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

INTRODUCTION: BUSINESS INTERESTS, SPECIAL INTERESTS, AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST

introduction business interests, special interests, and the public interest When Americans imagine their democracy, they envision government institutions that protect and nurture the public interest. So far, so good. But this vision quickly gets complicated and contradictory: Americans vilify equally the influence of uninformed public opinion and that of so-called special interests. And yet interest groups have played a role in American politics from the very beginning. In the earliest years of the Republic, merchants and consumers pressured congressional representatives for lower tariffs, while manufacturers advocated higher import duties. Farmers took up arms against taxes on whiskey because they enriched urban merchants at the farmers’ expense. The Fugitive Slave Law, recognition of squatters rights in western lands, and dozens of other nineteenth-century policies reflected the desires and needs of specific economic, regional, or political factions in American politics. Although leaders from James Madison and John Adams in the eighteenth century to Barack Obama in the twenty-first have excoriated special interests as threats to American democracy, interest groups remain entrenched in American politics. Of all the interest groups active in American cities, the local business organizations have enjoyed the greatest legitimacy and influence. Chambers of commerce, merchants and manufacturers organizations, realty boards, and a myriad of smaller organizations made up of prominent business leaders have enjoyed political influence out of proportion to their numbers or economic importance. In fact, these groups enjoyed such political legitimacy during the mid-twentieth century that they were rarely described as special interests at all. The central question of this book is how this type of organization secured its special status in local politics and how that status was transcribed into national 2 introduction politics in the second quarter of the twentieth century. To answer that question, I have examined local environmental policy in Los Angeles and the interactions of Los Angeles municipal and county officials with federal agencies and federal politics between the 1920s and 1950s. Business groups earned their legitimacy by supporting city and county officials with a wide range of political services that these elected officials desperately needed. Los Angeles’s experience with this is representative : the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce1 identified which emerging problems merited public action, studied policy options, drafted legislation, and framed public debate about emerging issues. City and county officials enacted ordinances drafted by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and routinely forwarded chamber recommendations to Sacramento and Washington for state and federal action. The city council also looked to the business alliance to provide “public” reactions on the very policies that the chamber had initially proposed. Federal agencies undertaking major public works for cities and counties looked to these same groups when they needed public input. In essence, public officials at all levels of government treated chambers of commerce and similar organizations as the voice of the people. The business groups themselves believed they represented the public interest , and they actively defended their status when challenged. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce’s influence never quite rose to the level of hegemony. Frequently, other community members organized to oppose specific chamber of commerce proposals. These challengers usually began their campaigns by asserting that they represented the public and that the chamber of commerce was merely a special interest. They offered alternative values for public policy that weighed home, community, and public services and recreation more highly than what they dismissed as “mere profits.” Their arguments echoed common American critiques of industrial growth and corporate consolidation and were clearly inspired by the stunningly rapid pace at which oil rigs and heavy industry displaced Los Angeles’s orange groves and rural suburbs in the twentieth century. However, those who challenged the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce usually mobilized after local government, with the assistance of favored business organizations , had already established the framework for understanding and introduction 3 solving environmental problems; as a result, they were excluded from the conversations most critical to formulating policy. Moreover, both before and after World War II, new industrial jobs attracted hundreds of thousands of new residents to Los Angeles who endorsed probusiness policies. Even the longtime residents struggled to balance the appeal of industrial prosperity with their desire to protect their communities from the changes that accompanied industrial growth. In the end, the economic importance of industry, the rise in the numbers of voters dependent on industrial jobs, and the close relationship between the From the 1920s...