Business Leadership and Environmental Reform in Late 19th Century U.S.
Cities

Referent/in: Christine Meisner Rosen, Berkeley

My presentation is intended to initiate a conversion about an issue that I am grappling with in the book I am writing on the history of the American response to industrial pollution.  My book will be a big and I hope important one.  It examines the history of American pollution beliefs, the history of US pollution regulation, the development of legal doctrines relating to industrial pollution, and the development of industrial pollution abatement technologies between 1840 and about 1930 – and it covers industry’s air and water pollution. It will put a lot of today’s problems into historical perspective.

One of my most unexpected and, I think, intriguing and important findings is that groups of reform minded businessmen repeatedly played important roles in movements to regulate industrial pollution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  We all know how opposed to pollution regulation businessmen in general are today – especially in the U.S.   This was true back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well, as my book will show.  But, what I am also finding is that reform minded businessmen were also among the leaders of movements to regulate industrial pollution and to develop and institute other solutions to it, such as abatement technologies and sewerage and sewage treatment systems.