Refuse, Reform, and Reversal: An Environmental History of the Chicago River, 1830-1910

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, Chicago’s industrial packinghouses, breweries, lumber mills, and brick foundries dumped their waste in the Chicago River. This sewage made the river an open sewer. The refuse threatened the city’s primary source of potable water: Lake Michigan. Chicago’s politicians, engineers, and sanitarians believed that the reversal of the Chicago River, made possible by the construction of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (SSC) in 1900, provided an adequate waste- removal system for the city. The SSC diverted the city’s sewage away from the lake, sending it downstream toward the Illinois River. In 1906, however, the Chicago River remained an open sewer. It repulsed the socialist activist and author Upton Sinclair, who documented the city's horrid environs in his novel, The Jungle. Sinclair described the Chicago River as a “cesspool of filth” that “stank like the craters of Hell and defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate.” Although the project’s architects publicly claimed that the reversal would clean the city’s water, the diversion of the Chicago River served industry at the poor’s expense. Those most susceptible to the river’s pollution, particularly working-class immigrant and African American communities, remained underserved. The SSC gave industries the confidence to pollute as they always had near the most impoverished neighborhoods. Heralded as a reformist triumph, the project only reinforced technocratic bureaucrats not as regulators of polluters, but of peoples and nature. The reversal of the Chicago River, a regional commercial endeavor, defended Illinois’s economic health in exchange for the public health of residents closest to industrial pollution.