How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, and the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (review)

This book examines the preponderant influence of chambers of commerce and other local power brokers in five environmental policy debates in Los Angeles from the 1920s through the 1950s. The five case studies are oil drilling on southern California beaches, air pollution in Los Angeles, flood control at Whittier Narrows, the Hoover Dam, and the Truman’s Administration’s aborted National Water Planning initiative. Sarah Elkind wants to understand how local chambers of commerce were able to make themselves the voice of the public when there were other groups that could also be said to represent the public interest. Her argument is that the local chambers co-operated with and helped local municipal and county officials that they were able to research issues and offer solutions to environmental crises, which is what public officials were looking for. In contrast, other groups arose in reaction to specific policies and were often at odds with public officials. As federal agencies became more involved in flood control, irrigation, and electric power during the New Deal era and afterwards, these local powerbrokers retained their influence and thus influenced federal policy.

It is hardly a surprise that public officials would turn to local business elites or that they would see these elites as “the public.” Nor, given what we know about federalism, the New Deal, and pork barrel politics, is it surprising that local politicians and elites influenced where and how federal money was spent. The reason to read this book is less for these arguments than for the rich historical detail Elkind has retrieved from Los Angeles archives. As is often the case, the actual events and weird alliances of local politics are much more interesting and surprising than the academic “so what” arguments we seem compelled to make. And Elkind does a superb job of bringing to life the nuances of Los Angeles environmental crises and providing the reader with a context for understanding them.

So, for instance, we learn that Los Angeles dumped its sewage into Santa Monica Bay and that the beach had to be closed in 1940 because of human waste. We learn that the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce supported the public beach movement in the 1920s and led the movement against oil drilling. We learn that “public ownership,” which usually connotes a democratic impulse against private interests, perpetrated racial discrimination such that blacks interested in swimming on Los Angeles beaches had to belong to the sort of private club that was under attack by the public beach movement. We learn that despite the undemocratic process behind the Whittier Narrows Dam project, the final outcome actually did serve the public purpose in terms of economics, engineering, and social costs. In her case studies, Elkind sticks to the sources and resists representing actors as good guys or villains. Her research brings out just how complicated policy decisions become at the local level, which of course is one reason progressives have for so long sought to remove these decisions from local politics.

At first I thought Elkind did not account for change over time because the power of the local chambers of commerce seemed so unchanging regardless of the political atmosphere. But then, I realized that was the point. Whether there was public support for public ownership as in the 1930s or a repudiation of federal overreach as in the 1950s, local elites were able to maintain and hone their influence. In her astute analysis of the fate of President Harry Truman’s National Water Planning initiative, Elkind writes that chambers of commerce and other local power brokers did not object to comprehensive planning because it necessarily increased federal authority, but “because the [initiative’s] proposals had the potential to eliminate precisely that patchwork of political authority that allowed them to influence federal policy” (164). As is well known, few Americans...