GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

38THE POLITICS OF AIR POLLUTIONa good place for business” (Chamber of Commerce of Pittsburgh 1900, 60).Therefore, “because of such worries, local business interests and associationswere active in pushing for smoke control in many cities” (Dewey 2000, 25),such as New York, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Chicago (Grinder 1978; Rosen1995; Stradling 1999; Dewey 2000; Gugliotta 2003).Within this context, the case of Chicago takes on theoretical and historicalsignificance, because members of its local growth coalition undertookdirect action to effectively control the emission of smoke. It is by understandingwhy these actions failed to abate smoke from coal that we can seewhy other cities failed during this time to translate concerns about smokeinto effective smoke abatement.RAILROADS AND AIR POLLUTIONRailroads, which used largely soft coal, were a source of smoke for most majorcities. It was a particularly significant source, however, for Chicago. This isbecause the city was a primary North American railroad hub. As historianWilliam Cronon (1991) outlines, Chicago was the key entry point for Northeasternand European capital, goods, and services into the Midwest and West.In turn, the city was the central means through which raw materials from theMidwest and West found their way into Northeastern and European markets.Moreover, Chicago itself became a major center of industrial production, andthe railroads serviced this substantial manufacturing base (Mayer and Wade1969; Keating 1988).Given the significant railroad traffic that Chicago experienced, it was alogical place where a political effort would emerge to control the smoke generatedby this traffic. This is for two reasons. First, and most obviously, withsuch a high number of railroad locomotives moving into and out of the area,these locomotives would produce a large amount of smoke. Second, with somany railroad firms invested in the Chicago area, if the city did imposeexpensive smoke abatement measures, it might be too costly for these firmsto move out of the area despite the costs associated with these measures. Asone president of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroad put it, “Railroadsare fixtures; they cannot be taken up and carried away” (as quoted inCronon 1991, 83).Therefore, shortly after the railroads in New York City were electrified,and the Anti-Smoke League, a woman’s organization, began a campaignprotesting the smoke emitted by the Illinois Central lines running throughthe upscale lake front and Grant park areas (Stradling and Tarr 1999, 693),the Chicago Association of Commerce (CAC) conducted a study of thesmoke generated by the railroads in the area. The CAC was a local organization,composed, as Stradling (1999, 126) explains, of “many of the city’s mostimportant businessmen.” Given its composition and work on numerous pol-