Book Review

Smokestacks and Progressives is the first book-length study of smoke pollution in the United States, and it is a welcome addition to urban environmental history. David Stradling covers some familiar ground with this subject, but the overall impact of the book helps to emphasize the impact of industrialization on a burgeoning urban culture and the growing sensitivity to environmental concerns in a society that had difficulty confronting pollution as a threat to its quality of life. For those intent on cleaning up the smoky skies of industrial cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the central dilemma was "how to use the troublesome reality of smoke to destroy the image of smoke as a sign of progress without threatening the idea of progress itself." This observation could be applied to myriad environmental problems in American society, where pollution abatement was often equated with the loss of jobs, increased governmental regulation of business, and even overt pessimism about the state of societal affairs.

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