Posted 21 December 2004

“If war, famine, disease, and death were the four horseman of the apocalypse, fire surely could have been a fifth.” From an apocalyptic precept that is as startling as it is convincing, Mark Tebeau’s Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800-1950 proceeds to narrate the history of its subtitle’s subject in immense and impressive detail. Starting with the emergence of voluntary firefighting units in the new American metropolises of the nineteenth century—New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, New Orleans and St. Louis—Eating Smoke charts the shifting perceptions of these remarkable men and of the fire they fought to smother, contain and control. Throughout, Tebeau makes his case very well. The virtues both of a traditional historical methodology based on empiricism and research and of a penetrating cultural analysis are on display here. Although the former is at times more prominent than the latter, Tebeau’s evocative narratives of major conflagrations like those that beset Chicago in 1871 and Boston in 1872 are interestingly interspersed with passages on the conflicting interpretations that these spectacular catastrophes inspired. Most striking among these is perhaps that which the title indicates: the remarkable degree to which an individual firefighter’s worth continued, throughout the period that the book covers, to be gauged in terms of how much smoke he could “eat”—a physical criterion that helps explain the necessary predominance of men in this overwhelmingly masculine story.

As a matter of fact, Tebeau is so good on such critical matters that that one starts to wish the book could expand its somewhat limiting and slightly unambitious scope. Tebeau’s coverage of West Coast developments, for example, is surprisingly and disappointingly scanty. Similarly, one yearns to hear Tebeau’s thoughts on the role fire played in other phases of American history or in the development of other major metropolitan areas of the world. One yearns, for example, to see Tebeau question whether national American culture between 1800 and 1950 sustained its earlier association of fire with the assumed “devilry” of the American Indian, or to explore in even fuller detail the extent to which city fires were interpreted either according to a Biblical cosmology or a set of folkloric superstitions. In the same way, the Great Fire of London, the source of so many vivid accounts and not a few fanciful ones, and a catastrophe intriguingly associated as much with progress and renewal as it was with death and destruction, could have prompted some very interesting comparative discussion. Such discussion, moreover, could have showcased Tebeau’s impressive skills as a cultural commentator and analyst in a yet more effective manner.

In terms of what it sets out to do, Eating Smoke succeeds unequivocally. A fascinating, engrossing, sturdy work of empirical history, it tells the student everything he or she needs to know about its chosen subject. But it is also everything that this subject is not: slow, contained, controlled, and unlikely to set the mind ablaze. One hopes that Tebeau’s next book does more justice to all of his formidable intellectual skills.  

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