a working-class suburb south of the city, wrote, “Sitting around and talking about pollution doesn’t help a dying lake and atmosphere. Act now. Make the industries improve their sewage disposal. Spend more money on pollution control. Impose heavier fines on littering.” In the minds of children, the path forward seemed so clear.5

The letters capture the sense of environmental crisis in 1970 and, somewhat less clearly, an understanding of the ongoing urban crisis. Pollution emanated mostly from the city’s core, especially the riverside mills and the lakeside power plants, but the children wrote mostly from surrounding suburbs—Westlake, Maple Heights, Cleveland Heights—a reminder of how much suburbanization had already reshaped the metropolitan area. Although the letters said little on the subjects of concentrated poverty, inadequate housing, crime, and racial inequality—all topics that probably seemed inappropriate for Earth Day letters—many students wrote with an understanding that Cleveland’s problems could not be solved through the haze of pollution. The city was engaged in major urban renewal projects, putting special emphasis on reviving the central business district, part of the effort to speed the transition to a service city. But as Havranek put it succinctly, “The new improvements in downtown Cleveland will not be seen through the pollution.” The letters raise serious questions: would the city survive the seemingly impossible confluence of crises described in the letters? What would become of a city suffering simultaneously under the weight of industry’s wastes and the wrenching displacement caused by industrial decline?

Cleveland’s first Earth Day is of special interest because in addition to suffering from problems common around the nation—pollution, litter, and even the proliferation of rats—the city had garnered an international reputation for its especially acute environmental crisis. In the years leading up to Earth Day, Cleveland appeared in the national press for a variety of reasons. Some of the attention was positive, especially in 1967, when it became the first large city to elect an African American mayor. But as the nation’s urban and environmental crises deepened, Cleveland attracted mostly negative attention. The city was struggling to clean up Lake Erie, its greatest natural asset and the most imperiled Great Lake. In 1965, the national press detailed racism’s consequences when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission held hearings on housing, schools, and employment discrimination in Cleveland so that it might understand the plight of African Americans in a typical northern city. Over the next three years, Cleveland experienced two intense riots, one before and one after Stokes entered office, both of which drew attention to the physical realities of the decaying ghetto. And the events of the summer before Earth Day, including the passage of a new air pollution ordinance, the creation of a water pollution control plan, and the Cuyahoga fire, had kept urban environmental issues in the news. In sum, by the time April 1970 rolled around, Cleveland had become emblematic of the intertwined urban and environmental crises. As Tasse put it in his letter to Stokes, “not every city can say they have a river that catches on fire.” Or, to put it another way, Cleveland had become the city “where the river burns,” just as the Plain Dealer had predicted.

Earth Day came at a critical moment in American urban history. White flight had remade cities in the previous decades. From Tampa to Milwaukee, from Boston to Los Angeles, metropolitan regions sprawled outward. In many American cities, underinvestment resulted in decaying housing, deteriorating infrastructure, and inadequate services in the urban core. Frustration among African Americans trapped in failed and failing neighborhoods fueled a series of Long Hot Summers, when riots and arson simultaneously protested and sped the destruction in ghettos around the nation. The Earth Day letters reveal the consequences of the increasing divide between the middle-class life of suburbia and the entrenched poverty of the inner city. Both suburban and inner-city children were living through environmental crises, but these crises were surprisingly dissimilar in nature. Children knew environmental problems were real and pressing, but how they experienced the environment determined how they articulated the problems.

As diverse as the writers were, they shared a trait that comes through in the letters: an attachment to place. This is especially true of Rady, who lived fifteen miles from downtown in a comfortable ranch home with a patch of woods beyond her backyard but who selected a distant power plant to represent her environmental concern. She thought herself connected to the industrial city to her east, perhaps connected by even more than pollution. It was “our city,” she wrote, that was being strangled by pollution. Indeed, Rady’s short letter was most poignant when she contemplated the future of her city. “In many years to come, space visitors to this planet may find the remains of a once great, but ignorant society,” she predicted. “What will become of Cleveland?” she asked, and then, to Stokes more directly, “What do you plan to do?”6

CARL STOKES IS NOT SUPERMAN

On November 13, 1967, Carl Stokes stood in City Hall’s Council Chambers and delivered his inaugural address. “In my first official statement as Mayor of Cleveland, I want to make it crystal clear that I intend to serve the best interests of all the people without fear or favoritism,” he said, understanding that racial anxiety still governed the thoughts of many white Clevelanders, despite the long, mostly positive campaign that led to his election just six days earlier. “Yes, Cleveland is a city in crisis—a crisis shared with all the other great metropolitan areas of our country and of the world,” he said, affirming that he knew just how difficult his task would be. “Our cities are the battleground in which American civilization is now engaged in a struggle for survival.” Military metaphors were commonplace in the late 1960s, given the War on Poverty, the Cold War, and the actual war in Vietnam, but when most Americans’ thoughts turned to urban battlegrounds they undoubtedly thought of the rioting that had wracked so many cities—or at least their ghettoes—during the previous three summers, each summer more violent than the last. And now, for the first time in history, a black man stood before a predominantly white city that he pledged to lead. “The enemy is not an organized military force, or even an ideology,” he continued. “The enemy is a combination of tangible and intangible big and little problems—human problems and physical problems—problems that press thorns of misery on huge segments of our population—problems that make our environment irritable and unpleasant—problems that range from tangled traffic and downtown decay to race relations and the crying need for job making industrial development, from the needs of the neighborhoods to the need for port and jet age air development.”

Carl Stokes could make a hell of a speech, no doubt about that. “Struggle for survival,” “thorns of misery,” “tangled traffic and downtown decay.” He expressed so powerfully what many Clevelanders thought about their city. And Stokes was just as dramatic when speaking about his hope for the future. “This is a city renowned throughout the world for its industrial genius, its cultural achievements, and its accomplishments in many fields,” he said. “We have what it takes to cure the blemishes of disease spots which now pock our community.” And then, in nearly a shout, he repeated his campaign slogan, “I BELIEVE IN CLEVELAND.” Stokes ended his inaugural address with the exhortation, “Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work!”7

And there was a lot of work to do. As he well knew, Stokes had stepped into the mayor’s office at an inauspicious time. “After World War II, when the deterioration of our cities became apparent,” he wrote several years later, “there was a complete failure to respond.” Inaction had led to deepening problems in housing, employment, and public health. Recreational facilities were insufficient, public properties were ill-kept. Even as the city began to lose population, some schools became terribly overcrowded as the district struggled to maintain de facto segregation in the face of shifting neighborhood demographics. The city had even failed to make sufficient investments in basic infrastructure; roads, streetlights, and sewers needed considerable attention. As Stokes wrote in his autobiography, “Cleveland wandered into the late 1960s surrounded by its failures and fearful of its future.” In essence, Stokes took charge of a faltering urban machine.8

The mayoral campaign had taken place in the shadow of the Hough riots, which had severely damaged the predominantly black East Side neighborhood in the summer of 1966. Many Clevelanders assumed that the presence of Stokes in the mayor’s office would improve the lot of the black community and decrease racial tensions throughout the city. To put it bluntly, as some people did, Mayor Stokes was an insurance policy against further racial violence. If most whites had modest expectations about his ability to turn the city around, they at least thought he could bring an end to the mayhem. Stokes received 50.5 percent of the vote, winning by fewer than two thousand ballots. He gained the support of nearly the entire black turnout, as he assumed he would, but also something like 20 percent of the white vote. These were the people his campaign had sought to win over—open-minded folks who appreciated Stokes’s energy and supported his policy ideas, as well as loyal Democrats who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Seth Taft, the Republican candidate. Other than being the right color, Taft had little intrinsic appeal to white ethnic voters. In addition to being Republican in a heavily Democratic city, he was an extremely wealthy man who until he threw his hat into the ring lived in Pepper Pike, a distant, exclusive East Side suburb. As the campaign progressed, the weakness of Taft’s candidacy—he was neither a gifted speaker nor a natural politician—made it clear that if Stokes lost, it would be solely because he was black. Although the Stokes campaign tried to mute the issue of race, one of its slogans played up the historic nature of the city’s choice: “Let’s Do Cleveland Proud.”9

Figure 2. The Stokes campaign tried to avoid the issue of race in 1967, but it also recognized the historic nature of the election. Here Stokes drops off his petitions for his mayoral run in the summer of 1967 at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, with his wife, Shirley, at his side. Photo by Clayton Knipper. Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University.

Stokes campaigned on the themes of openness, inclusiveness, and community engagement. Each of these phrases signaled to long-neglected African American residents that their voices would be heard. The phrases were also designed to reassure whites, many of whom feared the consequences of a racial transition in City Hall just as they feared the transition in their neighborhoods. Stokes also ran on an extensive “Program for Progress,” described as “Plans to Make Cleveland’s Future Brighter.” The program included thirteen major policy areas, including recreation (he would sell Shaker Lakes Park to Shaker Heights and invest in city parks), health centers (he would expand the Health Department and emphasize the prevention of disease), and air and water pollution (he would make Lake Erie “the valuable recreation asset it should be”). His campaign convinced the Plain Dealer, which endorsed him over incumbent Ralph Locher in the Democratic primary, praising his “vigor and imagination,” and then endorsed him again over Taft. Even the West Side News, which served an essentially all-white constituency, endorsed Stokes over Taft, praising his “sincerity, intelligence, enthusiasm, and courage.” All this speaks to the predominant theme of his campaign: hope. Indeed, the anticipation of change became so great that Stokes, who liked to refer to himself in the third person, tried to keep expectations realistic, even reminding an audience a month before the election, “Carl Stokes is not Superman.”10

CLEVELAND IS UNBEARABLE

Sixteen-year-old Debbie Mohorcic’s Earth Day letter to Stokes opened with two assertive questions: “People or profit? Do you want to conquer pollution, or do you want pollution to conquer us?” It was a formal letter, neatly typed, and despite the aggressive tone, she signed it “Respectfully yours.” She lived in a neighborhood of tidy homes—Cape Cods, bungalows, ranches—in the working-class suburb of Maple Heights, southeast of the Cuyahoga Valley’s steel mills, just the type of place that had benefited most from the nation’s long postwar boom, where white families with rising incomes secured better schools, cleaner air, and spacious lawns. But the only hint of the idyllic origins of Mohorcic’s letter was the home address in the upper left-hand corner. “I wonder how much longer we will be able to exist under these conditions, which are becoming worse every day,” she wrote. The “conditions” that concerned her were regional. She noted, as many students did, that Cleveland had made the federal government’s list of the five most polluted cities in the United States, and the Cuyahoga was ranked among the ten most polluted rivers. “What contest are we trying to win?” she wanted to know. And then she made clear just how serious the situation had become: “By polluting the water the way we are, we are killing the wildlife (especially the fish), and by polluting the air we are going to kill ourselves.”11

Maple Heights residents had physically escaped the city, but many of them continued to work in Cleveland’s mills and factories, so the community was only partially removed from the city’s industrial economy. Mohorcic seemed to understand this. She wanted to know why “big industries” were allowed to pollute so much, but she provided the answer herself. “Of course, these industries are bringing money to the city; but what is more important—the people or the profit?” she wrote, repeating her opening question. Mohorcic had articulated the central proposition of the environmental movement. Appearing in a variety of forms, this was the question environmental activists demanded that politicians answer: are corporate profits more important than public health or recreational opportunities? This was also a question that industry could rephrase to meet its own needs: is a pristine environment more important than good jobs?

Many students from Maple Heights wrote to Stokes, the letters sharing form and, at least partly, theme. Sixteen-year-old Pat Pivonka wrote most passionately. “Our city is almost dead,” she declared. “The lake is ugly and polluted and you cannot eat the fish that are caught there. The air is always dark, dreary, and smelly.” Pivonka defined “our city” expansively, but she was very familiar with a particular place exposed to industrial pollution. She had relatives who lived near the Republic Steel Plant, at the southern end of the industrial flats. “There is always red dust covering the houses—even though the people wash down and paint the houses frequently,” she wrote. Then she pronounced, “The smell and the looks of Cleveland is unbearable.”12 How could Stokes respond to that?

Some students, like Pivonka, wrote about specific sources of pollution, but just as often students simply railed against “pollution” as a generic problem. Air pollution garnered more attention than water, but dozens of students expressed concern about Lake Erie, especially its beaches, many of which were regularly closed to swimming because they were fouled by sewage. Others expressed concern about fishing, which had declined precipitously in the preceding years, helping fuel the “Save the Lake” movement in Cleveland in the late 1960s. Maple Heights student Barb Gray wrote one paragraph on air pollution and another on Lake Erie, ending the latter with, “What is the good of having a lake when you can’t fish or swim in it?” Jill Jaffe, writing from Monticello Junior High in Cleveland Heights, an upper-middle-class suburb on the eastern border of the city, offered to help clean the beaches so that she could swim and water-ski. “But it takes a lot more than just the help of one eighth grade girl,” she added. “I’m sure that there are other people willing to help.” Jaffe, who had also attended an Earth Day assembly and helped her classmates pick up litter around the school, wasn’t alone in expressing an interest in helping. This, too, was a common theme.13

Surprisingly few students mentioned the Cuyahoga River in their letters, and not all who did mentioned the fact that the river had caught fire just ten months before Earth Day. The paucity of Cuyahoga references suggests that the river played only a small role in children’s conceptions of their city. Unlike Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga held little recreational value, and most children rarely saw the river. It was largely hidden, invisible behind the mills in the wide southern flats and spanned by high bridges that afforded no view of the narrower northern stretches of the waterway. Although it was terribly polluted, the foul Cuyahoga was less intrusive than the streams of black smoke that issued from the great stacks of the mills and power plants. Its infrequent appearances in the letters remind us that children learned about their city mostly through their own experiences, and their experiences rarely included the Cuyahoga. Just as important, the paucity of references to the Cuyahoga reminds us that Clevelanders didn’t need their river to catch fire to tell them that their city was polluted.

Those who did mention the Cuyahoga understood its unique ability to represent environmental degradation. For instance, the river figured prominently in the letter from Westlake student Craig Miller, who asked, “Would you please tell me how any river could become a fire hazard because of the oil on it?” He followed the rhetorical question with an understated, “That is really weird.” The bulk of the letter from Maple Heights eleventh-grader Claudia Mendat reminisced about “a nauseating ride” on the Goodtime II, a small pleasure craft that gave her fifth-grade class a tour of the Cuyahoga and Lake Erie. “When I took the trip,” Mendat remembered, “my fellow classmates and I spent the day watching the Cuyahoga River change colors, and smelling how bad the stench could become.” To drive home her point, Mendat asked, “May I suggest that they change the name of this boat to the Pollution II?”14

In addition to relaying the Cuyahoga anecdote, Mendat’s letter revealed that she had internalized the imagery and language of the environmental crisis as received through the media. “It is plain to see that our area is deteriorating at a rapid rate,” Mendat wrote. “By 1980 we may be all walking around wearing gas masks in order to breathe,” she predicted, using a common visual representation of air pollution. Earlier in the year, Plain Dealer political cartoonist Ray Osrin had used a gas mask in a play on Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, one of which sat on a pedestal in front of the Cleveland Art Museum. In the cartoon, the muscular statue is perched on a rock overlooking the badly polluted river, with smoking factories in the background and a gas mask secured around his face. Osrin’s cartoon may have inspired some of the students who referred to masks in their letters, including thirteen-year-old Bob Adelberger, who asked, “How would the Cleveland Browns and the Cleveland Indians look playing ball wearing gas masks?” For Adelberger and Mendat, gas mask imagery connected their troubled world to an imagined, horrifying future.15

Children clearly learned about the environment from both personal experience and media exposure, and they expressed their concern using a variety of methods, from brief, polite requests for more information concerning what the mayor was doing about the problem to urgent demands for action. Despite the diversity, one approach appears frequently: narrating a personal experience with a troubled place. This was the case with Westlake’s Robert Tasse, who described a “recent school field trip to the Cleveland Health Museum,” during which he observed the city from the window of a bus. As they traveled toward downtown, Tasse struggled to see the skyline through the thick air. “It was so full of waste products, I could hardly see the top of Terminal Tower,” he wrote to Stokes. “I thought that was pretty disgusting.”16 Like Tasse, many children learned this type of environmental lesson from a trip to the city. Take eighth-grade Cleveland Heights student Nancy Danker, who objected to the air pollution she saw while riding on the Shoreway, the East Side highway that hugged the lakeshore, “looking out the car window.” Loren Clark of Westlake reported the same thing in greater detail. Writing the day after Earth Day, Clark complained about the Municipal Light plant, which according to her “emits black smoke all day,” although she lived more than fifteen miles from the plant. “Upon passing the plant on the shoreway,” she wrote, “I have to hold my breath or else choke.” She continued, “I can imagine what the residents of Cleveland have to put up with when there is an offshore wind.” This last sentiment is telling, of course, because as a resident of Westlake who apparently knew the pollution primarily through the windows of the car, she really could only imagine what residents of the city had to put up with. In letters like this, pollution appears as a real but distant problem, an occasional nuisance experienced mostly in short, memorable bursts, often while the children were on the move through the city, away from their cleaner suburban homes.17

Suburban children such as Mendat, Tasse, Danker, and Clark had special reason to emphasize urban pollution, of course: they were writing the mayor of Cleveland. Still, the letters make clear that children really did associate pollution with cities, even when it made its way into less urban settings, like out in Lake Erie. Several writers also complained about air pollution as it wafted out of the city and into their otherwise clean environments. Two months before Earth Day, for example, sixth-graders in Strongsville collected snow, brought it inside, and let it melt through a cloth filter. As the water dripped through, it left behind a layer of soot on the cloth. The children learned that Cleveland was to blame. Strongsville is twenty miles south of the city center, and from that distance Cleveland was unseen but certainly not unfelt. One of the Strongsville students, Ralph Simpson, wrote a terse but clear letter to Stokes: “You should get stronger laws in Cleveland. When I rode through it started to smell so bad that I wanted to leave right away,” it read in its entirety. Richard Dusky, also from Strongsville, agreed, and he told Stokes that four years earlier, when Dusky was five or six, he was “coming home from a baseball game” and the “pollution was very bad.”18 Like so many of the suburban children who wrote to Stokes, the Strongsville students described pollution as an urban trait, something they both blamed on Cleveland and remembered mostly from visits to the city.

In a few instances, children indicated that they thought the environmental problems of the city derived not just from the presence of factories and power plants or from the poor policies and priorities of politicians, but from the people who lived there. Writing from Westlake, fifteen-year-old Shelley Stelmach told the mayor, “I chose to write to you because it seems to me you haven’t done too much to clean up Cleveland.” She went well beyond blaming Stokes, however. “Maybe I don’t live in Cleveland but I can still see that this is a serious problem,” she wrote. “I don’t see how anyone could live in a house with a garbage filled yard; you’d think people had some pride in ownership.” Stelmach had probably heard something about the garbage problem in Cleveland’s ghetto, a constant concern in the late 1960s, but she didn’t realize that homeownership patterns were different in Hough and Central than they were in Westlake. “I think you should encourage people to clean up their own property,” she continued, “because, as I see it, pollution begins at home.”19

AMERICA HAS BOUGHT A LITTLE TIME

In early 1968, Trans-Action, a social science journal based at Washington University in St. Louis, published a study of the previous fall’s elections. “The Making of the Negro Mayors 1967” addressed the simultaneous elections of Stokes and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana. Since the three authors, Jeffrey K. Hadden, Louis H. Masotti, and Victor Thiessen, were social scientists at Case Western Reserve University, the bulk of the piece concerned Cleveland. Despite the good press that followed the victories, the authors did not “find much cause for optimism in those elections” and concluded that “it would seem that the elections have only accelerated the pace of ever-rising expectations among Negroes.” This conclusion followed the common assertion that frustration had grown among ghetto residents because their expectation of equal opportunity outstripped society’s willingness to provide it. The authors feared that the threat of violence had actually increased because expectations shot up after the elections, and they feared that Stokes and Hatcher could not deliver results. They concluded, “The Negro community’s frustration with the American political system will almost certainly heighten.” While some American liberals proclaimed the elections of black mayors a great step forward on the long road to justice and equality, Hadden, Masotti and Thiessen concluded, “America has, at best, bought a little time.”20

In victory Stokes had bought himself very little time. Taking office just six days after the election, Stokes entered City Hall unprepared to name a new cabinet and without faith or trust in many of the administrators who surrounded him. Exhausted by the campaign, Stokes was also unprepared to leap into the tasks at hand. So instead he took a family vacation after just two months in office, spending nearly two weeks in the Virgin Islands while people back home struggled through a heavy winter storm—a coincidence that had many Clevelanders saying “told you so.” Scandals involving two close aides, both forced out before February, distracted the mayor and the press and gave even more Clevelanders the sense that Stokes and the people around him were not up to the city’s challenges. The administration had gotten off to a slow start, as became evident to a national audience when the New York Times published an article by James M. Naughton, a Plain Dealer political reporter, under the headline “Mayor Stokes: The First Hundred Days.” The piece described the early missteps at length, and its appearance in the Times confirmed one of Naughton’s central points: Stokes was “under more intense scrutiny than any of his predecessors.”21

Since the end of World War II, Cleveland had been nearly a one-party town, Taft’s narrow defeat notwithstanding. Democrats had a lock on City Hall for twenty-five years, and party leaders greased the machine by providing plum jobs to supporters. Over the years, this led to the appointment and retention of ineffective employees, many of them in leadership positions. Add to this a lack of energy and vision at the top—a series of caretaker mayors—and it was no wonder Cleveland had a reputation as a poorly run and corrupt city. If one-party government failed Cleveland through ineptitude and inertia, after the 1967 election the situation changed abruptly. Cleveland suddenly looked more like a two-party town, with most Democrats backing Stokes, but with conservative Democrats lining up behind James Stanton, the City Council president, who quickly became a bulwark against the Stokes agenda. Stanton’s resistance was no surprise to Stokes, who well understood that ethnic whites would be troubled by their sudden loss of power in City Hall.

Given the difficult politics inherent in the arrival of the new administration, Stokes needed to take care in his appointments, making certain that he found capable administrators who would remain loyal. Understanding that part of Cleveland’s inability to handle its myriad problems stemmed from poor leadership of the city’s departments, Stokes pledged to “hire the best available individual for every policy making job at City Hall,” using “capability” as the only criterion.22 Given the typically low salaries in government service, however, he soon found himself struggling to attract more qualified managers without increasing budgets for personnel, which he was reluctant to do. At the same time, Stokes wasn’t above making appointments for purely political reasons. For instance, in an effort to reach out to the ethnic communities of North and South Broadway, Stokes hired Ben Stefanski II, the twenty-nine-year-old son of a Slavic Village savings and loan president, to lead the Public Utilities Department. Stefanski had no background in Public Utilities, a large department that had charge of Municipal Light, the water supply, and the sewer system, all areas in need of renewed attention. Stefanski didn’t know Stokes before the election, and he was as surprised by this call to service as everyone else in the city. Stefanski quickly became a trusted adviser to Stokes and a close, loyal friend—just the type of administrator the mayor needed. Still, Stefanski’s inexperience and the obviousness of the political motivations behind his selection made him a lightning rod for criticism. His appointment signaled to many Clevelanders that the Stokes administration would be business as usual.

In one important regard, however, the new administration was revolutionary. As the mayor’s brother and former congressman, Louis Stokes, put it in a recent interview, “black people had never been able to walk into City Hall and see people who look like them running the city.”23 That changed. Mayor Stokes appointed African Americans to high posts and made certain that hiring at all levels in city government would increase diversity. It is difficult to overestimate what this meant to the black community and, of course, to the individuals who now had the ability to find good jobs in municipal service. Some of these appointees became vital members of the administration, including Buddy James, a Legal Aid lawyer tapped by Stokes to head the Law Department. Perhaps the most visible African American leader in the administration, save Stokes himself, was Dr. Frank Ellis, who took over the Health Department in October 1968. Stokes had great expectations for a revamped Health Department. “The health of our people is at the top of our priority list,” he said while introducing Ellis, adding that the Health Department would no longer be “buried in the City Hall basement and swept from our minds.” Over the next three years, Ellis worked to improve service and public engagement, adding neighborhood health centers and making strides in disease prevention. Although he became an important public face of the administration, as he was introduced to the community he said, “This is not a time for speech making. It’s a time for doing.”24

In the summer of 1968, a civic advisory committee headed by Robert Morse, president of Case Western Reserve University, had identified Ellis as the leading candidate for the Health Department post, although the Glenville riots in late July delayed the announcement of his appointment. Ellis came to Cleveland with a strong reputation. He had earned his M.D. from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, had a stellar career, including years in the Army Medical Corps at the Kansas City Hospital and Medical Center, and when hired he was just completing a master’s degree in Public Health from the University of Michigan. But it may have been Stokes’s reputation that mattered more to Ellis’s arrival in Cleveland. As the Stokes administration was winding down, Ellis reflected, “When I first thought about coming here, I said it had this same real significance, and that I wanted to be a part of that. There can never be another health director who served under Carl Stokes, you see.” Other talented African Americans joined the Stokes administration with a similar sense of being part of history, including Bailus Walker, who was recruited by Ellis to the Health Department to head up a new rat control program. The Stokes administration got off to a slow start, no doubt, but as these and other appointees got to work, the pieces were in place for progress.25

Stokes may have been hindered by conservatives at home, but his administration benefited greatly from the liberal policies of the Johnson administration. His personal relationship with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and his star status as the first black mayor of a large city served Stokes well in Washington. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and continued to support Johnson’s War on Poverty by funding a series of programs designed to improve the plight of both urban and rural poor. New programs in housing, education, public health, and environmental protection worked their way through the chambers, and in hearing after hearing congressional leaders called on Stokes to testify in favor of increased federal involvement in urban affairs. In return, federal dollars flowed into the city. Cleveland applied for federal grants both large and small, from the expansive Model Cities program to the modest rat control program that Walker headed up. Although Stokes worked well with all the representatives from northern Ohio, beginning in 1969 he had a special relationship with the congressman serving the East Side, his older brother Louis, who shared an understanding of Cleveland’s needs and a similar philosophy of activist government.

Federal dollars were essential to the cash-strapped administration, but Stokes knew he needed more. He had promised not to raise taxes during the campaign and so instead envisioned an expansive private-public program called Cleveland: Now! Stokes hoped to raise corporate funds to help jump-start programs that in turn could apply for federal dollars. He announced the program to great fanfare on May 1, 1968, using a half-hour television and radio program broadcast on all major Cleveland channels. The next day’s Plain Dealer featured a double front page, the first dedicated entirely to Cleveland: Now! It featured a description of the program, designed to eventually raise $1.5 billion to spend on housing, jobs, and health initiatives, most of them focused on the inner city. Cleveland: Now! promised new health centers, job training programs, housing rehabilitation, and neighborhood cleanup efforts. As was common when Cleveland’s daily papers covered Stokes, the news was accompanied by a photograph of the smiling mayor; this image caught him holding a basketball on a school playground surrounded by adoring kids, both white and black. At the bottom of the page, another article described the drive for eleven thousand new jobs, concentrated in the inner city, where unemployment was over 15 percent, remarkably high in a metropolitan region where only 2.4 percent of the workforce was out of work. The Plain Dealer’s first page also included an editorial offering unqualified support for the “imaginative and bold plan.” Stokes’s slow start was officially over.26

In the months after the announcement, the administration had success raising money. Despite a serious hiccough in the program caused by press attention to the fact that Ahmed Evans, the Black Nationalist at the center of the Glenville Shootout, had received Cleveland: Now! funds, Stokes continued to tout the initiative, speaking of it regularly. The assertiveness of the Cleveland: Now! program worked its way into the language of the city. The program didn’t have the lasting impact Stokes would have liked, but he had changed the way people talked about their city. He had raised expectations about what even Westlake High School student Robert Tasse called “the NOW CITY.” The fierce urgency of NOW, first articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 and then reprised by Stokes in his renewal campaign, clearly resonated with many children, several of whom demanded action NOW! in their Earth Day letters.

TERRIBLE TO BE NEAR

When read together, the Earth Day letters sent to Mayor Stokes reveal a bit of sameness. The vast majority came from suburban kids who were overwhelmingly respectful and earnest. Writing in the formal setting of school, under the supervision of teachers, students followed the rules of polite society, from proper salutations to traditional, sometimes affectionate closings. They expressed concern about a fairly narrow range of problems. But a handful of letters stand out, serving as instructive exceptions. Among them are the letters from St. Wendelin’s, a Catholic elementary school on the city’s near West Side, just a few hundred yards from the Cuyahoga River on Columbus Road. The slender Willey Avenue arcs behind the school, down a steep grade, and into a gulch that carries the tracks of what used to be called the Big Four Railroad and a creek that used to be called Walworth Run. In truth, it is the creek that used to be, rather than its name, which persists. Walworth Run disappeared altogether in 1903, when the city finished burying the creek, turning it into a huge combined sewer that empties into the Cuyahoga at one of its many bends. Despite its location so close to the center of the city (it was just three blocks from the busy West Side Market), St. Wendelin’s wasn’t a prominent school, perhaps in part because it sat perched between the Nickel Plate and Big Four tracks, both of which carried heavy freight along the city’s east-west industrial corridor. And the nearby streets, including the aptly named Train Avenue running along the bottom of the gulch, carried little traffic other than the trucks serving industry and the cars of neighborhood residents. There had been a time when Walworth Run served Cleveland’s industrial growth admirably. It had been home to several oil refineries, some of which John D. Rockefeller consolidated into Standard Oil beginning in 1870. And just below St. Wendelin’s the Standard Paint and Lead Works and the Walworth Run Foundry took advantage of the good rail connections.

By the time St. Wendelin’s students took up the task of writing Mayor Stokes, their neighborhood had been terribly polluted for a hundred years. Lead and chemical wastes had spilled onto the ground and drained into the creek at first, and then the sewer. Factory stacks and locomotives had belched smoke over the valley—a century of sootfall. The city had buried the creek because for two decades it had served as an open sewer draining wastes from the city’s union stockyards, less than two miles upstream from St. Wendelin’s. The creek had disappeared, but so had the wastes—into the Cuyahoga. By 1970, some of the evidence of all this industrial development had disappeared. The refineries were gone, the trains were less frequent, and now the environment was both polluted and neglected.

The letters from St. Wendelin’s say nothing about the industrial residues. The railroad tracks and the factory stacks just a few hundred yards from where the children wrote warrant no mention. Instead, the children focused on a lot closer to the school that served as a casual dump. “Have you ever seen Willey Hill?” ten-year-old Louis Rodriguez asked Stokes about the street that headed down to the tracks below his school. “Well, I have. I live five houses away and when I play I can smell it,” he reported. “It really is a bad place, with broken glass, rats and garbage and even snakes.” Eight-year-old Mark Hudak wrote much the same thing of the lot near the bottom of the hill, complaining of “filth, garbage, broken glass, waste and smell.” This place was near his school, which worried him because “young children play there and live near there.” To make his point clear, Hudak stated bluntly: “It is terrible to be near.”27

St. Wendelin’s student Melissa Stevens wrote perhaps the most heartbreaking letter sent to Stokes on the first Earth Day. “I am writing to you because I and others have a problem which I think you can help us solve,” she opened hopefully. Like her classmates, she focused on the dump on Willey Avenue. “It has garbage and filth all around it,” she noted. Then she added, “It involves danger.” She thought that if Mayor Stokes knew of this place and the danger, he would “have someone to come and clean the mess.” She wrote “please.” Like all the children at St. Wendelin’s, Melissa wrote about a place she knew well, a place she knew was dangerous, an environment that needed to be cleaned, a place that was terrible to be near, a place that was near. And yet she was willing to do her part. “If you have it cleaned,” she wrote Stokes, “I promise I will do what I can to keep it that way. It should look like God wanted it to be. Thank you.”28

Few inner-city schools like St. Wendelin’s wrote to Stokes on Earth Day, but he did get a letter from a sixth-grade science class at Daniel E. Morgan School, in Hough, the neighborhood wracked by riots four years earlier, where decay and disorder were even more evident than on the near West Side. Mrs. Le Grande, who wrote a cover letter to the mayor, had led her science class in a brainstorming exercise on “how littering contributes to pollution.” Le Grande explained that the students had “concluded that littering can be controlled,” and she attached a list titled “Recommendations for Controlling Littering,” which well described the environmental problems that so immediately affected these children. The list begins simply, reasonably: “All trash should be disposed of in suitable containers.” Second, “the city should provide trash cans at every busy corner of the city.” The children also hoped that garbage collectors could be “more careful when collecting garbage.” The fourth recommendation remained practical: “Every car owner should be required to have a litter bag in his vehicle, available to occupants.” Fifth, another policy recommendation, “Garbage should be collected twice weekly in heavily populated areas.” This suggestion seems as if it might have been added by the teacher, and yet like the previous recommendations it was directly on task, as the students were, thinking of practical structural and policy changes that might lead to a cleaner Hough.29

Then the list begins to take on a different character, as if the brainstorming children began to connect their thoughts about litter to other aspects of the neighborhood they wanted improved. Street clubs could “concentrate more on the problems of pollution,” they proposed. “Dog owners should be required to walk their dogs instead of allowing them to run free in the neighborhood,” a solution whose wording suggests that the unleashed dogs, not what they left behind on the ground, posed the actual problem. “Breaking bottles and glass on the street and sidewalks should be out-lawed,” the children wrote, conjuring images of a neighborhood strewn with broken glass. And then, moving completely away from litter, the class recommended that “the city should do more to rid the neighborhoods of rats and other pests.” And the city should “provide supervisors for The Morgan Playfield,” next to their school. Finally: “All laws, (present and new) must be enforced.”30

Mrs. LeGrande’s classroom nearly comes alive again in this list, the children moving from the concrete, the most practical, most on-task solutions to littering, to other, related problems: the dogs that run loose in the neighborhood, the rats, the unsupervised playground. This was a neighborhood out of control. It needed order; it needed law enforcement. All this in an Earth Day letter. We surely get a sense of crisis here, as we do from the letters of suburban students, but it is a different crisis altogether. Suburban children expressed concern for the environment of places to which they felt some connection but which were generally at some distance from home. For the children of Hough, like the children at St. Wendelin’s, the environmental crisis wasn’t experienced through a car window; they didn’t see it on a field trip or an outing to a ballgame. They don’t reference gas masks or Municipal Light. They didn’t gather their sense of crisis from the news. They didn’t point to distant smoky factories or polluted waterways. Their environmental crisis was near at hand and underfoot. It was behind the school yard where they played, in the streets where they lived.

Mayor Stokes understood that these children were living through a crisis from which they could make no retreat. This was an existence he knew well, through his experience growing up poor in Cleveland. He wrote about his childhood, “We had almost no notion of anyone’s living beyond the horizons of our narrow patch of neighborhood.” This was the only environment these city kids knew: the environment of the urban crisis.31

WHY CAN’T WE HELP THESE PEOPLE?

In the summer of 1968, Cleveland police were keeping an eye on Ahmed Evans, a Black Nationalist who had gathered a number of supporters and a cache of guns in his Auburndale Avenue apartment. On July 23, that surveillance went terribly awry. Rising tensions led to gunfire, though no one knows who fired first. The shootout in Glenville lasted hours and left seven people dead—three of them policemen. The shootout evolved into Cleveland’s second major race riot in two years, as African Americans took to the streets of the city’s East Side. Arson, looting, and the threat of spreading violence convinced Stokes he should call for the National Guard. On the night the conflict began, forty-year-old Dorothy Cassidy sat in her Maple Heights home and watched the news reports from Glenville. “It scares me,” she wrote to Stokes. “I never felt this kind of fear before. Why should I & I’m sure others, have to be afraid in this great country of ours.” Surely Cassidy’s fear was real, fueled by the reports of intense violence—men holed up in a residential neighborhood, firing rifles and shotguns at police officers in the street. Even though Cassidy was ten miles away, seemingly safe in her suburban home, her connection to Cleveland was so strong that she worked out her anxiety in a letter to the mayor. “Surely the heat of the day has caused the troubles tonight,” she wrote, trying to find an explanation. “I’m uncomfortable & hot in my nice, clean, suburban home, and I think what must it be like for so many cramped into sticky, hot, overcrowded apartments.” Unlike many in the region who watched the violence unfold on television, she was empathetic toward those stuck in the ghetto. “Why can’t we help these people get away from that atmosphere at least one day a week when it’s hot,” she suggested.32

Cassidy’s proposal seems naive at first glance. Weekly escapes when the weather turned oppressive were unequal to the challenges of the urban crisis. Her suggestion ignored the other, more consistently oppressive forces at work on the black community—the forces that ensured chronic unemployment, a deteriorating housing stock, and inadequate public services. Still, Cassidy’s letter expressed the possibility that the environment played some role in sparking the violence—and not just the heat, but also the cramped, overcrowded apartments. Indeed, the letter hints at how troubled Cleveland really was, that this violence, as extreme and shocking as it was, had not come out of nowhere. It came out of the ghetto. This chain of events—shootout, riots, and the arrival of heavily armed troops—affirmed to many Cleveland-area residents that the city had entered a period not just of decline but of crisis, and in Cassidy’s letter we see how intimately the urban and environmental crises were intertwined.

That April, Stokes had helped prevent violence after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., spending hours in and around Hough trying to calm emotions and ease tensions. Perhaps because black Clevelanders saw the tears of their mayor on television and in the paper, or perhaps because he spent days out in the streets, asking angry crowds to “cool it,” while other cities burned, there was peace in Cleveland. “We must use the death of Dr. King as a stone upon which to build a better Cleveland and a better America,” Stokes said. “To do less would be to make a mockery of his life.” This performance during the King crisis helped solidify Stokes’s reputation around the nation as an effective African American politician. But just four months after King’s assassination, the Glenville riots revealed the limits of Stokes’s ability to calm black anger. As the violence spread, he took the extraordinary step of removing white police officers and guardsmen from the affected area in an attempt to reduce violence between police and the African American residents of the East Side. This action may have saved lives, but it deepened white suspicions of the black mayor, especially among police officers.33

On the one-year anniversary of King’s assassination, The Humanist published an essay by Stokes titled “Rebuilding the Cities,” opposite Eldridge Cleaver’s radical “Tears for the Pigs.” Using the headline “Militant vs. Moderate on the Black Revolution,” the magazine cast Stokes as the voice of reason merely through the stark contrast with Cleaver. “The people of the cities are tired of having their problems analyzed,” Stokes wrote. Everyone knew what the problems were; now it was about finding the political will to create solutions. “There must be a massive attack on poverty—one that will require a whole new order of national priorities,” he proposed. In what might have sounded like a strident message had it not been so directly contrasted with a polemic from the voice of the Black Panther Party, Stokes described how recent migrants into the city—the growing African American population—had “not come into a land of primeval forests and sweet, clear waters.” Instead, “their inheritance is the dregs—the filth and decay and the leavings of people who have long since moved into clean, spacious new surroundings.” Sounding something like Cassidy contrasting her own Maple Heights home with the neighborhoods of the inner city, Stokes drove the point home by purposefully conflating the deterioration of the natural environment with that of the city as a whole. “The once-clear Cuyahoga River has long since turned brown with refuse, polluted almost beyond help, and the lake itself is a deadly sea in which little lives beside the organisms of disease. Some call it blight. I call it tragedy.”34

Even though his first term had been rocked by violence, Stokes remained a popular mayor. He ran for reelection in 1969 and won a second term by a more comfortable margin. Not surprisingly, during his four years in office Stokes heard from many racists about his personal and policy shortcomings. (The most offensive and threatening letters wound up in a special file.) The most rabid tended to write from beyond Cleveland, indeed from outside Ohio, but white resentment inside the city was unmistakable. Some of the bitterness came from older Cleveland residents, perhaps those who felt least able to pick up and move away from the gathering crisis, those attached to their neighborhoods and their fading city. Some of the most pointed letters went unsigned, including one from early 1969 that asked the mayor to “make the streets of Cleveland safe for ALL people and let the black man stop all robberies and mugging.” Further, the writer wondered, “Why do these black women have so many youngsters, paid for by the whites?”35 This letter, like many others, conveyed an understanding of urban culture informed by racism, one that blamed African Americans not only for their own problems but for the problems of the entire city.

In a similar vein, an elderly white woman who had voted for Stokes wrote to express her disappointment about the trajectory of Cleveland. Fearing bodily harm or damage to her property, she signed the letter only “An old tax payer.” She had raised her own children without any help from the city, and now she didn’t want to “support illegitimate children and their mothers.” She had been unmoved by media coverage of East Side slums and “the filth where children play.” She wondered, “Why don’t these people living there take a broom and shovel and clean up their yards instead of throwing garbage out their windows.” To this old taxpayer, the physical disorder of the ghetto revealed the flawed character of those who lived there, a common and long-standing conception.36

The strength of this white resentment reveals how difficult Stokes’s job would be. It also reminds us that racial politics charged every interaction between Mayor Stokes and his correspondents, many of whom may not have known the city well but knew enough to read race into the landscape. Some pitied blacks trapped in the ghetto; others simply blamed them for their plight. The racial divide complicated everything in Cleveland at this critical moment, not just during the periods of open violence but as the city attempted to negotiate the long urban crisis. And race was a constant consideration for a black man attempting to manage a predominantly white city.

THE MORE INCLUSIVE URBAN CRISIS

The Earth Day letters are filled with urgency and fear, but it is difficult to determine how much stress children in the Cleveland area really experienced. Surely some students exaggerated their concerns for rhetorical effect, but expressions of anxiety about the future are frequent and vivid. Many of the children expressed concern not just for the future of their city but for themselves and even humanity altogether. A surprising number of students worried about dying young. Eighth-grader Nancy Danker, of Cleveland Heights, was made to “wonder whether or not pollution will kill me by the time I am twenty five years old.” Glenn Gray, of West Technical High School, was even more dramatic. “I hope within a few years that the people of the United States do something before the world itself is destroyed,” he wrote. Underlining “destroyed” six times was not enough. Gray added a postscript: “Do something now before we are destroyed!!!” And repeating Stokes’s own urgent demand for action, Gray added across the bottom of the page in bold block letters: “CLEVELAND NOW!”37

The mayor’s office responded politely to the letters, emphasizing the city’s actions to date and promising continued vigilance in the fight to clean up Cleveland. Undoubtedly, students complaining about air pollution heard something about how the city had passed a tougher ordinance in 1969; students concerned with water pollution were probably reminded that city residents had passed a $100 million bond issue in 1968 that would help reduce water pollution through investment in sewers and sewage treatment. As would be expected, the mayor’s office’s replies surely affirmed the need to act but not the students’ most dire predictions for the future.

In at least one instance, however, Stokes’s office sent a particularly aggressive reply to a letter from a concerned student. In June 1970, two months after Earth Day, seventeen-year-old Bernard Sroka of Independence, a thinly populated white suburb extending along the Cuyahoga south of the city’s mills, wrote Stokes to complain about “the layer of pollution hovering over the Cleveland area.” Noting that it “stinks downtown,” Sroka was concerned about the “blue gray haze” that had developed “even down here in Independence,” more than ten miles from inner-city Cleveland. Sroka asked Stokes, “Why don’t you try halting the pollution of our air, even it if means forcing the factories to close down and regulating auto use? Why don’t you help make Cleveland clean and beautiful so that it could live up to its motto of ‘The Best Location in the Nation’?”38

Stokes’s reply suggests a growing impatience with the drumbeat of complaints about the environment. “The problems related to the crisis in the environment are serious components of the larger, more inclusive urban crisis,” the letter said. “As mayor of the city of Cleveland, I must view them as such and act accordingly.” The response touted the administration’s many accomplishments related to the environment, claiming, “My administration has devoted more time, money and manpower to the fight against pollution than any previous administration in Cleveland’s history.” But the letter also pushed back against the very idea that the administration should dedicate more energy to solving environmental problems. “I face many more serious crises which affect the lives of my constituents to a greater degree than air and water pollution,” Stokes wrote. These were the “problems of the poor,” which “must receive highest priority. These include housing, jobs, food, clothing, and the ability to live in a society free of racial hatred.” Sroka, a young man writing at a safe distance from the concentrated poverty of the inner city, can surely be forgiven for demanding different priorities for Cleveland’s mayor, but Stokes understood that solving the environmental crisis would mean little if the urban crisis were allowed to persist.39