How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, and the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles
How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, and the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles
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Abstract
Focusing on five Los Angeles environmental policy debates between 1920 and 1950, this book investigates how practices in American municipal government gave business groups political legitimacy at the local level as well as unanticipated influence over federal politics. Los Angeles' struggles with oil drilling, air pollution, flooding, and water and power supplies expose the clout business has had over government. Revealing the huge disparities between big business groups and individual community members in power, influence, and the ability to participate in policy debates, the author shows that business groups secured their political power by providing Los Angeles authorities with much-needed services, including studying emerging problems and framing public debates. As a result, government officials came to view business interests as the public interest. When federal agencies looked to local powerbrokers for project ideas and political support, local business interests influenced federal policy, too. Los Angeles, with its many environmental problems and its dependence upon the federal government, provides a distillation of national urban trends, the author argues, and is thus an ideal jumping-off point for understanding environmental politics and the power of business in the middle of the twentieth century.
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Front Matter
- Introduction Business Interests, Special Interests, and the Public Interest
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One
Oil and Water: The Public and the Private on Southern California Beaches, 1920–1950
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Two
Influence Through Cooperation: The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and Air Pollution Control in Los Angeles, 1943–1954
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Three
Flood Control and Political Exclusion at Whittier Narrows, 1938–1948
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Four
Private Power At Hoover Dam: Utilities, Government Power, and Political Realism, 1920–1928
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Five
The Triumph of Localism: The Rejection of National Water Planning in 1950
- Conclusion Small Government and Big Business in the Mid-Twentieth Century
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End Matter
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