5 The Burning River

On Monday, June 23, 1969, Carl Stokes led the local press on a pollution tour of the Cuyahoga River at the southern end of the city’s industrial flats. About a dozen people—reporters, cameramen, and government officials—joined the excursion, which stopped at four sites, all of them near the Harvard Road bridge beyond the river’s navigable channel. At one stop, they stood and watched sewage pour from the defective Big Creek Interceptor, a large pipe designed to deliver waste and runoff to the nearby Southerly Treatment Plant. It had been malfunctioning for over a month and emptying directly into the Cuyahoga. Just around the corner, the group peered into the forty-nine-acre facility of Harshaw Chemical Company, which for more than sixty years had produced a variety of acids and salts—sulfates, carbonates, chlorides, nitrates—to meet the needs of the region’s industry. Here, tainted by chemicals, including Harshaw’s sodium sulfate, the river changed colors. Downstream, it passed between the great steel mills and turned ruddy from the iron wastes. At another stop on the pollution tour, Stokes pointed to a sewer pipe that emptied wastes from suburban Cuyahoga Heights directly into the river because that community had not connected the pipe to the nearby Southerly plant. The featured stop on the tour, however, was a mile downstream, where Stokes stood on one of the two railroad trestles that had been damaged by a fire on the Cuyahoga the day before. Here the group stood and spoke about the long-standing and complicated problem of pollution in the river. This is why they had come.

The administration had organized the tour quickly, having heard of the previous day’s fire only that morning. Here was a chance to define the problem, to describe what the administration thought needed to be done to solve it. Putting together the list of stops on the tour wasn’t difficult. Crusading car dealer David Blaushild had named Harshaw Chemical in his lawsuit against the city four years earlier, in part because it had been a notorious polluter of the river for decades, even before it had refined uranium for nuclear weapons at its Harvard Road plant in the 1940s and 1950s. The Big Creek Interceptor had been dumping sewage since May 20, although the story didn’t make the papers for another six days. By then, it had spilled over 150 million gallons of sewage, in a failure that had real consequences for the river and symbolic implications for the city’s inadequate infrastructure. As the Cleveland Press reported, this was “at least the fifth break in the sewer in the past six years.”1 And the city had been in a long, fruitless negotiation with Cuyahoga Heights and other suburbs regarding cost sharing for sewer development, attempting to determine how suburbs should be charged for new sewers that would connect to the city’s Southerly treatment plant.

The highlight of the tour, of course, was the site of the fire. Out on the damaged trestle, Stokes was in crisis management mode. But unlike when he traveled the overheated and roiling streets of Glenville the previous summer, he wasn’t trying to calm the situation as he walked from pollution site to pollution site on this Monday morning. Rather, he was trying to fan the flames, to draw attention to the fire. At his side stood Betty Klaric, the Press reporter who had taken on the environment beat and covered the polluted city since 1965. “This is a long-standing condition that must be brought to an end,” Stokes said to her. “There may be some wry humor in the phrase ‘the river is a fire hazard’ but it’s a terrible reflection on the city surrounding it when it does indeed become one.” Stokes wasn’t willing to accept full responsibility for the fire, claiming, as he did frequently, that because the state continued to issue permits to polluters, the city could accomplish little. Now he determined that the courts should settle the issue. To Stokes, pollution wasn’t a technical problem so much as a political one. Who should be responsible, and how should they find the resources needed to build the solution? “We’ll file the lawsuit on behalf of all the citizens of Cleveland and let the courts decide,” Stokes told Klaric.2

Reflecting back on that day in an interview in 2008, Klaric said, “To us it was just another fire…we all knew that the river was an open sewer used by industry which was dumping all this oil and all kinds of chemicals in the river, so we took it as a matter of course.” Just another day in the polluted city, or so she thought.3 But the fire began to take on greater meaning, even in the days that immediately followed. During the pollution tour, Stokes attempted to assign meaning to the fire. He argued that the city was not in a position to control the pollution within its borders. His administration had inherited a flawed infrastructure, including the faulty Big Creek Interceptor. Cleveland had no power over its suburbs, such as Cuyahoga Heights, and the city had failed to find an acceptable metropolitan solution. And it had no control over state regulations and the pollution permit system. Harshaw Chemical could pollute with impunity. Altogether, Stokes must have felt powerless on that charred trestle, looking down on the foul waters making their way through his city.

Figure 10. On the Monday after the Cuyahoga blaze, Mayor Stokes led the media on a tour of critical spots near the fire. Here Stokes talks with the Cleveland Press reporter Betty Klaric on one of the railroad trestles damaged by the fire. Photo by Herman Seid. Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University.

Stokes needed allies, and he sought them in the press, the federal government, and the environmental movement. If Cleveland was going to change, the Cuyahoga could no longer be an open sewer, let alone a fire hazard. Changing the river would take years and millions of dollars. It would also take a change in thinking about the Cuyahoga. It was not irredeemable; it could be reclaimed, and perhaps even become a living river again. Over the previous century, industry had made itself comfortable on the riverbanks, but now citizen demands for environmental quality were reaching even this most diminished of environments. In 1969, the city was in the midst of a long transition, as industrial plants shrank and closed—along the lakefront, along the rail lines, even on the industrial flats. But right where the 1969 fire began, capital investments had intensified in the postwar decades, as the steel mills modernized. Industry’s commitment to that spot helped the burning river become an especially meaningful battleground in the transition from industrial to service city. For his part, Stokes hoped that if his administration could stop the burning here, maybe the burning would stop elsewhere in the city, too.

THE OIL-SLICKED RIVER BURST INTO FLAMES

The Cuyahoga River caught fire just before noon on Sunday, June 22, 1969. An oil slick and accumulated debris burned intensely for less than half an hour, damaging two railroad trestles, the Newburgh & Southern slightly and the Norfolk & Western more seriously. Firefighters arrived in time to douse the blaze before it could do more damage; photographers arrived too late to catch the flames on film. And so the next day, Cleveland’s newspapers both ran front-page photos of the twisted Norfolk & Western tracks. The Plain Dealer photo, run with the caption “River Fire Damages Trestle,” showed a fireman soaking a charred pier with a water cannon from the deck of the Anthony J. Celebrezze, the city’s fireboat, which was stationed down the river. The caption reported that the fire had caused about $50,000 in damage. Battalion Chief Bernard Campbell said that in addition to the Celebrezze, the department had responded with fire trucks, which helped break up the burning slick from the shore.4

The damaged trestles crossed the Cuyahoga at a critical juncture, where the river jogs east, wedged between the long rolling mills of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company on the west bank and the towering Republic Steel blast furnaces on the east. The trestles marked the end of the navigable stretch of the narrow river, and the wooden bridges held their tracks just a dozen or so feet above the water. The bridge piers trapped tree limbs and other debris, which accumulated in great piles that dried above the slow-moving current. Soaked in the oily sheen that covered much of the lower river, wooden debris gathered in many spots like this along the winding Cuyahoga, behind piers and pilings, in eddies and still corners, creating fire hazards awaiting a spark. Neither the city nor the state could determine the immediate cause of the fire, but nearly everyone assumed that the two massive mills were at least partly to blame. In its brief Monday morning coverage, the Plain Dealer asserted, “Flames leaped up from floating oil wastes dumped into the Cuyahoga River by waterfront industries.” And that afternoon the Press announced on page 1, “Oily industrial waste on the Cuyahoga River caught fire.” Both papers apparently relied on the conclusions of Battalion Chief Campbell, who didn’t need to conduct an investigation before blaming waterfront industries that had dumped oil wastes into the river for decades.

Both Cleveland papers ran photos on Monday, but only the Plain Dealer included an article, which appeared on page 11C and was so clumsily handled that it contained two typographical errors in the lead paragraph. Under the headline “Oil Slick Fire Damages 2 River Spans,” the un-bylined article began: “An [sic] burning oil slick floating on [the] Cuyahoga River caused $50,000 damage to two key railroad trestles at the foot of Campbell Road Hill SE about noon yesterday, closing one to traffic.” At first neither Stokes on his pollution tour nor the papers that reported on it suggested that the fire represented an ecological disaster. Clevelanders were not ready to think of a burning river as an apocalyptic symbol of the developing ecological crisis. That symbolism would be learned slowly, over time. Instead, initially the story was about the damaged trestles, not the burning river. If the Cleveland papers made little of the incident, the national press initially ignored the blaze altogether. Apparently neither the Associated Press nor any other wire service produced a story about the Cuyahoga fire that June, since nothing about the fire appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Cincinnati Enquirer, or the Columbus Dispatch, although the Dispatch carried a story two weeks later about the fingerpointing between Cleveland and the state over who was to blame.5 The mild initial reaction to the burning Cuyahoga suggests that Clevelanders, and Americans generally, still had limited expectations for urban, industrial environments.

Most of the slight newspaper coverage in the weeks after the fire involved the back-and-forth between the city and state, but the Plain Dealer published a sharp editorial on Tuesday, the day after Stokes’s pollution tour. Under the headline “Cleveland: Where the River Burns,” the editorial opened with a “joke that isn’t a joke”: “Cleveland, eh? Isn’t that the place where the river is so polluted it’s a fire hazard?” Clevelanders apparently didn’t find this amusing because, as the editorial pointed out, the river was a fire hazard and it did “catch fire from time to time.” The Plain Dealer expressed anger toward industry in the flats: “So much heat should be put on industrial polluters that they will cease forever dumping oil and other wastes into the river.” And the piece expressed frustration with the jurisdictional conflicts between the state and the city and the city and its suburbs. But the paper considered the burning river a problem because of what it meant to the city’s reputation rather than its ecology. The Plain Dealer lamented that the “oily gunk” in the Cuyahoga had “given the river and the city a bad name for years.”6

The Press had a noticeably broader take on the situation, at least by Wednesday, three days after the fire, when it published its first editorial on the topic. By then the Press had reason to hit a different tone. On Tuesday a major chemical spill on the Rhine River in Europe had initiated a still-unfolding ecological disaster. Pesticides were floating downstream, killing millions of fish and causing German and Dutch cities to shut off their water intakes and prohibit swimming. The Press editorial, under the headline “And Now—the Rhine,” despaired that “the mighty Rhine has fallen to the level of the filthy Cuyahoga.” The German spill was “one more painful manifestation of human beings poisoning their environment.” And then, linking a series of environmental stories in a way that more and more Americans—and Europeans—were doing, the Press gave a sense of a larger unfolding environmental crisis. “As the Cuyahoga burns with its industrial wastes; as the Rhine flows majestically with its toxic insecticide; as the U.S. Army threatens to dump nerve gas into the ocean; as the Ohio Legislature refuses to ban Lake Erie oil drilling, United Nations Secretary U Thant warns in a report that mankind is destroying himself through pollution of land, sea and air.” The last entry on this list, a reference to a UN document created in preparation for the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, connected the Cuyahoga to a crisis that stretched around the world.7

And so slowly the burning river became part of a much larger story, not just of the polluted Cuyahoga, or of a terribly polluted Cleveland, or of industrial pollution generally, but of a global environmental crisis. This transformation accelerated after a short essay appeared in Time magazine in early August. Under the headline “The Cities: The Price of Optimism,” the un-bylined piece listed several troubled urban waterways, including the Potomac, which entered the nation’s capital “as a pleasant stream, and leaves it stinking” from untreated sewage, and the Missouri, fouled by meatpacking wastes in Omaha. The Hudson, Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Monongahela were all terribly polluted by the cities through which they flowed. “Among the worst of them all,” Time reported, “is the 80-mile-long Cuyahoga.” “Some river!” the essay exclaimed. “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.” After repeating a joke about how people who fall into the river decay rather than drown, the essay quickly told the story of the fire. “A few weeks ago, the oil-slicked river burst into flames and burned with such intensity that two railroad bridges spanning it were nearly destroyed.” Perhaps that one sentence about the fire would have had less influence had it not appeared above a dramatic photograph of a boat nearly engulfed in flames on the water, dark smoke filling the sky, streams of water from bridge-bound firefighters feebly spraying the tug. “Boat Caught in Flaming Cuyahoga” was the only caption.8 Time failed to note that the photo had been taken seventeen years earlier, when another fire swept across the Cuyahoga’s waters. It’s not clear whether the editors at Time mistakenly used the older photo or did so deliberately, perhaps thinking the more dramatic scene would grab readers’ attention. Either way, Time created a new story for the 1969 fire, connecting an old image with a new interpretation. When combined with the essay, the photo suggested that the river’s pollution had finally gotten so bad the river simply and spectacularly “burst into flames,” seemingly for the first time.

Time published another photo with the “Price of Optimism” essay, in which Carl Stokes stands next to Ben Stefanski during the pollution tour the day after the fire. Reporters stand in a semi-circle around the mayor, who seems to be gesturing toward the sewer outfall over his shoulder. Appearing next to the photo of the flaming Cuyahoga—burning in 1952—the image of Stokes and Stefanski heightened the sense that the administration might not be up to the task at hand. The essay emphasized the “archaic sanitary storm system” and the broken Big Creek Interceptor, which was still spilling “a gray-green torrent” of sewage into the river. Time gave Stefanski credit for successfully leading the campaign to approve the $100 million bond issue. “No one could be against clean water,” he said modestly in explaining the broad support for the bond. Still, the essay ended on an ominous note. “The Cuyahoga can be cleaned up in Cleveland, but as long as other cities keep dumping wastes upriver, it will remain exactly what it is today—an open sewer filing Lake Erie with scummy wavelets, sullen reminders that even a great lake can die.”

After the Time coverage, the 1969 Cuyahoga fire evolved into one of the great symbolic environmental catastrophes of the industrial era. In November, Audubon featured the Cuyahoga on its back cover, in a short, poetic piece labeled “Counterpoint.” At the top of the page was an aerial photograph of an ore ship winding its way up the river with downtown in the background. “Cleveland, take pride in your river. Cuyahoga. The very name flows as mightily as this great torrent of Midwestern capitalism.” Cleveland should feel no shame, for this is a river that had made so much. “The river of orange. The burning river. Unique to America, famous to the world.” Audubon, tongue in cheek of course, urged Cleveland not to clean its waters, which painted Lake Erie in hues that would make Picasso proud. “Let the West have its National Wild and Scenic Rivers. Dedicate your stream as a National Industrial and Urban Waterway, a tribute to progress.” The burning river and industry should be forever forged, Audubon said, a “monumental landmark” in the “shadows of towering factories.”9

By the end of 1970, the river’s infamy was secure. By then, political crusader Ralph Nader had formed a water pollution task force, one of many study groups made up of college students—commonly known as “Nader’s Raiders”—eager to investigate the nation’s many pressing problems. The water pollution study group focused on the federal government’s failure to prevent water pollution despite significant engagement with the issue over the previous decade. The results of the nationwide study appeared in a four-hundred-page book, Water Wasteland, published in 1971 as Congress was putting together what would become the first Clean Water Act. Task force leaders David Zwick and John Esposito wanted to open the book with an image that would grab people’s attention, and so they began, “On June 22, 1969, the Cuyahoga River burst into flame.” Zwick would later recall that the Cuyahoga fire was an obvious choice. “When a river catches on fire in one of your major cities, it’s obviously something of a problem,” he said in 1999. “Any uninitiated person would say that.”10

If the river fire had begun to influence the political debate concerning environmental regulation, it was gaining even more influence in cultural conceptions of the industrial Midwest. National Geographic’s stark issue in December 1970, under the cover “Our Ecological Crisis,” prominently featured the Cuyahoga, using a foldout image of the industrial river. The dark photo showed the smoking stacks of the Republic Steel blast furnaces, but no flames leapt from the shadowed waters. Next to a small headline, “Sad, Soiled Waters: the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie,” a four-paragraph caption described the fire and its industrial setting: “Along this six-mile stretch, before emptying into Lake Erie, the river receives the wastes of steel mills, chemical and meat-rendering plants, and other industries.” An additional caption on the same page described tests using minnows and the cyanide-laced waters of the Cuyahoga. Shown in a small photograph, the fish, belly up under the watchful eye of a federal water pollution control biologist, died in less than seven minutes. As with the initial coverage of the river fire, the connection between industry and fire was assumed here, but in other ways the story had changed dramatically. The Cuyahoga was now part of a larger, troubled ecology, one that included more than just the great lake into which it flowed. The “Ecological Crisis” issue described—and illustrated—a wide variety of environmental problems: air pollution in Montana, DDT in weakened birds’ eggs, heat pollution from nuclear plants, raw sewage in the Hudson River, and the visual pollution of sprawl in North Miami. By clustering images and descriptions of a variety of environmental problems, from oil spills to overpopulation, National Geographic was making a larger point about the “fragile beauty all about us” and the “threat to man’s only home,” phrases that appeared on the issue’s cover. As the caption concluded after describing the Cuyahoga’s troubles, “Thus man disrupts the ecology, the delicate interrelationship of organisms—including him and their environment.” The Cuyahoga, in its foldout magnificence, had become the poster child of the ecological crisis.11

THE RIVER IS GOING TO BLAZE UP AND DESTROY US

In the summer of 1969, Clevelanders knew, or ought to have known, that their river caught fire “from time to time,” as the Plain Dealer editorial had phrased it. It is impossible to know how many times flames spread over the river, simply because press coverage was inconsistent, but at least ten times the Cuyahoga burned intensely enough to catch the attention of the press. The first fire may have occurred in August 1868, when a spark from the stacks of a passing tug apparently ignited an oil slick on the river. The Plain Dealer noted then that the fire could have been far worse had it spread to the vast lumber stores along the banks. Further, the Plain Dealer heightened its crusade to force oil refiners along the river to clean up their businesses. “We have called attention to the fact that along the whole length of the river, under the wharves, and even under the warehouses, there are deposits of this inflammable stuff,” the paper reported, “and in some places to the thickness of several inches.” Just the year before the 1868 fire, John D. Rockefeller had cobbled together five refineries within the firm of Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler, already the largest oil refiners in the world. Still, the Plain Dealer had little patience for the relatively new business, seeing oil along the water as a threat to the already complex economy of the flats. Above the floating oil there were “millions upon millions of property in warehouses, elevators, flouring mills, machine shops and railroad freight depots, and extensive lumber yards, all liable at any moment, by the merest carelessness, of the use of a match or a lighted cigar, to be set on fire producing a conflagration that no human efforts could stop.” The newspaper’s reaction, along with that of Mayor Stephen Burhrer, who encouraged City Council to take further action to outlaw oil discharges, made clear that the problem revealed by the burning river was that the flames threatened shipping and riverfront businesses, which were at the heart of the city’s prosperity.12

In 1883, a spectacular fire raced across the high waters of Kingsbury Run during a dramatic late-winter flood. Oil leaking from a still at the Thurmer and Teagle refinery was ignited by a boiler house standing in the rising water. The New York Times described the horror of burning water moving downstream toward Standard Oil’s massive refinery. Although the heroic efforts of firemen and employees saved much of the plant, several Standard tanks exploded and buildings burned. Men jumped into the high water to dam up the culvert that separated Kingsbury Run from the Cuyahoga, successfully keeping the fire from the flooded flats along the larger river. Nearly thirty years later, in 1912, another horrific blaze threatened Standard Oil’s Refinery No. 1, when gasoline leaking from a barge at Standard’s docks covered the river and then caught fire. This time no floodwaters threatened to push the fire deep into the city, but the rapidly spreading flames killed five men caulking a boat at the Great Lakes Towing Company near Jefferson Avenue. “Without warning,” the Plain Dealer reported, “a shriveling blast of blue flame from the water beneath them wrapped the drydock in fire.” The deaths and the extent of the fire, which destroyed five tugs, a yacht, and three dry docks, heightened fears about the river as a fire hazard. The Press reported one tug captain as saying, “We don’t know at what moment the river is going to blaze up and destroy us.” Although the Cuyahoga remained critical to the city’s economy, “The Menace of the River,” as the headline of a Plain Dealer editorial called it, was unmistakable.13

These two fires became national stories because the loss of life and the scale of the damage warranted reporting. That the fires occurred on bodies of water was significant only because the waterways themselves were important as industrial thoroughfares. Along the Cuyahoga (and its small tributary, Kingsbury Run), businessmen developed the city’s most valuable properties—the properties that drove the economy. In Cleveland, like other successful industrial cities, land uses and water uses could conflict. Different interests—steel making, oil refining, shipbuilding, paint manufacturing among them—asserted their demands on the river. The Cuyahoga’s modest flow would cool the steel, dilute the wastes, and float the massive ships that moved to and from Lake Erie. In the first half century of Cleveland’s rapid industrial development, the city hardly regulated the use of the river. Wastes that emptied into the stream were problematic only if they threatened some other industrial use. Government and the Chamber of Commerce worked to balance the interests of those in the flats, but just the economic interests. There were no other considerations.

To some degree the industries worked in concert. Steel manufacturers made the materials that helped build the ships (and dozens of other products); chemical manufacturers supplied the acids needed to wash the steel; oil refineries supplied the lubricants and some of the fuel. Altogether, industrial Cleveland was an impressive, well-oiled machine. But it lasted only so long. American Ship Building Company, formed in 1899 through the consolidation of three Cleveland firms, was one of the mainstays of the lower Cuyahoga, with slips and dry docks along the Old River Bed near the mouth. After building a series of ships for service in World War II, however, the company closed its hometown yards, moving manufacturing to other Great Lakes ports and eventually south to Tampa, Florida. Likewise, Standard Oil, founded in Cleveland in 1870, had a shifting relationship with its hometown. Founder John D. Rockefeller moved to New York in the 1880s, and although he kept a home in Cleveland for many years, the Rockefeller wealth accumulated mostly in other places. The breakup of his company in 1911 left Standard Oil of Ohio (known as Sohio after the 1930s) based in Cleveland, and for decades refining, research, and corporate jobs remained in the area. As late as 1944, Sohio employed eleven hundred people at its Refinery No. 1 on Kingsbury Run. With the development of new sources of oil far from Ohio, however, eventually it no longer made sense to refine along the Cuyahoga. Sohio stopped refining oil there in 1966, when it cleared the site of its Refinery No. 1 and laid off or relocated the employees who worked in the flats.14

Tellingly, when Sohio announced the closure of the plant in 1964, the Plain Dealer ran the story under the headline “Closing of Sohio Works Will Help Clear the Air.” The first paragraph concluded that when the plant closed, “some of Cleveland’s air and water pollution problem will vanish.”15 Sohio gave a portion of the Kingsbury Run property to the city, along with a cluster of buildings. Among them was the company’s water pollution control facility, built to skim the oil off the company’s wastes before they emptied into the Cuyahoga. Although part of the land once occupied by the refinery remains vacant and overgrown, much of it became a truck terminal, built just after the dismantling of the refinery to take advantage of nearby Interstate 77. Undoubtedly the terminal’s construction eased concerns about the loss of jobs and suggested how land use would evolve in the new fluid city.

THE RIVER WILL BURN

In February 1936, the Cuyahoga caught fire under the Erie Railroad bridge that spanned the river between Gulf Oil’s storage tanks and the American Steel and Wire Company’s central furnace, just south of the Kingsbury Run outlet. The fire burned away the wooden piers of the bridge, temporarily closing the line and forcing a rerouting of trains. A worker who was operating the torch that ignited the oil suffered minor burns. The Press announced in a headline that the “Long-Feared River Peril” had arrived, indicating that the greatest consequence of the fire was “in its practical demonstration that the river will burn.” The real fear that day was that a fire on the river would ignite Gulf’s stored gasoline. Fire Chief James E. Granger concluded that the city needed to reacquire a fireboat. A series of fireboats had plied the river before 1932, when the last had been decommissioned in an effort to save money.16

In February 1948, another major fire made the papers. The Press coverage of the fire opened with the telling phrase, “Industry in the Cuyahoga River Valley is constantly menaced by fires.” The Saturday night blaze had caused $100,000 in damage, but the three-alarm “slop oil” fire had threatened much greater damage in the flats. The Plain Dealer ran the front-page banner headline “River Oil Fire Perils Clark Bridge” and reported that more than thirty hoses had trained water on the fire before it was extinguished. By then, the fire had buckled parts of the Clark Avenue Bridge and burned through a bundle of electric cables, knocking out power in the nearby Brooklyn neighborhood. The jackknife bridge of the River Terminal Railroad was inoperable; hot-burning railroad ties caused serious damage to the bridge itself, and the spreading fire destroyed the controls. According to the Press, the economic impact of the fire included a 10 percent “reduction loss” at Republic Steel because the railroad bridge linking two parts of the steel plant had been disabled.17

That August, the skipper of the city’s fireboat, The Mavret H., told the Press that his boat had patrolled the Cuyahoga the entire previous winter “because there is not enough water in the river to freeze.” The headline on the story read, “Fire Hazards Peril Cuyahoga Shipping.” In December, the Plain Dealer reported that chemical company representatives told the city’s port and harbor commission that “all-out war on the fire-hazardous oil slicks in the Cuyahoga River calls for more heroic measures than the mere spraying of chemicals.” Instead, skimming the oil from the surface “is the most important tactic in keeping the five river-miles of docks, bridges and industries safe from slick-fed fires, the commissioners were told.”18 Through all the press coverage in the late 1940s, it remained clear that the major problem of the burning river was its threat to transportation, both of shipping on the Cuyahoga and across the many bridges that spanned the water. References to the plight of the river itself were few. A 1948 editorial in the Press that focused on fire prevention also included a reminder that “while not entirely related to fire prevention, the whole question of sewage and industrial waste in the Cuyahoga River remains unsettled.” It noted, “Raw sewage continues to be dumped in the river today,” a problem that needed to be resolved, though perhaps not as urgently as the replacement of wooden pilings with nonflammable concrete.19

Coverage of the river fires in Cleveland’s newspapers was undoubtedly influenced by local economic interests, but these fires garnered essentially no coverage outside the city. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Columbus Dispatch did not run a word about the fires of 1936 and 1948. Further, a Cleveland Press article in early 1941 suggests that fires that caused no significant damage may have escaped media attention altogether. The last paragraph of a March 17, 1941, story in the Press referred to a “recent” river fire that caused $7,500 in damage to an ore carrier. The Press files don’t contain a story about the fire itself, however. It’s likely that the paper’s editors thought to mention the fire only after the Coast Guard threatened to prosecute “industries which pollute the Cuyahoga River with refuse which may impede navigation in the Cleveland harbor,” which was the subject of the story. The article also noted that insurance underwriters and “shipping interests” had often appealed to city officials to stop the pollution. “The oil-covered Cuyahoga River long has been classed by marine fire underwriters as one of the worst fire hazards on the Great Lakes.” Tellingly, the Cuyahoga was only “one of the worst,” an indication that other ports also had difficulty controlling flammable pollutants.20

The fires in the 1930s and 1940s didn’t spark a broad movement to clean the river, but they helped spur the construction of an improved sewer system that would—for the first time—serve the industrial valley. In early 1941, the state approved a general plan for sewering the valley, which in turn required the city to conduct studies concerning waste volumes and contents so the treatment plants could be adequately enlarged and improved. Consulting engineers Havens and Emerson conducted a 1944 study of “trade wastes” in the Low Level District—the industrial flats. It reviewed existing and planned sewers, including intercepting sewers that would redirect wastes from outlets on the river to the Westerly and Southerly treatment plants. But the heart of the study was data from twenty-eight industrial establishments within the city limits that released wastes directly into the Cuyahoga, data gathered to determine how much effluent would flow to each of the city’s treatment facilities if all wastes entered sewers rather than waterways. Havens and Emerson concluded that the large steel mills, which contributed nearly 10 percent of all wastes emptied into the river, should construct their own treatment facilities, given the acidity and metal content of their discharges, both of which would have posed problems for municipal facilities. The study advised that the Sohio oil refinery, which contributed a bit more than 10 percent of the valley’s wastes, should do the same.

As Havens and Emerson conducted its study, City Council created a special committee on stream pollution to gather facts and issue policy recommendations. The committee took a wide view of the problem, noting in its 1946 report: “The damages caused by stream and lake pollution are related to public health, domestic and industrial water supply, recreation, navigation, plant and animal life, and aesthetic values.” Using data gathered by Havens and Emerson, the council committee asked three critical questions: How much and which of the Low Level wastes should be treated in city plants? What wastes, if any, should be discharged directly into the river? And which industries should treat their own wastes? The committee also determined that legal questions concerning suburban wastes, some of which flowed into the Cuyahoga directly south of the city boundary, in Cuyahoga Heights, would have to be resolved before any solutions could be implemented. The report concluded that jurisdictional uncertainties had led to a failure to act. “The overlapping and divided responsibilities of authorities lead to a do-nothing attitude or to futile and scattered efforts to ameliorate bad conditions.” In 1946, Cleveland was just beginning a very long process of determining how to clean up the river.21

Beyond the committee’s policy and administrative recommendations, the report included an expansive table containing the Havens and Emerson data from the Industrial Wastes Survey of Principal Cuyahoga Valley Industries, conducted in 1944. The data reveal the employment value of the twenty-eight major industrial firms in the flats and give a sense of the relative pollution loads the industries contributed to the river. Harshaw Chemical was a fairly small employer—325 men worked at its riverside plant—but it produced over 700,000 gallons of wastes per day. Standard Oil’s Refinery No. 1, employing over 1,000 men, created 18 million gallons of process waste every day. These wastes contained oil residues and a host of other chemicals. The steel mills were larger still, with Jones & Laughlin’s 4,000 employees creating 57 million gallons of wastewater per day, much of it cooling water, contaminated only by heat. U.S. Steel’s American Steel and Wire coke works and furnaces employed 800 men and produced more than 80 million gallons of waste per day. The largest employer, Republic Steel, with over 5,700 employees, didn’t provide complete data, so the actual waste total is unknown, but all told, industry along the river employed more than 16,000 workers and produced more than 170 million gallons of daily waste. These totals didn’t include the Aluminum Company of America and U.S. Steel’s Cuyahoga Works, both major plants just outside the city limits in Cuyahoga Heights. Even without including these plants, the Havens and Emerson data made clear that industry was more than the central feature of the flats; it was also central to the region’s economy. Just as clear: the millions of gallons of process and cooling wastes posed an incredibly difficult engineering problem, one that would take years of study—measuring, calculating—before anyone did much in the way of building the solution.22

After the damaging 1948 fire, the Chamber of Commerce, which fought most regulation, became concerned enough with the condition of the river that it gathered together key players to discuss potential solutions. In addition to lobbying the city to rehabilitate the fireboat, the group hoped to persuade Clevelanders who worked with flammable liquids not to dispose of them in a way that might take them to the river. The committee would even study whether enough oil accumulated in the river to make its reclamation profitable.23 A few months later, the River and Harbor Committee of the Chamber of Commerce, headed by Gifford F. Hood, president of the American Steel and Wire Company, announced a four-part plan to prevent further fires, involving several responsibilities to be taken on by the city: employing a fire tug or the harbormaster’s yacht to patrol the river several times a day in search of slicks; purchasing equipment to remove slicks; and analyzing the river’s water quality at “various locations.” The committee also recommended a broad public campaign to discourage the draining of flammable wastes into the river through sewers. Unsurprisingly, the chamber’s plan was modest, required essentially nothing of industry, and failed to consider the Cuyahoga as anything other than the proper place for industry to dispose of its wastes. Taking a stunningly narrow view of the problem, the chamber had focused completely on oil slicks. For the chamber, the river’s only real problem was that it caught fire from time to time.24

Cuyahoga pollution studies continued to roll out; another major one appeared in 1960, conducted by the Sewage and Industrial Wastes Unit of the Ohio Department of Health. At the same time, some progress was made in controlling wastes. The state’s 1954 survey of wastes had found that Sohio was putting 782 gallons of oil into the river every day. That revelation forced Sohio to change production procedures, which halved the amount of oil reaching the river, and by the end of the decade, Refinery No. 1 had gained a new oil-skimming facility that reduced releases even further. Sohio was a major consumer of water, and oil was a visible pollutant, the one most directly related to the river fires. In part to be a good corporate citizen, to avoid bad press, and to keep ahead of state regulations, Sohio made it company policy to reduce its oil discharges. All this was achieved by 1960, when a lengthy Plain Dealer article described the company’s efforts under the headline “Sohio Spends Millions to Cut Contamination of Streams.” Unfortunately, other industries, including the steel mills and Harshaw Chemical, were less concerned about keeping ahead of the regulatory curve.25

CLEVELAND HAS BEEN EXCEEDINGLY LAGGARD

The day after the pollution tour, two days after the fire, Mayor Stokes wrote a letter to Governor Jim Rhodes demanding that the state investigate pollution entering the Cuyahoga from outside the city limits, review its permits for industrial polluters along the river, and establish a water pollution enforcement office in the area. The next day, state engineers patrolled the river, searching for the source of the unknown pollutant that fueled the fire, and Dr. Emmett Arnold, director of the Ohio Department of Health, defended the state’s role in water pollution control. In an interview with Betty Klaric, Arnold speculated that a spill of some volatile substance might have been at fault, although no company had reported such an accident, as required by law. Sounding like a politician, Arnold asserted that the state had the power to solve the problem since it had the authority to issue daily $500 fines to companies out of compliance with their permits. To his knowledge, no such fines had ever been issued, but, he told Klaric confidently, “We can usually get these industries to be good boys.”26

The visit by Arnold and the state engineers provided an initial response to Stokes’s letter, but a week later the state issued a fuller and more aggressive rejoinder, written by John Richards, engineer-in-charge at the Sewage and Industrial Waste Unit of the Department of Health. Richards claimed that the fire had focused “critical attention on the failure of the City of Cleveland to meet its schedules for pollution abatement.” Ignoring the riverside industry, Richards claimed that “Cleveland has been exceedingly laggard” in carrying out its sewer system improvement program, citing the combined sewers, which regularly emptied untreated wastes into the river, and the breakdown of the Big Creek Interceptor, which was still discharging twenty million to thirty million gallons a day into the Cuyahoga. He was also critical of the city for discontinuing its operation of a scavenger boat, which had plied the river to remove debris that posed a fire hazard. More important, Richards claimed the city had not made the promised progress on its three treatment plants, each of which still discharged only partially treated wastes. Noting that the state had already taken action to freeze all construction in five suburbs until they moved forward with plans to treat their sewage, Richards threatened to do the same in Cleveland.27

Stokes sent Richards’s letter on to Edward Martin, director of the Clean Water Task Force, who issued a thorough reply, which he also provided to the press. Point by point, Martin refuted the state’s claims about the “laggard” city. He wrote that the city’s investigators had determined that a highly volatile material had caused the fire, not “accumulated small quantities of oil ‘drippings’ originating in Cleveland’s combined sewer system.” He noted that the city’s scavenger boat had indeed been in operation before the fire, and had been “in continuous operation” since, but because the fire began on the upstream side of the bridges—the exact spot where the river’s navigable channel ends—the boat never had the ability to remove debris from beneath the trestle. Martin also defended the city’s slow response to the Big Creek Interceptor, noting that planning for a thorough reconstruction had been delayed by state highway construction in the area—Interstate 71 and the Jennings Freeway. Most important, the city had been slow to advance work on the treatment plants because it had yet to receive matching funds from the federal or state government. The Press correctly summarized the letter with the headline “City Rejects Blame for Fire on River.”28

The city-state conflict wasn’t playing well in the press, and Governor Rhodes must have recognized that it didn’t serve his purposes to continue the back-and-forth. He instructed Richards to respond to Martin’s letter. With a much more conciliatory tone, Richards made some concessions and found some common ground. He even praised the “leadership that Cleveland is providing in endeavoring to get an interceptor sewer installed up the Cuyahoga River.” He was not willing to move any of his personnel to Cleveland—his engineers were stationed in Cuyahoga Falls, twenty miles to the south—but he attempted to close his letter on a positive note: “It is our hope that cooperative efforts can help to speed a solution to your problems.” Still, calling the polluted Cuyahoga “your problem” reasserted the city’s primary responsibility for cleaning up the river.29

The Stokes administration and the state hadn’t exactly patched up their relationship by mid-July, but at least the Big Creek Interceptor had been fixed. After pouring 1.4 billion gallons of sewage into the river over the course of fifty-six days, the interceptor was now sending its wastes to the Southerly Treatment Plant. The repairs were not over. Longer sections of the pipe would have to be replaced over the winter, but the river got a reprieve. After hundreds of thousands of dollars in unplanned expenses, the city had at least ended the immediate crisis. Broader structural problems remained.

THE RAPE OF THE CUYAHOGA

On April 28, 1970, Carl Stokes was back in Washington to support legislation before Congress, this time bills introduced by Edmund Muskie that would increase federal spending on water pollution control. Muskie, the Democratic senator from Maine, had become a champion of environmental causes in Congress. He had strong allies among the nation’s mayors, including Stokes, with whom he had a good working relationship. On this occasion, Stokes came on behalf of the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, organizations created to help press the priorities of cities in Washington. His prepared statement was filled with statistics about municipal investments in sewage infrastructure and the indebtedness of the nation’s cities. He painted a convincing picture of the need for greater state and federal help, especially in the building of sewage treatment plants. But when Muskie asked him to make any remarks he would like, Stokes opened, “Frankly, on Earth Day, just a few days ago, I was not particularly impressed with the Congressmen and Senators and mayors and legislators and members of the administration who fanned out across the nation giving speeches about the terrible threat to the continuity and longevity of this nation, because there is no question in my mind but that those same Congressmen, those same Senators and legislators and very often the mayors will be reluctant to try to face what it would cost to do something about that which they were speaking so pointedly and so brilliantly on the various podiums throughout the nation.” This was a long-winded way of saying that on Earth Day many politicians were frauds.30

Stokes was careful to describe water pollution as a national problem and the difficulty of financing pollution control as a universal one, but he noted that Cleveland was a good example of the predicament in which cities found themselves. “We in Cleveland sit on the banks of a river and lake which has become almost legendary, not only in the United States but abroad.” Stokes said that during his February 1970 trip to Europe he “got very little humor out of the fact that the Cuyahoga River was being used as an example…of how bad rivers are. It just so happened that this followed not too long after our Cuyahoga River had realized its potential of actually catching fire.” In November 1969, the British Broadcasting Corporation had labeled Cleveland the pollution capital of the world, the burning river serving as irrefutable evidence. The story of the fire had spread, and now Mayor Stokes used his troubled river as the most moving evidence in the case for increased federal spending on sewer construction.

Significant revision to federal water pollution control law would await the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, but Congress was willing to take smaller steps in the meantime. In the fall of 1970, Carl’s brother Louis Stokes, who represented part of Cleveland in Congress, introduced a bill in the House to empower the Army Corps of Engineers to “investigate, study, and undertake measures in the interests of flood control, recreation, fish and wildlife, water quality, and environmental quality” on the Cuyahoga River. In supporting the bill, passed as part of the broad Rivers and Harbors and Flood Control Act of 1970, Congressman Stokes spoke at length about the Cuyahoga, noting that it would “live in infamy as the only river in the world to be proclaimed a fire hazard.” “In June of 1969,” he added, “the river actually caught fire, causing almost $100,000 damage to two railroad bridges. A continuous and vigorous cleanup program could have prevented this shameful occurrence.” As he continued, it became clear that the problem of the river fire was not the damage to the two bridges, as the newspapers had originally suggested. Stokes resented the stigma the fire had attached to Cleveland, the negative press his city had received, even in Europe. He noted that the lower Cuyahoga had “virtually no fish life” and that recreational uses of Lake Erie had decreased because of the river. Sport fishing had diminished and swimming had been disallowed in several areas “because of the hazardous levels of bacterial contamination.” “In short,” Congressman Stokes concluded, “the rape of the Cuyahoga River has not only made it useless for any purpose other than a dumping place for sewage and industrial waste, but also has had a deleterious effect upon the ecology of one of the Great Lakes.” He spoke the evolving language of environmentalism, helping to change the meaning of the story. Louis Stokes had found a new way to talk about an old problem.31

Congressman Stokes was successful in his bid to direct federal funds toward the cleanup of the Cuyahoga, and over the next several years the Army Corps conducted the study and even made some improvements to the river. But the corps focused on flood control and largely disregarded broader water quality issues. It issued a series of interim reports on what it called simply a “Flood Control Study” of the Cuyahoga, in which it described efforts to curb upstream erosion, trying to prevent high waters from cutting banks and sending silt and debris downstream into the navigable channel. The corps did not report on sewers or industry or water quality at all, beyond the problem of silt buildup. Congressman Stokes had been moved by the language of environmentalism, by the vision of a river that could serve as more than an industrial sewer. The Army Corps retained its narrower view. Its object: keep the river in its banks and keep it clear for shipping.

DANGER IN THE HEART OF CLEVELAND

Despite the considerable political attention to the economic threat posed by the polluted river, fires on the Cuyahoga had peaked in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Another railroad trestle was destroyed in June 1949, and a spectacular oil slick fire sent clouds of heavy smoke over the lakefront in March 1951. In October 1950, a year-long survey by the fire department concluded that, with some notable exceptions, most industries were cooperating with the city’s requests to stop dumping flammable liquids into the Cuyahoga. But the river “still presents a serious fire hazard to the community,” fire officials reported. In May 1952, Press reporter Maxwell Riddle took a fireboat tour of the river with city fire officials, who pointed out two-inch-thick oil slicks. “In many places, the river was bubbling like a beer mash,” Riddle wrote. Fire officials told Riddle that the worst spot on the river was near the mouth of Kingsbury Run, the creek that ran through the Standard Oil refinery before joining the Cuyahoga at the Great Lakes Towing Company boat repair yard. “A fire here would wipe that company out in a hurry,” a lieutenant with the fire prevention bureau said.32 Six months later, it happened. The 1952 fire was large enough to warrant another front-page banner headline, “Oil Slick Fire Ruins Flats Shipyard,” in the Plain Dealer. The fire damaged the Jefferson Avenue Bridge and came perilously close to the Standard Oil refinery; at the Great Lakes Towing Company, it destroyed three tugs and the dry docks. Firemen battled the blaze from the bridge and from a fireboat, attempting to prevent the fire’s spread. A series of photos snapped for the Plain Dealer included one of a tug “enveloped in flames,” which accompanied the story on page 1—and would appear in Time magazine years later.33

Local coverage of the November 1952 fire and the subsequent crackdown on polluters was still framed in economic terms. City leaders fretted over pollution not for the river’s sake but because it put others at financial risk. Under the headline “Danger in the Heart of Cleveland,” an editorial in the Press on November 4, 1952, said the big fire underscored the cost of inaction. “Well, somebody had better get busy. The oil slick menace is bound to affect fire insurance rates. Vessel owners are not going to use the river for winter mooring if they feel that the ships will not be safe there. That would be an economic loss.”34 As with the fire four years earlier, the 1952 blaze attracted essentially no press attention outside Cleveland. The Columbus Dispatch ran part of an Associated Press story on the fire, but the Cincinnati Enquirer failed to mention it at all. The Wall Street Journal also did not refer to the fire, though three days later it reported that Cleveland had reached a long-time low in unemployment, having apparently shaken off the effects of a recently resolved steel strike. According to a Federal Reserve Bank report, the Cleveland region had topped records in both steel and automobile production, suggesting that all was well in the industrial metropolis.35

Figure 11. Firefighters fought the 1952 Cuyahoga fire from the Jefferson Avenue bridge. The fire, among the worst on the river, caused serious damage to the Great Lakes Towing Company dry docks, hidden here by the smoke. Photo by James Thomas. Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University.

In 1952, Cleveland was still obviously an industrial city. This central fact was most evident at the upper reaches of navigation on the Cuyahoga, where two massive integrated steel mills crowded along the narrow channel. To the west, the Jones & Laughlin’s Cleveland Works, formerly Otis Steel and Cleveland Furnace Company, handled limestone and ore delivered by tug-guided ships. Its sintering plant prepared the ores for two blast furnaces; coke ovens baked thousands of tons of coal, delivered by rail, using some of the thirty-eight miles of standard-gauge track that laced the property. The plant consumed oil delivered by pipeline from a nearby refinery, as well as natural gas, used in the finishing mills, where steel took on the various shapes buyers demanded. On the opposite bank of the Cuyahoga, Republic Steel’s facilities were equally impressive. Sprawling across twelve hundred acres, these mills revealed industrialism’s productive genius and offered thousands of high-paying jobs.36 The 1950 census found roughly 42 percent of the city’s workers employed in manufacturing, many of them in the industries that filled the flats and the neighborhoods around the river.

Not all of Cleveland’s industries thrived in the 1950s, but steel industry investments continued. Jones & Laughlin invested more than $300 million in its physical plant in the twenty years after World War II, and improvements kept coming—new rolling mills, pickling lines, an electric furnace shop, and a basic oxygen steelmaking shop, the last completed in 1960. Modernization of J&L’s Cleveland Works was so extensive that it even required the straightening of the river—moving the channel to create a ten-acre site for a new hot strip mill in 1962. At its annual meeting in 1964, J&L described its new production units along the Cuyahoga, assuring shareholders that market studies “indicate that Cleveland is strategically located and is in the center of the geographic area that is the primary flat-rolled steel market in the world.”37

Republic Steel also made significant investments along the Cuyahoga. In the mid-1960s, Republic built new cold strip and hot strip rolling mills, investing $200 million in its flat-rolled steel plant. In 1969, Republic’s assistant vice president, John Lowey, called the hot strip mill “the largest single capital spending project ever undertaken in this city.” Like any good politician, Carl Stokes helped celebrate investments in his city. He and Ben Stefanski were especially eager to attend a ceremony in the Republic Building, part of the Terminal Tower complex near Public Square, for an announcement that the company was set to construct a new wastewater treatment plant at its Cleveland works. The plant would treat more than 100 million gallons of water a day, approximately equal to the waste created by a city of 500,000 people—an indication of just how much water steelmaking consumed. At the brief ceremony, Republic announced that the plant would be completed by the spring of 1970. Although pollution control facilities represented a small fraction of total capital investments, they added up. By its own accounting, Republic invested more than $27 million in wastewater treatment facilities in its Cleveland plants during the 1960s, including the construction of a sanitary sewer system to stop the dumping of waste from its 8,500 employees directly into the river—a practice ended in 1965, when the new sewer connected the plants’ toilets to the Southerly Treatment Plant.38

No wonder the state was accustomed to treading lightly when it came to regulating the steel industry. The hundreds of millions of dollars invested in Cleveland plants encouraged the development of a cooperative relationship between industry and the state. Just how cooperative this relationship had become was on display in the fall of 1969, when U.S. Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel asked the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration to hold informal hearings with Cleveland’s three major steel companies: Jones & Laughlin, Republic, and U.S. Steel, whose major regional plant was south of the city in Cuyahoga Heights. In calling for the October hearing, Hickel had taken everyone by surprise—the companies, the state, and even the press. “People of America have made it abundantly clear they will no longer tolerate pollution of their environment,” Hickel said in an attempt to explain the hearings.39

Steel industry executives gathered at the Pick-Carter Hotel in downtown Cleveland on October 7 and listened to their unlikely champion, Emmett Arnold, chairman of the Ohio Water Pollution Control Board, defend the performance of the companies to Murray Stein, chief enforcement officer at the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration. Arnold set the tone for the gathering, calling it “a waste of time and money” and stating flatly that the state resented federal interference. Arnold assured Stein that Republic Steel, the first company to address the gathering, was under state permit orders and not in any violation of the law. Further, the company had agreed to the recommendations and conclusions of the Lake Erie Conference, announced in June, and had set out a schedule to make the necessary plant improvements. Arnold’s defense of the status quo was even more vigorous than that of Republic Steel, which offered a lengthy statement—essentially a long list of the company’s investments in water pollution control at its Cleveland facilities. At the end of the statement, however, John Lowey reminded Stein that Republic had invested a huge sum “so that we may continue to be competitive with the best flat-rolled steel available anywhere in the world…. This is our way of protecting the jobs of roughly 8,500 employees of this district.”40 After the statement, Republic officials refused to answer Stein’s questions. The only consequence of the hearing for Republic—and for Jones & Laughlin and U.S. Steel, which were more cooperative in that their representatives answered questions and pledged compliance in the near term—appears to have been a few days of bad press, nothing they hadn’t suffered through already, especially since the fire.

Figure 12. Republic Steel’s massive plant along the Cuyahoga, just out of the picture to the right, was among Cleveland’s most conspicuous polluters, which brought unwelcome attention and forced expensive alterations to its mills. As Republic attempted to limit the costs of regulation, it touted its investments in pollution abatement equipment, as with this photo supplied to the Cleveland Press in April 1970, a week before the first Earth Day. Cleveland Press Collection, Cleveland State University.

Republic pushed back after the hearings, using former U.S. senator from Ohio John Bricker to lobby Secretary Hickel, a fellow Republican, in the hopes of stalling the sudden federal urgency concerning water pollution control, or at least in the hopes of shifting more of the heat away from industry and toward municipal sewage and agricultural runoff. In an internal document, Republic’s assistant counsel, J. W. Mills, offered guidance to Bricker, noting that the aggressive approach to enforcement announced by Hickel “could have a divisive effect and could be detrimental politically.” According to Mills, “radical political elements,” including Students for a Democratic Society, which was helping to organize “a national teach-in on pollution for next spring” (the first Earth Day), were trying to discredit the Nixon administration by keeping pollution in the news. “These groups foster an atmosphere of emotionalism,” Mills wrote in his November 19 memo, “whereby pollution is approached on the basis of general allegations rather than scientific proof.” He hoped that the Republican administration would give greater consideration to the problems industry faced in trying to meet the new pollution standards, especially in view of the engineering difficulties and the size of the capital investments required. And Mills reminded Bricker, “Industry has been a leader in the efforts to solve water pollution problems and has often been considerably ahead of both municipalities and agriculture.”41

In addition to the work of its own lobbyists in Washington, the steel industry could count on the support of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association (formerly the Chamber of Commerce) in working against greater federal involvement in water pollution control. The association was a consistent foe of increasing environmental regulation, especially at the federal level. Earlier in the year, it gathered members that had interests along the Cuyahoga, including the three steel companies, out of concern over new dredging guidelines being developed by the Army Corps of Engineers. The mill owners and other industries dredged the river in front of their docks every year, a task that was essential to their operations. The Army Corps had proposed banning the dumping of dredge spoils in open water, the common practice, since spoils were contaminated and contributed to the pollution of Lake Erie. Sensing that this new rule would greatly increase the costs of dredging, the association sponsored a series of meetings, including a breakfast meeting in March, three months before the river fire. Those gathered discussed ways to combat the proposal, including offering the argument that “there is no technical support for the theory that lake dumping causes pollution of the water.” However, the members recognized that “a strong public relations issue compels industry to seek an alternative” to open lake dumping. The compromise that the association proposed, and Cleveland congressman Charles Vanik supported, involved free private access to dump sites created by the federal government. In Cleveland, these sites eventually included an area behind a dike adjacent to Burke Lakefront Airport and a larger site adjacent to the pier at Gordon Park, where the city was gradually filling in around scuttled ore boats. This solution eased tensions on this particular issue, but the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, and the steel companies particularly, surely recognized that they were losing control of the regulatory process. The era of easy waste disposal was at an end.42

Industry lobbied against new regulations, strict enforcement, and quickened timelines in an effort to keep control of a process that it had long had well in hand. Since entering into the permit arrangement with the Ohio Water Pollution Control Board in 1953, Republic had invested heavily in pollution control equipment, with the concern that quality was a moving target. Republic and other industrial polluters worked to manage the rising expectations of residents and regulators. As Republic’s supervisor of water management, Louis Birkel, said to the control board in May of 1968, “the magnitude of the municipal and industrial complex served by the very small Cuyahoga River is truly astounding and the quality objectives should be correspondingly related.”43 Republic’s position was always that people should have realistic goals for the Cuyahoga, and realism was clearly at the core of industry’s relationship with state regulators. That relationship had led to discrete and identifiable improvements. Even Betty Klaric had noticed, reporting in January 1969 that things were improving along the river, where the discharge of pickling acid from the three largest steel mills had dropped from 150,000 gallons in 1963 to just 1,500 gallons. The discharge of iron had taken a similarly precipitous fall. She noted that the actual effect on the quality of the river was unknown, however, and after the river burned, it became more difficult for Republic and other companies to claim progress in pollution control.44

TO SWIM OR NOT TO SWIM?

After the 1969 Cuyahoga fire, the press remained alert to the troubled river. Fire Lt. Donald Pahler remained alert, too. Commanding the Celebrezze, Pahler and his men, alternating with two other fireboat crews, patrolled the Cuyahoga, motoring upstream to the end of navigation, where the river had caught fire, and making their way back down to the river’s mouth, breaking up oil slicks and piles of debris as they traveled. This was daily work. “There’s always the possibility if they burn, they’ll spread to another boat or even to shore,” Pahler said of the oil slicks. The Plain Dealer featured Pahler in a mid-August Sunday magazine article, illustrated by the same photo the paper ran the day after the fire, the one of the Celebrezze hosing down the trestle. The article emphasized the hazards these men faced—diluting a radioactive cobalt spill from a paint plant one day, trying to suck up a 200,000-gallon gasoline spill on another. And there was the constant threat of fire. Pahler, a twenty-four-year veteran of fireboat duty, took it all in stride. “I guess the Cuyahoga is an industrial river. It’s not pleasant but I really can’t point the finger at any one person or company for its condition. Look, water beauty to some people is a fat paycheck.” Pahler hadn’t seen anything living in the river since the end of the 1951 steel strike, but to him the best the city could expect from the Cuyahoga was that it not catch fire. Anything short of flames was okay. Plain Dealer reporter Edward Whelan spent the day with Pahler and his crew out on the water, Pahler’s last tour before taking a vacation on Lake Erie near Sandusky. As Whelan wrote, “Lt. Pahler went pleasure boating far from the gas tanks, paint plants and oil slicks.”45

Like Pahler, Klaric kept up her vigilance. Even before the fire, she had become part of the expanding Cleveland environmental story. In May, the Press began a series in which her stories appeared under a new byline: Betty Betterment. In a clumsy attempt to take advantage of her growing reputation in environmental reporting, the stories featured Klaric’s own activities, including her “campaign against blight,” which began at Gordon Park. There she took up a push broom “ready to tackle the litter,” an act that was captured in a large photo. She didn’t mention the fill operation—the dumping of rubbish into the lake—but she noted that the city provided too few garbage cans. She reported that lakeside open burning, an old municipal practice, had returned to Gordon Park, but it turned out to be a temporary effort to dispose of diseased elms. Next Betty Betterment tackled unkempt lawns in Tremont, where she helped plant grass and publicized a budding neighborhood beautification effort. In an article under the headline “Young Blight Fighters Need Tools,” she described how the Cleveland: Now! program might supply volunteers with rakes, shovels, and even a truck to facilitate the cleanup of Tremont, the aging ethnic neighborhood perched over the industrial flats. And then, just like that, the series in which Klaric played the conservative role of middle-class “municipal housekeeper,” a tradition that stretched back into the 1890s, ended, apparently cut short by the fire. Betty Betterment dropped her push broom and headed down to the filthy river to join Stokes on the pollution tour.46

But Klaric wasn’t finished being part of the story. A month after the fire, she and a half dozen of her Press colleagues decided to take a midday swim at Edgewater Beach. Braving the smelly water, the seven Press staffers ran through the shallows holding hands, a moment captured for the next day’s paper. “To Swim or Not to Swim in Lake?” the Press’s headline asked. Klaric answered “yes.” A sidebar listed bacteria counts at the city’s beaches, including Edgewater and White City, both of which had seen their numbers improve dramatically after the installation of the plastic barriers and the use of chlorine. Klaric even suggested that bathers need not concern themselves too much with the numbers, since, she wrote in an unfortunate phrase, “engineers have been pooh-poohing bacterial standards.” It seems that the greatest impediment to swimming in the lake was the smell.47

Klaric stayed on the environment beat through 1972, attending government meetings, press conferences, court proceedings, and hearings. She churned out hundreds of articles before the Press folded in 1982, after which she earned a law degree and embarked on a second career. She donated her clippings file to the Cleveland Public Library, where they have since been put on microfiche. Although there were real moments of crisis and movement—the river fire and Earth Day, for example—when read all together Klaric’s articles give a sense of treading water. The same issues crop up, the same names, the same companies—not because Klaric didn’t do her job or couldn’t uncover the real story. The story simply remained remarkably consistent.

Harshaw Chemical saw its share of press over the years, some of it good, including when the company and the city announced an agreement that would prevent 300,000 pounds of calcium sulfate from reaching the river every day, instead sending it to Southerly, where it would help precipitate phosphates in the sewage. This October 1969 agreement was rare in that it pleased both business and environmental interests.48 In early 1970, Harshaw was back in the Press after Klaric traveled to San Diego to report on an American Management Association meeting. There Paul Pine, a retired Harshaw vice president, spoke at length about pollution control. Pine had headed up the Committee on Industrial Wastes for the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, and he had been an active opponent of increased federal involvement in pollution regulation. He opposed the creation of the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration (which happened in 1965) and the development of federal water quality standards, arguing, as he did in 1963, that the “proper federal role is in the field of research, consultation, advice and promotional education efforts.” He thought the state was the appropriate governmental body to oversee pollution control. Unsurprisingly, then, while in San Diego, Pine praised the relationship that industry had built with state regulators in Ohio. “I cannot say enough in appreciation of the attitude, the patience and the competence of the Ohio Water Pollution Control Board and its staff of engineers,” he said. He praised at length the working relationship between understaffed regulators and the state’s industries, which had “stepped into the gap” and conducted the necessary research on pollution control. This cooperative relationship had been a success, Pine said, noting, somewhat optimistically, that “the Cuyahoga is no longer billed by the news media as the only river in the world that is a fire hazard.” Problems remained to be solved, Pine conceded, especially controlling household dumping of oil in sewers, the use of phosphate detergents, and the littering of waterways—all issues related to individuals, not industries. Klaric’s article on this positive appraisal of water pollution control ended with Pine’s thoughts on the Stokes administration’s creation of pools in the lake at White City and Edgewater beaches: “probably the most expensive swimming water in the nation.”49

Just two days after Stokes’s October 1969 announcement of the city’s agreement with Harshaw, which came on the same day the steel companies began the hearings before the federal regulators, the Press ran an editorial, “For a Cleaner River,” in praise of federal involvement in water pollution control. After eight paragraphs on the Cuyahoga, a smaller headline added “… And Cleaner Air,” after which the Press demanded that City Council pass the new air pollution ordinance. Just below the editorials on pollution, the Press ran another, which to most readers probably seemed unconnected. “This has been a bloody week in Cleveland,” it began. Five homicides—and it was only Thursday. The city’s homicide total had reached 212—61 more than the previous year at that point. After repeating Mayor Stokes’s call for the passage of a gun control ordinance, “bottled up” in council since May, the Press asked, “How many more must die?” The juxtaposed Press editorials remind us that Cleveland was dealing with the environmental and urban crises at the same time, and both were wreaking chaos and sparking calls for greater regulatory control. While standing on the charred railroad trestle earlier that year, Stokes had talked of remaking the city, moving away from the industrial past. He knew this would not be an easy task.50