Whatever happened to industrial waste?: Reform, compromise, and science in nineteenth century southern New England.

In 1886 James Olcott in a speech before the Agricultural Board of Connecticut called on his audience and the citizens of Connecticut to "agitate, agitate" in order to "cleanse" the state of the "social evil" of the pollution "sewage from families and factories." He urged them to stop the "raising of a polluted stream upon any body at the will of ignorant or reckless capitalists." Although Olcott admitted to his audience that there were powerful interests opposed to "anti-stream pollution," he also reminded them that "the mightiest vested interest in the land [slave powers] ... could not prevail against [agitation of the common people]."(1)

Olcott was not alone in calling for cleaning the waters of New England of wastes from both families and factories in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Holding to a view that health was related to the quality of the environment, these early water pollution reformers, mostly doctors and scientists from New England's leading families, led the movement for clean water and air. Rallying sentiment around the slogans of "purity" and "anti-stream pollution" these activists pushed for the creation of boards of health and associations for public health. Then as members or commissioners of those boards and associations, they called on the citizens to clean their states' streams and rivers of industrial and sewage pollution which they believed also led to air pollution.

Although these nineteenth-century pollution reformers focused on both industrial and sewage wastes, by the early years of the twentieth-century specialists in the field of water pollution concentrated almost exclusively on bacterial hazards and largely ignored the influence of industrial wastes.(2)

The shift of concern from a combination of industrial waste and sewage waste to a focus primarily on sewage was linked to a transition in science from an environmental theory of disease to a germ theory of disease. It also involved the eclipse of the scientific generalists, particularly doctors, by the scientific specialists, particularly laboratory trained biologists and chemists. If public health advocates abandoned their concern for industrial wastes in the early twentieth century for a concern over sewage, they had reason for such a shift. Population concentrations and municipal water systems were inundating the nation's water system with sewage waste and were a cause of significant morbidity and mortality. But this link between policy and science did not occur in a neat, neutral fashion. It occurred within a political context where there were real political and economic actors with interests and constituents. It is only through understanding that context that a full picture develops of why by the early years of the twentieth century public health advocates abandoned a concern over industrial wastes. This history will also show that the intersection of science and policy in environmental affairs took place well before the post-World War II environmental movement.(3)

Unlike the earlier health reformers who saw unhealthy conditions as unnatural, contrary to God's design, and a product of ignorance and poor habits, the post-civil war "water purity" reformers saw public health reform in terms of political struggle.(4) Their efforts, particularly those for water cleaned of industrial wastes, involved the post-war reformers in a direct confrontation with industrial capitalists.

Reformers came to pollution reform from a background of leadership and social involvement. They claimed authority for their concern over pollution both because of their background and because of their scientific or intellectual expertise. The Civil War experience gave these post-war reformers an increased appreciation of the state as an agent for change.(5) They assumed the state would listen to them because of their knowledge and because of their social position as privileged Yankees. In his first address before the Massachusetts Board of Health, Henry Bowditch, from one of Boston's leading families, argued that the Board of Health should be "a special function of state authority which until the days of scientific investigation has been left almost unperformed."(6)

But, of course, the reformers were not the only New Englanders with position and knowledge. In confronting industrial capital, the reformers of the post-war period went up against powerful forces and individuals who saw in the workings of industrial capitalism not only their own financial success, but also progress and prosperity for the whole community. These individuals also had access to knowledge and science. The conflict which emerged involved not only a conflict between visions of progress and privilege, it also involved concepts of science and expertise.(7)

The early pollution reformers were doctors, lawyers and amateur statisticians. They were scientific generalists who understood science in holistic, ecological terms. They were informed by a theory of disease (anti-contagionism) which was environmental. While these reformers were struggling to clean the air and water of New England, change was also occurring within the community of science. New advances in scientific theory, method, and technologies as well as changes in the nature of scientific education were giving rise to a new generation of scientific specialists. Because the reformers were partly claiming privilege for their reforms on grounds of their scientific expertise, divisions within the scientific community also spilled over into the social and political world, and that was a world of conflict.

The business and industrial leaders who opposed the pollution reformers also understood the importance of the state, but for them the state was an instrument to protect their interests.(8) They also understood science. The conflict that emerged between the water reformers and their concern about the health of the community, and the industrialists and their concern for profits and industrial progress put the state and the community in a position of chosing between two opposing policies. The science of the specialist provided a way of resolving that conflict. The specialist seemingly offered a new scientific or technological method for bringing the community both the prosperity and progress of industrial capitalism and the health that modern science could offer.

Pollution and the Reformers

Pollution reformers like James Olcott made a case for their concern. As doctors and statisticians these reformers brought the science of observation and statistical relations to the problem of public health. They pointed to brooks, streams, and rivers which had previously been clean and full of fish yet were by the 1870s and 1880s darkened by industrial wastes, smelled of human sewage, and contained few live fish.(9) They used as evidence the taste of the water, the smell of the streams, and the visible appearance of filth and visible absence of fish. They pointed to dying urban residents and sick farm animals. They were doctors, like Henry Bowditch and Robert Davis, who knew the look of a sick patient, statisticians, like Lemuel Shattuck, who knew about relationships and numbers, and farmers, like James Olcott, who knew the look of sick animals. These reformers argued that filthy rivers gave rise to an unhealthy environment which endangered the health of those who drank the water or breathed in the foul smelling air. Typical of the industrial wastes dumped into the streams were those of the Stanley Iron Works of New Britain, Connecticut. "Wastes from the 'pickling vats' of sulfuric acid used to clean the iron, several times during the day the contents are dumped into the stream. Whitening and cleaning also results in dumps of cream of tarter, caustic soda, and waste varnish, and oils and grease. These are dumped into the streams."(10) Paper mills used acids, caustic alkali, and bleaches (particularly lime chloride) in their processing activity which were dumped into nearby streams along with the biproducts of the cleaning process, hydrate of alumina and ammonia. Sulfuric acid, muriatic acid, lime arsenated soda, and dyes were used by textile companies and dumped into the waterways. The woolen mills, particularly in the washing of the wool, used soda ash, calcium chloride, and phosphates, and produced massive amounts of organic wastes. Tanneries washed sulpho naphthol (used as a preservative to store the hides in shipping), sulphide of arsenic and lime as well as organic fats, dyes and other chemicals into the waters of New England.(11)

The reformers, arguing from the theory of anti-contagionism - the environmental theory of disease causation - claimed that the problem of pollution was not merely an aesthetic issue but also involved the health of the citizens of the state, the economic wellbeing of the state, and its political stability. The Connecticut legislature was told, for example, that crime decreased when sanitary conditions were provided. "We are thus led to the connection between sanitary science and political economy." The Board of Health argued that not only did pollution give rise to "deadly miasmas" that "contaminate the air," and cause sickness, but it claimed that miasmas also led to the riots in Pittsburgh in 1877. Pollution, these theorists argued, divided social classes from their natural "kindly sympathy and duly recognized dependence between the rich and poor." Although these reformers admitted that "communism does not originate from unsanitary conditions ... yet it finds its recruits and most reckless supporters where sanitary reform is most needed."(12) Earlier Connecticut citizens were reminded that "a pernicious environment in effect roots up the nobler and best instincts of our nature. It brutalizes and dwarfs the intellect, corrupts the morals, breeds intemperance and sensuality, and is ever recruiting the ranks of the vile and the dangerous."(13)

Legislatures felt the pressure of these public health advocates and responded by creating state boards of health empowered to investigate the cause of the problems of pollution and of public health generally.(14) Quickly these boards of health began to focus on the issue of water pollution, both sewage and industrial waste. The early reformers were empiricists and their observations showed clear links between pollution and decline in human health. Although they were also concerned with air pollution, it was water pollution which became the focus of most of their attention. Scientific observation demonstrated the negative impact of industrial wastes and human sewage on water systems, and the negative impact of polluted water on health. Where once there had been clear, clean smelling rivers and streams filled with fish, the introduction of industrial wastes and sewage led to blacked, smelly waters with few live fish. Indeed pollution reformers of the 1870s and 1880s tested water quality by walking downstream from a fouling source tasting the water and looking for swimming minnows.(15) Living areas near these polluted waters also had significantly higher levels of epidemic diseases which were discernable by looking at mortality statistics.

Concern over public health was not new to nineteenth-century Americans. Epidemics of small pox, yellow fever, typhoid, and chorea had already alerted Americans of the dangers of collective living.(16) In 1850 the state of Massachusetts set up a special commission to study the sanitary conditions of the state. Under the direction of Lemuel Shattuck, a statistician and legislator, the commission gathered together the mortality figures of the state in a Report of the Sanitary Commission. Shattuck interpreted the statistics that he compiled as showing the impact of the environment on disease, not only on individual homes but whole communities. The health of the community required that the community clean up the sources of poisonous air.(17)

In 1869 the state of Massachusetts ordered its newly created State Board of Health to study the influences of intoxicating beverages, to investigate and advise on sanitary matters, and make annual reports to the state on the health of the citizens, and concern itself with public health.(18) Although the legislature did not have a clear public health agenda when it passed the legislation which created the nation's first State Board of Public Health (initially the Board had little explicit power), the men who came to dominate the Board in its first years of existence did. In its first report the Board made clear that it saw its role as an active agent of state action. "We believe that all citizens have an inherent right to the enjoyment of pure and uncontaminated air, water and soil, that this right should be regarded as belonging to the whole community; and that no one should be allowed to trespass upon it by his carelessness, or his avarice, or even by his ignorance."(19)

The chairman and leading force behind the Massachusetts Board was Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch. The secretary was another reform-minded doctor, George Derby. The other experienced medical person on the Board, Dr. Robert Davis, was also an activist reformer.(20) Bowditch, Davis and Derby had been involved in the fight against slavery (as was another person on the board, the civil engineer, John Hoadley). Bowditch came from a highly successful Boston family, was educated (as was Davis) at Harvard and went off to France for further medical studies. In France Bowditch fell in with radical reformers and intellectuals. He returned to America not only an accomplished doctor, but an egalitarian reformer.(21)

In 1862 Bowditch argued that medicine was to serve people. That year he delivered a widely publicized speech before the Massachusetts Medical Society where he called for a state board of health.(22) Seven years later, when Massachusetts created its Board of Health, Bowditch, as one of the state's leading doctors as well as the son of a distinguished family and an early advocate of such a board, was appointed to the Board and became its chair.

Bowditch and Derby saw the Board as a vehicle for sanitary reform, and they quickly moved the Board in that direction. In his initial address Bowditch noted that the legislature initially may have "unconsciously, perhaps on the part of many of its members, proposed a system that may be made by us capable of good to the citizens in all future time."(23)

In 1870 Bowditch went to England to study what was being done in London to curb the worst problems of slums and sanitary conditions.(24) Coming back from England Bowditch urged the Massachusetts Board to take a broad reformist-activist position.(25)

By agitation and pressure the medical reformers on the Board were able to broaden their power, not only issuing reports on the sanitary conditions of the state, but also making suggestions for reform. For several years after its establishment, the Board argued in its yearly reports that industrial and sewage pollution of the state's streams and rivers endangered the health of the citizens of the state. The Board contended that pollutions were of importance to the inhabitants of Massachusetts because "they reach[ed] to the very foundations of the national health and prosperity" of the state. "Some of the brooks which were but recently pure and undefiled are now polluted so that neither man nor beast will freely drink of them; and this change is insidiously taking place from year to year."(26) And the Board argued that it was not only drinking of impure water which was a problem. Breathing impure air contaminated by polluted water also had "pernicious effects."(27)

In 1878 the Board pushed for legislative action to clean up the State's rivers and streams. At the same time the Board articulated a role for the state as an instrument of popular will on behalf of the common good. The Board of Health urged in a 1874 report that in the state's creation of the Board, and in "endowing it with ample authority, it [the state] has taken large and very wise steps.... All these show that the government recognizes its interest in, and responsibility for, the health and working power of the people, and its determination to lend its authority for their promotion."(28) Under the proposed law "no individual or corporation, and no authority of any city or town, or public institution, shall discharge, or cause to be discharged ... into any stream or public pond ... any solid refuse ... or any polluting substance so as either singly or in combination with other similar acts ... to interfere with its volume or flow or pollute its waters." The suggested act would prohibit a stream from being "converted into a sewer in any city or town." The act specifically prohibited the dumping of polluted matter into a pond or stream, including the discharge of sewage or refuse containing human excrement and required that discharge from manufacturing or other establishments be "cleansed or purified." The act allowed present polluters to continue until a "reasonable length of time to comply with the provisions of ... [the] act." Cities and towns with sewers would allow the sewage of manufactories "to be discharged through public sewers: provided such sewage contain no poisonous chemicals ... or any matter injurious to the public health." The act also would have created a Rivers' Pollution Commission to monitor water pollution, approve or disapprove of sewage plans, issue cease and desist orders in cases of public nuisances, and provide permission for action.(29)

Despite resistance by manufacturers the legislature followed the board's recommendation and passed "An Act Relative to the Pollution of Rivers, Streams and Ponds" (Acts and Resolves 1878 183). Although the act gave the board sweeping power, reflecting the interests of the largest of the State's manufacturing interests, it exempted the three rivers of the state which had the greatest concentration of industrial use, the Merrimack, the Concord, and the Connecticut, and allowed for some corporations already polluting by either prescription or legislative grant to continue. Despite these significant compromises with the industrial water users, practical enforcement of the bill against industrial polluters led to a major political battle and the reorganization of the State Board of Health.(30)

In 1879, one year after Bowditch's victory in getting the water pollution bill passed the governor, under pressure from manufacturers amid considerable political maneuvering, merged the State Board of Health with the Board of Lunacy and Charity. Bowditch was removed as chair of the newly combined board. Charles Francis Donnelly, a Harvard educated Irish immigrant, who came to this country as a child, assumed the chair. Donnelly was a lawyer with close family connections to textile manufacturing. His family ties and personal disposition made him sympathetic to the concerns of the manufacturers that the pollution bill was damaging their interests.(31) Bowditch believed that Donnelly sought the position as head of the new board specifically in order to protect his manufacturing interests from the regulations against industrial pollution in the new bill. Bowditch quoted Donnelly as saying, "you do not approve that I allow myself to be chosen chairman of this board with the intention of permitting nothing to be done by it on the pollution of streams."(32)

The next decade saw considerable lobbying by manufacturers to prevent enforcement of the provisions against industrial pollution, while health officials and reformers accused the manufacturers of undermining public health. Bowditch claimed that under Donnelly the Board failed to address pollution. "I get mad every time I go to a meeting and have about made up my mind to resign."(33)

Bowditch and his fellow reformers did more than get mad. In opposing the industrialists they confronted not only their political opponents, but also their neighbors and relatives, which made mobilizing support more difficult when they tried to use their position as leaders of the community. Bowditch, after all, knew the Governor personally. Unfortunately, for him, those he attacked also had position in the community a friend in the governor's chair, and influence in the legislature.(34)

Public health activists' hostility to Donnelly as well as a conflict between Donnelly and the new Governor, Benjamin Butler, led Butler to appoint the public health reformer, Henry Walcott of the American Public Health Association, to the Health Committee of the merged board and to remove Donnelly as chair.(35) The Health Committee of the new Board and particularly Walcott pressed for action on pollution. Manufacturers, on the other hand, accused the Board of hostility to their interests and the economic development of the state.(36) In 1882 one manufacturer argued before the state legislature that pollution enforcement would compel the manufacturing interests to move out of the state, leaving behind "villagers which depend upon the mills for their prosperity."(37)

The conflict pitted the medical and scientific community against the manufacturing interests. The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal editorialized that the manufacturing interests of the state were corrupting politics to get their way, leaving the poor to "drink bad rum," because the manufacturers continued to pollute public waters supplies, and through their "control over politics" prevented public action to protect drinking water.(38) Bowditch argued that the Board had fallen "into the hands of self-seeking capitalists who were afraid of their millstreams being cleaned up from the [pollution] poured into them by the mills owed by evil capitalists."(39) In 1885, because of manufacturers' hostility to Walcott's position on pollution, he was not reappointed to the board by Governor Robinson, and Donnelly was once again named chair.(40) Bowditch went to the Governor to beg him not to capitulate to the industrialists in removing Walcott, "the only person on the Board working honestly for sanitary ideas."(41)

Meanwhile, Walcott, a scientist with a reputation of honesty and integrity, fought his removal. He denounced the corrupt influence of the manufacturers on the Board and called for a new and even more rigorous act to protect water purity. The Boston Globe characterized Walcott's cause as a campaign for "purity over impurity," as public support for the honest scientist rose.(42) The Boston Herald, realizing the growing public interest in the matter, assigned a reporter to do a series of stories on it. In response to inquiries by the Herald reporter, Donnelly, said that public health shouldn't involve government action. "The people can see when they are diseased. The Physician examines and experiments that is all. It is contrary to American ideas for the state to take care of the health of the people. By doing so self reliance is taken away. The average citizen needs no state board."(43)

Public support for the "purity" campaign and hostility to Donnelly were so intense that Robinson relented. The Board of Health was reestablished as an independent entity "with enlarged powers and duties," and in 1886 a new and stronger water purity act was passed.(44) Walcott as well as two other doctors were appointed to the Board, but to placate the manufacturers, Governor Robinson added two manufacturers and Hiram Mills, an engineer and consultant to manufacturers.

The New Scientific Specialists and the Germ Theory 

Once on the Board, Hiram Mills became the head of the committee on water supply and sewage. He used his position to focus attention on the problems of sewage treatment and the public health risk of typhoid and other sewage borne diseases.(45) In doing so he also de-emphasized concern over industrial wastes. Mills was not only a civil engineer and a consultant to manufacturers, he was the chief engineer for the powerful Essex Company of Lawrence. Although he was a champion of water power, he was concerned about the relationship with urban deaths, particularly due to typhoid and water pollution. He also believed that technology could solve this problem without inhibiting the activities of the manufacturers.

Shattuck, Bowditch and Walcott had used general empirical science as the basis for their medical and statistical data to argue for cleaning up industrial wastes and protecting the general environment. Mills, on the other hand, had the support of biological scientists, scientific experimenters as well as engineers in prioritizing sewage and sewage waste treatment. Mills was successful in focusing concern around sewage treatment and away from industrial wastes partly because he claimed to be an honest scientist, partly because he provided a solution to the problem of sewage waste, partly because in contrast to the earlier agitation of Bowditch and Walcott, his solution did not involve a seemingly unresolvable conflict between the interests of the manufacturers and the interests of public health, and partly because his concern was linked to the newly emerging acceptance of the germ theory of disease causation.

While the medical reformers in this country were mustering their statistical evidence that the environment, particularly foul miasmas, caused disease, European scientists began suggesting another source of disease, invisible germs. In the 1870s and 1880s work by the Germans, J. Henle, and Robert Koch, the Englishman Joseph Lister and the Frenchman Louis Pasteur began to gain some attention in the United States.(46) Despite this attention, activists in the public health field remained skeptical. In 1877 the Massachusetts Board of Health, although admitting that there might be validity in the germ theory, "whatever theory of bacteria and germs proves true," continued to argue that "certain diseases, especially cholera and typhoid fever may arise de novo under certain conditions of filth."(47) Public health officials in Connecticut questioned the validity of the germ theory into the early 1880s. They were willing to entertain the theory, but only as a contributing factor, "the atmospheric theory, indeed, should have due consideration." "In this report the germ theory and its terms will be freely used, it is however tentatively held subject to revision.... The germ theory is not yet proven, and while doubtless true in many points, require further study and proof before it ranks among accepted facts."(48)

By the mid-1880s the germ theory had won the battle of disease causation.(49) For the scientists struggling with the issue of water pollution the germ theory provided an explanatory paradigm which explained why disease tended to break out in certain areas. It was not foul smelling water or poisonous vapors that caused disease, rather it was invisible germs passed into the water system because of sewage dumping and were taken in by drinkers further down stream that caused the spread of the disease. Advances in laboratory science, with researchers trained in graduate programs to use the latest technological instruments and chemical analysis, opened the door for new scientific specialists to dominate the field of disease causation and transmission.

Increasingly the generalists on state Boards of Health stopped going out and looking at fouled water, but instead examined the reports of professors such as Ellen Swallow and William Sedgwick at MIT, for information to determine their action. For the Massachusetts Board of Health, the germ theory, new technology, and the expertise of the new laboratory scientists, led to the question of sewage treatment. In 1887 the state ordered the Board to do a thorough scientific study of the state's water and sewage. This time the state did not have Dr. Charles Folson author the report as it had in 1877, but rather directed Ellen Swallow, a laboratory-trained biologist from MIT, to lead the project. Swallow developed the world's first water purity tables and established water quality standards for the state. Using Swallow's data, Board member Hiram Mills and another MIT professor, William Sedgwick, a PhD. biologist from Johns Hopkins, set up an experimental sewage waste treatment station in Lawrence in 1888.(50) The experimental station at Lawrence was a great success. While the English experiments in filtration gained limited results, the Lawrence station was able to prove, using the methods devised by Swallow and implemented by Sedgwick, that bacteria and other germs could be eliminated by filtration through sand and exposure to air and sunlight.(51) Science and technology found a solution to the problem of sewage pollution and the passage of germs into the water supply of the state. The success of the Lawrence station was quickly heralded by public health reformers. Health reform shifted from doctors and reform advocates to scientists, chemists and biologists, like Swallow and Sedgwick, working in laboratories and engineers, like Mills, working at experimental stations.(52) Members of the newly established state boards of health picked up on the work of the New England boards, and established laboratories to look for bacteria in municipal water supplies.(53) In Connecticut towns were advised to quickly adopt the Lawrence station's model system. Pressure to do so was increased by successful lawsuits of down river residents against pollution being dumped into water they used for animals and drinking.(54)

If the germ theory, modern science and technology had solved the problem of the spreading of disease to down river drinkers, the germ theory also solved the problem of manufacturers of industrial pollutants. While Bowditch and Walcott were complaining of industrial pollution in the 1870s and early 1880s, the germ theory now provided manufacturers with a new way to present industrial wastes. Germ theory redefined what was pollution and what was not. Indeed what Bowditch and Walcott saw as industrial pollution fouling the state's waters, others, using the germ theory, saw as cleansing agents killing germs. If rivers and streams full of fish were a sign of health for the earlier reformers, rivers and streams free of fish were a sign of cleaned waters for those opposed to clearing industrial wastes.

Industrial wastes, it was argued, helped reduce sewage pollution by killing germs. In Connecticut, the state Board argued that "inorganic chemicals [industrial pollutants] [are] harmless, or positively beneficial in counteracting the organic matter."(55) In 1888 the city of New Britain claimed that the industrial discharges of acids and limes its manufacturers were dumping into the local streams were counteracting the sewage in the stream. Although the State Board of Health remained skeptical of the claim they did allow that sewage pollution was not ended by the refuse; it might "be modified by it."(56)

Earlier environmentalist health reformers pointed to fish as a sign of water purity. Fish, ironically, now became suspect, as scientists showed fish living in water also supporting germs. "While the impurity of water may in a measure be indicated by its poisonous action on fishes, and while water sufficiently contaminated to prevent the life of fish in it is unquestionably too much polluted for any domestic purposes, it does not necessarily follow that such contaminated steams must be dangerously polluted. Fish will live in concentrated fresh sewage, but will die when the water contains one hundred thousands part of blue vitriol."(57)

The success of the Lawrence station encouraged public health officials to lobby for sewage treatment centers, and these centers were slowly built,(58) although a massive construction campaign of sewage treatment center building did not materialize.(59) Science and technology did offer solutions to the problems of nineteenth-century pollution. Drinking water, rivers and streams were cleaned up, although over a much longer period of time than imagined by those early reformers of the late 1860s and 1870s. But that cleaning took a particular form, and that form was affected by the intersection of science and the struggle over reform. The germ theory did not inevitably lead to the disappearance of industrial wastes from the discourse of water reform at the end of the nineteenth century. Industrial wastes were clearly polluting water systems. Although the science of toxicology was still in its infancy the scientific community was not unaware of the problems of industrial wastes.(60) In its 1896 report the Massachusetts Board of Health discussed not only the problems of industrial wastes ("waste liquors or sewage from those manufacturing industries in the State which pollute or threaten to pollute our rivers and ponds"), but also possible solutions to the problems. The station in Lawrence experimented with different methods of removing industrial wastes. Yet despite this concern the "problem of successful and economical disposal of this sewage ... [remained]."(61) In 1902 M.O. Leighton of the Geological Survey delivered a paper to the APHA calling for the organization to look into "manufacturing wastes." The APHA responded by appointing a committee which reported that the task was immense, and the committee disappeared for lack of interest.(62)

For the reformers of the 1870s and 1880s, the science of observation linked industrial and sewage pollution (both clearly observable) to concerns for public health. The struggle to clean up those rivers and streams led to an unresolvable conflict, between economic development and public health.(63) Earle Phelps in his report for the American Public Health Association noted that "experience has demonstrated that.... If there are no feasible methods for the prevention of a nuisance that nuisance will in general be tolerated, even though it be a serious one, instead of the industry being destroyed."(64)

The very jockeying of personnel on the Massachusetts Board of Public Health - Bowditch off, Donnelly on, Donnelly off, Walcott on, Walcott off, Walcott on - reflects the failure of either position (economic development or public health) to dominate public politics or discourse. The industrialists argued convincingly that forcing them to stop polluting would harm the economic welfare of the state, while the public health reformers argued just as convincingly that not to clean up the pollution would harm public health. In contrast to the Pennsylvania courts where Christine Rosen found that the industrialists were able to have their way until new technologies opened up the possibility of abatement, in New England neither position could win out over the other. The industrialists spoke for progress and jobs, while the reformers spoke for purity, integrity, and science.(65) The germ theory provided a solution for this conflict by focusing public concern on sewage.(66) This permitted pollution itself to be redefined as only sewage while suggesting the possibility that industrial wastes were not pollution but cleaning agents. It defined the measure of clean not in terms of life (fish), but water free of germs. On the other hand science and technology did provide a real victory for public health reformers. And in refocusing the debate of pollution on sewage, the battle for reform was shifted solely into the public arena, to municipal governments, which although powerful and resistant to reform turned out to be far more manageable than private corporations.(67)

In many ways the reforms of these nineteenth-century agitators were successful. The combination of science and legislative action led to first the construction of sewage lines, then the building of experimental stations and laboratories to investigate methods of dealing with sewage wastes, water filtration systems, and ultimately sewage treatment stations. Although it took decades of further agitation and legal action before most communities stopped dumping raw (untreated) sewage into the closest available water way (not until 1959 did Pittsburgh and the surrounding cities cease dumping raw sewage into the nearest rivers), the beginning was clearly chartered by these early anti-contagionist public health officials with their concern over miasma.(68) Yet just as these reformers were going into full battle against pollution, the main justification for their attack, their environmental theory of disease causation, was undermined by the new germ theory of disease, and their position as scientific experts was being challenged by the new scientific specialists.

The old reformers were scientific generalists, usually medical doctors and statisticians, who understood pollution as something that could be seen, smelled, or tasted, dirty, blackened bad smelling air or water, without fish. The new health activists were scientific specialists, biologists, chemists, bacteriologists, engineers who understood pollution as something chemical and often invisible or visible only to the trained eye using technical equipment. These activists built laboratories, took samples, and built experimental stations. They did not look for fish or taste the water.(69)

Conclusion

Science and public policy came together around a concern for health and the spread of invisible germs in the waters of the nation, but they did not come together by happenstance. How the germ theory and public policy united was also tied up in the nature of the public struggle that emerged over the issue of pollution reform. If public health officials were concerned about industrial and sewage pollution in the 1870s and 1880s, by the 1890s and 1900s industrial pollution fell from public attention.(70) The germ theory provided not only a science to tackle a real health problem, but a way to do so with minimal political costs. The germ theory not only changed the discourse of science, but also redefined what was pollution, and this had political as well as scientific ramifications. The new experts turned away from the dual concerns of industrial and sewage wastes and focused instead on only sewage wastes. Cleaning up sewage wastes involved public officials spending funds for public treatment plants. Cleaning up industrial wastes would have involved conflicts over economic development and with entrenched economic interests.

The new generation of scientific specialists were not just professionals replacing amateurs, for the new theory was politically expedient for the opponents of industrial waste reform. The new specialists found themselves working in a highly politicized world where their expertise linked together the interests of business, progress, and science within the world of politics and culture.(71) Industrial pollution did not disappear from the discourse of health reform because of the germ theory. Powerful interests opposed industrial pollution reform, and the germ theory facilitated the focusing of health reform discussion on sewage pollution and away from industrial pollution. The germ theory did not replace miasma as the theory for disease migration because industrialists used it against the anti-contagionists reformers, but the germ theory, which (when toxicology was only vaguely understood) indeed had better explanatory power for understanding disease, affected the nature and direction of the reform struggle. In other words the germ theory was better science, but how it was used in the larger political struggle was not neutral.

In New England manufacturers were able to resist pollution reform, but they were initially not able to defeat or silence the reformers who put forward an argument for the public good of clean water linked to public health to checkmate the manufacturers' argument of the good of economic development.(72) In the case of pollution reform and public health it was the new science and technology which gave the manufacturers the edge to continue their industrial pollution.

Ironically the success of the compromise of the 1888s partially removed public health from the reform camp. Just as the radical wing of the progressive movement was beginning to attack environmental issues of poverty, the linkage that Henry Bowditch had made between poverty, reform and public health was weakened in the area of community health. Although some public health advocates in the progressive period began talking about workers' health and occupational health and safety, for many the science of public health left the battlefield of reform.(73) It is particularly ironic that Massachusetts's Board of Health which sent Henry Bowditch, its first chairman, to study Octavia Hill's tenement reforms and settlement houses in London as a model for public health action, fell silent on environmental reform just as Robert Woods was setting up Andover House (the settlement house) in Boston.

If the twentieth-century water pollution reformers failed to pick up on the broader issues of occupational health in the early twentieth century, it was not because they had no history of concern, but rather because the older water reformers were stymied by the interaction between business resistance and the growing influence of the scientific specialists. These scientists defined their expertise, and the privilege of their progressive and economically developmental knowledge, better than could the older generation of scientific-generalist reformers.

As this story indicates, the interaction between environmentalism and public policy did not emerge in the twentieth century but had roots deep in the nineteenth century where the conflict between economic development and clean water first emerged. In many ways we are haunted with that conflict and its compromise resolution today, both as a product of its consequences and as it seems to be replaying itself.(74) Perhaps our environmental future arrived in the late 1880s.(75)

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank Joel Tarr, Lew Erenberg, Bonnie Blustein, Sam Warner, the history faculty seminar at Cambridge University, particularly Tony Badger, the Chicago Urban History group, Ted Steinberg, Andrew Hurley, Nancy Theriot, Mary Blewett, Susan Hirsch, and Mary Hawkesworth for helpful criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.

1. Speech by James Olcott, before the Agricultural Board of Connecticut, Reprinted in State of Connecticut, Ninth Annual Report, State Board of Health, Hartford, 1887, 239, 241, 242.

2. See Christopher Sellers, "Factory as Environment: Industrial Hygiene, Professional Collaboration and Modern Sciences of Pollution," Environmental History Review 18, Spring, 1994, 57, 59, 60; Joel Tarr, "Industrial Wastes and Public Health: Some Historical Notes, Part 1, 1876-1932," American Journal of Public Health 75, 1985, 1059-1067; James Cassedy, Charles V. Chapin and the Public Health Movement (Cambridge, 1962). See also Joel Tarr, "Disputes over Water Quality Policy: Professional Cultures in Conflict, 1900-1917" American Journal of Public Health 70, April, 1980, 427-35. For a discussion of twentieth century concern form industrial wastes see Craig E. Colten, "Creating a Toxic Landscape: Chemical Waste Disposal Policy and Practice, 1900-1960," Environmental History Review 18 Spring, 1994, 85-116.

3. For a discussion of the intersection of science and policy in the twentieth century see Samual Hays, Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge, 1987); Donald Fleming, "Roots of the New Conservation Movement," Perspectives in American History 6, 1972, 7-91; Elizabeth Fee, Disease and Discovery: A History of the John Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (Baltimore, 1987). For a discussion of twentieth-century public health advocates focus on purely germicidal wastes see Sellers, 57. Sellers notes that water pollution activists' focus on purely bateriological concerns meant that it was "the industrial hygienists rather than water pollution experts [that] played [the] pioneering role [of developing a toxicological approach to pollution]." 59.

4. See Charles Rosenberg and Carroll Smith Rosenberg, "Pietism and the Origins of the American Public Health Movement: A Note on John H. Griscom and Robert M. Hartley," in Judith Leavitt and Ronald Numbers Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health (Madison, 1978), 345-358, for a discussion of the pietistic motivation of the health reformers of the 1840s and 1850s. See also John Griscom, Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York, With Suggestions for Its Improvements (New York, 1845) for examples of the belief that unhealthy conditions were a product of ignorance and the solution to these problems was to "apply knowledge."

Although these early reformers were concerned about tenement house reform, ventilation and improved slaughter houses, their focus was primarily on eliminating general evils. Rosenberg and Smith Rosenberg, 347-352. The generation of reformers who became involved in public health after the war were much more inclined to see real political enemies. See John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of Public Health (Urbana, 1990) for a discussion of the public health movement and its concern for environmental causes of disease.

5. See George Fredrickson, The The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, 1965) for a discussion of the crisis of identity of Northern Intellectuals after the war. Unlike the early abolitionists who, according to Fredrickson, were hostile or at least ambivalent toward the state, taking the lessons of abolitionism and the Civil War, the post-war reformers looked to the state as a new agent for social reform. In the post war period reformers tended to be divided over the role of the state and business. What shape that reform would take and how the state should function divided the reformers between conservatives who believed that the state could act as an agent of compromise between the interests of business and the public and radicals who looked to the state to control or discipline business. See Fredrickson, 189 for a discussion of the radical reformers acceptance of the role of the state in social reform.

6. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, unpublished "The Massachusetts Board of Health, Its Origins, Its Repudiation at Home and Abroad, Its Grotesque Metamorphosis and Death, Under Political Fear and Chicanery, Its Reconstruction With Vastly Increased Powers," undated MS, Monograph, Volume VIII, Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, 9. Here after cited Bowditch, "Origins."

7. See Fredrickson for a discussion of the role of science and professionalism in the post-war reforms activities of Northern elites and intellectuals. 108-112. Also see John T. Cumbler, "The Making of an Early Environmental Consciousness," Environmental History Review Vol. 16, 1991.

8. See Donald Pisani, "Promotion and Regulation: Constitutionalism and the American Economy," Journal of American History 74, December, 1987, 740-68 for a discussion of the emerging economic and political power of the industrialists.

9. In 1882 Connecticut passed a bill to study pollution of streams. The Board of Health wanted more than a study. It wanted to know "How can sewage and manufacturing wastes be kept out of our streams?" State of Connecticut (hereafter, Conn.), Ninth Annual Report, 1887, 239-242. Sixth Annual Report, 1884. See also the Tenth Annual Report, 1888, for a list of the industrial pollutants which threatened Connecticut's waters.

See Bowditch, "Origins," 34, 36, 42-43 and State of Massachusetts, Fourth Annual Report, State Board of Health, 1872, public doc. no. 31 (Boston, 1873).

10. Conn. Tenth Annual Report, 1888.

11. The State of Massachusetts (hereafter Mass.) Eighth Annual Report, State Board of Health, 1877 (Boston, 1878), 24-46. (This report was submitted as a special report by Charles Folsom, entitled "The Pollution of Streams.") Twenty-Eighth Annual Report, 1896, 428-468. In 1895 Massachusetts's Lawrence Experimental Station investigated the filtration and removal of hazardous industrial wastes from the waste flow before dumping. The experimental station found that additional filtration through coke or iron filings removed arsenic, and that combined with sand and gravel filtration and/or fine wire screens industrial wastes could be processed to a level equal to municipal levels and that "economical methods of removing [chemicals] can probably be found." Ibid, 439, 444.

Some of the industrial wastes dumped into the region's waters were organic wastes such as the washes from wool textile manufacturers, while others were chemical. Both contributed to water pollution and a decline in dissolved oxygen. For a discussion of industrial waste pollution in Chicago see Craig E. Colten, "Industrial Wastes in Southeast Chicago: Production and Disposal, 1870-1970," Environmental History Review 10, Spring, 1986.

12. Conn., Sixth Annual Report, State Board of Health, Hartford, 1884, 48.

13. Conn., Report of Committee of State Board of Health and Vital Statistics to the General Assembly, 1875, Hartford, 1875, 16.

Early nineteenth-century physicians believed that disease was caused by contagion. Taking their cue from the bible doctors looked to quarantining the sick or suspected sick as the main tool for dealing with the problem. By the 1840s more and more doctors were noticing the connection between poor sanitary conditions and poor health. Differing mortality rates between rural and urban populations and the simple common sense connection between the smell associated with filthy environments and high disease rates led to the belief that the environment itself caused disease. By mid-century the environmental theory of disease causation had gained strong support among doctors and the general public. Arguing against the contagionists these doctors argued that it was vapors coming from feces, rotting carcasses of dead animals, garbage, and polluted water which seared the lungs of urban dwellers making them susceptible to disease. "The agency of foul and putrid air filled with decomposing organic material, in causing disease, is a very recent discovery, yet nothing is better established." "A house whose entry smells musty is dangerous." Mass., First Annual Report, State Board of Health 1869, doc. no. 39 (Boston, 1870). The doctors who believed in anti-contagion were not sure why these vapors caused disease. "These gasses are dangerous to health. What the specially noxious element in them is no one can define." "There is something beyond all this [the gasses the chemists are familiar with] coming from the decay of organized substances ... which gives rise to the most virulent poison and to the most destructive forms of disease." Ibid, Fourth Annual Report, State Board of Health, 1872, doc. no. 31 (Boston, 1873).

In 1842 Edwin Chadwick published Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Classes of Great Britain which led to widespread interest in the environmental causes of disease. See Mass., Fifth Annual Report, State Board of Health, 1874, doc. no. 30 (Boston, 1874) 368, for interest in Chadwick's work.

For a discussion of the emergence of anti-contagionism among public health activists see Stanley Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning 1800-1920 (Philadephia, 1989), 125-129; see also Barbara Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1842-1936 (Cambridge, 1972); Martin Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880-1980; and Robert Clarke, Ellen Swallow, the Woman Who Founded Ecology (Chicago, 1973).

By the 1870s the germ theory was more accepted in Europe; among American physicians and sanitary engineers it did not make much progress until the 1890s. Although William Sedgwick of MIT and Charles Chapin would later gain significant influence with the germ theory, but in the nineteenth century anti-contagionism held the dominant position. Leading this group was Colonel George Waring. See James Cassidy, "The Flamboyant Colonel Waring: An Anti-contagionist Holds the American Stage in the Age of Pasteur and Koch," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1962, 36: 163-176. See also John Duffy, "Social Impact of Disease in the Late 19th Century," in Leavitt and Numbers, Sickness, 401. For a discussion of the development of the Public Health movement's concern over pollution see Joel Tarr, "Industrial Wastes and Public Health," 1059-1068.

The miasma theory of disease also played a role in the early court ruling on the nuisance and pollution. In the case of Henry Lemon vs. Town of Newton, Lemon argued that pollution dumped into a brook which flowed through his property rendered it "unhealthy by stenches coming from the brook." See Lemon vs. Newton, Massachusetts Reports, 134 (1883) See also James Grace and others vs. Board of Health of the city of Newton, Massachusetts Reports, 135 (1883); in this case the Board of Health issued a decree demanding the elimination of a nuisance of stagnant water which was giving rise to "unhealthy odors as to cause great sickness in the neighborhood."

14. Public Health Boards were not the only avenue of activity for those concerned about pollution. Increasingly individuals and towns were going to court arguing that pollution was a public nuisance. See Charles Jackman vs Arlington Mills, Massachusetts Reports, 135 (1884); Inhabitants of Brookline vs. Charles Mackintosh, Massachusetts Reports, 133 (1882); Earnest A. Harris vs. Charles Mackintosh, Massachusetts Reports, 133 (1882). See also Christine Rosen, "Differing Perceptions of Value of Pollution Abatement across Time and Place: Balancing Doctrine in Pollution Nuisance Law, 1840-1906," Law and History Review II, Fall, 1993, 303-381.

15. Conn. Ninth Annual Report, 1886. 20-23.

16. As early as 1799 Massachusetts required the city of Boston to create a Board of Health to deal with the problem of yellow fever. Headed by Paul Revere the board ordered Bostonians to clean up their environment to prevent a reoccurrence of the epidemic. Barbara Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1842-1936 (Cambridge, MA, 1972) 10, 11. Boston responded again in 1832, this time to the cholera epidemic, with calls for the city to clean its streets and homes. Ibid, 12.

For a discussion of the role of public action against epidemics see Sam Bass Warner, The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York, 1972) 25, 26, 203.

17. Charles Chapin, A Report on State Public Health Work (Chicago, AMA, 1916) 61.

18. Although there had been municipal Boards of Health Massachusetts believed that it was the first to have a state board. Mass., First Annual Report of the State Board of Health, 1869, Boston, 1870. Louisiana had the first formal State Board of Health, (1855), but it was really the Board of Health for the city of New Orleans involved in quarantining. Chapin, A Report 61.

The Massachusetts Board was created after a legislative committee in 1866 recommended its establishment. Democratic Party Leader Thomas Plunket of Pittsfield pushed the bill through the legislature. Plunket's wife had read Henry Bowditch's 1862 speech calling for a state board of health. Mrs. Plunket mobilized public support for the board, through petitions and her husband's political clout. Plunket argued before the legislature that "it was cheaper to try and prevent rather than to fail to cure diseases." Bowditch, "Origins," 2-5.

The law creating the Massachusetts Board stated that "the board shall take cognizance of the interests of health and life among the citizens of the Commonwealth. They shall make sanitary investigations and inquires in respect to the people, the causes of disease, and especially epidemics, and the sources of mortality and the effects of localities, employments, conditions, and circumstances on the public health."

The Massachusetts State Board of Health began looking at several areas where the environment had a negative impact on public health, including slaughterhouses in and around Boston. Mass., First Annual Report, 6.

19. Ibid, 15.

To guarantee the right of a clean environment, the board saw the need for state action and a broadening of the provisions "to the abatement of nuisances." State action was needed because "local and private interests have often been so strong as to paralyze the action of the health authorities." Ibid, 16.

In his first address before the board, its first chair, Henry Bowditch claimed that the board should guarantee that each citizen of the state "may not only have as long a life as nature would give him, but live as healthy a life as possible." Bowditch, "Origins," 9.

See Schultz for the origins of the state boards of health, and Rosenkrantz for the origins of Massachusetts' board of health.

20. The Board had seven members. Besides Davis and Bowditch, there was a mechanical engineer, John Hoadley, who like Bowditch and Davis had been involved in the radical wing of the abolitionist movement. Hoardley began his career as an engineer for the Erie Canal, then in 1844 he took a job with a textile company to build its factory and canal system. He then became involved in manufacturing mill machinery, steam engines and locomotives. On the board was also a historians-journalist, and Democratic Party activist, Richard Frothingham; another physician Charles Folsom, who was too young to have been involved in abolitionism, joined the Board shortly after its creation and allied with Bowditch, Davis, and Duffy in pushing for an activist reformist position. Duffy was the secretary to the board. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography Vol. 23, 404.

21. Besides volunteer teaching of the poor in his time off, Bowditch threw himself into the radical Garrison wing of the abolitionist campaign. Even late in life Bowditch continued his radical politics, advocating women's admission to Medical Schools and the Massachusetts Medical Society, opposing intolerance and continuing his support for black equal rights. He also argued against the Massachusetts Medical Society excluding members who didn't meet the newer, more specialized standards for being a doctor. See Bowditch papers, Countway Library for numerous examples of his campaigns for equal rights for women and blacks; see, for example, his letter to T. G. Richardson, 1880.

See Rosenkrantz for a brief biography of Bowditch and Davis. 55-63.

22. Bowditch, "Origins," 2-5.

23. Bowditch, "Origins," 7. Bowditch called on the board to act "in the light of the broadest philosophy." 15.

24. In London Bowditch involved himself in a variety of philanthropic concerns from Octavia Hill's and Ruskin's model tenements projects to settlement house activity of Burdett Coult and the Peabody House. He returned to Boston convinced that environmental reform was needed to deal with the problems of public health. Bowditch letter to the Massachusetts Board of Health, Dec. 30, 1870. Bowditch papers, Vol. III, #3.

The English had first recognized stream pollution by mid-century with the growth of common law and suits for damages. In 1865 a royal commission on river pollution was appointed to among other things determine "how far by new arrangements, the refuse arising from industrial processes can be kept out of the streams or rendered harmless ... "A second commission in 1868 found extensive amounts of water to be "poisoned, corrupted, and clogged by refuse from mines, chemical works, dyeing, scouring, and fulling woolen and worsted stuffs, skin cleaning and tanning." Quoted in Phelps "Stream Pollution ...," 198. In 1876 the British Pollution Prevention act was passed (earlier Britain had passed a Gasworks Clauses Act in 1847 prohibiting dumping of gas house wastes, and a Water Works Clauses Act, 1847, also outlawing pollution, and a Salmon Fisheries Act, 1861 protecting fishing streams). The 1876 Act prohibited "the discharge into any streams of any poisonous, noxious, or polluting liquid proceeding from any factory or manufacturing process." Quoted in Phelps 198.

25. Bowditch claims that during the first 10 years the board as a unit acted "as an organ of state power." He did note in his papers that one member was initially reluctant to move forward, but after visiting the slaughter-house region of Brighton, the board was unanimous. "Origins," 25.

26. Mass., Fourth Annual Report of State Board of Health, 1872, Boston, 1873, 20. In 1872 the legislature directed the board to investigate pollution of Miller's river, and 1875 the legislature directed the board to investigate river and stream pollution. In 1874 the board reported on the conditions of the state's rivers, and in 1876 the board spent most of its report on the pollution of the state's waters by sewage and industrial wastes. Hereafter these will be cited as Annual Reports. See Fourth Annual Report, 4-8, 10, 11; Fifth Annual Report, 63-150; and Seventh Annual Report, 23-154, 276-400. In its 1878 report the board listed polluted waters from each town, specifically noting "polluting mills," as well as "other sources than the mills." Ninth Annual Report, 1878, 57, 58, 59, 60.

27. Mass., Sixth Annual Report, 1875, 73.

28. The Board had prepared the ground for this legislation by arguing in its 1874 report that the creation of the board reflected the importance of the state as an agent for public good and that action should be extended to "legislative action to protect public health. So far, these laws have had some effect in some places, but they are ineffective in others. There are manifold sanitary evils yet to be abated." Fifth Annual Report, 1874, 364.

29. Ninth Annual Report, 1878, 73-79. Despite its prohibition against industrial pollution the Board did recognize the needs of industrialists. "It would be unwise to place too great restrictions upon manufacturers by setting up, for all cases, some arbitrary standard of purity, which must be always followed, but which could not be enforced." The board suggested a compromise of acting to "regulate, rather than wholly prohibit, the contamination by filth of our waters." Quoted in Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York, 1991), 229.

30. Following the passage of the law, the board attempted to force several manufacturers to stop polluting. These attempts met with resistance by manufacturers. See Bowditch, "Origins," 43; see also Rosenkrantz, 87.

31. Donnelly, a conservative Catholic from a highly successful Irish family which owned textile mills in southern New England, had first sought out a position on the Board of Charity in order to insure that Catholic orphans were placed in Catholic families. He later became involved in defending manufacturing interests through his family's concerns. Katherine Conway and Mabel Cameron, Charles Francis Donnelly: a Memoir With an Account of the Hearings on a Bill for Inspection of Private Schools in Massachusetts, 1888-1889 (New York, 1909), 237, 240.

32. Bowditch, "Origins," 43.

33. Henry Bowditch letter to his son. Oct. 28, 1879. Bowditch papers, Vol. VIII 245.

34. See Cumbler, "The Making of an Early Environmental Consciousness," Environmental History Review Vol. 15, 1991, 73-91 and "Can a Gentleman be a Conservationist?" paper Environmental History Conference, Houston, March, 1991 for a discussion of elite conservation reformers and their ambivalence about and connection with industry. See also footnote number 40.

35. Bowditch, "Origins," 36. Shortly after the boards were merged, Benjamin Butler was elected governor. Butler was hostile to Donnelly because Donnelly was a conservative Democrat opposed to Butler. Butler refused to reappoint Donnelly to the chair when his term expired in 1883. Although Donnelly was no longer chair, and reformer Henry Walcott continued to push for pollution reform, the merged board continued to have trouble operating. Butler lost the election in 1883. The new governor, Robinson, anxious not to alienate the manufacturing interests, refused to reappoint Walcott to the Board, but did reappoint Donnelly as chair. Conway and Camron, "Charles Francis Donnelly, A Memoir," 22, 23, 240; Rosenkrantz, 78.

36. Massachusetts was not the only New England state to confront the problem of industrial pollution and face resistance from manufacturers. The Connecticut Board of Health, established in 1879, also faced resistance from manufacturers to action to protect water quality. "In the case of streams, it is vastly more difficult [to protect the purity] for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the manufacturing interests are affected." Conn., Second Annual Report of the State Board of Health, Hartford, 1880. See Rosen, "Perceptions of the Value of Pollution Abatement," for a discussion of pollution issues in the courts in the Mid-Atlantic states.

37. Quoted in Rosenkrantz, 83.

38. Ibid.

39. Bowditch papers, Vol. 4, #3.

40. Bowditch, "Origins" 43.

41. Ibid, 43. Robinson asked Bowditch for a recommendation for a replacement for Walcott and Bowditch replied that "no self-respecting physician ... would accept it." Ibid.

42. Rosenkrantz, 85. The Massachusetts Medical Society appointed a committee to protest to the Governor and petitions came into the Governor's office from around the state. Bowditch, "Origins" 44.

43. Quoted by Bowditch in "Origins," 48. For the series of stories about Walcott's removal see Boston Herald, Dec., 1885.

Although this battle was most intense in New England, the most industrialized region of the nation, other areas, and other countries, also experienced this conflict. Phelps, "Stream Pollution by Industrial Wastes," in APHA, A Half Century of Public Health, (New York, 1921), 202-207.

In England manufacturers also fought the laws concerning pollution. Two English investigators, Wilson and Calvert asserted, "the restrictions then imposed were such as to give the manufacturer every facility for procrastination and evasion." C. G. Milnes Gaskell claimed in an article in Nineteenth Century (1903) that "manufacturers were too powerful a body to be compelled to do their duty. Parliament [Gaskell said to Gladstone] has been very lenient to the manufactures [over pollution]." Say far too cowardly." Gladstone replied. Quoted in Phelps, 199. See Joel Tarr, "Industrial Wastes" for a discussion of the concern over industrial wastes and economic development.

44. Bowditch, "Origins," 49-50.

45. Acts and Resolves 1886, 230. Rosenkrantz, 86, 87. See Steinberg, 235-239 for a biography of Mills, and a discussion of his involvement in pollution reform.

46. See Thomas Brock, ed, Milestones in Microbiology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 65-120 for examples of articles done by these researchers in their discovery of the germ theory. See also APHA, A Half Century of Public Health (New York, 1921) 13-6; see also Frederick Gorham, "A History of Bacteriology and Its Contribution to Public Health Work," 66-93, in APHA, A Half Century. See Nancy Tomes, "The Private Side of Public Health: Sanitary Science, Domestic Hygiene and the Germ Theory 1870-1900," Bulletin of History of Medicine, Winter, 1990, 509-631 for a discussion of the acceptance of the germ theory.

47. Eighth Annual Report, 1877, 118.

48. State of Connecticut, Third Annual Report, State Board of Health, 1880, Hartford, 1881, 6. Hereafter cited Conn. Annual Report. Yet even as late as 1883 the Connecticut board was arguing that infant diarrhea was caused by polluted air. Conn. Sixth Annual Report, 1883, 1884, 213. See also Lemon vs. Newton, Massachusetts Reports, 134 (1883); James Grace and others vs. Board of Health of the city of Newton, Massachusetts Reports, 135 (1883) for examples of the miasma theory used in nuisance cases.

49. By 1885 the Connecticut board was willing to accept the germ theory. "What a few short years ago was only argued from the standpoint of supposition, and analogy is now in many cases argued as facts, and the microscope with its improvements ... coupled with new and approved methods of investigations, have given to those minute bodies a legitimate standing as etiological factors of the utmost importance in disease. Conn. Seventh Annual Report, 1884, 1885. 157.

By the turn of the century the board was thoroughly won over. "It can hardly be doubted that the portal of infection is though the mouth." Conn. Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, 1903, 1904.

For a discussion of the resistance of American public health officials to the germ theory and their eventual acceptance of the theory see Phyllis Richmond, "American Attitudes Toward the Germ Theory," Journal of History of Medicine, 1954, 428-54; See also Schultz, 138.

50. Mass. Annual Report, 1888, 1889, 32, 33. See Robert Clarke, Ellen Swallow: The Woman who Founded Ecology (Chicago, 1973), 147-8 for a discussion of Swallow's influence on the development of scientific sanitation reform.

51. Mass. Annual Report, 1888, 1889, 32, 33.

52. Charles Chapin, A Report on State Public Health Work (Chicago, 1916), 48. For a discussion of the emergence of the scientific expert in public health reform see Rosenkrantz, 75, 76, 82, and Tarr, "Disputes Over Water Quality Policy." See also Joel Tarr, "Searching for a 'sink' for an Industrial Waste: Iron-making Fuels and the Environment," Environmental History Review 18, Spring, 1994; Craig Colten, "Creating a Toxic Landscape"; and Christopher Sellers, "Factory as Environment."

By the 1890s the Massachusetts Board was looking at ammonia and dissolved oxygen in the water systems. By the early 20th century George Fuller and George Whipple, both trained at MIT had discovered that coliform bacteria in water were an indication of human and animal feces since they were not in typical water organisms. This allowed for water testing for fecal pollutants and pathogenic organism. See Mass. Annual Report, 1896; Tart, "Industrial Wastes," 1060.

53. Although in New York and Philadelphia there had already been significant debate about water quality, in most areas the debate over clean water was not joined until after the germ theory had already won over health reformers. Most state boards of health were established after the struggle over reform in New England had settled the question of focus on sewage waste. See Charles Chapin, A Report.

Indeed because of Massachusetts' innovative role in establishing a Board of Health and the leadership its members gave to the national movement, the conflict and resolution in Massachusetts set the pattern for the rest of the nation. Bowditch, "Origins," 18, 19.

54. For recommendations of the Connecticut Board of Health see Conn. Seventeenth Annual Report, 1894, 1894, 221-224; Conn. Nineteenth Annual Report, 1896, 1897 xvii, 290; Conn. Twentieth Annual Report, 1897, 1898, 268. For litigation against upstream polluters see Conn, 1897; Nolan v. City of New Britain, 38 A. 703, 69 Conn. 668.

Rosen's work on nuisance cases in Pennsylvania notes that the courts began to find for the victims of pollution in the early twentieth century after almost a half century of ignoring their concerns. The courts appeared to have begun finding for the victims in New England slightly earlier. See Rosen, "Pollution Abatement" 367.

55. Conn, Tenth Annual Report, 1887, 1888, 196.

56. Conn, Tenth Annual Report, 1887, 1888, 203-215.

57. Conn, Tenth Annual Report, 1887, 1888, 183. On a more important level the state report stated: "Which are of more importance, fish or the manufactories, there can be but one answer." Ibid.

In that same report the board noted that industrial wastes do "little harm to the river in a sanitary sense, though they have long since rendered the water of the streams wholly unfit for fish...." Ibid, 188.

58. The Boston Herald Sept. 28, 1894 noted, "under the direction of the State Board of Health the struggle for the amelioration of certain unhealthy and economically disadvantaged conditions in the valleys of the Sudbury and Concord rivers existing for a half century has finally begun."

59. The science which focused on invisible germs also offered cities an alternative health policy to sewage treatment: the option of cleaning the water before it was used and then dumping its used polluted water into streams, for down stream users to likewise clean their water. Hiram Mills, of the Massachusetts Board of Health, and an employee of the Boston Associates's Essex Company, used the information and technology developed at the Massachusetts' experimentalstation to develop a filter system for the city of Lawrence's drinking water. Mills' system, rather than focusing on cleaning water before dumping it, focused on cleaning the water as it was taken in. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography Vol. 12:71 See Joel Tart, "Disputes Over Water Quality Policy." Tarr argued that public health professionals divided over the issue of cleaning up wastes before dumping or filtering the water before using. He finds that while the old scientific generalists, particularly doctors, wanted to clean wastes before dumping, the new scientific specialists, particularly the sanitary engineers who were trained in biology, chemistry, and engineering, argued that a cost benefit analysis suggested that filtering the water before use would be more efficient. Ironically in this dispute industrialists concerned about needing clean water for their processes supported the generalists. See also Joel Tarr, James McCurley, Terry Yosie, "The Development and Impact of Urban Wastewater Technology: Changing Concepts of Water Quality Control, 1850-1930" in Martin Melosi, Pollution and Reform in American Cities (Austin, 1980), 59-82 for a discussion and history of the development of waste treatment.

The debate over whether to filter before dumping or before consuming continued in Massachusetts throughout the 19th century. In 1896 for example the State Board of Health would not let Taunton dump raw sewage into the Taunton river because of its negative impact on down river towns. The Board of Health demanded the town develop a filtration system to dispose of their wastes before dumping. Mass., Twenty-Eighth Annual Report, 1896, 66.

60. See Tarr, "Searching," and Craig Colten, "Creating a Toxic Landscape."

61. Mass. Twenty-Eighth Annual Report, 1896, 428.

62. Earle Phelps, "Stream Pollution By Industrial Wastes and Its Control," in APHA, A Half Century, 197-208.

63. See Rosen for a discussion of the conflict between pollution abatement and economic development.

64. Phelps was not endorsing ignoring industrial wastes; rather he was describing what he believed to be a reality. In 1918 Phelps, who was trained at MIT under Sedgwick in both chemistry and bacteriology, and was one of the new generation of scientific specialists, argued that industrial wastes were a concern because they drew upon the streams' natural purifying power. He also argued that large amounts of industrial waste were undesirable because their presence "dulls the esthetic sene of a community, and by presenting apparently insuperable barriers to any real progress towards a clean stream, may delay or permanently prevent the proper treatment of the more dangerous sewage pollution." Quoted in Tarr, "Industrial Wastes," 1064, see also 1062. Tarr argued that Phelps was concerned that industrial wastes not be ignored by public health officials.

65. Phelps contended that it was counterproductive to pass anti-pollution legislation which hurt industry. Such actions Phelps argued would leave industry in the state which passed the legislation at an unfair competitive disadvantage. It would "work an economic wrong in discriminating against the manufacturer in the more progressive states." It was better to wait until "experimental progress" provided a profitable way to dispose of pollution. Phelps, 206-207.

In their 1896 report on the work of the Lawrence experimental station on filtration and industrial wastes, it was noted that in the case of fats and the tanning industry, wastes could be recovered and sold and hence pay for part of their recovery. Mass., Twenty-Eighth Annual Report, 1896, 450.

This debate continues to haunt us today. For Phelps, particularly before 1924, action taken before technological systems are in place to make cleanup profitable, would be ignored or harmful. Bowditch on the other hand would probably argue that technology follows reform. Without the pressure of reform industrialists would not change their behavior.

Although before 1920 when he wrote on industrial wastes for the APHA's in-house history, Earle Phelps was arguing against legislation before scientific progress allowed for a way of disposing of pollution with out hurting industry, by 1926 after he had worked on a series of stream pollution studies on the Ohio River and directed the Division of Chemistry at the Hygienic Laboratory, Phelps turned against compromise with industrial pollution. In his 1926 comments to the AJPH, he attacked a Pennsylvania law which classified some rivers "c" as too polluted to clean, by arguing that a true "conservative" would not totally give up a river to pollution. Tarr, "Industrial Wastes," 1062.

66. After Massachusetts adopted its sewage control measures and treatment stations, typhoid deaths dropped significantly and from the end of the nineteenth century until the early twentieth the state had the nation's lowest rates of typhoid. Chapin, A Report 29.

67. Even when the Board of Health had the power of public support and legislative action, industrialists ignored or fought restrictions against their pollution. For industrialists' resistance to pollution reform see Rosenkrantz, 75.

Ironically since their early days the boards of health had hoped to find some way to satisfy both industrialists and public health concerns. In the early years that mutuality of interest seemed impossible to find. The germ theory and the abandoning of concern over industrial wastes led to the compromise not found by the early reformers. Once sewage wastes could be cleaned up, and industrial wastes were seen as possible benefits to water purity, a compromise was possible. See Mass. Fourth Annual Report, 1872, 1873, 20-25.

68. Tarr notes that the new professional scientific experts, the sanitary engineers, opposed the general treatment of sewage as not cost efficient. They argued that cities, especially those with a single sewer line systems should treat the water they used and leave down river riparian users to clean their own water. Tarr, "Disputes Over Water Quality Policy," 431-432.

69. Charles Chapin, the Commissioner of Health for Rhode Island in the early years of the twentieth century, noted that Rhode Island established a water laboratory where "a chemist with engineering training has been employed." Charles Chapin, 38. One of the first acts of Vermont's board was to set up a diagnostic laboratory in 1886, as was New Hampshire's. Chapin, 38; Walter Hill Crockett, Vermont, The Green Mountain State (New York, 1923), 624.

70. In his 1914 report on state public health, Chapin notes the extensive work done on sewage, but does not mention industrial wastes at all, not even as a past concern. Chapin, A Report on State Public Health Work. In the American Public Health Association's A Half Century of Public Health, published in 1921, Earle Phelps, a chemist for the United States Public Health Services, noted that although there was some concern for industrial pollution, most attention was confined to "laboratory and testing stations." As noted earlier Marshall O. Leighton, an MIT graduate who before he went to work for the Geological Survey worked as a public health officer in New Jersey did not give up his campaign to arouse the interest of the public health community in industrial wastes, worked personally out of the Geological Survey laboratory to look into industrial wastes in 1905. Phelps, "Stream Pollution By Industrial Wastes and Its Control," in APHA, A Half Century of Public Health, 197-208. See also Joel Tarr, "Industrial Wastes," 9.

71. See Tarr, "Disputes ..." and Rosenkrantz for a detailed discussion of the emerging conflict between the new public health professionals and the generalists during the period of progressive reform.

72. Christine Rosen's work on judges' responses to pollution nuisance cases in the late nineteenth and twentieth century found that the judges were influenced by the economic and political constellations of their states. She also found that by the turn of the century technological change and the rising costs of pollution tended to push all judges away from balancing, which tended to advantage polluters particularly in Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century, in favor of pollution abatement. Although Rosen found that in the courts in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania the manufacturing interests were able to dominate over the interests of those suffering from the consequences of pollution, in the area of public health in New England the issue was much more contested. See Rosen, "Pollution Abatement."

73. In Illinois Dr. Alice Hamilton with Hull House's support did a series of workplace studies which led in 1911 to Illinois passing an Occupational Diseases Act.

74. Ironically it was the concerned reformer Earle Phelps' call to the American Public Health Association to avoid passing anti-industrial waste pollution reforms that would "work an economic wrong in discriminating against ... manufacturers," and his plea that reform should wait until "experimental progress" would make reform profitable made over seventy years ago that sounds familiar today, not his rejection of abandoning some rivers to pollution because of the costs of cleaning them. Phelps, 205-207.

75. Ironically as the state boards of health were noting a decline in typhoid and other contagious diseases, they also were reporting an increase in cancer. Although these figures are highly questionable cancer jumped from tenth leading cause of death in 1888 to seventh in 1896. Because of the problematic nature of reporting on deaths it is unclear how accurate this increase really is. Mass., Twenty-Ninth Annual Report, 1897, xxxvii.