Book Review

Canada and the United States

Despite how air pollution wafted onto the central stage of politics in the post-World War II United States, historians of this era have largely ignored it. Scott Hamilton Dewey's book shows how much we have missed. Dewey's work places him in the front ranks of what has recently become a burgeoning field of inquiry; it is the first full-fledged historical treatment of dealings with aerial contaminants from the 1940s through the 1960s. He writes of how today's regime of atmospheric regulation first took shape, as "smog" got in our eyes and onto the radar screen of media and local government officials, first in California but also later in other locales. Besmirched breezes soon wound up under federal control with the passage of the Clean Air Act; this book offers the most compelling explanation yet of why.

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Three separately handled case studies make up Dewey's story: cutting-edge Los Angeles, lagging New York City, and rural central Florida. Los Angelenos bore first witness to the new type of pollution brought on by massive use of automobiles: the brown stinging mist that became known as "smog." New York, typical of the nation as a whole, grappled fitfully through the 1950s and early 1960s with what its officials viewed through the older paradigm of "smoke control": visible particles that resulted more from coal than from gasoline burning. Only as they began to have their own smog studies and alerts during the mid-1960s did a widespread sense of urgency arise, most notably in the 1965 mayoral election. If anything, the airborne wastes from central Florida's phosphate industry roused earlier worries, for they included fluorine, which destroyed the neighboring trees and grass on which citrus growers and cattle raisers depended. Public concern surged from the mid-1950s onward and brought federal studies and interventions.

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