Papers presented by Christine Rosen since 2019
2020 Charlotte, North Carolina
"Business Leadership of Urban Anti-Air and Water Pollution Movements during the Progressive Era"
Christine Rosen, University of California, Berkeley
Abstract:
My paper will illuminate a piece of business history that predates the emergence of the truism prevalent today: that corporate leaders are, by their very nature, the enemies of efforts to use the power government to solve pollution and environmental problems due to the inherently heavy economic costs of such efforts. I will focus on describing some of the anti- air and water pollution movements that led to the enactment and enforcement of industrial smoke regulation and the construction of water and sewage treatment systems in cities across America from 1890-1920, movements that were led by progressive urban businessmen and their organizations, groups like the Chambers of Commerce of Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Chicago, the Boards of Trade of Cincinnati, Newark, and St. Louis, and the Merchants’ Association of New York. I will discuss the ways these men and their organizations ignited public and official interest in solving air and water pollution problems and how they went about lobbying for the enactment of the legislation and the passage of the bond issues needed to fund the solutions to these problems. I will also discuss the methods they used to fight more conservative business interests who opposed their goals. Most historical work on this subject either ignores the role that progressive business leaders and their organizations played in these movements or characterizes their role in negative terms, as conservative attempts to undermine the more activist efforts of women reformers and sanitary reformers. My research shows that this view is more reflective of the power of the widely held present-day conventional wisdom that corporate leaders are by their very nature, inherently and inevitably opposed to strong, effective corporate environmental regulation than an accurate reflection of what actually happened during this earlier period of American business and environmental history.