GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

AUTOMOBILE EMISSION STANDARDS 77through its newspaper, leading proponents of the area’s economic growth(Pincetl 1999, 31 and 96; McDougal 2001). Biographers of the Chandlerfamily and the Los Angeles Times, Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt (1977),hold that[t]he Chandler family, publishers of the Times, has always held a specialplace as the single most powerful family in Southern California because ofits extensive investment and broad political clout in the region. Othernewspapers and publishers have played roles in their cities’ history, but theextent to which the Chandlers and the Times held sway in Los Angeles wasunique. (7)Another student of Los Angeles history wrote of the Los Angeles Times thatit was “an enormously influential urban development corporation by itself.”In describing Harry Chandler, the individual who established the Times as theprincipal newspaper in southern California, this same historian renders theobservation that “it would have been hard to find anyone more closely associatedwith the booster impulse in Southern California, if for no other reasonthan that he owned a huge portion of it” (Lotchin 1992, 97).Harold W. Kennedy (1954), the counsel for Los Angeles County andthe County Air Pollution Control District during the 1940s and 1950s,explained that Norman Chandler—by this time the Chandler family patriarch—had“originally sponsored the ‘clean air movement’ for Los AngelesCounty” (15; also see Brienes 1975, chap. 5). Chandler’s attitude toward theLos Angeles smog question is evident in a statement he made to oil industryexecutives in 1948:The Los Angeles Times had entered the [anti-smog] campaign in the publicinterest with the avowed purpose, if possible, of finding all the sources of airpollution, and was committed to the position of going forward without fearor favor irrespective of its effect upon any industry. (paraphrased in Kennedy1954, 15)In an effort to build a political consensus on the issue of air pollution abatementin Los Angeles, “Chandler recruited a new citizens’ committee” in 1946(Brienes 1975, 123). Marvin Brienes (1975), who wrote his dissertation on theeffort to abate smog in Los Angeles between the years 1943 and 1957, notes:Known at first as the Los Angeles Times Citizens Smog Advisory Committee,the new group boasted a prestigious membership, including Dr. Robert A.Millikan of the California Institute of Technology, the Rotary Club president,Don Thomas of the tourism-boostering All-Year-Club, and [StephenW.] Royce [owner] of the Huntington [Hotel]. (123)Brienes adds that “at the first working meeting” of the committee, “January1947, [William] Jeffers [official head of the Citizens’ Smog Advisory Committee]