Ted Moore

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Ted Moore | Democratizing the Air: The Salt Lake Women's Chamber of Commerce and Air Pollution, 1936–1945 | Environmental History, 12.1 | The History Cooperative

democratizing the air: the SALT LAKE WOMEN'S CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND AIR POLLUTION, 1936–1945

ABSTRACT

This essay examines challenges by the Salt Lake Women's Chamber of Commerce of definitions of conservation, democracy, and the role of the city through the group's efforts to enact air pollution reforms from 1936 to 1945—a time and a place that generally are seen as less than willing to offer women a significant public voice. The Women's Chamber served as a transitional group between pre- and postwar conservationism and environmentalism, suggesting that this period deserves more scholarly study. The case study also advances the links between urban and environmental history.

DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, various citizens' groups in Salt Lake City tried to link the city's air pollution problems to the failures of its economic policies. Their reform efforts challenged the emphasis on economics and efficiency over health and aesthetics that had shaped previous city government policy.¹ The group that spearheaded those efforts was an almost exclusively middle-class women's organization that called itself the Salt Lake Women's Chamber of Commerce. Its reform efforts began the process of reorienting ideas about conservation in a manner that started to resemble an environmentalist ethos that prioritized health, aesthetics, clean air, protection of the environment from pollution, and a decentralized economy over the ideology of efficiency and economic growth—an ideology that had characterized much of the mentality of people in Salt Lake up to the 1930s.²	1
Those involved in the Women's Chamber of Commerce and other reform groups hoped that if they could shift the city's attitudes further along the spectrum toward environmentalism, they also, in effect, would wrest the city's power base away from outside interests like the railroads and mining companies that they thought controlled city and state politics. Members in the organization came to believe that while residents labored under a thick pall of smoke that diminished their health, damaged their property, and left them financially impoverished, mining and railroad entities enjoyed the economic fruits of a polluted Salt Lake sky and controlled policies that perpetuated air pollution. Members of the Women's Chamber argued that by using a Utah-based company to purify the primary source of the smoke—bituminous coal—and by using Utah-owned companies to process and market the coal by-products, the local economy would become more diversified and locally controlled, while the cleaner air would serve as the basis for a broader attempt to beautify the city. In other words, they believed that more local control over energy equaled less political and economic power for outside interests. They also hoped to reorient attitudes about the environment and urban growth toward what they believed the city's residents wanted—clean air, open spaces, and greater local autonomy.	2
The conventional historiography of environmentalism has tended to split into two periods, the Progressive Era and post-World War II. Part of this is a result of the seminal study done by Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency. Hays's work demonstrates how conservation became imbedded in the structure of the federal government and shaped its policies from the first decade of the twentieth century into the 1950s.³ Historians documenting urban environmentalism have tended to follow Hays's lead, concentrating primarily on the periods up to the end of World War I and after World War II, largely ignoring the interwar period and accepting the idea that conservationism left little if any room for environmentalist policies. As a result, the efforts and contributions of reformers—especially women—regarding urban environmental reforms during the interwar years have been largely ignored or interpreted within a conservationist framework. This trend has slowly begun to change with some more recent studies, such as those done by Joel Tarr, Sherie Mershon, Robyn Muncy, Angela Gugliotta, and Maureen Flanagan.⁴	. . .

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