GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

76THE POLITICS OF AIR POLLUTIONLos Angeles experienced its “daylight dimout” when dense smog settledover the area. According to one newspaper, “Thousands of eyes smarted,many wept, sneezed and coughed. Throughout the downtown area and intothe foothills the fumes spread their irritation.”Everywhere the smog went that day, it left behind a group of irate citizens,each of whom demanded relief. Public complaints reverberated in thepress. There was an outraged demand for action. Citizens committees wereappointed. Elective officials were petitioned.They go on to write that “concern over the air pollution episodes of fall 1943,especially that of September 8, stimulated response more substantial than themayor’s [earlier] optimistic prediction of an elimination of smog within a matterof months” (53).Brienes (1976) outlines how the response of Los Angeles’s political leadersto the poor air quality enveloping the area in the early 1940s was to framethe issue in a politically expedient manner. The city’s mayor and other cityofficials publicly blamed a butadiene plant as the cause of the noxious air.Brienes notes thatthe fight to tame the butadiene plant had perfectly comprehensible dimensions.It had a beginning, and an end. There was in it an attraction onecould never find in contemplation of massive pollution problems that hadbeen woven, over years, into the fabric of the metropolis. (526)Therefore, by focusing on a single butadiene factory, Los Angeles’s politicalelites were eschewing a more systematic analysis of Los Angeles’s air pollutionsituation—one that might raise politically and economically uncomfortablequestions. Brienes explains that “in the butadiene plant a solitary villainwas isolated.” Hence,in itself this eliminated a number of potential complications: the need forlong, close investigations of thousands of possible offenders; the accumulationof basic scientific data in chemistry and meteorology; planning for permanent,long-range control programs.As a result, air pollution “abatement became a relatively simple matter of fixingsomething up or shutting it down” (526–527).EARLY EFFORTS TO CONTROL AIR POLLUTIONIN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIAA comprehensive effort to control air pollution in Los Angeles was notundertaken until the Chandler family and its newspaper, the Los AngelesTimes, took up the area’s air quality matter. The Chandler family throughoutthe twentieth century had been a central political force in Los Angeles, and,