Reimagining the Cuyahoga River Fires By Bridget Mackie
In 1952, Carl Stokes was working as a liquor enforcement agent in Toledo, Ohio. He had come a long way from his childhood in government-subsidized housing in Cleveland’s East Side. After dropping out of high school at seventeen and joining the U.S. Army, he traveled to Alabama and Germany, places that instilled in him a desire to become educated. Once discharged, he went back to complete his high school diploma and eventually enrolled in West Virginia State University. There, Stokes met a professor who inspired him to pursue a better education back in Cleveland at Western Reserve University. It was in Cleveland that Stokes began working part-time and put aside his education for the material gains that a better job could get him. Using some connections within the Ohio government, Stokes got a job as a liquor enforcement agent. On November 3, 1952, the same year he was working as a liquor enforcement agent, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire. The resulting damage was estimated to cost over $1.3 million and included the destruction of three tugboats, the dock of the Great Lakes Towing Company, and the Jefferson Avenue Bridge. Despite the enormous damage, this was not the fire that would be ingrained into the public consciousness; in fact, the fire of 1952 was not covered outside of Cleveland at all. When most people hear about the Cuyahoga River Fire, the one they are talking about is the fire in 1969. This was the fire that caught the attention of a nation with growing environmental fervor. This was the fire that led to the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act. This begs
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the question: Why would one fire become a national rallying cry while the other was barely remembered? All told, the Cuyahoga River has caught on fire at least thirteen times in recorded history, between 1868 to 1969. Much of the newspaper coverage on these early fires focused on how expensive the damages were. This is due to the attitudes toward the Cuyahoga River at the time. In the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, Cleveland was a city built on industries like steel and oil, both of which are heavy polluters. Because of the Cuyahoga’s proximity to industry, it was valued for its uses as a shipping route, not as an ecosystem that deserved protection. The Cuyahoga became a dumping ground for industrial waste via the sewer system, which made it one of the most polluted rivers in the United States. It is important to note that many business owners and members of Cleveland’s government tried to address the pollution on the Cuyahoga River, suggesting measures to reduce the amount of industrial waste that entered the Cuyahoga and starting initiatives to clean the oil slicks off the river. The goal of these initiatives was to prevent fires from disrupting shipping along the river and to keep businesses safe; clearly, the primary motivations of these initiatives were economic and not environmental. Towards the middle of the twentieth century, the economy of Cleveland, along with those of other industrial cities, began to shift as automation in manufacturing contributed to a decline in jobs within the industry. Between 1952 and 1969, the years between the two final fires, Cleveland lost some 60,000 jobs in manufactur-
