Chicago, the Great Lakes, and the Origins of Federal Urban Environmental Policy

Harold L. Platt
Loyola University of Chicago

Just after midnight on 17 January 1900, a special train pulled out of Chicago carrying a  contingent of public officials on a secret mission to Lockport, about 30 miles to the southwest along the Des Plaines and Illinois River Valleys.  They were racing to beat an injunction that was expected to be issued later that day by the United States Supreme Court.  The managers of the Sanitary District of Chicago (SDC) were headed for a dam that controlled the water level in a brand new, 30-mile ship canal and drainage channel.  Touted as the world's largest earth-moving project, the $33,000,000 waterway promised not only to solve the city's sanitation problems but also to boost its economy as the centerpiece of a grand, deep-water highway from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.  Reaching their destination before noon, they ordered the dam's "bear trap" doors lowered, sending a rush of water down the Illinois River.  The opening of the canal was so hurried that unfinished construction projects five miles downstream at Joliet were swept away in the ensuing flood, creating a sudden danger of inundating the city.  Nonetheless, SDC officials felt relief in winning their race with the Attorney General of Missouri who was heading for Washington to ask the high court to stop the operation of their project before it got started.	1
This triumph was short-lived, however.  The justices agreed to hear Missouri's claim that Chicago's sewage posed a serious public health threat to St. Louis as well as every other community downstream that drew its drinking supplies from the Mississippi River.  Seeking an injunction, Missouri's legal counsel claimed that Illinois and the SDC had no right to pollute natural streams and rivers that flowed from one state to another.  He scored an important, initial victory by convincing the national court to accept original jurisdiction in a nuisance case between two states.1	2
The strange birth of the sanitary canal in the midst of conflict was symptomatic of a widening circle of controversy that swirled around Chicago's water management politics and policies, growing in number and scope over the next forty years.  For the local population, of course, the most important question was whether the city had found an answer to its long, frustrating search for an "ultimate sink" for its human and industrial wastes.2  Hopes of ending decades of environmental degradation caused by turning the Chicago River into an open sewer had first inspired the formulation of new sanitation plans. By the mid-1880s, rapid increases in the sheer amount of filth dumped into the shallow stream were threatening the health of not just those forced by poverty to live near this toxic, industrial corridor, but the entire population.   In spite of several attempts in the past to reverse the flow of the Chicago River towards the Mississippi basin, heavy rainfalls kept washing the river's accumulated wastes into Lake Michigan, contaminating the city's drinking supplies.  In part, the drainage canal had been designed on a gigantic scale in order to forestall this health risk.	3
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