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Abstract
“That smoke means money.” This is what Devra Davis’s mother said when Davis complained about the soot-filled smoke that blanketed their Donora home. In good times, 4,000 workers operated the Donora mills 24-hours a day, emitting endless plumes of that smoke. Their labor produced the steel for the Golden Gate and Verrazzano Narrows Bridges, for rails that stretched the width of the country, and the wire that fenced in the American prairies and World War I and II battlefields. When the mills’ profitability declined enough to make it less desirable, U.S. Steel left. Previous examinations of the effluent that caused the Donora air pollution disaster in 1948 have focused on sulfur and fluorine gases. This dissertation explores the impact of heavy metal particulates (cadmium, lead, and arsenic) on the townspeople that was in Donora’s effluent in hazardous levels, while placing Donoran’s experiences within the context of the trajectory of American steel and labor from 1901 through 1970. “Smoke Meant Money: The History of Smog in a Pennsylvania Steel Town” starts with the rise of industrialization in the Pittsburgh region and its surrounding river valley towns (1740-1900), goes through Donora’s founding and its time as a mill town (1901-1967), ending with the impact of deindustrialization on Donora from 1967 to the present. The dissertation presents a town built to service a mill that was started by a group of Gilded Age oligarchs as a method of accumulating capital. The people of Donora made the town their own through sixty years of building their community, fused together by dangerous work under the haze of a slow-rolling environmental disaster. Donora’s rich culture was a blend of the traditions of southern and Eastern European immigrants escaping oppression and poverty and African Americans escaping the treachery of Jim Crow. Through the slow loss of population after the last mill closed in 1967, remaining Donoran’s attempted vainly to maintain Donora’s character. The corporation achieved its purpose – accumulating wealth. Conversely, American society did not meet its responsibilities – assuring a decent life for its people. There is a price for that disregard.