All That Is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

Industrial capitalism arrived in Europe as great urban fires were already retreating. The United States, however, was generously timbered and far more reliant on wooden construction. As a result, its infernos continued, and even increased, well into its age of capital. They especially struck places of intense commodification: hastily built settler towns, slave cities, financial centres and sites of mineral extraction. Noting the connection between fire and capitalism, a class of upwardly mobile strivers came to appreciate fires for their ability to disrupt social hierarchies, reset property relations and nurture economic dynamism. Oddly, many who had suffered fires even interpreted them as ‘blessings in disguise’. This pyrophilia was not universal, however, and the richest men of the Gilded Age strenuously opposed it, seeking instead to fireproof the environment. The clash between pyrophobes and pyrophiles was between economic incumbents and economic insurgents, and it touched on many areas of late nineteenth-century culture. Familiar Gilded Age artefacts such as Chicago’s White City and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz can be productively understood in terms of this widespread fight over the value of fire, and thus the shape of capitalism.