The first Earth Day in April 1970 was a national affair, with cities across the United States crafting tailored events that both celebrated the environment and warned against pollution and environmental decay. Comic book publishers joined in as well, with Iron Man and Namor the Submariner battling pollution within the Marvel Universe. DC Comics, meanwhile, published a two-part storyline – one appearing before Earth Day and the other afterwards – that saw Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, and the rest of the Justice League of America likewise fighting pollution in a narrative mirroring actual events in Cleveland, Ohio, at the time.
The story begins in Justice League of America issue 78, with Green Arrow stumbling upon a night watchman confronting a group of thugs. “Smog’s so thick, it’s like patrolling in a sack,” Green Arrow tells himself. “Can’t see a thing! But I can hear gunshots coming from the direction of that new factory. Somebody needs help, fast!” The superhero quickly realizes that neither he nor the watchman can accurately fight in the heavy smog and launches a flare arrow. Although it lights up the sky enough for Green Arrow to see his surroundings, the arrow also falls into a nearby river, which then erupts into flames.
“Is that river really on fire, or am I having a blasted nightmare?” Green Lantern rhetorically asks when he and his fellow Justice League of America cohorts arrive to assist Green Arrow in putting out the blaze.
No one had to ask similar questions when Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes took members of the local media on a tour of the Cuyahoga River on June 23, 1969. Their first stop was the Big Creek Interceptor, a large pipe that delivered waste and runoff water to a nearby treatment plant. A month earlier, it had malfunctioned and spilled over 150 million gallons of sewage into the Cuyahoga. A second stop was near the Harshaw Chemical Company, where the water color had dramatically changed after sixty years of chemical waste dumping. The third featured more sewage, this time from the suburb of Cuyahoga Heights, which had never connected their sewer pipe to any treatment plant.
The last stop on the tour was another mile downstream, where two railroad trestles had been badly damaged by a fire that erupted on the Cuyahoga River the day before. No one knew how the fire started – a spark from a passing train likely landed on one of the river’s many oil slicks – nor was it an isolated incident.
“This is a long-standing condition that must be brought to an end,” Stokes told the reporters. “There may be some wry humor in the phrase ‘the river is a fire hazard’ but it’s a terrible reflection on the city surrounding it when it does indeed become one.”
As David and Richard Stradling explain in their 2015 book Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland, fires on the Cuyahoga River were tied to the local economy. A 1944 study estimated there were 16,000 workers employed in factories along the Cuyahoga, and those factories dumped more than 170 million gallons of waste each day. The river was not rapidly moving, which made it ideal for cooling steel, diluting chemical wastes, and providing access to factories by boat. Industry was therefore attracted to the region, creating a fire hazard out of the Cuyahoga River in the process.
The night watchman that Green Arrow encountered earlier approaches the Justice League of America after the flames of the burning river in the DC Universe have been extinguished. “I was hired as a watchman in that new factory,” he tells them. “Pretty soon I noticed there was several tons of gunk pourin’ into the river each hour. Poison, deadly poison. I made conversation with some of the rannies who were workin’ inside. Asked ’em what kinda products they were makin’, and none of ’em knew. Hombre name of Sherlock Holmes said that after yuh eliminate the impossible, anythin’ left has gotta be the truth, no matter how loco. And it was plenty loco, ’cause what that factory was manufacturin’ was pollution. It was there to deliberately foul the air an’ water.”
A celestial map is among the files that the watchman stole from the factory as proof, and the Justice League decide to split up – Superman and Green Lantern to the distant planet on the map, Green Arrow to City Hall to warn the local government, and the rest of the superheroes to investigate the factory. At City Hall, however, Green Arrow is met with derision rather than concern. “Take your bleedin’ heart and get out!” a government official shouts at him. “That factory brings in thousands of tax dollars. We need the money. That conservation stuff is a load of bunk!”
“Man, you are stupid,” Green Arrow counters. “There’s poison in the milk babies drink. Lake Erie’s so polluted, there’s virtually no marine life left. Sea animals are dying in hordes. Mister, the Earth is in trouble!”
Standard Oil added oil-skimming facilities to its refineries during the 1950s – cutting the 782 gallons of oil it was inadvertently dumping into the Cuyahoga River in half by the end of the decade – but economic considerations still took precedent in the region. Jones & Laughlin Steel spent $300 million after World War II on its Cleveland facilities, while Republic Steel invested $200 million during the mid-1960s alone. With that kind of money being spent in both the city and the state, as well as the thousands of jobs provided as a result, politicians were reluctant to antagonize those companies. As a fire lieutenant remarked at the time, “Water beauty to some people is a fat paycheck.”
For some maybe, but not everyone. In 1967, a local businessman filed a lawsuit against Cleveland, charging the city with not enforcing pollution control laws and specifically citing industrial waste being dumped into the Cuyahoga River by Republic Steel, U.S. Steel, Sherwin Williams, and Harshaw Chemical. The city countered that Ohio’s Pollution Control Board had issued permits to those companies, granting them the right to discharge waste into the Cuyahoga, which had been officially designated as an “industrial water supply.”
Back in the DC Universe, Superman and Green Lantern have finally arrived at the planet Monsan, a once habitable Earth-like world with carbon-based life forms and plenty of vegetation. What they now find is an ecological disaster, with an unbreathable carbon monoxide atmosphere, soil reduced to ashes, and devastation as far as the eye can see. The pair decide to explore further and eventually find the last remaining inhabitant of the planet.
“Once we gloried in our industrial might,” he tells the superheroes. “Day and night, our fabricating plants spewed forth goods – and, alas, poisons – into our atmosphere. Our scientists warned us we were destroying Monsan with waste. But their pleas were not heeded by our governing council. It was only when our people began dying that the truth became apparent. Hurriedly we tried to halt the dreadful pollution, but planets are like any living organism. Once they are murdered, they cannot be restored to life.”
A bureaucrat named Chokh discovered that Monsanians could alter their body chemistry through radiation, enabling their bodies to adapt to the polluted environment. “Chokh is not satisfied,” the man continues. “He is voyaging to other star-systems, seeking planets like Monsan to make them fit places for him and his kind. He plans to ruin, then colonize. I struggled to survive, hoping somehow to warn someone.” Having accomplish his goal, he gasps his last breath and dies in Superman’s arms.
Now that the superheroes know what they are up against, they immediately head back to Earth. Before they leave, however, Green Lantern wants to destroy Monsan “to help the universe forget that it ever existed.” Superman stops him and instead argues, “Let Monsan be what the old man wanted it to be – a monument to mortal ignorance and a warning.”
Cleveland was becoming a warning as well. In early August 1969, Time magazine ran a feature story on polluted waterways in the United States. “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows,” the article said of the Cuyahoga River. “A few weeks ago, the oil-slicked river burst into flames and burned with such intensity that two railroad bridges spanning it were nearly destroyed.” A picture of a tugboat on the river, engulfed in flames as a lone firefighter attempts to hose it down, accompanied the article.
The caption read, “Boat Caught in Flaming Cuyahoga,” and although technically correct, Time failed to mention that the photograph was taken seventeen years earlier during a previous fire. The dramatic image was eye-catching, however, and soon the burning river was national news. It wasn’t long before the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) named Cleveland the “pollution capital of the world,” and the Cuyahoga River became the poster child for the still small but growing environmental movement – just like the planet Monsan in the DC Universe.
Anthony Letizia