The Cuyahoga River's Last Fires

In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire, not for the first time, but for the last time. This event is often credited with helping pass the Clean Water Act and inspire the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
are going to talk about an event that became a
really huge symbol in the environmental movement, and it's often

(00:24):
credited with helping surpass the Clean Water Act and inspire
the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. But a lot,
like a lot of the things that we talked about
on the show, the actual story is way more complicated
than that, and the whole thing is often portrayed in
a way that has a lot of inaccuracies. In nineteen

(00:44):
sixty nine, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire.
This was not for the first time, it was, in fact,
for the last time. But for the people who have
heard of this fire, the image that probably came to
your mind is not from this fire at all. It's
from a completely differ one. And as we mentioned before
the episode, the image that comes to mind for me

(01:06):
is R. E. M. Saying about Kuyahoga. It has nothing
to you know, and no no historical significance other than
it was a great song. I don't even know it,
so maybe after we record, I will go look it up.
There you go. Cleveland, Ohio, sits on the shore of
Lake Erie, along a very twisty part of the Cuyahoga

(01:27):
River which empties into the lake. And there are a
couple of different theories about where the river's name comes from,
either a Mohawk word for crooked or a Seneca name
meaning place of the jaw bone, and sometimes these are
also conflated and described as being a Seneca word for crooked. Yeah,
I found out a lot of times before I found
this thing that's spelled it out completely differently. Centuries before

(01:51):
the establishment of Cleveland, the Cuyahoga River Valley was home
to several indigenous cultures, beginning with prehistoric nomadic peoples who
came to the area roughly thirteen thousand years ago. Later,
the River Valley's prehistoric inhabitants also included people's from the
Mound building Hopewell culture, followed by what's known as the

(02:12):
Whittlesey people. What we know of these cultures comes from
the archaeological records, so we don't know their actual name.
Hopewell comes from Mordecai Hopewell, who owned the land that
was home to a series of their mounds. Whittlesey is
named for geologist and archaeologist Charles Whittlesey. Cleveland was established

(02:33):
on part of the Connecticut Western Reserve. This was land
in the Northwest Territory that was claimed by Connecticut. Although
the Seneca likely used parts of the Western Reserve as
a hunting ground, the area that became Cleveland doesn't appear
to have had a permanent population in the decades just
before its founding. That changed when Moses Cleveland surveyed and

(02:55):
mapped the Connecticut Land Company's Western Reserve holdings. Cleveland was
the first settlement that was established after this survey, which
was completed in seventeen ninety six. The population of the
newly established Cleveland grew very very slowly, although the immediate
area wasn't permanently inhabited, other parts of what would become

(03:15):
the state of Ohio were People were reluctant to move
to the area out of fear of attacks by the
indigenous population, and until the eighteen twenties, it was also
hard to get to thanks to a lack of roads
or other transportation options. Eventually, steamboats on Lake Erie roads railroads,
and the construction of the Ohio and Erie Canalway made

(03:37):
it more accessible. As Cleveland grew, it became an important
industrial center in the United States. Standard Oil Company, which
is still recognizable name, was established by John D. Rockefeller,
and it was founded there around eighteen seventy. Steel mills
became a huge part of Cleveland's economy and also one

(03:58):
of the major employers, with almost thirty percent of the
city's population working in the steel industry by eighteen eighty.
These industries and the city itself grew up in a
time when there wasn't a lot of regulation about how
to handle waste. Sewage emptied into the river, as did
industrial waste and runoff. The water became so dirty that

(04:19):
if you fell into it, you went to the hospital
when you got out again. This wasn't remotely unique to Cleveland,
and to a lot of people. A river that was
obviously visibly filthy was a necessary trade off for all
of the industry that was bringing money into the city.
Cleveland's population peaked in nineteen fifty at nearly a million people,

(04:40):
but then, as was the case for many other industrial
cities in the United States, the industrial sector started to decline.
Between nineteen fifty two and nineteen sixty nine, the city
lost sixty thousand manufacturing jobs, and that industrial decline brought
along with it a loss of jobs, an increase and
abandoned industrial property along the outer front, a higher crime rate,

(05:02):
and a range of other social and economic issues. As
the city center became increasingly run down, anyone who could
afford to move to the newer suburbs did, and that
compounded all of these issues. Running alongside this was an
increase in racism and racial tensions in Cleveland. The city
had experienced the same demographic shifts as many other major

(05:24):
cities after the Civil War and the end of reconstruction.
African Americans had moved to Cleveland and other cities from
the Deep South, seeking work in factories and trying to
escape oppressive Jim Crow laws. But Cleveland's white citizens had
then started moving out of the neighborhoods that were becoming
home to black families, in a pattern that's commonly known

(05:46):
as white flight. Since middle class white families were moving
out of neighborhoods as lower income black families moved in,
the tax base for these neighborhoods dropped dramatically, which led
to a corresponding decline and all of the systems and
services that are funded by taxes. And even though segregation
and discrimination weren't as legally codified in Ohio as they

(06:09):
were in much of the South, they still existed. Racism
and racial bias in policing and housing created a lot
of the same disparities in Cleveland as Jim Crow laws
did elsewhere. The Supreme Court would eventually rule that Cleveland
schools were segregated by race, even though that racial segregation
was not spelled out in law. All of this culminated

(06:32):
in the Huff riots of July. It's unclear exactly what
sparked that riot, but the most commonly cited account is
that white restaurant owners and the predominantly black neighborhood of
Huff refused to give a black customer a glass of water,
and then they hung a sign in the window that
read no water for n words. A crowd of mostly

(06:53):
black protesters gathered outside the restaurant, and after police arrived
to try to disperse the crowd, the situation and escalated
from an angry mob throwing rocks to a six day
riot that involved looting, arson in the deployment of the
Ohio National Guard. Four people were actually killed in this riot,
and all of them were black. This incident is often

(07:15):
cited as contributing to the election of Carl Stokes as
Cleveland's mayor in nineteen sixty seven. It was his second
attempt at running for mayor, having lost in nineteen sixty five.
He was the first black mayor of a major US city,
and a number of historians suggests that his election was
in part out of a desire for stability and unity

(07:35):
in a city that was really struggling. Stokes platform during
the election focused on jobs, housing and attempts to revitalize
the city. But because this fire that we're going to
talk about happens during his time in office, he wound
up becoming a really prominent figure in a completely different movement.
And we'll talk about that more after a sponsor break.

(08:02):
On June at twenty second, nineteen sixty nine, sparks from
a train passing over one of the trestles that crossed
the Kuyahoga River ignited oil that had collected on its surface,
and the resulting fire was pretty visually dramatic. It reached
about five stories tall. Firefighters extinguished the blaze within twenty
or thirty minutes, but not before it damaged two rail trestles,

(08:26):
one belonging to Norfolk and Western Railroad and the other
to Newburg and South Shore. Estimates on how much the
damage cost to repair them varies from between fifty thousand
and a hundred thousand dollars, depending on who you ask.
The city of Cleveland was not particularly traumatized by the
burning river. It was not the first time that it
had caught fire. The Kuyahoga had burned at least thirteen

(08:50):
times over the previous hundred years. The most recent fire
before the one in nineteen sixty nine had occurred in
nineteen fifty two, and it had been far more destructive,
leading to about one point three million dollars in damages,
including the dry docks of the Great Lakes Towing Company
and multiple tugboats. It had nearly reached the standard oil refinery,
which could have been utterly catastrophic. The river's deadliest fire,

(09:14):
which caused five deaths, had happened in nineteen twelve. To
be clear here, the Cuyahoga River is by far not
the only river in the world to have ever caught fire,
just as examples other Great Lakes tributaries did during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well, including the Chicago
and Buffalo rivers, and this also still happens. As just

(09:36):
one other example, India's bell Under Lake has caught fire
more than once this year, which is seen, and of
course there are also lots of other pollutants that can
be in the water and be dangerous in ways that
don't involve setting on fire. By nineteen sixty nine, the
city of Cleveland simultaneously shrugged off river fires and viewed

(09:58):
them as a threat. When river caught fire, it wasn't
met with a lot of public fanfare or panic, but
there was an increasing awareness of the need to clean
up the river. That need, though, was driven by the
risk of fire damage, not really a desire to clean
the river for its own sake. Air pollution, which could
easily spread to the more distant suburbs, got a lot
more attention in terms of general pollution. Cleanup the flammable

(10:22):
river was also a problem that Cleveland was actively working on.
Cleveland's voters had approved a one hundred million dollar bond
initiative in nineteen sixty eight such just the year before,
and that was aimed at cleaning up one of the
big sources of pollution, which was untreated human waste. This
situation was particularly bad when heavy rains would cause the
sewer system to overflow, and the bond initiative was meant

(10:45):
to upgrade existing facilities, add new sewer lines, and build
a new sewage treatment plant. Ben Stefanski, who was Cleveland's
Director of Public Utilities, was the driving force behind the
spot and a big advocate for getting the public support,
both for the initiative itself and for the taxes that
would be necessary to fund it. In the days immediately

(11:07):
after the fire, local news coverage and local discussion of
what had happened was mostly focused on the damage and
who should pay to repair it. Because firefighters extinguished the
blaze so quickly, photographers didn't get to the scene in
time to get a picture of the fire in progress.
When the Cleveland Press and the Cleveland Plane Dealer went
to press the next day, they did so with photos

(11:29):
of the damaged railroad trestles, not of the fire itself,
and the press ran photos without a story, while the
Plane Dealer published a brief story as well, but all
the way back on page eleven c SO to Cleveland
in nineteen sixty nine, the river catching fire was not
anywhere near front page news. The much worse two fire
that we mentioned a little while ago, on the other hand,

(11:51):
had been the political back and forth that followed, which
was also reported in the local media, focused mostly on
the damage and the lame. Stefanski placed the blame on
the state, saying that it was issuing industrial permits that
allowed the dumping of industrial waste into the river. Then
the state countered that it was the city's failing sewer system,

(12:13):
the one that had been targeted to be upgraded with
this bond initiative, that needed to take the blame for
a lot of the oil in the water. The city
then excused the state of failing to match the bond
funds with funds of its own to help with this project.
After a while, the local media got tired of reporting
on all of this back and forth. An editorial that

(12:33):
ran in The Plain Dealer about two weeks after the
fire read quote bickering between Cleveland and the state over
who bears responsibility for the condition of the Cuyahoga, a
stream so polluted it catches fire From time to Time,
will not improve the quality of the filthy stream. All
of this discussion was really pretty local. There was little

(12:54):
to nothing in the national media until Time magazine published
a story on river pollution in August of nineteen sixty nine.
This story largely focused on the Kuyahoga River and it
reference to the June nine fire, but because there were
no pictures of that fire, Time used a picture from
the much more serious nineteen fifty two fire. This is

(13:16):
actually the picture of the fire that is on our
website for this episode. And although there are online versions
of the article that exists today with the photo clearly
captioned as being from a different fire, the one that
actually ran in Time in nineteen sixty nine just said
quote boat caught in flaming kaya Hooga. Suddenly, Cleveland and
the Cuyahoga River were in the national spotlight as evidence

(13:39):
of the dire state of the nation's polluted waterways, not
just in Ohio, but elsewhere too. More national coverage followed.
In nineteen seventy, National Geographics cover announced Our Ecological Crisis
as a title, with pictures of the kaya Hooga, not
at that time on fire, being part of a fold
out that accompanied the store. The river at that point

(14:02):
was still visibly incredibly filthy, and all the retrospectives that
are written today usually note correctly that the nineteen sixty
nine fire was the last and not the first, and
they don't usually use an out of contact context picture
with no explanation that it's really from an earlier fire.
In the nineteen seventies and even nineteen eighties, a lot

(14:23):
of the articles that evoked this fire were just sloppy.
They got key dates wrong. They described the fire as
something that stretched over miles of river when it was
really pretty contained. There were lots of other embellished details,
and they made it sound like the nineteen sixty nine
fire was both unique and a massive disaster rather than

(14:44):
something that was appalling. I mean, the river should not
catch fire, but it was also contained, quickly extinguished, and
was something that happened, as the newspaper said from time
to time. With all of this inflated coverage, the nineteen
sixty nine fire took on a almost mythical aspect. People
started remembering and we're using the air quotes. They're seeing

(15:05):
the fire on TV, even though no television footage existed.
Do you recall we mentioned that reporters got there too
late to even get photographs. Randy Newman wrote the song
burn On about the fire in nineteen seventy two, and
in the liner notes to a later album said he
had seen this non existent TV broadcast in part because

(15:25):
he was the first black mayor of a major US city.
Carl Stokes became a very visible presence in all of
this coverage, and eventually this blossoming national focus circled back
around locally, with Cleveland Areas school children writing hundreds of
letters to him asking him to clean up the city's pollution,
including the quality of the air and the health of

(15:48):
Lake Erie. Most of the letters were from suburban kids
who didn't live near the river, and few of them
actually mentioned the river, but they advocated in general for
a cleaner Cleveland and a cleaner planet. More about how
that idea spread from elementary school children onward is going

(16:08):
to happen after we first pause and have a little
sponsor break. Until nineteen sixty nine, none of the Kuyahoga's
many fires had gotten much national attention. The Time magazine
article and that photograph that was very dramatic are certainly
part of why it's suddenly got so much more pressed.

(16:30):
But apart from that, the nineteen Sine fire happened at
a time of both growing environmental awareness and increasing social
activism overall. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which outlined the dangers
of the pesticide DT, had come out in nineteen sixty two,
and while still somewhat controversial, the book became a hugely

(16:51):
influential bestseller and it was a lot of people's first
introduction to the idea of environmentalisms. And that was just
a few years before. For this river fire, we have,
I feel compelled to mention, gotten a lot of requests
to cover Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. We have done. Uh,
but we have done. I mean that by saying we
got a lot of request not that we have written

(17:12):
an edit on her at this time. Yeah yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. But just for those of you who might
hear that and say, hey, that would be a great episode,
we know we've gotten that. That requestment definitely covered on
the list. Uh. By nineteen seventy, the federal government had
heard about the Kuyahoga fire as well. Louis Stokes, brother
of Mayor Carl Stokes and a member of the U. S.

(17:32):
House of Representatives spoke before the House in late nineteen
seventy advocating adding language to a flood control bill that
would allow the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to
study water quality in the kuya Hooga River. He described
the fact that it had even caught fire as shameful.
He also made it seemed like the Kyahoga was the
only flammable river. Yad, I don't think it's definitely not

(17:57):
the only flammable river, but I think it was more
of an oversight than a like a deliberate effort to
make it focus only on Cleveland. But after this point,
both Stokes Brothers and the fire itself became a huge,
visible part of a campaign for federal regulations of both
the environment and water quality. Outside the halls of government,

(18:18):
the environmental movement was also continuing to grow. The First
Earth Day was observed on April twenty second, nineteen seventy
and as part of that First Earth Day, which had
UH celebrations, slash protests, slash observances all around the country,
college students at Cleveland State University marched from campus to
the Cuyahoga River. The National Environmental Protection Act and e

(18:42):
p A was signed into law on January one of
nineteen seventy. This was one of the nation's first general
laws to protect the environment. President Richard Nixon also announced
his intention to establish an Environmental Protection Agency in the
spring of nineteen seventy. The Agency it's self was established
on December two of that year, and the Clean Water

(19:03):
Act followed in nineteen seventy two. President Nixon actually vetoed
the Clean Water Act because of the cost involved, but
Congress overrode his veto. This was not the nation's first
law specifically related to water pollution. That, at least in
the most concrete terms, would be the Federal Water Pollution
Control Act of ninety eight. The Clean Water Act was

(19:26):
essentially a series of amendments to that ninety eight law,
among other things, that established a structure for regulating the
discharging of pollutants into the water. It funded the building
of a new of new suits treatment plants in places
that needed them, and it authorized the Environmental Protection Agency
to implement programs for pollution control. Of course, that's not

(19:47):
the end of the story. There have continued to be
new laws and rules about pollution and water since then,
with a continuing focus on weighing the cleanliness and safety
of waterways with the impact to businesses to maintain it.
This include it's the Heavily Contested Waters of the United
States Rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, which
is currently undergoing a review process through the e p A,

(20:09):
the Army, and the Army Corps of Engineers. In spite
of the various agencies and regulations, polluted waterways and municipal
water systems also continue to make headlines, including the Flint,
Michigan water crisis, in which the city has not had
clean water since a number of sources like to sort
of well, actually, the Cuyahoga River fire of nineteen sixty

(20:32):
nine it's impact on environmental protection laws. They note that
cities and states have begun had begun doing their own
work on cleaning up rivers, lakes, and streams before the
federal government ever got involved. The industrial decline in Cleveland
also meant there were a lot fewer factories discharging waste
into the river, which meant that the river was cleaner

(20:53):
than it had been in decades prior. And while all
of this is technically true, the Kuyahoga River was still
really really dirty in nineteen sixty nine, as were many
other rivers that had been adjacent to a similar cycle
of industrial rise and fall. It's also difficult for any
one state or municipality to tackle the problem of water

(21:14):
pollution on their own, since most bodies of water crossed
through multiple jurisdictions. As it became a symbol for catastrophe
and a need for environmental stewardship, the city of Cleveland
also became a national target of embarrassment. Articles in the
wake of the fire described it as a crumbling relic

(21:34):
of a fading industrial era, with white flight leaving the
city's downtown as a derelict shell. And while some of
the criticism was warranted, we talked about a lot of
these issues in the first act of the show, a
lot of the coverage really became unnecessarily mean spirited, with
Cleveland being nicknamed the Mistake on the Lake. Even after

(21:55):
years of environmental cleanup and a downtown renewal that started
in the nineteen eight east, Cleveland's reputation as a collapsing
miss persisted. There is even a joke in the two
thousand three series finale of Buffy the Vampires Layer that
Cleveland is on a hell mouth I think a lot
of people who grew up after this era, like after

(22:18):
the Nixon presidency and the creation of the E p
A and all that stuff, you don't remember this specific
story about Cleveland still grew up with the idea that
Cleveland was some sort of rundown laughing stock without really
knowing why. Yeah, and this is a lot of why.
And of course, obviously industry was not the only thing
that there was going on in Cleveland before any of

(22:40):
this happened. It's just the thing that's most relevant to
what we were talking about today and today, the Cuyahoga
River Fire of nineteen sixty nine has been somewhat reclaimed
by the city of Cleveland with a pinch of self
deprecating humor. Great Lakes Brewing Company opened in the Ohio
City neighborhood of Cleveland, not far from the river and
n and they brew a Burning River pale ale which

(23:03):
launched in and has labeling that gives a nod both
to the infamous river fire and the Clean Water Act
that followed it. Uh and Great Lakes Brewing Company also
hosts Burning Riverfest, which is a festival to support the
environmental organization Burning River Foundation. I think a lot of
the rest of the world is gradually catching up to

(23:25):
the idea that that Cleveland has renewed a lot of
itself since nineteen six when the river caught on fire,
at least I hope uh. Featured on The Drew Carey
Show with much positive um framing well too too. Dear

(23:46):
dear friends of mine who grew up both in Ohio
and then lived in Atlanta for many years, which is
where I knew them, have just moved back to Cleveland,
and they certainly would not have moved to a place
that was terrible. So I definitely hope that. I mean,
every place has legitimate criticisms, but I don't think Cleveland

(24:09):
deserves to be the laughing stock that it was for
so many decades. Yeah. I have a good friend that
that moved there uh uh several years ago. That's more
than several who had never been there and was kind
of like dreading it because still that shadow of of
stuff that we grew up with that it was not
a great place. And she had this like, this is
actually a wonderful place to live. So reports only good things. Yeah,

(24:37):
speaking of cities that became laughing stocks, I have listener
mail that's about the Scopes trial. This is from K
and this is a correction and also fascinating because it
is an error that is literally everywhere cases. Dear Tracy
and Holly. I've listened to your podcast for several years

(24:57):
and always enjoy it, but the recent podcast on this
Scopes trial was particularly interesting to me. One small correction
to begin the Druggist slash school board chair was Frank
eat Robinson, not Fred Robinson. Edward Lawson made that mistake
in his Pulitzer Prize winning books Summer of the Gods,
and it has been reproduced often. I'm gonna take a

(25:19):
pause from the letter to say here to say I
would almost call it it has been reproduced everywhere, Like
I think every source that I used UH had the
wrong name. And then as I was, um, you know,
we we we love our listeners, but also need to
fact check things because sometimes we do get corrections that

(25:40):
are not correct. Um. And when I was fact checking
this correction, UM, I found all of these notes in
the Smithsonian Archives. That was like the Smithsonian Archive correcting
incorrect photo captions that had the wrong name. So this
error is ubiquitous. UH, And K specifies, I'm not going

(26:02):
to go into exact detail because privacy, but she specifies
that the reason that she knows this is because he's
family member, and then I'll get back to the letter.
In addition to selling the school books in question, serving
as a school board chair, helping come up with the
plan for the trial, et cetera, he also testified his wife,

(26:25):
Clark Haggard Robinson, was a stringer for the Chattanooga Times,
and her brother Wallace, was one of the prosecution attorneys.
The family home, built about nineteen ten by Mr. Robinson's
father in law, was diagonally across the street from the courthouse,
and Clark was happy to entertain many of the attorney's
reporters and other visitors to Dayton at her table, including

(26:46):
both both Darrow and Brian. The one exception was H. L. Mencken,
who was, as he noted, famously uncomplimentary of the South
in general and Dayton in particular. She refused to have
him in her house. M Southern hospitality goes a long way,
but not that far. You also talked about the chimpanzee

(27:07):
Joe Mindy, who was part of the circus atmosphere surrounding
the trial. If you search for pictures of the chimp,
you will probably come across this one has a link.
I don't know the identity of the woman in the photographs,
but the man is Fred Robinson, and the children are
his daughter Francis and his brother Wallace, and some of
the pictures Wallace has cut off. Francis always said that

(27:28):
as soon as Joe Mindy had his coke and left
the drug store, she made sure that her father broke
the glass and threw it away so no one would
drink out of it. Uh. That cracks me up, because
I know I have drunk after my cats previous areas.

(27:50):
Thanks for the podcast. You did an excellent job of
telling the real story of the trial and it was
great fun for my husband and me to listen to.
And then she has a few concluding notes and says
signs off as Kay, thank you so much. Kay. As
I alluded to when I took a break for reading
the letter, I did not know that that ubiquitous error
is all over the place everywhere. Um. It reminds me

(28:12):
of when we did that episode on the eradication of
of smallpox and how we said that it was the
only disease that mankind has ever intentionally uh eradicated and
the a lot of people, not a lot, but some
people wrote in to be like, actually render pest um

(28:32):
and I was like, not only did I not know that,
but there are a whole lot of sources about this
that are wrong. So thank you so much for that
A fascinating account. Hey, if you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast or history
podcasts at how Stuffworks dot com or also on Facebook
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(28:55):
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You can come to our website, which is missing history

(29:17):
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(29:42):
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