Smokestacks and Progressives

Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951

af David (University of Cincinnati) Stradling

Air quality became an important issue for middle-class residents in coal-dependent cities-how could a city without pure air, they asked, truly be clean, healthful, and moral? Eventually engineers came to the fore, displaced the reformers (many of them women) as leaders of the movement, and answered their own question-how to abate dirty air.