SYMHC Classics: The Cuyahoga River's Last Fires

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Over the last couple of weeks of June, the U. S. Supreme Court released a whole series of decisions that related one way or another two topics we have covered on the show, issues we've talked about on the podcast. One of the last ones was in West Virginia versus the Environmental Protection Agency, and this was a case about whether the Clean Air Act gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to set admissions caps based on the generation shifting approach, that is, shifting power generation to cleaner sources of energy than things like burning coal. The Supreme Court ruled that it did not. Leading up to and after this decision, imagery from the Coyahoga River was all over social media and in mainstream news recording because people use the Coyahoga River as an example of a world without environmental regulations. We did an episode on the Coyahoga River and the times that it caught fire. That episode came out on June, and we talked in that episode about how the river came to be a symbol in the environmental movement. So we are bringing that out as our Saturday Classic today. Yeah. I felt like every time I looked at Twitter, there was another picture of the river on fire, So here's the context on that. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we are going to talk about an event that became a really huge symbol in the environmental movement, and it's often credited with helping surpass the Clean Water Act and inspire the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Butt like a lot of the things that we talked about on the show, the actual story is way more complicated than that, and the whole thing is often portrayed in a way that has a lot of inaccuracies. In nineteen sixty nine, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire. This was not for the first time, it was, in fact, for the last time. But for the people who have heard of this fire, the image that probably came to your mind is not from this fire at all. It's from a completely different one. And as we mentioned before the episode, the image that comes to mind for me is R. E. M. Saying about Kuyahoga it has nothing to you know, and no, no historical significance other than it was a great song. I don't even know it, so maybe after we record I will go look it up. There you go. Cleveland, Ohio, sits on the shore of Lake Erie along a very twisty part of the Cuyahoga River which empties into the lake, and there are a couple of different theories about where the river's name comes from, either a Mohawk word for crooked or a Seneca name meaning place of the jaw bone, and sometimes these are also conflated and described as being a Seneca word for crooked. Yeah, I found out a lot of times before I found this thing that spelled it out completely differently. Centuries before the establishment of Cleveland, the Cuyahoga River Valley was home to several indigenous cultures, beginning with prehistoric nomadic peoples who came into the area roughly thirteen thousand years ago. Later, the River Valley's prehistoric inhabitants also included people's from the Mound building Hopewell culture, followed by what's known as the Whittlesey people. What we know of these cultures comes from the archaeological records, so we don't know their actual name Hopewell comes from Mordecai Hopewell, who owned the land that was home to a series of their mounds. Whittlesey is named for geologist and archaeologist Charles Whittlesey. Cleveland was established on part of the Connecticut Western Reserve. This was land in the Northwest Territory that was claimed Bynnecticut. Although the Seneca likely used parts of the Western Reserve as a hunting ground, the area that became Cleveland doesn't appear to have had a permanent population in the decades just before its founding. That changed when Moses Cleveland surveyed and mapped the Connecticut Land Company's Western Reserve holdings. Cleveland was the first settlement that was established after this survey, which was completed in seventeen. The population of the newly established Cleveland grew very very slowly, although the immediate area wasn't permanently inhabited. Other parts of what would become the state of Ohio were people were reluctant to move to the area out of fear of attacks by the indigenous population, and until the eighteen twenties, it was also hard to get to thanks to a lack of roads or other transportation options. Eventually, steamboats on Lake Erie Roads, railroads, and the construction of the Ohio and Erie Canalway made it more accessible. As Cleveland grew, it became an important industrial center in the United States. Standard Oil Company, which is still a recognizable name, was established by John D. Rockefeller, and it was founded there around eighteen seventy. Steel mills became a huge part of Cleveland's economy and also one of the major employers, with almost thirty percent of the city's population working in the steel industry by eighteen eighty. These industries and the city itself grew up in a time when there wasn't a lot of regulation about how to handle waste. Sewage emptied into the river, as did industrial waste and runoff. The water became so dirty that if you fell into it, you went to the hospital when you got out again. This wasn't remotely unique to Cleveland, and to a lot of people. A river that was obviously visibly filthy was a necessary trade off for all of the industry that was bringing money into the city. Cleveland's population peaked in nineteen fifty at nearly a million people, but then, as was the case for many other industrial cities in the United States, the industrial sector started to decline. Between nineteen fifty two and nineteen sixty nine, the city lost sixty thousand manufacturing jobs, and that industrial decline brought along with it a loss of jobs, an increase and abandoned industrial property along the waterfront, a higher crime rate, and a range of other social and economic issues. As the city center became increasingly run down, anyone who could afford to move to the newer suburbs did and that compounded all of these issues. Running alongside this was an increase in racism and racial tensions in Cleveland. The city had experienced the same demographic shifts as many other major cities. After the Civil War and the end of reconstruction. African Americans had moved to Cleveland and other cities from the Deep South, seeking work in factories and trying to escape oppressive Jim Crow laws. The Cleveland's white citizens had then started moving out of the neighborhoods that were becoming home to black families, in a pattern that's commonly known as white flight. Since middle class white families were moving out of neighborhoods as lower income black families moved in, the tax base for these neighborhoods dropped dramatically, which led to a corresponding decline in all of the systems and services that are funded by taxes. And even though segregation and discrimination weren't as legally codified in Ohio as they were in much of the South, they still existed. Racism and racial bias in policing and housing created a lot of the same disparities in Cleveland as Jim Crow laws did elsewhere. The Supreme Court would eventually rule that Cleveland schools were segregated by race, even though that racial segregation was not spelled out in law. All of this culminated in the Huff riots of July n sixty six. It's unclear exactly what sparked that riot, but the most commonly cited account is that white restaurant owners and the predominantly black neighborhood of Huff refused to give a black customer a glass of water, and then they hung a sign in the window that read no water for n words. A crowd of mostly black protesters gathered outside the restaurant, and after police arrived to try to disperse the crowd, the situation escalated from an angry mob throwing rocks to a six day riot that involved looting, arson in the deployment of the Ohio National Guard. Four people were actually killed in the striot, and all of them were black. This incident is often cited as contributing to the election of Carl Stokes as Cleveland's mayor in nineteen sixty seven. It was his second attempt at running for mayor, having lost in nineteen sixty five. He was the first black mayor of a major US city, and a number of historians suggests that his election was in part out of a desire for stability and unity in a city that was really struggling. Stokes platform during the election focused on jobs, housing an attempts to revitalize the city. But because this fire that we're going to talk about happened during his time in office, he wound up becoming a really prominent figure in a completely different movement. And we'll talk about that more after a sponsor break. On June at twenty, nineteen sixty nine, sparks from a train passing over one of the trestles that crossed the Cuyahoga River ignited oil that had collected on its surface, and the resulting fire was pretty visually dramatic. It reached about five stories tall. Firefighters extinguished the blaze within twenty or thirty minutes, but not before it damaged two rail trestles, one belonging to Norfolk and Western Railroad and the other to Newburg and South Shore. Estimates on how much the damage cost to repair them varies from between fifty thou and hundred thousand dollars, depending on who you ask. The city of Cleveland was not particularly traumatized by the burning river. It was not the first time that it had caught fire. The Kuyahoga had burned at least thirteen times over the previous hundred years. The most recent fire before the one in nineteen sixty nine had occurred in nineteen fifty two, and it had been far more destructive, leading to about one point three million dollars in damages, including the dry docks of the Great Lakes Towing Company and multiple tugboats. It had nearly reached the standard oil refinery, which could have been utterly catastrophic. The river's deadliest fire, which caused five deaths, had happened in nineteen twelve. To be clear, here, the Cuyahoga River is by far not the only river in the world to have ever caught fire, just as examples other Great Lakes tributaries did during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well, including the Chicago and Buffalo rivers, and this also still happens. As just one other example, India's bell under Lake has caught fire more than once this year, which is seen, and of course there are also lots of other pollutants that can be in the water and be dangerous in ways that don't involve setting on fire. By nineteen sixty nine, the city of Cleveland simultaneously shrugged off river fires and viewed them as a threat. When the river caught fire, it wasn't met with a lot of public fanfare or panic, but there was an increasing awareness of the need to clean up the river. That need, though, was driven by the risk of fire damage, not really a desire to clean the river for its own sake. Air pollution, which could easily spread to the more distant suburbs, got a lot more attention in terms of general pollution. Cleanup the flammable river was also a problem that Cleveland was actively working on. Cleveland's voters had approved a one hundred million dollar bond initiative in nineteen sixty eight such just the year before, and that was aimed at cleaning up one of the big sources of pollution, which was treated human waste. This situation was particularly bad when heavy rains would cause the sewer system to overflow, and the bond initiative was meant to upgrade existing facilities, add new sewer lines, and build a new sewage treatment plant. Ben Stefanski, who was Cleveland's Director of Public Utilities, was the driving force behind the spot and a big advocate for getting the public support, both for the initiative itself and for the taxes that would be necessary to fund it. In the days immediately after the fire, local news coverage and local discussion of what had happened was mostly focused on the damage and who should pay to repair it. Because firefighters extinguished the blaze so quickly, photographers didn't get to the scene in time to get a picture of the fire in progress. When the Cleveland Press and the Cleveland Plane Dealer went to press the next day, they did so with photos of the damaged railroad trestles, not of the fire itself, and the press ran photos without a story while the plane Dealer published to brief story as well, but all the way back on page eleven c SO to Cleveland in nineteen sixty nine, the river catching fire was not anywhere near front page news. The much worse N two fire that we mentioned a little while ago, on the other hand, had been The political back and forth that followed, which was also reported in the local media, focused mostly on the damage and the blame. Stefanski placed the blame on the state, saying that it was issuing industrial permits that allowed the dumping of industrial waste into the river. Then the state countered that it was the city's failing sewer system, the one that had been targeted to be upgraded with this bond initiative, that needed to take the blame for a lot of the oil and the water. The city then accused the state of failing to match the bond funds with funds of its own to help with this project. After a while, the local media got tired of reporting on all of this back and forth. An editorial that ran in The Plain Dealer about two weeks after the fire read quote bickering between Cleveland and the state over who bears responsibility for the condition of the Kyahoga. A stream so polluted it catches fire from time to time will not improve the quality of the filthy stream. All of this discussion was really pretty local. There was little to nothing in the national media until Time magazine published a story on river pollution in August of nineteen sixty nine. This story largely focused on the Kuyahoga River and it reference to the June nine fire, but because there were no pictures of that fire, Time used a picture from the much more serious nineteen fifty two fire. This is actually the picture of the fire that is on our website for this episode. And although there are online versions of the article that exists today with the photo clearly captioned as being from a different fire, the one that actually ran in Time in nineteen sixty nine just said quote boat caught in flaming kaya Hooga Suddenly Cleveland and the Kuyahoga River. We were in the national spotlight as evidence of the dire state of the nation's polluted waterways, not just in Ohio, but elsewhere too. More national coverage followed. In nineteen seventy, National Geographics cover announced our Ecological Crisis as the title, with pictures of the Kuyahoga not at that time on fire, being part of a fold out that accompanied the story. The river at that point was still visibly incredibly filthy, and all the retrospectives that are written today usually note correctly that the nineteen sixty nine fire was the last and not the first, and they don't usually use an out of contact context picture with no explanation that it's really from an earlier fire. In the nineteen seventies and even nineteen eighties, a lot of the articles that evoked this fire were just sloppy. They got key dates wrong, They described the fire as something that stretched over miles of river when it was really pretty contained. There were lots of other embellished details, and they made it sound like the nineteen fire was both unique and a massive disaster rather than something that was appalling. I mean, the river should not catch fire, but it was also contained, quickly extinguished, and was something that happened, as the newspaper said from time to time. With all of this inflated coverage, the ninety nine fire took on an almost mythical aspect. People started remembering and we're using the air quotes, they're seeing the fire on TV, even though no television footage existed. As you recall, we mentioned that reporters got there too late to even get photographs. Randy Newman wrote the song burn On about the fire in nineteen seventy two, and in the liner notes to a later album said he had seen this non existent TV broadcast in part because he was the first black mayor of a major US city. Carl Stokes became a very visible presence in all of this coverage, and eventually this blossoming national focus Sir Gold back around locally, with Cleveland area school children writing hundreds of letters to him asking him to clean up the city's pollution, including the quality of the air and the health of Lake Erie. Most of the letters were from suburban kids who didn't live near the river, and few of them actually mentioned the river, but they advocated in general for a cleaner Cleveland and a cleaner planet. More about how that idea spread from elementary school children onward is going to happen after we first pause and have a little sponsor break. Until nineteen sixty nine, none of the Cuyahoga's many fires had gotten much national attention. The Time magazine article and that photograph that was very dramatic are certainly part of why it's suddenly got so much more pressed. But apart from that, the nineteen nine fire happened at a time of both rowing environmental awareness and increasing social activism overall. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which outlined the dangers of the pesticide d T, had come out in nineteen sixty two, and while still somewhat controversial, the book became a hugely influential bestseller, and it was a lot of people's first introduction to the idea of environmentalisms. And that was just a few years before this river fire. We have, I feel compelled to mention, gotten a lot of requests to cover Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. We have done. Uh, but we have done. I mean that by saying we got a lot of request not that we have written an incident on her at this time. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. But just for those of you who might hear that and say, hey, that would be a great episode, we know we've gotten that. That requestment definitely covered on the list. Uh. By nineteen seventy, the federal government had heard about the Kuyahoga fire as well. Louis Stokes, brother of Mayor Karl Stokes and a member of the U. S. House of Representatives, spoke before the House in late nineteen seventy advocating adding language to a flood control bill that would allow the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to study water quality in the Cuyahoga River. He described the fact that it had even caught fire as shameful. He also made it seem like the Kuyahoga was the only flammable river. Did I don't think it's definitely not the only flammable river, But I think that was more of an oversight than a like a deliberate effort to make it focus only on Cleveland. But after this point, both Stokes Brothers and the fire itself became a huge, visible part of a campaign for federal regulations of both the environment and water quality. Outside the halls of government, the environmental movement was also continuing to grow. The First Earth Day was observed on April nineteen seventy, and as part of that First Earth Day, which had UH celebrations, slash protests, slash observances all around the country, college students at Cleveland State University marched from campus to the Cuyahoga River. The National Environmental Protection Act and e p A was signed into law on January one of nineteen seventy. This was one of the nation's first general laws to protect the environment. President Richard Nixon also announced his intention to establish an Environmental Protection Agency in the spring of nineteen seventy The agency itself was established on December two of that year, and the Clean Water Act followed in nineteen seventy two. President Nixon actually vetoed the Clean Water Act because of the cost involved, but Congress overrode his veto. This was not the nation's first law specifically related to water pollution. That, at least in the most concrete terms, would be the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of nineteen forty eight. The Clean Water Act was essentially a series of amendments to that nineteen forty eight law, among other things, that established a structure for regulating the discharging of pollutants into the water. It funded the building of a new of new suits, treatment plants and places that needed them, and it authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to implement programs for pollution control. Of course, that's not the end of the story. There have continued to be new laws and rules about pollution and water since then, with a continuing focus on weighing the cleanliness and safety of waterways with the impact to businesses to maintain it. This includes the heavily contested Waters of the United States Rule also known as the Clean Water Rule, which is currently undergoing a review process through the e p A, the Army, and the Army Corps of Engineers. In spite of the various agencies and regulations, polluted waterways and municipal water systems also continue to make headlines, including the Flint, Michigan water crisis, in which the city has not had clean water since a number of sources like to sort of well, actually, the Cuyahoga River fire of nineteen sixty nine and it's impact on environmental protection laws. They note that cities and states had begun had begun doing their own work on cleaning up rivers, lakes, and streams before the federal government ever got involved. The industrial decline in Cleveland also meant there were a lot fewer factories discharging waste into the river, which meant that the river was cleaner than it had been in decades prior. And while all of this is technically true, the Cuyahoga River was still really, really dirty in nineteen sixty nine, as were many other rivers that had been adjacent to a similar cycle of industrial rise and fall. It's also difficult for any one state or municipality to tackle the problem of water pollution on their own, since most bodies of water crossed through multiple jurisdictions. As it became a symbol for catastrophe and a need for environmental stewardship, the city of Cleveland also became a national target of embarrassment. Articles in the wake of the fire described it as a crumbling relic of a fading industri real era, with white flight leaving the city's downtown as a derelict shell. And while some of the criticism was warranted, we talked about a lot of these issues in the first act of the show, a lot of the coverage really became unnecessarily mean spirited, with Cleveland being nicknamed the Mistake on the Lake. Even after years of environmental cleanup and a downtown renewal that started in the nineteen eighties, Cleveland's reputation as a collapsing miss persisted. There is even a joke in the two thousand three series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that Cleveland is on a hell mouse. I think a lot of people who grew up after this era, like after the Nixon presidency and the creation of the E p A and all that stuff, you don't remember this specific story about Cleveland still grew up with the idea that Cleveland was some sort of rundown laughing stock without really knowing why. Yeah, and this is a lot of why. Uh. And of course, obviously industry was not the only thing that there was going on in Cleveland before any of this happened. It's just the thing that's most relevant to what we were talking about today and today the Cuyahoga River Fire of nineteen sixty nine has been somewhat reclaimed by the city of Cleveland with a pinch of self deprecating humor. Great Lakes Brewing Company opened in the Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland, not far from the river, in six and they brew a Burning River pale Ale, which launched in ninete and has labeling that gives a nod both to the infamous river fire and the Clean Water Act that followed it. Uh. And Great Lakes Brewing Company also hosts Burning river Fest, which is a festival to support the environmental organization Burning River Foundation. I think a lot of the rest of the world is gradually catching up to the idea that that Cleveland has renewed a lot of itself since nineteen sixty nine when the river caught on fire, at least I hope uh featured on The Drew Carey Show with much positive framing. Well too too. Dear dear friends of mine who grew up both in Ohio and then lived in Atlanta for many years, which is where I knew them. I've just moved back to Cleveland, and they certainly would not have moved to a place that was terrible. So I definitely hoped that. I mean, every place has legitimate criticisms, but I don't think Cleveland deserves to be the laughing stock that it was for so many decades. Yeah. I have a good friend that that moved there uh uh several years ago. That's more than several who had never been there, and was kind of like dreading it because still that shadow of of stuff that we grew up with that it was not a great place. And she had this like, this is actually a wonderful place to live, so reports only good thing. Yes, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.