GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

AUTOMOBILE EMISSION STANDARDS 75the stature of United States senators down to the city planning commissionsstood ready to mobilize it” [parentheses in original] (130).By the 1940s and 1950s, it was clear that the supporters of the “GreaterLos Angeles” project had succeeded in their objective of attracting “thelargest possible number of permanent new residents and businesses to LosAngeles from other parts of the country” (Foster 1971, 22). By 1940, LosAngeles County’s population had grown almost 200 percent to about 3 millionpeople when compared to a population of about 1 million in 1920, andby 1950 the population of Los Angeles County had reached 5.4 million(Krier and Ursin 1977, 44 and 92). This growth in population coincided withthe increasing industrialization of the Los Angeles basin. In addition toexpanded airplane manufacturing, growth in Los Angeles during this periodtook place in such industrial activities as petroleum refining and steel production(Viehe 1981; Boone and Modarres 1999; Hise 2001). As I outlinedin the last chapter, this growing population and industry were served by atransportation network centered almost totally on the automobile. Hence,the number of automobiles registered in the county grew from approximately900,000 in 1930 to 1.2 million in 1940, and by 1950 the total number ofautomobiles was 2 million (Krier and Ursin 1977, 44 and 92).With industrialization and the growing automotive population, air pollutioncame to the Los Angeles area. During the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, Los Angeles did not have the severe air pollution problemthat plagued urban areas east of the Mississippi in this period because ofits comparatively small industrial base and its access to oil and natural gas assources of energy (Fogelson 1967; Viehe 1981; Williams 1997). By the middlepart of the twentieth century, however, industrialization and automobileuse, combined with the Los Angeles basin’s somewhat unique topography andmeteorology, created an air pollution situation that threatened the futuregrowth prospects of the area, and even the gains already made.“SMOG COMES TO LOS ANGELES”Historian Marvin Brienes (1976) describes in his article “Smog Comes to LosAngeles” when air quality in Los Angeles became a salient issue. He notes that“on a warm July day in 1943 a mysterious malady settled silently over downtownLos Angeles.... [T]he distressing condition worsened daily.” This episode“reached its height” on July 26 “as a thick, smoky cloud, heavier by far than anyexperienced before, descended over the downtown area in the early morninghours and cut visibility to less than three blocks.” According to newspaperreports, workers “found the noxious fumes almost unbearable.” With this airpollution event Brienes concludes that “smog had come to stay” (515–516).Scholars Krier and Ursin (1977) point to September 8, 1943, as a watershedday in forcing smog onto the political agenda in Los Angeles. On this day,