Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society by Arwen Mohun (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society by Arwen Mohun Scott Knowles (bio) Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society. By Arwen Mohun. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. 344. $55. It’s not often that a reader encounters Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Florence Kelley, and Huey Newton in one volume—but such is the range of personalities one finds in Arwen Mohun’s creative and highly readable Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society. Mohun develops a series of risk cases spanning American history, linking them together in a chain that runs from fires in colonial Philadelphia to consumer product safety debates in the late twentieth century. The book is divided into three sections. First, Mohun considers risk in the pre- to partially industrialized nation, including cases of urban fire, lightning, smallpox, and horse-related injuries. These “risks from nature,” she argues, were understood and managed according to the mentality of a “vernacular risk culture”—“a set of rules, customs, and beliefs … generated in the course of everyday activities … passed informally from person to person, reinforced through the authority of experience and social status” (p. 1). The second section outlines the emergence of risk analysis and regulation as a professional act, spurred by the dangers of industrial transportation (railroads) and factory employment. By the 1930s “safety professionals gradually expanded the scope of their efforts from factories to streetcars to schoolrooms … [allying] themselves in these efforts with businessmen, bureaucrats, and other members of a burgeoning middle class” (p. 159). The book’s concluding section focuses on the debates surrounding the attempts over the twentieth century to create a risk-regulation state. Illustrated through the evolution of automobile safety, insurance, and licensing, and in an ingenious chapter on early gun-control legislation, this section comes to the grim conclusion that by the 1980s the “dreams of a powerful regulatory state that put safety first had been sacrificed to a declining, deindustrializing American economy and a new political ideology that suggested that safety at any cost might be a luxury American society could not afford” (p. 254). Mohun’s analysis is strongest when she is walking us through dramatic [End Page 245] culture clashes over risk: a grenade flies through Cotton Mather’s window in the midst of a raging public debate over smallpox inoculation in 1721 (he was in favor of inoculation). The relative safety or danger of lightning rods set off a war of words in Franklin’s day. Handgun control in Progressive-Era New York City spawned an argument over federal gun control that enlivened the NRA and landed in the committees of the New Deal Congress. Whereas Risk functions very well in this sort of historical anthropology—cultures of risk in conflict mode—it functions less well in advancing our thinking about why exactly American society tolerates some risks—automobile crash deaths and failing levee systems, for example—and not others, like airline crashes and terrorist attacks. Mohun’s central explanatory dynamic is one of constant dispute, that is to say this is a history of knowledge claims and counterclaims in a rough-and tumble-democracy. The vaccine and the lightning rod, the driver’s license and the gun license—each resolves a crisis of risk in its time and place, and yet each case also opens up longstanding American conflicts along lines of class, race, regional identity, and ideology. Could there also be something to say here about more structural historical features of the American political economy—the longstanding urban versus rural divide, or perhaps the ongoing battle of individual freedom versus the protection of the commons? The shift from a less to a more environmentally destructive form of capitalism over the past 300 years, and the rise of the military-industrial complex, with its accompanying national toleration of near-constant war and nuclear threat, also deserve close attention in any comprehensive study of American risk history. These criticisms aside, the book is a welcome addition to the growing field of risk and disaster studies, primarily because Mohun takes on a long stretch of historical time, rather than (as is too often the case among historians) focusing narrowly on one type of risk, or one singular disaster...