Fighting Fire with Fire(fighters)

ED: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. With wildfires raging in about a dozen states, we’re spending an hour talking about the history of fire in America.

ED: Nowadays, firefighting is one of the most respected lines of work. We hail firefighters as heroes who sacrifice their lives for others. But if you look to popular historical accounts of fireman, like the 2002 film, Gangs of New York, you’d think that in the 19th century, they were basically ruffians.

MALE SPEAKER: There were 37 amateur fire brigades, and they all fought each other.

ED: At this point in the movie, one brigade pulls up to a burning building just as another rounds the corner. And instead of rushing toward the flames, dozens of men collide into fisticuffs. This common image of the tough, bare knuckle firefighter prompted one listener to give us a call.

MALE SPEAKER: Hi, this is Brian calling from Baltimore, Maryland. My question is, many firefighters were originally formed as gangs which fought each other to be the one to put out the fire. How does such a wacky form of civil service come to be, who were these people, why did they fight fires, and how were they finally superseded by fire departments? Thanks very much. Bye-bye.

BRIAN: We called up Brooklyn College historian Benjamin Carp for the answer. Carp says that in the colonial era, firefighting was the responsibility of everyone in the community. Everyone grabbed a water bucket, got in line, and passed it hand to hand to put out the blaze. By the turn of the 19th century, as cities became denser and fires became harder to handle, fireman’s brigades sprang up. But Carp says that Hollywood’s rough and tumble portrayal of those guys is something of an exaggeration.

BENJAMIN CARP: Firefighters weren’t necessarily originally formed as gangs, they were originally formed as volunteer companies. As firefighting equipment became a little bit more specialized in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, all of a sudden you needed men who would volunteer to work with the hand pumped engines and put out fires. And given the ethos of the day, this was a way to display your manly prowess, to be a good Republican citizen, to protect your community from the deadly effects and destructive effects of fire. It was a proud tradition of service.

So while they were volunteer organizations, I don’t know if I would necessarily call them gangs. And they’re definitely was a golden age of volunteer fire service in the early 19th century.

ED: So who were these volunteer firefighters that Brian’s asking about?

BENJAMIN CARP: Sure. The volunteer firefighters actually represented a surprising mix. Some of them were artisans, journeymen, craftsmen who worked with their hands. But there were also people from the developing middle class. Clerks, and merchants, and even wealthy men. They were also racially very exclusive, which doesn’t reflect very well on these early volunteer fire companies. But generally, African Americans were excluded in most northern cities.

ED: So with these people organized by neighborhood, I think Brian’s question’s reflecting the widespread sense that these groups are pretty competitive with each other. And you have stories of them racing to the fires, and trying to beat the other team, so forth. Is there truth to that story?

BENJAMIN CARP: Yes, there’s some truth. The firefighters were sometimes cooperative with one another. They would stage parades together, they would visit one another, they would have meals together. But sometimes they could also be very competitive, as well. They would compete to see who could pump their engine the hardest, they would compete to see who could throw water the highest. And it absolutely was true that some of these volunteer fire companies would fight each other at the scene of a fire. But I do think that to some extent in popular culture in some of the popular history since then we only remember the competition and not the actual firefighting that these volunteer fire companies really did accomplish.

And in part, that’s actually because of early 19th century theatre had a character called Mose Humphries was based on a real firefighter, but he was a particularly violent and manly individual, and that really became the stereotype of what the firefighter was like.

ED: So there’s nothing particular about firefighting that made them especially rowdy?

BENJAMIN CARP: Well, yes. I mean, one of the things that makes this a particularly fraught discussion is because firefighters were supposed to be protecting the city, when they did get disorderly, they were extremely vulnerable to that type of criticism. And so especially beginning in the 1850s and 1860s, you have a group of reformers, anti-immigrant critics, and insurance companies who really target the firefighters for their rowdiness and do really begin to depict to them as gangs. And so that combination of forces eventually lead some of the largest cities to turn to paid fire departments, and doing away with their older volunteer fire companies.

ED: We called our listener Brian back to find out if Ben Carp’s answer lined up with the history he had been reading on the subject.

MALE SPEAKER: What he raises, I think is really important is a dimension of thinking about that there was a volunteer dimension, right? And there were some economically diverse cooperation that went into it. And so while I very much appreciate that that aspect of highlighting the virtue and the cooperative spirit the time, I’m a little dubious. And I think that what we find is a much more richer system of coercion and crime probably driving this as well.

ED: So I hear you saying one thing and really meaning another, to be honest, Brian. You’re polite.

MALE SPEAKER: Oh really?

ED: You say, Yeah, I find that kind of persuasive, but you don’t, really.

MALE SPEAKER: No, I do. I cite historical [INAUDIBLE], which is to say, that’s another I give that I’ll keep in my head, but we’re talking history, right? So you’re comparing anecdotes, and it’s like which anecdote you should focus on.

ED: That’s fair. It’s kind of like a court of law. We talk about the preponderance of evidence, you know? And so, yeah, I think it’s fair to say that if you’re going to enjoy history, you have to enjoy that wobble in the explanations. And recognize in many ways, the interesting part is the variance. I think the thing that was revealing to me from Ben’s response was how our own belief in professionalization can go back and make us think that what came before professionalization was more problematic than it might be.

So I would say as a historian, thank goodness that we have this wobble, or else we’d be out of business after we answered all the questions. So we appreciate you asking your good question, and I appreciate your manly, if I can use the phrase from the early 19th century, resistance to Ben’s countervailing response.

MALE SPEAKER: All right, thanks so much for your time.
ED: My pleasure. Bye bye. Earlier we heard from Benjamin Carp, a historian at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College.