Blazing Culture-lism: Cause for Mild Alarm

Abstract

In an appendix listing the specific jobs in her broad occupational categories, Amy Greenberg places Writer (Newspaper) as low white collar, while two social steps down she includes-just above the unskilled watermen and day laborers and with draymen, teamsters, and waiters as semiskilled-the Writer (Academic) (p. 168). This seems a bit harsh. Though there's no evidence that academics make more money or contribution than their fellow semiskilled bell-ringers, police, and porters, their status and ability seems similar to those of journalists and are probably used to no more social detriment. In fact, Cause for Alarm shows skill and work enough to be mild cause for celebration among those interested in urban change in midnineteenth-century United States. Greenberg's study deals with the history of firefighters in the three cities of Baltimore, St. Louis, and San Francisco in roughly the period 1820-1866. Her book challenges the two common interpretations of the transition that is the real focus of interest, that from volunteer to professional fire organizations. Early scholars saw the successful demand for more efficient and less turbulent paid systems as the reformist result of increasing violence and partisan involvement by the volunteers. More recent ones have given a less favorable twist to the story by seeing in professionalization middle-class repression of the working-class or communal-ethnic that came to control the volunteer firehouses. The questions Greenberg raises about aspects of these two explanations are a good deal more convincing than are her own answers. Yet Greenberg's conclusions, tied as they are to the profession's current debate over civic declension, and especially to its current preference for answers grounded in group cultures and consciousness, are well worth pondering. While scholarly books on the professionalization of police forces have proliferated in the last three decades, firefighting has been given much scantier and slanting academic attention. The richest research has been done