Steven Solomon
Page 28
The interests of both nations were served in the world wars by the denial of Suez Canal access to German shipping, despite the international convention that designated it an international waterway open to all. But in 1956 the Suez Canal became the instrument that extinguished both nations’ final imperial pretensions and inaugurated the era of Cold War politics in the Middle East. In one of the greatest blunders of American postwar foreign policy, Eisenhower administration secretary of state John Foster Dulles inadvertently opened the door to Soviet Union influence in the region and fanned the flames of anti-Western pan-Arabism.
The “Suez Affair” began in 1952 with the rise to power in Egypt by military coup d’état of the charismatic Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. With tacit approval from the postwar superpower, the United States, Nasser negotiated the British withdrawal of troops from the Canal Zone, which was completed in the summer of 1956. Nasser’s supreme ambition was to build a giant dam on the Nile River at Aswan that would vastly increase irrigation and electrification in impoverished Egypt. It was a project of such monumental economic and symbolic political importance, heralding a renewal of Egyptian control over the Nile like that exerted by the Pharaohs of its bygone ancient civilization, that Nasser himself likened it to a modern pyramid. Concurrent to negotiating the exit of the British from Suez, Nasser thus also sought financing from the West for the enormously expensive Aswan high dam. Dulles, like British and French leaders, deeply distrusted Nasser. He disliked him personally as well. Above all, Dulles could not abide Nasser’s effort to steer a neutral policy in the Cold War, and resented the Egyptian’s efforts to negotiate between the West and the Soviet Union, which was eager to establish itself as a strategic power in the Middle East. In the fall of 1955, Dulles had been both shocked and upset when Nasser, after being stonewalled in a request for American arms, made a massive military purchase from the Soviet bloc, including 200 warplanes and 275 tanks—an alarming action that promptly accelerated war planning in Egypt’s neighbor and enemy, Israel.
In the winter of 1955–1956, Dulles elected to keep Nasser grounded in Western influence by agreeing to a substantial loan and grant package from the World Bank, the United States, and England for the high dam at Aswan. When Nasser bridled that the stringent terms, which included the monitoring of the Egyptian economy by the World Bank, were insulting and patronizing, however, Dulles didn’t budge. He knew the Soviets had offered to build the dam at Aswan. But he didn’t believe they had the technical capability to accomplish it. He thought they, or Nasser, were bluffing. So he waited Nasser out. After several months Nasser indeed capitulated to the terms and dispatched the Egyptian ambassador on July 19, 1956, to Dulles’s office atop the State Department to conclude the deal. But Dulles had been growing increasingly sour toward Nasser in the meantime. In what, at best, was a confused policy, and at worst a blundering miscalculation, Dulles wanted to give Nasser, and the Soviets, a further comeuppance by strongly asserting American dominance in the region. Despite urgings from top British officials to equivocate and “play it long,” Dulles began to inform the Egyptian ambassador why the United States was not able to support the Aswan deal at that moment. The ambassador grew agitated. He pleaded with Dulles not to withdraw the offer, informing him, with a tap on his pocket, that Egypt had an alternative financing offer ready for signing from the Soviets. It was plain he preferred the Western deal. Yet Dulles was irritated at what he viewed as blackmail for better terms. He sniffed, “Well, as you have the money already, you don’t need any from us. My offer is withdrawn!”
An infuriated Nasser not only signed with the Soviets to build the Aswan Dam. One week later, on July 26, he did something wholly unanticipated by Dulles—he unilaterally nationalized the Suez Canal. Tolls, he predicted, would pay for the dam within five years. He secretly gave the signal to begin seizure of the canal in a fiery speech before a large throng in Alexandria by using a prearranged code word—“de Lesseps.”
It was a move that changed the history of the twentieth century. While President Dwight Eisenhower and Dulles equivocated in their response over the fear of igniting a wider Middle Eastern war, to England and France it was an intolerable threat to let Nasser “have his thumb on our windpipe,” as British prime minister Anthony Eden put it. Beyond anger at Nasser’s impudence, England and France feared the economic costs if Egypt used the canal to hold hostage the lifeline of oil shipments transported in tankers from the Middle East to Europe, as well as the imitative repercussions in their other restive colonies. They began colluding to seize back the canal and depose Nasser. To execute their plan, they enlisted Egypt’s archenemy, Israel. Israel, which had fought against Egypt and other Arab states in its war for independence (1948–1949) and in 1956 was still denied use of the canal and was furthermore without shipping access to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean due to an Egyptian blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba at the Strait of Tiran, readily cooperated. On October 29 Israeli paratroopers, led by future prime minister Ariel Sharon, dropped into the Sinai peninsula 25 miles from the canal and began advancing upon it, while simultaneously seizing control of the Strait of Tiran at the eastern tip of the Sinai. Following their script, England and France feigned the role of neutral peacemakers interested in safeguarding the integrity of shipping through the canal. They demanded an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal by both sides to 10 miles from the canal. The Israeli troops froze. Egypt, which was the actual target since only its troops were within that proximity, did not. Reminiscent of 1882, England and France bombarded Egyptian air bases and landed “peacekeeper” troops that occupied the northern part of the canal when Nasser refused to withdraw.
But the world was entirely different than in 1882. Cold War politics and postwar independence movements had eclipsed the colonial imperial axis at the center of world power relationships. The Soviet Union threatened to intervene on Egypt’s behalf. Egyptian forces managed to block oil shipments through the canal. Investors around the world began dumping the British pound sterling, driving England into a financial crisis. Dulles and Eisenhower, the ultimate global power broker, felt personally betrayed by the secret Anglo-French collusion. Upon hearing the news of the allied attack, Eisenhower called Eden and said, “Anthony, have you gone out of your mind? You’ve deceived me.”
Fearing a new Cold War blowup—the abortive Hungarian revolution had also just occurred—Eisenhower decided that England and France had to withdraw. He obtained England’s capitulation by threatening to block an emergency International Monetary Fund jumbo financial loan package to save the wobbling sterling. British troops were already halfway down the canal when they were recalled on November 7. France was enraged, but could not stand alone. Concluding from the experience that England would always stand with America ahead of France and continental Europe in a crisis, France became the prime mover of the launch, within months of Suez, of the six-country Continental European Common Market—without England. French leaders managed to deny England membership in the forerunner of the European Union until 1973. A U.S.-led resolution, backed by the Soviet Union, condemning Israel and humiliating England and France, led to the first-ever deployment of a UN peacekeeping force, 6,000 blue helmet soldiers were sent to Suez and Sinai.
The withdrawal of England, France, and Israel put a triumphant Nasser back in charge as the canal reopened, adulated by a suddenly newborn pan-Arabist movement, and gave the Soviets their first important foothold in the Middle East. Before year’s end in 1956, de Lesseps’s statue at the entrance to the Suez Canal was torn down with the incitement of angry Egyptian mobs. The Suez debacle hastened the setting of the sun on the last important vestiges of the global colonial empires of England and France and brought to a close the world political era that had reached its apogee with steam-powered industrialization.
The heyday of the coal-burning steam engine lasted until the end of the nineteenth century. By then it began to be superseded by new forms of energy developed to meet industrial society’s insatiable demand for greater and mo
re manageable power. The technical limit of the classical steam engine peaked out at about 5,000 horsepower. This was inadequate for generating electricity in a fast-spinning dynamo—a versatile, important new form of energy that replaced much steam-powered machinery and created an entire new cluster of technological capability. Oddly enough the electrical age was initially powered by the reengineering of old-fashioned energy derived from falling water. Water turbines, in which water falling from high elevation flowed through fixed channels to turn finlike blades, were more efficient descendants of the waterwheel. Through most of the nineteenth century, turbines simply replaced waterwheels where great horsepower was required. Eventually their power efficiency surpassed that of steam engines. When the electrical age began following Thomas Edison’s 1879 invention of the lightbulb, water turbines were the most effective way of generating electricity. The world’s first big hydroelectric power station, featuring water turbines, was built in 1886 in America at Niagara Falls. Within a decade it was running ten 5,000 horsepower pressure water turbines to produce electricity. By 1936 the Hoover Dam had water turbines generating 134,000 horsepower, or 100,000 kilowatts.
Steam turbines also rapidly gained efficiency and soon became a major source of electrical generation in conjunction with the burning of fossil fuels. Steam turbines that generated a mere 1,600 horsepower in 1900 were producing three times as much a decade later. A series of steam turbines generating 68,000 horsepower powered the transatlantic liner Lusitania in 1906, heralding its wide application in high-speed ships. Gradually, steam turbines in thermal power plants burning coal, natural gas, or oil became viable alternatives to hydroelectric plants.
Hydroelectric power created its own political, economic, and social revolution. Electricity was highly transportable, and it could power cities and factories far from the water site where it was located. Nations poor in coal for steam power but rich in mountain water flows—or “white coal”—suddenly gained access to an energy resource that allowed them to enter the industrial age. This was dramatically illustrated in mountainous Italy, which not only became an industrial power, but also a viable nation-state, thanks to hydroelectricity. Abundant hydroelectricity liberated Italian steam-powered industry from the crippling burden of having to pay up to eight times more for scarce coal than its English counterparts. The newly unified Italian state built its first small hydroelectric plant in 1885. By 1905 it used more hydroelectricity than any other country in Europe. Nearly all of Italy’s electricity came from hydropower as late as 1937. Dams were erected throughout the glacial Italian Alps, and its northern alpine lakes were used as reservoirs for generating hydroelectricity. Milan became the world’s second city with electric street lighting. Hydroelectricity thus added a modern chapter to Italy’s legacy of water history dating back to the large-scale drainage projects and aqueducts of ancient Rome. The hydroelectric boon, as well as earlier land drainage and irrigation projects in Lombardy, came at a timely moment to legitimatize a regionally fractious nation-state that formed in stages around 1870, against the many who doubted that it would hold together.
The diffusion of hydroelectricity helped spread the Industrial Revolution throughout Europe, America, and belatedly to other parts of the world. By 1920 environmentally clean and renewable hydroelectric plants generated some two-fifths of electricity in America; by 2000 hydropower still generated nearly one-fifth of world electricity. As the good hydroelectric water sites grew scarce and steam turbines improved, more electricity was generated in large thermal plants using fossil or nuclear fuels. These power plants used water not just for the steam turbines but also as coolant. As a coolant, massive volumes of river water were sucked in for brief periods to absorb huge amounts of heat, and then, after recooling, were discharged back into the river. As most auto motorists knew, water was similarly used as a coolant in the important innovation of the oil burning internal combustion engine. The exponential growth of power man extracted from water reached astonishing amounts by the late twentieth century. State-of-the-art water turbines installed at large dams were capable of more than 1 million horsepower (750,000 kilowatts); steam turbines were even more powerful, up to 1.7 million horsepower (1.3 million kilowatts).
The progression of water use in energy production—from simple, directly channeled water current to turn waterwheels, to steam engines heated by coal, to spinning turbines that generated electricity from cascading torrents or steam pressure, to coolant for large nuclear and fossil fuel plants—itself highlighted a prominent feature of water’s role in human history: with each new technology cycle, its uses were always evolving and expanding. Starting from the steam engine’s role in extracting coal to overcome the fuel famine, and coal’s provision of the combustive material to generate steam, water, and energy in many of its forms have become symbiotically interlinked partners in the key processes that powered much of the twentieth century’s extraordinary industrial expansion. No nation exploited the water-energy resource nexus so beneficially and on such a large scale as Britain in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century that mantle passed to America.
Before England or America could take full advantage of the beneficial opportunities of their new industrial societies, however, they had to find an effective response to the first of several major environmental challenges created as a by-product of industrialism—urban water pollution.
PART III
Water and the Making of the Modern Industrial Society
CHAPTER TEN
The Sanitary Revolution
The summer of 1858 was one of the hottest and driest ever in London history. In the first fortnight in June, sweltering heat caused a putrid stench to rise from the pools of stagnant sewage that choked the river Thames—headlines in the British press dubbed it the Great Stink. Inside the Houses of Parliament overlooking the river, behind the heavy lime chloride-soaked window draperies, members who had dithered ineffectually for decades over the worsening unsanitary water and sewerage conditions suddenly discovered that they had no escape from the assault of the stench, which demanded their immediate response. Adding urgency to their concerns was trepidation that the miasmas emitted from the Thames were putting their own personal health in mortal danger, since the prevailing medical theory of the day held that diseases were communicated by such foul air. The Great Stink, in short, succeeded in riveting politicians’ attention in a way that all the many years of appalling manifestations of London’s mid-nineteenth-century sanitary crisis had not.
In the previous decade alone, two cholera epidemics had killed over 25,000 Londoners. Throughout the city, sewage and human waste regularly seeped from cesspools into wells and was flushed into the Thames from which it was promptly pumped back up in Londoners’ drinking water. People were consuming their own sewage. Yet even contaminated water supply was insufficient to slake the water famine among the city’s fast-growing population. Street taps that each supported 20 to 30 crowded houses often were opened to sell water only one hour per day three days per week. Not surprisingly, Londoners’ daily existence was afflicted with chronic illness, shortened lives, and infant mortality that claimed some 15 of every 100 children within their first year. Even the vociferous gathering cry to reform London’s water and sanitary system, echoed by such celebrated figures as author Charles Dickens and scientist Michael Faraday, had been insufficient to rally MPs to empower an effective central public municipal authority to meet the long-brewing crisis.
An environmental by-product of the urbanization that accompanied early industrialization, the Great Stink was more than a mere nuisance or embarrassing advertisement for the social virtues of the British Empire’s vaunted liberal market democracy. It threatened the very sustainability of a sufficiently healthy surplus force of wage labor to cheaply man the new factories. Given Parliament’s unresponsive record, when the weather suddenly cooled on June 17 to provide a break from the Great Stink, the Times of London bemoaned: “What a pity it is that the thermometer fell ten degrees yesterday.
Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench. The intense heat had driven our legislators from the portions of their buildings that overlook the river. A few members, indeed, bent upon investigating the matter to its very depth, ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose. We are heartily glad of it.”
Fortunately the Great Stink did not abate so quickly in the hot summer of 1858 as to dissipate from the politicians’ agenda. On July 15 House of Commons leader Benjamin Disraeli—the same Disraeli who two decades later as prime minister would boldly commit England to buying shares in the Suez Canal—took the floor and introduced the overdue mandate and funding legislation to purify the Thames’s water and construct a proper sanitary sewerage system befitting the world’s leading city. So it happened that after years and years of fruitless debate, the reform legislation passed in just eighteen days. It proved to be the watershed turning point of the mid-nineteenth-century Sanitary Awakening. The awakening triggered a public health and environmental revolution that in the twentieth century resulted in the virtual abolition of the age-old scourge of infant mortality, the breakthrough scientific germ theory of disease, a quantum jump in human longevity, an unprecedented explosion in urban and total global population, and an enlarged, proactive state role in the governing compact between democratic governments and free markets.