David E. Nye on Steam Power in America

     What struck me most in reading this week's selection from Consuming Power was the symbolism of coal.  The gleaming mineral began to replace wood as the cheapest and most readily available fuel for steam power in the 1820's and '30's.  David E. Nye's account of the Age of Steam in the latter half of the nineteenth century returns repeatedly to the indelible stain of coal--literal, geographical, social, and spiritual--on the rapidly changing national consciousness.
     Even as the faces, clothes, and homes of Coal Belt miners were blackened by their livelihood, their lungs also slowly acquired the tinge of the deadly soot.  While mining companies pursued profits without benefit of a regulatory authority, "Picturesque rural areas 'were quickly transformed into hills ravaged of their forest cover...the waters running red and green with wastes, the whole atmosphere thickened by a gray pall of smoke and dust and grime'" (83).  Cities turned to bituminous coal for heat, blanketing their streets with grime and darkening the cool white marble façades of the antebellum North.  King Coal even cast a pall over religion and politics, whose leaders were loath to criticize the miracle fuel even in the midst of earthly tragedy.  At a funeral following a coal-fired boiler disaster in Hartford, "the two clergymen who gave sermons at the funeral attributed the blast to God's inscrutability, going out of the way to exonerate the company and its employees of negligence...Thus both law and religion absolved management of responsibility for disasters and encouraged further industrialization" (85).