Submitted for coursework, spring, 2019
Andrew Hurley, a twentieth-century labor historian, effectively marshals an interdisciplinary approach, bridging environmental, civil rights, and labor and urban history to study the company town of Gary, Indiana, home to U.S. Steel and its subsidiaries. Using this multi-pronged approach, Professor Hurley examines the Gary in the post-war era from 1945-1980. Using public libraries, local, regional, and union archives, union archives, Hurley assembles his narrative with a broad swath of primary sources, including newspapers, census data, U.S. Government studies and reports, union grievance files, and personal interviews with former steel workers, labor leaders, executives, city planners and community members. Hurley argues that “divisions of race and class were instrumental in creating patterns of environmental inequality” (xiv). White residents and factory owners of Gary employed numerous strategies to perpetuate inequality, chief among them control over jobs and space. In the 1940s, however, according to Hurley, everyone initially subordinated their desire for clean water and air for economic security in the form of employment. Ironically, the large concentration of Blacks relegated to the midtown area in the mid-20th century “kept them from breathing the city’s very worst air” (33-34). This quickly changed, however, as whites were convinced by blockbusting real-estate agents in many cases to move as Blacks sought to suburbanize, as well.
Seven hybrid chapters organized thematically and chronologically provide the framework for Environmental Inequalities. The book opens with a toxic spill of hydrochloric acid in 1987 to set the stage. Chapter 2 explores how local government, rather than challenge firms such as U.S. Steel as it pumped effluents into Lake Michigan, sought ways to filter drinking water as it was pumped out of the Lake and to residential areas for fear that environmentalism and economic progress stood at odds with one another. What Hurley’s description of 1940s Gary lacks in Dickensian rhetorical flourishes, it makes up for in empirical weight, which leaves the reader with an impression of Coketown from Hard Times, sans fiction and social commentary. Chapters 3 through 5 develop the “contradiction between social objectives and environmental practices” (45) and explore environmentalism from “middle-class,” “working-class,” and “African American” frameworks, respectively. By “middle-class” it becomes evident quickly that Hurley struggles not to conflate whiteness with this term, showing how U.S. Steel’s prosperity, the New Deal, and urban “renewal” programs fueled a white migration to suburban areas, and along with it, a desire for the bucolic scenes advertised to them as consumers. This brought about initiatives for cleaner beaches and open spaces, which whites fought for within a context of political pluralism but also against people they didn’t want, such as African Americans, which is addressed later. Hurley’s somewhat Maslowian lens characterizes a more heterogenous group of working-class employees with a view of environmentalism more immediately, but not exclusively, tied to working conditions. Wildcat strikes undermined the cozy relationship between union leadership and factory bosses, which helped reach certain gains in conditions where both sets of leaders ignored important legislation such as OSHA. (88) Other strategies, such as preventing heat exhaustion by negotiating for larger work crews to work in smaller shifts around coke ovens instead of expensive remodeling was one of the ways Hurley points out workers were able to successfully negotiate. (82) Hurley identifies the Calumet Community Congress, an organization developed by steelworker Jim Wright, the son of a Mexican immigrant, as a hopeful organization precisely because it could gather a wider coalition based not on ethnic lines but around issues of environment. (104). African Americans in chapter 5 are championed by Curtis Strong, a lion in union leadership and an activist whom Hurley interviewed personally. Prior to the apex of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, African Americans used “wildcat strikes, union politics, and legal battles” both within and without of the factory setting. Blacks also organized boycotts for shops that wouldn’t allow them to patronize, laws to protect against predatory housing, and for open spaces such as areas on the beaches (Marquette Park), a taking of freedom that whites could not abide, leading to violence, dissent within more established Black organizations, and some temporary concessions for physical protection. (167) African American Mayor Hatcher’s election in 1967 brought with it new hopes for Blacks and temporarily sustained a multi-racial, multi-class initiative to improve coke oven emissions, but ultimately Nixon Administration priorities, the Carter Administration’s support for jobs over environment, and a recalcitrant U.S. Steel broke the tender coalition. Sand mining, overland waste dumps, and pumping waste deep below the surface of Lake Michigan end the final chapter, demonstrating how nominal gains in air pollution were converted bad losses in land, and particularly in areas where people of color and working-class neighborhoods shared space (162).
Hurley’s prose is so engaging and fluid that a casual reader might wonder if academic rigor had been eschewed for an emphasis on style, but Hurley combines what few authors can: concision, precision, and academic rigor. While it is considered unproductive to critique a book for missing a point it did not intend to make, it is this reviewer’s opinion that the space Hurley made available through brevity leaves room to develop a sustained critique of gender as a factor in the changes that occurred during the 35 years of Hurley’s study. A desire for brevity also likely inspired statements such as the following: “The Native American Potawatomis who had roamed the Lake Michigan shores until the 1830s moved westward when white pioneers pushed through the area, leaving behind a landscape bereft of humans” (37). Readers might wonder if there is more to that story, or the story of “Mexicans” that are mentioned sporadically but never gain a foothold in the narrative. The only other minor criticism is that without reading carefully, some of Hurley’s arguments can be misunderstood. On the one hand, he posits that race largely determined the exposure to pollutants within the factory, with African Americans (and Mexicans) subjected to the least healthy jobs, but that outside the factory the pollutants were more evenly distributed in the air supply and water in the 1940s (31, 37, 114). Certainly the distribution was more even in that all people were exposed to poor air quality, but his evidence develops a very similar thesis outside of the factory as well, with social factors controlling access to cleaner air and water.
Hurley’s approach allows Environmental Inequalities to dialogue with legal works on residential segregation such as Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) as well as scholarship in environmental history, such as Kate Brown’s Plutopia (2013) in which workers in Hanford nuclear site and Osersk, Russia, also enjoy a measure of economic security while perpetuating racist exclusionary tactics in exchange for subordinating their civic rights. Environmental Inequalities reads like a trade paperback supported with a solid chassis of primary evidence, and therefore it would be appropriate for a upper-level high school or undergraduate course, deepening the connection between environmental studies, labor history, and race and class studies.