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Venetian gondolas on the Illinois River: water analysis and the cultivation of progressivism in the river cities, 1865–1910

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Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, the city of Chicago built a Sanitary and Ship Canal (CSSC) to carry the city’s wastewater downstream while allowing ships to travel freely between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River. The project drew a wide range of responses downstream. While sanitarians warned that the CSSC would be a conduit for epidemics, city boosters in Joliet, Illinois envisioned tourists floating in Venetian gondolas on the Illinois River. Other Illinois River cities shared this sanguine view of the CSSC. Historians traditionally associate progressivism with national, state and urban settings. This paper argues that Illinois public health leaders successfully cultivated progressivism in cities along the Illinois River as an integral part of their efforts to solve regional water supply, wastewater and transportation problems. These cities readily adopted the progressives’ faith in scientific expertise: as they weighed waterway development against potential health threats from Chicago’s effluent, these cities welcomed the counsel of scientific experts from the Illinois State Board of Health (ISBH) and area universities. This essay is structured around three critical junctures when Illinois Rivers cities partnered with scientific experts on large-scale water analysis projects to assess the Illinois River system: the ISBH studies led by John Rauch (1865–1879); John Harper Long (1885–1889); and Long and Arthur William Palmer (1895–1902). In addition to supporting ISBH initiatives, downstream cities secured state funding for water analysis and expansion of local water systems from the Illinois legislature, evidence of their faith that scientific expertise would protect their cities’ health and commerce.

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Notes

  1. The Sanitary District of Chicago allowed Lake Michigan water to flow into the CSSC on 1 January 1900 and opened the channel fully on 17 January 1900 (Water in the Ditch 1900).

  2. Historians have explored the struggles of growing cities to develop safe and adequate water supplies and the political and engineering challenges associated with sewage disposal.

    The costs and benefits associated with Chicago’s efforts to develop its water supply and sewage systems have been well studied (Bacon and Dalton 1968; Cain 1972, 1974, 1978; Cronon 1991; Hill 2000; Colten 1986; Zimring and Bryson 2013; Pierce 1957).

    The inward focus of Chicago’s water supply and sewerage infrastructure development projects mirrors developments in other American cities (Melosi 1980, 2000; Tarr 1984; Tarr et al. 1984; Galishoff 1975; Leavitt 1982; Platt 2004; Steinberg 1991, 2013; Blake 1956). On the development of water analysis, see Hamlin (1990).

    On the role of engineers in designing these systems, see Schultz and McShane (1978). The late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates over the nature of pollution and how society could best manage urban and industrial wastes have received much historical attention (Sellers 1997; Thorsheim 2017; Uekötter and Lübken 2016; Rome 2001). In this era, cities would begin filtering and chlorinating their water supplies (O’Toole 1990; Shapiro-Shapin 1999).

  3. In the 1920s, legal scholars Starr (1921) and Williams (1929) wrote at length on the litigation regarding pollution, navigation and water levels in the Great Lakes that followed the opening of the CSSC. On the context of the scientific research performed to determine the safety of Chicago’s effluent for the 1900–1906 Supreme Court trial, see Shapiro-Shapin (1997, 1999).

  4. The building of the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the Sanitary and Ship Canal has received much historical attention (Cain 1974, 1978; Lamb 1978; O’Connell 1980; Cronon 1991; Hill 2000). Scholars have shown how canals altered regional patterns of commerce, settlement and industry. See, for example, Sheriff (1996) on the Erie Canal, Cronon (1991) on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, Steinberg (1991) on the canals in New England’s Merrimack Valley, and Pastore (2014) on the Blackstone Canal in Rhode Island.

    While the management of navigable channels could foster cooperation among nations (Gatejel 2018), reshaping the environment through man-made channels could bring severe environmental consequences, especially when channels fell into disrepair or were repurposed as sewage and industrial waste conduits (Pastore 2014). Alexander (2009) and Bogue (2000) have explored the environmental impact of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway on the fisheries of the Great Lakes, while Dorsey (1998) has studied fishing treaties between the United States and Canada. On the impact of the Panama Canal on regional ecology, disease patterns and regional communities, see Carse et al. (2016). Canals shifted patterns of energy usage that in ways that negatively impacted the environment (Jones 2010; Pritchard 2011; Worster 1985; White 1995).

  5. During the Progressive Era, state, local and national agencies increasingly hired scientific experts to design and administer health related projects (Platt 2004; Foss-Mullan 2001; Haber 1991; Young 1989; Harden 1986; Trachtenberg 1982; Hays 1975; Rosen 1972; Wiebe 1967). The Progressive movement afforded chemists, engineers and other scientists ample opportunity for discipline building on both sides of the Atlantic (Hamlin 1990; Rogers 1998; Tarr 1984; Tarr et al 1984; Melosi 1980, 2000; Schultz and McShane 1978).

  6. By 1892, Peoria boasted distilleries, breweries, packing houses, a large wire factory and agricultural implement factories, while Joliet housed steel and rolling mills, and Ottawa augmented its shipping interests using local silica to open glass works (Howard 1972).

  7. John Rauch has received much scholarly attention for his scientific collaboration with Louis Agassiz, his service as Assistant Medical Director of the Army of Virginia (Union), and his public health work. The latter included a smallpox vaccination campaign, sanitation, urban planning, and rebuilding Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871. His leadership in instituting medical licensing in Illinois has also been well studied (Harris 2019; Szczygiel and Hewitt 2000; Goebel 1994; Davenport 1957). The speech quoted below, “Sanitary Problems of Chicago, Past and Present,” began as his Presidential Address at 1877 annual meeting of the APHA, was amended in 1879, and then published in an updated form in the 1881 Annual Reports of the ISBH (Rauch 1881).

  8. John Harper Long (1856–1918), professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University Medical School from 1882–1918, trained generations of medical students and published original research on the connections between medicine and chemistry (nutrition, enzymes). He authored numerous chemistry textbooks and laboratory manuals in analytical and quantitative chemistry, served as an expert witness in the US Supreme Court, and participated in the foundational work of agricultural chemistry. In addition to his work for the ISBH, he served on the American Medical Association’s Council of Pharmacy and Chemistry and was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1901. He was also president of the American Chemical Society (1903) and the Institute of Medicine in Chicago (1918). His work brought together academic research in “pure chemistry” with applications in medicine, public health, pharmacy and industry. See Northwestern University (1918) and Long (1898).

    Historians have devoted much attention to the development of water analysis methods and the rise of professionalization in chemistry and engineering (Hamlin 1990; Gossel 1992; Thackray et al 1985; Haber 1991; Tarr 1984; Shapiro-Shapin 1997). It is important to note that the growth of trust in water analysis to detect indicators of sewage pollution emerged amidst efforts to standardize practices and reagents. Long’s 1899 “Chemical and Bacteriological Examination of the Waters of the Illinois River and its Principal Tributaries,” a study performed for the ISBH, reveals a mixture of standard water analysis methods with regular, if minor, modifications to make procedures more efficient, accurate and consistent. Some tests described contained recipes for producing reagents while others relied upon supplies now available in standard forms.

  9. Historians have shown how the fear of cholera and the rise of bacteriology shaped the development of water supplies and public health efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Rosenberg 1962; Markel 1993; Hamlin 1990, 2009; Evans 1987). The literature on the emergence and acceptance of bacteriology is vast (Gossel 1989, 2000; Tomes 1998; Rogers 1989; Geist 2012; Worboys 2007).

  10. Chemist Arthur William Palmer (1861–1904) was a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 1883–1904 (Palmer and Arthur William 1979; Palmer and Arthur William 1904).

  11. On John Clough Thresh (1850–1932), see Obituary: John Clough Thresh (1932). Thresh cautioned against overreliance on laboratory testing to determine disease threats (Hamlin 1990). Thresh’s writings on water purification first appeared in the mid-1880s and his textbooks, first published in 1896, would be in use in revised editions through the 1960s.

  12. Illinois River towns increasingly financed levee districts all along the Illinois River that restricted the river in its channel and led to major flooding events (Schneider 1996). Schneider (1996) has shown how, in the wake of disputes over land use and problems with river flooding, the hunting clubs along the Illinois River increasingly converted their land from a bottomland environment to agriculture. By 1912, commercial traffic on the I&M had been largely replaced by pleasure craft and, in 1914, the Niagara made its last commercial trip on the canal (Lamb 1978).

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Matthew Daley, Paul Murphy, Eric Shapin and the two anonymous reviewers for generous and thoughtful commentary. The author thanks Virginia Peterson for assistance with the map of the Illinois River system.

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Funding was provided by a Grand Valley State University Research and Development Grant.

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  1. Department of History, MAK D-1-220, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI, 49401, USA

    Carolyn G. Shapiro-Shapin

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Shapiro-Shapin, C.G. Venetian gondolas on the Illinois River: water analysis and the cultivation of progressivism in the river cities, 1865–1910. Water Hist 11, 153–184 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-019-00235-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-019-00235-2

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