by Martin Doyle
Ellerbe Creek feeds into Falls Lake, which, while not as polluted as Lake Michigan at the turn of the twentieth century, is nonetheless the recipient of the wastewater of several towns and cities along with hundreds of farms. In ongoing efforts to clean up the lake, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made life more and more difficult for the operators at Durham’s wastewater treatment plant. Not all of the nitrogen and phosphorus can be removed from the water as it passes through treatment plants, and Dodson has to monitor how much nitrogen gets into Ellerbe Creek as part of his day-to-day operations. In 2014 the total nitrogen was about 103,000 pounds. In 2011, the EPA and the State of North Carolina set a sequenced series of limits to how much nitrogen could be released into Ellerbe Creek; Phase 1 limits were set at 97,000 pounds per year. “You know, we can hit that,” Dodson said. “I’ll have to push the plant a bit more, but I can squeeze things down to 97.”
Phase 1, however, implies a Phase 2, and that is where Dodson foresees trouble. Phase 2 would limit releases of nitrogen to only 67,000 pounds per year—a 30 percent reduction that would be beyond the technology used to operate his plant. “That would be a transformation. We’d have to move to reverse osmosis. And if we went to that, Durham would have drinking water coming out of their wastewater plant.” The problem to Dodson is not that the water coming out would be too clean. The problem is identical to the problem that Chesbrough and Sedgwick faced over a century earlier: the costs would be enormous, but the residents wouldn’t benefit. When Dodson reflects on the future, he just shakes his head: “If they go to Phase 2, I bet they bankrupt the city.”
How did the federal government come to require cities to spend enormous amounts of money on sewage treatment? Like many others in American history, that story stretches back to the Great Depression and the World Wars.
The first iteration of John Dodson’s North Durham Treatment Plant, like many treatment plants in the United States, was built during the Great Depression, the third great fiscal pivot of U.S. governance. If, from the founding of the United States until 1837, states had been the financial center of government and the Panic of 1837 pivoted the U.S. financial system to becoming city centered, then the Great Depression and World War II handed the financial reins to the federal government.
The seeds of this restructuring were sown in 1913 when Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment, which allowed the federal government to begin collecting income taxes in 1914 to fund the costs of World War I. Before 1914, the federal government’s share of taxation tended to rise during wars, primarily through tariffs until the start of World War I, but then decrease as war-related debts were repaid. But the close of World War I was different from all previous wars. Even after the war ended in 1918, income taxes remained in place for the federal government to continue generating revenue.2
A dramatic change in the location of government debt also took place during this era. The federal government was largely debt free in the early twentieth century whereas local governments had taken on substantial debt leading up to the eve of U.S. involvement in World War I, when municipal debt made up over 70 percent of total government debt. This situation reflected the central role that cities played in society by providing most of the services associated with government—water supply, firefighting, police, roads—while the federal government remained relatively inert. Local governments generated revenue primarily from property taxes. If you were alive in the early twentieth century, you sent most of your taxes to your local municipal government—and the size of your tax bill was determined by where you lived rather than how much money you made.
When the Great Depression hit, most people could no longer afford to pay their property taxes. The cities, unable to collect, were likewise unable to pay their existing debt. As the Depression deepened, cities could no longer justify taking on additional debt; so any infrastructure projects, even those already begun, ground to a halt for lack of funds. Cities struggled to sustain basic functions like waterworks, railroad projects, and police services. For cities that could not even pay for drinking-water infrastructure and services, sewage treatment works were far down the list of potential projects.
In response, the federal government filled the vacuum left by city governments with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Between the federal programs and projects of the New Deal and the costs of World War II, the federal government’s portion of total government debt soared to over 50 percent by 1942, where it has remained ever since. The shift in spending and debt was accompanied by an equally dramatic shift in revenue: income taxes rose to offset the increased federal debt, increasing from around 20 percent of total government revenue in 1920 to over 50 percent in 1942. Property taxes, in contrast, plummeted to below 10 percent of total government revenue after the war. As the economic historian John Wallis would note in his analysis of fiscal policy, the United States emerged from World War II with a fundamentally different financial structure than the one it had entered the war with—and, in fact, a different structure from what the country had used since its founding.3
With this dramatic change in taxation came equally dramatic changes in how different levels of government got their money, and an increasingly convoluted revenue system. Before the Depression, there was general consensus that federal funds should be spent only on projects of national need, and local funds would be spent on projects of local interest. Property taxes would be linked to municipal projects, tariff taxes to national projects. But the New Deal created a fiscal system through which the federal government collected income taxes nationally and then spent that revenue via grants to state and local governments—an enormous redistribution of funds and government power across the country.
This is exactly how funds were obtained for Durham’s first sewage treatment plants and Chicago’s wastewater treatment plants of the early twentieth century. In Chicago’s case, using the backward-flowing Chicago River proved to be only another short-term solution; the city ultimately had to construct a wastewater treatment plant capable of handling most of the city’s wastewater. What’s more, Chicago was hit hard by the Depression; by January 1, 1932, the sanitary district was unable to sell bonds—no one would loan the city money—to finance ongoing and proposed work, thus bringing its planned treatment plant to a standstill. To fill the financing gap, in 1933 some of the first grants given out by the Public Works Administration (PWA) were routed to Chicago. Rather than doing the work itself, the PWA loaned the city money by purchasing municipal bonds from Chicago to finance the wastewater treatment plant. The sewage treatment plants that resulted would eventually be the largest in the world.
The best-known public works construction feats of the New Deal are the large federal dams, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) stone bridges, national parks, and expanded highway system. Yet the program of federal government grants to local governments run by the PWA was no less influential. It was instrumental in the rapid expansion of sewer and wastewater treatment, supporting over 1,800 sewer projects across the nation. Between 1933 and 1939, the PWA financed almost 65 percent of the nation’s sewage plants; in the late 1930s, it supported around 80 percent of the total new sewerage system construction nationwide, including that infant North Durham Plant in North Carolina that John Dodson would operate eight decades later.4
Just as the New Deal brought electricity to the rural masses, the change in fiscal order also brought sewerage to the urban masses: the urban population serviced by sewers rose to almost 75 percent by the close of World War II while urban population rose by almost 50 percent over the same time period. By the 1960s, over three-fourths of the nation’s sewage was treated in some way before being routed into streams and rivers.5
Recovery of the national economy after World War II, however, did not lead to another shift in the fiscal roles of the various levels of government: federal aid to cities had replaced property taxes as the primary source of revenue for city services, and it would remain a primary source of revenue for several decades
despite the financial recovery of cities across the United States. In 1956 the federal government provided 30 percent of costs for building sewage treatment works, and that number grew to 50 percent in 1966.6
Cleaning up the pollution from America’s rivers was done in the shadow of FDR’s Public Works Administration, accomplished as much through a philosophical change in government revenue and financing as it was through chemistry and engineering. And as the federal government took hold of the purse strings for these projects, it simultaneously introduced federal regulations for water quality. The capstone of this trajectory was the Clean Water Act of 1972, a federal legislative action inseparably associated with a burning river and the tireless work of an Ohio housewife.7
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The middle of the twentieth century marked the point when America’s rivers became not just polluted, but industrialized. The growth of oil refineries, mining, and particularly the organic chemical industry introduced to America’s rivers an entirely new array of wastes, with largely unknown characteristics, leading to unforeseen consequences. Initially, industrial wastes were seen as innocuous or even beneficial; they were thought to have a bacteriological effect with the potential to kill the pathogenic cholera- and typhoid-causing microbes. But it gradually became clear that these new compounds—benzene, carbon tetrachloride, tetrachloroethane, and trichloroethylene, among a tongue-twisting list of many others—were more toxic and longer lived than pollutants of previous eras.
While the Monsanto Chemical Company during the 1940s separated its toxic waste to bury rather than dump into the Mississippi River at East St. Louis, most chemical manufacturers were not so progressive. Many industrial manufacturers began setting limits for how much time their own employees could be exposed to these chemicals, yet they continued to dispose of the compounds and wastes by spilling them untreated into streams and rivers. During the late 1930s, New Jersey investigators estimated that almost 7 million gallons of untreated industrial chemical waste were dumped each day into New Jersey’s streams. This practice continued into the late 1960s, when only 15 percent of the chemical industry’s waste received any treatment before being dumped into streams and rivers.8
The geographical clustering of polluting industries soon left its foul traces on the American landscape: chemical manufacturers in the Mid-Atlantic region left vast amounts of pollution in the river networks of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania; eastern Louisiana and western Mississippi became egregiously polluted from the petrochemicals dumped by the dozens of factories along the banks of the Lower Mississippi River; streams and rivers draining the copper-laden mountains of Montana became lunar landscapes of mine tailings. The Cuyahoga River was particularly extreme; it touched not only the coal and steel empires of the Ohio River valley but also the hub of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire of the Great Lakes. The banks of the Cuyahoga were already home to twenty refineries during the Civil War, and through the turn of the twentieth century, steel mills, chemical plants, paper mills, and all other manner of industrialization sprang up along the river.
On through the mid-twentieth century, the auto industry became integral to the Upper Midwest economy and proved particularly damaging to the health of the Cuyahoga. Although the cars were primarily assembled in Detroit, Michigan, many of the individual parts were manufactured along the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland and Kent, Ohio. Farther upstream on the river sat Akron, Ohio, the largest rubber-manufacturing city in the world. Waste flowing out of the wastewater treatment plant in Akron accounted for over two-thirds of the total river flow, making the Cuyahoga less a channel of water than a roaring stream of industrial waste. In 1968 the Cuyahoga was assessed by a group of scientists, who found that in Akron the river was a “grossly polluted zone,” while at the most downstream end, just upstream of where it enters Lake Erie, the river was “grey, septic in the pools, and odorous,” and noted for not meeting any “water quality criteria for any use.”9 The Cuyahoga had become an open sore on the landscape.
Edith Chase—the conservation pioneer who cleaned up the Cuyahoga decades ago—is now 89 years old. She is just a shade over five feet tall and has a shock of dark, undisciplined hair. She is mild mannered, but the Ohio Environmental Council calls her the “Grand Dame of Lake Erie.” She is an unabashedly proud housewife who has accomplished more in that informal role than most achieve in a formal career at a regulatory agency: despite never having a formal policy career, Chase received a lifetime achievement award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). She has a simple philosophy for fixing the environment and changing the world: “You have to get mad, and you have to get lucky.”10
In the 1960s, Edith Chase was a recently transplanted housewife in Kent, Ohio, which was then a bustling college and manufacturing town. But the town was also beginning to see the initial hints of decline. Factories were being downsized, and a few were shuttered. A smattering of houses had fallen into disrepair, and the river was in atrocious condition. With an undergraduate in chemistry from Antioch College and a masters in organic chemistry from the University of Minnesota, Chase was well aware of what was causing the local river to decline. She began to look for ways to get involved.
What she found was the League of Women Voters, a group of well-educated, well-networked, and well-organized women throughout the United States. Formed in 1920 in the aftermath of the women’s suffrage movement, the league already had a long list of achievements, including being instrumental in passing the Tennessee Valley Authority Act (TVA), which they supported because it brought electricity to households—and women—throughout the Deep South. The league followed a long tradition of women playing a leading, yet often behind-the-scenes role in environmental conservation, ranging from the formation of the Audubon Society to the initiation of the first systematic street-cleaning programs. Women, and specifically housewives, could and often did base their conservation claims on the socially laudable grounds that their interests were in protecting their home and children. Water quality in particular became a central focus in the 1950s and 1960s: no issue was as critical to housewives as ensuring that their children could safely drink water. Water pollution quickly became a topic discussed by housewives and those catering to housewives—before long, Good Housekeeping magazine began carrying in-depth articles on water pollution in America’s cities and suburbs.11
In the industrialized Upper Midwest, the League of Women Voters set its sights on Lake Erie, which was typically described as either dying or already dead. Lake Erie received over 750 million gallons a day of untreated—or barely treated—municipal waste and 2 billion gallons a day of industrial waste. In the 1950s the Niagara River, the outlet of Lake Erie, was proposed by state regulators to be reclassified from a Class A river to a Class C river—an official indication that the river was not fit for human consumption, bathing, or swimming. Tourists at Niagara Falls were basking in and spellbound by the mists of what was effectively a cascading open sewer. Tens of thousands of dead fish washed up on the banks of Lake Erie tributaries, and in 1965 a “dead zone,” where the water quality and oxygen levels were so low that few organisms could inhabit it, was discovered in the middle of the lake. The zone spanned over 2,600 square miles—an area larger than the state of Delaware.
The League of Women Voters launched the political battle to clean up Lake Erie in 1963 with the formation of the Lake Erie Basin Committee. Edith Chase joined the league a year later and eventually became chair. Almost fifty years after working on the lake and the river cleanup, she can still rattle off chemical compounds and their decay rates as easily as she recites her grandchildren’s birthdates. She cites the names of scientists as well as the dates of their relevant studies and publications. And she recalls the first and last names of the U.S. newspaper reporters she worked with to publicize the league’s studies and findings. Just as impressive is her clear command of the policies and regulations; she knows those of the past and the present.
In her position as chai
r, Edith Chase played a central role in developing and implementing the league’s strategy for cleaning up Lake Erie—a strategy that would serve as a model for any twenty-first-century environmental nongovernmental office (NGO). As she herself argued convincingly, “The League was way ahead of the game on water pollution.” Armed with housewives like Edith Chase, many of whom lived around the lake and along its vile tributaries, the league dug into the topic, ultimately writing and publishing one of the most comprehensive and coherent reports on the Erie yet available: Lake Erie, Requiem or Reprieve? There was no shortage of scientific journal articles, technical reports, and op-eds on Lake Erie at the time, and the league had to compete with them to draw attention to potential solutions. Yet while most reports on water pollution were dense, towering, and focused on chemistry or pictures of dying fish, the league’s report managed to be both sweeping in its scope and, at a slender fifty pages in large font, concise and to the point. It reviewed the geologic history of the basin, synthesized chemistry data, analyzed scientific studies, and then did what few others had done—it identified the disparate policies and regulations that might improve water quality and identified where the bottlenecks were for making existing policies work.12