Steven Solomon
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The first pandemic spread in Asia, but did not reach Europe. The second emerged in 1826 from Bengal and became truly global. It struck Moscow in 1830, killed 100,000 in Hungary in 1831, hit the Baltic by 1831, and jumped by ship to England. Cholera doomed thousands in London and Paris in 1831–1832. Quarantines failed to do anything but add to the material deprivation of the cramped urban poor, who were the most afflicted due to the abysmal state of their hygiene. Riots broke out in Paris. Doctors were stoned by half-crazed mobs. In London they were accused of murdering victims in order to dissect their corpses. By 1832 the pandemic reached Ireland, then crossed the Atlantic with emigrants to terrorize Montreal and Quebec. It migrated south to the United States, striking Detroit and towns along the Erie Canal. New York became a graveyard of tolling church bells and citizens fleeing for the pastures of northern Manhattan. By 1833 the cholera reached Mexico. Pilgrims on the hajj to Mecca, first struck in 1831, carried the disease back to Islam’s far-flung global homelands. Some 13 percent of Cairo’s inhabitants were decimated.
The cholera pandemics that ravaged London in 1848–1849 and again in 1853–1854 added fervor to the debate over the disease’s cause. In a celebrated case of medical sleuthing, John Snow, determined to find hard evidence to back up his waterborne theory of cholera, tracked a disproportionate number of cholera cases in the latter outbreak to a single free public well pump at Broad Street, not far from his own Soho medical office, that was widely used by the neighborhood’s overcrowded, poor residents. Subsequent research revealed the proximity of the well to a potentially contaminating sewer. Snow persuaded a local governing body to remove the pump handle to prevent further contagion. But he could not persuade the special government committee investigating the cholera epidemic, who saw potential miasmatic causes as well. Snow continued to press his pioneering work to the end of his short lifetime. He died prematurely in 1858, the year of the Great Stink, at age forty-five.
Parliament’s political will for sanitary reform had oscillated with the outbreaks of cholera. Yet even the tens of thousands of cholera deaths within five years during the midcentury epidemics did not provide enough impetus to overcome the entrenched nexus of vested local interests and liberal market economic ideology of those opposed to any centralization and enlarged public role for London’s fragmented municipal government. The increasing foulness of the Thames and fear of the next pandemic, however, was a constant reminder that reform’s opponents could offer no viable remedy of their own.
The mid-nineteenth-century sanitary crisis was an early manifestation of an inherent dilemma in the industrial market economy: it had no automatic, internal mechanism to restore a healthy equilibrium to natural ecosystems polluted by the unwanted by-products of growth, even though such environmental sustainability was a necessary condition of its continued productive expansion. In ancient Rome the sanitary welfare and public order had been provided by state bread doles and the public construction of aqueducts. In England the liberal democratic competition among pluralistic interests, under the duress of urgent crisis, ultimately produced an accountable municipal body with sufficient authority to provide for the common public good. The final triggering event for this reform was the Great Stink, which Parliamentarians, led by Disraeli, personally could no longer ignore.
Once empowered, London’s Metropolitan Board of Works expeditiously built a world-class model urban sanitary and water supply system. Under the direction of its longtime chief engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, a sophisticated network of intercepting sewers was built under London, part of which ran parallel along each side of the Thames, to reroute the waste far downriver from central London. At certain low-lying areas the sewage had to be lifted to join the gravity flow of the rest of the system. To house part of the network, as well as provide for the underground railway, gas lines, and other familiar modernizing features of late Victorian London, three river embankments were constructed between 1869 and 1874. Another innovation was to build the sewers and tunnels with little-tested Portland cement, which proved both admirably resistant when submerged in water and able to withstand three times more pressure than traditional Roman cement.
Validation for the new sewerage system came swiftly. In the cholera pandemic of 1866, the only afflicted communities in London were those not yet fully connected to the new network. London was never again afflicted with cholera. The 1866 experience tilted the tide of official opinion in favor of Snow’s hypothesis that cholera was indeed communicated through contaminated water. Final doubters were quelled by the dramatic 1892 experience in the German city of Hamburg, where one side of the street, which drew its water unfiltered from the Elbe, was devastated by the cholera outbreak while residents on the other side of the street, who drank filtered water, were entirely spared. By then, German scientist Robert Koch had already announced his 1883 discovery of the waterborne cholera bacillus during an outbreak in Egypt.
Koch’s isolation of the cholera bacillus, buttressed by the contemporary research of Louis Pasteur and other pioneer bacteriologists, was a cornerstone of the landmark germ theory of disease and the stupendous public health breakthroughs of the twentieth century. Koch won the Nobel Prize in 1905. By 1893 a cholera vaccine had been developed and inoculations quickly became commonplace. The cholera breakthrough was rapidly replicated with cures for other major bacterial diseases. Typhoid fever—another waterborne filth disease whose epidemics afflicted urbanizing cities throughout the nineteenth century, and in 1861 claimed the life of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Consort Albert, and later nearly killed her son and future king Edward—was brought under control with an effective vaccine (1897) and the same sanitary reforms that eradicated cholera. Following the stunning success of U.S. doctors in eradicating endemic, mosquito-borne yellow fever during the construction of the Panama Canal, a worldwide assault on the disease was launched in 1915 by the newly created Rockefeller Foundation; by 1937 a new, inexpensive vaccine all but eliminated the dreaded disease as a world health problem. Global malaria control became a target in the 1920s. Initial success came with drainage, and after World War II the widespread use of pesticides, such as DDT. All in all, the virtual elimination of many communicable diseases through the combination of improved sanitary and environmental conditions, antibiotics, and vaccinations caused average human longevity to leap stunningly by twenty years between 1920 and 1990 and doubling from the pre–Sanitary Awakening age. Infant mortality plunged, falling to half of 1 percent in the United Kingdom and most of the industrialized world by the early twenty-first century—a twentyfold improvement from the mid-nineteenth century.
The Sanitary Awakening and acceptance of the germ theory of disease also spurred England to take important further actions to ensure that London’s water supply was both ample and clean. The guiding principles were that water should be drawn from the cleanest available source, purified, and protected against contamination during distribution. Although the Thames remained London’s main supply of drinking water, it was supplemented by underground and upland river sources. Filtration plants were built to eliminate impurities through various methods, including traditional, slow sand filtering and, after the 1890s, rapid filtration of water pretreated with coagulants. Another key turning point was achieved with chlorination of water supplies from the early twentieth century. To purify water of germs, other chemical and heat disinfectants were applied, including copper, silver, ultraviolet light, and powerful ozonization processes. Sewage was jettisoned far from population centers into bodies of water under the catchy, good housekeeping guideline of societies everywhere that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” From the late nineteenth century, London ceased discharging its sewage into the Thames and instead carried it on barges to be dumped in the ocean.
By 1900, England had turned the corner on improving public sanitation and health. Very gradually, the Thames recovered. Even the fussy salmon reappeared in the river in 1974 after a 140-year hiatus. By 2007, London had some 14,000 miles of sewers and wa
s preparing its first major upgrade, featuring a 20-mile-long sewage storage tunnel under the river, since the original Victorian-age network because the old sewer system could no longer handle a population that had grown to 8 million.
England’s sanitary revolution triggered a virtuous cycle of competition among industrialized democracies to improve water supplies and public health. By 1920, residents of almost all the world’s rich industrial cities in Europe and North America enjoyed abundant, clean freshwater for drinking, cooking, and washing. For the first time in 5,000 years, cities became generally self-sustaining habitats for human populations. Typhoid and yellow fever outbreaks, and some cases of great, deadly fires, induced several eastern American cities to act contemporaneously with Scotland and northern Britain to provide water for sanitation, drinking, and firefighting. By 1860, 12 of the largest 16 American cities had municipality-run water supply systems. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chicago achieved America’s most ambitious civil engineering project until the Panama Canal—the reversal of the flow of the Chicago River. By reversing its flow, the river no longer evacuated sewage into the city’s Lake Michigan drinking supply, but instead carried it downstream to be diluted in the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. Death from waterborne disease fell sharply in America and became negligible by 1940.
Contemporaneously, sewage treatment plants became commonplace. In one of the unsung achievements of modern society the effluent of fully treated wastewater was often wholesome enough to be safely consumable as drinking water, although almost nowhere in the world did cities dare to actually do so. After the three steps of state-of-the-art sewage treatment—filtering our solids, breaking down the remaining organic matter with microorganisms, and applying chemical disinfectants to kill remaining bacteria—the quality of the discharged water was often superior to the bodies of water into which it was discharged. Rather than being dumped in the sea, London’s sludge today is incinerated through a bed of sand at 850ºC—with the recovered heat used to power electricity-producing steam turbines that drive the treatment plant, and the excess energy sold to Britain’s electric grid. The final, released wastewater is measurably cleaner than the water in the Thames.
By enormously increasing the supply of clean freshwater resources, the sanitary revolution played a pivotal role in sustaining the urban ecosystems at the heart of industrial civilization. Without it, the momentous, rapid shift of humanity from the farming countryside to the industrial cities would have been impossible. In 1800, only 2.5 percent of the world’s population, or about 25 million people, lived in cities. In 2000, nearly half the world’s 6 billion people did so. Urban concentrations became immense: 29 megacities held over 7 million compared to only six cities in the world with 500,000 two centuries earlier.
Western liberal democracies’ success in delivering ample freshwater and sanitary services to its citizens provided one of its important comparative economic and politically legitimizing advantages over its Cold War rivals. The communist world’s authoritarian, command economy states, in contrast, lagged notoriously far behind in providing sanitary and other kinds of environmental health—both a leading indicator and a causal force of their relative decline. Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, for example, the Moscow River received untreated nearly all the sewage of the capital city, rendering it virtually an open sewer reminiscent of the Thames during the Great Stink. In the same period, some 90 percent of Chinese cities had no wastewater treatment at all. Worse still were conditions in the third world, which could best be compared to those of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, with 90 percent of all sewage and 70 percent of industrial wastes dumped into streams and lakes without any treatment at all at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
That the influential pacesetter in leading the response to the sanitary environmental challenges of early industrialism had shifted from Britain to the United States was not coincidental. It reflected the continuing historical shift westward in power across the oceans to the United States, which became the world’s most prolific, productive, and innovative manipulator of water by the early twentieth century.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Water Frontiers and the Emergence of the United States
The global ascendance of the United States closely paralleled its mastery of its three disparate hydrological environments: its rainy, temperate, river-rich eastern half, dominated by the continent’s arterial Mississippi River; its predominantly arid, drought-prone, Far West extending to the Pacific Ocean from the 100th meridian of the high Great Plains; and its frontage on the sea-lanes between the world’s two largest oceans. By fusing these diverse water frontiers into a coherent national political and economic realm, America leveraged its favorable geographical location and the abundant natural resources of its vast island-continent to become civilization’s world superpower in the twentieth century.
Like other great states’ rise to power, America gained command of its native resources for the main conventional uses of water as well as made innovative responses to special challenges that mobilized water’s inherent transformational powers to produce spectacular breakthroughs that defined the age. The first phase, which was fully realized by the end of the nineteenth century, featured the westward expansion of its frontier from the coastal states east of the Appalachian Mountains throughout the rich farmland of the Mississippi River Valley as far as the beginning of the dry belt in the Great Plains of Kansas and Nebraska. Development was activated mainly by the application of “Yankee ingenuity” to existing European economic technologies. This enabled America to take advantage of the region’s abundance of lakes, rivers and fast-flowing streams, rich farmland, wooded forests, and long indented coastlines, and to compensate for the young nation’s shortages of labor, capital, and technical expertise. Waterwheels and early water turbines powered the rise of homegrown factories and later provided the key to exploiting America’s huge potential hydroelectricity. The enormous farm and raw materials wealth of the Mississippi Valley heartland was unlocked by the advent of river steamboats and canals, which created an inexpensive, long-distance inland water transport network linking the markets of New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. Steam locomotives thickened and extended the transport web across the continent by 1869, adding momentum to America’s industrial ascent. By the late nineteenth century, when the age of iron and steam was superseded by the mass production technologies of steel, electricity, petroleum, and the internal combustion engine, American industry was the most productive in the world.
While America rose to power on its eastern resources, it truly distinguished its destiny as world superpower by overcoming and harnessing the latent potential of water obstacles within its two other hydrological frontiers. Its global primacy was first declared through its completion in 1914 of the grandest water engineering challenge of the age—the Panama Canal. At a stroke, the Canal established America as the commercial fulcrum of maritime world trade, launched the sea power of its increasingly formidable “big stick” navy across two oceans and quickened the linkages between its underdeveloped Far West and its productive eastern economy.
Even greater impetus was generated by the water innovations that transformed its inhospitably arid, virgin, western frontier lands into a cornucopia of irrigated agriculture, mining, and hydroelectric-powered industry. The original Boulder (later renamed Hoover) Dam on the Colorado River provided the technology prototype for the giant, multipurpose dams erected worldwide in the twentieth century that facilitated the extraordinary prosperity of the agricultural Green Revolution and global industrialization. Midwestern farmers created a breadbasket from a dust bowl when they became capable of tapping the enormous water wealth hidden away in the huge fossil aquifer—an underground lake the size of Lake Huron—submerged deep beneath the high central plains through the advent of more powerful pumping and irrigation technologies. By the 1940s, in short, America was exploiting its ample natural
water resources in a more intensified and enlarged manner than any society on Earth—a reliable leading indicator and catalyst, in every age of history, of robust prosperity and civilization.
Eastern U.S. & Mississippi
Panama Canal
Water was a key strategic determinant of America’s victory in its War of Independence from England in the late eighteenth century. By fortuitous timing the American Revolution occurred at the end of the age of sail and prior to the beginning of naval steam power. This effectively enlisted the sea itself as a natural ally of the secessionists and minimized England’s greatest military advantage—sea power. The arduous, six- to seven-week transatlantic sail protracted British supply lines and complicated execution of its command and control. Every British soldier, every cannon and musket, and every food ration had to be shipped 3,000 miles across the sea. Had the British already possessed steam gunboats, they could have easily maneuvered up America’s inland rivers to impose their will militarily upon the inland population as they did from the 1820s onward in Burma, India, and China. Instead they were confined to their more cumbersome sail age tactics, such as blockading harbors, raiding and seizing seaport cities, patrolling traffic on the high seas, and convoying troops and supplies among coastal ports. Suppressing the rebels required large troop deployments over expansive distances and rugged interior terrain, exploited by the American Continental Army’s hit-and-run tactics, which would have been a challenge even for the brilliance of Napoléon. The British army of the day was not up to the task, militarily or logistically. England therefore pinned its main hope of victory on rallying the active supply and intelligence support of colonial Loyalists.