Crenson 1971 Unpolitics of Air Polution

Political Science
JOHNS HOPKINS PAPERBACK

"A landmark work in urban politics .... No one who lives in a
large American city can doubt its relevance, and it has enornlOUS
scholarly merit as well."-/. David Greenstone, University:of
Chicago
"The politics of pollution is now both a major field of urban
controversy and a generator of significant studies .... Ml).tthew
A. Crenson's ... study of the air pollution issue, based upon the
experiences of two Midwestern cities, contends that large
industrial and political interests may use the processes of indirect
democracy to decrease rather than. promote public concern."
-Library Journal
'The Un-Politics of Air Pollution is ... a superb work in my
view. It makes a significant contribution in several fields of
political science-to theory that relates to the meaning and
relationship of pluralism and democracy; to urban politics,
especially that aspect of it that focuses on community power;
. and, more broadly speaking, to the entire field of empirical
theory."-Peter Bachrach, Temple University .
. MATTHEW A. CRENSON is Assistant Professor.of Political
Science at The Johns H o p k i ~ s University ..
THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS Baltimore, Maryland 21218
ISBN 0-8018-1379-4
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THE UN-POLITICS
OF AIR POLLUTION
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MATTHEW A. CRENSON
THE UN-POLITICS
OF AIR POLLUTION
A Study of Non-Decisionmaking in the Cities
THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS Baltimore and London

Copyright 1971 by The Johns Hopkins Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218
The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London
ISBN 0-8018-1177-5 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8018-1379-4 (paper)
Originally published, 1971
Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1972
Contents
Preface ................................ ................ vii
I. Introduction ........................................ .
II. Two Case Studies: Gary and East Chicago. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 35
III. Air Pollution and the Air Pollution Issue ................. 83
IV. The Impact of Industrial Influence ...................... 107
V. Political Parties and the Pollution Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. l33
VI. Air Pollution and Political Agendas ..................... 159
VII. Does Pluralism Fail Democracy? ........................ 177
Appendixes
1. Sample Cities and Their Suspended Particulate Rates
187
2. National Opinion Research Center Interview Schedule for
Panel of Community Leaders .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 189
Bibliography ............................................. 221
Index ......................... " ............... " ., ..... 225
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Preface
TODAY ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION has become one of the nation's
chief worries. Unfortunately, although pollution itself has been with
us for many years, the worrying has. begun only recently. This book
attempts to discover some of the reasons why the concern was so late
in developing, why many cities and towns in the United States failed
to make a political issue of their air pollution problems.
Air pollution, of course, is not the only urban problem that has
been a victim of political neglect. Poverty and racial discrimination,
for example, as well as pollution, have been present in American
cities for some time but provoked little in the way of political action.
There appear to be many subjects of great moment in contemporary
American politics which had the status of "non-issues" in the past.
Some observers, in fact, have contended that neglect of this kind is
a pervasive feature of American political life. The issues that we
ignore sometimes seem to be more important than the ones that re-
ceive attention. The decisions that we fail to make often seem to be
more critical for the life of the nation than the ones that we do make.
Most empirical political research, like the political system, has
overlooked these non-issues and non-decisions, and the oversight is
understandable. Where there are no political issues or decisions, there
are no political events to investigate-or so it would seem. The
analysis of non-decisions and non-issues seems to require that the
analyst provide an explanation for things that do not happen, and
some political scientists have argued that there is simply no reasoned
and reliable way to construct such explanations. The present study
attempts to find a way to do so.
Many people and institutions have helped to make this attempt
vii
viii PREFACE
possible, and others have done what they could to keep it from
becoming a failure. For his advice and assistance I am especially
grateful to J. David Greenstone, who offered his guidance from the
very beginning of the enterprise to its completion. Duncan MacRae
and David Easton reviewed the entire manuscript, and their com-
ments were most helpful. Some bits of advice offered by Peter Rossi
while the project was still in its formative stage later proved to be
invaluable, and it was Peter Rossi and Robert Crain who made it
possible for me to collect the necessary data. Without their generosity,
and the generosity of the National Science Foundation, I would never
have been able to undertake this project. Robert Crain's role in data
collection was far more important than my own, and I dare not con-
sider the results had things been the other way round. I am also
grateful to James Vanecko and others at the National Opinion Re-
search Center who worked on the study.
A research fellowship from The Brookings Institution made it
possible for me to give full-time attention to the manuscript for a
year, during which Gilbert Steiner provided both scholarly advice
and administrative assistance. To my wife, Alene, goes the credit for
typing the first draft and for being more patient than I had any right
to expect.
THE UN-POLITICS
OF AIR POLLUTION
I Introduction
IN MID-NoVEMBER 1953 a warm air mass, on its march to the
Atlantic, glided to a noiseless halt over New York City, but New
Yorkers enjoyed no immediate respite from their chilly autumn. The
newly arrived warm air had come to rest high above the city streets,
leaving a "damp chilly gloom" at ground level.
1
Occurrences of this
sort are called temperature inversions, and the appearance of this
1953 inversion in New York seems to have meant that about two
hundred residents of the city would have less than a week to live.
Had normal weather conditions prevailed, the air temperature
would have decreased with altitude. Ordinarily, air that is near the
ground is relatively warm. Since warm air rises, this ground-level air
is always changing places with the air above it. The result is a con-
tinuous vertical circulation of air, a natural ventiiation system by
which the windborne wastes of man and nature are carried to great
heights and dispersed. When a temperature. inversion occurs, this
ventilation system is shut off. Natural and manmade garbage-soot,
dust, smoke, waste gases, and the like-begins to accumulate in the
stagnant cool air close to the earth's surface. It was just such a buildup
of airborne wastes that enveloped New York in November 1953.
New Yorkers were not entirely oblivious to the abnormally dirty
air and its unpleasant consequences. It reduced visibility on the New
Jersey Turnpike. It "produced a cheerless atmosphere for Saturday
football crowds." It caused headaches, nausea, burning eyes, and loss
of appetite. It even prevented a group of local astronomers from
observing the transit of Mercury across the sun, a celestial event that
1 New York Times, 15 November 1953.
1
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2 THE UN-POLITICS OF AIR POLLUTION
would not be repeated for another fifty-nine years.
2
But what was
most notable about New Yorkers' observatioJ;ls on the "smaze" was
that they failed to perceive its most serious result: it had killed people.
Not until nine years later, in 1962, did a careful study of mortality
statistics reveal that the dramatic buildup of dirty air was accompanied
by a fairly sharp increase in deaths. By comparing the mid-November
daily death rates for 1953 with those for previous and subsequent
years, investigators were able to estimate that there had been about
two hundred deaths in excess of the usual number during the week
of the pollution incident.
3
Even in 1953, however, there were observable indications of the
damage that dirty air might do to health-the headaches, nausea, and
burning eyes, even the "sluggish and distressed" pigeons in the
parks
4
-and evidence of the smaze attack's more lethal consequences
could have been extracted from the city health records. But at the
time there was no sustained demand for such an investigation. City
residents and leading municipal officials seem to have lost interest in
the air pollution problem soon after the local pollution level returned
to "normal." The local Bureau of Air Pollution Control continued to
do its work in relative obscurity, with a small staff, small budget, and
under existing legislation: This inattention to air pollution problems
was not extraordinary-in fact, New York in 1953 was more alert
to the dangers of dirty air than were many other cities. Its modest air
pollution bureau was a symbol of local apprehension-also modest
but present all the same. For at least some New Yorkers, normal air
pollution levels, as well as extraordinary buildups of airborne dirt,
were cause for alarm,
5
but it would seem that even their concern was
inadequate to the seriousness of the problem. A hazard which had
probably cost the city two hundred lives in a week-possibly many
more in the future-would seem to deserve much more attention. f
How could there be such a gap between the magnitude of the problem
and the magnitude of public concern?
That there actually was a disjunction between the size of the prob-
lem and the volume of public alarm is a matter not for scientific
determination but for moral judgment. It might be argued that two
hundred deaths in a city the size of New York do not constitute a
2 Ibid.
3 Leonard Greenburg et aI., "Report of an Air Pollution Incident in New York City,
November 1953."
4 Editorial, New York Times, 21 November 1953.
5 Ibid.
F
INTRODUCTION 3
grave calamity and that New Yorkers could not be blamed for their
lack of interest in the matter. In this view, there was no gap between
the level of public concern and the severity of the air pollution prob-
lem. New York was not inattentive or neglectful, and its lack of
interest in atmospheric pollution r ~ q u i r e s no explanation. The matter
was simply not important enough to deserve much attention. But
people with different opinions concerning the value of human life
might arrive at different conclusions. The gap between the "real"
importance of the air pollution issue arid the importance actually
accorded it increases, decreases, at-disappears entirely according to
the opinion of the observer concerning the value of human life. The
magnitude, even the existence, of such ,Cdisjunction-canrrot be de-
termined solely on the basis of empirical evidence. It is therefore not
surprising that some political scientists have consciously avoided the
investigation of these elusive "gaps." Students of urban and com-
munity politics recognize them as creations of moral judgment, not
observable features of empirical reality, and, apparently for this
reason, some have concluded that an unbiased, scientific investigation
of such "gaps" is impossible.
6
The present study attempts to show that an unbiased explanation
of municipal neglect in the field of air pollution is possible and,
further, that it is worth the trouble. In the first place, a bias results
from the failure to take it into account. A scholar 'who makes it his
policy to ignore instances of municipal inaction, as most political
scientists do, would conduct his investigation of air pollution policy-
making in New York as though he had made the moral judgment that
there is nothing questionable about municipal neglect of dirty air.
He would proceed on the implicit assumption that a town can never
pay too much or too little attention to its dirty air, or to any other
problem which it faces. When a city ignores some issue, it is simply
because the issue in question is not an important one. It is not im-
portant because the city, by ignoring it, has said that it is not
important.
This is one way to dispose of the troublesome notion that there
may be some mismatch between the amount of attention that a town
devotes to a local problem and the amount of attention that it actually
deserves, but the solution adds nothing to scientific objectivity.
6 For an argument along these lines (and others), see Nelson W. Polsby, Com-
IIllmiry Power and Political Theory, pp. 96-97; Aaron Wildavsky, Leadership ill a
Small TOIVIl, p. 11.
?
Though it successfully divests the research enterprise of certain per-
sonal biases, it replaces them with the political biases of the town
whose affairs happen to be under scrutiny. The investigator and the
community that he 'is investigating both look at the world through
the same lens, with the same blind spots and distortions. Matters
which are ignored by the community are ignored by the investigator
as well. No attempt is made to account for seemingly important
cis ions that are never made, significant policies that are never formu-
lated, and issues that never arise. In short, there is no attempt to
account for possible blind spots in community political institutions.
It is hardly more objective and scientific to ignore non-decisions
and non-issues than to account for these phenomena. Admittedly, the
attempt to explain non-decisions encounters some grave methodologi-
cal difficulties, which will be considered shortly. Of greater importance,
however, is the reason why anyone should regard non-issues and non-
decisions as items of general political significance not just for our
respiratory well-being but for the understanding of political systems
in general. Non-issues have seldom been regarded as politically re-
vealing phenomena. Actions, decisions, and issues have almost always
seemed more fruitful of investigation. Political scientists have
only infrequently asked why certain seemingly important topics never
get to be issues.
Perhaps their lack of interest in this question may be attributed not
only to a misguided concern for objectivity but to the prevailing view
that its answer lies beyond the scope of political science-that there
explanation for the existence of non-issues in American
cities. In tnel.Jnitea-states, it is thought, no political inhibitions pre-
vent citizens from converting their private discontents into subjects
of public debate: "The independence, penetrability, and heterogeneity
of the various segments of the political stratum," writes Robert Dahl, f
"all but guarantee that any dissatisfied group will find spokesmen in
the political stratum. "7 It follows that if people remain mute on some
topic, or if some potential issue is never raised, the silence cannot
be attributed to political constraints upon the expression of discontent.
The failure of an issue to emerge i!!!Q.-1he "political stratum" may
indicate that there is simply no discontent abouLthe __ or it may
signify that, alt,hough dissatisfaction exists,
7 Robert A_ Dahl, Who Govems? Democracy and Power in an American City,
. p. 93.
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INTRODUCTION 5
Hons have diverted_ the citizens from registering their complaints with
their political leaders.s In any case, the political institutions of
American cities do not produce non-issues. As a rule, the' political
stratum is open to any sizable group of citizens who are interested
and energetic enough to voice their demands. The of
the political system thus assures that almost any "important" problem
can be converted into a political issue.
It is precisely this penetrability which is called into question when
the effort is made to provide a political explanation for non-issues
and non-decisions, and this is a second reason why it is worth the
trouble to look into these things. At stake in this investigation is the
allegation of democratic openness in American local politics. There
is the possibility that instances of municipal inaction and neglect are
not politically random but politically enforced occurrences. ltisthis
possibility that the present study will examine, in an to con-
struct an unbiased, verifiable political explanation for the fact that
many cities and towns in the United States have ignored their dirty
air.
Such an examination is especially pertinent to the politics of air
pollution. Municipal inaction has been a regular response to the air
pollution problem in communities throughout the nation. The political
immobility of American cities in this matter has become a major
consideration for would-be air pollution policymakers. In 1966 a
leading federal air pollution official testified before a House sub-
committee that "one of the impediments to more rapid progress in
pollution abatement relates to the existence and scope of state and
local government regulatory and control activities. I would like to
point out to the committee that not more than half of the 'urban areas
which are in need of regulatory and control program's for air pollution
control now have them and of these ... the majority are operated
at an inadequate level." The pollution expert added that he regarded
the ,ities' slowness to act as primarily the result of political and social
obstacles, not technological difficulties." If this assessment is accurate
\.- then the explanation for local inattention to the air pollution issue
squarely within the province of political science.
8 Ibid., p. 224.
? U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Science and Astronautics, Subcommittee on
SCience, Research, and Development, The Adequacy of Technology for Pol/ution
Abatement, p. 57. .
T
THE THREAT OF DIRTY AIR
Today almost every citydweller is aware that there are some good
reasons why public authorities ought not to overlook the air pollution
problem. Growing interest in the air pollution problem been
accompanied by a growing body of evidence concerning the damage
that dirty air does to human beings. The most dramatic examples
arise from pollution crises like the one that struck York in 1953.
By comparison with the experience of other cities, New York's dirty
air disaster was only a minor catastrophe. One heavy "fog" that
blanketed the city of London for five days in December 1952 is
, thought to have resulted in about four thousand deaths. Many of the
victims dropped dead on London streets; about fifty bodies were
removed from one small park in the South End of the city.10 A sub-
sequent investigation of similar "fog" episodes in the winter
of 1873, 1880, 1882, 1891, and 1892 showed that there were suspi-
cious increases in the London death rate in each of these foggy
. , ,
periodsY
Of all the recorded pollution incidents, the most remarkable was
one that began in the eastern United States late in November 1962,
and like the monster in a classic science fiction movie, swept halfway
the world, bringing disease and sometimes death to the resi'-
dents-of one city after another. In New York respiratory complaints
among the elderly increased. In London, where heavY pollution set
in about a week later than it did in New York, approximately seven
hundred excess deaths were recorded. In Rotterdam at about the same
time the pollution rate rose. sharply, followed by a slight increase in
mortality and in hospital admissions, especially among people over
fifty years of age suffering from heart and lung conditions .. In Ham-
burg, where the wave of pollution crested next, it was thought to havet
brought an increase in deaths from heart disease. A week later the
pollution rate in Osaka increased sharply, and sixty
deaths were recorded. Other cities may have suffered ffio the epIsode,
but the lack of mortality and morbidity statistics makes it impossible
to determine whether those populations were noticeably affected by
the wave of dirty airY
Investigations of pollution incidents in this country and' abroad
10 Donald E. Carr, The Breath of Life, p. 47.
11 Lewis Herber, Crisis in Our Cities, p. 33.
12 Arthur Stern, ed., Air Pollution, 1: 560-61.
INTRODUCTION 7
demonstrate that air pollution can be a killer, but they do not dis-
close the full rang;-of damage that dirty air may do. Exposure to
extraordinarily heavy pollution for short periods of time is clearly
harmful, but there is some evidence that prolonged exposure to
. "normal" levels of air pollUtion may also be dangerous. The evidence
for this danger is much more uncertain than that for' the damage done
by dramatic accumulations of dirty air, but it is reasonably clear that
. prolonged, "normal" exposure to dirty air can be a._C1!usal factor-.in
sonie lung and heart diseases. Atmospheric pollution is strongly
implicated as a cause of sickness and death from emphysema and
chronic bronchitis. It may also cause or aggravate some cases of
asthma and heart disease. The evidence for a connection between
pollution and lung cancer remains inconclusive, but synthetically
generated air pollution can produce lung cancer in laboratory animals.
Clinical and statistical studies have not yet demonstrated that dirty
air can produce lung cancer in human beings,13
Different kinds of pollution naturally present different kinds of
health hazards. A combination of sulfur dioxide and suspended par-
ticulates is to have been responsible for the deaths that
occurred in London and for the increase in mortality that accom-
panied New York's "smaze" incident. Sulfur dioxide is a
by-product of fuel combustion .. Its major sources are coal and fuel
oil. The 'gasls colorless and odorless in small amounts. Laboratory
tests have shown that only. relatively high concentrations of sulfur
dioxide are capable of interfering noticeably with r!!spiration, and
city air seldom contains such large amounts of the gas, but in city air
sulfur dioxide coexists with particles of floating ,dirt, and these sus,.
pended particulates seem to heighten the harmful properties of S02'
In the presence of metal oxides, molecules of the gas may react with
water vapor to form a fine mist of sulfuric acid. S02 is also absorbed
hy solid particles in the air, which; when inhaled, can penetrate more
deeply into the crevasses of the lungs than sulfur dioxide alone. These
sulfate particles can also remain in the lungs longer than can free-
floating sulfur dioxide. A relatively low concentration of sulfur dioxide
in combination with suspended particulates can therefore produce
more serious lung irritation than can sulfur dioxide alone.14
13 Ibid., pp. 568-74.
14 For some interesting evidence on this point, see U.S., Congress, Senate, Public
Works Committee, Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, Air Po/lution-I967,
pp.2103-18.
There are several possible methods for limiting the damage done
by SO,. Some cities have chosen to attack the problem by prohibiting
the use of fuels- containing more than a fixed amount of sulfur, but
control efforts of this kind have been hampered bX the fact that loW--
sulfur fuels are not readily available, or by the fact that they are
generally more expensive than the high-sulfur variety. Devices that
extract sulfur dioxide from flue gases have been' developed, but ther
remain costly. British officials claim to have. achieved some success
in reducing the lethal potential of SO, by reducing the amount of
floating dirt in city air. There area number of feasible techniques for
reducing the emission of solid and semisolid particles into the air,
and by controlling these particles, the British hope to deprive SOo
of the vehicles that carry it deep into the lungsY I
Sulfur dioxide and suspended particulates are major constituents
of air pollution in the eastern United States, but they are not the only
ones. The atmosphere above many American cities is also, tinged
with a chemically complex product of autQmobile exhp,lJ.st!> .. Nitrogen
oxides and unburned hydrocarbons-both constituents of automobile
exhaust-react with each other in the presence of sunlight to produce
a brownish haze called "photochemical smog." The known health
effects of photochemical pollution are not especially serious: eye,
nose, and throat irritation are common, but on no occasion have
pollution experts been able to establish a' connection between heavy
concentrations of photochemical smo'g and increases in mortality
rates. It has been pointed out, however, that the sensory irritation
produced by smog may reduce the resistance of the body, to more
serious disorders. Experiments conducted in Los Angeles show that
when patients with chronic respiratory conditions are exposed to
unfiltered Los Angeles air, their symptoms grow noticeably worse.
Experimental animals exposed to concentrations of ozone, one com- r
ponent of photochemical smog, develop symptoms of bronchitis and
emphysema, and the exposure seems to lower their resistance to some
pulmonary infections, pneumonia, for example. The ozone concentra-
tions which produced these effects in the laboratory animals were
about two or thJ;ee times as great as the ones that are usually present
in Los Angeles air. Given present levels of automotive pollution,
therefore, ozone and the other toxic substances in photochemical
smog do not constitute an immediate danger to human health.
15 Stern, Air Polllltion, pp.568-74.
.. ("
INTRODUCTION 9
Photochemical smog remains more an irritating nuisance than a
, I " ."
'serious threat to the survival of urbanites!" The nuisance has ,been
irritating enough to provoke widespread complaints, however; espe-
cially in southern California. California officials have played an
important part in inducing the automobile industry to do 'something
about the smog problem.
Automobile manufacturers began to install pollution control de-
vices on new 1963. The first of these devices was designed to
reduce the emission of pollutants from automobile crankcases. In
1966 the industry agreed to install an additional piece of equipment
which would cut down the emissions of carbon monoxide and un-
,burned hydrocarbons, and early in 1967 a petroleum products com-
pany announced that it had developed and patented a simple,
inexpensive device that would remove up to, 85 per cent of the
nitrogen oxides from automobile exhaust. The invention was sub-
mitted to the automobile manufacturers for testing;' None of the
devices for controlling automotive pollution is completely effective,
and their effectiveness declines sharply if, automobile owners fail to
have them checked and adjusted regularly. They cannot be expected,
therefore, to cleanse the urban atmosphere of-every trace of smog, and
even the, limited gains that are achieved by these devices maybe
wiped out by future increases in the stock of automobiles. Should
the severity of automotive pollution increase substantially, it is quite
conceivable that photochemical smog may yet endanger human life;
The damage done by pollution is, ,of course, not confined to human ,I
beings. Photochemical smog, for example, can cause serious damage
to crops and to vegetation in general. Economic studies have shown
that severe pollution can lower the value of real estate in affected
areas, and other costs of dirty air show up .in and. in
'expenses for building The possible justifications for
rilaking an issue of dirty air are-therefore numerous.
There are numerous techniques for coping with pollution problems.
scrubbers, afterburners, and other devices can trap
many undesirable products of combustion before they are released
into the air, and in many cases it is possible, to achic;ve substantial
reductions in pollution emissions without the use of any special
apparatus. Relatively simple (though sometimes expensive) measures
like restricting the kinds of fuel that maybe adjusting the
1" Ibid" pp. 604-8.
10 Ronald Ridker, The Economic Costs 0/ Air Polllltion.
equipment that burns it, and regulatirlg. the time and place of burning
can all contribute to a reduction of air pollution. Neglect of dirty air
c"annot be attributed to the absence of a technical capacity for dealing
with it.
There also exists a legal capacity for coping with dirty air. The
federal courts have declared that local regulation of air pollgtiQn
"clearly falls within the exercise of even the most traditional concept
of what is compendiously known as the police power,"18 and munici-
palities ha've devised a number of legislative instruments for bringing
this power to bear upon polluters. Some have done no more than to
include air pollution among the common-law nuisances that are
susceptible to local regulation. Other localities have proceeded more
systematically, establishing maximum permissible emission standards
for the various species of polll!tants. Still others have attempted to
curb pollution by regulating the installation and use of fuel-burning
equipment. or the fuel itself. Registration, licensing, and inspection of
fuel-burning installations are popular variants on this regulatory tech-
nique.
19
American cities and towns have at hand a wide variety of
legal methods for dealing with locally produced air pollution.
Some pollution, however, drifts across municipal boundaries from
neighboring jurisdictions or is emitted by mobile sources like auto-
mobiles, whose very mobility enables them to elude effective local
regulation. For the solution of these pollution problems, municipalities
have relied increasingly on state and federal authorities. Control of
automobile emissions, for example, is almost entirely a matter of
state and rather than municipal, policy. State and federal
governments have also had a hand in the creation of metropolitan
area or regional authorities for the regulation of interlocality pollution.
The political center of gravity for pollution policymaking has
moved steadily higher within the federal system, but this upwqrd
movement has not been produced by pressure from below. The federal
government has taken on new responsibilities in the field of pollution
abatement, not so much because state and local officials demand it
but because these lower levels of government have often failed
take action themselves. Even when the federal government has pro-
vided financial incentives for state and local initiative in the field of
pollution control, as it did under the Clean Air Act of 1963, the
18 Huroll Portland Cement Co. v. City of Detroit, 362 U.S. 440 (1960).
19 Health Law Center, University of Pittsburgh, Digest of Municipal Air POl/UtiOIl
Ordillallces, pp. iv-v.
INTRODUCTION 11
response. has bee? feeble.
2f1
Though there is a technical capacity' to
reduce air pollutIOn substantially, a legal ability to take significant
action, considerable financial and technical assistance to
that action, many local governments have remained inactive in the
. face of a demonstrably serious problem and despite an apparent
intensification of public concern about the perils of dirty air.
PUBLIC OPINION AND THE POLLUTION PROBLEM
. Before. War II Americans seldom worried about their dirty
mr, and It IS often suggested that their prewar complacency in ibis
matter was largely justified. The air was simply not dirty enough to
be worrisome. Today's dirty air is regarded as a symbol'of postwar
economic pr?sperity and technological prowess. It is a peryasive sign
that populatIOn and consumption have been growing, that industries
have been booming, that automobile ownership has been expanding,
and that Americans have more garbage to incinerate than ever before.
The recent increase in national concern about air pollution reflects
the fact that pollution .jtself has increased."
There is undoubtedly some truth to this explanation. Two or three
decades ago, for example, automobiles certainly constituted a less
pot.ent source of pollution than they do today, and industrial processes
WhICh have come into use only during the last generation have un-
questionably added something new to the nation's air burden. Never-
theless, the available evidence indicates that, in spite of these new and
expanding sources of pollution, the nation's dirty air problem is in
some Ways less serious now than it was twenty, thirty, or forty years
ago. As new sources of pollution have arisen, older sources have
declined, and with them has gone a considerable amount of the air-
borne con.tamination that once hovered over American cities. For
example, in the days when furnaces and railroad locomotives all
burned coal, the air above some of the nation's major cities seems to
have contained substantially more sulfur dioxide than it does today.
In Pittsburgh, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and St. Louis, prewar meas-
ures of sulfur dioxide were several times as high as today's measures
20 Adequacy of T'5,hllology f?r p. 58; Senate, Air
p. 764. The 1963 legIslatiOn also prOVIded for federal technical
assIstance to states localities and 'for a mechanism that would enable states and
municipalities to proceed against interstate and inter locality pollution problems.
21 Marshall Goldman, ed., COlltrolling Pol/lltion, pp. 5-6.
for these cities.
22
Anrl recent research conducted by the U.S. Public
Health Service indicates that where sulfur dioxide levels are high, the
of airborne dirt (suspended particulates) is also likely to be
high.23 It is certainly possible that this relationship between S02 and
suspended dirt came into being only within the past decade or so.
But if it did not, as is more likely, then it is possible that urban air
of the 1920's and 1930's contained not only a heavier burden of
sulfur dioxide but also much more dirt than the city air of the 195tl's
and 1960's.
The recent intensification of national ,interest in dirty air, then,
cannot be attributed entirely to a sudden increase in air pollution rates
during the period after World War II. It is far from certain that the
air really is dirtier now than it was before the war. Of course; the
nature of pollution has very likely changed, and this difference may
help to account for the shift in public attitudes about pollution, but
not all the relevant changes have been confined to the physieal
composition of urban air. People have changeq. as well, and these
human changes are probably partly responsible for the recent increase
in public concern about dirty air. Today's citydwellers are probably
more fastidious about the air that they breathe than were previous
generations of 'urbanites. Although there is no. conclusive evidence,
the analysis of some existing data suggests that the contention is a
highly plausible one. In 1963 the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare sponsored a study of public attitudes toward dirty air-
in the St. Louis metropolitan area. At the same tirne,the Department
sponsored a survey of pollution rates in St. Louis and its suburbs.
The results of the pollution survey were compared with the results.
of the attitude survey in order to see how closely citizen opinion about
dirty air is tied to actual pollution levels. The findings permit some
tentative inferences about the extent to which the physical quality 9f
the air, on the one hand, and the qualities of human beings, on the
other, are responsible for variations in people's concern about dirty
air.
The St. Louis pollution data come from seventeen suspended par-
ticulate sampling stations scattered around the St. Louis area and
from eleven sulfur dioxide stations. The HEW pollution study identi-
22 L. R. and J. F. Ba:rkley, Concentration oj Sulfur Compounds in City
.
23 Thomas B. McMullen et al. "Air Quality and Characteristic Commumty Parame-
ters" (Paper delivered at the Meeting of the Air Pollution Control Association,
Cleveland, Ohio, 1967), Appendix.
INTRODUCTION 13
fies each of these stations by its location on a grid-square map of the.
St. Louis region. The locations of the residences of the respondents
in the opinion survey are also identified by their grid-square co-
ordinates. Using the grid-square map, squares three miles on each
side were drawn around each of the seventeen parti,culate sampling
stations and each of the eleven SO" stations. Respondents whose
homes fell within one of the seventeen particulate sampling blocks
were selected for m'embership in one subsample of attitude survey
respondents. Those who lived within one of the SOz sampling squares
were chosen for another, overlapping subsample .. of opinion survey
respondents. The selection procedure guaranteed that no resident of
a square lived more than about two mil'es from the air sampling
station at the center of his square.
If citizen concern about dirty air is tied to actual pollution rates,
residents of high-pollution squares (defined as areas that scored above
the median particulate rate for all sampling areas in the St. Louis
metropolitan area) should be more likely to be bothered by air
pollution than residents of low-pollution squares. The findings re-
ported in Table I-I show that this was the case for at least one type
of pollution-suspended particulates. Geographic variation in the level
of suspended particulates was accompanied by some variation in the
probability that citizens would that they have been bothered by
air pollution. However, variation in sulfur dioxide levels seems to pro-
duce relatively little variation in citizen opinion, as indicated. in
1-2. It is probable that the relative insensitivity of the public to sulfur
dioxide has something to do with the fact that it is colorless and
usually odorless, while airborne dirt is a much more tangible form
of pollution.
Actual air pollution conditions do have some effect on people's
TABLE I-I: REACTIONS OF RESIDENTS TO SUSPENDED
PARTICULATE RATES, ST. LOUIS METROPOLITAN AREA,
1963
Particulate Level Respondents
High
Low
* Four responses n.a.
Bothered
62.7%
46.7%
No. of Cases
134
182
(320)*
Note.: Throughout the tables numbers in parentheses
represent numbers of respondents.
'-
TABLE 1-2: REACTIONS OF RESIDENTS TO SULFUR
DIOXIDE LEVELS, ST. LoUIS METROPOLITAN AREA,
1963
Sulfur Dioxide
Level
High
Low
Respondents
Bothered
53.5%
48.3%
* Two responses n.a.
No. of eases
200
145
(347)*
d
. )
attitudes about air pollution. But the survey results reporte m
Table 1-3 show that there are other factors that seem to have an even
more substantial impact upon a person's sentiments cOI).cerning the
air he breathes, the most important of which is his own Table 1-:3
shows that people over forty are much less likely to be bothered by
air pollution than are people under forty who live in polluted
neighborhoods. The finding is a notable one. St1.l;dIes o.f.
effects of air pollution have consistently shown that dIrty arr is . a
greater threat to older people than to younger people. We might
therefore anticipate that people over forty would show more concern
about air pollution than people under forty, but the St. Louis suniey
data yield just the opposite result, which tends to the
contention above that today's citydwellers are more fastidIous about
the air they breathe than were their predecessors. The findings reflect
an increase, from one generation to the next, in aggravation about the -
air pollution problem. Pollution levels that were acceptable in the past
are intolerable to many younger urbanites.
There are several promising explanations for t4is generation gap,
the most promising of which is that younger people in the United
States tend to be better educated than their elders, and better-educated
people, as Table 1-3 are much more likely to be bothere<;J
by airpolhition than their less well-educated neighbors. Increased
years of schooling may have made Americans more sensitive to their
surroundings; and this increased sensitivity; evident in the well-
educated younger generation, may account the rising chorus of
complaint about dirty air. Perhaps more important, rising standards
of education have gone hand in hand with rising standards of living.
As' yqung Americans have become more accustomed to comfort,
convenience, and cleanliness, dirty air may have become a more
noticeable flaw in their environment.
Because younger people tend to be better educated than older
people, and because education seems to heighten people's concern
INTRODUCTION 15
TABLE 1-3: CHARACI'ERISTICS OF RESPONDENTS BOTH-
ERED BY AIR POLLUTION, BY PARTICULATE LEVEL,
ST. LoUIS METROPOLITAN AREA, 1963
Respondent Characteristic Particulate Level
High Low
% %
Age
40 and over 51.8 41. 7
(83) ,(108)
Under 40 82.0 52.2
(5(J) (69)
n.a. =.10
Education
High school or more 74.2 48.4
(41) (102)
Less than high school .. 48.6 40.4
(92) (74)
n.a.= 11
Annual income
$5,000 and over 76.9 46.9
(39) (96)
Under $5,000 51.2 45.2
(82) (62)
n.a. = 41
Race
White 70.3 48.8
(64) (153)
Non-white 55.1 38.5
(70) (26)
n.a. = 7
Note: Numbers in parentheses represent total respond-
ents in each category. , '
about air pollution, it seems reasonable to surmise that it is increased
education which has made young people .more concerned about
dirty air than their elders. Younger and older people who are
similarly !,!ducated should differ little or not at all in their opinions
about dirtY air. The recent intensification of public interest in air
pollution may thus be attributed to the fact that the public is better
educated and more prosperous than ever before. The findings reported
in Table 1-4 cast considerable.doubt upon this line of explanation.
TABLE 1-4: RESPONDENTs BOTHERED BY AIR POLLUTION, BY AGE, EDUCATION, AND
PARTICULATE LEVEL, ST. LoUIS METROPOLITAN AREA, 1963
Education,Age
High school or more
Less than high school
High Particulate Levels
Under 40 40 and over
81.0%
(29)
82.8
(21)
(12)
47.9
(71)
* Insufficient cases to compute a percentage.
Low Particulate Ldyels
Under 40 40 and over
60.0%
(50)
.
(19)
36.6%
(52)
45.5
(55)
".-
I
-
Educational differences between younger and older people do not
seem to account for the generation gap in public attitudes about dirty
air. Even when we control for the effects of educational differences,
younger St. Louis residents are much more likely to be bothered by
air pollution than are older St. Louisans of similar educational attain.:
ments. Furthermore, the generation gap could not be explained away
by controlling for other variables that have a substantial impact on
attitudes about air pollution-;-incof!1l': and ra.e.
One remaining explanation for the generational difference is that
young have experienced a different sampling of 4mericari
history than their elders. They have been exposedtO-a--different set
of events and institutions. They may react differently to the- con-
ditions of cify1ffethan do their elders because they have come to
adulthood in different kinds of cities. It may be that they are inclined
to make an issue of dirty air because the urban institutions which
have shaped their experience encourage them to do so. In order to
explain why younger urbanites are different from older urbanites,
therefore, it may be useful to ask what is different about the recent
history of American cities.
One recent urban cH'!velopment to which political scientists have
paid particular attention is the decline and: disappearance of the
J:>olitical machine. The ward politician, who dispensed patronage,
favors, and' friendship in bits 'and pieces to individuals, has given way
to the reform politician, who dispenses his favors in wholesale lots
to the entire community or to large segments oUt. The possible sig-
nificance of this political change for the dirty air issue consists in the
\
fact that clean air is a "favor" which can be dispensed only in whole-
sale lots. It is an individual benefit which does not lend itself to the
machine politician's way of doing business, and for that reason it is
probable that machine politicians were less likely to make an issue of ,
clean air than reform politicians.
It is also probable that the machine politician's way of doing busi:-
ness had some impact upon the attitudes and perspectives of the
people with whom he dealt. The kinds of demands' and complaints
generated by his clientele came to reflect the kinds of favors and
benefits that he had to offer-not general benefits like clean air but
more specific and individualized favors like jobs or street ,repairs or
building permits. The machine shaped the attitudes of people who
were exposed to it, and older people have been exposed to the in-
fluence of the machine for larger portions of their lives than younger
INTRODUCTION 17
people. Older' citydwellers, then, who came to adulthood while the
machine was still in working order, exhibit attitudes that may reflect
the practices of the machine. who
have spent all or most of their adult lives in the presence of reform
politicians and reform politics, hold different kinds of attitudes. They
are more likely than their elders to fra,me demands for general bene-
fits (like clean air) and to make complarnts about general nuisances
(like dirty air). The generational difference in attitudes about air
pollution may therefore reflect a in the nature of urban
, political institutions, --
'-Just such a trend is evident in the recent political history of St.
Louis, where "good government" forces' took control of the city
administration in 1949,24 and it may be that this political shift helps
to explain the notable shift in opinion between older and younger
St. Louisans. There is nothing in the St. Louis survey results to prove
that this' explanation is correct, but the data do indicate that such a
shift has occurred. The generational in attitudes about air
pollution suggests that people have become more concerned about
the air that they breathe; the' evidence indicates thatlthis increase in
concern propably reflects something other than an increase in actual
pollution rates; and. the findings l'uggest that the generation,a1 opinion
shift cannot be attributed entirely (or even substantially) to changes
in the individual characteristics of urbanites-their educational
ments, for example.
Urban social and political institutions constitute the most likely
remaining sources .of change. Alterations in these institutions may
produce shifts in the kinds of urban problems that choose
to complain about. Recent public concern about air pollution may
therefore have been generated in part by institutional change. This
tentative conclusion has some especially important implications for
the nature of urban political institutions. Perhaps these institutions
need not simply mirror the concerns of urbanites; they may also help
to shape these concerns. The kinds of demands that rise to promi-
nence' within a political system-its key political issues-are deter-
mined in part by the polity itself. Likewise, issues that fail to become
prominent may have beef! consigned to political oblivion by the
of local political institutions. In other words,
polItIcal systems may be "impenetrable" where certain issues are
24 Edward C. Banfield, Big City Politics, pp, 125-27.
II i
.. "I
concerned, and those issues, like the dirty air issue prior to World
War II, consequently became non-issues.
In many cities and towns the dirty air problem has remained a
non-issue until quite recently. The immediate object of the chapters
that follow is to account for the fact that many communities have
ignored their dirty air, but it is also hoped that the investigation of
local non-issues and non-decisions will the character of
local political systems-particularly with respect to their "penetra-
bility"-in a way that the study of issues .and decisions cannot.
PLURALISM AND POLITICAL PENETRABILITY
The belief in the penetrability of community political systems is
one component in a more comprehensive view of the structure and
operations of local politics. The proponents of this view are adherents
of the "pluralist alternative."25 Theirs is an alternative, in both method
and conclusions, to the "reputational" or "elitist" approach which has
attracted a sizable following among sociologists.
The reputational analysts have tended to see' the political system
as a reflection of the stratification system. Political power accrues-to
those who hold high social status within their and
to control great wealth. The local economic elite
therefore becomes the local political elite and local government, an
executive committee of the capitalist class, Political power tends ,to
be concentrated within a small, cohesive plutocracy which rules in
its own interests. This elitist conclusion is supported by reputational
studies of community politics, which have attempted to uncover the
organization and distribution of political power in communities by
identifying those leaders whom knowledgeable local residents regard,
as influential. In other words, the reputational method relies upon a
sampling of informed community' opinion to disclose the location of
political power.
The pluralists, on the other hand, insist that an accurate description
of community political organization can be achieved only by examin-
ing a sample of political actions, not opinions. According to .. the
pluralist view, power Ican be said to exist only when it has--been
exercised. It cannot be exercised unless the supposed power-holder
25 Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory, p. 113.
INTRODUCTION 19
takes some observable action, and this action must be followed by an
appropriate and observable response on the part of his "victim."26
The pluralists suggest that we should look for these acts of power
and subservience wherever there are "key political issues}' subjects
that residems of a community regard as important enough .to fight
about.2
7
important and visible struggles to influence the course
of local policy reveal the distribution of community power more
surely than any sounding of local opinion.
From of decisionmaking activities 1in key issues, the plural-
.ists have assembled the evidence to support their pluralistic conception
of community politics. Against the reputational view, the pluralists
argue for the independence of local political systems. The polity, they
contend, 'is no mere ap.nex of the economy but an,autonomous
of activity. The distribution of politica). power and the course of
political events 'are not determined by the distribution of wealth and
status.
28
In insisting that the political system is something more than
the reflex of the class system, the pluralists seem to suggest that
political institutions are not entirely at the mercy of their environ-
ments and that they may !n fact be capable of exerting some inde-
pendent influence upon their surroundings. This proposition is implicit
in our earlier interpretation of the St. Louis survey findings, which
holds that political institutions may help to shape public opinion and
perceptions. But having granted such causal autonomy to the political
system, the pluralists seem reluctant to recognize it. They insist instead
that local political systems are highly "penetrable," that is, political
institutions and leaders are highly vulnerable to the aspirations kd
concerns of the citizenry and are, for the most part, unable. to in-
fluence or ignore those popular sentiments.
29
The pluralists reject the
subordination of the political system to the class system, but only
to subordinate the polity even more thoroughly to its environment.
Obviously, there is more involved .here than the causal efficacy of
political institutions. To affirm the independence of the political sys-
tem from its non-political environment is to deny, to some degree,
the responsiveness and penetrability of local politics. That denial
would undermine what may be the most significant pluralist conten-
tion, namely, pluralism helps to assure political demoC;...
26 Robert A. Dahl, "The Concept of Power," pp. 202-3.
27 Robert A. Dahl, "A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model," pp. 466-69.
28 D;lhl, Who Governs?, pp. 11-86.
29 Ibid., pp. 164-65.
racy. The pluralists support this contention with their- evidence
concerning the distribution of political power in communities. They
concede that only a minority of. local citizens actively exercise in'-
fluence in community decisions. Nevertheless,' this
minority will tend to be responsive to t):1e sentiments of the majority.
Their responsiveness is . a result of division and competition among
themselves, which renders them vulnerable to popular sentiment.
Power, according to the pluralist view, is not concentrated within
a .!Wlfiedpolitical elite. It tends to be fractionated and fleeting. This
is so because power is issue-based. It passes from one set of hands to
another as different local issues rise and subside. Because it is issue-
based, it cannot be centralized within some small ruling class which
oversees the handling of all local issues from its positiori at the peak
of a unified political hierarchy. Instead, community power will be
scattered across a spectrum of local leaders and groups, each capable
of exercising influence in only one or a few issue-areas. Within each
of these policymaking areas, there is likely to be a further
tion of influence, so that the resolution of a local dispute will often
involve a laborious effort to as.semble the many bits and pieces of
power held by a mUltiplicity of leaders.
In the eyes of the pluralists the decentralized and heterogeneous
character of local politics is proof 9f the penetrability of the political'
stratum. It signifies that the entry of new leadership and new issues
into community politics is not regulated by some small clique of all-
powerful insiders who can exclude from the political stratum all men
and issues uncongenial to their own temperaments .. Heterogeneity
helps to guarantee political penetrability and stands as evidence of
past penetrations. The diversity and disjointedness of community
political systems are signs of the openness of local politics.
30
But this community political portrait may be more ordered and,
inhibited than the pluralist interpretation would lead us to believe.
The mere fact that a diversity of independent political groups has been
able to introduce a diversity of issues into the political statum does .
not mean that "any dissatisfied group will be able to find spokesmen
in the political stratum," as Dahl says, or that any issue can pene-
trate the political stratum. The pluralists' reasoning on those points
resembles the logic of the argument that there is no racial discrimina-
30 Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory, p. 131; Herbert Kaufman and
Nelson W. Polsby, "American Political Science- and the Study of Urbanization,"
pp.134-35. .
INTRODUCTION 21
tion in the United States because Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and
Lena Horne are all to be found in socially or economically prominent
positions. Visible diversity does/ not necessqrily imply openness. The
undeniable pluralism of observable political activity may in reality
be pluralism of a highly restricted sort. _
One might argue that if such restrictions do exist, we would cer-
taiuly find traces of them in the pluralists' own studies of political
action and decisionmaking--cases in which local powerholders act
suppress the political activities of some rising new leader or to block
the emergence of some embryonic political issue. We need not depart
from pluralist methods, therefore, to examine instances of political
im.penetrability,31 and these methods have produced little, if any,
eVIdence that such instances do occur. It has been pointed
out, however, that the pluralist approach suffers from a serious short-
coming which could diminish its sensitivity to the signs of political
impenetrability. Specifically, the pluralist emphasis upon political
a,ctivists and their actions may'lead investigators to overlook the
of and thereby
the ImpenetrabIlity of the polItIcal process. Local political influence
need not lie wholly with decisionmakers in key issue-areas. Re-
searchers may also have to reckon. with "non-decisionmakers," people
whose political power consists in their ability to prevent the considera-
tion of some kinds of issues. Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz have
observed that
power is exercised when A participates in the making of decisions that
B. But powe::. is also. exercised when A devotes his energies to
or SOCIal and political values and institutional
p.ractIc.es that hrmt the scope of the political process to public con-
SIderatIOn of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to
A. T? the extent that A succeeds in doing this, B is prevented, for all
prtIcal purposes, from bringing to the fore any issues that might in
their resolution be seriously detrimental to A's set of preferencesY
This .Rower to the scope of the political process-to make it
impenetrable in certain respects-is -riot revealed -by -the investigation
of political activities in key issue-areas because the issues in which
this kirid of power is likely to be significant are precisely the ones that
never become "key."
31 Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory, p. 97. I
32 Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, "The Two Faces of Power," p: 948.
22 THE UN-POLITICS OF Am POLLUTION
It is not unreasonable to suppose that this power really does exist.
Any community, after all, must find some way to restrict its political
attentions and energies to a handful of issues if it is not to be over-
whelmed by demands upon its attention. It must be able to select just
a sample of political concerns from an infinity of possible political
interests.
33
The pluralists contend, in effect, that the sample chosen
for attention is likely to approximate a random one, or, at least, that
it cannot be biased in any significant way by local political institutions
or leaders. Yet there is reason to believe that the sampling process is
biased and that political leaders and institutions, by their ability to
enforce inaction in some issue-areas, play an important role in intro-
ducing that bias.
The existence of such a bias is lent some credibility by the uncertain
impression of many amateur and professional political observers that
there is something called "local political climate" or "political atmos-
phere" or "political culture," which varies in some consistent fashion
from one town to another. One important aspect of this "climate"
seems to be the substantive content of local political debate-the
kinds of issues that have preempted the attentions of the local political,
stratum. What this notion suggests is that local politicarissuescan all
beintegrated in some coherent cultural configuration, which expresses
the "spirit," or perhaps the "cultural motivation," of a community.34
More precisely, any city tends to exhibit a general and consiste.nt bias'
in favor of some kinds of political issues and in opposition to others.
Systematic empirical studies of community politics tend to support the
casual impression that different cities develop different arrays of
political concerns, which reflect underlying variations in local political
predispositions. Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest that
community political institutions may be influential in determining the
strength and character of these local biases.
35
E. E. Schattschneider has suggested a reason why political institu-
tions should promote bias in the selection of political issues. "'J.'J:1e
crucial problem in politics/' he says, "is the management of conflict.
No regime could endure which did not cope with this problem. All
politics, all leadership, all organization involves the management of
conflict. All conflict allocates space within the political universe. The
consequences of conflict are so important that it is inconceivable. that
33 David Easton A Systems Analysis of Political Life, pp. 58-59.
34 For a more treatment of these concepts, see Ruth Benedict, Patterns
of CIIltllre, chap. 3. .
35 Oliver Williams and Charles Adrian, FOllr Cities, chaps. 9-13.
. INTRODUCTION 23
any regime could survive without making an attempt to shape the
system." In the interest of their own political survival, therefore,
leaders and organizations must make sure that issues which threaten
tE:ir existence, their own allocations of political space, are not ad-
mitted to the political arena. Toward some species of c'onflict they
must remain impenetrable. The nature 6f their will depend,
of course, upon what kinds of leaders or organizations they are, but
all of them, according to Schattschneider, will exhibit an insensitivity
to some issues. "All forms of political organization," 'he writes, "have
a bias in favor of the exploitation of some kinds of conflicts 'and the
sup.f,!ression of others because organization is the mobilization of bias.
Some issues are organized into politics while others 'are organized
l out."3G
Schattschneider's observations suggest a view of community politics
which is different in certain fundamental respects from the one that
has been advanced by the pluralists. Implicit in the latter position is
assumption that political. systems ,can do very little to
msulate themselves from their non-political environments. They are
vulnerable to almost all the demands, discontents, and issues that
private citizens choose to thrust upon them. The present study, rely-
ing primarily upon the insights of Schattschneider and of Bachrach
and Baratz, proceeds on a contrary hypothesis. It suggests that
pluralistic polities, for all their apparent penetrability and hetero-
geneity, may in reality restrict the scope of the IJolitical process to
a limited range of "acceptable" issues and political demands. Much
of this restrictive influence is likely to be exerted indirectly. For
example, the citizens of a community will probably tend to frame
their demands in such a way as to achieve a good political reception.
They will often adapt their requests to the presumed inclinations of
local political institutions and political leaders, perhaps_o.rniLs..9me
requests altOgether. Local political forms and practices may even
inhibit citizens' ability to transform some diffuse discontent into an
explicit d\'!mand. In short, there is something like an inarticulate
in political institutions, even in those that appear to 'be most
open-minded,flexible, and disjointed-an ideology in the sense that
it perception and articulation of social prob-
lems ami conflicts, and SQ a town develops its own unique "political
cliniate." . - .
The and sources of this unstated bias must elude
'"
31l E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People, p. 71.
It is not unreasonable to suppose that this power really does exist.
Any community, after all, must find some way to restrict its political
attentions and energies to a handful of issues if it is not to be over-
whelmed by demands upon its attention. It must be able to select just
a sample of political concerns from an infinity of possible political
interests.
33
The pluralists contend, in effect, that tbe sample cbosen
for attention is likely to approximate a random one, or, at least, that
it cannot be biased in any significant way by local political institutions
or leaders. Yet there is reason to believe tbat tbe sampling process is
biased and that political leaders and institutions, by their ability to
enforce inaction in some issue-areas,. play an important role in i.J;J.tro-
ducing that bias. ('
The existence of such a bias is lent some credibility by the uncertain
impression of many amateur and professional political observers that
there is something called "local political climate" or "political atmos-
phere" or "political culture," which varies in some consistent fashion
from one town to another. One important aspect of this "climate"
seems to be the substantive content of local political debate-the
kinds of issues that have preempted the attentions of the local political
stratum. What this notion suggests is that local political issuesca-n all I
beintegrated in some coherent cultural configUration, which expresses.
tbe "spirit," or perhaps the "cultural motivation," of a community.34.
More precisely, any city tends to exhibit a general and consiste:nt bias
in favor of some kinds of political issues and in opposition to others.
Systematic empirical studies of community politics tend to support tbe
casual impression that different cities develop different arrays of
political concerns, whicb reflect underlying variations in local political
predispositions. Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest tbat
community political institutions may be influential in determining tbe
strengtb and character of these local biases.
3s
E. E. Schattschneider has suggested a reason why political institu-
tions should promote bias in the selection of political issues. "Tge
crucial problem in politics," he says, "is the management of. confllct.
No regime could endure which did not cope with this problem. All
politics, all leadership, all organization involves the management of
conflict. All conflict allocates space within the political universe. The
consequences of conflict are so important that it is inconceivable tbat
33 David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life, pp. 58-59.
34 For a more elaborate treatment of these concepts, see Ruth Benedict, Patterns
0/ Culture, chap. 3.
35 Oliver Williams and Charles Adrian, Four Cities, chaps. 9-13.
INTRODUCTION 23
any regime could survive without making an attempt to shape tbe
system." In the interest of their own political survival, tberefore,
leaders and organizations must make sure tbat issues Wbicb threaten
their existence, their own allocations of political space, are not ad-
IiUifed to tbe political arena. Toward some species of conflict they
must remain impenetrable. The nature of their resistance will d e p e n d ~
of course, upon what kinds of leaders or organizations they are, but
all of them, according to Schattschneider, will exhibit aninseQ.sitivity
to some issues. "All forms of political organization," be writes, "bave
a bias in favor of the exploitation of some kinds of conflicts and tbe
suppression of others because organization is the mobilization of bias.
Some issues are organized into politics wbile others are organized
out."3G
Schattschneider's observations suggest a view of community politics
which is different in certain fundamental respects from the one tbat
has been advanced by the pluralists. Implicit in the latteI\ position is
tbe assumption that pluralistic political systems can do very little-to
insulate themselves fro'ffi their non-political environments. They are
vulnerable to almost all the demands, discontents, and issues that
private citizens choose to thrust upon them. The present study, rely-
ing primarily upon the insights of Schattsci:meider and of Bachrach
and Baratz, proceeds on a contrary hypothesis. It suggests thaD
pluralistic polities, for all their apparent penetrability and betero-
geneity, may in reality restrict the scope of the poli!ical process to
a limited range of "acceptable" issues and political.demands. Much
of this restrictive influence is likely to be exerted indirectly. For
example, the citizens of a community will probably tend to frame
their demands in such a way as to achieve a good political reception.
They will often adapt their requests to the presumed inclinations of
local political institutions and political leaders, perbaps.....9J!lit some
requests altogether. Local political forms and practices may even
inhibit citizens' ability to transform some diffuse discontent into an
explicit demand. In short, there is something like an inarticulate
id<eology in political institutions, even in those that appear to be most
open-minded, flexible, and disjointed-an ideology in the sense that
it promotelnhe-selective per:,ception and aJ;"ticulation of socig1 prob-
lems andconflicts, and SQ a town develops its own unique "political
climate."
The nature and sources of this unstated bias must elude research
36 E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People, p. 71.
(
efforts like those of the pluralists, which mirror the movements of
political systems, making inquiries only where there have been
observable actions and institutionally recognized issues. Such an
investigation incorporates institutional biases in the design of its
research. If these biases are the presuppositions of research, they can-
not be its objects. It is not difficult to imagine the kinds of phenomena
that may be overlooked in this way. By virtue of their preoccupation
with observable political actions and key political issues, pluralist
investigators would naturally overlook the sort of political influence
whose medium is not observable political action. For example, in
order to avoid the anger and active participation of some potentially
powerful group, political activists might avoid all issues that could
adversely affect its interests. The actual distribution of community
influence in such a situation would not be disclosed in the usual
pluralist inventory of political participants and their actions. Non-
participants would also have exerted influence to enforce inaction.
Moreover, by comparison with the potential issues which this offstage
influence has suppressed, the visible and supposedly important' issues
of local politics may turn out to be relatively trivial. There is no
reason to assume that the only important issues are the visible ones.
Visible issues may be distinguished only by the fact that they are.
relatively "safe."
The existence of an offstage power to enforce political inaction
would suggest that there are some types of local policy issues and
decisions (the non-issues and non-decisLoE.,s) in which community
power may assume a unitary or monolithic configuration: on such
matters there is neither bargaining nor visible disagreement. This
observation, though it appears to require a modification of the
pluralists' disjointed view of commuriity politics, is not really incon-
sistent with their line of analysis. We can extend the pluralist proposi-
tion that power is tied to issues: just as the identities of power-holders
vary from one policymaking region to the next, so the organization of
power varies from one issue-area to another. In some matters this
power will be highly decentralized; in others, decentralization, com-
promise, and negotiation all disappear. The local political system
becomes unified and impenetrable, and political activists all bow to
the presumed interests of an offstage power-holder.
The power to enforce inaction need not always lie outside the orbit
of visible political actions and issues, of course. Political activists
could be the wielders, as well as the victims, of this power. By
INTRODUCTION 25
monopolizing their town's civic energies for their own favorite issues,
the activists could deprive other issue-areas of the political resources
necessary for decisionmaking. What is more likely is that the political
projects which engage their attention may simply discourage other
kinds of pursuits. For example, a vigorous effort by local decision-
makers to enact an air pollution ordinance could deter other,
decisionmakers from launching a program to attract heavy industry
to the community. In this instance, the power of enforcing inaction
is in the hands of active participants in local policymaking; its effects
are felt by those who remain offstage and outside the spotlight of
pluralist research.
Occurrences like this one have inconvenient implications for the
pluralist view of community politics. They suggest that the influence
of political activists may extend well beyond the boundaries of the
issue-area in which they are observed to be active. A leader who
participates in decisionmaking only in matters of downtown com-
mercial development may also be helping to enforce immobility in .
the field of public housing. If this were the case, the very plutalism of
pluralist theory might have to be re-evaluated. Activists ina liingle
issue-area could influence a number of other issue-areas-some
actual, some only potential-raising the possibility that a community
may be governed not by an amorphous collection of independent
political sovereignties but by a hierarchy of sovereignties and semi-
sovereignties. The prominence of some issue-areas may be related to
the subordination of others.
This finding would not, of course, call in question the basic
empirical results of pluralist research, only the pluralists' interpreta- I
tion of those results. The discovery of a power to enforce inaction
does not invalidate the finding that local political activists tend to
specialize in one or a few issue-areas, nor does it necessarily imply
that communities are governed by small, cohesive, and hidden elites
whose members manage to have their way in every local decision.
What it does suggest is that the pluralism of observable political
activity may actually be a rather stunted kind of diversity, hedged
about by concentrations of political influence which prevent the
further growth of local political heterogeneity. It also suggests that in
some matters, local political activists may behave as though' they did
constitute a cohesive elite or as though they were all responding to
the directives of an elite. The effect of this behavior is to restrict the
range of commut'tity political concerns, to fix local horizons,
and to relegate some potential issues to political oblivion. These
processes of non-decisionmaking will not be brought to light by
scrutinizing decisionmaking activities in key issue-areas. The proper
object of investigation is not political activity but political inactivity.
RESEARCH METHODS
Anyone who hopes to construct an explanation for political in-
action immediately faces difficulties. The task, after all, is a peculiar
one. We must account for things that do not happen, and it might be
argued that such a curious enterprise must inevitably stray far from
the hard facts about politics-the observable actions, conflicts, and
Avents that are the raw materials for any reliable piece of social
science research. This objection is not, however, a crippling one.
Inaction is just as much a fact, just as susceptible to empirical verifi-
cation, as is action. There is no obvious reason why a study of non-
events cannot be factual.
Some scholars have indicated a few not so obvious reasons. for
regarding such a study as impossible: "For every event that occurs,
there must be an infinity of alternatives. Then which non-events are
to be regarded as significant?" 37 From the infinity of
able, why should we pick those related to air pollution mstead, of
those related to the prevention' of elephant stampedes or the perse-
cution of witches? In many modem American communities we could
easily verify the presence of all three types of inaction, each just as
"factual" as the others. It is the necessity of choosing among these
, and an infinity of other alternatives that, in the opinion of some
scholars, "presents truly insuperable obstacles to research."
obstacles cannot be evaded by stipulating that we are interested m
some non-events-the neglect of the air pollution issue-rather than
others. "It is obviously inappropriate for outsiders to pick among all
the possible outcomes that did not take place a set which they regard
as important but which community residents do not."
mental difficulty here is one already mentioned. The assertion that

given it, it is charged,
of research:1!-38-... '- ---'
37 PoIsby, Community Power and Political Theory, p. 97.
38 Ibid.
INTRODUCTION 27
This study has already exhibited the prejudice alleged by suggest-
ing that there is a political explanation for instances ofjJolitical
The implication whlarnas bee;P;;sued
is that results from the operations of political influence and
but it."ma,y- also bJLlD:e __
residents regard:the.--
toP!CS example, it would obviously be preposter-
ousto maintain that the citizens' failure to make an issue of the
menace results the repressive power of the local sorcery
mterests .. Most people sImply do not believe in witches, and it takes
no exerCIse of power to deter them from witch hunting. If we insist
on seeing a concentration of influence behind such instance of
political inaction, we will inevitably arrive at a bizarre view of com-
munity politics. The result would be only slightly less unrealistic if
we were to confine Our attention to "important" kinds of inaction-
inaction on the air pollution issue, for example, instead of the witch
menace. Though the issue may seem terribly important to an out-'
sider, we cannot assert that there is something "unnatural" in the
citizens' neglect of it, nor can we argue that they must have been
deceived concerning their true interests or that some entrenched
p.ower-holders have frustrated the desires of the people by enforcing
silence on the matter of dirty air. The public may be genuinely un-
interested in air pollution.
It is clear that an investigator cannot impose own 'political
priorities upon a community and then arbitrarily attribute all lapses
from these standards to the obstructive operations of political in:-
fluence, but it is also arbitrary to assume, as does the' pluralist
approach, that when a community neglects some topic, it is simply
because no one cares about it. and political
as we have already suggested, considerable con-I
.. ..
artlCulatethelr cares. We can assume neither that the neglect of an
nor that it is "natural."
The method which we shall use to examine and explain non-issues
makes neither of these assumptions. It recognizes that standards ot

various patterns of political neglect and attentiveness, anditseekS to
@ate-certaIn in the

t10n for Ignoring dirty air, tlien we should find some 'relationship
between the neglect of the air pollution issue and characteristics of
local political leaders or institutions. If we do not find this relation-
ship, the pluralist contentions will have been substantiated.
The proposed research strategy will require, of
extenUc;> whicQl!irpollution has become a political issue in eachof
a number of cities. Secona;wnerewe-fiucCaHlert)TIces betweencities
of the dirty accompany-
fiig inter-citjpoHtIcal-differences.fu-thisway we should be-aole-to
ascertaili or not1:here IS a political explanation for local
inattention to the air pollution problem. It will become apparent that
certain kinds of local political systems tend to be "impenetrable" with
respect to the dirty air issue-at least that is one conclusion that might
be drawn from the discovery of an association between neglect of the
issue and the political characteristics of local leaders
conchid.e'that towns with certain bf1eaders
and institutions tend to have relatively mild pollution problems, and
that it is the mildness of the problem-not the impenetrability of the
institutions-which prevents dirty air from becoming a major
issue. This ambiguity can be eliminated rather easily by controlling
for the actual level of local air pollution.
A second ambiguity, however, is not so easily overcome. It might.
be argged that towns with certain kinds of political leaders and institv.-
unconcerned
aboiif"ib.e air thiitliey orea-t:hi,-and that it is the
citizens; not the unresponsiveness of th_e leaders and that
prevents the inclusion of the issueonJocal politicaL agendas. Ideally,
welliight solvetlie problirrdJY conducting a public opinion survey in
each of a number of cities in order to find out just how indifferent to
the air pollution problem various local populations are. That, how-
ever, would be an excessively expensive solution. Instead, we can t
use the survey findings from St. Louis, which show that citizen con-
cern about dirty air is related to age, education, income, and race.
We will therefore control for those variables in trying to determine
whether or not political leaders and institutions are responsible for
local inattention to the pollution issue. In this way, it should be
possible to distinguish the effects of political factors from those of
non-political factors like the' private perceptions and sentiments _ of
the citizens.
It should be noted that those problems which proceed from the
assumption that air pollution deserves more attention than American
cities have given it have not been solved. The statement remains
INTRODUCTION 29
value-laden, but the bias implicit in it no longer threatens to under-
mine the validity of the research enterprise. It has been replaced by
an alternative presupposition. In.tead QLasserting_that some cities
gjven insufficienLattentionto _ theiL 1!ir p()lluti.Q:n ,problems, we
needoJ1ly that some have been less concerned with
!l,ir tha!LQthers. Our job is to explain those variations 'bJ. local
concern.
It is true that this explanation may itself a moral judgment.
Though we are dealing only with inter-city variations in the political
importance of the air pollution issue, we -have chosen to focus on
those cities which have accorded comparatively little importance to
dirty air and to account for their neglect of the issue. We might just
as easily have concentrated on towns which have assig:ned it a
relatively high priority. Special interest in the inattentive towns is
prompted by the the_airpoll_ution pf6blemis-impoifant
and deserVes extewVeCoD.sideration, that cities should pay a: grea.t
Gear ofllttention to their that when they do not, the'
oversight is worthy' oC an explanation. This explanatory effort is
-clearly not value-free, but its presuppositions do not diminish its
empirical validity. Anyone who regards air pollution as a trivial issue.
and chooses to make contrary evaluative assumptions can use the
evidence presented in the pages that follow to construct his own
explanation for the fact that some cities have devoted an inordinate
amount of attention to this insignificant urban problem. II
There remain some other possible weaknesses in the proposed '
method of investigation, however. Perhaps the most uncertain step in
the research procedure is the one that calls for an assessment of the
extent to which dirtyllir l1as. become a political issue. Though "issues"
anif"non-issues" have been mentioned repeatedly, "issue-ness" has not
yet been defined, nor have we suggested how it might be
When politicians talk about an they are usually referring to
a subject of speaking aboliflih -
unsettled matter which is ready for adecision.
39
The definition used
here'iscloserto the latter any unresolved matter,
controversial or non-controversial, de-
Cision:Ifisatopic which a community's political
-.---::
agenda. The problem is to decide at just what point a topic becomes
an agenda item and is therefore ripe for authoritative resolution.
It is unlikely that anyone can identify with certainty the moment
39 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 7th ed., S.Y. "issue." ,
in which a subject of discussion is "ready" for a decision. We can
expect to find that there are subtle gradations of "readiness"
subjects that are completely ignored and thpse that command leadmg
priorities for attention. One axis of variation follows the stages of the
decisionmaking process from the recognition of a problem to its con-
sideration by local authorities. The more advanced an item is in this
process, the more clearly it is a component of a community's political
agenda. Recognized community problems are closer to being agen?a
items than unrecognized ones; discussed problems, closer than undIs-
cussed ones.4
But the passing recognition of a problem and the idle discussion of
it by a few citizens do not seem sufficient to transform a matter
previously ignored into a political issue. The conventional definitions
of "issue-ness" appear to require more than this. It is also necessary
that there be serious consideration
in the-1Ilatter,41 and the
with the
topic which attracts the attention of civic
therefore'IDore nearly an agenda item than one that has only captured
the concern of ordinary citizens.
It is also important to take account of the manner in which civic.
leaders address themselves to a prospective issue-wpether-.!hey
themselves to
mendatiol1s._or _whether --
_acti(}I! . Only when advocacy or opposition has
made- an -appearance among community leaders will we say that a
topic has taken its place on the local political agenda. Both adv?cacy
and opposition are signs that at-least a few local leaders senously
desire some authoritative action on a given issue. There is a relatively
high probability that the publicly stated policy preferences of these
prominent men and women will provoke the governing to
make some decision about the topic under discussion. The subject
has therefore become an issue, an unresolved matter which is ripe for
authoritative action. If about
has
troversial. If there isn6-disagreement, It IS non-controversIal. .
Ea.CilOf the issues on a local political agenda represents a decision-
40 For a more detailed enumeration of the stages in decisionmaking; see Robert E.
Agger, Daniel Goldrich, and Bert Swanson, The Rulers and the Ruled, pp- 40-51.
41 Easton, Systems Analysis of Political Life, p_ 140.
!
j
INTRODUCTION 31
making process which has reached a particular stage of maturation.
Some of these processes will have cut through broad channels of the
political a large proportion of the civic leadership will have
been swept mto these policymaking episodes. Other decisions will be
brought about. ,:ith only small trickles of activity and involving just a
handful of pohtIcal actors. In other words, some issues are bigger thim
others. The greater the proportion of civic leaders who take positions
the bigger the issue. '
I:I?W can we determine whether and to what extent a subject of
concern has met the criteria of "issue-ness"? By what kinds
of actIOns does a member of the political stratum signify that he has
taken a position on a subject, and how do we distinguish civic leaders
citizens? If we were conducting a study in a single
an of. local decisionmaking episodes would probably
supply the mformatIOn necessary to identify its active leaders.
tion of their political activities would probably yield an extensive
catalogue of the ways in which civic leaders can take positions on
of public concern. It might even he possible to distinguish
of leadership and subtle variations in the strength
of that political activists display when they take sides on
an Issue. Unfortunately, in order to identify with any precision the
determinants of political inaction, we must be able to make COIB-
pa:risons among many cities, and an extensive study of this kind must
.for. something less than the rich detail that is possible in an
mvestIgatIOn whose financial and intellectual resources are focussed
upon the affairs of a single town. It will, therefore, beimQractical to
ga.uge of air pollution or of any other locafproblem
by - intensive examInation of local decisionmaking
The method of inquiry must be more economical than those used in
conventional case studies of community policymaking.
The information about urban political issues and activities CG)fi-
in this study comes from a survey, conducted by the National
OpIlllon .Research Center during late 1966 and early 1967, of formal
leaders m fifty-one American cities, ranging in popUlation from
50,000 to 750,000.4
2
The leaders (ten from each city) are the heads
of organizations and institutions which are likely to be found in almost
any urban area: mayors, Chamber of Commerce presidents, presi-
dents of local bar associations, chairmen of local Democratic and
42 For a of this survey, see Peter Rossi and Robert Crain, "The NORC
Permanent Commumty Sample." ,
Republican Party organizations, city or county health
municipal planning or urban renewal directors, local labor
presidents, editors of leading community. and the presI-
dent of the largest bank in each of the cItIes surveyed. These
leaders provide most of the testimony on which "issue-ness" of aIr
pollution is gauged and the political characteristics of the fifty-one
towns determined.
The reliability of the leaders' testimony obviously depends in part
upon the kinds of information that they hav: ?een asked to supply.
Past community research has shown, not surpnsmgly,
are most accurate as informants when they are answermg questlOns
about their own activities or about occurrences in which they have been
directly involved.
43
Questions of this kind were in
to gather the information necessary for measurIng the Issue-ness
of air pollution. The respondents were asked, for example, wheth:r
their organizations had ever taken positions on the of
pollution. They were also asked to describe any actIvI-
ties related to air pollution or pollution control-specIal meetings
the subject, studies conducted, publicity campaigns, and .so on. TheIr
answers to these questions were used to construct an mdex of the
"issue-ness" of air pollution.
44
:
In effect the assumption was made that the local panels of orgaru-
zational could serve as human yardsticks for estimating the
ievel and nature of decisionmaking activity in each of the cities under
study. They serve in this capacity not because they themselves are
sure to be influential decisionmakers but because they are almost sure
to stand in the path of .influence and decisionmaking. Their formal
authority is likely to make them essential in the .formulation
execution of local policy decisions. From the strategtc vantage
which they occupy, we can scan various policymaking for
of activity. They themselves are likely to reflect. th:
concerns of their communities in their own orgaruzational activIties.
These activities will almost never tell the whole story about. any
decisionmaking episode, but they will indicate what kinds of
have engaged the attention of the local political stratum. The bIgger
the issue,. the more activity we can expect to find among the mem-
bers of our panel.
43 Raymond Wolfinger, "A Plea for a Decent Burial," p. 842.
44 See below, pp. 94-102.
INTRODUCTION 33
SUMMARY
The analysis of the information collected must, of course, be quite
rough. In order to assure the reliability of the local informants, it
was necessary to ask them only simple questions, and simple ques-
tions, as everyone knows, can be expected to elicit only simple
answers. The kinds of information which the respondents have been
able to supply, therefore, do not justify the testing of very subtle
propositions about local politics, nor are they likely to afford an
intimate view of local political activity.
It is important, therefore, not to demand too much of the evidence
that has been assembled. The data supply a crude measure of varia-
tion, from one town to another, in the political prominence of the
air pollution issue. In addition, they provide some indicators of the
general characteristics of local political leaders and institutions. After
taking into account the level of local air pollution and certain relevant
attributes of local popUlations, statistical relationships will be sought
between the neglect of the air pollution issue and the political char-
acteristics of local leaders and institutions. These statistieal associa-
tions are useful in explaining why some cities have failed to cope with
their dirty air. They suggest that local political strata with certain
characteristics tend to be "impenetrable" where the air pollution issue
is concerned, and they stand as evidence of a local "non-decision-
making process" in which certain people and institutions have the
power to enforce inaction.
The rationale for this conclusion is quite similar to the one 'that
underlies the pluralists' conclusions about the existence and distribu-
tion of community power. The pluralists identify a power relationship
. as one in which A can get B to do things that B would not otherwise
do.
4s
The critical step in the analysis of power is therefore to find out
what B would ordinarily do. One way to make this determination is
to observe people who are similar to B and who face similar circum-
stances, save for the circumstance of A's presence. If A has power
over B, B's behavior will differ from the behavior of other, similar
people who are not exposed to the influence of A. In our case B is
the entire popUlation of a particular town. The town's political actions
on the air pollution issue will be compared with the actions of other
towns whose popUlations are similar in age, education, income, and
race. These comparisons will be further adjusted to assure that the
45 Dahl, "The Concept of Power," pp. 202-3.
populations in question face similar conditions-in t ~ s case, s ~ m ? a r
levels of air pollution. After determining how the actIOns of slTIular
B's vary from one town to another, these variations are related to
differences in the characteristics of various A's-local political insti-
tutions and leaders. In this way, it will be possible to find out how
different kinds of A's affect the activities of similar B's and, specifi-
cally, whether certain kinds of A's are able to deter B's from making
an issue of dirty air.
For the purposes of this study, as for the pluralists, the indicator
of a power relationship is a statistical association between the actions
or characteristics of A and the actions or inaction of B. Where such
associations exist, the inference is drawn that A has somehow induced
a response in B. Some question has been raised concerning the
legitimacy of this inference, as well as its relevance to the concept of
power. It has been objected that there must be more in a power
relationship than the mere association of stimulus and response. If
we insist simply that "he who stimulates has power over the re-
spondent," then we must "do violence to the conception of power
which one has by Verstehen." We must concede, for example, that
"the victim who incautiously displays a well-filled wallet has power
over the- thief who robs him."46 Clearly, something is missing from
any notion of power founded simply upon the association of stimulus
and response. In the case of the thief and his victim, the victim does
not want to be robbed. As for the thief, he is probably aware of his
victim's aversion to robbery but not deterred by it. In short, the
stimulus-response conception of power fails to account for the way
in which men define their own interests and the way in which others
perceive and respond to those interests.
These subjective aspects of power relationships are beyond the
scope of a comparative, extensive study such as the present one, but,
an attempt has been made to recapture some of the SUbjective com-
plexities of power relations by conducting detailed political case
studies in a pair of cities with similar popUlations and similar air
pollution problems but substantial differences in their handling of the
air pollution issue. By examining these differences, I hope to illustrate
how political power can produce political inaction and impenetraoility
and to give an example, at least, of the subjective context in which this
kind of power operates. .
46 Francis J. Wormuth, "Matched-Dependent Behavioralism: The Cargo Cult in
Political Science," p. 817.
I
F
I I
Two Case Studies: Gary and East Chicago
When the city of Gary, Indiana, was being put together just after
the turn of the century, its low skyline was already streaked with
industrial smoke. Before Gary had a city hall, or a public school, or
paved streets, it had a steel mill. Before the steel mill, there was an
uninhabited stretch of sand dunes and boggy meadow where the city
of Gary now stands. Engineers employed by U.S. Steel found only
an unoccupied hunting lodge on the site of the future' city when they
arrived in 1906, but they rapidly added a complex of blast furnaces,
open hearths, and coke ovens to the local landscape, and the southern
shore of Lake Michigan soon bristled with industrial smokestacks. A
few hundred yards from the new mill, U.S. Steel started to build the
town that would house its employees. Company engineers moved
inland to layout city streets. A U.S. Steel subsidiary, the Gary Land
Company, divided the emergent town into lots, put up the first of
thousands of steelworkers' bungalows, made home loans to U.S. Steel
. employees, and exercised a veto over architectural plans for all build-
ings erected in Gary. Even the name of the new metropolis came from
the company: Judge Elbert Gary had been the corporation's presi-
dent and it was the Judge who selected the site for his company's new
midwestern mill.
1
Today, thanks largely to Judge Gary and his corporation, there is
a city of more than 180,000 on a site that late nineteenth-century
entrepreneurs considered one of the "most desolate available in the
United States."" The town has the second largest steel mill in the
1 Works Progress Administration Indiana Writers' Project, The Calumet Region
Historical Guide, pp. 149-61.
2 Ibid., p. 24.
35
world, an impressive domed city hall, about twenty public schools,
many miles of paved streets, and it often lies under a heavy blanket
of dirty air. Shoppers on Gary's main street can frequently see a
ponderous plume of pink or rust-colored smoke rising behind the
city hall dome, and motorists on the Indiana Toll Road often en-
counter the same rusty haze when they near the city limits. In 1962
a more systematic observer of air pollution, the U.S. Public Health
Service, ranked sixty American cities according to the dirtiness of
their air. Gary stood at the head of the list.
3
Gary has not ignored its atmospheric pollution. Today a special
division of the city Health Department is charged with the responsi-
bility for cleaning up the air, but municipal activity in the field of air
pollution is a relatively recent development in Gary. Though local
residents testify to a long history of smoky skies and gritty window
sills, it was not until the mid-1950's that air pollution became a public
issue in the city, and only in 1962 did the City Council finally see fit
to pass an air pollution ordinance.
Some Gary residents maintain that their city's slowness to confront
its dirty air calls for no special explanation, that a "natural" and self-
evident inertia in political affairs and public sentiment accounts for
the neglect of new and highly technical issues like air pollution. Where
such novel topics are concerned, they argue, it is simply axiomatic
that the public and the political system will tend to remain at rest.
But while Gary remained at rest, other cities were growing restive.
East Chicago, Indiana, a town of sixty thousand that shares Gary's
western boundary, began serious deliberations on an air pollution law
early in 1948 and passed an ordinance in the following year. The city
thus got around to the matter of dirty air about seven years before
Gary did. Moreover, once it had addressed itself to the air pollution
problem, East Chicago produced legislative results in about a year,
less than one-fifth the time that it took Gary to draft' and enact an'
ordinance.
When measured against East Chicago's speedy performance, Gary's
lethargic handling of the air pollution problem appears somewhat less
than natural and axiomatic. The political inertia that some prominent
citizens of Gary seem to have taken for granted merits an explanation.
The pronounced difference in inertia between the two towns must
reflect some other differences between them-differences visible in
their respective modes of air pollution policymaking.
3 Gary Post-Tribune, 15 December 1962.
TWO CASE STUDIES: GARY AND EAST CHICAGO 37
Outwardly, Gary and East Chicago are kindred cities, the homes
of installations. In both towns, factory prop-
erties form a solId margIn along the Lake Michigan shore and there
are sizable industrial outcroppings in the territory to the East
Chicago, the less populous and spacious of the two cities is more
cluttered with industrial sites than Gary. It is not for an
East Chicago resident to see factory smokestacks from his back
yard or live on a street which comes to a dead end at the fenced
boundary of some industrial domain. In Gary the factories and mills
more keep their distance from residential neighborhoods,
but t?at dIstance, though great by East Chicago standards, is not
suffiCIent to put factories out of sight and smell. There are some
homes in town's upper-income "executive" neighborhood
where It IS pOSSIble to take in the lake, the patio, and U.S. Steel's
new oxygen-electric furnace at a single glance. '
Gary and East Chicago have arrived at their present similar
appearances through slightly different courses of development. Unlike
Gary, .East Chicago did not spring, into existence under the auspices
of a smgle large corporation. Its origins were modest and its growth
largely unsupervised. In the late 1880's and early 1890's the town
emerged as the haphazard product of a few small industrial settle-
By 1901, when the Inland Steel Company bought land in East
a small town and several factories were already standing
m the of its property. Unlike U.S. Steel in Gary, there-
fore, Inland dId not have the opportunity to build its own industrial
from the ground up, nor was the company large enough at the
tII?e to undertake such an enterprise. East Chicago therefore matured
WIthout the benefit of an initial plan of development. Its appearance
. has been shaped by the uncoordinated site selection decisions of a
variety of industrial corporations, but the physical results are quite
similar to those in Gary"
The visible pre-eminence of heavy industry in East Chicago is
by visibly dirty air. Like Gary, East Chicago suffers
from a relatIvely severe pollution problem; in fact, because the two
towns to one another, they often share the saine prob-
DIrty aIr, as pollution officials of both cities readily poiht out,
IS. no of municipal boundaries, and there are. no sharp
In quality between the two. In both towns, for example,
momtorIng statIOns of the National Air Sampling report
4 WPA Indiana Writers' Project, The Call/met Region Historical Guide, pp. 217-19.
comparable amounts of airborne dirt, as Table II-I indicates. Those
differences that exist between the two towns show that East Chicago's
air is somewhat cleaner than Gary's, a fact which makes Gary's
relative insensitivity to the air pollution issue all the more curious. Of
course, the available data do not tell us what East Chicago's air was
TABLE II-1: ANNUAL GEOMETRIC MEANS FOR
SUSPENDED PARTICULATES*
Year Gary East National
Chicago Urban
Average
1958 262 214
1960 190 152 99
1962 192 173 89
SOURCE: U.S. Public Health Service, Air
tion Measurements o/the National Air Sampling Net-
work, 1957-1961; U.S. Public Health Service, A
Summary 0/ National Air Sampling Network Data,
1957-1965.
* Micrograms of particulates per cubic meter of
air.
like before the town enacted its pollution ordinance in 1949. At that
time, well before the establishment of the Air Sampling Network, the
town's air may have been just as polluted as Gary's. Given the'
proximity of the two cities and their common industrial character, it
is quite unlikely that they would ever differ sharply in air quality.
A look at national air pollution averages underlines the resem-
blance between dirty air in Gary and dirty air in East Chicago. In
1962, for example, when Gary's mean particulate count stood at
192 micrograms and East Chicago's at 173, the geometric mean for
suspended particulates at all urban monitoring stations of the National
Air Sampling Network was 89 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
Where dirty air is concerned, Gary and East Chicago clearly are more ,
similar to each other than is either to the "average" American city.
Sulfur dioxide measurements for Gary and East Chicago are
available, but most of the annual S02 averages for Gary are based
on air samples which were not numerous enough to meet the stand-
ards of the National Air Sampling Network. There are, however,
adequate measures of airborne sulfates for both towns. The NASN
sulfate measurements are based upon chemical analyses of suspended
particulates. The sulfate content of the particulates can serve as an
index of the amount of airborne sulfur compounds, both gaseous and
solid. Unfortunately, even these measurements do not provide a com':
pletely satisfactory basis for making comparisons between Gary and
East Chicago. The sulfate data for East Chicago were collected in
1958, for Gary, in 1960. The measurements show that East Chicago's
mean sulfate count was 19.0 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
The mean for Gary was 16.9 micrograms. The national urban average
for the years 1957 through 1960 was 11.8 micrograms. Again, though
sulfate pollution seems to be somewhat higher in East Chicago than
in Gary, the cities are closer to each other than either is to the
national average.
Local industries appear to be responsible for most of the pollutants
that burden the air in Gary and East Chicago. A 1966 study of pollu-
tion emissions in northwest Indiana indicated that industrial sources
accounted for about 90 per cent of particulate emissions and about
60 per cent of hydrocarbon emissions in the region.
5
The industrial
contribution to air pollution in Gary and East Chicago is probably
even larger than it is in other cities in the area because most of the
major industrial installations in northwest Indiana are located in one .
or the other of the two towns. The predominant industries, steel pro-
duction and petroleum refining, account for a substantial part of the
area's air pollution and for most of its jobs. All three steel mills in
northwest Indiana in 1966 were located in either Gary or East
Chicago. They accounted for almost 70 per cent. of the particulate
pollutants, about 56 per cent of the nitrogen oxide emissions, and
about 20 per cent of sulfur oxide emissions. Three of the region's
four oil refineries were located in East Chicago. Their most notable
contributions to local pollution were hydrocarbons. Emissions from
East Chicago refineries accounted for about 44 per cent of all hydro-
carbons released in northwest Indiana.
The industrial character of Gary and East Chicago is also reflected
in their populations. Both communities are steelworkers' towns. In
1960 the three steel companies in the area-Inland, Youngstown and
Sheet and Tube, and U.S. Steel-employed 43 per cent of East
Chicago's work force and 36 per cent of Gary's.6 Citizens of the two
towns were similar in most respects which the survey fOlmd to affect
people's attitudes toward dirty air. The median age ~ f Gary residents
was almost identical to that of East Chicagoans. Median education
5 Guntis Ozolins and C. Rehmenn, "Air Pollutant Emission Inventory of North-
west Indiana."
6 U.S., Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1960. Detailed Characteriftics,
Indiana.
was about the same for both towns, though Gary's citizens appear to
be somewhat better educated, on the average, than residents of East
Chicago. The median income of Gary residents was also slightly
higher than that of residents of East Chicago, but here again the
difference was not large. A more substantial difference existed in
racial composition: in 1960 about 39 per cent of Gary's residents
were non-white, while the figure for East Chicago was only 24 per
cent.
There is an additional dissimilarity between the two towns which
overshadows all the others. While East Chicago's population grew by
only 6 per cent between 1950 and 1960; Gary's increased by one-
third. A similar difference is recorded for the decade 1940 to 1950,
when Gary's population grew by almost 20 per cent while East
Chicago suffered a slight decline. East Chicagoans have a s ~ p l e
explanation for the fact that their city has virtually stopped groWIng:
there is simply no more space available in the town. Land for new
housing and new factories is almost impossible to find, and its scarcity
has all but halted population growth in East Chicago.
Because of Gary's growth and East Chicago's stability, their popu-
lations have come to differ slightly. In 1950 they were more nearly
alike than they were in 1960. In 1950 there was almost no difference
between the cities in median income or median education, and the
proportion of the local work force employed in the steel industry was
45 per cent in East Chicago and 42 per cent in Gary. Even in 1950
there was a noticeable difference between the proportion of non-
whites in Gary and in East Chicago, but the difference was smaller
than it had become by 1960. In the late 1940's, when East Chicago
began to consider the enactment of an air pollution ordinance, the
populations of the two cities were, in a number of respects, more
nearly similar than they are today.
EAST CmCAGO TRIES TO CLEAR THE AIR
Political Background
In the late 1940's the stability of East Chicago's population seems
to have been accompanied by a kind of tranquility in local politics. It
was not that East Chicago politic,ians had stopped djsagreeing with
one another-bickering was frequent, and sometimes quite intense-
but subjects for disagreement seem to have been rather scarce because
politicians were seldom called upon to resolve questions of public
TWO CASE STUDIES: GARY AND EAST CmCAGO 41
policy. Only a few identifiable policy issues disturbed the local politi-
cal routine. Zoning squabbles, generated by the scarcity of land,
sometimes supplied the substance for political debate, and there were
always taxes to argue about. In addition, a few special projects
aroused the interest of East Chicago civic activists. One of these was
the passage of an ordinance that would require the installation of
crossing gates on all railroad lines that ran through the city. Another
was the consolidation of all previously enacted city ordinances into
a simple, rationally organized municipal code. Such statutory stock-
taking was a fitting enterprise for a community that had reached a
plateau in its development.
City patronage provided another focus for the attentions of East
Chicago politicians. No civil service regulations restricted the partisan
attachments of city employees, and proved loyalty to the Democratic
Party was usually a prerequisite for officeholding. The Democratic
Party, however, could not be said to constitute a single object of
loyalty. It was a loose collection of as many as half a dozen inde-
pendent groups, each headed by a different Democratic chieftain.
Members of these intraparty factions were seldom bound to their
respective leaders by ideology. Ethnic and neighbprhood ties seem
to have been more important than shared political beliefs, and the
hope for municipal employment may also have helped to maintain
factional loyalties. The mayor of East Chicago, who doubled as the
local party chairman, recruited most of his city officials from those
intraparty groups which had provided him with electoral support.
Not all party factions were willing to meet this requirement, however.
The mayor presided over, but did not completely control, the various
sub-chiefs within his party. This, at least, is the way East Chicago's
Democratic Party organization is described by people who were active
. in it during the late 1940's, and the election returns of the period
tend to bear them out. In 1947, when the incumbent mayor ran
successfully for re-election, he was able to command only a little
more than 40 per cent of the Democratic primary vote. His electoral
showing was hardly what would be expected from the autocratic boss
of a smoothly run political machine. The mayor's political success
depended upon an uncertain coalition of factions and leaders which
he managed to hold together by a judicious distribution of municipal
jobs.
One leading municipal jobholder was Loyd Cohen, East Chicago's
city attorney since 1939. He had been a moving spirit in the local
crossing gate campaign and again in the movement for consolidation
of city ordinances. While he worked on these two projects,
was also taking the first steps toward the enactment of a local ordl.,
nance that would effectively reduce the emission of smoke and fumes
from the city's factories. As a public official Cohen was unusual in
East Chicago. Though he was an influential member of the city admin-
istration he was only a peripheral figure in the Democratic Party
organiz;tion. He was not identified with any of the ethnic or neighbor-
hood factions that supplied the mayor with votes or political' man-
power, and he could not deliver any bloc of electoral support to his
political chief. Had he been interested in gathering votes, he would
probably have been handicapped by his inability to claim ethnic
kinship with the Greeks, Serbians, Poles, Italians, and Hungarians
who figured prominently among local party adherents. Moreover,
Cohen does not seem to have been temperamentally suited to partisan
operations. He was, according to a local Democrat of long standing,
"a fine boy," but one who "wasn't liking politics."
For East Chicagoans "politics" has a somewhat different meaning
than it does for political scientists. The community definition is
probably best illustrated by the comment of a local newspaper editor
asked to explain a disagreement that had arisen during the discussion
of a local political issue: "In this town, people don't disagree about
issues. It's just politics." "Politics" in East Chicago is distinct from
the public process by which matters of community concern are de-
bated and resolved. In the eyes of many local residents, the political
system is a complex network of private feuds which often have noth-
ing to do with the public issues under consideration. One retired
municipal official, for example, was asked about a dispute between
a local doctor and a local undertaker which arose during an evaluation
of the town's air pollution control program. He explained that it had
little to do with dirty air. The undertaker had been interested in
enlarging his profits by using his hearse, when it was idle, as an
ambulance. The doctor, for reasons of professional dignity, refused to
refer his ambulance cases to an undertaker. The undertaker retaliated
by publicly attacking the physician's stand on the air pollution pro-
gram. In another case, it was explained that a local tavern owner, coal
merchant, and former City Council member had testified before the
Council on behalf of the local air pollution ordinance not only be-
cause the fumes from a neighborhood factory irritated the patrons of
his bar but because the owners of the factory had him to
remove' his coal yard from land which they had leased to him in the
past. His support of the air pollution ordinance was his way of getting
even with the company.
These explanations can only be regarded as bits of political gossip.
It was impossible to check their veracity against newspaper reports,
and most respondents, though they frequently referred to the existence
of private feuds, were understandably reluctant to talk about details.
Nevertheless, although local gossip may not accurately portray the
motives that lie behind political events-or even the events them-
selves-it does reveal something about the way in which politically
active East Chicagoans regard local politics. For them, political
activity appears primarily as a means for private advancement and
private revenge. This view is shared even by those citizens who are
not active in partisan affairs. Representatives of the local business
community seem to have regarded some especially vigorous attempts
to enforce the local air pollution ordinance not as efforts to clean the
air but as attempted "shakedowns." It was even alleged that certain
local politicians on one occasion explicitly demanded a bribe in return
for assuring a favorable decision concerning air pollution regulations.
Again, these charges are only rumors, but they reveal the attitudes
of East Chicagoans toward the nature and purposes of the political
process. ' .
In the minds of East Chicago political activists, Loyd Cohen was
set apart from the private funding and the alleged venality of the
local political system. To some he was a puzzling figure. They found
it difficult to understand why a man should choose to remain city
attorney for thirteen years when he could profit so much more by
entering private legal practice. No one was able to suggest any
"private" reasons for Cohen's choice, nor could anyone perceive a
. devious scheme for private advancement in his campaign against
dirty air. Others might use the air pollution issue for personal revenge.
But even the most suspicious local Democrats believed that Cohen
supported the cause of clean air simply because he opposed dirty
air. He was a politician who "wasn't liking politics."
Raising the Issue
As city attorney, Cohen was an ex officio member of the East
Chicago Board of Public Works and Safety. By local tradition,
citizens with grievances were welcome to appear before the Board
and state their complaints. Officially, the Board was
neither to hear complaints nor to do much about them, but East
Chicagoans seem to have valued the chance to make the Board
aware of their opinions, and, in the late 1940's at least, scarcely a
Board meeting passed at which some irate citizen did not appear to
register his demand or complaint. Frequently, the complaints were
about dirty air, and it was Cohen's repeated exposure to them that,
by his own account, prompted him to draft a clean air ordinance.
Blast furnace "slips" at the two local steel mills regularly pro-
voked a heavy turnout of angry citizens at the weekly meeting of the
Board. Slips occur when there is a sudden shift in the load of lime-
stone, coke, and iron ore which is being roasted in a blast furnace.
The resulting increase in pressure opens the furnace's safety valves,
which then release billows of heavy black smoke into the air. When
slips occurred in East Chicago, the Board could look forward to an
uncomfortable confrontation with -local housewives at its next sched-
uled meeting. Occasionally the protesters also appeared at City Council
sessions. The Council, perhaps to avoid these confrontations or to
draw attention away from public officials, made it a practice to invite
representatives of smoke-producing industries to appear at meetings
of the Board of Public Works and Safety. When the executives at-
tended, they became the primary targets for complaints about smoke
and soot.
A typical confrontation between local housewives and corporate
management occurred in September 1948, just a few weeks before
Loyd Cohen was to submit his draft air pollution ordinance to the
City Council. Mrs. Steve Serdel, a local newspaper reported, arrived
at the Board meeting accompanied by two other housewives. She was
carrying a soiled dress belonging to her daughter. The trainmaster for
the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad was also present at the meeting,
and Mrs. Serdel explained that his company's locomotives had been,
responsible for soiling her daughter'S clothing. "She was on the
porch," said Mrs. Serdel as she brandished the dress, "on her way to
church, and in just a matter of a few seconds the dress was dirty."
The railroad representative apologized and explained that responsi-
bility for the dirty dress lay with company employees who were not
acquainted with "proper procedure." He promised that disciplimrry
action would be taken to prevent similar accidents in the future. At
least one of the housewives was not satisfied. "Maybe we should call
up the railroad," she said, "to find out when it's safe to put our wash
out." Loyd Cohen now entered the discussion in an attempt to pacify-
I
n
the housewives. He announced in public .for the first that
. tended to submit a draft air pollution ordInance to the City Council,
:'d he asked the complaining ladies to appear before the Council in
support of his ordinance.
7
Cohen had begun to work on the air pollution law in 1945, three
years before he made his appeal for public suppo.rt. His ",:as
slow largely because he began his efforts at draftIng WIth
almost no knowledge of the technical aspects of pollutIOn control. At
the outset, his only guide was an ;'hich
has been enacted in 1941 by the East Chicago City Council WIthout
much public notice. Cohen soon came to regard the 1941 law as a
legal expression of industrial vIew that home
and backyard burning, not factory operatIOns, responsl?le for
the town's extraordinarily dirty air and was determIned that hiS Own
ordinance would allocate responsibility for air pollution more realis-
tically. Cohen turned instead to the laws which other ha.d
enacted in order to cope with the pollution problem. The dIrty aIr
ordinances of St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles County seemed
suitable models for an East Chicago law. He also contacted officials
of the National Institute of Municipal Law Officers, of which, he was
a member and requested the Institute's drafting service to provide
him with model air pollution ordinance. While he waited, he con-
sulted with the corporation counsels of Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Los
Angeles County at the annual conventions of the Institute.
the first two years of preparation, Cohen never sought the adVIce ?f
the numerous industrial engineers who were employed by firms In
East Chicago; in fact, he made no effort to inform any Chica-
goansof his work on the air pollution law. It.was not 1947
that Cohen finally notified Mayor Frank MIgas of hIS IntentIOn to
submit a dirty air ordinance to the City Council. The Mayor, accord-
ing to Cohen, was mildly favorable to the proposal but hardly
enthusiastic. Cohen continued to polish up his ordinance.
By early 1948 Cohen had completed a satisfactory first draft .. The
legislation provided for two kinds of regulation. One type speCIfied
maximum permissible emission standards for smoke and suspended
7 Hammond, Indiana, Times, 23 September 1948, There, are t'Y0 weekly newspapers
in East Chicago but no daily. The newspaper of a neighbOring town, Hammond,
provides daily coverage of East Chicago affairs, The Hammond pape,r was used as a
source of information about East Chicago's dirty air debate because Its
somewhat more extensive tban tbat of East Chicago papers and because copies 0 It
were more easily obtained.
particulates,
8
and anyone whose furnace or factory exceeded these
limits could be fined as much as $300 and sentenced to 180 days in
jail. A second set of regulations had to do not with pollution emissions
but with the apparatus that generated them. These provisions were
intended to regulate the design, installation, and upkeep of all fuel-
burning equipment as well as "any article, machine, equipment,
structure, or other contrivance, the use of which may cause the
issuance of air contaminants within the city." Enforcement of equip-
ment and emission standards was to be entrusted to a chief air
pollution control inspector. Any citizen who intended to install a
piece of equipment that was likely to "cause the issuance of air
contaminants" would be required-to submit two sets of plans to the
pollution inspector. If the blueprints met all pollution control require-
ments, the inspector would issue a construction permit, for which
there would be a small charge. In addition to reviewing blueprints,
the inspector would be authorized to conduct a yearly inspection of
every pollution-producing installation in East Chicago. Owners of
equipment that met the local pollution control standards would be
issued an annual certificate of operation. Any installation that failed
to pass the yearly inspection would be "sealed" until necessary cor-
rections had been made.
9
The costs of blueprint approval and annu!ll
inspection programs were to be covered entirely by fees that the
inspector collected for licenses and certificates. Under Cohen's plan,
any East Chicagoan who had reason to be dissatisfied with a decision
of the pollution inspector might appeal the ruling to an Air Pollution
Control Advisory and Appeals Board. The draft ordinance required
that members of this body must "have no other interests which may
conflict with the air pollution control program";!O in other words,
representatives of local industry were not eligible for appointments
to the Board.
But it was to the representatives of local industry that Cohen
turned in order to secure approval of his pollution control proposal.
In February 1948 he called a private meeting at City Hall, to which he
invited the officers of the East Chicago Chamber of Commerce.
George Applegate, the Chamber's newly appointed assistant secretafJ1'"
manager, represented the organization. At the Chamber's next board
8 MuniCipal Code of East Chicago Indiana, Title 1, sees. 2401-8; Title 5, sees.
709-99.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
of directors meeting, Applegate reported that ':it was his opinion
the City Administration is defimtely to adopt an [arr
pollution] ordinance," and he noted that the CIty had. re-
quested Chamber cooperation in the After
the board of directors decided that It was advIsable for orgamza-.
tion to take an "active interest" in the drafting of the control
legislation. A five-member Smoke Abatement set up
to act as the Chamber's delegation at drafting seSSIOns WIth
Cohen. The chairman was to be Dr. Edward Cotter, a local physIcIan
whose clinic served many East Chicago industrial workers under com-
pany health plans.
11
Negotiations
During the next eight months, representatives of the
Smoke Abatement Committee met with Cohen at least twenty tImes.
Dr. Cotter was present at none of these sessions, and it was Ge?rge
Applegate who led the Chamber delegation. At most of meetmgs,
the organization's contingent included one or more engmeers. em-
ployed by East Chicago industrial firms; the
city engineer, also attended some of the se.ssIOns. WIth the exceptIOn
of these technical specialists, no East ChIcagoans but
and the Chamber committeemen took part in the air pollutIOn negotI-
ations at City Hall. Nor were any other East Chicagoans invited to
participate, and in the hope that no one else. would ask to do so,
Cohen took care to avoid publicizing the meetmgs. .
The City Attorney's effort to maintain secrecy was part of hIS
attempt to win the confidence of local industrial .managers.
anticipated ,that the businessmen would be unfnendly. to aIr
. pollution proposal, and he believed that suc,:ess of
depended upon his ability to overcome thIS bUSI?eSS anunosIty: The
City Hall negotiating sessions were therefore mtended to.
potential opponents before their opposition had a to c.rystallIze.
Cohen was convinced that if East Chicago corporatIOns belIeved that
they had a hand in the writing of the air
would take a more lively and benevolent mteres.t the
than if the city administration snubbed them. He lImIted
in the drafting sessions to Chamber of Commerce representatives
11 East Chicago Chamber of Commerce, Minutes of the Board of Directors meeting,
5 August 1948.
because he was afraid that if he opened the meetings to other East
Chicagoans, the result would be public pressure for a quick con-
clusion to the negotiations and rapid enactment of a strong air pollu-
tion law. The City Attorney was particularly concerned lest some
city councilmen demand that the dirty air ordinance be submitted
immediately to the Council, before it was "ready"-that is, before it
had been modified to meet the major objections of local industries. An
effort to snatch the legislation from the hands of the Chamber dele-
gation, he thought, would frighten local businessmen and "cause
industrial opposition to jell prematurely." The corporations would
then transfer their battle against the pollution ordinance to the state
courts, where the program might be tied up in litigation for years.
By avoiding publicity, Cohen also hoped to induce the businessmen to
take his proposal seriously. If he were to advertise his efforts on
behalf of pollution control, he thought, the Chamber members might
dismiss him as an upstart public official out to achieve public noto-
riety. Secrecy would help him to secure the Chamber's cooperation.
Cohen found an unexpected ally in (ieorge Applegate. Though he
did not endorse every provision of Cohen's draft ordinance, he was-
convinced that some air pollution legislation ought to be enacted for
East Chicago. Applegate seems to have acted as chief intermediary
between the Chamber and the City Attorney. During the course of
the negotiations with Cohen at City Hall, he also participated in a
parallel set of meetings which were held at Chamber of Commerce
headquarters. The purpose of these special meetings was to work out
a unified organizational position on each section of the air pollution
legislation. Applegate and other members of the Smoke Abatement
Committee reported to the Chamber on the modifications in the draft
ordinance to which Cohen had agreed. Further modifications could
be suggested by the engineers and industrial executives who were
present at these meetings, and recommendations were made concern- '
ing those provisions of the law which were yet to be discussed with
Cohen. After disagreements among the Chamber members had been
settled, Applegate and the Smoke Abatement delegation conveyed
their organization'S views to Cohen. ,
At the City Hall bargaining sessions there were seldom more than
half a dozen participants, but the Chamber meetings frequently at-
tracted as many as twenty or thirty representatives of corporate
management. Dr. Cotter usually presided at these gatherings, but
Applegate and Oliver Campbell, a combustion engineer for a l a r ~ e .
oil refining company, seem to have done most of the talking. Within
the Chamber there was less than complete agreement concerning the
proposed air pollution legislation. According to the reports of people
who participated in the conferences, internal differences were greatest
at the outset of the negotiations with Cohen and eight months later,
when the deliberations were drawing to a close. At the start of the
discussions, the representative of a small tar products company stood
alone in his opposition to any kind of air pollution legislation what-
soever. The range of business opinion ran from this extreme view
through a series of subtle gradations to the positions of Applegate and
Campbell.
Campbell, a member of the Smoke Abatement Committee, was
largely responsible for rewriting Cohen's draft ordinance so that it
would meet Chamber specifications. He also seems to have been
influential in modifying those specifications so as to minimize the
inconsistencies between the Chamber position and Cohen's original
proposal. At the Chamber's smoke abatement meetings, he attempted
to persuade local industrial executives that the costs of many pollu-
tion control measures required by the proposed ordinance would be
more than covered by savings in industrial expenditures for fuel. Air
pollution, he argued, was often a sign of inefficient fuel combustion;
by increasing the efficiency of combustion, therefore, some East
Chicago industries might save money.
Campbell's frequent appeals to the principles of economy and
efficiency were not the only arguments raised in support of the' pro-
posed legislation. It was also pointed out that if municipalities failed
to take action against air pollution, the federal government might
eventually decide to do so. Most of the businessmen seem to have
preferred dealing with local rather than federal officials, and some of
them saw the approval of a municipal pollution ordinance as one way
to forestall federal regulation of their pollution-producing industries.
Apprehension about federal intervention and considerations of
efficiency seem to have convinced many Chamber members that an
air pollution control program was desirable. One month after the
initiation of talks with the City Attorney, the Chamber was willing
to go on record as a supporter of an air pollution ordinance, but the
law would have to be "reasonable, practical, and sufficiently flexible
to meet changing conditions." In the Chamber's view, Cohen's original
proposal did not meet these requirements. The Chamber further in-
sisted that "the smoke problem be recognized as one subject to
solution only on a long range basis." In other words, East Chicagoans
could not expect local industries to comply immediately with any new
restrictions on the emission of contaminants. In some cases, large
expenditures and extensive research might be required before effective
methods of pollution control could be put into effect. FinaUy, the
Chamber recommended that the poUution ordinance ought to be
after that been enacted in Chicago some years
earlIer. - The ChIcago ordInance was apparently regarded as more
reasonable, practical, and flexible than Cohen's proposal.
Cohen refused to his own ordinance and draw up another
draft based on the ChIcago law. The Chicago ordinance he believed
failed t? assign sufficient responsibility to industry as a 'source of ai:
contamInants. To adopt the Chicago legislation as a model would
mean the essential purpose of his own proposal, the
regulatIOn of factory poUution. The Chamber representatives seem
.to have pressed Cohen on this point. They agreed to use his
?ngInal proposal as the basis for further negotiations but they made
It clear that his ordinance would have to be modified in several im-
portant respects to win Chamber approval.
. The discussion of these modifications occupied aU subsequent meet-
Ings. M?st of th.e changes demanded by the Chamber representatives
tech.mcal advisers would have exempted certain kinds of
Industnal eqUIpment, under certain conditions, from the poUution
standards that Cohen had written into his ordinance. The general
argument of the members of the Chamber delegation was that it
tech.nologicaUy impossible, in some circumstances, for certain
kIndS. of Industrial apparatus to meet Cohen's emission standards, and
that It :"ould be unreasonable to apply the standards to
those pIeces of machInery. Cohen was ill-equipped to resist these
and disinclined to ignore them. He was naturaUy reluctant
to dIspute. the professional judgments of the technical specialists
acc?mpamed the Chamber's negotiating team. Cohen's only technical
was the Assistant City Engineer, who was not reaUy an
at alI but a music teacher who had earned a place in the
mumcIpal bureaucracy. Moreover, the charge that certain
the ordinance were "unreasonable" made Cohen par-
tIcularly cautIous. An alIegation of unreasonableness might provide
the grounds for a successful legal chalIenge of the pollution law in
the state courts. It was just such a legal battle that he had hoped to
12 Ibid., 4 March 1948.
avoid by negotiating with the Chamber representatives. He therefore
agreed to most of the Chamber's revisions in the draft ordinance,t3
and by August 1948 George Applegate could report to the Chamber's
board of directors that the City Attorney and the Chamber negotiating
team had been able to achieve "95 per cent agreement" on the .pro-.
posed legislation.
14
A few points remained, however, on which Cohen declined to make
concessions. The Chamber representatives had requested that open
hearth furnaces and Bessemer converters
15
be exempted from the pro-
visions of the dirty air ordinance. There was, they said, no feasible
method for controUing the emission of air polIutants from this equip-
ment. Cohen refused to grant these exemptions. His refusal was not
based upon any independent judgment of the steel industry's techno-
logical capability to curb polIution from these sources; he simply felt
that the steel industry was the largest single contributor to air pollu-
tion in East Chicago and that open hearths and Bessemer converters
accounted for a major part of its emissions. To exempt these pieces
of equipment from the regulations, Cohen believed, would cut the
heart from his program.
16
A final point of contention between the City Attorney and the
Chamber had to do with the administration of the proposed air
pollution control program. Specifically, the Chamber objected to the
provision in Cohen's ordinance that excluded representatives of local
industry from membership on the Air Pollution Control Advisory and
Appeals Board. On this matter, too, Cohen stood firm. His reaso,ns
13 Among the concessions was one that exempted the infamous blast furnace slips
from anti-pollution regulations. .
14 East Chicago Chamber of Commerce, Minutes of the Board of Directors meet-
ing, 5 August 1948.
15 Both of these devices are designed to convert pig iron, the product of blast
furnace operations, into steel ingots. Open hearths account for about 90 per. cent of
steel production in the United States. Bessemer converters are o?solete pIeces of
equipment which today account for only about 2 per cent of nauonal output. See
Jean J. Schuenemann et al., Air Pollution Aspects 0/ the Iron and Steel Industry,
. d
16 Through he had no way of knowing it at the li;me, pro?ably
the contribution of Bessemer converters to East ChIcago arr polluUon. By comparIson
with other sorts of steelmaking equipment, Bessemer converters cannot. been
a very significant source of dirty air. There were only a few converters. sull In opera-
tion in East Chicago. Moreover, even today there are no known techmques for con-
trolling pollutant emissions from Bessemer converters. As for the open hearth
exemption, the Chamber's argument seems to have been sound. Recent
studies indicate that open hearths account for a substantial portIOn of the st.eel
industry's contribution to commilnity air pollution, and as early as 1950
control devices were installed and successfully used on open hearth furnaces In
California. One cannot be certain, of course, that the control apparatus I!sed. on the
newer California models would have worked equally well for steel mills In East
Chicago.
for refusing to compromise are reminiscent of the rhetoric of Jack-
sonian democracy: "I've always been a little wary of complete domi-
nation of local officialdom by local industry. [I wanted to] exclude
industry from the Board. It would spread involvement to put private
citizens on the Board-promote more citizen participation in govern-
ment."
It was to private citizens that Cohen next appealed in order to gain
support for his ordinance. In September, with the exemptions for
Bessemer converters and open hearths still in dispute and the com-
position of the Advisory and Appeals Board also a matter for
disagreement, Cohen closed the City Hall negotiations. He announced
to the Chamber representatives that he intended to submit a draft air
pollution ordinance to the East Chicago City Council on Septem-
ber 27. Five days before the target date, on September 22, Mrs. Serdel
had appeared at the Board of Public Works and Safety meeting with
her daughter's soiled dress, as mentioned earlier, and Cohen had been
prompted to make an advance announcement of his ordinance and
a plea for public support. He also announced that he had been
persuaded to delay the introduction of his ordinance for two weeks,
until October II.
George Applegate and the Chamber of Commerce were responsible
for the postponement. Applegate explained to a newspaper reporter
that the Chamber Smoke Abatement Committee had "worked closely
with the city government on this important measure, so we asked for
this last chance togo over the final draft before it goes before the
Council."17 Chamber negotiators met with Cohen once during the
first week in October in a last attempt to settle differences. Cohen
stood firm on the major points of contention but accepted a few minor
revisions in the draft ordinance.
When Cohen appeared at the City Council meeting on October 11,
it was only to report that there would be another two-week delay
before his ordinance could be presented. After questioning by Council
members, he explained that the postponement had been ordered by a
"higher authority." The councilmen were not pleased. After attacking
several local corporations for their failure to control industrial pollu-
tion, one of them "bellowed that he had expected the smoke ordinance
at the meeting and was deeply disappointed by the delay."18
Mayor Migas was the "higher authority" who had ordered the
11 Hammond Times, 23 September 1948.
18 Ibid., 12 October 1948.
7
second postponement. Representatives of a large industrial corpora-
tion with a plant in East Chicago had approached him to ask for the
delay, and Migas had granted their request. The Mayor assured Cohen
that the new postponement did not mean that East Chicago's air
pollution legislation was in danger, and he promised that there would
be no further delays in introducing the ordinance. According to
Cohen, the Mayor did not explain why the postponement had been
requested or what corporation had requested it. Some East Chicago
informants, though they decline to name the firm involved, suggest
that local executives of the company asked for the postponement in
order to settle a difference of opinion between the corporation's East
Chicago branch and its central office. The headquarters officials be-
lieved that the East Chicago Chamber of Commerce-and their own"
East Chicago executives-had conceded too much to Loyd Cohen
on the matter of air pollution control. The local managers sought to
gain time to placate their superiors. No industrial representatives
approached Cohen to ask for further changes in the draft legislation.
On October 25 Cohen finally submitted his ordinance to the
Council. He thanked George Applegate and the Chamber committee
for their assistance in drafting the law, But he acknowledged that the
Chamber negotiators were not completely satisfied with his own
version. To the Council members, Cohen explained that the uneasy
agreement which existed between the city administration and local
industry inight be disrupted by incautious amendment of the air
pollution legislation.
19
East Chicago's city councilmen seem to have
heeded Cohen's warning. During the three months in which they con-
sidered the proposal, they made only one change in the draft that
Cohen had submitted to them. The change had to do with installation
specifications for coal-burning furnaces-not a matter of any great
importance to local industries, but one that seems to have aroused the
concern of apartment house owners, who had not been parties to the
negotiations between Cohen and the Chamber. In general, the council-
men seem to have been more interested in understanding the pro-
visions of the air pollution bill than in changing them. In public
hearings before the Council's Health and Morals Committee, Cohen
and representatives of local industry attempted to explain the pol-
lution control regulations to the Committee members and to East
Chicago residents who raised questions concerning the ordinance.
By February 1949 the Health and Morals Committee had com-
pleted its consideration of the dirty air bilI, and the ordinance reached
the Council floor. Discussion was brief and did not touch at all on
the substance of the law. The councilmen were concerned about the
kinds of qualifications that would be required of appointees to the
post of air pollution control inspector-whether or not the inspector
would have to be a graduate engineer. Having expressed themselves
on this point, they unanimously approved the air pollution control
ordinance.
Epilogue
East Chicago's city administration almost immediately began to
prepare for the enforcement of the dirty air law. Charles Molnar, the
assistant city engineer, was appointed air pollution inspector, and
within a few months he initiated the first annual round of inspections
and fee collections. But Molnar never completed the certification
program. Local industries refused to pay their fees for certificates of
operation and notified the city administration that they would con-
tinue to withhold the fees so long as the Pollution Inspector continued
to "misinterpret" the air pollution law. Molnar, they argued, had
insisted on charging inspection fees for pieces of industrial equipment
that were clearly not within the scope of the inspection program
authorized by the new ordinance. Under public pressure to deal
sternly with the local industrial corporations, he had attempted to
apply the pollution regulations to refrigeration equipment, air con-
ditioners, exhaust fans, septic tanks, and other items on the grounds
that each of these installations was likely to "cause the issuance of
air contaminants."
Once again, the Chamber of Commerce Smoke Abatement Com-
mittee entered into negotiations with representatives of the ci'ty
administration-the Mayor, the Pollution Inspector, and the Air Pol-
lution Control Advisory and Appeals Board-and by the next Octo-
ber an agreement was finally reached concerning the enforcement of
the dirty air ordinance. Under the terms of the compromise, Molnar
was to exempt thirty-two items of equipment from the annual air
pollution inspections. For their part, the industrial managers agreed
to pay their inspection fees in full for 1950, but not for 1949. 20
20 East Chicago Chamber of Commerce, memorandum to membership 27 October
1950. '
I
!
I
n
Once under way, East Chicago's pollution control program turned
out to be somewhat different from the one that Loyd Cohen had
envisioned. Under Mayor Migas' successor, a new pollution control
inspector established more peaceful relations with local industry than
Charles Molnar had been able to achieve. One consequence of this
amity was to deprive the Air Pollution Control Advisory and Appeals
Board of its chief function. Under the new regime, few East Chicago
businessmen felt the need to appeal to the Board, and the Pollution
Control Inspector almost never asked for its advice. There was also a
change in the scope of the pollution control program. An informal
agreement between the Inspector and local businessmen exempted
from the pollution standards, but not from the certification fees, all
pieces of equipment installed prior to the enactment of the dirty air
ordinance.
In spite of this important restriction, it appears that East Chicago's
efforts at cleaning the air achieved a partial, if temporary, success.
Pollution data show a steady and substantial decline in suspended
particulates in the city from 1957 through 1961. In 1962, however, the
downward trend was reversed. The turning point coincided with the
adoption of a new steelmaking technique at one of the East Chicago
mills, a method known to generate relatively heavy particulate
emissions."' By 1965, the latest year for which pollution data are
available, East Chicago particulate rates were approaching their
1957 level. .
GARY HOLDS ITS BREATH
Political Background
The city of Gary was not roused to action by its neighbor's anti-
pollution efforts. It was not until late 1955-almost seven years after
East Chicago enacted its dirty air ordinance-that the matter of air
pollution finally surfaced as a political issue in Gary. Having made its
entry into the city's political life, it became snared in a political situa-
tion less congenial to its growth than the one that existed in East
Chicago during the late 1940's.
In Gary, as in East Chicago, the city administration was intimately
connected with the machinery of the Democratic Party. No legal
barriers separated the municipal from the partisan bureaucracy, but,
21 Schuenemann, Air Polllltion Aspects of the Iroll and Steel Illdus.try, pp. 49-50.
mfz
unlike East Chicago, the Democratic Party was not a precarious
coalition of independent ethnic groups. By 1955 it was well on its
way to becoming a tightly organized political instrument. At the
heart of the Party was an organization called the Club Sar, an inter-
ethnic coalition of eastern and southern Europeans which began to
function in local politics during the 1930's. In 1951 the Club took
custody of both the Democratic organization and the city administra-
tion. Club Sar's mayoral candidate, Peter Mandich, drew about 35
per cent of the vote in that year's Democratic primary, more than
any of the other seven mayoral candidates, and went on to win the
general election. Four years later, when Mandich ran for re-election,
he received a substantially larger share of the primary vote-about
53 per cent. In 1959 he traded offices with George Chacharis, the
founder of Club Sar, who was then serving as county sheriff.
Chacharis carried the Democratic primary with more than 80 per
cent of the vote, demonstrating that Club Sar had the Democratic
organization well in hand.
Between 1951 and 1959 Gary's Democratic Party was undergoing
an important transformation whose end product would be a unified
political organization. During the same period, other changes were
also disturbing the stability of local public affairs. Rapid population
growth imposed an expanding burden upon local public facilities.
Existing streets and parking spaces were no longer sufficient to the
transportation needs of Gary's residents, and existing public housing
units could not meet the needs of low-income residents. Changes in
the composition of the town's population, however, seem to have
raised problems that were even more serious than those produced by
population growth alone. During the 1950's an increase in the pro-
portion of Negro residents in Gary coincided with the gradual
emergence of racial conflicts in local politics. The race issue, when
it could not be avoided, was handled gingerly, sometimes withobt
mentioning race at all. Departures from this discreet practice were
generally unacceptable to Gary's civic leaders. Undisguised debate
about racial problems was apparently not considered a legitimate form
of political discussion. On one occasion, for example, a debate be-
tween white and Negro members of the City Council concerning
"inefficiency" in the distribution of occupants among public housing
projects was disrupted by a newly elected white councilman who
asserted that racial segregation, not administrative "efficiency," was
actually the subject of the discussion. He went on tG-accuse the Gary
Housing Authority of practicing racial discrimination, and the chair-
man of the Authority promptly filed a slander suit against him. The
prospective defendant was Milton Roth, a young Gary attorney who
became a member of the City Council in 1955. During his career as
an elected official, which was brief, Roth regularly assumed the
political role of an issue-raiser. He was seldom able to contribute
much to the resolution of these issues: his time in office was too short,
his influence too small, and, moreover, the issues that attracted him
were not easily resolved, at least not in Gary. They were almost all
politically delicate or risky topics-racial discrimination, alleged
abuses in the distribution of municipal patronage, water fluoridation
(a controversial matter almost everywhere), and air pollution (a sub-
ject of particular delicacy in Gary).
Roth's attempts to place these matters on Gary's political agenda
were not calculated to increase his popularity among the town's
Democratic leaders. In fact, very few of his political activities were
likely to win him friends within the Democratic organization. He
ran for the City Council in 1955 without party endorsement. In order
to win his at-large seat, he had to displace one of the regulars from
the Democratic ticket, and he accomplished this in the party primary.
Once elected, he joined with two other likeminded councilmen in an
unsuccessful effort to win control of committee assignments from
representatives of the Club Sar faction, who were than a majority
within the Council.
Perhaps even more than Loyd Cohen, Roth was a political figure
set apart from his town's major partisan organization. While Cohen
merely refrained from participation in most Democratic Party activi-
ties, Roth actively opposed the Democratic organization on a number
of occasions. It was because of his unfriendliness to the Party, says
Roth, that he lost his City Council seat in the 1959 primary-the
same election in which Club Sar's mayoral candidate captured more
than 80 per cent of the Democratic vote. Roth's electoral support in
both of his campaigns came, not from the network of regular Demo-
cratic precinct captains but from a group of about thirty people whom
he describes as Gary's "liberal wing" and from the League of Women
Voters. His sources of support distinguished him from most of Gary's
Democratic politicians, as did his organizational affiliations. He was
the president of the Gary chapter of the United World Federalists; a
member of the ACLU, and a member of the NAACP, from which
he received an award in 1957 for his work in race relations.
Raising the Issue
The air pollution problem was an issue in Milton Roth's first cam-
paign for a City Council seat but not in the campaigns of the other
candidates for municipal office. The subject was suggested to him
by a friend of his parents as one likely to attract the attention of the
electorate. Roth followed this advice and mentioned the air pollution
problem in several campaign speeches. He advanced no specific
remedies but merely cited the obvious severity of the problem and
promised that, if elected, he would try to do something about it.
Whether his discussion of dirty air actually won any support among
the voters Roth could not be certain. In fact, it was difficult for him
to determine whether his own expression of concern about dirty air
corresponded to any widespread citizen interest in the problem. The
city administration had provided no special forum for the expression
of residents' complaints. Like East Chicago, Gary had a Board of
PubUc Works and Safety, but its members did not see it as one of
their regular responsibilities to hear citizen grievances. If Gary resi-
dents did wish to complain about dirty air prior to 1959, therefore,
it would have been relatively difficult for them to make their com-
plaints public. Their dissatisfaction with local air quality would not
have been easily detected by many of Gary's civic leaders and public
officials. Unlike Loyd Cohen, therefore, Roth launched his anti-
pollution campaign without visible and repeated assurances that local
residents were seriously concerned about dirty air.
In 1956 Roth took the first step toward fulfilling his campaign
promise to do something about air pollution. He wrote a letter to U.S.
Steel. In it, he noted that he was concerned about Gary's dirty air
problem, and he inquired what the company planned to do about air
pollution. A prompt and polite reply came back in which a company
representative told him that U.S. Steel recognized the need to do
something about air pollution and was trying to devise methods and
equipment for reducing the emission of pollutants from steel mills.
A U.S. Steel official soon paid a personal visit to Roth's law office.
He was Granville Howell, an assistant to the company's executive
vice-president for operations. Howell was in charge of U.S. Steel's
activities in matters of air and water pollution control. A former
resident of Gary, he already knew the Roth family, and members of
his own family still lived in the city. Howell's sister, in fact, was the
friend who originally suggested that Roth should make a campaign
issue of the air pollution problem.
Howell's visit was both a social and an official call. As a representa-
tive of his company, he reaffirmed its recognition that the air pollution
problem merited serious attention. U.S. Steel, he said, would be w i l l ~
ing to cooperate in any "reasonable" program of pollution control
that the city of Gary tnight choose to adopt. The alternative to co-
operation with local authorities, he said, might be strict federal
regulation, something that the company would like to avoid. Roth
need not be concerned, therefore, that U.S. Steel would actively
oppose his pollution control proposals. Of course, the company's
cooperation would not bring an immediate solution to local dirty air
problems. Pollution control would be an expensive and technically
difficult enterprise, and the company's contribution to any pollution
abatement drive would therefore have to be "programmed"-spread
out over a number of years. Just how many years Howell did not
say, but in a public statement made some time after his conversation
with Roth, he indicated that about twenty-five years would be suffi-
cient for achieving full pollution control at his company's Gary mill.
22
Finally, Howell told Roth that U.S. Steel could not be expected to
take the initiative in Gary's pollution control campaign. The company
would have to be prodded into activity. Once Gary had its pollution
control ordinance, U.S. Steel would willingly cooperate with city
officials, but until then Roth could expect no active assistance from
the corporation.
In several respects, Howell's remarks were a remarkably faithful
restatement of the policies that had guided U.S. Steel during the
regime of Judge Elbert Gary. The Judge, hoping to avoid federal
antitrust proceedings against his corporation, had consistently at-
tempted to convince both the public and the government that U.S.
Steel was one of the "good trusts." It was good, said Gary, because
its managers had good intentions. They had no disposition to behave
like monopolists. Though they had plentiful opportunities for corpo-
rate expansion and the resources to exploit them, they would, the
Judge promised, exercise self-restraint. If federal authorities never-
theless saw fit to impose restrictions upon the corporation's activities,
U.S. Steel's managers would make no attempt to resist the will of the
government. The company was a potential tyrant which had chosen
22 Gary Post-Tribulle, 28 September 1962.
not to exercise its capacity for domination. By Gary's account, it
was a benign, pliable, and passive giant.'3 This was the gist of the
message that Granville Howell later brought to Milton Roth.
The policy of corporate quietism was not new to Gary. Even as
U.s. Steel executives were giving the city its name, its streets, and its
first buildings, they were determined not to become the barons of a
company town. The unpleasant experiences of the Pullman Company
at its community in Illinois had convinced U.S. Steel that it was in-
advisable to take an active role in the direction of local affairs. An
attempt to manage the public business of Gary might bring trouble
to a corporation that was doing its best to avoid both trouble and the
public attention that was sure to follow it. 24 Long after the era of
Judge Gary, U.S. Steel remained faithful to the principle of non-
interference in local politics. In 1963, when the civil rights issue
boiled up in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S. Steel, the city's largest em-
ployer, was urged to use its enormous economic power to achieve a
rapprochement between the races. Roger Blough, the corporation
president, announced that U.S. Steel would not intervene in the
affairs of Birmingham. The notion that a company should "attempt
to have its own ideas of what is right for the community enforced
upon that community by some sort of economic means" was, he
said, "repugnant" to him and to the other officers of the corporation.
25
Once again, U.S. Steel elected to take a passive role in community
politics.
Assured that the company would adhere to a similar policy in
matters of air pollution control, Milton Roth proceeded with his
attempt to launch an anti-pollution campaign in Gary. In late March
1956 he announced publicly that he would soon be taking preliminary
steps to promote municipal action on the dirty air problem. On the
same day that Roth issued his statement, Roger Blough happened to
,
be paying a routine visit to the Gary mill. At a press conference a
local reporter asked him what U.S. Steel planmid to do about the
city's air pollution problem. Blough answered that the company in-
tended to apply the lessons that had been learned from Pittsburgh's
successful smoke abatement program to the solution of Gary's pol-
lution problem. The Pittsburgh findings, he said, showed that the
23 Ida Tarbell, The Life of Elbert H. Gary, pp. 124, 137, 212; Gertrude Schroeder,
The Growth of Major Steel Compallies, pp. 44-45.
24 Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, History of Urball America, pp.
275-77.
25 U.S. News alld World Report, 11 November 1963.
city's "main troubles stemmed, not from the mills, but from coal-
fired home furnaces."26
Blough's comments underlined those of Granville Howell. If home
furnaces, and not steel industry operations, were the chief sources of
air pollution, then there was no need for the steel industry to take the
initiative in cleaning the atmosphere. Responsibility for battling air
pollution lay primarily with local homeowners. The "Pittsburgh find-
ings" appeared to justify the steel industry's unwillingness to take the
lead in anti-pollution efforts. In short, U.S. Steel seemed to be con-
ducting itself much as Granville Howell had SaId it would.
The effect of Blough's statement was to raise some doubts con-
cerning the nature of Gary's air pollution problem. Roth's original
inquiry to U.S. Steel had assumed that the major source of local
pollution was the company mill. Blough suggested that the problem
originated elsewhere. Roth's first proposal concerning the dirty air
problem was therefore designed to resolve this difference of opinion.
He recommended that the city of Gary should commission a study
of local pollution in order to determine its sources and severity.
Before formally submitting his proposal, Roth discussed it with Mayor
Mandich. The Mayor, Roth recalls, was not opposed to an air pollu-
tion study, but he was not enthusiastic about it. He observed that
pollution control might be a "nice idea," but he added that as long
as he saw smoke issuing from the stacks at the steel mill, he knew
that Gary was prosperous. Roth left the conference with the im-
pression that, like U.S. Steel, the city administration would not
obstruct his activities on behalf of pollution control.
Roth had already selected a research organization to conduct the
pollution survey. From a friend he learned that the Armour Research
Institute, an affiliate of the Illinois Institute of Technology, was ex-
perienced in such studies and might be willing to undertake the
investigation. After his conversation with Mayor Mandich, Roth con-
tacted the Armour Institute in Chicago, explained to Institute officials
what it was that he wanted, and received a promise of cooperation.
The cost of a Gary survey, he was told, would be about ten thousand
dollars, and it would take from nine to eighteen months. The Institute
would submit a formal research proposal to Mayor Mandich as soon
as possible. Once the Mayor approved the prospectus and the City
Council appropriated funds for the survey, work would begin. It.was
26 Gary Post-Tribulle, 25 March 1956.
agreed that during the course of the study a special committee of
Gary citizens would represent the city in dealings with the Institute.
Roth informed Mayor Mandich of his progress, and in midsummer
the Institute sent its proposal to Gary. By mid-October the Mayor had
still not responded. Roth wrote to the Armour officials explaining
that the Mayor had been preoccupied with the enactment of legisla-
tion creating municipal parking lots but would soon be free to make
his decision. A month later Mandich announced the proposal and
informed citizens of the forthcoming study. He claimed no part in
arranging for the survey: all the credit, he said, belonged to Milton
Roth.
27
Perhaps the Mayor's statement was simply an act of political
generosity to a sometime enemy, but one possible consequence of his
magnanimity, unnoticed at the time, was to disassociate himself and
his administration from the study and from the anti-pollution effort
that it represented. By giving all credit for the pollution study to
Milton Roth, the Mayor avoided taking a public position on the air
pollution issue.
Less than a week after securing the Mayor's acquiescence, Roth
attempted to extract the ten thousand dollars for the study from the
City Council. When he introduced a resolution that would provide
the necessary money, it was defeated. The rejection of the resolution,
the Council president explained, did not signify that the Council was
opposed to the conduct of an air pollution study. The problem, he
said, was that Roth had submitted his resolution verbally, and "in a
matter of such import" the Council felt that legislation ought to be
introduced in writing.
2s
But Roth has a different explanation for llis
initial defeat: "Whatever originated with me had a good chance of
not winning." He came to the next Council meeting armed with a
written version of his resolution. It was approved without a dissenting
vote, but almost two months passed before work began on the pol-
lution survey. Mayor Mandich, said the Gary Post-Tribune, wal
responsible for this interval of inactivity. He had been slow appoiriting
a committee to act on the city's behalf in dealing with the Armour
Institute.
29
Once the town's representatives had been selected, the
Armour investigators began their work almost immediately. Dustfall
collectors were installed at six locations around the city. From the
roof ui the Hotel Gary, an Armour staff member made smoke sight-
ings and measurements of wind velocity and direction. Together with
27 Ibid., 15 November 1956.
2S Ibid., 21 November 1956.
29 Ibid., 5 February 1957.
I
I
I
=
the smoke, wind, and dustfall findings, information from a land use
survey of the town helped the investigators to determine the sources
of local air pollution. After eighteen months of study, the necessary
data had been collected, and the Institute submitted its final report
to the Mayor.
The survey's most notable finding was that "only about half" of the
airborne dust and smoke in Gary originated at U.S. Steel's mill. The
estimate was founded upon four pieces of evidence: (1) only
northerly winds carried mill smoke over the city, and northerly winds
blew only about half the time; (2) at low wind velocities, mill smoke
did not reach groundlevel-it rose above the city and dispersed;
(3) even with high-velocity, northerly winds, mill smoke seldom
covered more than a quarter of the city; and (4) non-industrial
polluters-home furnaces, automobiles, and incinerators-had been
observed to produce a lasting haze over parts of the city. The report
did not reveal the reasoning which led the investigators from these
items of evidence to their conclusions about U.S. Steel's contribution
to local dirty air, but it spared no detail in its recommendations for
the solution of that problem. It even suggested how much the city
ought to pay a pollution control officer and what should be spent to
equip him.30
The pollution control program outlined for Gary was, in some
quite similar to the one already adopted in East Chicago.
The maximum emission standards suggested were almost identical
to the ones in East Chicago's pollution ordinance. But there were
also some notable differences. The Armour proposal suggested special
exemptions from the pollution standards for certain kinds of industrial
equipment. The exemptions included some which Loyd Cohen had
been unwilling to grant and others that East Chicago industrialists
had not even requested. Almost all of the exceptions recommended
in the Armour report were intended to ease the impact of pollution
restrictions upon "metallurgical processes." The investigators noted
that it might be difficult or impossible for some of these processes to
meet the recommended standards, though future technological de,-
velopments might improve their performance. To demand immediate
compliance with all pollution requirements
can cause more harm than benefit. On the other hand, to lower all
standards to the level attainable by this industry is also unrealistic.
It would waste the capacity for improvement of a considerable sector
of Gary industry and citizens. Thus, it is suggested that for a period
30 Armour Research Institute, "Air Pollution Survey of Gary, Indiana."
of about 10 years the following existing metallurgical processes be
exempted from the suggested provisions: open hearth furnaces, blast
furnaces, Bessemer furnaces, ferrous foundries, driers, kilns, and
roasters.
31
In other words, U.S. Steel was to be virtually immune from regulation
for a decade, but Gary's smaller industries and homeowners were to
abide by the dirty air regulations. Like Cohen's program, the Armour
proposal provided for an advisory committee to oversee the activities
of the local pollution control officer, but while Cohen had taken care
to exclude industry representatives from the advisory board, the
Armour Institute wanted to assure that the members of the board
were people v.:ho might "enjoy the confidence" of both "the public
and indust.ry." 32
Some Gary residents, among them a few members of the special
committee appointed by Mayor Mandich, were not entirely convinced
by the Armour report or satisfied with its recommendations. Some
found it difficult to believe that U.S. Steel contributed "only about
half" of the pollutants in Gary's air. The unscientific evidence of sight
and smell seemed to support a higher estimate. An examination of
the Armour recommendations convinced at least one observer that
the Institute "had the interests of U.S. Steel closer to its heart than
the interests of Gary." Such skepticism toward the Institute's work
was expressed in other cities as well. While the Armour investigators
were completing their survey in Gary, the Institute and its parent
institution, the illinois Institute of Technology, were helping to draft
an air pollution ordinance for Chicago. Critics of. the Chicago law
subsequently charged that the investigators were excessively con-
cerned about the welfare of local industries:
The city's pollution control ordinance was drafted by. scientists at
the illinois Institute of Technology. IIT is a school that IS sUPI?0rted 1
heavily by major industries with research grants-the steel, oil and
chemical industries in particular. .
It is not surprising, therefore, that IIT produced a document .that
was not only friendly to industry but left loopholes that permItted
industries to delay air pollution control expenditures for many years.
33
In Gary, as in Chicago, a few citizens believed that their town had
31 Ibid., p. 27.
32 Gary Post-Triblille, 50ctober 1958.
33 Jay McMullen, "We Get the Big Runaround on Air Pollution Control," Chicago
SIIII-Tililes, 1 January 1968.
been made the victim of an academic-industrial complex. But other
less sinister explanations might account for the Armour Institute's
solicitous handling of possible industrial objections to air pollution
control. Its responsiveness to the presumed interests of industry need
not have been prompted by its own interest in lucrative grants and
research contracts. The Institute investigators may have perceived
that no pollution control program could be enacted in Gary without
the acquiescence of local manufacturers, particularly U.S. Steel, and
may have drawn up their recommendations with an eye to securing
this acquiescence.
Whatever the explanation, it is clear that the Institute was far less
firm with local industries than Loyd Cohen had been, and it is fairly
certain that the Armour investigators underestimated U.S. Steel's
share in the dirty air problem. More recent studies indicate that the
steel industry's contribution to community air pollution is enormous
relative to the contributions of home furnaces, automobiles, and
refuse disposal. On an average winter day in a northern city, 35,500
coal-burning home furnaces--certainly many more than Gary had
in 1958-release only about as much particulate matter as a battery
of thirteen open hearth furnaces. (At its plant in Gary U.S. Steel had
fifty-five open hearth furnaces). A quarter of a million homeowners
_ burning rubbish in open fires would generate only slightly more
particulate matter than four blast furnaces with rudimentary pollution
control equipment. (U.S. Steel had twelve blast furnaces at its Gary
works.)34
In spite of local reservations about the Armour report, Roth
solicited the Institute's assistance during the next stage of his anti-
pollution campaign. In February 1959, about three months after the
completion of the pollution survey, he announced that he was
attempting to draft a pollution control ordinance for Gary. The law
was "highly technical and difficult to write," and it might be some
time before he would have a final draft ready for submission to the
City Council. 35 Roth relied on Pittsburgh's pollution ordinance as a
legislative model and on the experts at the Armour Institute for
technical advice. For political and moral support, there was the
League of Women Voters, which had formed an air pollution study
34 Schuenemann Air PoUlI/ioll Aspects of the Iroll alld Steel Illdustry, pp. 80-81;
American Iron and Steel Institute, Directory of Iroll alld Steel Works ill the Uilited
States alld Callada, pp. 169-70.
35 Quoted in Gary Post-Tribulle, 5 February 1959.
,
i
:
committee not long after the completion of the Armour survey.
By letter and telephone, the ladies of. the League. urged . Mayor
Mandich and members of the City Council to take actIOn agamst the
local dirty air problem, but their efforts had no noticeable effect.
When Roth finally submitted his ordinance to the Council shortly
before the 1959 elections, it was referred to a committee from which
it never again emerged. Roth himself fared no better at the hands
of the voters, and the elections ended his career as a member of the
City Council.
Raising the Issue: A Second Attempt
For more than a year Gary's air seems to have been the object of
no action save that of inhaling and exhaling, but early in 1961 one
local resident attempted to take up the job that Roth had left un-
finished. Albert Gavit, Jr., chairman of the Civic Improvement
Committee of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, suggested to his
fellow Jaycees that their organization ought to select the dirty air
problem as the target for one of its community service projects. The
suggestion was accepted, and Gavit himself led the subsequent effort
to organize public support for dirty air legislation.
Gavit was a young attorney newly launched on his career and, like
Roth was a man in search of an issue. Roth had been looking for
that would enliven his campaign for public office and per-
haps improve his chances for success. Gavit was a candidate for no
office, but he needed a political issue in order to gain recognition from
Gary's established civic activists. Because he was young and had been
educated away from home at a military school, Gavit was not well
known to the business and professional men who had grown up in
Gary, men who now presided over the town's civic and fraternal
organizations and sat on its citizens' committees. Likt; Roth, he was
a political outsider. By "sponsoring" an issue, Gavit believe.d. that
he might establish a reputation as a willing and capable partiCipant
in civic affairs. He selected air pollution as the vehicle for his entry
into public life because he had a serious personal interest in it. He
and other members of his family had suffered from severe respiratory
disorders, and he thought that polluted air might have been responsi-
ble for producing these illnesses.
Gavit began his anti-pollution campaign quietly. He wrote to the
Armour Institute and asked whether any effort had been made to
p
incorporate the recommendations of the Gary pollution study in a
draft air pollution ordinance. The Institute answered that it was not
permitted to release such information to private citizens and sug-
gested that he direct his inquiry to the city administration. Gavit also
wrote to U.S. Steel, inquiring whether the company intended to take
any action on the local pollution problem. Once again, Granville
Howell was dispatched to Gary. His conversation with Gavit was
nearly identical to his talk five years earlier with Milton Roth. He
assured Gavit that his corporation was concerned about dirty air and
would welcome any "reasonable" attempt by the city to cope with
the pollution problem, but no U.S. Steel assistance would be forth-
coming in setting up or putting into force a pollution program.
Having made no progress with U.S. Steel or the Armour Institute,
Gavit next sought to confront the city administration with some
evidence of widespread public support for the enactment of an air
pollution ordinance. With the assistance of the League of Women
Voters, he circulated a petition among civic organizations and service
clubs. It asked the Mayor to justify the expenditure of public funds
on the Armour study by sponsoring municipal legislation that would
embody some of the Armour recommendations. Organizational en-
dorsements of the petition were plentiful, but there were some sig-
nificant omissions from the list of signers, the most notable of which
was the Gary Chamber of Commerce, whose officers declined to
endorse the petition.
Supported by this uncertain mandate, Gavit demanded that Mayor
George Chacharis take at least some steps toward the drafting of an
air pollution ordinance. The Mayor responded by announcing that
he had just requested the Armour Institute to draw up a dirty air law
for Gary. The legislation, he said, would be ready in just two weeks.
36
Six months later there was still no word on the ordinance, and Gavit
inquired what had become of the Armour Institute's recommenda-
tions. Mayor Chacharis replied that he was "pressing" the Institute
for a piece of legislation and added that he expected to have a draft
ordinance in about a week. City Hall observers remained pessimistic.
According to the Gary Post-Tribune, they were convinced that Gavit's
anti-pollution effort had exposed a lack of public interest in the
problem.
3
'
36 Ibid., 3 March 1961.
3. Ibid., 22 September 1961.
It was more than a year before. Mayor Chacharis had another
public statement to make concerning Gary's forthcoming pollution
ordinance. This mayoral announcement was prompted not by. Gavit
but by the Indiana state legislature. In 1961 the legislature enacted
a bill which empowered state officials to initiate legal proceedings
against any municipality that failed to take appropriate action against
a local air pollution problem. The law was to become effective on
January 1, 1963. In September 1962 a conference was held at Pur-
due University at which local officials and pollution experts discussed
the new state program. Granville Howell was the keynote speaker.
His company's major reservation concerning the Indiana law,he said,
was that "it does not wish to install the vastly expensive pollution
control machinery in its sprawling Gary complex all at the same time."
Howell estimated that about twenty-five years would be sufficient
time for his corporation to solve its pollution problems. He added
that "community air pollution problems are individual in nature-
each differing from another. He said that local interests 'should be
given a chance to reach a solution without outside interference."38
A few weeks later Mayor Chacharis appeared to endorse Howell's
statement when he noted, in a newspaper interview, that pollution
conditions in Gary were complex and required long study. He did not
feel that "the city should be rushed into action that might. prove
unwise." Gary's pollution problem presented difficulties that other
cities did not face. To the Mayor, the most important of these
difficulties was one that "revolves around the fact that U.S. Steel
plants here, which are major contributors to the city's economy, are
also major contributors to its air pollution." Chacharis said that he
"would not want to damage the steel company by imposing a too-
stringent pollution ordinance." According to the Mayor, the city
administration would shortly produce a pollution law that was ap-
propriate to Gary's special circumstances.
39
'
It is difficult to determine exactly what actions city officials' had
been taking with respect to the air pollution problem .. People who
would presumably have been involved in Chacharis' announced efforts
to draft a dirty air ordinance-staff members at the Armour Institute
and some city employees-were either not available for interviews or
could not recall any attempt made by the Chacharis administration
to draw up an air pollution law. A few suggested that there really
38 Quoted in ibid., 28 September 1962.
had been no such attempt. Mayor Chacharis did not have the chance
to substantiate his assertion by producing a draft ordinance. In the
fall of 1962 he was indicted for failing to pay federal income taxes
on $250,000 in kickbacks from contractors doing business with the
city. He resigned from office, and before the winter was over, the
founder of the Club Sar was on his way to a federal penitentiary in
Michigan.
Raising the Issue: A Successful Attempt
The Mayor's departure left the city government and the local
organization in temporary disarray. A new mayor, John
Vlsclosky, moved up from his post as city comptroller. He was soon
a?proached by Chris Angelidis, a sanitary engineer employed in the
C.1ty Hea!th Department, who asked permission to write an air pollu-
tIOn ordInance for Gary. Visclosky gave his blessing to the project
and Angelidis rapidly put together the draft. He was well prepared
for the job. Before joining the Health Department, Angelidis had
been employed by the Inland Steel Company at its East Chicago mill
where he specialized. in the management of waste control and
posal processes, including air pollution control. He drew on this ex-
?erience and on the pollution ordinances of Pittsburgh and Chicag0
40
In preparing his legislation. The recommendations of the Armour
study played only a small part in the draft ordinance, the advice of
U.S. Steel officials almost none at all. Angelidis did not reject the
of industry representatives; they did not have any
recommendatIOns to make. On those few occasions when he dis-
cussed the air pollution legislation with U.S. Steel officials, Angelidis
found them "lethargic," disinclined to advance any suggestions for
the revision of his draft. According to Angelidis, they seemed content
to let him write the ordinance as he saw fit.
The ordinance that he saw fit to write, however, was in large meas-
ure tailored to the interests of U.S. Steel. The reticence of tlte indus-
trial executives concerning their company's policy preferences did not
prevent .Angelidis .from estimating what those preferences might be
and taking them Into account. U.S. Steel therefore influenced the
content of the pollution ordinance without taking any action on it,
and thus defied the pluralist dictum that political power belongs to
4.0 The Chicago ordinance on which AngeJidis relied was not the one that the East
Chicago Chamber of Commerce had urged Loyd Cohen to adopt.
political actors. Though the company did not act, Angelidis con-
sciously adapted his anti-pollution proposal so that it would not
offend the interests of U.S. Steel. Perhaps the "lethargy" of the
corporation managers was an indication that Angelidis had correctly
anticipated their objections and had managed to sidestep potential
areas of conflict. The draft ordinance that resulted from Angelidis'
cautious strategy was weaker, he says, than the one he would have
liked to write, but he believed that, faced with stringent pollution
regulations, U.S. Steel's passive acquiescence might change to stub-
born resistance or even active opposition. The dangers of corporate
intractability, he believed, would be greatest when the time came for
enforcement. After the law had been approved and had passed into
the hands of municipal administrators, he thought, the company's
ability to resist regulation would increase, while the interest of the
citizens, momentarily aroused by events surrounding the enactment
of the ordinance, would die down. Gary's pollution control officer
would then find himself virtually alone in his attempt to influence
the actions of a giant corporationY If U.S. Stee1.chose to ignore his
directives, he would not be likely to subdue the corporation with
threats and punishments. The most serious sanction at his disposal,
shutting down industrial installations that refused to comply with
anti-pollution directives, could hardly be used against Gary's largest
employer. If his attempts to reduce steel industry pollution were thus
frustrated, it would also be difficult to make progress against pol-
lutants from home furnaces and inctnerators. Residents would not
readily comply with dirty air regulations if they knew that U.S. Steel
continued to foul the air uninhibited by them. The dirty air program,
thought Angelidis, would then be worthless. Once Gary had an anti-
pollution program, he hoped, it might be possible to strengthen the
dirty air regulations. Several provisions of his ordinance allowed for
a gradual stiffening of pollution restrictions, and there was a l w a ~ s
the possibility that, after enactment, the regulations might be made
more rigorous by amendments. Subsequent events showed that
Angelidis' hope for a strengthened pollution program was well
founded, but he perceived no hope for initiating such a program in
1962. The choice, as he saw it, was between timid regulation and no
regulation at all.
41 Angelidis' fears are confirmed by several studies of government regulation of
business: see, for example, Marver Bernstein, Regulating Business by Independent
Commission.
The ordinance that Angelidis drafted was, therefore, less ambitious,
in certain important respects, than the one that had been enacted in
East Chicago almost thirteen years earlier. Much existing industrial
equipment was, for all practical purposes, excluded from the scope
of the regulatory program. Open hearth furnaces, Bessemer con-
verters, sintering plants,42 and electric furnaces currently in operating
condition were all immune from the maximum emission limits. The
ordinance required only that the operation of these existing pieces
of equipment be "consistent with normal good operating practice."
Bessemer converters and sintering plants that were installed after the
enactment of the law were to continue to operate under this lenient
standard.
The ordinance was not so lenient where other sorts of steelmaking
equipment were concerned, however. Special restrictions upon the
emission of particulates from blast furnaces .and newly constructed
open hearths were more demanding than the emission standards that
East Chicago had adopted, and Angelidis recommended a smoke
restriction for coke ovens that was somewhat more rigorous than the
East Chicago smoke regulation. The general smoke and particulate
standards that Angelidis wrote into his ordinance were also a bit
more restrictive than the East Chicago regulations.
43
Angelidis felt that he could afford to tax the agreeability of the
steel industry with these special demands because they had been
made before-and accepted. In 1960 Allegheny County, Pennsyl-
vania, passed a pollution law that covered the Pittsburgh area, where
U.S. Steel maintained a number of industrial installations, and it was
the company's acquiescence in this legislation that now emboldened
Angelidis. The provisions of his ordinance that would impose restric-
tions upon blast furnaces and new open hearths were copied almost
word for word from the Allegheny County law. What the company
had agreed to accept in Pittsburgh, it could hardly reject in Gary.
Perhaps it was Angelidis' reliance upon the Allegheny County pollu-
tion law that disarmed the steel company. This, at least, would be
one way to account for the fact that U.S. Steel registered no audible
objection to any of the pollution restrictions while the Gary ordinance
42 Sintering plants are enclosed conveyor belts on which iron ore is heated before
it goes to a blast furnace. The purpose of sintering is to fuse sman pieces of ore and
ore dust into larger chunks that are suitable for heating in blast furnaces.
43 The East Chicago ordinance prohibited particulate emissions greater than 0.85
pounds per thousand pounds of gas released int!) the atmosphere. The Gary standard
was 0.65 pounds.
was being drafted or afterward, when it was before the City Council.
Other factors may also have helped to restrain the company, how-
ever. There was the new Indiana state pollution law scheduled to go
into effect at the beginning of 1963, with its provision for state inter-
vention in the handling of local pollution problems. U.S. Steel may
have seen the Angelidis ordinance as a welcome instrument for fend-
ing off state officials. There was also a U.S. Public Health Servjce
study, released just a little more than two weeks before the draft
ordinance was presented to the City Council, which reported that
Gary's air was more heavily burdened with suspended
than any of the other fifty-nine urban atmospheres tested. The find-
ing provoked a mild outburst of journalistic consternation on the
editorial page of the Gary Post-Tribune,44 and perhaps this mani-
festation of public concern about dirty air helped to convince U.S.
Steel that, for the present, it ought to remain silent on the matter of
air pollution, so as to avoid adding to the. political salience of the
issue.
The appearance of the Public Health Service report may also have
sharpened the steel executives' apprehension concerning the possi-
bility of federal participation in the attack on local air pollution. Even
as Gary's political leaders were deliberating over the Angelidis ordi-
nance, other political leaders at the National Air Pollution Conference
in Washington and within the Kennedy administration were discuss-
ing the possibility of a significant federal role in the enforcement of
pollution regulations}5 Here again was a threat of "outside inter-
ference" that could deprive "local interests" of the chance to achieve
a solution to local air pollution problems. Outside interference could
also deprive some local interests of much of their influence. It is
likely, for example, that the power of U.S. Steel would be somewhat
diluted if the local air pollution issue were to become a state political
issue, and it would be diluted still further if the debate were trans-
ferred to the national political arena. U.S. Steel preferred to settle the
matter at the local level, as Granville Howell made clear. An officer
of the local Chamber of Commerce stated the preference for local
decisionmaking more bluntly than Howell. Industry wanted the
control program to be housed within the Gary city govern-
ment, he said, "because that's where we can get at it." It was there-
fore important for U.S. Steel to control the scope of the dirty air
44 Gary Post-Tribune, 15 December 1962.
45 See James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy; The EisenhoweL Kennedy, and
Johnson Years, pp. 351-55.
7
debate, to keep it within the limits of the local political system.
46
The company's reticence on this subject may have been one way to
minimize conflict over air pollution and so keep the issue within
bounds.
Gary adopted its own local solution to the dirty air problem with
uncharacteristic haste. Late in December 1962 the Angelidis.ordi":
nance came before the City Council. Its arrival produced no debate.
No amendments were offered. It was approved almost immediately-
just three days before the Indiana state pollution law was to become
effective. Because of the Council's quick work, Gary's pollution prob-
lem remained a local issue, at least for the time being.
The Aftermath: Negotiations
Gary's pollution law did not become effective until more than a
year after its passage. The ordinance itself did not require this delay,
but Gary's municipal administrators believed that some period of
grace was needed in which local homeowners and businessmen might
prepare for the enforcement of the pollution law. Chris Angelidis, who
had been appointed chief of the new Air Pollution Division within
the city Health Department, spent the interval conducting an air
sampling program, organizing and staffing his agency, and helping to
negotiate agreements between the city government and some of Gary's
leading polluters.
These agreements established time schedules for "programmed"
obedience to the pollution law. The ordinance authorized Angelidis
to permit piecemeal compliance with the pollution requirements in
cases where special control equipment had to be installed or where
extensive modification of machinery was required to bring a pollution-
producing installation up to the standards. For their own part, the
polluters were required to give Angelidis satisfactory guarantees that
they would take the necessary steps to obey the law within a
"reasonable" period of time. The details of these guarantees were
the subjects of the negotiations between representatives of the city
administration and the operators of pollution-producing installations.
Almost all of the polluters who were involved in these discussions
were industrial firms, and the most important of these was, naturally,
U.S. Steel.
U.S. Steel was among the first of the manufacturing concerns to
46 On the importance of controlling the scope of conflict, see Schattschneider,
The Semisovereign People, pp. 2-3.
enter into negotIatIOns with the members of Gary's Air PollutiO!!.
Control Advisory Board, who were serving as representatives of the
city administration, but the company was one of the last local
industries to conclude a compliance agreement with the municipal
government. The prolonged confrontation between the city and the
company was the occasion for the first open breach between U.S. Steel
and Gary residents on the matter of dirty air.
Long before the negotiations began, some prominent Gary residents
seem to have been impatient for a showdown with the steel company.
In August 1963 a columnist for the Post-Tribune urged U.S. Steel
to "stop killing time" in the matter of pollution control, and a month
later the newspaper took up the same cry again in one of its regular
editorials. In November 1963, when steel company executives held a
preliminary meeting with the Pollution Advisory Board, they were
exposed to somewhat more subtle pressures. Chris Angelidis chose
the day of the conference to release some results of his air sampling
survey, which showed that U.S. Steel was responsible for at least
70 per cent of the particulate matter that floated above the town. On
the same day Martin Katz, the new mayor, warned that if Ga...-y's
pollution problems could not be solved locally, they might have to
be turned over to state or federal authorities. U.S. Steel agreed to
submit a detailed compliance schedule by March 1, 1965.
47
As the deadline approached, public impatience seems to have in-
creased. In editorials the Gary Post-Tribune repeated the Mayor's
warning that state or federal action might result from the city's
failure to deal effectively with the dirty air problem. A city council-
man complained that the town's dirty air program was pointless so
long as U.S. Steel remained beyond the reach of municipal pollution
control efforts. A local branch of the Steelworkers' Union announced
that it would "marshal its full resources against the U.S. Steel Cor-
poration" in the struggle to clean Gary's air, and its pledge was soon
seconded by another union local. 48
U.S. Steel presented its compliance proposal two weeks early, and
local criticism of the company subsided, but only until mid-March,
when the Pollution Advisory Board announced that it was not satis-
fied with the proposal. The reason for the decision was not the
substance of the U.S. Steel compliance program. The Board was
content with the eight-year schedule presented by the company. But
17 G ~ r y Post-Tribune, 26 August, 22 September, 6 November 1963.
48 Ibid., 12 November 1964, 20, 24, 27 January 1965.
in
the U.S. Steel proposal included a provision that some Board mem-
bers regarded as an "escape clause." It allowed the mill to halt its
pollution control program if the Board of Directors of the company
refused to appropriate funds for carrying out the control measures.
Bargaining continued for another six weeks, but the negotiations
finally broke down early in May. Later in the month, Mayor Katz
formally announced the city's rejection of the U.S. Steel compliance
plan. He attacked the company's Board of Directors, whom he held
responsible for the escape clause, for their "callous, indifferent atti-
tude for people living and working in this area." He threatened grand
jury action against the steel company and once again raised the
possibility of federal intervention. Katz reserved his expressions of
animosity for the headquarters officials of U.S. Steel. The local execu-
tives of the company, he said, were "sympathetic and understanding
of the problem, but their hands have been tied by the distant atti-
tudes ... displayed by the directors." Two weeks later, the com-
pany-both directors and local officials-agreed to accept a modified
escape clause that would permit a moratorium in the pollution control
efforts in the event of natural catastrophe, national emergence, strikes,
or economic depression.
49
"
Epilogue
By the end of 1966, Chris Angelidis could report that the average
suspended particulate level in Gary had declined by about 16 per cent
since the initiation of local pollution control efforts almost three years
earlier. The program which had presumably achieved this partial
success was about to be abandoned. Angelidis had already begun to
seek the strong pollution control policy that he had not been bold
enough to request when he drafted the dirty air law in 1962. The
new anti-pollution drive was distinguished from the previous effort
by the addition of federal authorities to the ranks of Gary's air pollu-
tion policymakers. The federal government had been engaged in
anti-pollution activities since 1955, when Congress authorized the U.S.
Public Health Service to distribute grants for air pollution research.
The agency's clean air program did not bring it into contact with
Gary officials until the end of 1964. By that time Congress had
widened the scope of Public Health Service air pollution activities in
the Clean Air Act of 1963, empowering the agency to distribute
49 Ibid., 20 May, 4 June 1965.
grants-in-aid to state and local governments to support the develop-
ment and enforcement of pollution control regulations. It was under
the authority granted to it by this law that the Public Health Service
negotiated an agreement with officials of Gary and three other north-
west Indiana cities (East Chicago, Hammond, and Whiting) providing
financial support and technical assistance to a proposed Northwest
Indiana Air Resources Management program. The regional program
was to come into being when each of the four towns enacted an
identical pollution ordinance. The ordinance was to be drafted
jointly by officials of the four municipalities, and representatives of
the Public Health Service would be on hand to assist in its prepara-
tion.
The new anti-pollution effort was also distinguished by the be-
havior of Gary's Chamber of. Commerce. This time it was roused to
action by the call for pollution restrictions. Together with the
Chambers of the other three cities involved, the Gary Chamber
drafted a detailed critique of the newly proposed pollution control
program and entered into negotiations with municipal and federal
pollution officials. In April 1967, after a number of the Chamber
recommendations had been incorporated into the draft ordinance,
Gary and East Chicago, along with the other two cities, enacted the
same dirty air law.
CONCLUSION
Not only did air pollution legislation come slowly to Gary, but the
air pollution issue was slow to develop as well. Political and industrial
leaders in the town seem to have been reluctant to take positions on
the matter of air pollution control, even positions in opposition to
control. Mayor Mandich and Mayor Chacharis both exhibited ,this
reluctance, and so, in their own ways, did the Gary City Council and
the Chamber of Commerce. Most important, Gary's anti-pollution
activists were long unable to get U.S. Steel to take a clear stand. One
of them, looking back on the bleak days of the dirty air debate, cited
the evasiveness of the town's largest industrial corporation as a de-
cisive factor in frustrating early efforts to enact a pollution control
ordinance. The company executives, he said, would just nod sympa-
thetically "and agree that air pollution was terrible, and pat you on
the head. But they never did anything one way or the other. If only
there had been a fight, then something might have been accom-
plished." What U.S. Steel did not do was probably more important to
the career of Gary's air pollution issue than what it did do. Before
the passage of the town's first air pollution law, the company never
brought its weight to bear on the dirty air debate. Its representatives
were seldom visible among Gary's air pollution activists, and when
they did appear, it was not to argue or exert pressure. They an-
nounced, in effect, that the corporation would not interfere with
Gary's effort to initiate an anti-pollution program. It would not resist
the enforcement of pollution regulations, nor would it take a hand in
the drafting of them. The company's position was that it would take
no position. In East Chicago, industrialists reacted quite differently.
The local Chamber of Commerce quickly resolved to take an "active
interest" in the drafting of anti-pollution regulations. Industrial repre-
sentatives were responsible for most of the revisions made in Loyd
Cohen's proposed ordinance, and industrial pressure forced a modifi-
cation in the enforcement of the ordinance once it had been passed.
In East Chicago, it would appear, industry made an active effort to
influence the resolution of the air pollution issue, and the results of
that attempt were easily visible in the political outcome.
If successful political action is the measure of political influence,
then it is obvious that East Chicago's industrialists were more in-
fluential in the air pollution field than were Gary's. But it is also
obvious that there is something inappropriate in this conclusion. It
suggests that corporations which succumbed quickly to pollution
regulations were in fact more powerful in the matter of pollution con-
trol than those which succumbed more slowly. A different and more
sensible assessment might result if we. were willing to recognize that
political action is not the only medium through which political
influence may operate. In fact, it is absolutely essential to take
account of the "inactive" varieties of influence if we are to explain
Gary's uneven movement toward an air pollution ordinance, and to
understand U.S. Steel's part in that movement.
Though steel company executives were rarely active participants
in Gary's dirty air deliberations, the corporation was never really
unrepresented in those discussions. While Chris Angelidis was writing
his air pollution law, the interests and influence of U.S. Steel were
never far from his mind. As a result, the ordinance that he wrote was
weaker than he would have liked. The company was on the mind of
Mayor Chacharis too, when he counseled unhurried action in the
pollution field. He knew that pollution restrictions could impose
significant costs upon the corporation, and he sensed that what was
costly for U.S. Steel might eventually be costly for Gary. Perhaps
apprehensions of this kind also lay behind the Mayor's own hesitancy
to do anything about dirty air. A similar concern for U.S. Steel was
evident in the Armour Institute's recommendations, with their gener-
ous concessions to the special needs of "metallurgical processes."
And the actions of both Albert Gavit and Milton Roth were, by their
own accounts, influenced by the anticipated reaction of the company
to pollution control proposals. Though U.S. Steel never really threw
its weight against the anti-pollution forces, its weight was felt ail the
same. It seems to have put a brake on the progress of the air pollu-
tion debate in Gary. Hesitation, timidity, and delay were the results,
and it is apparent that these results were not unattractive to U.S. Steel.
Granville Howell made the company's inclinations clear when he
predicted that it would probably take twenty-five years to achieve
effective pollution control at the Gary mill.
In spite of its political passivity, U.S. Steel seems to have had the
ability to enforce inaction on the dirty air issue. Apprehension about
the company's reaction to pollution control proposals may even have
been responsible for Gary's late start in the pollution field. Not sur-
prisingly, the apprehensions of Gary's air pollution activists almost
always centered around U.S. Steel's use of its massive economic
power. The company, as Mayor Chacharis pointed out, was the
mainstay of Gary's prosperity. If it chose, it might do considerable
harm to the city's economy. Of course, even U.S. Steel could not
afford to do anything it pleased: no one believed that the company
would respond to the costs of a local pollution control program by
closing down its Gary plant. There were other less drastic actions,
however, that could still bring substantial hardship to Gary. It was
feared that the corporation might seek to minimize the costs of pollu-
tion regulation by diverting production increases or plant expansion
from its Gary mill to other installations subject to more lenient pollu-
tion control regulations. Or, when the company faced the need for
production cutbacks, it might concentrate those reductions at the
Gary works rather than at other mills where dirty air restrictions were
less stringent. It should be noted that one consequence of federally
enforced nationwide pollution standards would be to deprive U.S.
Steel and other corporations of the power derived from their ability
to exercise options of this kind.
't
Apprehension about industry reaction to pollution control seems
to have been less acute in East Chicago than in Gary. In Gary it
was thought that U.S. Steel participation was an essential prerequisite
for the enactment of an effective pollution program. Early efforts to
promote the pollution issue were almost all intended to involve the
company in a discussion of the dirty air problem, and the early
frustrations were largely the result of failure to effect its participation.
In East Chicago the anti-pollution forces seemed willing, if necessary,
to proceed without the benefit of industrial consultation. The differ-
ence WaS apparent from the very beginning of the pollution debate.
When George Applegate returned from his first meeting with Loyd
Cohen, he reported to his Chamber of Commerce associates that the
East Chicago city administration was determined to pass a pollution
ordinance. In his" opinion, at least, a dirty air law would be enacted
whether or not local industry chose to participate in the effort. Apple-
gate's impression of the situation is confirmed by Loyd Cohen, who
claims that he would have continued with his anti-pollution campaign
even if the Chamber of Commerce had refused his invitation to dis-
cuss the provisions of the proposed pollution ordinance. The job, he
acknowledges, would have been more difficult, and he would probably
have written a weaker and more cautious ordinance, but in the end,
East Chicago would still have had its dirty air law.
There were several other signs of a willingness to forego industrial
cooperation in the anti-pollution effort. East Chicago's impatient City
Council members, for instance, seem to have been anxious to curtail
the city-industry negotiations so that they could pass a pollution
ordinance. Loyd Cohen was even fearful that the Council members,
if given the chance, might ignore industrial wishes entirely. Disregard
for industrial goodwill was also evident in the overzealous enforcement
of East Chicago's pollution ordinance once it had passed. In general,
East Chicagoans seem to have perceived industrial participation as
important but not essential to the anti-pollution effort.
There were many reasons for East Chicago residents to be less
apprehensive about the power of local industry than were Gary
residents. The town, unlike Gary, was not' the creation of a single
giant corporation. Its emergence was the unplanned result of plant
location decisions made by a number of small and medium-sized
companies. East Chicago owed its existence to industry, but not to
any particular industrial corporation. Its indebtedness was therefore
unfocused, as was the attention that local decisionmakers gave to
I
,: ,Ii
.'
80 THE UN-POLiTICS OF AIR POLLUTION
industrial firms. In Gary, one corporation was undeniably the pre-
dominant member of the local industrial community-for all practi-
cal purposes, it was the industrial community. In East Chicago there
was no similar focus of attention. The resolution of the dirty air issue,
it was thought, might be affected by anyone of five or six firms. What
is more, it was widely recognized that these companies did not always
act as one. The apparent fractionation of industrial power and opinion
may have emboldened the partisans of pollution control. East
Chicago's economic stability may also have helped. It was clear that
the city had reached an economic saturation poir-t. It could absorb
little, if any, new industrial enterprise. Though the town might still
be vulnerable to production cutbacks, there was little need for East
Chicagoans to fret about lost opportunities for industrial growth.
It is not necessary to enumerate all the factors that may have
diminished the reputation for power of East Chicago industry. The
essential fact, for our purposes, is that pollution activists there seem
to have been less apprehensive about industrial power than were
decisionmakers in Gary. The difference may help to explain :why
Gary moved so late and so slowly against its dirty air problem. U.S.
Steel, though it usually remained outside the circle of visible political
activity, was nevertheless able to affect the course of that activity. In
Gary the reputation for power may have been more effective than its
exercise. It could have enabled U.S. Steel to prevent political action
without taking action itself, and it may have been responsible for the
political retardation of Gary's air pollution issue. To the extent that
it has an identifiable effect on local politics, the reputation for power
is itself a form of power. When adherents of the pluralist alternative
dismiss the mere reputation for power as a scientifically :worthless
datum, they may be dismissing an important part of political reality.
There are other factors that may account for the variation in
political behavior between Gary and East Chicago. Even two towns
as similar and as close geographically as Gary and East Chicago will
differ in a number of important respects. Each of these differences
becomes a potential explanatory factor when the time comes to ac-
count for some intercommunity variation in political behavior. A
glance at the two case studies shows that there are many factors in
addition to the reputation for power of local industry that might have
been singled out to account for the fact that Gary ignored its dirty
air while East Chicago did not: for example, differences between the
two towns in the strength and structures of local party organizations,

differences in the ability of citizens to register complaints about dirty
air, differences in the volume and nature of the political business that
the two towns faced, differences in the political skill and experience
of the people who attempted to promote the air pollution issue in the
two cities, and differences in the parts that state and federal govern-
ment played in the pollution politics of Gary and East Chicago: Any
or all of these variations, as well as some others, could have con-
tributed to the observed differences between the two cities' handling
of the issue.
The problem here is that we cannot find out whether these inter-
community variations actually did contribute to the difference that
we are trying to explain or whether their connection with the differ-
ence in question is merely fortuitous. For example, it is possible that
we may have been misled in our attempt to explain Gary's neglect
of the dirty air issue in terms of the power reputation of local industry.
The decisive factors here may have been the power of the Gary
Democratic Party and its lack of interest in proposals advanced by
political outsiders like Milton Roth or Albert Gavit. It may be that
the reputation of U.S. Steel was just a distracting sidelight; it may be
that industrial influence and political party influence were closely
related. Perhaps U.S. Steel's reputation for power was itself actually
dependent upon the power of the Democratic Party organization or
on the fact that Gary was preoccupied with certain items of political
busip.ess other than air pollution. The remedy for this uncertainty is
an extension of our investigation to cities other than Gary and East
Chicago--cities, for example, that share Gary's strong industrial com-
munity but East Chicago's weak party organization. We need to con-
trol for the effects of some explanatory variables so that we can
isolate the effects of others. Expanding the scope of the investigation
can also help us overcome the idiosyncrasies of Gary and East Chi-
cago politics, so that we can construct a general explanation for the
neglect of the air pollution issue.
The Gary and East Chicago findings are useful as a source of
working hypotheses for this investigation. They suggest the kinds of
factors which may be relevant to the life of the dirty air issue. They
also indicate the kinds of political processes which mediate between
the explanatory factors and the political career of an issue. Finally,
they provide a concrete introduction to pollution politics-the kinds
of people who participate in it and the kinds of policy questions that
it involves. Our next task is to translate these specifics into a more
general portrayal. We must know something about the over-all nature
of the issue in order to make any sensible predictions about its life
chances under political conditions not present in Gary and East
Chicago, as well as to bring some order to the succession of hypotheses
that will be advanced. A modest theoretical framework will therefore
be supplied, within which the factors that affect the emergence of the
issue can be located-a basis for prediction that is simpler and clearer
than the unordered, idiosyncratic political experience of Gary and
East Chicago.
III Air Pollution and the Air Pollution Issue
By comparison with East Chicago's air pollution debate, Gary's
dirty air issue was politically stunted. It matured only after a long
and inhospitable season. But pollution politics in Gary, though ~ l o w
to mature, were not entirely different from pollution politics in East
Chicago. In fact, there were many respects in wIllch Gary's encounter
with the dirty air issue was simply a slow-motion replay of its neigh-
bor's experience.
In both towns the people who promoted the air pollution debate
were political outsiders. They remained more or less detached from
what were probably the principal vehicles of community political
action-the local Democratic Party organizations-and the Party
organizations, for their part, remained more or less detached from the
air pollution debate. Local Chambers of Commerce and industrial
organizations, on the other hand, sooner or later became active par-
ticipants in anti-pollution policymaking for both Gary and East
Chicago. What opposition there was to local pollution control p r o ~
posals came primarily from these business and industrial groups. But
support for the pollution abatement programs was not consolidated
within formal organizations. Albert Gavit's inconclusive attempt to
accomplish such a consolidation only convinced Gary's political
observers that the public was not concerned about the problem. In
general, organized interest groups-neighborhood improvement as-
sociations, for example--were not effectively mobilized to protest the
damage done to buildings, furnishings, or people by dirty air. Almost
all of the "organized" backing for the two anti-pollution campaigns
came from municipal administrators and, to a lesser extent, from local
newspapers. In both towns, city bureaucrats framed the relevant
83
legislative proposals and engineered their passage. Newspapers added
their weight to the dirty air debate by their extensive coverage of the
anti-pollution campaigns. Had it not been for their interest in the
issue, it would have been much more difficult for us to reconstruct
the sequence of events that led to the enactment of pollution ordi-
nances in the two towns.
The air pollution issue, then, seems to have evoked roughly similar
patterns of political activity in Gary and East Chicago. Opposition
was concentrated in
When it was visible, v.:as usually unorganized, diffuse, aJld...Jed ... by
political outsiders or muniCipal bureaucrats. The interest of the local
press probably n::ftected flie--diffiiseness-of the anti-pollution
Of all community organizations, the local newspaper is probably the
institution whose clientele is most amorphous and difficult to identify,
and the newspapers were among the very few community organiza-
tions in Gary and East Chicago who took an active and apparently
positive interest in pollution control.
At least one more item might be added to the list of similarities
between pollution politics in Gary and in East Chicago. In neither
place was the dirty air controversy an especially intense one, though
levels of intensity are difficult to determine. Certainly there was no
head-on clash of organized interest groups, nor were there many
instances of unyielding devotion to a particular proposal or point of
view. Among the opponents of the pollution control programs, for
example, there was almost no one who seriously proposed that local
businessmen and industrialists the passage of any and
all pollution legislation. The support for
pollution control may have helped to maintain this restraint. There
was no organized, concentrated assault upon the interests of local
industrial concerns, and perhaps industry itself exercised restraint
precisely because it did not want to risk activating and unif)1ing the
anti-pollution forces.
There is good reason to expect that we might find a similar pattern
of political activity in the pollution debates of other cities. The con-
. figurations of political decisionmaking, after all, probably have some-
thing to do with the substance of decisionmaking-with the kinds of
issues and policy questions that are involved. When the same issue
arises in a number of different cities, there is likely to be some
resemblance between the various local attempts to resolve that issue.
Similar sets of groups and institutions will participate. In effect, each
'z
AIR POLLUTION AND THE ISSUE 85
political issue may be said to have a typical "constituency," or set of
. constituencies, which is likely to be visible wherever the issue has
made an appearance.
All of this is merely an extension of the pluralist proposition that
political power is tied to political issues. The pluralists have argued.
that, as different local issues rise and subside, they tend to activate
different sets of local decisionmakers. Unfortunately, the pluralists
have never been able to tell us just which decisionmakers tend to be
activated by what issues-not until after the issues have arisen and
the decisionmakers have stepped forward. We know only that the
distribution of
unpredictable way, with changes in the subjects of community political
concern. ---"--"--"-',--, """', ---'- ---'-''',,'---.-.-'' .. --,''-,
'-The predictability of these variations would obviously be increased
if we could show that, when the same issue arises in different cities, it
tends to trigger political activism among similar kinds of people and
organizations-that it has a typical constituency. Tpe composition of
this aboJJUb,e,kindLQf.l20liticai
conditions that can prevent a potential political issue from making)ts
appearance:)ts "constituency may be weak, or a.bsent, or'
ITom some internal imbalance that impairs its ability to promote the
issue in question. The factors that affect the life chances of an issue
will probably be reflected in the life of that issue, the pattern of
political activity that it typically generates.
The evidence from Gary and East Chicago suggests that there may
be such a pattern for the air pollution issue, a "typical" dirty air
constituency. It should not be hard to understand why this is the case.
The uniformities that we have observed in the politics of pollution
probably reflect the fact that there are uniformities in the costs and
benefits that pollution control offers to different communities. Con-
fronted with similar social costs and benefits, different communities
will generate somewhat similar patterns of political activity. A crude
economic analysis of pollution control policy shows why we can
generally expect it to elicit concentrated opposition and diffuse
support.
For economists, dirty air is not just a nuisance or a health hazard:
it represents a flaw in the economic system. In a perfectly functioning
market economy, industries would pay some price for the fumes that
they generate, burners of rubbish would pay a price for their smoke,
and drivers of automobiles would foot the bill for their exhaust. In
the absence of any pollution control regulations, polluters are not
compelled to pay anything for the privilege of using the air as their
dumping ground, and because the air that they use costs them virtually
nothing, they treat it as though it were worthless. Their air resource
costs fall not primarily on them but on the public at large, and the
result is an inefficient allocation of air resources between those who
use the air for waste disposal and those who use it for breathing.
Polluters get more air than they ought to.l
In order to achieve an economically efficient allocation of air re-
sources, it would be necessary to force the p.lllluters to realize ~
the air is not costless-that its sUM is limited and that it has uses
~ a n waste disposal. Most pollution control proposal8acnieve-
this by compelliilg- waste disposers to pay _.5om.e_pl'iGuOL.llSinUhe
gk, either in the form of a fee or a fineJPresumably, polluters would
attempt to avoid these costs, if they were high enough, by substituting
for them the costs of pollution control. While it is difficult to predict
the final economic result of these proposals, it is fairly clear that what
they all seek to achieve is a redistribution of pollution costs from the
public at large to the polluters, from a "diffuse" group to a group
whose membership is probably more limited and, in some of the most
critical cases, certainly better organized. Anti-pollution proposals
would therefore bestow socially diffuse benefits while imposing
socially concentrated costs. The degree of concentration of costs is
most readily apparent in the expenses that pollution abatement pro-
grams can impose upon industrial corporations. For example, in 1962,
an electrostatic precipitator for a small open hearth furnace would
probably have cost a steel manufacturer about $150,000. The furnace
itself might have been worth only $50,000 more than that sum.
3
Faced with the prospect of such sizeable expenses, it is hardly sur-
prising that the steel corporations of Gary and East Chicago event-
ually took an interest in the matter of air pollution control policy, and
that opposition to pollution control proposals in the two cities was
concentrated within business and industrial organizations. By the same
token, it is not surprising that support for the Gary and East Chicago
programs was diffuse and largely unorganized: the prospeetive bene-
fits of pollution control were relatively diffuse. Organizations with
limited and well-defined constituencies were therefore not activated
1 Goldman, Controlling Pol/ution, pp. 10-19.
2 Edwin S. Mills, "Economic Incentives in Air Pollution Control," in ibid., pp.
100-106.
3 Robert L. Chass, "The Status of Engineering Knowledge for the Control of Air
Pollution," p. 217.
t
on behalf of dirty air restrictions. The only organized backing for
pollution abatement came from institutions whose clienteles were
hazy and diffuse--certain local administrative agencies and the press.
In short, the pattern of political activity that emerged in connection
with the anti-pollution proposals appears to have mirrored the antici-
pated distribution of costs and benefits.
The costs and benefits of pollution control are only the most
obvious explanatory factors that might be used to account for the
similarity of pollution politics in Gary and East Chicago. We can add
something to the plausibility of the explanation by establishing that
the. air pollution ~ s s u e tends to arouse the same pattern of politic;_'ll
acttvIty wherever It appears, and that thIS pattern is a distinctive one
Wntcnis not likely to becIUplicated in issue-areas. where the prospec-
tive distribution of costs and benefits is different.
The evidence for this generalization comes from a survey of
organizational officials in fifty-one American cities. Ten officials were
interviewed from each city, and four of the ten-the labor council
president, the editor of the largest newspaper, the president of the
Chamber of Commerce, and the president of the local bar associa-
tion-were each asked a series of questions about community activity
on the air pollution issue and a series of questions on the federal
anti-poverty program. Each series began with a question worded like
this:
It's often said that there are two sides to every issue. But on: some
matters, people may be divided into more than two sides. And in
those few cases where everyone agrees about a subject, there is really
only one side represented. How would you characterize the subject of
air pollution [anti-poverty program] as it has been discussed in
[name of city]? Has only one side been active, two sides, or more
than two?
1. no sides-the subject has never come up
2. one side-everyone agrees
3. two sides
4. more than two sides.
If the official reported that the subject had never come up, he was
not questioned further. Those respondents who reported that the
subject had been discussed (whether or not they reported general
agreement) were next asked to identify the "leading" people and
groups active in community discussions and to describe their positions
on the issue.
These inquiries are clearly less satisfactory instruments for examin-
. local politics than are the case study procedures employed in
other investigations of It has been
ary to as
k short and relatively slITlple questions about complex
necess b' . . t
subjects, and the result has been to some am Igmty m 0
both the questions and the answers. There IS good. reason for un-
certainty about what it means to "take sides" on an and there
may be considerable disagreement concerning the .that place
a local organization among the "leading" groups m an Issue-area.
What is more, the method of inquiry suffers from that
although it was sometimes possible to address the
to those people who participated in making the commumty s
the intention was to select the sample from a .group people ltkely
to be knowledgeable observers of decisionmakmg actiVIty, not neces-
sarily actors in it. . . ..,
The need for extensive information about polttIcal actIVIty m many
different cities makes shortcomings of this kind unavoidable. Of
course these investigative deficiencies oblige us to treat the responses
of ou; informants with caution. The respondents' accounts tell us
only about perceived activity and can be exp.ected to. only a
crude profile of likely decisionmaking tendencIes for CIties m general.
It is assumed that there is a rough correspondence between the per-
ceptions of our respondents, taken as a group, and the facts of com-
munity decisionmaking. .
Some of these collective perceptions are reported m Table Ill-I.
The responses of the informants concerning individual group
activity in the fields of poverty and pollution .put about
sixty-five response categories. From these men-
tioned with some frequency were selected. The nme. are
listed in the table in the order of the frequency they
appeared in the replies to questions about active partICIpants m the
resolution of the dirty air issue.
4
'
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the table is what It mdicates
about the perceived activity of the "general public," a group more
diffuse than any other. The 109 respondents who reported that P?l-
lution control was an issue resorted to this residual category WIth
some frequency in describing its supporters, but it was never men-_
4 "Supporters" were those mentioned as active on the side "m?st
. I " "Opponents" were those mentlone as active
extensive air pollutIOn program.." th "I t extensive" pollution control
on those sides demandmg less extensive or e eas ,
programs.
TABLE III-I: LEADING SUPPORTERS AND OPPONENTS OF AIR POLLUTION CONTROL
AND ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS, AS SEEN BY COMMUNITY LEADERS, 51 AMERICAN
OTIES
Group Supports Supports Opposes Opposes
Air Pollution Anti-Poverty Air Pollution Anti-Poverty'
Control Program Control Program
Industrial corporations and
% % % %
their executives
8.2 1.3 94.7 4.7
Chamber of Commerce 23.8 5.3 15.8 10.4
City and county administra-
tors and their agencies 27.5 23.3 0.0 4.7
Local newspapers
15.5 4.7 2.6 15.1
"General public"
13.8 0.0 2.6 13.2
Labor organizations
4.6 20.0 0.0 2.8
Political parties
2.8 16.7 5.3 21.7
Churches, clergymen, and
church-affiliated organiza-
tions
0.9 27.3 0.0 5.7
Ethnic groups and organiza-
tions (including civil rights
groups)
0.0 42.0 0.0 2.8
(109) (ISO) (38) (106)
Note: Respond.ents were permitted to name as many groups as they pleased, so that
percentages In thiS table do not add to 100. Throughout the tables, numbers in paren-
theses represent numbers of respondents.
tioned by the 150 respondents who reported support for the anti-
poverty program and identified its supporters, which tends to confirm
the earlier suggestion that support for pollution control is relatively
diffuse, like the diffuse benefits likely to arise from it.
The pattern of opposition to pollution control is clearly quite
different. The figures show that more than 90 per cent of the thirty-
eight respondents who perceived opposition to pollution control cited
industry as a leading antagonist. Chambers of Commerce ranked
second, though only distantly, among its enemies. Thus almost all the
perceived opposition was concentrated within two kinds of organized
interest groups. The general public was named by only 2.8 per cent
of the thirty-eight, as a leading opponent of pollution control.
Opposition to the poverty program was viewed as somewhat less
concentrated than opposition to air pollution. The general public, for
example, was named as a leading opponent by 13.2 per cent of the
106 respondents who perceived opposition to the poverty program.
The pattern of variation for this group and others again confirms the
impression that oppositiQ!LtQ( air. pollution control is xelatiYelY-SJ2n-
centra ted and support relatively_ dif;fuse. The configurations of politi-
car activity in both cases a]?pear to reflect thejinds-oLcosts_aI!d
.!:enefits that are at stake. The dirty air issue raises the prospect of

,it'
socially concentrated costs and socially diffuse benefits, hence the
concentrated opposition and diffuse support. The poverty issue, we
might reasonably argue, involves costs and benefits of just the opposite
kind-relatively diffuse costs and relatively concentrated benefits.
The result of this reversal is a reversal in the pattern of political
activity.
Table III-l reveals one more notable difference between the
politics of poverty and the politics of pollution. The breakdown of
respondents at the bottom of the table indicates, not surprisingly, that
air pollution is a much less controversial issue than the anti-poverty
program. Of the 109 respondents who said that air pollution was a
community issue, only 38 (slightly more than a third) perceived that
anyone had taken a position in opposition to pollution control pro-
posals. Of the 150 respondents who said that people in their towns had
taken sides on the poverty program, over two-thirds (106) believed
that the backers of the program faced opposition.
The relative non-controversiality of the dirty air issue is reflected
in another of the survey findings. In each sample city the local health
commissioner was asked to report on past efforts to enact pollution
ordinances. Thirty of the fifty health commissioners interviewed
said that air pollution ordinances had been introduced in their com-
munities' city councils since 1950. None of the ordinances proposed
was reported to have been defeated. Even if we allow for gaps in the
administrators' memories and for the fact that many of the proposed
ordinances were probably amended before being passed, the record
is a remarkable one. Among other things, it suggests that Jhe only
way to prevent air _p-.Q!lution legislation from being
vent coming.J:!.E in tfie fiist place-that once dirty air
legislation has been introduced in a city council, some anti-pollution
regulations are almost sure to result. In the life history of an anti-
pollution proposal, therefore, it appears that the most critical stage-
is not so much the passage through the decisionmaking the
object oCThe pluralists'
through the prior process of in which a3Qm-
,
key poHfica.Lisues.
Table III-l indicate that pollution
politics everywhere is rather similar to pollution politics in Gary and
East Chicago. Support for anti-pollution proposals tends not to be
consolidated within identifiable interest groups. It is diffuse. When it
tz
does organized backing, that backing comes most often from
local bureaucracies, as in Gary and East Chicago. Opposition
to on the other hand, is highly concentrated within
organIzed busIness. indust:ial groups. Finally, political parties
seldom take an Interest In pollution control but remain, as in
Gary and East ChIcago, relatively detached from the dirty air debate.
In. general, the survey findings tell us that there is probably a relation-
ShIp between .the emergence of the air pollution issue and the appear-
ance o.f .a pattern of political activity-between the substance
of and the configurations of the political process.
ThIS InfOrmatlOn can be useful in organizing the search for those
factors that tend to diminish the "issue-ness" of air poll.ution. The
survey suggest that there are some organizations-industrial
corporations, Chamb:rs of Commerce, local administrative agencies,
and newsp.apers-whIch seem to perceive that they have a stake in
the resolutlOn of the air pollution issue. To some groups the dirty air
debate presents the possibility of organizational benefits, to others,
the prospect of costs. In towns where organizations of the latter sort
occupy dominant positions, we would hypothesize that the "issue-
ness" of air pollution will be dampened. Organizations that can
to through the promotion of the dirty air issue
WIll rarely InItIate discussions of the problem themselves. We might
ex?ect th.at in c?mmunities where these groups are especially
Influ,entIal, promInence may deter other individuals from raising
the Issue. :: mIght be p:-edicted, for example, that among similarly
.cItIes, there WIll be a negative relationship between the
polItIcal mfluence of local industrial corporations and the issue-ness
of air pollution.
Not. all organizations behave as though they had a stake in the
r.esolutlOn of the dirty air issue, and perhaps they tend to reduce the
of the pollution issue simply because they have no
m It: They are not members of the dirty air constituency.
partIes appe.ar to fall in this category. Though party organiza-
tIons were named WIth some frequency as active participants in the
debate over poverty programs, they were almost never mentioned
as participants in the dirty air debate. In towns where parties are
where. (as in Gary) they tend to monopolize the political
of theIr communities, it is improbable that the air pollution
Issue WIll floursh. In other words, there will be a necrative association
between the influence of local political party and the
issue-ness of air pollution. Before this prediction can be teste?, it
necessary to decide upon means of measurmg aIr
pollution, issue-ness, and polItIcal mfiuence.
MEASUREMENT OF BASIC VARIABLES
Air Pollution
Of the three items that call for quantification, dirty air is. surely
the most easily measured. There is broad concermng the
major components of urban air pollution, and It IS no longer very
hard to identify them. The most troublesome
in measuring the dirtiness of air are the occasIOnal unavaIlabilIty of
pollution data and the problem of .using data to assess the
"over-all pollution problem" of partIcular cItIes.
The U.S. Public Health Service has developed. a procedure
ranking metropolitan areas according to the seventy of ove:all aIr
pollution.
5
The ranking attempts to take account three dIfferent
pollution factors, E2rticu.lates, OXIdes, and
chemical smog. These three ingredIents will also be used here as
measrrresof"lne severity of local air pollution problems. Wherever
possible, the same sources of pollution data used by the P .H.S. to
construct its ranking will be used. .'
Data on suspended particulates come statIOns
of the National Air Sampling Network, WhICh IS mamtamed b} the
Public Health Service in cooperation with state and local governments.
There are or have been N.A.S.N. stations in forty-on: the fifty-one
sample cities. In each town the station is located withm the central
business district, at a distance of no more than 75 feet ground.
Pollution data from a single site naturally do not proVide
information about particulate levels in outlying of .the. CIty, but
investigations conducted by the Public Health ServIce mdl?ate that
"concentrations of pollutants at a center-city site bear a fairly c?n-
sistent relationship to concentrations in and
areas." Because there is such a relationship,. center-city
sampler does provide a valid index for companng cItIes.
> U S Public Health Service, Press Release (HEW-R43), 4 1967. ters" pp
McMullen et aJ., "Air Quality and Characteristic Commumty arame , .
2-3.
'iF,
In compiling its own pollution ranking, the Public Health Service
assembled the available particulate data for metropolitan areas and
computed a particulate average for each area for the period 1961-
1965. For the forty-one cities of the sample in which N.A.S.N.
stations were located, the same procedure was followed, with two
exceptions. First, particulate averages were computed for cities, not
metropolitan areas. Second, the particulate data included in these
averages cover the period 1957 to 1965. It was decided to make this
second departure from the P.H.S. procedure because these pollution
measures are intended to serve a slightly different purpose than the
P.H.S. ranking. The P.H.S. seeks to make its index up to date, but
we are interested in relating our own assessment of a city's air pollu-
tion problem to actions that sometimes have occurred over fairly long
periods of time. It is therefore appropriate that we should take
account of long-term pollution problems.
Of the ten cities that lacked N.A.S.N. sampling stations, seven had
alternative sources of data which could be used. In four cases it was
possible to use particulate data that had been collected at N.A.S.N.
stations in neighboring cities. In none of these four instances was the
relevant sampling station more than about three miles from the
geographic center of the city for which particulate data was needed.
In three other cases particulate information came from more distant
sampling. sites. These data were included in the computations only
after consulting with metropolitan area pollution officials, who indi-
cated that there was no reason to believe that there were sharp
differences between pollution conditions in the cities for which infor-
mation was needed and\l\t the more distant sampling sites. There
was no acceptable for the three remaining towns, and,
unless otherwise noted, they have been excluded from all the statistical
computations that follow. '
The information on sulfur oxides used here is somewhat less com-
plete than the data that the P.H.S. used. In order to construct the
sulfur oxide component of its index, the P.H.S. combined data on
ambient sulfur dioxide with sulfur oxide emission estimates. In con-
structing its index, the P.H.S. combined data on ambient sulfur dioxide
with sulfur oxide emission estimates. Information on ambient sulfur
dioxide levels is relatively scarce for the cities of our sample, and we
will have to rely on the emission estimates alone, but this is not an
especially serious revision of the P.H.S. procedure. The P.H.S. esti-
, i
mates of sulfur oxide emissions have been shown to be closely associ-
ated with measurements of ambient S02.'
Photochemical smog, the third factor to be included in any pollution
index, is probably the most complex variety of dirty air. Its
tion has only recently been revealed, and the techniques for measunng
smog levels have only recently been developed. These measures have
not yet been widely adopted, and the P.R.S. index therefore attempts
to take account of photochemical smog levels by using an alternative
indicator, an estimate of local gasoline consumption.
exhaust is by far the most potent source of smog, and there is a sub-
the amount of
gasoline consumed in a city and such known components of smog as
nitrogen dioxide.
s
The data on suspended particulates, sulfur oxides, and gasoline
consumption give us three pollution measures for each of the forty-
eight cities finally selected. It remains to decide exactly what to do
with these measurements. The P.R.S. has reluctantly chosen to com-
bine its pollution measures, weighted equally, in,.!!; index of the
over-all severitYOflocaI dirty arr-pr061eriiS:- The tr:Qgh!e with this
prbcedure,-astl:IePES. pomtsout, IS-tliat that. one form
of pollution is as "severe" as another-that different varieties of dirty
aIrali"do approximately fuesamekinds of damage.
9
The assiimptiOrlfs anunrealistic one.
As an alternative to the P.R.S. procedure, we might treat each one
of the pollution measures as a separate index. To control for the
effect of actual pollution levels upon the "issue-ness" of dirty air,
we can simply control for three pollution indices instead of one. In
addition to avoiding the pitfalls of the P.R.S. technique, this strategy
has the positive advantage of allowing us to examine possible differ-
ences in the political impact of different types of pollution.
The "Issue-ness" of Air Pollution
A political issue has already been defined as a subject on which
community leaders have taken public positions. The more leaders
7 Ibid., pp. 15-18; Ozolins and Smith, Estimating Commllnity Air Pol/lIt!on
Emissions. McMullen and his associates report that the product-moment correlation
coefficient between the P.H.S. sulfur oxide emission estimates and measurement of
ambient sulfur dioxide is + .74. Sulfur oxide estimates refer to the total tonnage of
all sulfur and oxygen compounds produced in a city.. . .
S McMullen et al., "Air Quality and CharacterIstic Commuruty Parameters,"
Appendix.
9 U.S. Public Health Service, Press Release, 4 August 1967.
who take positions, the bigger the issue.
'u
In order to measure
directly the "size" of an issue, it would therefore be necessary to
identify all the leaders of a town and somehow gauge the sum of
their position taking activities. The data do not permit a direct meas-
urement of this sort. Instead, the positiontaking activities of just a
handful of formal leaders, representing a variety of community organi-
zations and institutions, will be examined. The presumption here
is that the activities of these people and the organizations that they
head will reflect positiontaking activity in the community at large.
The assumption, as we shall soon see, is not a rash one.
Different organizations can be expected to act differently in order
to signify that they have taken positions on a matter of public concern.
For a political party, decisive action may take the form of a campaign
platform statement. For a newspaper, an editorial is the conventional
instrument for publicizing a position. An administrative officer's
action may be more guarded-perhaps a report that "lets the facts
speak for themselves." The interview schedules attempted to antici-
pate these probable variations in organizational behavior; different
respondents were asked different kinds of questions about action on
the matter of dirty air. Newspaper editors, Chamber of Commerce
presidents, and labor council presidents were asked, first, whether
they thought that their organizations had taken positions on air pollu-
tion control. They were also asked to describe specific activities which
their organizations had undertaken with respect to the dirty air prob-
lem. Only if the claim that a position was taken was accompanied by
some account of specific activities was the respondent's organization
counted as having taken a stand on the issue.
A somewhat different approach was used with local political party
chairmen, who were asked whether their organizations had taken
platform positions on air pollution control. For the purposes of the
issue-ness index, a town's political parties were counted as having
taken a position only if both parties reported platform statements on
dirty air. This requirement reflects the belief that a topic on which
only one party feels obliged to take a platform position cannot have
been a very serious campaign issue. For similar reasons, the other
respondents were required to back up their claims to have taken
positions on dirty air with some specific actions. The idea was to sift
out serious from frivolous instances of position taking. As it turned
10 See above, pp. 29-31.
bn
out this approach did not make any great difference for the measure-
of issue-ness. IQJ!1ost of the cities where one political party llad
takena position on dir!y air, the other had anaalmost all the
Chamber of Commerce presidents, newspaper editors, and labor
council presidents who reported that their had
positions on air pollution could also report some specific organIza-
tional activity in the field of pollution abatement. .
Local health commissioners were also asked for some eVIdence of
activity in the matter of pollution control. Here the approach was
more oblique because it was expected that their activities would be
more oblique. We anticipated that they might regard as
impartial administrators whose effectiveness could be dlffilllished .by
overt participation in policy disputes, that they would seldom p.erceive
that their agencies had "taken positions" on matters of publIc con-
cern, and that they would conceive their function to be pr?vision. of
expert opinions and information to lawmaking and polIcymakI?g
authorities. Even the act of dispensing information can be a specIes
of positiontaking, however. A health commissioner who informs the
residents of his town that they have a serious air pollution problem
has in effect taken a position on the matter of air pollution control.
His' carries an implied proposal that something ought
to be done about dirty air. It was this discreet sort of positiontaking
activity that we attempted to uncover. .
The administrators were first asked whether they thought that theIr
cities faced "very serious," "serious," or "not serious" air pollution
problems. Those who perceived serious or very serious problem.s were
next presented with a list of people and groups, both publIc and
private, and asked to indicate which of them had been about
the existence of the problem. Finally, the health commISSIOner was
asked to identify the person or group who had pointed out the
lem to each name on the list. If he named himself or his agency,
department was counted as having taken a position on air pollution.
The interviews with the health commissioners produced at least a
hint that we may have underestimated their willingness to take
public positions on air pollution control. One health officer m a
southern city commented, during the course of his interview, that he
had come close to losing his job because of his vigorous efforts to
secure the enactment of a local pollution law. In a midwestern city
a health commissioner said that he had been at odds with some
members of the local board of health because of his persistent and
z
unsuccessful attempts to get the board's approval for an air pollution
ordinance that he had drafted and wished to submit to the City
Council. In both of these cases, health officers seem to have discarded
their presumed administrative aloofness. It should be noted, however,
that in both instances the administrators reported that they had also
performed the information-dispensing function which had been ex-
pected of them.
For each city in the sample, the interview data yielded five indi-
cators of organizational positiontaking, one each for the health depart-
ment, the Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO Council, and the
largest local newspaper, and a single indicator for both local party
organizations. Considered one by one, these reports of positiontaking
activity could provide valuable information about the dirty air issue.
For example, these data might be used, along with other pieces of
information, to find out what kinds of local conditions induce Cham-
bers of Commerce or labor councils or political parties to contribute
to the discussion of the air pollution issue. Occasionally, that is pre-
cisely the sort of purpose for which the information is used. But it
was also hoped that something more could be extracted from it-not
merely an account of the positiontaking activities of particular organi-
zations, but a general measure of the issue-ness of air pollution in
different cities. If this can be done, then we must assume that the
position taking responses of our informants are not just unconnected
reports of organizational activity. In each city, they must all con-
sistently reflect a single community attribute, the size of the local
dirty air issue. Perhaps an analogy will show why it is sensible to
assume that this is the case and reasonable to use this information
about position taking to test the issue-ness of air pollution in different
cities.
Suppose that people were being tested of cities and indi-
vidual intelligence instead of issue-ness. We have an intelligence test
consisting of five questions, and our first concern is to establish that
the ability to answer these questions is an indication of something,
that the test items do not call upon a haphazard collection of capaci-
ties but all tap the same dimension of individual ability. There is
reason to suspect that the five questions are not all equally difficult.
Some of them were answered correctly by most of the people to whom
the test was administered. Others were successfully answered by just
a handful of test-takers. By comparing the number of correct answers
on one question with the number of correct answers on the other
h
questions, all five test items can be arranged in a tentative order of
difficulty, from easiest to hardest. If the easier and harder questions
actually do tap the same dimension of individual ability, then we
should find a certain kind of order in the responses of the people who
take the test. Anyone who can answer the hardest question should
also be able to answer all four of the easier questions. If he and
others like him cannot, then we can conclude that the hardest question
calls for a different kind of ability than do the easier questions. This
line of reasoning can be extended to the other respondents and the
other questions. Anyone answering the second hardest question ought
to be able to answer the three easier questions. Anyone answering the
third hardest question ought to answer the two easier ones, and so on.
After the test performances of all the respondents had been canvassed,
each test-taker could be classified in one of a limited number of
response patterns.
The acceptable response configurations for the hypothetical intelli-
gence test are set out in Table III-2. If these response patterns prevail,
we can conclude that the five test items exhibit a characteristic called
unidimensionality: they are all indicators of a single underlyin!j.uality
T1lefeasons fOr thIS conclusion should be fairly clear.
We expect the harder questions to demand greater intelligence (or
visual acuity or education) than the easier questions. Anyone who
can meet the large demands of the hard questions ought to be able to
meet the smaller demands of the easy questions, provided that all
these demands are for the same commodity, or, to put it another way,
provided that the test items are unidimensional.
It may already be apparent that the examination of hypothetical
questions and responses is more than a way to establish the uni-
dimensionality of test items. It has also been shown that, taken
together, the test questions constitute an ordinal scale of measurement.
TABLE IIl-2: ACCEPfABLE RESPONSE TyPES
FOR A PERFECT SCALE
Response Test Question
Pattern 2 3 4 5
0
I
+
2
+ +
3
+ + +
4
+ + + +
5
+ + + + +
J
t
Whoever can answer the third question in the scale, for example,
possesses more of that underlying quality than a test-taker who can
go only as far as the second question.
Indicators of organizational position taking can now be substituted
for hypothetical test items and sample cities for test-takers. The
criteria of scalability and unidimensionality are the same in this case
as they were for the items on the intelligence test. We must first
arrange the five indicators of organizational activity in order of
difficulty, more precisely, in order of the frequency with which the
five kinds of organizations took stands on dirty air. The organizations
that come first in this array are the ones that most frequently took
positions on air pollution. In a sense, these groups took stands on
dirty air more "easily" than did the other kinds of organizations. At
the end of the tentative scale comes the kind of group that was
least likely to take a position, the most "difficult" group, in other
words. Next, it is necessary to examine the response pattern for each
of the cities in the sample. In this case, the response configuration is
actually a pattern of organizational positiontaking. If the five indi-
cators of organizational activity are scalable and unidimensional, then
in any city where the most "difficult" group has taken a stand on dirty
air, all of the "easier" groups will have taken positions as well. In
general, the response patterns that we find should conform to the
ideal patterns that appear in Table III-2.
Social statisticians have devised several methods for testing the
over-all conformity of actual response patterns to ideal patterns, and
they have suggested several conventional criteria for deciding whether
a set of measurements, such as the organizational indicators, is
sufficiently close to the ideal to qualify as scalable and unidimen-
sional.
11
These tests have been applied to the positiontaking reports
of the organizational officials, and the results show that the data do
reach the minimum criteria, but just barely.12 The five organizational
indicators do roughly reflect a single underlying dimension, and they
do provide a scale for measuring that dimension, but only with a
fairly substantial chance of inaccuracy. The positiontaking scale and
the ideal response patterns associated with it appear in Table III-3.
The ordering of the items in the scale tends to support the earlier
conclusions concerning the pattern of political activity that emerges
11 For criteria of scalability, see Samuel Stouffer et al. M easlIremenl and Pre-
diction, pp. 77-80. '
12 Coefficient of scalability = .67 (the conventional minimum is .60). Coefficient of
reproducibility = .89 (the minimum is .90).
TABLE III-3: PROPOSED "ISSUE-NESS" SCALE
City
Response
Pattern
0
1
2
3
4
5
Organization Took Position on Air Pollution
Health Largest Chamber Labor Political
Department Newspaper of Council Parties
Commerce
No No No No No
Yes No No No No
Yes Yes No No No
Yes Yes Yes No No
Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Yes Yes Yes No Yes
in association with the air pollution issue. The scale shows that local
health agencies, newspapers, and Chambers of Commerce were all
more readily moved to take positions on dirty air than were labor
councils or the two political parties. This pattern is generally con-
sistent with the one that we discovered in our earlier survey findings
concerning the respondents' perceptions of "leading" air pollution
activists. The survey findings suggest that, had we attempted to use
positiontaking reports to measure the issue-ness of the anti-poverty
program, a different ordering of scale items than in the of air
pollution might have been found. Political parties and labor organiza-
tions might have surpassed the Chambers of Commerce and perhaps
even local newspapers in their readiness to take a stand on urban
anti-poverty efforts. Unfortunately, the necessary data to construct
a positiontaking scale for the poverty program are not available, and
there are problems enough in the scale that we have constructed for
the air pollution issue.
Inconsistencies with the ideal scale pattern are not randomly dis-
tributed among the five items in this scale. Exactly half of these
errors are attributable to a single item, the indicator of health depart-
ment activity. This_concentration.oLerrorsindicates.1hat-the-meas).lre
posiiloDtaklng a differeE!.-dimension
than do the other four items, or that it lies on the same dimension
other as well. The reason ,may be that health department
representatives were asked different sorts of questions than were the
other respondents. Perhaps they were the wrong questions, but there
is at least a hint of another explanation. .
Those health commissioners who produced inconsistencies in the
scale did so because they reported that their agencies had not been
responsible for informing any of the groups and organizations on our
list about local air pollution problems. In every one of these cases,
z
the health commissioner said that someone else had done the in-
forming. And in several instances, the same kind of organization, a
state administrative agency, was reported to have performed this
information-dispensing function. What this uniformity suggests is that
health departments may be sensitive to state anti-pollution
orgaiuziitiCiiiSaren:oCWhere-state
authoritiestaKtnhdnitiativeili -matters-of air polltmon, some local
health departments appear to have retired from the field.
The effect of state intervention is even more clearly evident in some
other pieces of information that have been collected. In each town the
local health officer was asked to name the persons and organizations
on whom he depended most for advice about air pollution problems.
Of the fifty health commissioners who were interviewed, six could
name no one on whom they depended for advice. Half of the remain-
ing health officers mentioned state agencies as advice-givers, and these
health commissioners were about five times as likely to produce in-
consistencies in the scale as were those who reported some other
source of advice about dirty air. Scale errors and state intervention
appear to go together, as do state intervention and health department
inaction. There is a modest negative association between health
p-ositiontqking andrelIiiiiceon state advice (r = -.-22).
-Theexistence of this relationship may signiry-thaCState action in
the pollution field tends to discourage action by local health agencies,
or it may mean that the failure of local agencies to take action helps
to stimulate state intervention. Both interpretations are plausible, and
the choice of an appropriate one will have to be deferred until we
can examine some additional evidence. For the time being, it is
sufficient to know that the indicator of health department position-
taking tends to be incompatible with the other four items in our scale,
and it is probably wise to exclude itY It reflects a different set of
forces, perhaps a different underlying dimension, than do the other
four indicators.
It remains to identify the underlying dimension that these four
scale items reflect. Here, we are probably much better off than we
would be if we were actually attempting to construct an intelligence
test. The relationship between conventional notions of intelligence and
the questions that appear on intelligence tests is seldom an immedi-
ately obvious one, but there is a fairly direct connection between
13 Excluding the health department indicator from the scale raises the coefficient
of scalability to .79 and the coefficient of reproducibility to .92.
I I
"
-
the items that appear in our own scale of measurement and the con-
cept of "issue-ness." Issue-ness has already been identified with
positiontaking activity, and the items that are included in the scale
were all selected precisely because they have to do with that kind of
activity.
The scale constructed therefore provides a simple means for
assessing the "issue-ness" of air pollution. By examining the response
patterns of the cities in our sample, we can decide where each tOWI\
belongs on the issue-ness scale. We could then attempt to find out
how the scale positions of the cities are related to other local political
characteristics. It turns out, however, that this research strategy is a
statistically cumbersome one. It will usually be more convenient, and
more informative, to dissolve the issue-ness scale into its constituent
items-the original indicators of organizational positiontaking. We
can then look for relationships each of these items and other
local characteristics. The results of this procedure are not the same
as they would have been if we had simply set out to discover what
kinds of local conditions induce particular kinds of organizations to
take positions on dirty air. We know now that the various indicators
of organizational positiontaking not only represent the actions of par-
ticular groups but roughly reflect various levels of the issue-ness of
air pollution. We can therefore use these items in the effort to find out
what kinds of factors tend to stunt the growth of the air pollution
issue.
ISSUE-NESS AND AIR POLLUTION
Probably the simplest explanation for a community's neglect of the
dirty air issue is that its air is not dirty. If this is the case, then there
is no need to resort to any more exotic explanatory variables like
the distribution of political influence or the structure of local govern-
ment. Inter-city variations in the issue-ness of air pollution would be
accounted for in the most obvious way, by referring to inter-city
variations in the dirtiness of air.
The findings reported in Table 1II-4 show that this obvious ex-
planation is useful but not sufficient. Each of the figures in the table
is a product-moment correlation coefficient, a_measuJE of the streJ!gth
air
particular indicator of example the first figure
14 Concerning the statistical interpretation of these coefficients, see James S. Cole-
man, Introduction to Mathematical Sociology. pp. 263-68.

TABLE III-4: AIR POLLUTION AND THE ISSUE-NESS OF AIR POLLUTION
Pollution Indices Issue-ness Scale Item
Newspapers Chamber of Labor Political
Commerce Council Parties
Suspended particulates +.29 +.32 +.22 +.35
Sulfur oxide emissions -.10 +.15 +.23 +.28
Gasoline consumption -.09 -.14 -.19 -.06
(47) (48) (46) (47)
in the first column of the table shows that there is a modest positive
association between the average concentration of suspended particu-
lates in a city and the likelihood that the largest local newspaper will
take a position on the matter of air pollution control. The other co-
efficients reported in the first row of the table show that there is a
similar association between the concentration of suspended particu-
lates and each of the other issue-ness indicators. The conclusion here
is fairly obvious and understandable: the heavier the concentration of
suspended particulates, the greater the likelihood that the air pollution
issue will flourish. The relationship appears to hold at every level of
issue-ness. There is no point at which the concentration of particu-
lates becomes irrelevant to the further growth of the air pollution
Issue.
The other relationships reported in Table 1II-4 are not so congenial
to common sense. The data show, for example, that there is a weak
negative association between the level of sulfur oxide emissions and
the likelihood that local newspapers will take positions on the dirty
air issue. The relationship is so slight, however, that the only tenable
inference to be drawn is that variations in sulfur oxide pollution make
almost no difference for the position taking activities of local news-
papers. The other correlation coefficients reported in Table III-4
show, as one might expect, that sulfur oxide emissions are positively
related to positiontaking activity on the part of Chambers of Com-
merce, labor councils, and local party organizations, but none of
these associations is especially strong. They suggest, at most, that
sulfur oxide may contribute slightly to the growth of the dirty air
issue, and even this limited contribution may be due in part to
suspended particulates rather than sulfur oxides. Sulfur oxide levels
are associated with suspended particulate rates (r = +.30). What
appears as evidence of the political impact of sulfur oxides, there-
fore, may in fact reflect the influence of this associated form of
pollution. By controlling for the level of suspended particulates, it is
b
TABLE III-5: SULFUR OXIDE POLLUTION AND THE ISSUE-NESS OF AIR POLLUTION,
CONTROLLING FOR TIlE LEVEL OF SUSPENDED PARTICULATES
Estimated sulfur oxide
emissions
Issue-ness Scale Item
Newspaper Chamber of Labor
-.20
(47)
Commerce Council
+.06
(48)
+.17
(46)
Political
Parties
.+.19
(47)
possible to assess the independent effect of sulfur oxide pollution
upon the issue-ness of dirty air. The results in Table III-5 suggest
that its positive effects are .. P211Etion !.s-pr.ob-
tl)llI.l In its
most common form it is colorless and, except in abnormally heavy
. -- .. --.---.-.-.. ......
concentratIons, odorless as well, so that it is easy to understand Wily
this reli:ltivefy .. .QLJ!.iLpollution __ generally fails to
trigger political actioii-on the dirty air issue.
'5
The relationship between gasoline consumption and the issue-ness
of dirty air is more consistent than the relationship between sulfur
oxides and issue-ness, but it is also more difficult to understand.
Table 1II-4 showed that there is a weak negative association between
the gasoline consumption index and every one of the organizational
positiontaking indicators. The implication is that there exists a
very slight (and probably negligible) tendency f()r tl).c: issJ.le::ness-of
air RQ1l.ution .. to_dimtnishas the severitY of automotive
creases, a tendency directIy()pposed to co.i:nIDon sense. It may be that
faulty measurement accounts for these unexpected findings. Though
the gasoline consumption data are probably the best available esti-
mates of automotive pollution for the cities of the sample, it is clear
that these estimates are less satisfactory than direct measurements of
smog would be. They may not accurately reflect ambient air quality in
the sample cities. Still, the gasoline measurements cannot be too
seriously deficient, since previous investigations have shown them to
be associated with other, more direct measures of automotive pollu-
tion.
'6
It is therefore unlikely that measurement error accounts fully
for the findings. Unlike sulfur oxide pollution, the pollutants from
automobile exhaust are often easily noticed. Photochemical smog, the
15 It should be pointed out that this conclusion is consistent with the findings of
the St. Louis opinion survey that were reported in Chapter II. St. Louis residents,
like those of the cities in the sample, seem to have been relatively insensitive to sulfur
oxide pollution.
16 See above, p. 94.
tz
most notorious of these contaminants, is easily visible and physically
irritating. Because it is noticeable, it might be expected to goad many
communities into anti-pollution activities. The findings in Table III-4
suggest that it does not.
One possible explanation for the political impotence of automotive
pollution in the sample cities is that l()cal .. authoritiesare.unable .. to
.. contamination. Its
and n!1II1er9!!s.flM ll,[e therefore
More important, regulation of the automobiles themselves would
probably not produce any significant relief from automotive pollution.
It would also be exercise some control over their m<lp.u-
Recent state and federal legislation"fii"tne pollution field has
recognized this necessity, but for local authorities, the necessity is
a virtual impossibility. There are only a very few large cities (none of
them included in our sample) which account for such a large portion
of the motor vehicle market that they might conceivably demand that
automobile manufacturers comply with local standards for automobile
exhaust systems. To most localities automobile manufacturers are
politically inaccessible. Since local solutions to automotive pollution
are simply not feasible, local leaders may have refrained from taking
positions on a problem that so clearly defies local solution, leaving
it to political units that are more capable of dealing with it.
There is some support for an explanation of this kind. In the first
place, it is apparent that local authorities who face severe automotive
pollution problems are more likely to turn to higher levels of govern-
ment for assistance than local officials who do not. Health com-
missioners in cities that scored high on the gasoline consumption
index were more likely than others to say that they had relied on
state officials for advice (r = + .29). This tendency was not ap-
parent where other kinds of pollution, suspended particulates and
sulfur oxides, were concerned ..
Reliance upon state authorities, it will be remembered, was also
associated with local health department inaction on the dirty air
issue, and automotive pollution is the factor that appears to account
for this relationship. Incapable of attacking the automotive pollution
problem themselves, the local administrators turn to state authorities,
who are better prepared to handle it. Having surrendered the problem
to state agencies, the local officials tend to be inactive in the pollution
field. Perhaps as a result of such a process, automotive pollution
b
turns out to be unrelated to local political action in the pollution
field.
Whatever the explanation, it appears that gasoline emissions, like
sulfur oxide emissions, have almost. no independent effect upon the
issue-ness of air pollution. ..LgrLnot rea@y noticeable,
anp the prob!e ..
1Il
.... Qi.. . may not be solut;!e.
Fo'nfcompfete description of local pollutIOn problems, It may be Im-
portant to take both forms of pollution into account, but because they
have almost no local political impact, we will concentrate on the third
major form of pollution, suspended particulates, which .does
to have a fairly substantial political effect. Even thIS pohtIcally
efficacious form of pollution does not account fully for inter-city
variations in the issue-ness of dirty air. The correlation coefficients
in the first row of Table III-4 showed that there is no perfect corre-
spondence between the level of suspended particulates and the local
level of political activity on the pollution issue. Factors other than
pollution itself may distort the translation of dirty air into a political
issue and the present attempt to identify the dirty air constituency
provides a theoretical basis for locating some of these
factors. We have predicted that the political influence of certam local
groups and organizations will be critical to the survival and growth
of the dirty air issue and that these groups can be found where the
costs and benefits of pollution control are likely to fall. The next
chapter will test these predictions.
R
IV The Impact of Industrial Influence
Not all of the people and groups who are influential in community
decisionmaking will necessarily be visibly active in local politics. Some
will be able to exert their influence from points outside the range of
observable political behavior. In Gary, for example, U.S. Steel seems
to have been one of these offstage influentials. Though the corporation
seldom intervened directly in the deliberations of the town's air pollu-
tion policymakers, it was nevertheless able to affect their scope and
direction. This is what Robert Dahl has called "indirect influence."1
Presumably, it is indirect because there is no opservabieinteraction
between the p,ers9n being influenced and the influential to whom he
A political actor who is indirectly influenced adapts his
behavior to his own perception of the preferences of others, tailoring
his action to his expectation of the response that it will provoke among
those whom he fears or respects.
The pluralist theory of community politics acknowledges the ex-
istence of indirect influence, but pluralist research does not make
much of it. Pluralist political studies are concerned almost exclusively
with the kinds of influence that may be exercised through direct par-
ticipation in political decisionmaking.
2
What indirect influence adds
to this direct irifluence," according to the pluralists, is a measure of
democratic control. In any community, says Dahl, there will be a
small minority of citizens who are much more highly involved in the
town's political life than is the great bulk of the local population.
1 Dahl, Who Governs?, p. 163.
2 Pluralist research techniques are clearly designed for the investigation of those
varieties of political influence which are revealed in observable political action (see
ibid., pp. 330-31).
107
Members of this small "political stratum" naturally exercise much
greater direct influence over most local decisions than do ordinary
citizens. Indirect influence is one of the things that prevents this
minority rule from degenerating into oligarchy. Local political leaders,
often taking their cues from the results of local elections, "keep the
real or imagined preferences of constituents constantly in mind in
deciding what policies to adopt or reject."3 Thus, though most com-
munity residents take no active part in poiicy decisions, their pre-
sumed preferences will nevertheless be taken into account when those
decisions are made. Though ordinary citizens possess little or no
direct influence, most of them have a moderate amount of indirect
influence, and their possession of it helps to reduce the mismatch in
power between the minority who are members of the political stratum
and the majority who are not.
Especially interesting for our purposes is the pluralist contention
that indirect influence helps to convert the inarticulate discontents of
apolitical citizens into political issues. Ordinary citizens, says Dahl,
rarely generate political issues themselves. This job is usually per-
formed by members of the political stratum, who anticipate and
respond to the presumed concerns of their constituents by translating
these worries, aggravations, and aspirations into items for the local
political agenda} Indirect influence therefore enhances the penetra-
bility of local politics, its readiness to receive and nurture nascent
political issues.
What Dahl has neglected to point out is that indirect influence may
also have exactly the opposite effect: it may inhibit the introilltction
of new issues into Influence that is capable of stimu-
lating action within the political stratum may also operate to prevent
action, and though indirect influence may clear the path for some
issues, it can raise a barrier to others. That possibility is illustrated by
Gary's hesitant encounter with tl)e dirty air issue. The Gary case
history also suggests that indirect influence is not merely the mecha-
nism by which the preferences of ordinary citizens are brought to bear
upon the conduct of local politics. If indirect influence can work for
ordinary community residents, then there is no reason why it cannot
work for U.S. Steel or General Motors or bank presidents or members
of families in the Social Register. There is nothing inherently demo-
cratic about indirect influence. It may just as easily serve the political
3 Ibid., p. 164.
4 Ibid., pp. 90-91.
tz
IMPACT OF INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE 109
interests of social or economic elites as the interest of the great mass
of ordinary citizens. In fact, there is no reason to presume that in-
direct influence is any more democratically distributed than direct
influence. Most important, there is the possibility that indirect in-
fluence may serve elite interests by restricting the penetrability of
local politics, reducing its receptivity to potential political issues, and,
incidentally, obstructing the political careers of the Milton Roths and
Albert Gavits whose political fortunes happen to be tied to those
issues. That, at least, is the possibility that the Gary case history
suggests. It remains to determine whether Gary's experience is
peculiar or typical of many American cities. At stake in this matter
are both the pluralists' notion of political penetrability and their
optimistic assertions concerning the democratic role of indirect
influence.
These considerations raise what is probably one of the most
frequently posed and difficult problems of social science:' how is
E?litical influence to be measured. On the basis of the findillgsiD
Gary, it has been argued that the indirect influence of local industry
is one of the factors which affects the political life chances of the
dirty air issue. In order to test this hypothesis, it is necessary to find
out who holds influence in the cities of our sample and in what
amounts, though that is probably an oversimplification of the prob-
lem. It is oversimple, first, because it assumes that influence is
"possessed" by people. Most students of the problem would maintain
that it is a property not of a person but of a relationship between
people. They would also be reluctant to speak about "amounts" of
influence, as though all types of political influence could somehow be
summed up to give us over-all influence scores for people, groups,
and organizations. It is not at all clear that such a sum can be com-
puted. For each influential, we would have to take account of several
different and seemingly incommensurable dimensions of influence.
We would want to know just how many people were under the sway
of a given influential. We would want to find out just how deeply he
could influence them. Could he induce them to give up their lives,
their savings, or just a few minutes of their time? Finally, we would
want to find out just what kinds of decisions he had the ability to
influence. Could he make his weight felt in matters of taxation, mili-
tary strategy, public education, urban renewal, or in all of these and
others as well? Once all this information .is gathered, there is the
problem of deciding how to combine it in an index of influence.
Simple arithmetic procedures seem inappropriate for accomplishing
this amalgamation. Perhaps the notion of amalgamation is itself
inappropriate.
One school of community political research has sought to bypass
these difficulties by the problems of influence measure-
ment from the observers of political influence to the people who have
actually influenced others or themselves been influenced. Adherents
of the "reputational" approach attempt to locate and measure in-
fluence simply by asking selected members of a town's political
stratum to identify their community's most influential residents. People
who are frequently cited as influentials are judged to possess more
influence than those who are less frequently mentioned.
5
.
The reputational strategy suggests one obvious solution to the
problem of assigning weights to the various dimensions of influence
and combining them in an over-all influence index. Members of the
political stratum are themselves given this task, at least implicity.
If anyone is qualified to assess over-all influence, it is they, because
they have actually felt its weight. Of course, they may also feel the
pressure of things other than political influence. They may be im-
pressed by a man's wealth or social status. This combination of "real"
influence with other elements creates difficulties for the reputational
strategy. Nelson Polsby has stated the problem thus:
Presumably what is being determined when are to
identify influentials is who has a reputation for bemg mfluentlal. 'J:!le
reputation can be divided into that part which is justified by
and part which is not so justified. It is clearly those in the commumty
whose behavior in the main justifies their reputation as leaders whom
social scientists would want to call the "real" leaders in the com-
munity. In other words, asking. about reputations is asking, at a
remove, about behavior. It can be argued that the researcher should
make it his business to study behavior directly rather than depend
on the opinions of secondhand sources.
6
Polsby's criticjsm is probably a sound one, but only so far as direct
influence is concerned. Here it is true that the only "real" leaders
are the ones whose reputations for leadership are justified by their
actions. But indirect influence does not operate through political
action. People who are indirectly influenced respond not to the
exercise of power but to the perception of power, and, whatever its
5 Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure, p. 258.
6 Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory, pp. 50-51.
tz
shortcomings, the reputational approach, as Polsby points out, allows
us to identify those people who have a reputation for being influential.
The reputational technique, then, will be used here for the limited
purpose of helping to identify those communities in which local
industry is reputed to have influence. If the findings from Gary are
not misleading, we should discover that in such towns the life chances
of the dirty air issue are diminished. Such a discovery would help to
substantiate the contention that active influentials are not the only
"real" community leaders. The as well as its
exercise, the coj;rse of local politics in a particularly
way, not simply by the resolution of political
issues but by controlling their emergence.
-ne reputational technique still some reworking to meet
pluralist objections before it is useful for the present purpose.
Pluralist critics have pointed out certain shortcomings in the method
which impair even its ability to uncover the reputation for power.
First, they argue that it makes the unwarranted assumption that every
community really does have some leading influentials. When an
investigator asks local residents "Who runs this town?" he presupposes
that there is someone who runs the town, when, in fact, no person or
group of people may really be in charge. Thus when local informants
are asked to identify their town's influentials, they must be given a
clear opportunity to answer that there are no influentials.' The
methpd used here gave respondents this option, and a number of
them chose to take it.
A second objection to the reputational technique is that it ignores
variations in the distribution of influence that may occur from one
issue-area to another.s A leader who is influential in municipal elec-
tions may carry no weight when questions of urban renewal arise.
People who are concerned with municipal elections will probably
regard him as an influential leader. Informants who are concerned
about urban renewal will probably be less likely to cite him as a
leader. Neither group of respondents, it might be argued, ha,s pro-
vided an accurate indication of his influence, and combining their
answers does not produce a satisfactory solution either. The resulting
influence index would overstate his urban renewal influence and
understate his municipal election influence. Of course, this index
7 Herbert Kaufman and Victor Jones, "The Mystery of Power," p. 207; Polsby,
Community Power and Political Theory, p. 113.
S Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory, pp. 68, 113-14.
might be regarded as a measure of his "average" influence. But this
facile solution fails to address the question of whether election in-
fluence and urban renewal influence are really equivalent and there-
fore susceptible to being averaged. Not only might this average
influence index be inaccurate, but it would also be unsuited to Our
particular research purposes. Our concern is not simply with influence
in general, but with influence in a specific issue-area, the field of air
pollution control. People who are perceived to be quite powerful in
the matter of pollution control may not score high on an index of
general influence, and by considering only the general influence of
local leaders, we may overlook those very people who are most
relevant to the emergence and resolution of the dirty air issue. When
local informants are asked to identify their community's influentials,
the question should therefore refer to a specific issue-area. Only
questions of this kind were used in the present study.
There remains one more major problem that some critics have
cited as a weakness of the reputational approach. Raymond Wolfinger
has identified it as the "difficulty of making sure that the researcher
and the respondent share the same definition of power."9 "Power"
and "influence" are terms with multiple meanings, and investigators
who use these terms run a high risk of introducing ambiguity into the
questions that they ask and, more important, into the answers that
they receive. The possibility of disparity between the interviewer's
notion of power and his respondent's conception of it is one more
reason for an investigator "to study behavior directly rather than
depend on the opinions of secondhand sources," as Polsby says. In
fact, the problem here is quite similar to the one that Polsby has in
mind when he warns against the confusion of "real" leadership (i.e.,
leadership that is justified by behavior) with the mere reputation for
leadership (leadership as the informants see it). Wolfinger's criticism
might be answered in much the same way as Pols by's was: the
criticism is well taken when direct influence is the object of inquiry
but is irrelevant to the study of indirect influence as the pluralists
themselves would define it. For Ol,lr purposes, whatever an informant
regards as influence is influence. We are interested primarily in his
perception of local politics and, for the present at least, not in the
reality that lies beyond that perception.
Though the answer is probably appropriate to Wolfinger's com-
9 "Reputation and Reality in the Study of 'Community Power,''' p. 638.
z
ment, it does not constitute a complete response to his criticism.
"influence" remain ambiguous terms, and they could
conceivably mtroduce some confusion into our inquiries. There is no
reason to insist that the questions asked of respondents be imprecise,
and an attempt has been made to minimize the possibility by employ-
ing terms that are somewhat less abstract than "power" and "in-
fluence." The chance for misunderstanding remains, as it would in
any question addressed to an informant, but it is hoped that it has
been reduced.
In each of the sample cities, our modified reputational questions
were addressed to a set of seven organizational officials. The panel
of influence judges included the presidents of the largest local bank,
the Chamber of Commerce, the bar association, the AFL-CIO
Council, the editor of the largest newspaper, and the chairmen of
the Democratic and Republican Party organizations. Each of these
respondents was given a list of fifteen groups and organizations and
was then asked a series of questions about the distribution of in-
fluence among these groups for different issue-areas. He was asked,
for example, to go down the list of organizations and "tell me for
each whether their support is essential for the success of a program
of air pollution control, whether their support is important but not
essential, or whether their support is not important." It should be
noted that the question gives the respondent a clear opportunity to
answer that no one is influential, it specifies the issue-area in which
the survey is interested, and it avoids the use of abstract words like
power and influence. Even so, it may reasonably be argued that some
of the terms employed in the question have uncertain meanings. For
example, different respondents may have different notions of "suc-
cess" in the field of air pollution control. It may mean, as it seems to
have meant to Milton Roth, the successful enactment of an anti-
pollution ordinance, or it may mean the successful enforcement of
regulations, as it did to Chris Angelidis. Here, as before,
the mformant's definition, whatever it may be, is acceptable. If he
believes that the passage of an air pollution ordinance is the critical
step in a dirty air program, then we want to know whose influence he
perceives to be relevant at that step. We are interested, for the
in political reality as the respondent perceives it. The ques-
tIOns call upon these perceptions, and not upon the objective facts of
a situation.
What is needed next is some means for converting the individual
perceptions of the respondents into indices of influence for the cities
in the sample. The first piece of information that we require isa
measure of perceived industrial influence on the air pollution issue.
If the Gary case history is a representative one, then industry's power
reputation is probably more critical for the life chances of the dirty
air issue than is any other political variable. A rather straightforward
index of perceived industrial power could be constructed by simply
summing up the number of informants in each city who mentioned
industry as either "important" or "essential" to the success of a pol-
lution control program. This total could then serve as a measure of
perceived industrial influence on the dirty air issue. The procedure
appears to take account of the three major dimensions of influence
that were mentioned earlier. It clearly -reflects the substantive aspect
of influence-the kind of decision or issue to which it is relevant.
Second, it appears to take account of the extent of influence, the num-
ber of people who respond to it. Finally, it attempts a threshold.
measurement of the "depth" or intensity of influence, distinguishing as
it does between those respondents who regard industry as unimportant
in the pollution field and those who regard it either as essential or
irriportant.
There are two important shortcomings in this tentative strategy for
measuring perceived industrial influence. First, the threshold level that
we have chosen to gauge the intensity of industrial influence may be
the logical one, but, as a practical matter, it is simply too low. Only a
little more than 12 per cent of the respondents thought that industry
was unimportant on the air pollution issue. The exact figures for per-
ceived industrial power in this issue-area and in the others for which
we asked questions of the reputational type are presented in Table
IV -1. The findings suggest that the dirty air issue is a peculiar one
as far as industrial influence is concerned. In no other decisionmaking
area were the respondents so likely to say that local industry was
either an essential or an important political actor.
If we choose to distinguish between these answers and the ones in
which industry was mentioned as unimportant, then we will have very
little to make distinctions about. There are only a few cities in which
anyone regarded industry as unimportant to the fate of a local pol-
lution control program. The obvious solution to this problem is to
raise our standards for industrial influence. We shall therefore con-
struct the industrial influence index for a city by summing up only
TABLE IV-I: PERCEPTIONS OF INDUSfRIAL INFLUENCE IN SELECTED ISSUE-AREAS
Issue-Area
Industry Support Is
"Essential" "Important" "Not Total
Important"
% % % %
Air pollution control programs 49.8 37.7 12.5 100.0
Urban renewal projects 31.7 52.2
(329)
16.1 100.0
Municipal bond referenda 25.4 54.2
(341)
20.3 99.9
(330)
Mayoral elections 13.3 57.7 29.0 100.0
School board appoint-
(338)
ments/ elections
5.9 43.4 50.7 100.0
(341)
Note: Throughout the tables, numbers in parentheses represent total respondents in
each category.
those responses in which industry was named as "essential" to the
success of an air pollution control program.
There is one further difficulty in the perceived influence index as
it now stands. Suppose that all of the informants in a city to whom
the list of fifteen groups and organizations was presented answered
that all of the groups on the list were essential to the success of a
local pollution control effort. Suppose that in another city every
respondent mentioned industry support as essentia,l to pollution control
but judged all of the remaining fourteen groups to be unimportant.
In both cities local industry would have received the same number
of "essential" votes, but it is clear that its influence in the first city
ought not to be regarded as equal to its influence in the second city.
In one town industry is perceived to be no more influential than any
other group; in the other, it is undeniably pre-eminent in the field of
pollution control. In other words, influence is relative, but the present
measure of industrial influence does not take that relativity into
account.
It is clear that in attempting to measure industrial influence on the
. air pollution issue, we must also take account of the influence that
other groups enjoy in this field. We must know not only how many
"essential" votes industry has received but also how many of these
votes have gone to other organizations on our list. In order to accom-
plish this, the perceived influence index has been modified in the
following way: for each city, the "essential" votes of all respondents
for all groups were summed up. Next, industry's share of this total
was computed as a percentage. The median share for industry was
15 per cent. Where industry's portion of the "essential" votes was
greater than this, it was considered to be highly influential on the
air pollution issue. Where industry's portion was 15 per cent or less,
it was judged to have relatively little influence.
It should be apparent that the index has not been used to make
any exact measures of industrial influence. It allows us oilly to dis-
tinguish between "high" and "low" industrial influence. The reason,
quite simply, is that the index is probably not a reliable indicator of
any finer variations in power. No claim is made for it as an exact
and final solution to the problem of measuring influence. Like other
uses of the reputational method, it is probably best regarded as little
more than "a systematic first step in studying a city's political system
rather than a comprehensive technique of discovering the distribution
of power."lO Strictly speaking, the index does not even provide a
rough measure of indirect influence, but only of the reputation for
power. In order to establish the existence of indirect influence, it is
necessary to show not only that a particular person or group is per-
ceived to be influential, but that this perception' has somehow affected
the course of political events.
INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE AND THE GROWTH
OF THE POLLUTION ISSUE
Local polities in which industry is perceived to be highly influential
on the matter of air pollution control will be relatively impenetrable
to the dirty air issue-at least, that is the prediction one would be
inclined to make on the basis of Gary's experience. Local political
actors, it might be argued, will have no difficulty in perceiving that
the resolution of the dirty air debate may be quite costly for local
industrial corporations. If they also perceive that industry is politically
powerful, they will hesitate even to initiate the debate. In statistical
terms, the hypothesis is simply that, if we control for variations in
locd pollution levels, we will find a negative association between the
index of perceived industrial influence and each of the various indi-
cators of the issue-ness of dirty air. The correlation coefficients,
10 Ibid., p. 637.
TABLE IV-2: PERCEIVED INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE AND THE ISSUE-NESS OF AIR POLLU-
TION, CONTROLLING FOR SUSPENDED PARTICULATE LEVEL
Industrial influence on air
pollution
-.11
(45)
Commerce Council
-.01
(46)
-.09
(44)
Political
Parties
-.15
(45)
presented in Table IV-2, show that when this is done there is a
general negative association between industrial influence and the
issue-ness of air pollution, but most of the relationships are very
weak. Industry's reputation for power does not appear to make any
substantial difference for the life chances of the dirty air issue.
But a closer look at the data tells a somewhat different story. The
cities of the sample were divided into two groups, those with above-
average scores on the suspended particulate index and those with
average or below-average scores. For each group a separate measure
of association for the relationship between industrial influence and the
issue-ness of air pollution was calculated, again controlling for the
exact level of air pollution. The results, given in Table IV-3, make
it readily apparent why the correlation coefficients in Table IV-2 were
so low. Newspaper positiontaking, for example, is negatively associ-
ated with industrial influence among the high-pollution cities, but
there is a slight positive
c
association between the two variables among
the low-pollution cities. In effect, one relationship cancels out the
other, and the result is a low over-all association between industrial
influence and newspaper positiontaking, as was seen in Table IV-2.
The same kind of canceling-out process appears to have occurred for
each of the othe,.r issue-ness indicators.
TABLE IV-3: INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE AND THE ISSUE-NESS OF AIR POLLUTION, CON-
TROLLING FOR SUSPENDED PARTICULATE LEVEL
Newspaper Chamber Labor Political
of Council Parties
Commerce
High-pOllution
Industrial cities -.34 -.23 +.07 +.03
influence on (18) (18) (18) (17)
air pollution Low-pollution
cities +.05 +.30 -.24 -.36
(27) (28) (26) (28)
The statistical explanation for the findings is not difficult, but a
substantive explanation is no easy matter. The only thing that is clear
is that the impact of industrial influence upon the issue-ness of air
pollution turns out to be much more complex than anticipated. In
heavily polluted cities industrial influence does seem to operate as a
deterrent to the growth of the political issue, but its deterrent effects
do not extend to all of the local organizations which appear in the
issue-ness scale. The positiontaking activities of local newspapers and
Chambers of Commerce do seem to be inhibited by industrial in-
fluence; the activities of local labor councils and political parties do
not. Because the indicators of organizational position taking have been
ranked in a scale, it is possible to locate the impact of industrial
influence not only with respect to various community organizations
but also within the life history of the dirty air issue. We know that
positiontaking by newspapers and Chambers of Commerce tends to
occur at an earlier stage in the development of the issue than does
positiontaking by labor councils and political parties.u The suscepti-
bility of the former to industrial influence therefore suggests that, in
heavily polluted cities, industry's reputation for power is brought to
bear on the dirty air debate at a relatively early period in its develop-
ment. In the low-pollution cities, industrial influence also appears
to retard the development of the issue, but the deterrent effect is felt
only at a relatively late stage. Here labor councils and political parties
(but not newspapers or Chambers of Commerce) are vulnerable to
industry's inhibiting influence. In short, where air pollution is rela-
tively severe, industrial influence tends to inhibit the early growth of
the dirty air issue. Where pollution is less severe, industrial influence
tends to block the later development of the issue.
The earlier consideration of the costs and benefits of pollution
control supplies at least the hint of an explanation for this pattern.
It was predicted that local industry would be likely to attempt to
prevent the emergence of the dirty air issue because pollution control
might be costly for manufacturers. No attempt was made to take
account of variations in its cost, however. It was implicitly assumed
that the burden imposed on industry by dirty air regulations would
be roughly the same everywhere, which is obviously unrealistic. There
is good reason to believe that the expenses of pollution control weigh
more heavily on industrial corporations in cities where pollution itself
is. heavy. The level of activity in a community is associated
WIth level of pollutIOn.' 12 reflecting the obvious fact that industry
contr!butes . to. that pollutIOn. Where the air is highly polluted, in-
are likely to be high, and the cost of controlling
IS lIkely to. be both relatively large and relatively obvious. Thus
the of quickly becomes relevant to the political life
of the P?llutlOn Its impact is evident during the early stages
of the development. In low-pollution cities, where the costs of
emissions are likely to be lower, the inhibiting
of mdust:lal power reputations does not become evident
until. a later stage m the growth of the issue. If this is the case it
remams unclear why, in heavily polluted cities, industrial
should cease to affect the development of the dirty air debate in its
stages-why, if the issue can survive its early days, industrial
mfluence become irrelevant to its further development.
thIS phenomenon has something to do not with the costs
?f pollutIon control, but with its perceived benefits. Its benefits, like
Its can be to vary with the severity of pollution. Where
aIr IS not .very to. begin with, little can be gained by cleaning
It, there IS relatively lIttle to sustain the issue in the face of clear
polItIcal obstacles. In high-pollution cities, on the other hand the
benefits of.cleaning the air will be relatively large. What is impo;tant,
of IS that these benefits be recognized by community residents
theIr leaders. That recognition may come only after the pollution
Issue has to emerge, after the attention of the community has
called to and general solutions have been proposed. At this
pomt the seventy of pollution itself may provide stimulus to the
growth of dirty air issue effective enough to override political
deterrents lIke industrial influence.
. In short, the peculiar pattern of negative associations that appear
III Table .IV-3 may be the result of a complex interaction between
the and the perceived benefits of pollution control. In
low-pollutIOn cItIes the costs to industry of pollution control are likely
to be small, and, as a result, perceived industrial influence does not
prevent the issue from taking root. Once the pollution problem has
brought to the community'S attention, however, its ability to
elIcIt a broad response is diminished by the very fact that local pol-
12 The correlation coefficient for the association between the proportion of the
!ocal work force employed in manufacturing and the level of suspended particulates
IS +.25.
lution conditions are not especially serious, and the perceived benefits
of pollution regulation are relatively small. In high-pollution cities
just the opposite conditions hold. Pollution control is likely to impose
relatively heavy costs upon local industry, and those costs will prob-
ably be obvious to local political actors. Perceived industrial influence
will therefore be an immediate obstacle. Once the dirty air issue has
become established, however, its growth prospects are enhanced by
the severity of local pollution. Having once been called to the atten-
tion of the community, the issue is not so easily forgotten.
E. E. Schattschneider calls attention to phenomena of this kind
when he points out that the course of a political conflict is largely
determined by its scope. The balance of forces in a dispute is de-
cisively affected by the extent to which the "audience" becomes
involved in it.
13
In the present case, it appears that the introduction of
the dirty air issue into a heavily polluted city may mobilize the audi-
ence more effectively than its introduction into a low-pollution city.
The result is a subsequent difference in the balance of forces which
are at work in the dirty air issue. In low-pollution cities industrial
influence tips the balance during the later stages of the issue's
ment; in high-pollution cities it does not. .
This interpretation suffers from all the uncertainties that go with
any post hoc rationalization of empirical findings. The data are not
sufficient to establish the general accuracy of the explanation. Per-
haps its greatest merit is that it is theoretically parsimonious. The same
kinds of considerations that produced the original prediction about
industrial influence and the issue-ness of air pollution have provided
the materials necessary to modify that prediction. We have not had
to discard the framework of anticipated costs and benefits. Even so,
the explanation must remain a provisional one. The only conclusion
that is well justified is this: industrial influence does inhibit the growth
of the air pollution issue, but the nature of this inhibiting effect de-
pends upon the actual level of pollution.
There is other evidence that supports this conclusion. The respond-
ents were asked not only whether their own organizations had taken
positions on dirty air but also whether any people in their com-
munities had "taken sides" on the matter. Their responses to this
question and others were discussed above in an attempt to find out
what patterns of political activity emerge in conjunction with the air
13 Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People, pp. 1-2.
issue. We can use those responses now to construct an
addItIOnal n:easure for the issue-ness of dirty air, more precisely, a
measure of Its perceived issue-ness.
. "Taking sides" is just the sort of activity that we have identified
With the. emergence ?f a political issue. When local informants say
that their fellow reSidents have taken sides on dirty air they a
. . ' re
reportmg, m effect, that the subject of air pollution has crossed the
of the political system. They perceive that it has become
an Issue. We would expect that perceptions of this kind would occur
frequently in cities where industrial influence is high than where
It IS. low. That. is modified somewhat by the previous
that vanatl.ons m actual pollution levels have something to
do With the operation of industrial influence. In high-pollution cities
the efficacy of industrial influence appears to be restricted to the early
days of the dirty air debate.
. It is this "early" influence that we would expect to be most evident
m the p:esent case. When we try to find out whether anyone in a
commumty has taken sides on dirty air, what we are attempting is a
measurement of the issue-ness of air pollution. The previous
findmgs suggest that only in high-pollution cities does industrial in-
fluence tend .to bar the threshold of the political system against the
entry the Issue. Only in high-pollution cities, therefore, should we
find eVidence that industrial influence has a substantial effect upon the
answ.ers our questions about people taking sides on
dirty .al:. In fact, m high-pollution cities there was a strong negative
(r = - .61) between the measures of local industrial
mfluence on the air pollution issue and the number of informants in
a. who reported that their fellow residents had taken sides on
aIr. In the low-pollution cities there was a weak positive associa-
(r = + .15) between industrial influence and "perceived
Issue-ness. "
DIRECT VS. INDIRECT INFLUENCE
. So far, the evidence indicates that the distribution of perceived
mfluence within a local political system has something to do with the
penetrability of th.at system. Where industrial corporations are thought
to be powerful m the matter of anti-pollution policy,. either the
emergence or the growth of the dirty air issue is likely to be hindered.
The obvious conclusion is that industry's reputation for power reduces
the viability of the air pollution issue, but before we can make that
inference, it is important to know just what part of industry's power
reputation we have been examining-whether it is, in Polsby's words,
"that part which is justified by behavior" or the "part which is not
so justified."
If it is industry's "unjustified" power reputation that prevents the
air pollution issue from flowering, then we have established that
manufacturing corporations enjoy indirect influence in the matter
of pollution control. Like U.S. Steel in Gary, they can diminish the
survival prospects of the dirty air issue without taking action on it.
In this case, industry's reputation for power, unsupported by acts of
power, would be sufficient to inhibit the efforts of would-be air pol-
lution policymakers. There is another possibility, however. Perhaps
what we have been regarding as industry's reputation for power on
the air pollution issue is really a simple and direct reflection of actions
that it has taken. In other words, the reputation may be "justified by
behavior." In this case, it might be argued, industry'S reputation for
power is not the real obstacle to the emergence of the air pollution
issue. The actions that lie behind that reputation are the things that
deter the emergence of the dirty air debate. In short, we have an
example of direct, not indirect, influence.
In order to find out whether political action was the source of
industry's reputation, we asked several of our informants whether
they or other officers of their organizations had ever talked with
industrial executives about the air pollution problem. Conversation,
after all, is one form of political action, perhaps the most common
form, and a possible medium for the exercise of direct influence.
Through such conversations, industrial executives might dissuade
an informant's organization from taking a public position on air
pollution control. If talking to industrial executives actually had this
result, then it would be established that industry had exercised direct
influence to block the emergence of the air pollution issue. This
exercise of influence might also serve to enhance industry's reputation
for power in the matter of pollution control, thus accounting for the
negative relationship that exists between the perceived influence of
industry and the issue-ness of dirty air.
Two pieces of statistical evidence are necessary to sustain this
explanation. First, it must be shown that there is a positive association
between perceived industrial influence and the occurrence of con-
n
versations about pollution between our informants and industrial
executives. This statistical relationship could establish that industry's
power reputation in the pollution. field was a reflection of its actions
in this area. Second, industry's actions on air pollution must be shown
to be responsible for inhibiting the emergence of the dirty air issue.
We would need to show that organizations whose officers had dis-
cussed the air pollution problem with industry were less likely to take
positions on air pollution than those organizations whose officers had
not had these conversations.
The findings reported in Tables IV-4 and IV-5 show that the
evidence does not fulfill the requirements of the direct influence argu-
ment. The coefficients in Table IV-4 indicate that industry's partici-
pation in dirty air discussions with the editor of the largest newspaper
and the presidents of the Chamber of Commerce and labor council was
not positively associated with its reputation for power. In fact, there
were several cases in which industry's power reputation was negatively
associated with its participation in these discussions. The findings in
Table IV-5 show that, when representatives of industry did discuss
dirty air with the informants' organizations, it did not discourage
these community groups from taking a position on the issue. Industrial
participation in such discussions is positively associated with position-
taking in the pollution field.
Thus the survey evidence not only fails to support the direct in-
fluence argument but pretty consistently contradicts this line of
explanation. The data show that industry's perceived influence is not
a reflection of its actions. If any aspect of industrial behavior under-
lies industry's power reputation, it is industrial inaction, as was the
case in Gary. That much is suggested by the negative correlation
coefficients in Table IV-4. They indicate that where industry remains
silent on the dirty air issue, it is likely to be thought of as highly
TABLE IV-4: PERCEIVED INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE AND OCCURRENCE OF CONVERSA-
TIONS WITH INDUSTRIAL EXECUTIVES ABOUT AIR POLLUTION, CONTROLLING FOR
SUSPENDED PARTICULATE LEVEL
Newspaper Chamber of Labor Council
Talked with Commerce Talked with
Industry Talked with Industry
Industry
Perceived High-pollution cities -.44 +.10 -.05
industrial (18) (18) (18)
influence Low-pollution cities -.06 +.25 -.34
(26) (27) (25)
TABLE IV-5: CONVERSATIONS WITH INDUSTRIAL EXECUTIVES ABOUT AIR POLLUTION
AND TAKING A POSITION ON AIR POLLUTION, CONTROLLING FOR SUSPENDED PAR-
TICULATE LEVEL
Newspaper Chamber of Labor Council
Took Position Commerce Took Position
Took Position
High-pollution cities +.32 +.51 +.44
Talked to (18) (18) (18)
industry Low-pollution cities +.39 +.45 +.45
(26) (27) (25)
influential in the pollution field. We might conclude that industry's
power reputation in anti-pollution matters tends to be an "unjustified"
one, and, since that is the case, it follows that the neglect of the air
pollution issue is largely a consequence of industr,y's indirect influence,
not its direct influence. The mere reputation for power, unsupported
by acts of power, has been sufficient to inhibit the emergence of the
dirty air issue.
The survey evidence also indicates that, where industrial action
does occur, it does not prevent the expansion of the dirty air debate.
Here again, industrial inaction appears to be the critical factor. The
positive coefficients in Table IV-5 indicate that when industry speaks
up on the matter of dirty air, the growth prospects of the air pollution
issue are enhanced. It follows that when industry remains silent about
dirty air, the life chances of the pollution issue are likely to be
diminished.
Industrial behavior may deserve some place in the attempt to
account for the neglect of the dirty air issue, but it is industrial in-
action and not industrial action that proves to be the critical form of
behavior. Perceived industrial influence, industrial inaction, and the
neglect of the dirty air issue go together, although it is difficult to say
exactly how. We might maintain, for example, that industrial inaction
is a simple by-product of the neglect of the dirty air issue. Where
industry's influence has enforced inaction on the air pollu-
tion issue, manufacturing executives, like everyone else, have little to
say about the problem. On the other hand, it may be that industry's
inaction is an important link in the relationship between perceived
industrial influence and the neglect of the air ponution issue. There is
some support for this line of argument in the Gary case history, where
U.S. Steel's silence on the matter appears to have been a major source
of frustration to promoters of the air pollution issue because they per-
ceived that the company's inaction was a critical obstacle to the
developmen: of dirty air debate: "If only there had been a fight,
then somethmg mIght have been accomplished."
U.S. could afford to remain inactive on the pollution issue
because Its power. reputation deterred others from contributing to
the growth of the Issue. So long as the maturation of the dirty air
debate. COUld. be retarded, there was no need for industry to take
defenSive actIOn against the anticipated costs of a pollution control
program. As long as industry took no defensive action, the issue was
stalle? at a. very early stage of its development. It appears that in-
dustn.al action or "neutrality" may serve as a strategic device for
blockmg the emergence of the air pollution issue, but it is a device
that be used successfully only when industry enjoys an impressive
reputatIOn for power. In effect, the possession of indirect influence
permits industry to refrain from exercising its direct influence. In
East industry's "unjustified" power reputation was apparently
not suffiCient to halt the emergence of the issue, and industrialists
were compelled to take to the field as political activists in order to
protect themselves from the possibility of excessive pollution control
When they did, they naturally hastened the development of the
Issue.
INDIRECT INFLUENCE AND DEMOCRACY
. :0 say that influence has contributed to the impenetra-
bilIty of local polItical systems is implicitly to .assert that it has pre-
the politi.cal process from accurately reflecting the concerns
of Speci?cally, t.he assumption is that local residents really
are by air pollution and that industry's reputation for power
from expressing that irritation. But it may be that
cities m Illdustry enjoys a reputation for power also happen
to have reSidents who are relatively indifferent to the quality of the
air breathe. !"s a matter of fact, there may be more than a
fortUitous connectIOn between public indifference and industrial in-
fluence. One might argue that only where the public is unconcerned
about air is it for local industry to enjoy a reputation
for power III the pollutIOn field. Industry may receive its prominence
by default because local residents have failed to take an interest in
the pollution problem. Obviously, such public indifference may also
lead to the neglect of the dirty air issue. The statistical connection
that we have observed between industrial influence and the neglect
of the dirty air issue may have appeared only because they were both
dependent upon the same third factor, the character of public opinion
and interest. If this were the case, it could no longer be asserted that
industrial influence obstructed the entry of the issue into local politics
because there was really nothing to obstruct-no movement to be
resisted, no pressure to be counteracted. Industry's apparent ability
to prevent air pollution from becoming a key political issue could be
explained away by the fact that, in cities where industry was perceived
to be influential, dirty air was simply not a matter of public concern.
In order to decide whether this explanation is accurate, it is neces-
sary to know something about the level of popular interest in the
dirty air problem. If the explanation is a sound one, then there should
be a positive relationship between popular indifference and industrial
influence, and public indifference should also be associated with the
neglect of the issue. If we find these two things, we will also find a
third: when we control for popular interest in the dirty air problem
the relationship originally observed between industrial influence and
the issue-ness of air pollution will tend to disappear. In effect, its
disappearance is the sign that the statistical connection between .
industrial influence and issue-ness merely reflected the fact that both
these things are dependent upon the control variable, public opinion.
Unfortunately, the evidence necessary to conduct this test of the
relationship between industry's power reputation and the neglect of
the dirty air issue is not available, since it has been impossible to
collect information about public opinion in all the sample cities. How-
ever, some data concerning public attitudes toward air pollution in
one city, St. Louis, are available. The factors, in addition to air pol-
lution itself, that helped to determine whether or not a citizen felt
that dirty air was bothersome were discussed in Chapter I, where the
age, income, education, and race of the respondents were shown to
be the most important. The St. Louis findings suggest that these four
items, as well as the actual level of pollution, can serve us as rough
substitutes for direct measures of public opinion about dirty air. By
controlling for each of them, along with a measure of actual pollution,
we can attempt to control for the local level of public concern about
air polIution.
H
In each of the four sections of Table IV-6 one of the
14 Normally, it would be desirable to control for pollution levels and ~ e four
population characteristics simultaneously. In the present c ~ s e , that strategy IS prob-
ably an undesirable one. The problem here is that we have few cases but many
variables. This combination teIlrts to inflate correlation coeflicients.
TABLE IV-6: PERCEIVED INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE AND THE ISSUE-NESS OF AIR POLLU-
nON, CONTROLLING FOR SUSPENDED PARTICULATE LEVEL AND SELECTED POPULATION
CHARACTERISTIC
Population Characteristic
Held Constant
Newspapers Chamber of Labor Political
Median education
High-pollution cities -.32 -.28 +.01 -.14
(18) (18) (18) (17)
Low-pollution cities
+.08 +.30 -.14 -.35
Median income
(27) (28) (26) (28)
High-pollution cities -.32 -.21 +.10 +.07
(18) (18) (18) (17)
Low-pollution cities
+.09 +.25 -.19 -.40
Median age
(27) (28) (26) (28)
High-pollution cities -.34 -.23 +.08 +.03
(18) (18) (18). (17)
Low-pollution cities +.05 +.34 -.24 -.35
Percentage non-white
(27) (28) (26) (28)
High-pollution cities -.35 -.22 +.08 .01
(18) (18) (18) (17)
Low-pollution cities +.05 +.28 -.23 -.39
(27) (28) (26) (28)
four popUlation characteristics has been held constant, as has the level
of suspended particulates. The results show that when relevant demo-
graphic factors are introduced as control variables, the pattern of
association between industrial influence and issue-ness does not dis-
solve. The introduction of these controls makes only a very few note-
worthy differences for the nature or strength of this relationship. This
finding does not prove that public opinion has no effect upon the
efficacy of perceived industrial influence, but it does indicate that
popular sentiment about air .pollution probably does little to soften
the impact of industry's reputation for power.
INDIRECT INFLUENCE AND PLURALISM
It is presumably a sign of the pluralism of local politics that the
distribution of influence within one issue-area is seldom reproduced
exactly within others. Though local industry may figure prominently
in the pollution field, its power will not necessarily extend to matters
of urban renewal or local bond referenda or municipal elections. The
converse is also true. Industrial influence in urban renewal or bond
referenda or elections is not necessarily accompanied by industrial
influence in the pollution field. The survey evidence is consistent with
the presence of this variability in the distribution of influence. The
findings reported in Table N-1 showed that perceived industrial
influence varies widely from one issue-area to another. Pluralist
theory anticipates these results.
But pluralist theory would not lead us to expect that industrial
influence in urban renewal or in other matters might be relevant for
the course of political events in the pollution field. Yet it is certainly
not outlandish to suppose that such transfers of influence do occur.
Would-be pollution activists, though not directly confronted by the
perception of industrial power, may be deterred from taking action
against dirty air because they are apprehensive about coping with
industry in matters of urban renewal or municipal bond referenda or
in any field where industry does have a reputation for power. If this
were the case, it would be possible for industry to affect the course of
pollution politics even though it enjoyed neither a reputation for
power nor any direct influence within the pollution field itself. An
industrial reputation for power established in matters of urban renewal
or in municipal bond referenda or elsewhere could cast its shadow
across the politics of air pollution. Where industry enjoys a reputation
for power in some fields besides air pollution, it may more effectively
influence the life chances of the dirty air issue than if it had to rely
exclusively on its reputation in the pollution field. To the extent that
power reputations are transferable in this way from one issue-area to
another, the apparent pluralism of local politics would be diminished.
The independence of each policymaking area would be reduced, as
would the political significance of variations, from one policy making
region to the next, in the distribution of direct influence.
The survey evidence indicates that, to some extent, transfers of
influence from one issue-area to another actually do occur. Industry's
reputation for power in urban renewal, mayoral elections, municipal
bond referenda, and school board appointments was gauged in just
the same way used earlier to measure its perceived influence in the
pollution field. Several of these othet measures of industrial influence
turned out to be associated with the issue-ness of air pollution, and
these associations were independent of the one observed earlier be-
tween industry's reputation for power in pollution matters and the
life chances of the dirty air issue. In other words, perceived industrial
influence in urban renewal or mayoral elections or bond referenda
TABLE IV-7: PERCEIVED INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE IN SELECTED ISSUE-AREAS AND TIIE
ISSUE-NESS OF AIR POLLUTION, CONTROLLING FOR SUSPENDED PARTICULATE LEVEL
AND PERCEIVED INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE ON TIfE AIR POLLUTION ISSUE
Issue-Area Issue-ness Scale Item
Newspaper Chamber of Labor Political
Urban renewal
High-pollution cities - .17 -.58 -.24 +.01
(18) (18) (18) (17)
Low-pollution cities -.12 +.28 -.08 -.08
(27) (28) (26) (28)
Municipal bond referenda
High-pollution cities -.23 -.40 -.20 +.17
(17) (17) (17) (16)
Low-pollution cities .38 -.04 +.03 -.28
(27) (28) (26) (28)
School board appointments
High-pollution cities -.07 -.45 -.05 +.22
(18) (18) (18) (17)
Low-pollution cities -.02 +.04 +.11 +.40
(27) (28) (26) (28)
Mayoral elections
High-pollution cities +.13 -.34 -.07 +.16
(18) (18) (18) (17)
Low-pollution cities +.17 +.31 +.07 -.02
(27) (28) (26) (28)
subtracts something more from the life chances of the dirty air issue
than is subtracted by industry's reputation for power in the pollution
field alone. The relevant partial correlation coefficients are presented
in Table N-7, where not only the level of suspended particulates
but also the index of perceived industrial power on the dirty air issue
were held constant. If industrial reputations for power are transferable
to the pollution field from other issue-areas, then the resulting partial
correlation coefficients should be negative. Some of them are. It is
evident, as it was earlier, that perceived industrial influence does
operate to obstruct the emergence of the pollution issue, but only
under certain conditions. It is primarily in the high-pollution cities,
where the costs of pollution control are likely to be high, that
industry's perceived power appears to be regularly transferable to
the pollution field from other areas. Not all types of industrial in-
fluence are equally relevant to the life chances of the dirty air issue,
however. The pollution issue appears to be more Vulnerable to
industry's reputation for power in the field of urban renewal and in
bond referenda than to its reputation in mayoral elections or in
school board appointments. To put it more abstractly, industry's
reputation for power seems to be most effective when it arises in a
policy-area that involves the distribution of material resources, rather
than in the appointment of government personnel.
CONCLUSION
It should come as no great surprise that the political power of
polluters operates to diminish the survival and growth prospects of
the pollution issue. Anyone who bothers to reflect on the political
sources of inaction in the pollution field could probably predict these
findings, but very few investigators have thought it worth while to
inquire about the political origins of political inaction. The evidence,
then, provides some fairly obvious answers to a not-so-obvious
question. The question has been overlooked, in part, because of a
conviction that the sources of political neglect are not themselves
political. It has been maintained that, if citizens really are bothered
by some local problem, no politically imposed inhibitions will bar
the conversion of their private discontents into a public issue. The
visible heterogeneity of local politics is thought to assure that the
polity will not overlook genuine citizen concerns; diversity, it is
argued, is a sign of responsiveness to diverse interests. But the findings
of this study indicate that this heterogeneity is not all that it has
appeared to be. The visible fragmentation of political power among
issue-areas does not necessarily obstruct the exercise of indirect in-
fluence across issue-areas. This means, among other things, that
influence established in one issue may operate to prevent another,
emergent issue from securing its place in the sun. The operation of
indirect influence thus undermines the apparent pluralism of local
politics by reducing the independence of one issue-area from another
and prevents the enrichment of even this diluted pluralism by im-
posing restrictions on the emergence of new issues and issue-areas.
Uncovering these restrictive operations of indirect influence has
demonstrated that political neglect is not a politically random phe-
nomenon, at least where the air pollution issue is concerned. In this
field, an element of political consistency in the occurrence of ,non-
decisionmaking has been found. If non-decisionmaking is not a
politically random occurrence, then decisionmaking cannot be politi-
cally random either. It follows that any investigation of community
affairs which confines itself to the, study of decisionmaking events
will have founded its research conclusions upon a politically biased
sample of phenomena. The bias is a serious one. Suppose for ex-
ample, that this investigation of pollution politics had been ;estricted
to those in which the dirty air problem had developed into what
t?e pluralists have called a "key political issue," towns where pollu-
had been a potent stimulus to decisionmaking activity. The find-
Illgs that these towns would tend to be ones in which industry's
reputatIOn for power was relatively puny. Evidence from these cities
woul.d provide. unsound foundation for inferences about industry's
role III the politICS of air pollution.
A similar bias, can infuse more general conclusions about com-
munity was pointed out earlier that the penetrability of
local polItICS IS lIkely to be exaggerated by investigators Who confine
their attentions to those political issues which have stimulated
decisionmaking activity. These issues, after all, are precisely the ones
that have succeeded in penetrating local politics, and. the study of
these penetrations alone will understandably lead to the
C?nclUSIOn . that the boundaries of the political system are easily
pIerced. It IS necessary to consider the politically unsuccessful as well
as the politically successful issues, political inaction as well as action.
by themselves, are probably misleading guides to political
alone, they fully reveal neither the impenetrability of local
polItIcs ?or the of political power. We have already seen
some eVIdence, for mstance, that there is a disjunction between in-
dustry'S political actions and its political influence and that the mere
perce?tion of industrial power, unsupported by industrial actions, is
suffiCIent to affect the survival prospects of the pollution issue. Of
industry's reputation for power is not the only political factor
on the of the issue depends. Some of the other political
determmants WIll be considered in the next chapter.
V Political Parties and the Pollution Issue
Industry's reputation for power has proved to be a useful explanatory
variable, but a mysterious one. We know that it can help to make
political inaction a more comprehensible phenomenon, but industry's
reputation for power itself remains fundamentally incomprehensible.
Perceived industrial influence in the pollution field does not grow, as
one would expect, from industry'S actions in this area. For that reason,
it may be argued, there is something arbitrary or unjustified in the
informants' perceptions of industrial influence. To say that the life
chances of the dirty air issue are dependent upon industry'S power
reputation may mean only that they are related in a systematic way
to the random imaginings of our respondents.
Yet these imaginings do. have tangible political effects, and it
would be a mistake to dismiss them as phantoms. What is more, they
are not random. Certain kinds of cities appear to provide especially
congenial environments for industrial power reputations. Where local
elections are partisan, for example, industry is more likely to qualify
as highly influential on the pollution issue than in towns where they
are non-partisan (r = + .33). Cities without civil service regulations
also appear to be hospitable breeding grounds for industrial power
reputations. Where major municipal employee groups remain outside
the coverage of civil service laws, industry is more likely to be
regarded as highly influential than in towns where city bureaucrats
are civil service employees (r = + .33). In short, industry's reputa-
tion for power tends to flourish where local government bears some
of the formal earmarks of traditional machine politics-where local
133
candidates for office carry partisan labels and municipal jobs are
legally available for distribution as patronage.
l
There are several possible explanations for this affinity between
industrial influence and the characteristic signs of machine politics.
Industrial influence, we might argue, is likely to be substantial where
industrial operations are extensive. Such operations presuppose a
local labor force that is largely blue-collar, and blue-collar populations
have .traditionally been inclined toward machine politics-hence the
relationship between industrial influence and the formal trappings of
the machine.
The trouble with this plausible explanation is that the data do not
support it. It is true that industrial influence and blue-collar popula-
tions tend to go together. The larger the blue-collar fraction of a
town's labor force, the greater the likelihood that industry will be
highly influential on the pollution issue, but the connection is so weak
(r = + .08) that it cannot carry the weight of our argument. It is
necessary to look for some alternative explanations.
Alternative explanations are not hard to find, but they suffer from
old age. More than fifty years ago Lincoln Steffens, Moise Ostro-
gorski/ and other observers of American urban affairs perceived that
there was a symbiotic relationship between big business and the
political machine. Businessmen, it was argued, sought special privi-
leges from local governments-low tax assessments, franchises,
licenses, and favors of all sorts. Of course, they were not unique in
this respect. Most organized groups seek concessions of some kind
from governmental authorities. What distinguished the businessmen
were the large monetary rewards which they could offer for the ful-
fillment of their political desires. In effect, these capitalists sought to
extend the incentive system of business to politics, and the appearance
of the political machine signaled their success. Its distinguishing
characteristic as a political organization was its extensive use of
specific, material incentives to maintain the reliability of its em-
ployees." Private business organizations provided the wherewithal to
sustain the machine; the machine used these resources to secure con-
1 It should be pointed out that partisanship and patronage are not the only
manifestations of machine politics. A third characteristic of the. machine is its
ability to control the party primary (see Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson,
City Politics, p. 117). Unfortunately, it was not possible to collect sufficient primary
election data to test for machine control of the primaries.
2 Lincoln Steffens, AlIIobiography, chap. 27; Moise Ostrogorski, Democracy alld
the Party System ill the Ullited States, pp. 268-80.
" Banfield and Wilson, Cit)' Politics, p. 115.
POLITICAL PARTIES AND POLLUTION 135
trol of government; the businessmen were repaid with the privileges
that they desired.
Under such an arrangement, the incentive system of the machine
would make the polity particularly responsive to the wishes of busi-
ness. In the field of pollution control, for example, the machine
polity would be especially receptive to the demands of local industry,
and this special receptivity might account for the fact that industrial
influence in the pollution field and the formal traits of machine politics
tend to appear in tandem. This, at least, is the explanation that
Steffens or Ostrogorski would probably have favored.
But the conclusions of Steffens and Ostrogorski are founded upon
the observation of urban political institutions as they existed more
than half a century ago, and, by all accounts, urban affairs have
undergone a substantial change since then. Today, it is held, business-
men rarely distribute their riches among local politicians. In fact,
many who built their enterprises with the assistance of the machine
subsequently became the backers of local reform movements, at-
tracted by the prospect of a stable, predictable, and professional
municipal bureaucracy.' The view is widely held that the old con-
nection between local business and the machine has been weakened
substantially, if not severed; it is therefore peculiar that we shOUld
continue to find some fairly strong hints that the old pattern of defer-
ence still persists. Perhaps what we have found is only a cultural
vestige of a bygone political arrangement: the material connection
between business and the machine may have withered, but the political
perceptions that it engendered have survived. There is reason to
believe, however, that the deference of machine polities to industrial
interests is based on something more substantial than a memory, at
least where the air pollution issue is concerned. It is not the cash
contribution of the industrialist that maintains this deference but the
party organization's way of doing business and the nature of that
business. In order to understand why this is the case, it is necessary to
give these matters rather extensive consideration.
THE POLITICAL PARTY AS A BROKERAGE OPERATION
In spite of its abuses, the traditional machine performed an im-
portant political function. In order to provide his businessmen-clients
Ibid., p. 265.
b
with the privileges and protection that they demanded; the political
boss had to establish control over the city government. IIi 'most cities
the formal apparatlis of government was (and still is) a rather dis-
jointed affair, sometimes paralyzed by the constitutional decentraliza-
tion of formal authority. The boss and his machine overcame this
fragmentation. Behind a constitutional fa<;ade they attempted to
establish a more centralized, orderly, and informal government; and
urban party organizations are still engaged in this task.
Neither the traditional machine nor its modern counterpart have
attempted to achieve the desired consolidation of influence by lining
up adherents behind a charismatic leader or a popular ideology. They
proceed more quietly, by "purchasing" small pieces of influence and
authority from the people who own them. These purchases are often
made with no specific use, no policy or ideological commitment, in
mind. The party boss, according to Banfield and Wilson, is merely a
broker in the power business, and "much of what the political broker
gathers up is on speculation: he does not know exactly how it will
be used, but he is confident that someone will need a large block of
power."5 Someone is sure to find that the fractionation of local
authority obstructs the achievement of a desired objective.
The boss obviously needs resources to make such purchases of
power. In the heyday of the machine he seems to have relied heavily
on cash and patronage, but it is generally acknowledged that munici-
pal reform and the loss of businessmen-clients have caused a con-
siderable shrinkage in his supply of these inducements. Today, he
must acquire his purchasing power from alternative sources, and it is
public policy that generates the new political currency. The party
leader uses the costs and benefits of public policy to purchase bits of
influence.
6
Not all public policies have an equal exchange value for the party
leader. Their worth will naturally vary with the magnitude of the costs
and benefits that they create. But it is also important to take account
5 Ibid., p. 104.
6 One interesting possibility that arises from these considerations is that the
federal government, through its urban grant and subsidy programs, may be providing
a large part of the resouq:es that now sustain the operations of party politicians. These
federally funded programs, though they seldom yield much in the way of traditional
patronage, may supply politicians with reservoirs of policy costs and benefits, which
can be used to "purchase" bits of influence. Of course, a broker can purchase power
only from people who already have it. If left to his own devices, he is therefore
likely to dispense federal largesse to those who are already influential in his com-
munity. He is not likely to use federal programs to achieve any significant redistri-
bution of local political power.
of the nature of those costs and benefits. In general, "collective"
benefits will be less valuable to the party leader than "specific" bene-
fits. Clean air is an excellent exampleofa collective benefit, collective
because there is no way to control or restrict its distribution among
the residents of a city. If the local Derriocrats get clean air, they
cannot deny its use to Republicans or Independents. Collective bene-
fits are indivisible and cannot be captured by any social grouping
whose membership does not- inchide the whole community. The dis-
tinguishing quality of these benefits is' that "they must be available to
everyone if they are available to anyone;'"
There are two reasons why control over collective benefits does
not give the' influence broker as much purchasing power as control
over specific benefits. Because collective benefits must be available
to everyone in' a community, there is no way to' restrict their distri-
bution to people who have paid for them; It is understandablethat
many people-perhaps most people-would like to be included
among those who receive without paying. People who own pieces of
influence, therefore,' will not readily exchange them for collective
benefits. It is more profitable to be a freeloader. Nevertheless, there
are some people who' ignore narrow considerations of personal profit
and willingly pay for the enjoyment of collective benefits. In return
for a promise of clean air, for example, they may voluntarily sur-
render their time, 'energy, votes; money, or influence. Their willing-
ness to make these sacrifices in return for a collective good, as
Mancur Olson has pointed out,S cannot be attributed to the desire for
material profit alone. Devotion to principle, program, ideology, or a
sense of public obIlgation probably plays some part in the behavior
of most clean air advocates. Their precise motivations need not con-
cern us for the present. The important thing to note is that they sur-
render the influence that they possess in return for a combination of
material benefits (clean air) and non-material inducements (moral
or ideological' gratifications). An influence broker might conceivably
buy the influence of these program- or principle-oriented people by
simply committing himself to their "collective'" objective, thus giving
them the ideological or moral gratifications that they desire in addition
to the material benefit of clean air. But influence that is purchased
in this way is not the kind that is likely to be most useful to an
influence broker. It must certainly be counted as a political asset,: but
, Mancur Olson, The Logic 0/ Collective Actiol/, p. 14.
S Ibid., pp. 10-11.
it is not an especially fluid asset because the broker's title to it is
likely to be encumbered with non-material commitments.
The second reason why collective benefits are not especially useful
to influence brokers, then, is that they are not fluid. Fluid assets are
essential to a brokerage operation, Resources acquired in one trans-
action must be used in other tr;msactions to acquire still more valuable
resources. The influence broker overcomes the fragmentation of local
influence by assembling bits and pieces of power that he has
purchased in a variety of political transactions and applying them to
a single political objective. A politician who extends a favor in the
field of urban renewal, for example, may demand repayment in the
form of support for a municipal bond issue. In this way, he makes
himself useful to those who have a stake in the achievement of a
political objective and "purchases" their labor and support for any
subsequent political enterprises which he may undertake.
Influence purchased with collective benefits will not exhibit the
kind of fluidity that is essential for these transactions. It will tend
to be tied to a relatively restricted range of principles, policies, or
objectives." Outside this range, the influence sellers will not receive
the moral or ideological gratifications that were part of the original
purchase price. Once the:e inducements are withdrawn, the sales
contract is broken, and the sellers are likely to withdraw their sup-
port. A political leader whose assets are tied down by moral or
ideological commitments will therefore find it difficult to behave like
an influence broker, and a leader who "purchases" support with
collective benefits is likely to find himself in just such a situation.
A leader who dispenses specific benefits in exchange for pieces of
influence is much more likely to maintain the fluidity of his political
holdings. His title to these assets is likely to be less encumbered
because the people who surrender their influence in return for specific
benefits need not be paid off with non-material inducements such as
programmatic or ideological commitments. A desire for personal profit
is sufficient to make people respond to specific benefits, and this is
why influence purchased with these benefits is a more fluid, political
asset than influence purchased with collective benefits. It can be
applied to political projects in which the seller has no interest or
commitment. The practice of log-roIling depends on this kind of
fluidity and provides a good illustration of what it means for political
9 See James Q. Wilson and Peter Clark, "Incentive Systems: A Theory of
Organization."
assets to be fluid. A log-roller creates political obligations by bestowing
specific benefits on other political actors. Later, he can call in these
political debts on behalf of enterprises to which the influence sellers
may be completely indifferent or even antagonistic. Log-rolling is an
operation that maximizes the convertibility of political assets. It
tends to prevail, as some observers have noted, where the political
stakes are highly specific, and this is probably no accident. '0
Because specific benefits have greater purchasing power than col-
lective benefits and because they yield more fluid political assets, they
are likely to be attractive to people who are influence brokers-in
American cities, usually the party politician. The preference for
specific benefits probably has much to do with his behavior. It may
explain, for example, why he usually purchases irifluence in bits and
pieces rather than in wholesale lots." It may help to account for some
of the policy preferences of party men. It has been noted, for instance,
that politicians tend to be antagonistic toward urban planning because
"the politician's way at the municipal level seems to be usually
slanted toward segmental approaches and special interests." 12 The
segmental bias is certainly more congenial to a specific than to a
collective incentive system.
The same kind of bias may be responsible for the connection that
we have observed between perceived industrial influence on the air
pollution issue and the formal characteristics of the machine. Be-
cause party organizations are not inclined toward collective benefits
we can expect that political machines will be relatively uninterested
in the benefits of pollution control policy. Clean air, a collective bene-
fit, will not add much to the resources that party influence brokers
require to sustain their political operations. On the other hand, the
costs of pollution control-its negative benefits-are clearly not of
the collective variety. It is not the case that if these costs fallon
anyone, they must fall on everyone. A large portion of them can be
"captured" by a group whose membership is quite limited. In short,
the costs of pollution control constitute a specific, negative benefit
of public policy that might be used to carry on the operations of a
political brokerage. These costs fall most noticeably on local industry,
and it is for that reason, perhaps, that a machine polity is more likely
10 Theodore Lowi, "American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies and Political
Theory."
11 Edward C. Banfield, Political Influence, pp. 241-42.
12 David WalJace, "Renaissance manship," p. 174.
Inn
than others to turn toward industry where the air pollution issue
is concerned. It is there that the politician's entrepreneurial oppor-
tunities lie. By manipulating the costs of pollution control, he may
be able to purchase the kind of influence that is most useful in over-
coming the formal fragmentation of urban authority.
The inclination toward industry is evident not only in machine
polities, but among party men generally. The findings reported in
Table V-I show political party chairmen more likely than most other
informants to perceive that industry would have an essential role in
any local anti-pollution efforts. It can be argued that this result re-
flects the interest of the party politician in maintaining or enhancing
the brokerage operations of his organization. He turns toward in-
dustry in the matter of pollution control because it is there that he
can use specific inducements to acquire relatively fluid political assets.
Of course the "brokerage" interpretation is not the only one that
might be offered to account for the political perceptions of party men
or for the conjunction of perceived industrial influence with machine
politics. What makes this interpretation a particularly attractive one
is the fact that it is consistent with both of these findings and with
others as well. Because it lends coherence to many bits of evidence,
it is useful, and probably correct.
Many characteristics of pollution politics in Gary and East Chicago
can be understood in terms of the party politician'S preference for
specific rather than for collective policy benefits. It is probably sig-
TABLE V -1: PERCEPTIONS OF INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE
ON- AIR POLLUTION CONTROL
Group Industrial Support
Is "Essential"
%
Labor council presidents 58.5
(46)
Political party chairmen 55.9
(92)
Newspaper editors 51.1
(47)
Chamber of Commerce presidents 47.9
(48)
Bar association presidents 37.2
(43)
Bank presidents 35.0
(48)
Note: Numbers in parentheses represent respondents
in each category; total respondents, 336, of which 12
were n.a.
t
nificant, for example, that the promoters of pollution control pro-
posals in both towns were not party organization men. The advocates
of clean air appeared outside the party organizations because the
party incentive systems, relying as they did on specific benefits, were
probably not congenial to men who sought collective goods.
The behavior of party politicians during the course of the dirty air
debate may also reflect the bias of the party system. Local politicians
seldom intervened in local discussions of the pollution problem, but
when they did, it was often to represent the interests of industrial
corporations. Mayor Migas, at the request of some East Chicago
industrial executives, delayed the introduction of Loyd Cohen's dirty
air ordinance. Mayor Chacharis, when he spoke out on the pollution
problem, counseled caution in the campaign against dirty air lest an
excessively strict regulation of industrial emissions do damage to the
economic interests of U.S. Steel and perhaps to the economic well-
being of Gary. It may be that these kindnesses to local manufacturers
represented attempts to manipulate the costs of pollution control and
thereby purchase bits of industrial influence. -
PARTIES AND THE LIFE CHANCES OF THE POLLUTION ISSUE
Because of the nature of his political operations, the broker-
politician will probably respond more readily to requests for specific
benefits than he will to requests for collective benefits. Where he is
a prominent figure, his -favoritism can be expected to have some effect
upon the kinds of demands that rise to the surface of local politics.
"Collective" demands will tend to be filtered out of the political sys-
tem because they 'cannot be made to serve his purposes so easily as
specific demands. In politics dominated by party organizations, then,
we can expect that- the demand for clean air will tend to be shunted
aside, and pollution politics in Gary 1iUd East Chicago provide a
possible illustration of this phenomenon.
In East Chicago during the late 1940's the local Democratic Party
organization was torn by factional rivalries. Mayor Frank Migas, the
party chairman, was under political siege. He could not attract a
majority vote in the primaries, and it was not long before an opposi-
tion faction ejected him, first from the party chairmanship and later
from the mayor's office as well. It was during this period of party
debilitation that Loyd Cohen successfully mobilized East Chicagoans
for the campaign against dirty air and managed, with no great
difficulty, to place the air pollution problem on the community's
political agenda.
There may have been more than a coincidental connection be-
tween the temporary confusion in East Chicago's dominant party and
Cohen's success. Cohen did not feel obliged to take his anti-pollution
proposals to the party politicians, and his effectiveness, one might
argue, depended in part upon .his circumvention of these broker-
politicians. He did not rely on political middlemen to assemble the
bits of influence that were needed for his project: he himself secured
the acquiescence of local industrialists; he activated public support
for his anti-pollution campaign. He was his own political broker, and
his political self-reliance meant that the dirty air issue, in its rise to
prominence, would skirt the party organization and the organizational
bias which inclines politicians toward policies that generate specific
benefits.
The Democratic Party, as the evidence in Chapter II indicates, was
probably more powerful and tightly organized in Gary during the late
1950's than it was in East Chicago during the late 1940's. When.
Milton Roth raised the dirty air issue with Mayor Mandich, Gary's
Democratic organization was in the midst of a political consolidation,
and by the time that Albert Gavit attempted to reopen the dirty air
debate, the consolidation appears to have been complete. Mayor
Chacharis had been able to command more than 80 per cent of the
vote in the Democratic primary of 1959. The robust condition of the
party may have been one of the factors that obstructed the emergence
of the air pollution issue. If obstruction did occur, it was not the
result of any active attempt to suppress the issue. Party leaders were
simply uninterested in it, perhaps because it originated with political
outsiders like Albert Gavit and Milton Roth, possibly because the
issue did not seem to be particularly profitable. Their disinterest was
a crucial factor in the progress of the pollution issue because Gary's
pollution activists, unlike Loyd Cohen, seem to have thought it
necessary to turn to them for assistance. Albert Gavit was especially
sensitive to this need: his anti-pollution efforts were designed, for the
most part, to activate party politicians on behalf of clean air. When
the party men remained unmoved after his repeated attempts to
mobilize them, Gavit finally gave up. He believed that the anti-pollu-
tion campaign was a hopeless effort so long as it did not number them
among its backers.
In East Chicago, then, where the party organization was tempo-
rarily disorganized and pollution activists did not rely on its brokerage
.the dirty air issue flourished. In Gary, where the party
orgamzatiOn was strong and pollution activists turned to it for assist-
ance, the issue floundered. It was not until Mayor Chacharis went to
jail, and the party hierarchy was momentarily disorganized that the
pollution issue began to rise toward a position of on
Gary's political agenda. This coincidence and others like it suggest
that where local party organizations are strong and unified, the life
chances of the pollution issue will be diminished. Clean air, we might
argue, simply does not yield the kinds of political assets that party
organizations are likely to find attractive, and its irrelevance to party
interests is sufficient to diminish the force of demands for pollution
control in cities where parties monopolize the political initiatives of
their communities.
If this is an accurate analysis of pollution politics in Gary and East
Chicago, then we ought to find some support for it in other cities of
our sample. We ought to find that where members of local political
turn to political parties for a solution to the dirty air problem,
the SIze. of the pollution issue is diminished. People who "turn to the
parties" are those who believe that party support is essential to the
success of a local pollution control program. It was a similar belief
that we looked for when measuring perceived industrial influence-
the belief that industrial support would be essential for a campaign
against dirty air. The present object of measurement therefore is
really "perceived party influence," and it has been in 'the
same way, using the same reputational question and the same index
of influence.13 For the time being, no distinction will be made between
Republican and Democratic influence. The party influence measure-
ment combines reputational votes for both parties in a single index.
Political parties in a city qualify as highly influential on the air pol-
lution issue if their joint share of the "essential" votes on this issue
is greater than the median two-party share.
The nature of political party operations and the evidence from
Gary and East Chicago lead us to expect that, among towns with
similar pollution levels, there will be a negative relationship between
party influence in the matter and the life chances of the pollution issue.
The findings reported in Table V-2 do not support these expectations:
13 See above, pp. 113-16.
TABLE V-2: PERCEIVED PARTY INFLUENCE AND THE ISSUE-NESS OF AIR POLLUTION,
CONTROLLING FOR SUSPENDED PARTICULATE LEVEL
Commerce Council
Party influence on air
pollution
-.19'
(45)
, Partial correlation coefficients.
-.02
(46)
+.02
(44)
Political
Parties
+.11
(45)
after controlling for variations in local pollution levels, is only a
weak and uneven association between the power of local
parties and the various indicators of positiontaking on dirty alr.
There are, however, some local conditions that accentuate the
impact of party influence upon the survival and growth prospects of
the pollution issue. As in the case of industrial Influence, the opera-
tion of perceived party power appears to affected by the local
pollution level. In low-pollution towns party does to
inhibit the early growth of the issue; in high-pollutiOn It does
not. The finding is an understandable one. In towns,
the prospective benefits of pollution control are relatively small. The
party's need for specific inducements can be to
override the need for pollution abatement. In high-pollutiOn to:v
ns
,
on the other hand, the benefits of pollution abatement are relatively
large, and the dirty air issue can be expected to overcome
the party bias against "collective" poliCies. .
Low pollution is not the only condition that appears to activate
the deterrent capacity of perceived party influence. .and more
important catalytic factor is the absence of perceived power.
The operation of this factor is notable not only because accentuates
the impact of party influence but because it most effectively reveals
the nature of the political party's organizational bias. It. has
argued here that this bias inclines the party toward publIc polICies
that are likely to generate specific, capturable benefits .con-
trol over such benefits enables the party organization to sus tam itself .
as a political brokerage. Control over c911ective benefits, on the ot?er
h d is not likely to provide the party with the kind of purchasmg
that it needs to acquire the fluid political assets that are
tial to a brokerage operation. This is why the benefits. pollution
abatement policy fail to arouse the interest of They
are collective benefits. But the costs of pollution control pollcy may
well stimulate the party politician's entrepreneurial appetite. These
negative benefits of public policy are relatively specific. They fall
heavily upon a social grouping whose membership is limited-the
local industrial community. Because this is the case, they may provide
the party politician with the sorts of inducements that he needs to
carry on his brokerage activities. He may manipulate the costs of
pollution control in order to purchase useful bits of industrial in-
fluence, provided, of course, that industry is perceived to have
influence to sell. In towns where industry enjoys a reputation for
power, therefore, we should find that perceived party influence oper-
ates to enhance the life chances of the pollution issue because the
dirty air debate will appear to offer entrepreneurial opportunities to
political parties.
Where industry does not enjoy a reputation for power, the pollution
issue can supply the party politician with little that is useful to his
organization. We can therefore expect that party influence will oper-
ate to inhibit the emergence of the dirty air issue. That is precisely
what we find. The results in Table V-3 show that among cities where
industry does not enjoy a reputation for power in the pollution field,
perceived party influence is negatively associated with most of the
indicators of issue-ness. Here, the party's influence appears to reduce
the life chances of the pollution issue. Among cities where industry
does enjoy a reputation for power, however, party influence seems
to operate to enhance the life chances of the dirty air debate.
It was found earlier that the air pollution issue tends not to flourish
in cities where industry enjoys a reputation for power. These new
findings suggest, in addition, that where industry does enjoy that
reputation, the life chances of the air pollution issue will be greater in
cities where political parties are influential than where they are not.
This finding, like several of the previous ones, can be subsumed under
TABLE V-3: PERCEIVED PARTY INFLUENCE AND THE ISSUE-NESS OF AIR POLLUTION,
CONTROLLING FOR PERCEIVED INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE AND SUSPENDED PARTICULATE
LEVEL
Perceived
party
influence
High industrial
influence
Low industrial
influence
-.06
(19)
-.44
(26)
Commerce Council
+.13
(20)
-.20
(26)
+.48
(19)
-.20
(25)
Political
Parties
+.40
(20)
+.01
(25)
the "brokerage" interpretation of political .party It
to reflect the interest that party organizatIons have m the arr
11
. t "purchase" industrial influence-when that mfluence
po utlOn Issue 0
is available. . b f
The impact of party influence could not be away y er-
ring to local population characteristics like medIan age,
level, income, or racial composition-factors we.re pr.evI?usly
found to affect the level of public concern about arr. It IS
then that the workings of party influence do not Simply reflect publIc
in the matter of air pollution. They represen: a

.. . I d ands The consideratlOn of
to orgamzatl0I!al, not Just popu ar, em . .
local population characteristics therefore farls to alter the assessment
that party influence can have an important effect upon the penetra-
bility of community political systems. .. . .
Nor is this assessment much altered when a dIstmc.tlOn IS made
between Democratic and Republican parties. Both parties appear to
affect the life chances of the pollution issue in roughly the way,
as Tables V-4 and V-5 indicate. They show that Democratic.Party
influence and Republican Party influence both operate accordmg to
the "brokerage" pattern. They promote the emergence of the pollu-
TABLE V-4 PERCEIVED DEMOCRATIC PARTY INFLUENCE AND THE ISSUE-NESS OF AIR
POLLUTION: CONTROLLING FOR PERCEIVED INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE AND SUSPENDED
PARTICULATE LEVEL
Perceived High industrial
Democratic influence
influence Low industrial
influence
Newspaper
+.23
(19)
-.44
(26)
Issueness Scale Item
Chamber of Labor
Commerce Council
+.18
(20)
-.20
(26)
+.56
(19)
-.20
(25)
Political
Parties
+.14
(20)
-.01
(25)
TABLE V-So PERCEIVED REPUBLICAN PARTY INFLUENCE AND THE ISSUE-NESS OF AIR
POLLUTION: CONTROLLING FOR PERCEIVED INDUSTRIAL INFLUENCE AND SUSPENDED
PARTICULATE LEVEL
Perceived
Republi-
can influ-
ence
High industrial
influence
Low ind us trial
influence
Newspaper
- .16
(19)
-.27
(26)
Chamber of Labor
Commerce Council
+.08
(20)
-.01
(26)
+.53
(19)
-.21
(25)
Political
Parties
+.38
(20)
-.18
(25)
tion issue in those cities where industry has a reputation for power-
where it is perceived to have influence to sell; they inhibit the
emergence of the issue in towns where industry does not enjoy a
reputation for power and does not have influence to sell. The small
differences that do appear between the effects of Democratic and
Republican influence suggest that the operation of Democratic Party
influence may adhere somewhat more consistently to the "brokerage"
pattern than Republican Party influence.
THE NATURE OF PARTY INFLUENCE
It should not be difficult to understand how the built-in biases of
the political party may affect the treatment that the pollution issue
receives at the hands of party organizations. However, it remains
unclear just why party bias should also affect the responsiveness to
the pollution problem of local newspapers, Chambers of Commerce,
and labor organizations. We do not know how perceived party in-
fluence is brought to bear on these organizations nor why they respond
to it. The survey data do not provide clear answers to either of these
questions. It is uncertain, in the first place, whether the party exer-
cises its influence through observable political actions or whether its
"unjustified" reputation for influence affects the behavior of other
organizations-in other words, whether the party's influence is direct
or indirect.
The problem here is to discover whether or not perceived party
influence in the pollution field is based on party behavior in the area,
and an attempt has been made to solve the problem in the same way
as the earlier attempt to determine whether perceived industrial in-
fluence was a reflection of industrial action.14 In this case, however,
the inquiry produced uncertain results. The weight of the evidence is
divided about evenly between the conclusion that party influence is
direct and the conclusion that it is indirect. It is probable, therefore,
that it is a mixture of both.
We can only speculate about the ways in which the two kinds of
party influence manage to affect the behavior of civic activists, but
the speCUlations are supported at some points by bits of evidence.
For example, the findings from Gary and East Chicago suggest that,
if party support is thought to be essential to a pollution control cam-
paign, then the expressed disinterest of party politicians in the pollu-
14 For a more complete discussion of this problem, see above, pp. 121-24.
tion problem could have a decisive effect upon. the career of the
issue. Local pollution activists might abandon theIr efforts on behalf
of clean air and turn their attention to projects that appear to have
more favorable political prospects. Few people like to waste their
effort on enterprises that seem doomed to failure. .' .
The prospect of failure seems to have hadsomethmg to d.o. ::Ith
the slow development of Gary's dirty air debate. Party polItIcIans
were able to influence the growth of the anti-pollution campaign by
diminishing the optimism of some pollution the
politicians were thought to be essential to the antI-pollutIOn effort,
their actions in this matter were critical signs of the chances for suc-
cess. The cues that they gave to other politica1 actors could influence
the distribution of energy and attention among alternative civic
enterprises.
The party's reputation for power, however, is .probably not the
only thing that may induce a civic activist to take hIS cues from party
politicians. The politician, after all, has traditionally .regarded
as expert in the evaluation of political possibilities, and It IS un?er-
standable that people should rely on his judgment
of political success and faihlre are involved. As a polItIcal It
is his business to know which political projects are likely to YIeld a
return on which ones are not. His evaluation of a civic
enterprise' therefore make it more or less attractive to other
political actors. Its stock may rise Of fall according to his
Of course if he is not regarded as an effective influence broker, hIS
judgments' will probably carry little weight with actors,
but where he has a reputation for power, there IS an espeCIally good
that it will be accompanied by a reputation for' political
expertise. . ..
. There is another more indirect avenue of party mfluence WhICh
may also help to ca'rry the party's organizational bias into the activi-
ties of newspapers, labor organizations, and Chambers
The connection between the party and these other orgamzatIOns IIlay
be an "ecological" one such as Norton Long describes when he
gests that communities may be regarded as an of
The ecological interpretation of urban affairs emphasIZes the mter-
connectedness of various local institutions and organizations. Like
the plants and animals in a natural ecological system, the elements of
15 Norton Long, "The Local Community as an Ecology of Games."

a local organizational ecology use one another in order to maintain
themselves. The fruits of one organization provide other organizations
with sustenance.
The ecological approach to local politics calls attention to these
interdependent relationships and to the continuous mutual adjust-
ments that they are likely to entail. Organizations, like the creatures
of a natural ecological system, modify their life habits so as to make
use of the resources generated by their neighbors, and an ecological
system that includes a strong party organization is likely to be
characterized by modifications of a particular sort. We have seen that
the resources that a strong party typically makes available to its
organizational neighbors are specific benefits, and we can expect that
these neighbors will adjust their incentive systems so that, in their
own efforts to keep and attract members or adherents, they can make
use of the inducements that the party provides. These adjustments
are likely to have a visible impact upon organizational behavior. The
nature of an organization's incentive system, as James Wilson and
Peter Clark have pointed out, is likely to be reflected in the character
of organizational strategy, in the configurations of organizational con-
flicts, and in leadership behavior.
'fl
It is also likely to have some effect
upon the kinds of political demands that an organization generates or
nurtures. If its incentive system is fueled by specific benefits, it will
tend to make relatively few collective demands because collective
benefits will not effectively serve its own maintenance and enhance-
ment interests.
Political parties, therefore, may influence the activities of other
organizations by affecting the character of the organizational resources
that happen to be available within a local community. The very
existence of a strong party organization may induce other local groups
to shift their survival strategies and their political behavior. For ex-
ample, Chambers of Commerce in strong party towns will probably
differ in a systematic way from Chambers in weak party towns. In a
strong party town we would expect the Chamber to stress "specific"
services to its members. In a weak party town we would expect the
Chamber to concentrate on more diffuse, intangible inducements, like
appeals to the spirit of civic boosterism or local prideY
1 fl "Incentive Systems."
1, An "ecological" explanation of this sort secms to provide the most promising
to for James Q. Wilson's findings that the organization of Ncgro politics
In a community generally comes to resemble the organization of white politics. Negro
political organization is heavily influenced by the organizational resources available,
The adaptation of its organizational neighbors to the existence of
the party is something like the adaptation of giraffes to the existence
of tall trees. In both cases the adaptation functions to enhance growth
and survival prospects, and in both cases the adaptors acquire a
limited resemblance to the objects that have induced their adjust-
ments. Party indifference to clean air and to collective benefits gen-
erally is likely to be transferred to other organizations within its
environment. This hypothesis might explain why, under certain con-
ditions, perceived party influence seems to deter local newspapers,
Chambers of Commerce, and labor organizations from taking posi-
tions on the dirty air issue. The party's influence may operate to
create or reinforce organizational incentive systems that are inhospi-
table to such collective benefits.
But there are also some situations in which party influence seems
to have just the opposite effect. In towns where industry enjoys a
reputation for power, perceived party influence operates to enhance
the survival prospects of the pollution issue. This result, as has been
pointed out, is quite consistent with the organizational needs of
political parties, reflecting their interest in using specific policy bene-
fits (in this case, negative benefits) to purchase bits of industrial
influence. In towns where industry has influence to sell, it is under-
standable that parties themselves might attempt to promote the pol-
lution issue. But it is not quite understandable why, in these same
towns, party influence should induce other organizations to promote
the issue. The "ecological" bias that strong parties engender would
presumably diminish the interest of these other organizations in the
quest for collective benefits like clean air. How can party influence
operate to reverse this bias?
A partial answer is that the party does not uniformly succeed
in doing so. A look at the top row of Table V-3 shows that local
newspapers and Chambers of Commerce are not especially responsive
to party influence in towns where industry enjoys a reputation for
power. Only local labor organizations seem to be sensitive to their
influence, and it is a notable coincidence that only in the case 9f labor
organizations can we conclude that the operation of party influence is
and the nature of those resources is influenced, in turn, by the character of white
political organizations. Chicago provides a good illustration of the ecological relation-
ship that may exist between white and Negro political organizations. Here, it appears,
the emergence of the Dawson machine within the black ghetto was in large part a
response to the availability of organizational resources that were generate'! by
Chicago's white machine, chiefly patronage, favors, and cash (see James Q. WIlson,
Negro Politics, pp. 22-24, 48-76).
largely direct rather than indirect. The responsiveness of labor coun-
cils to party influence can be explained in terms of observable party
action in the matter of dirty air.
18
This coincidence suggests that we may be able to describe the
operations of party influence like this: where the pollution issue is
irrelevant to the party's organizational interests, the party's indirect,
"ecological" influence will operate to diminish the life chances of the
issue. Where it is advantageous for the party to promote the debate,
it must exercise its influence directly in order to overcome the com-
munity bias that it has created indirectly: it must take some positive
action if the issue is to develop. The party organization can then
bargain about it with local industrial corporations. Influence brokers
may purchase bits of industrial influence by making concessions to
industrial interests.
Two points concerning this description ought to be kept in mind.
First, it is highly tentative, though it is occasionally supported by
uncertain hints in the survey data or in the case study materials.
Second, even if the speculative nature of the description is discounted,
it must be recognized that the portrayal is onesided. It attempts to
reveal the ways in which a strong party organization may affect the
behavior of its organizational neighbors but neglects to take account
of the reciprocal influence that neighboring organizations may exert
upon the operations of a political party. The possibility of mutual
adaptation, not just onesided adjustment, is implied by the ecological
analogy used here.
. The debut of the political machine, which was discussed earlier,
provides a good illustration of the way in which the party may adjust
to its organizational neighbors. If the classic account is reliable, the
appearance of the machine can be regarded as the party's response
to the emergence of large-scale, capitalist enterprise. Party organiza-
tions adapted their operations and their incentive systems so that they
could make use of the resources that local capitalists were able to
provide. The growth of the machine represented an "ecological"
adjustment of the party to other organizations in its environment.
Another sign of party adjustment is the impact of reputedly power-
ful manufacturing firms upon the operation of party influence. The
presence of these industrial corporations seems to make a difference
18 Specifically, there is a positive relationship between perceived party power and
the .occurrence of dirty air discussions between labor council officials and party
offiCIals (r = + .28) and another positive association between the occurrence of these
discussions and positiontaking by labor on the issue (r = + .40).
152 THi': UN-POLITICS OF AIR POLLUTION
in the way the party works, and community newspapers appear to
have a somewhat similar capacity to affect party operations. News-
papers, like industrial corporations, are profitmaking organizations,
but in the newspaper business "profit" will very probably include
diffuse, intangible rewards as well as hard cash. If publishers were
singlemindedly devoted to financial advancement, they would probably
not be in the newspaper business."
s
Among the intangible returns that
help to sustain the newspaper as a community organization, moral
and ideological gratifications figure prominently. Newspapermen like
to think of themselves as public crusaders or as guardians of the public
welfare, and the fact that the newspaper claims the public in general
as its constituency, and things in general as its field of competence,
reinforces these self-conceptions. It is, as Norton Long points out,
one of the few local institutions with a long-term interest in the
community -as a whole.
20
The newspaper's claim to represent the whole community will
probably incline it, more than other local organizations, toward public
policies whose benefits accrue to the whole community. Its advocacy
of collective causes may help to justify its institutional pretensions
and to strengthen its ability to employ moral or ideological induce-
ments to maintain itself and its following. We should therefore expect
to find local newspapers among the leading advocates of collective
benefits such as clean air, and the findings reported in Chapter III
confirm those expectations." We might also anticipate that the pres-
ence of an influential newspaper within a community would affect
the operations of local political parties. The newspaper is probably
less responsive than most other local organizations to specific induce-
ments, the broker-politician's stock in trade, so that where the news"'"
paper is influential, the party politician may have to change his -way
of doing business. In order to purchase newspaper support for his
civic enterprises or to forestall its opposition, the politician may find
it necessary to employ non-material or collective incentives. In doing
so, he would of course depart from the normal operating procedures
of an influence broker.
Perhaps more important than newspaper influence itself is what
newspaper prominence reveals about the character of a community
and its residents. Where newspapers enjoy a reputation for power,
19 Banfield and Wilson, City Politics, pp. 319-21.
20 Long, "The Local Community as an Ecology of Games," pp. 259-61.
it is likely that a large segment of the local population is responsive
to the moral or ideological inducements that newspapers can employ.
When this is the case, the party politician will find it difficult to play
the role of an influence broker. He will frequently discover that
specific policy benefits do not provide him with much purchasing
power because the sellers of influence demand moral or ideological
gratifications in exchange for their support or cooperation. To the
extent that the politician meets those demands, he leaves the influence
brokerage business.
In short, newspaper influence and the things that go with it could
conceivably modify the operations of political party organizations in
a way that might be significant for the life chances of the pollution
issue. In the presence of a reputedly powerful newspaper, the party
bias against clean air might dissolve. This change could be brought
about in much the same way that industrial influence can induce a
shift in the party's treatment of the pollution issue. Where news-
papers are perceived to be powerful, party politicians may see some
profit in promoting the dirty air issue. They can use the benefits of
pollution control to purchase newspaper influence, which they can
then use to sustain their own operations. Where newspapers are not
perceived to be powerful, however, the air pollution issue will not
present these entrepreneurial advantages. An uninfluential newspaper
has nothing of political value to offer in exchange for the benefits of
pollution control. In such a situation, the party's organizational biases
will not be softened, and party influence will operate to diminish the
force of clean air campaigns.
Unfortunately, the data do not bear out these reasonable expecta-
tions. The power reputations of local newspapers have no consistent
effect upon the operation of party influence. Newspaper prominence
is reflected less in the operation than in the level of perceived party
power, and there is a good reason for this result. Newspaper influence
tends, as suggested above, to be encumbered with moral or ideological
commitments and is not an especially fluid political asset. This is not
to say that it is completely irrelevant to the dealings of a party in-
fluence broker, however. It is significant that party organizations do
not thrive on the kind of influence that they can buy from newspapers
or their adherents. Newspapers do not contribute much to their
sustenance. Where newspapers occupy a prominent place in the local
ecology of organizations, we can therefore expect that political parties
will find it relatively difficult to collect the kind of political influence
TABLE V-6: PERCEIVED NEWSPAPER INFLUENCE AND PERCEIVED PARTY INFLUENCE
Newspaper Influence in
Air Municipal Urban School Mayoral
Pollution Bond Renewal Board Elections
Referenda Appoint-
ments
Air
pollution -.19 -.26 -.14 -.19
Municipal
bond
referenda -.20 -.38 -.15 -.38
Party Urban
influence renewal -.35 -.29 -.05 -.18
in School board
appoint-
ments -.31 -.21 -.22 -.31
Mayoral
elections -.13 -.22 -.40 -.10
which makes them grow strong. Newspapers and political parties tend
not to flourish as influential actors within the same ecological system;
that, at least, is the implication of the findings presented in Table
V _6.
22
The table shows that perceived newspaper influence in any
issue-area is negatively associated with perceived party power in any
other issue-area. The relationship between these two local institutions
appears to be competitive, not symbiotic.
CONCLUSION
Edward Banfield has argued that local political issues grow out of
the maintenance and enhancement needs of a city's large formal
organizations.
23
In this chapter and the preceding one an attempt has
been made to elaborate on the mirror image of this hypothesis. The
argument, in effect, is that the neglect of potential political issues can
22 The associations between newspaper power in one issue-area and party power in
that issue-area have been purposely omitted from Table V-6. The reason, briefly, is
that the influence measures for the two kinds of local organizations are based upon
each organization's share of the reputational votes cast within particular issue-areas.
The larger the newspaper's share of the votes within an issue-area, the smaller the
party's share is likely to be, and vice versa. In other words, there will tend to be an
artificially induced negative relationship between the index of party influence in an
issue-area and the index of newspaper influence within that issue-area. This artificial
association tends to inflate the negative correlation between perceived party power
and perceived newspaper power. The same problem does not exist when we compare
perceived party influence in one issue-area with perceived newspaper influence in
another issue-area. In this case, the two local organizations would be drawing on
different pools of reputational votes.
. 23 Political Influence, p. 263.
be traced to their incompatibility with the maintenance and enhance-
ment needs of large organizations.
Where industry is powerful, for example, the life chances of the
pollution issue are diminished, and it is not difficult to understand
why. Industrial corporations are sustained by profits, and the pollu-
tion issue poses a possible threat to profits. Industrial influence there-
fore operates to inhibit the growth of the dirty air issue. The impact
of political parties is somewhat more subtle. Parties maintain them-
selves by exchanging specific benefits for pieces of influence, and
there are some circumstances in which the pollution issue fails to
generate benefits that can be employed in these exchanges. In such
situations, party influence operates to obstruct the entry of the issue
into local politics. .
In a sense, the source of this obstruction is not the political party
itself, but political pluralism. The party's operating procedures, as
well as its organizational biases, are derived from the need to do busi-
ness in polities where a variety of independent political elites hold the
power to frustrate successful political action. Were it not for this
fractionation of influence, there would be little demand for the
brokerage services that American political parties have traditionally
provided, and were it not for the imperatives of its brokerage opera-
tions, the political party would probably not have maintained its
indifference toward collective goods. In pluralism, it appears, there
is a built-in potential for political bias, and influential party organi-
zations help to realize that potential. The bias is quite similar to the
one that seems to have roused muckrakers fifty years ago to complain
that American politics and politicians accorded special advantages to
"special interests." Some of the muckraking journalists, like Lincoln
Steffens, went on to point out that this inclination toward special
interests did not originate in the moral degeneracy of party politicians
but was built into the business of American politics. The preference
for specific benefits has a similar kind of origin, and perhaps it is
a descendant or a continuation of the political bias that Steffens and
others perceived. At any rate, it may constitute an important limita-
tion upon the alleged openness of pluralistic political systems, tending
to obstruct the expressiou of collective interests and the political
progress of collective issues.
In general, a political issue tends to be ignored if there is a mis-
match between the kinds of benefits that it is likely to create and the
kinds of inducements that influential community organizations need
in order to survive and grow. This elementary generalization, how-
ever, leaves some important things unsaid. It suggests that the life
chances of a political issue will depend in part upon the kinds of policy
benefits that are at stake in it, but the proposition says nothing about
the criteria that might be used to distinguish one kind of benefit from
another. It would not be hard to assemble a long list of ways in which
we might classify policy benefits. The problem is to identify those
dimensions of variability that are worthy of attention, and it is to
that problem, among others, that recent investigations in "policy
theory" have addressed themselves. The one element common to
most of these efforts is the distinction, presented under various labels,
between collective and specific benefits. Theodore Lowi, for example,
has called attention to the "disaggregability" of public policies-the
divisibility of the costs and benefits that they entail. Lewis Froman,
relying on the work of Lowi and others, has drawn a distinction
between "segmental" and "areal" policies-policies that affect par-
ticular groups within a community vs. policies that affect the whole
local population.24
The same kind of distinction has occasionally been employed by
organization theorists in their efforts to classify organizational incen-
tive systems. Something like the collective-specific dimension appears
to underlie the division that Wilson and Clark make between organi-
zations with purpose-oriented incentive systems, on the one hand, and
organizations with solidary or material incentive systems on the other.
The difference between collective and specific also seems to be one
element in Amitai Etzioni's distinction between "expressive" and
"utilitarian" organizations.
25
Organizational incentives, like policy
benefits, can be arranged on the continuum from collective to specific.
More important, the location of an organization's incentive system
on this continuum has something to do with organizational practices
and propensities. The classificatory efforts of the organization theorists
would have been wasted if they did not show that the character of an
organization's incentive system makes a difference in its behavior.
In the present effort to relate the maintenance and enhancement
needs of organizations 10 the costs and benefits of political issues, the
attempt has been made to capitalize upon the analytic tendencies that
24 Lowi, "American Business, Public Policy"; Lewis A. Froman, Jr., "An Analysis
of Public Policies in Cities."
25 Wilson and Clark, "Incentive Systems"; Amitai Etzioni, A Comparative Analysis
0/ Complex Organizations.
are shared by both organization theory and policy theory and to
merge the categories implicit in organizational analysis with the cate-
gories of policy analysis. Collective organizations, it is argued, will
tend to attach themselves to collective issues, specific organizations to
speCific. issues. The fortunes of a political issue can be expected to
vary WIth the prominence of its organizational patrons.
Policy theory and organization theory are drawn together by more
than the similarity that exists between their respective classification
schemes. There is also some resemblance between the ways in which
these two enterprises use the classification systems that they have
developed. Policy theorists seek not only to categorize policy char-
but to relate these characteristics to patterns of political
actIVIty-to uncover the connection between the substance of policy
and the process of policymaking. That has been one concern here
as well. In Chapter III an attempt was made to find out whether the
air pollution issue regularly evoked some distinctive pattern of politi-
cal activity, and it was argued that, where dirty air was concerned,
different cities tend to move toward a single pattern of political
decisionmaking. The costs and benefits that are at stake in the pollu-
tion issue are everywhere similar, and this similarity in the political
stakes is responsible for inter-city similarities in the political process.
The line of reasoning here is quite similar to the one that Wilson and
Clark follow in their attempt to relate organizational behavior to
organizational incentive systems. Like the policy theorists, they hope
to discover some systematic relationship between patterns of activity
and the types of inducements which stimulate and sustain those
activities. In this respect, policy theory and organization theory seem
to run parallel. In fact, the phenomena themselves, as well as the
analytic approaches to them, exhibit some notable similarities.
Issues and policies are not simply pieces of political subject matter.
To say that an issue has arisen is to announce the emergence of an
informal organization, a body of would-be decisionmakers who inter-
act with one another in their efforts to deal with some common con-
cern. Political issues, then, have an organizational aspect. When policv
theorists try to relate the characteristics of a policy to the pattern a"f
political activity which it has genera!ed, they are attempting, in effect,
to establish a connection between the kinds of inducements that are
distributed by an informal organization and the internal practices of
that organization. We have been looking at issues as organizations,
but we have been less concerned with their internal operations than
with their external relations. As organizations, issues are dependent
upon their environments for the fulfillment of their maintenance and
enhancement needs. They are elements in the same local ecological
systems which contain Chambers of Commerce or: political parties.
What has been said about the local ecology of organizations sug-
gests that a certain kind of coherence or unity will tend to develop
within such a system. To the extent that it is possible, groups will
adapt their operations so as to make use of the resources that are
provided by other, influential groups. When such adaptations are not
consistent with the maintenance and enhancement needs of an organi-
zation, its prominence can be expected to decline. This seems to be the
fate of a political party that finds itself confronted with a highly in-
fluential newspaper. The end result of all these organizational adjust-
ments is a degree of consistency among the operations and inclinations
of organizations that are locally influential. In this way, organizational
hiases may be translated into a general community bias.
As members of the local ecological system, issues and issue-areas
can be expected to partake of this bias. This means that we may
expect to find some consistency or unity among the political issues
that flourish in a community, just as we would expect to find a similar
consistency among the influential organizations of a town. In part,
this common tie among issues may reflect the consistency which has
been presumed to exist among the inclinations of locally influential
organizations. In part, it may be the result of "ecological" interactions
among the issues themselves. The existence, the sources, and the na-
ture of this unity among issues are the concerns of the next chapter.
V I Air Pollution and Political Agendas
If dirty air were the only problem demanding the attention of urban
political leaders, we would almost certainly be breathing more easily
than we do. But cleaning up the air is obviously just one of the many
civic projects that draw upon the political energies of American cities,
and because it is just one concern among many, it is understandable
that it should sometimes be overlooked. Cities may ignore their dirty
air simply because they have other things to worry about.
Local leaders, it might be argued, are able to cope with just so
many political issues at one time. To the extent that they become
interested in some matters, they must ignore others. In Gary, for
example, Mayor Mandich was so busy with the matter of downtown
public parking that he was unable to make the necessary preparations
for the Armour Research Institute's air pollution survey.! One political
issue distracted attention from the other, and this was probably not
the only instance in which the progress of Gary's clean air campaign
had been retarded by the existence of political distractions. The town,
after all, faced many problems that seemed to demand the attention
of its political leaders. Public housing, traffic, race relations, and
population growth could have diverted the attention of Gary's politi-
cal activists from the cloud of grit and smoke that hung above them.
This explanation is a popular one among Gary civic leaders. The
long neglect of the air pollution problem, they argue, was the
"natural" result of inherent limitations in human attentiveness, one
of those unavoidable oversights that can be expected to occur when-
ever people are trying to do several things at once. Unavoidable or
1 See above, p. 62.
159
not, the oversight and the explanation of it have some important
implications for the theory of community politics. They suggest that
political issues are not independent of one another, but compete for
allocations of political attention. When one issue gains in prominence,
others must lose. The life chances of one issue are therefore bound
up with the life chances of others.
The insights of Gary's civic activists are not universally endorsed
by community political theorists. Members of the pluralist school, at
least, do not admit the assumption that different political issues must
draw their sustenance from a single, fixed reservoir of political energy.
The assumption is a critical one for the notion of issue competition.
If different issues do not depend on the same pool of resources, then
there is no need for them to compete with one another, and it is the
contention of the pluralists that they do not depend upon the same
resources. A town's political resources, the pluralists argue, are likely
to be fragmented, and different issues will tend to draw their suste-
nance from different fragments. Moreover, the pluralists maintain
that a community's usable political resources are not fixed. There are
slack resources which can be brought into play when the situation
demands it.
2
When one issue rises to prominence, therefore, it need
not do so at the expense of others.
The fragmentation to which the pluralists refer is probably most
clearly evident in the organization of political manpower. Civic
activists tend to specialize in the affairs of different policy-areas, and
the division of activists among political specialties probably reduces
rivalry among issues. Political specialization, like bureaucratic spe-
cialization, may enhance the capacity of a community to deal with
many different items of business at the same time, so that one piece
of public business need not interfere with the conduct of other public
business.
Other elements in pluralist theory would also seem to contribute
to the mutual independence of different political issues and so reduce
the possibility of competition among them. The pluralists would
probably be quick to point out, for example, that if civic activists are
so busy with some issues that they lack the time or energy to deal
with others, additional activists may arise to cope with the neglected
subjects. This infusion of new political manpower, or the threat of it,
could reduce both the need for issues to compete with one another
2 Dahl, Who Governs?, pp. 191, 228, 305.
AIR POLLUTION AND POLITICAL AGENDAS 161
and the likelihood that any significant topic will be neglected. The
alleged openness of pluralistic polities-their receptivity to new civic
activists-and the presence of unused political resources may there-
fore help to reduce the extent to which the political fortunes of one
issue are influenced by the political fortunes of others.
The essential themes of pluralist theory are all consistent with one
another on the matter of issue competition. Political fragmentation,
specialization, openness, and the underutilization of political resources
are all factors which can be expected to minimize the importance of
this competition. In fact, they appear to minimize the likelihood of
any sort of interconnectedness among political issues. In pluralist
theory only the notion of "issue-area" seems to suggest that issues
may be tied to one another, and even here the ties do not appear to
be very strong or to extend very far. An issue-area is a subject matter
category. Issues that fall within the same category, the pluralists
argue, will often be handled by the same group of civic leaders. They
will all depend upon the same reservoir of political manpower. Be-
cause this is the case, there is reason to expect that the issues in an
issue-area will be tied to one another in some way. The salience of
one issue will be related to the salience of others. But if such relation-
ships do exist, the pluralists give no account of them. What is more,
they provide very little advice that might be useful in locating the
boundaries of an issue-area. Nowhere have the pluralists clearly stated
the criteria by which one identifies an issue-area. The upshot of all
this is that issue-areas are not very tight or coherent groupings of
political agenda items. In the pluralist view, the linkages between
different political issues are few and weak.
RELA TIONS AMONG ISSUES
If the pluralist view is an accurate one, we should find little or no
association between the prominence of one issue and the prominence
of others. At most, we may expect to discover a weak relationship
between the political fortunes of issues that fall under the same sub-
ject matter heading. In the eyes of Gary's civic activists, however, a
different kind of arrangement prevails. There is a rivalry among
political issues. As one issue moves to the center of attention, others
must retire to the sidelines. If this view is an adequate portrayal of
the connections that exist among political issues, then we should often
find that the prominence of one issue is negatively related to the
prominence of others.
In fact, there is some evidence to support the pluralist view, some
to support the competitive. view, some that supports neither. The
evidence comes once again from interviews with formal community
leaders. Eight respondents in each town were asked, in an open-ended
question at the very beginning of the interview, to name the most
important problems that their cities had faced since 1960. The
answers to this question have been used to construct measures-
admittedly crude-of the prominence of the air pollution issue and
of eighteen other kinds of issues that were mentioned by the in-
formants. The measure itself is quite simple. After classifying the
various policy concerns that were named by the respondents, we com-
puted, for each city, the proportion of informants who had cited each
of the nineteen types of concerns. Next, the median proportion for
each kind of issue was determined. In cities that scored above the
median on an item, the problem in question was judged to have
achieved relative political prominence.
This attempt to measure the political salience of different .issues
represents a research short cut,made unavoidable by the need to
examine the relationships that exist among a rather large number of
items. It would have been better, perhaps, to ask more precise ques-
tions about positiontaking activity on each of the nineteen issues, but
that would have demanded too much of the project's finances and of
the respondents' patience. Instead, the informants were simply asked
to describe the civic problems that happen to have been uppermost
in their minds during the past few years, on the assumption that
these thoughts reflect the composition of recent local political agendas.
By making the question an open-ended one and by placing it at the
very beginning of the interview schedule, it was hoped that the inter-
viewers' influence over the responses would be minimized.
The strategy seems to have worked rather well. One sign of its
effectiveness is the fact that it produced results that are consistent
with the earlier and more elaborate attempts to measure the issue-ness
of dirty air. The open-ended question yields an index of thepromi-
nence of the dirty air issue which is associated with all of the position-
taking indicators that we have been using. More important, the new
index is related in a consistent way to the issue-ness scale constructed
earlier. If it had been sensible to do so, this item might have been
incorporated into the scale, where 'it would have fallen at the mid-
point, between the indicator for Chambers of Commerce and the one
for labor councils."
There is a second sign that the open-ended question has worked as
it was intended to. If the informants' answers really do reflect the
nature of local political concerns, then we may expect that respondents
from the same town will give the same kinds of answers. The absence
of such local unanimity would lead us to suspect that their reports
do not accurately reflect community political conditions. But una-
nimity is not absent. Though they were free to mention any urban
problems that came to mind, informants tended to cite problems that
had also been named by other respondents in their towns. As a result,
if we select any particular problem, we will find that it gets mentioned
a disproportionate number of times in some towns and not at all in
others. For example, almost 80 per cent of the "votes" for the air
pollution problem came from just 20 per cent of the cities in the
sample. Responses for all of the other community problems were
concentrated in the same way, though the degree of concentration was
not always so high. This element of unanimity among respondents
from the same town suggests that a common body of experiences or
events stands behind the answers that all of them have given. Their
replies appear to reflect, not just their private concerns, but the con-
cerns of their community-its political agenda.
The data reveal some notable regularities in the composition of
these agendas. Some issues, for example, very rarely share space on
the same agenda, while others quite regularly travel together. There
appear to be some fairly consistent patterns of attraction and repulsion
among issues, and the existence of these patterns would seem to con-
tradict the pluralist view that different political enterprises tend to
remain mutually independent. But the contradiction may be an
illusory one. Suppose, for example, that there were a positive relation-
ship between the prominence of the air pollution issue and the promi-
nence of the water pollution issue. It might reasonably be argued that
this connection signifies not a political kinship between the two con-
cerns but a relationship between the physical conditions that create
those concerns. The two issues may go together only because dirty air
and dirty water tend to go together. If this were the case, we would
have found not a relationship between political issues, but a connec-
tion among the objective, non-political conditions that generate those
3 Had this item actually been included in the scale of issue-ness the coefficient of
reproducibility would have been .91. '
-.......L.. ___________ ....... ' .... ___________ -..JJ
TABLE VI-I: THE PROMINENCE OF THE AIR POLLUTION PROBLEM AND THE SALIENCE
OF OTHER CiVIC PROBLEMS, CONTROLLING FOR SUSPENDED PARTICULATE LEVEL
Civic Problem
Government reorganization
Water pollution and sewage disposal
Mass transit
Crime, police and fire protection
R'ace'relations
Loss of taxpaying residents
Municipal revenue and taxes
Public education
Recreation and parks
Unemployment
Wages and working conditions of public employees
Central business district renewal
Building and zoning codes
Traffic, streets, and parking
Housing
General conflict and public mistrust
Poverty and welfare
Business and industrial development
Association with the
Prominence of Air
Pollution as a Civic Problem
+.39
+.25
+.20
+.17
+.14
+.07
+.06
+.03
-.01
-.02
-.03
-.05
-.06
-.09
-.11
-.15
-.37
issues. As political enterprises, the two concerns might remain quite
independent of each other.
This possibility would naturally introduce some uncertainty into
the task of drawing a conclusion from the association between the
air pollution issue and the water pollution issue, but most of this
uncertainty can be eliminated by simply controlling for the dirtiness
of local air. By holding constant the level of local air pollution, we
can, in effect, cancel out its tendency to vary in conjunction with the
severity of water pollution or with any other local problem. The
correlation coefficients that appear in Table VI-1 have been com-
puted in this way. They show how the prominence of the dirty air
issue was related to the prominence of each of eighteen other. issues
that the respondents mentioned. In all eighteen cases, the actual level
of air pollution has been held constant, which means that the associa-
tions do not reflect any of the relationships that may exist between
dirty air and other issue-creating conditions.
Many of the relationships rep8rted in the table appear to support
the pluralist view that different issues tend to be politically inde-
pendent of one another. For example, there is almost no association
between air pollution as a civic concern and public education or
unemployment or central business district renewal. The prominence
of these issues neither enhances or reduces the life chances of the
pollution issue. There are several other matters that do seem to have
some bearing upon the political prominence of the dirty air problem,'
however.
The correlation coefficient reported at the bottom of Table VI-l
shows that where business and industrial development is a topic of
local concern, the dirty air problem tends to be ignored. The promi-
nence of one issue appears to be connected with the subordination
of the other, and the existence of this connection calls into question
the pluralist view that different political issues tend to rise and sub-
side independently. But the relationship is precisely the sort that the
informants in Gary anticipated when they suggested that different
issues compete with one another for attentibn. In this view, the
negative association between the air pollution and economic develop-
ment issues stands as evidence of the rivalry that exists among
political issues-the general tendency for one issue to gain its political
prominence at the expense of other issues. But the other associations
reported in the table suggest that the rivalry among issues is not a
widespread phenomenon. It occurs only within certain pairs of issues,
and it should not be difficult to understand why the two issues now
under consideration should constitute one of those competitive pairs.
Business and industrial development and air pollution control are
civic projects which can be expected to impose contradictory demands
upon a community. Pollution control is likely to require an increase
in the operating costs of local industrial corporations. Efforts at busi-
ness and industrial development are likely to call for a reduction of
those costs, so as to make the community a more attractive site for
manufacturing firms. A local polity that is occupied with the task of
business and industrial development will therefore tend to be "im-
penetrable" where the air pollution issue is concerned. Its politicaJ
interests and commitments are sharply inconsistent with the com-
mitments that are demanded by a clean air campaign.
A city does not ignore its dirty air simply because it is busy with
other things but because its other concerns are incompatible with the
pursuit of clean air. That, at least, is one conclusion suggested by the
table, but there is another possible conclusion. The real obstacle to
the growth of the air pollution issue, it might be argued, is not the
civic commitment to business and industrial development but the
concentration of political influence that ~ t a n d s behind that commit-
ment. We would expect that a town devoted to the cause of business
and industrial development might generally defer to the interests of
-
industrial corporations. In such a community, industry would be
likely to enjoy a reputation for power, and perceived industrial in-
fluence in the pollution field tends to diminish the survival prospects
of the dirty air issue. Perhaps it is not the concern for economic
development that reduces the prominence of the pollution issue, but
the industrial influence which is likely to go with that concern.
The evidence, however, fails to support this alternative explana-
tion. There is no association between industry's power reputation in
the pollution field and the civic prominence of efforts at economic
development (r = - .05). If any kind of influence supports business
and industrial development, it is that of political parties (r = +.21),
and this finding is an understandable one.
Business and industrial development is a civic project that is likely
to generate a large supply of specific, capturable benefits. It is true
that the economic development effort may eventually profit a whole
community, but it is important to note that this profit is not bestowed
on the community as a whole. Tax reductions for business firms, free
or underpriced land, special exemptions from zoning regulations,
reduced charges for municipal services, public loans-these are all
instruments of local economic development policy, and they all repre-
sent dividends for particular people or corporations. It is possible to
exercise a degree of control over the distribution of these specific
benefits: they can be given to some people and not to others. All of
these things are likely to make business and industrial development
attractive to party politicians. It is an enterprise which can yield the
sorts of policy benefits that parties need in order to sustain their
political brokerage operations.
The very things that make business and industrial development
attractive to party politicians set it apart from the quest for pollution
control. Clean air is a collective, indivisible benefit, while economic
development policy generates specific, capturable benefits. The ap-
parent rivalry that exists between these two concerns may reflect
fundamentally different orientations toward public policy. Communi-
ties that exhibit one of these orientations will be unlikely to !iupport
a political enterprise that presupposes the contrary inclination. Cities
that have spawned "specific" issues will be relatively inhospitable to
clean air campaigns.
It would seem to follow from this that polities which have exhibited
a concern for clean air will also tend to be concerned about other
collective issues, and this brings us to the issues that are listed near
the top of Table VI-I, those topics which appear to be congenial
to the growth of dirty air deliberations. Government reorganization,
water pollution, mass transit, crime, and race relations are all civic
concerns whose prominence is positively associated with the salience
of the air pollution issue. One thing that all of these congenial topics
have in common is that they are all relatively "collective" concerns.
Consider, for example, the matter of government reorganization.
Almost all of the items that fell within this category had to do with
the creation or renovl).tion of governing bodies for metropolitan areas,
not cities. The respondents mentioned proposals for the creation of
metro governments, for transferring municipal functions to county
governments, for the annexation of suburban areas, and for the
establishment of special district authorities to handle certain govern-
mental functions for entire metropolitan regions. All of these pro-
posals seem to presuppose a certain insufficiency in existing municipal
government. It is insufficient, the argument goes, because today's
urban problems are metropolitan in nature, not municipal, and their
solution requires a government apparatus which is metropolitan in
scope.
What is it about an urban problem that makes it "metropolitan"?
One answer, it seems, is that the problem is a collective one. Neither
the costs that it imposes nor the benefits that would arise from its
solution can be captured by individual municipalities within a metro-
politan area. The costs and benefits are indivisible and collective, and
a "collective" form of government is needed in order to deal with
such an issue. Of course, it may also be needed in order to deal with
certain "specific" commodities. Some adherents of metro govern-
ment, for example, perceive it as an instrument for equalizing the
distribution of specific benefits between the deprived residents of
central cities and more fortunate inhabitants of suburbs. In effect,
they would use this governmental arrangement to change the character
of the dividends that are distributed by local government. By dis-
pensing these benefits through a metropolitan area organization, they
hope to make them less specific-less susceptible to capture by limited
social groupings and more nearly indivisible. Under metro govern-
ment, it is argued, what one receives, all receive. In short, metro
government and kindred arrangements represent an inclination to
frame public policy in collective terms. They are intended, first, to
generate benefits that are collective by nature, clean air, for example;
second, they are intended to allocate benefits that are not collective
by nature in a way that is collective by design.
When the respondents mentioned government reorganization, there-
1.
!
I
fore, they were talking about a relatively "collective" concern. It
shares something of this collective character with water pollution,
mass transit, police and fire protection, crime, and race relations-
all civic concerns whose prominence is positively associated with the
salience of the air pollution issue. In each of these policy areas, the
benefits dispensed are comparatively collective ones. For example,
the benefits of mass transit are collective by comparison with the
benefits of other approaches to urban transportation, but they are not
collective in any absolute sense. The very fact that people can be
required to pay for individual bus or subway rides indicates that the
benefits of mass transit need not defy division and controlled distri-
bution, but it is important to note that these specific benefits are
bestowed in wholesale lots. If mass transit is made available to one
urbanite, then it must also be made available to a large number of
his fellow citizens, often to the whole population of a city, unlike other
varieties of urban transportation policy. The "traffic, streets, and
parking" category in Table VI-1 is the receptacle for these other
approaches, and it represents a class of policies which offer rela-
tively specific remedies for urban transportation problems-parking
lots, widened or one-way streets, new traffic signals, and the like.
All of these devices can be used in a practical way to benefit the
residents of particular neighborhoods or even the people who live
around a particular intersection. They generate benefits that are
rather specific and capturable. Of course, there are other policy con-
cerns within the "traffic, streets, and parking" category which are not
so specific, of which the urban expressway is a notable example. If
one citydweller enjoys the advantages of expressway transportation,
then a large number of his fellow citizens must be able to enjoy them
too. Like the benefits of mass transit, the dividends of expressway
construction are seldom doled out in small pieces. Nevertheless, the
expressway probably represents a somewhat less collective public
benefit than does mass transit. Its primary dividends, after all, are
not available to the residents of a whole community, but only to
those who own cars. The "mass transit" and the "traffic, streets, and
parking" categories, then, represent two kinds of civic responses to
the same kind of urban problem. Neither of these responses is purely
collective or purely specific, but mass transit, it might be argued, is
generally the more collective of the two approaches. It is also the one
whose political prominence is positively associated with the salience
of the air pollution issue.
"Race relations" is another civic agenda item that tends to appear
together with the dirty air issue, and it also represents a set of
relatively collective concerns. Most of these concerns have to do
with the achievement of racial equality through racial integration in
housing, employment, schools, and public accommodations. Racial
integration is not the only way in which communities seek to reduce
social and economic inequality, and the items included in the "poverty
and welfare" category of the table have to do with some of the other
means for diminishing these inequities. There are a number of dis-
tinctions that might be drawn between these other methods and the
integrationist approach. One of them is this: under the integrationist
approach, general benefits are conceded to Negroes as a group.
Poverty and welfare policies, on the other hand, would distribute
benefits, and costs, in small pieces to individuals. In other words,
integration is a more collective policy than is poverty and welfare,
and it is notable that the salience of integrationist concerns is
positively associated with the prominence of the pollution issue
(r = + .17). But between the pollution issue, on the one hand, and
poverty and welfare issues on the other, there is a slight negative
association (r = - .15).
In general, air pollution tends to be found in the company of other
relatively collective issues. Its closest companions are those topics
that are most clearly collective ones, government reorganization
(r = +.42) and water pollution (r = +.39). It exhibits a lesser
affinity for issues whose collective character is less pronounced, issues
like mass transit (r = + .25), crime (r = + .20), and race relations
(r = +.17). Even this mild affinity disappears when issues of mixed
or uncertain character are concerned, and it turns to aversion where
the issues in question are highly specific ones, like poverty and wel-
fare (r = - .15) or business and industrial development (r =
- .37). In short, it appears that there is some regularity in the attach-
ments of the dirty air issue. The more collective an issue, the closer
its connections with the air pollution issue. That, at least, is the
pattern to which these findings correspond, if only roughly, Because
of the difficulty of determining just how collective an issue is, there
must remain considerable uncertainty on the matter.
Some things, however, are less doubtful. It is fairly clear that these
findings are inconsistent with the pluralist portrayal of community
politics. Issues do not constitute mutually independent areas of
activity. Action in one issue-area may have some bearing on the
170 THE OF AIR POLLUTION
level of activity in other areas. Civic leaders who promote theeco-
nomic development issue, for example, may thereby discourage the
promotion of the dirty air issue. The influence of these political
activists extends beyond the field of their visible actions to other
issues and would-be issues. Thus community politics may be some-
what less fragmented than the study of political action alone would
indicate. Several issue-areas may, in effect, be subject to the influence
of local leaders who are visibly active in only a single field. of public
concern, and this influence may operate to reduce the penetrability
of community political systems. By promoting one political agenda
item, civic activists may succeed in driving other issues away. These
findings and their implications cannot be accommodated within the
pluralist theory of local politics, nor were they anticipated by the
informants from Gary, who contended that issues compete with one
another for attention. The research results Seem to call for a third
view of the relationships that exist among political issues.
COMMUNITY POLITICS AS AN ECOLOGY OF ISSUES
Political issues produce other political issues; not randomly, but
with a measure of order and even rationality. One political demand
may trigger a series of rationally related demands for things that
facilitate the achievement, distribution, or enjoyment of the benefit
that was originally requested. It is rational, for example, that a com-
munity which has turned its attention to the problem of unemploy-
ment should also exhibit some interest in the matter of business and
industrial development. The two subjects are related to one another
as problem and solution, and it is therefore not surprising that un-
employment and economic development should often share space on
the same political agendas (r = + .25). It is also understandable
that where civic leaders are interested in economic development, they
tend to be concerned about building and zoning regulations as well
(r = +.29). A town that wants to attract business and industrial
corporations, after all, must find some place to put them. The effort
at business and industrial development may therefore set off a re-
shuffling of local land uses and generate demands for the revision of
municipal building and zoning codes. Rezoning may serve as a
means to the end of economic development.
In many other cases; the empirical connections that exist between
pOlitical. also be interpreted as means-end relationships.
The positIve assoclatlOn between the issues of air pollution and govern-
ment reorganization is one such connection. Atmospheric contamina-
tion is seldom a condition that begins and ends within the jurisdiction
of a single municipality. It tends to be a regional or metropolitan-area
problem, and its solution may require a regional or metropolitan-area
form of government. Concern about dirty air might therefore lead to
demands for government renovation and to reorganization proposals
such as the respondents mentioned, proposals that would create or
invigorate governing bodies for metropolitan regions, and so provide
organizational instruments adequate to the task of cleaning up the
air. It is also possible that a commitment to these otganizational
instruments may create the demand for clean air. Once they have
taken up the cause of metropolitan-area government, civic activists
may search out those urban problems for which metro government
offers an appropriate solution. Where government reorganization is
a salient political issue, therefore, air pollution also tends to become
a matter of civic concern, and so does water pollution. Like the dirty
air problem, the dirty water problem is one that is likely to call for
metropolitan-area action. The water pollution issue and the govern-
ment reorganization issue therefore tend to go together (r = +.39).
In general, the promotion of one political issue may lead rationally
to the promotion, or the neglect, of others.
To say that issues lead to other issues also says something about
the role that political issues play within local politics. It suggests, first,
that issues ought not to be regarded as safety valves for purging a
community of discontent. The emergence of one issue, rather than
preparing the way for the discharge of social tension-and the
resolution of underlying conflict-may actually generate new foci of
discontent. It may call attention to discomforts and deprivations that
previously went unnoticed or were not regarded as fit subjects for
public discussion. To put it another way, political issues can create
political consciousness.
They also tend to shape or restrict that consciousness. Political
agenda items like the economic development issue do not produce a
general expansion in the scope of political discussion, but expansion
only in certain directions. The same kind of means-end rationality
that leads from the promotion of one issue to the promotion of others
may also lead from the promotion of one issue to the avoidance of
others. The negative relationship between the economic development
and air pollution issues is a case in point. A clean air campaign, we
might reasonably argue, is likely to interfere with the promotion of a
business and industrial development program. It is therefore rational
for a community which has committed itself to economic develop-
ment to avoid the air pollution issue. To sum up, the means-end
connections that exist among political issues may help to guide the
growth of local political agendas. A community that commits itself
to the consideration of one local concern may, in effect, commit itself
to a whole chain of rationally related issues and diminish its ability
to consider rationally antagonistic issues.
The problem with this rational view of the composition of political
agendas is that it does not go far enough. Mean&-end rationality does
seem to account for some of the negative and positive relationships
between issues, but there are far more empirical relationships between
issues than there are plausible means-end explanations. For example,
it is not difficult to perceive the rational inconsistency between the
air pollution and economic development issues, but how do we ex-
plain the empirical estrangement that exists between the economic
development issue and the matters of government reorganization
(r = -.32), mass transit (r = -.30), race relations (r = -.25),
crime (r = -.14), and water pollution (r = -.13)? It is not easy
to see how the economic development issue might be rationally in-
consistent with all of these matters. There is no obvious reason, for
example, why local concern for mass transit or government reorgani-
zation should interfere with a community's effort to make itself
attractive to business and industrial firms. It is certainly possible that
there may be some rational contradiction between the economic
development issue and each of these other matters, but the contra-
dictions, if they do exist, are obscure and probably not likely to
produce the kind of estrangement that was observed. One thing is
not so obscure. The economic development issue turn's out to be
negatively associated with every one of the political agenda items
identified as a relatively collective issue. There are no other items on
the list of community concerns to which the economic development
issue is so inhospitable. Issues that involve the disposition of relatively
specific goods-topics like economic development, unemployment,
and building and zoning regulation-tend to appear together, but
not in the company of relatively collective issues. Collective issues,
on the other hand, tend to keep company with other relatively col-
lective issues. Table VI-2 gives evidence, for example, of a positive
TABLE VI-2: INTERCORRELATION AMONG SELECTED ITEMS ON POLITICAL AGENDAS
123456789
I. Crime
2. Mass transit
3. Race relations
4. Air pollution
5. Water pollution
6. Government re-
organization
7. Unemployment
8. Building and
zoning codes
9. Business and
industrial de-
velopment
+.11 +.29
+.35
+.27 -.04 -.06
+.26 -.04 -.03
+.21 +.12 -.06
+.30 +.34
+.39
-.01 -.11 -.14
-.01 -.05 -.30
+.16 +.04 -.25
-.03 -.18 -.41
+.01 .00 -.13
-.03 -.11 -.32
+.11 + .. 25
+.29
association am?ng the matters of air pollution, mass transit, crime,
and race relatIons, all relatively collective issues. Government re-
organization,. water pollution, and air pollution seem to make up
another pOSSIble cluster of collective agenda items. These subjects
too, are all positively related to one another. '
with one collective issue, a city is more likely to
ItS attention to another collective issue than to a specific issue.
ThIS means that a community's political agenda will not constitute a
random sample of political concerns. It will exhibit a general bias
toward relatively specific or toward relatively collective issues. Means-
end rationality, as was noted, does not fully account for the existence
of general bias. The process by which issues create political
bring other issues to the surface of local politics
IS fully or so it appears. There is, however, a certain
III ItS operation. Collective issues tend to trigger other
.Issues, and specific issues tend to lead to other specific
regularity suggests that the process may reflect means-end
ratIonalIty of a more comprehensive sort than the kind that seems
to ope.rate within scattered pairs and trios of political issues. Specifi-
cally,. It may reflect rationality that comes with political ideology.
The Issues on a polItIcal agenda may all be rationally linked, not to
one another, but to some comprehensive political ideal or principle
that transcends the agenda-an ideological vision of the political
system.
4 Some of the coefficients in Table VI-2 differ from the comparable coefficients in
VI-I. Th.e reason f?r these differences is that the coefficients in Table VI-I were
part!al correlatlo? coeffiCIents. (computed so as to control for the level of suspended
while the. ones In Table VI-2 were computed without any controls for
po uUon levels. PolJutlon levels were held constant in the first case in order to
In order to support this interpretation of the findings, it would
be necessary to show that, among local political actors, there exist at
least two widespread ideological tendencies, each of which would
have to be rationally connected with one of the two general biases
that we have detected in the composition of local political agendas,
the bias toward collective and the bias toward specific issues. Previous
inquiries into the nature of local political ideology have strongly sug-
gested that there are two such tendencies. Banfield and Wilson have
identified a "public-regarding ethos" and a "private-regarding ethos."
5
Public-regarding citizens are distinguished by the habit of framing
and justifying their political decisions in terms of some conception of
the public interest. This intellectual habit naturally assumes that there
is a public interest, a collective good which is distinct from the private
wants of individual citizens. Collective issues seem to presuppose this
conception, and certainly the lack of it would constitute a logically
significant impediment to the conduct of political discussions about
collective benefits. For citizens who partake of the "private-regarding
ethos" there exists no public interest. Public policy does not serve a
community interest, but the private interests of individuals and groups
within the community. In other words, the political process operates
to distribute specific rather than collective benefits.
The public-regarding ethos and the private-regarding ethos appear
to be something less than political ideologies. They represent two
very broad, imprecise, and seldom articulated orientations toward
politics, but they are likely to be connected with other views of the
political system that lie closer to the surface of consciousness. Among
members of the political stratum, it is especially likely that ethos will
be translated into ideology. According to Robert Dahl, members of
the political stratum will usually be more self-conscious, precise, and
consistent in tht;ir political beliefs than other people.
6
Compared to
their fellow citizens, political activists are ideologues. Agger, Goldrich,
and Swanson have found a similar tendency toward ideology among
cancel out the effects of any relationship that might exist between dirty air and other
issue-producing conditions. The intention was to isolate the between
issues from any connections that might exist among the non-pohtlcal conditions .that
created those issues. These controls were omitted from the second table not beca.use
they were undesirable, but because it was impossible the underlym!!,
issue-producing conditions in relationships among pohtlcal Issues hke mass tranSit,
race relations, or business and industrial development.
5 Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, "Public-Regardingness as a Value
Premise in Voting Behavior."
6 Who Governs?, pp. 90-91.
commu?ity leaders and have devised a scheme for classifying
IdeologIcal preferences among civic activists. In one of
Important aspects, this typology appears to mirror the dis-
that and Wilson make between public-regardingness
and pnvate-regardmgness: Agger and his associates found that one
important of ideol.ogical variation has to do with the conception
of a commumty that IS embodied in a political creed. Some civic
see the community as an aggregation of conflicting private
mterests, and they see some of those interests-usually their own-
as appropriate guides to the making of public policy. Other political
leaders "view the community as a collectivity-an organism with a
common and believe that this common interest is a proper
and practIcal gUIde for political decisionmakers.'
COllective issues presuppose this organic view; they promise to
bestow in.divisible public goods upon the community as a whole. A
general bIas toward collective issues might therefore be the rational
product of the collectivist principle. A rationally consistent political
actor of the collectivist persuasion might be expected to enlist in one
cause after another. The bias that is evident in his personal
proceeds rationally from his devotion to a particular
IdeologIcal VISIOn or principle. But it would be a mistake to assert
that bias in community political agendas arises in precisely the same
way. Communities are not rational; individuals are. Communities do
not adhere to ideological principles; individuals do. Rather than
impute ideological rationality to communities it is necessary to find
out how the ideological consistency of individuals is translated inio
community bias, the kind of bias that leads a town from one issue to
others of the same species.
Issues create not only other political issues, but political activists
as well. The .kinds of that a community produces will probably
have somethmg to do WIth the kinds of people who enter the political
.. The makeup of the political stratum-its ideological lean-
mgs-will have something to do with the subsequent composition of
the community's political agenda. One issue can therefore affect the
life chances of other issues by affecting the character of a town's
political manpower, and this may be the way in which biases are
introduced into community political agendas. -
; Robert E. Agger, Daniel Goldrich, and Bert Swanson The Rulers and the Ruled
pp. 17-21. "
The manpower supply that is created by a issue :-:ill tend
to differ in a systematic way from the manpower that IS mobilIZed for
a specific issue. Citizens who spend their energies in the quest for a
collective good are more likely than other political actors to accept
non-material, moral gratifications as compensation and, because of
their public-regarding predispositions, are likely to contribute to the,
growth of other collective issues. A issue, be
expected to cultivate public-regardingness wIthm a town s polItIcal
stratum and the result is to increase the political stratum's receptivity
to othe; collective issues and to create a bias in the composition of
the local political agenda. In effect, political issues provide one
another with sustenance. Political manpower, the by-product of one
political issue, becomes a political resource for other, related issues.
The same kinds of ecological relationships that exist among com-
munity organizations may also exist among community political
issues and the existence of these relationships may help to account
for the existence of bias in local political agendas. Whether they
actually do so remains uncertain. There is evidence of bias in the
makeup of local agendas, but no sure indication how it got there.
V II Does PI uralism Fail Democracy?
It would misrepresent the findings of this study to refer to them
all as conclusions because they are not really conclusive. The investi-
gation has provided some highly probable, but not definitive, explana-
tions for the fact that some towns ignore their dirty air. Even if these
explanations were certain, they would not account fully
for local neglect of th,e issue. Taken together, they do not explain all
of the inter-city variation in its prominence. Finally, even if we could
offer an exhaustive explanation for the neglect of the air pollution
problem, we would not have accounted for political neglect in general.
The air pollution issue is not representative of all community political
issues. It may be easier to overlook than other matters of public con-
cern, and the factors that promote neglect in the pollution field are
undoubtedly different from the factors that consign other policy-areas
to. political oblivion. Granting all of these shortcomings, the findings
still have some important implications for the study of local politics-
and particularly for the pluralist view of community politics.
The findings, stated in their most elementary form, are these:
first, community political power may consist of something other than
the ability to influence the resolution of local political issues; there is
also the ability to prevent some topics from ever becoming issues and
to obstruct the growth of emergent issues. Second, this power need
not be exercised in order to be effective. The mere reputation for
power, unsupported by acts of power, can be sufficient to restrict the
scope of local decisionmaking. Even people and groups who do not
actively participate in a community's political deliberations may in-
fluence their content. Likewise, the "victims" of political power may
remain politically invisible-indeed, invisibility may constitute their
177
response to the power of non-decisionmaking. The actions or power
reputations of other political actors may deter these would-be .actors
from making -their way into the political arena. The operatlOn of
political power, therefore, is not always revealed in observable polit-
ical action, nor do community political decisions reveal the full range
of local policymaking. One must also consider the non-decisions. To
put it simply, there is more to local politics than meets the ~ y e . .
What does meet the eye is the disjointedness of commumty affairs.
Studies of local political activity undertaken by political scientists
have disclosed that community decision making is a highly fragmented
process. In fact, it is not a single process at all, but an array of
relatively independent processes each set in motion by a different
political issue. Different issues tend to activate different groups of
political decision makers, different kinds of political alignments, and
different styles of policymaking. In effect, each political issue brings
into being its own species of political order, and the result is a high
degree of political disorder. Political issues are transitory, episodic
phenomena, and because the political life of a community tends to be
organized around issues, it too tends to be episodic and unordered.
But our findings indicate that the emergence of the issues them-
selves may be politically regulated or coordinated, and while this does
not change the facts of observable political activity, it does alter the
impression of disjointedness that those facts convey. The issues on a
community's political agenda are not a random selection. The visible
political activities of a community are more ordered and inhibited
than an inspection of the activities alone would lead us to believe.
There are politically imposed limitations upon the scope of decision-
making. Within the area that is bounded by these restrictions, political
power appears to be fragmented and political decisionmaking un-
coordinated. But there is a general bias or direction in this disjointed-
ness. Decisionmaking activity is channeled and restricted by the
process of non-decisionmaking. The power reputations of people and
groups within a community may deter action on certain sensitive or
politically unprofitable issues. Activity in one issue-area may tend to
foreclose action in certain other issue-areas, as the findings reported
in Chapter VI suggest. Decisionmaking restrictions such as these
impart a degree of bias and unity to the political activities of a
community.
Moreover, it takes a degree of unity to maintain the restrictions
themselves. The political stratum of a community will seldom behave
DOES PLURALISM FAIL DEMOCRACY? 179
"pluralistically" toward issues which fall victim to these restrictions.
On such matters there will be virtually no disagreement, no competi-
tion, no bargaining. No groups of specialist decisionmakers will arise
to deal with them. In short, a polity that is pluralistic in its decision-
making can be unified in its non-decisionmaking.
It is not necessarily the case that this unity will be created or main-
tained by the power of some small, cohesive elite. Members of the
political stratum may be unanimous in their avoidance of certain
political issues, but this does not mean that they are all acting at the
direction of a single political control center or that the neglect of
every proscribed issue can be attributed to the same small clique of
"non-decisionmakers." The power to enforce inaction, it might be
argued, is almost as fragmented as the power to command action.
The perceived influence of local industry, for example, tends to
obstruct the political career of the air pollution issue, but it may be
the perceived influence of local real estate agents that blocks the
emergence of the fair housing issue or the power reputation of the
local teachers' union that enforces silence on the matter of educational
reorganization. It is quite likely that no single person or group sets
the limits of a community's decisionmaking activities. It might be
argued, therefore, that the process of non-decisionmaking is really
not much different from the process of decisionmaking. In both
political operations, power is distributed among a variety of people
and groups. Non-decisionmaking,it seems, simply adds another
dimension to political pluralism.
While there is no logical flaw in this conclusion, it misses. the point.
Although the fragmentation of political power is the distinguishing
trait of a pluralistic political system, it is a characteristic worthy of
attention only because it is seen to have momentous consequences for
the nature of the polity, and the occurrence of non-decisionmaking
calls some of these consequences into question.
Pluralism, the argument goes, helps to assure that popular senti-
ment will be brought to bear on a community'S decisionmakers. It is
a guarantee that the small minorities of citizens who exercise direct
influence over most decisions in most American cities will remain
responsive to the local majorities who are politically inactive. Where
there is -pluralism, it is argued, tpere is likely to be competition
amollg political leaders, and where leaders must compete with one
another, they will actively seek the support of constituents. A leader
who fails to cultivate public support runs the risk of heing thrust
aside by his rivals when the time comes to submit himself and his
policies to the judgment of the electorate. The politically quiescent
non-leaders will therefore acquire considerable indirect influence
over policymaking because leaders will keep popular preferences in
mind when they are making policy decisions, not so much to protect
themselves from public wrath as from their rivals, who might promote
and profit from that wrath. The pluralistic organization of the politi-
cal elite, therefore, helps to assure that the great bulk of the popula-
tion-will enjoy a substantial amount of indirect influence in the making
of almost all public decisions, even though it seldom participates
directly in the making of any public decision.
Pluralism, then, acquires much of its importance from its presumed
relationship with democracy. But the evidence concerning non-
decisionmaking suggests that this relationship may be a tenuous one.
First there is the matter of competition among political elites and its
cont;ibution to the democratic responsibility of local leaders. Political
competition is undoubtedly important for the maintenance of popular
control over political elites, but much depends on just what the
competition is about. If popular sovereignty is contingent upon
ship competition, then it will not extend to those matters on which
leaders choose not to compete. Restrictions on the scope of competi-
tion therefore diminish the field of democratic control, provided that
the restrictions themselves are not dictated by the popular will, and
the restrictions that have occupied our attention probably are not.
In other words, the limited democracy that is apparent in the decision-
making activities of a pluralistic political system may be limited still
further by the occurrence of non-decisionmaking. Visible
competition does not necessarily signify that a community's
is generally vulnerable to public opinion. Contrary to the contentIOns
of Robert Dahl and others, competition among ruling minorities does
not necessarily lead to government by the majority.
A pluralistic system which is not also an open has cease.d
to perform some of the functions that make pluralism valuable. It IS
not only responsiveness to majority sentiment that may have been
diminished. Restrictions upon the scope of decisionmaking may also
deny minorities the opportunity to grow to majorities.
tives of minority opinion, a political issue is not just a piece of public
business. It can serve as a soapbox or a pulpit, a critical opportunity
to communicate with the public, to persuade them, and perhaps to
arouse them to action. When issues are excluded from a communtty's
DOES PLURALISM FAIL DEM
OCRACY? 181
political agenda, minority opinions are likely to b d. .
. h . e erued thel
moment m t e spotlIght. Restrictions upon the scope of I I d .. r
k h oca eCISlon-
rna mg, t en, may also stunt the political consciousness of th I
bl
d I .. e ocal
pu IC, an It IS not po ltical conSCIOusness alone that m b
Th I I
. ay e stunted
e p ura IStS nghtly pomt out that political power is tIed t I..
. Wh 0 po ItIcal
Issues. en Issues .are shunted aside, therefore, it is likely that some
would-be leaders wIll lose their opportunities to achieve pro .
A I
I mmence
po Itlca challenger like Milton Roth for example wll I .
h. " lose a
c ance for a publIc showdown with established economic or political
lead.ers. In the the public loses an alternative source of infor-
matIOn and opmlon concerning the policies of the government.
. Pluralism is no guarantee of political openness or popular Sover-
eIgnty. We. may diversity of the decisionmaking groups
that compnse a town s polItIcal stratum, but it should be remembered
this .visible diversity tells us nothing about those groups and
Issues WhIch may have been shut out of a town's political life and
for that reason, there may be something fatuous in the ceIeb:ation:
The .sure inference that can be drawn from the visible diversity
of a polItIcal system is that it is visibly diverse. It need be no more
open and tolerant than the private club that proudly accepts members
of all religious creeds but excludes Negroes, women, and people with
unorthodox political opinions. Similarly, where diverse citizen con-
cerns become the subjects of political decision making, it need not
follow that local political leaders are responsive to all or even most
The of their democratic responsiveness may
m fact be senously restncted. Matters of considerable importance to
the people of a can be placed beyond the limits of political
cou:petItIOn. While political diversity may count for some-
thmg m Itself, It does not constitute political democracy.
The curious thing a.bout all of these observations is that they rely
u??n theoretIcal concept as do the pluralist contentions that
VISIble dIverSIty promotes democracy, the notion of indirect influence.
It has been. that undemocratic restrictions on the scope
of local polItIcal aCtIVIty are the products of indirect influence. They
are not the results of suppressive acts or directly applied pressure but
are. to. power reputations of various local groups, organi-
zatIOns, and mdlVlduals. Likewise, the pluralists argue that the democ-
racy of a pluralistic political system is not evident in the influential
. of the demos, but in its indirect influence. In the pluralistic
polItIcal systems of American communities the demos enjoys a reputa-
tion for power that is sufficiently impressive to control the behavior
of politically active minorities. Though most policy decisions are
actually made by political elites, they roughly reflect the preferences
of a larger public. Consequently, indirect influence is more democrati-
cally distributed than observable, direct influence. While this assertion
helps to soften the apparent inconsistency between democratic politi-
cal principles and the visible facts of community decisionmaking, it
introduces a disturbing paradox into the pluralists' approach to the
study of local politics. On the one hand, they urge us to attribute no
more power to reputed political elites than we can actually see them
exercise. On the other, they maintain that the power of non-elites is
really much greater than their observable actions would indicate:
Beyond this methodological inconsistency, there lies a more serIOUS
problem. How do we know tha't in pluralistic polities indirect influence
is more democratically distributed than direct influence? Partisans of
the pluralist view have never bothered to gather the evidence to
substantiate this claim. In order to do so, they would have to depart
from pluralist research techniques. It would be necessary to find out
something about reputations for power, not just acts of power. The
pluralists would have to make use of the very mode of investigation
that they have explicitly rejected, the reputational method. More
important still, investigations which have employed the reputational
technique tend to detract from the plausibility of the pluralist conten-
tion. They suggest that perceived influence may be less democratically
distributed than actively exercised influence. This finding does not
necessarily refute the pluralist claim. It is still necessary to find out
whether this oligarchic influence actually affects the course of political
activity. If it does not, then it cannot properly be called influence. But
the findings of this study indicate that it does. We have already seen
that the perceived influence of political and economic elites can have
an important effect upon the level of political activity in the field of
air pollution.
The present investigation of non-decisionmaking does not deny
pluralism, but it does cast doubt on some of the most important
claims that are made on its behalf. Pluralism does not guarantee that
every dissatisfied group of citizens will find a place to roost within
the political stratum, nor does it assure that political competition and
discussion will extend to all or even most areas of citizen concern.
Finally, there is a good reason to doubt that the competition en-
gendered by pluralism really inflates the indirect influence that the
DOES PLURALISM FAIL DEMOCRACY? 183
ruled have over their rulers. Political openness and democratic
responsiveness are likely to exist to the extent that citizens find it
possible to intervene directly in the political process. We cannot rely
upon the mere plurality of political elites to secure the values of a
liberal democracy. Even a diversity of competing political elites can
exhibit collective biases against some kinds of issues. These biases
appear to grow out of the organizational maintenance and enhance-
ment ~ e e d s of local elites, and it seems probable that they may be
transmItted from one dominant organization to others by a series of
"ecological" adjustments. Non-decisionmaking is the end result, but
it is not. inevitable. The case of Gary, for example, suggests that
federal or state intervention in local affairs may sometimes suspend
local biases and help to bring formerly neglected issues to the fore.
In effect, political actors who find the local polity unresponsive to
their demands can occasionally carry their case to another political
arena whose biases are more favorable to their cause. ..
In the air pollution field, successive pieces of national legislation
have made it progressively easier for a community's clear air advo-
cates to introduce the federal government into local dirty air debates.
The Federal Clean Air Act of 1967, passed a few months after the
data for this study were collected, may well have altered the list of
factors that affect the life chances of the dirty air issue in local com-
munities. Increased federal activity in urban affairs has undoubtedly
altered the life prospects of many would-be community issues other
than air pollution. This does not mean that organizational biases are
banished from politics; it means that henceforth the biases will be
different. The ecological systems that bring bias to bear upon the
composition of political agendas will no longer be local ones, but
federal-state-Iocal.
Bias is an inescapable feature of political systems. "All forms of
political organization," writes E. E. Schattschneider, "have a bias in
favor of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression
of others because organization is the mobilization of bias."l All forms
of political organization can therefore be expected to produce non-
decisions. Of course, some systems may be less inclined toward
non-decisionmaking than others. It has been suggested, for example,
that the frequency of non-decisionmaking may be diminished by
increasing the direct intervention of citizens in the political process.
1 The Semisovereigll People, p. 71.
But, in the end, the mere frequency of non-decisionmaking is not of
critical importance. The crucial question is not how many non-
decisions a political system makes but what kinds, and how significant
they are.
The main issue in the evaluation of a political system is not simply
how much bias it exhibits, but whether that bias is good or bad,
whether the issues that it neglects are worthy or unworthy. That is
clearly a matter for moral, not scientific, judgment, but the judgment
need not be an unreasoned one. It is possible to advance reasons for
believing that a proscribed issue is not trivial. It might be pointed out,
for example, that the air pollution issue is one that bears directly
upon the comfort, health, and even the survival of many citizens, and
air pollution is not the only topic of seeming importance that may
succumb to non-decisionmaking. More than one observer of the
American political scene has been struck by its glaring oversights and
omissions. "The most significant fact about the distribution of power
in America," writes Robert Wolff, "is not who makes such decisions
as are made, but rather how many matters of the greatest social im-
portance are not the objects of anyone's decision at all."2 Conversely,
the most significant fact about these non-decisions is that many-
perhaps most-of them have something to do with the distribution
of power. They are not all politically random oversights but instances
of politically enforced neglect.
2 Robert Paul Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism, p. 118.
Appendixes
Appendix 1
SAMPLE CITIES
AND THEIR SUSPENDED
PARTICULATE RATES
City
Akron, Ohio
Albany, New York
Amarillo, Texas
Atlanta, Georgia
Berkeley, California
Birmingham, Alabama
Bloomington, Minnesota
Boston, Massachusetts
Buffalo, New York
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Charlotte, North Carolina
Clifton, New Jersey
Duluth, Minnesota
Fort Worth, Texas
Fullerton, California
Gary, Indiana
Hamilton, Ohio
Hammond, Indiana
Indianapolis, Indiana
Irvington, New Jersey
Jacksonville, Florida
Long Beach, California
Malden, Massachusetts
Manchester, New Hampshire
Suspended
Particulate
Rate'
124
76
63
97
69
125
85t
129
112
87
107
92t
67
86
99t
214
99
133
156
103t
73
135
71t
59
'Average concentration of suspended
particulates in micrograms per cubic meter
of air.
City Suspended
Particulate
Rate'
Memphis, Tennessee
101
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 134
Minneapolis, Minnesota
85
Newark, New Jersey 103
Palo Alto, California
101 t
Pasadena, California 133
Phoenix, Arizona
194
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 157
St. Louis, Missouri 147
St. Paul, Minnesota 94
St. Petersburg, Florida 43
Salt Lake City, Utah
112
San Francisco, California 63
Santa Ana, California
99
San Jose, California 101
Schenectady, New York 76
Seattle, Washington 73
South Bend, Indiana
III
Tampa, Florida 84
Tyler, Texas
60
Utica, New York
97
Waco, Texas 83
Waterbury, Connecticut 83
Waukegan, Illinois
82t
t Computed from data collected at a
nearby air sampling station (see Chapter
III, p. 93, for details).
187
Appendix 2
NATIONAL OPINION RESEARCH CENTER
INTERVIEW SCHEDULE FOR PANEL OF
COMMUNITY LEADERS
Name ofRespondent--'-______________ _
Position ___________________ _
City and State _________________ _
Time Interview Began _______________ _
189
III
-
190 APPENDIX
1. A. What do you personally think has been the most important problem
which ( city ) has had to face since 1960?
B. What other problems have been very important during this time period
(1960-1966) ?
2. Here is a list of subjects which sometimes pose problems for cities in the
United States. (HAND RESPONDENT CARD 1.) Would you tell me
which of these have been very serious problems in ( ~ ) , which have
been fairly serious problems in ( ~ ) , and which have not been serious
problems in ( ~ ) ?
Very
I
Fairly
I
Not
Serious Serious Serious
A. Industrial and economic devel-
opment (new plants, electrifica-
tion, employment, labor supply,
etc.) ................... '" 2 3
B. Housing and building (slum
clearance, blight and deteriora-
tion, zoning, etc.) ........... 2 3
C. Race and ethnic relations (school
desegregation, housing segrega-
tion, racial violence, etc.) .... 2 3
D. Public improvements, services,
and utilities ( transportation,
roads, streets, sewage, etc.) ... 2 3
E. Health (public & private. hospi-
tals, sanitation, etc.) ........ 2 3
F. Culture (libraries, clubs, theaters,
etc.) ...................... 2 3
G. Education (including school con-
struction, curriculum problems,
reorganizations, etc.) ........ 2 3
H. Social improvement and welfare
(child welfare, crime, delin-
quency, poverty, care for the
aged, handicapped, etc.) ...... 2 3
I. Air pollution (the regulation of
industrial and private emissions) 2 3
J. Recruitment of capable public
servants .................... 2 3
NORC INTERVIEW SCHEDULE 191
3. (LET RESPONDENT KEEP CARD 1.) Would you now tell me whether
each of these subjects has provoked a great deal of controversy in
( ~ ) during the years since 1960, has provoked a moderate amount
of controversy, or has provoked little or no controversy?
4.
A. Industrial and economic devel-
opment (new plants, electrifica-
tion, employment, labor supply,
etc.) ..................... .
B. Housing and building (slum
clearance; blight and deteriora-
tion, zoning, etc.) .......... .
C. Race and ethnic relations (school
desegregation, housing segrega-
tion, racial violence, etc.) ....
D. Public improvements, services,
and utilities (transportation,
roads, streets, sewage, etc.) ...
E. Health (public & private hospi-
tals, sanitation, etc.) ....... .
F. Culture (libraries, clubs, theaters,
etc.) ..................... .
G. Education (including school con-
struction, curriculum problems,
reorganizations, etc.) ....... .
H. Social improvement and welfare
(child welfare, crime, delin-
quency, poverty, care for the
aged, handicapped, etc.) ..... .
I. Air pollution (the regulation of
industrial and private emissions)
J. Recruitment of capable public
servants .................. ..
A Great I A Moderate I Little
Deal of Amount of or No
Controversy Controversy Controve'rsy
2
2
2
2
2
:2
2
2
2
2
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
3
Is there any single person whose opposition would be almost impossible to
overcome or whose support would be essential if someone wanted to (run
for /be appointed to) the school board in ( ~ ) ?
Yes ....... (ASKA) ........ 1
No ....... (ASKB) ........ 2
IF YES:
A. Who is that? ____________________ _
What is his position in the community? __________ _
IF NO:
B. What person comes closest to this description? _________ _
j
i
192 APPENDIX
5. Here is a list of groups and organizations. Please tell me for each whether
their support is essential for the success of a candidate for the school ?oard,
whether their support is important but not essential, or whether theIr sup-
port is not important. (HAND RESPONDENT CARD 2.)
Support
Support Not
Essential Important
A. Democratic Party 2 3
B. Republican Party 2 3
C. Chamber of Commerce 2 3
D. Church leaders 2 3
E. New.spapers 2 3
F. Bar association 2 3
G. Labor unions 2 3
H. Ethnic groups (IF NAMED AS
ESSENTIAL OR IMPORTANT,
ASK: Which ethnic groups?) 2 3
1. Neighborhood groups 2 3
J. Heads of local government
cies 2 3
K. City and county employees 2 3
L. Industrial leaders 2 3
M. Retail merchants 2 3
N. Bankers and executives of finan-
cial institutions 2 3
O. Other businessmen 2 3
6. Is there any single person whose opposition would be almost impossible to
overcome or whose support would be essential if someone wanted to
organize a campaign for a municipal bond referendum in
Yes ....... (ASKA) ........ 1
No ....... (ASKB) ........ 2
IF YES:
A. Who is that? ___________________ _
IF NO:
B. What person comes closest to this description? _______ _
7. On this list of g.roups and organizations, please tell me for each
whether theIr support I.S the. Success of a municipal bond
theIr support IS Important but not essential, or whether
theIr support IS not Important. (HAND RESPONDENT CARD 2.)
I Support I
Support
Support
Important,
Not
Essential Not Essential
Important
A. Democratic Party
2 3
B. Republican Party
2 3
C. Chamber of Commerce
2 3
D. Church leaders
2 3
E. Newspapers
2 3
F. Bar association
2
3
G. Labor unions
2 3
H.
Ethnic groups (IF NAMED AS
ASK: Which ethnic groups?)
2 3
I. NeighborhoOd groups
2 3
J.
of local government agen-
Cles
2 3
K. City and county employees
2 3
L. Industrial leaders
2 3
M. Retail merchants
2 3
N.
Bankers and executives of finan-
cial institutions
1 2 3
O. Other businessmen
1 2 3
o.vercome or whose support would be essential if someone wanted to get the
CIty to undertake an urban renewal project?
Yes ....... (ASK A) . ....... 1
No ....... (ASKB) ........ 2
IF YES:
A. Who is that? ____________________________ ___
What is his position in the community? ___________ _
IF NO:
B. What person comes closest to this description? ________ _
194 APPENDIX
9. On this same list of groups and organizations, please tell me for eac?
whether their support is essential for the success of an. urban renewal
ect, whether their support is important but not essentIal, or whether theIr
support is not important. (HAND RESPONDENT CARD 2.)
10.
Support
Support Not
Essential Important
A. 2 3
B. 2
F. Bar association
G. Labor unions 2 3
ASK: Which ethnic groups?) 1 2 3
I. Neighborhood groups 1 2 3
J. Heads of local government agen-
cies 2 3
K. City and county employe!!s 2 3
L. Industrial leaders 2 3
cial institutions 2 3
O. Other businessmen 2 3
Is there any single person whose opposition would be almost impossible to
overcome or whose support would be essential for a program for the con-
trol of air pollution in
Yes ....... (ASK A) . ....... 1
No ....... (ASKB) ........ 2
IF YES:
A. Who is that? _____________________________________ _
IF NO:
11. On this same list of groups and organizations, please tell me for each
whether their support is essential for the success of a program for air pollu-
tion control, whether their supportis important but not essential, or whether
their support is not important. (HAND RESPONDENT CARD 2.)
I Support I
Support
Support
Important,
Not
Essential Not Essential
Important
A. Democratic Party
2
3
B. Republican Party
2
3
C. Chamber of Commerce
2 3
D. Church leaders
2 3
E. Newspapers
2 3
F. Bar association
2 3
G. Labor unions
2 3
ASK: Which ethnic groups?)
2 3
I. Neighborhood groups
2 3
J.
Heads of local government agen-
cies
2 3
K. City and county employees
2 3
L. Industrial leaders
2 3
M. Retail merchants
2 3
N.
Bankers and executives of finan-
cial institutions
2 3
O. Other businessmen
2 3
overcome or whose support would be essential if someone wanted to run
for mayor in
Yes ....... (ASK A) ........ 1
No ....... (ASKB) ........ 2
IF YES:
A. Who is that? ____________________ _
IF NO:
';
196 APPENDIX
13. On this same list of groups and organizations, please tell me for
whether their support is essential for a candidate for mayor, whether theIr
support is important but not essential, whether their" support is not impor-
tant. (HAND RESPONDENT CARD 2.)
14.
Support
Support Not
Essential Important
A. Democratic Party 2 3
B. Republican Party 2 3
C. Chamber of Commerce 2 3
D. Church leaders 2 3
E. Newspapers 2 3
F. Bar association 2 3
G. Labor unions 2 3
ASK: Which ethnic groups?) 2 3
1. Neighborhood groups 2 3
J. Heads of local government agen-
cies 2 3
K. City and county employees 1 2 3
L. Industrial leaders 1 2 3
cial institutions 1 2 3
O. Other businessmen 1 2 3
Listed on this card are seven different things which most cities would like
to do. (HAND RESPONDENT CARD 3.) However, no one city can do
all of these things at the same time.
A.
From what
you know,
which one of
these seven
things does the
city council
consider most
important?
( 1) Seeing to it that this city becomes
a very attractive place to live-
with good residential areas and
convenient community
facilities ................... .
(2) Seeing to it that this community
has a good climate for business
B.
Now, which
one would
you say the
city council
considers
second most
important? I,
"
2
C.
Finally,
which do
they consider
third most
important?
3
Which would encourage economic
growth .................... .
(3) Seeing to it that the city provides
its poor and disadvantaged with
a decent life-with adequate
food, housing, and opportunity
( 4) Seeing to it that this is a city free
from harmful strife between eco-
nomic, religious, or neighbor-
hood groups ............... .
(5) Seeing to it that this city main-
tains its heritage and its tradi-
tional values ............... .
(6) Seeing to it that the city has a
government which is efficient,
honest, and economical " .....
(7) Seeing to it that the city is a place
where citizens play an active role
in government ............. .
2 3
2 3
2 3
2 3
2 3
2 3
15. Now, with this same list of things, please teII me which the community
leaders outside of government would
( 1) Seeing to it that this city becomes
a very attractive place to live-
with good residential areas and
convenient community
facilities ................... .
(2) Seeing to it that this community
has a good climate for business
which would encourage economic
growth .................... .
(3) Seeing to it that the city provides
its poor and disadvantaged with
a decent life-with adequate
food, housing, and opportunity
(4) Seeing to it that this is a city free
from harmful strife between eco-
nomic, religious, or neighbor-
hood groups ............... .
(5) Seeing to it that this city main-
tains its heritage and its tradi-
tional values ............... .
(6) Seeing to it that the city has a
government which is efficient,
honest, and economical ...... .
(7) Seeing to it that the city is a place
where citizens play an active role
in government ............. .
A.
Consider
most
important
B.
Second
most
important
2
2
2
2
2
2
C.
Third
most
important
3
3
3
3
3
3
po
I'
!
1111
198 APPENDIX
16. When the city government in ( city ) is inaugurating a new project-
such as an urban renewal project, a new welfare program, a new capital
improvements program-is it the normal practice to hold a number of
public meetings on the proposal, to hold one or two public meetings on the
proposal, or doesn't the government usually hold public meetings on the
proposal?
A number of public meetings are usually held .... (ASK A). . . . . .. 1
One or two public meetings are usually held ..... (ASK A) ....... 2
Usually no public are held ............ (GO TO Q. 17) .. 3
A. IF PUBLIC MEETINGS HELD: Do a large number of citizens
attend these meetings, or do almost no citizens attend these meetings?
A large number . . . . . . . . . . .. 1
Very few .................. 2
Almost none . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 3
17. Are proposed projects of the city government very often altered because of
- the testimony or suggestions made by citizens either in public meetings or
in other ways, or are proposed projects rarely altered, or are proposed proj-
ects never altered because of suggestions of citizens?
Often ............... : ..... 1
Rarely .................... 2
Never .................... 3
18. To the best of your knowledge when the leaders of the Chamber of Com-
merce are making a decision about community affairs, to what group's
opinions do they give the greatest weight? (RECORD VERBATIM; THEN
CIRCLE APPROPRIATE CODE.)
Retail merchants ............... 1
Industrial executives ............ 2
Bankers and executives of financial
institutions .................. 3
Others (SPECIFY) ............. 4
19. When the leaders of the Republican Party are making a decision about com-
munity affairs, to what group's opinions do they give the greatest weight?
(RECORD VERBATIM; THEN CIRCLE APPROPRIATE CODE.)
Local businessmen . . . . . . .. . . . . . .. 1
Neighborhood groups ........... 2
Ethnic groups (SPECIFY) ...... 3
Labor unions .................. 4
Heads of municipal agencies ..... 5
Local newspapers .............. 6
City and county employees . . . . . .. 7
Negroes ....................... 8
Other (SPECIFY) ............. 9
20. When the leaders of the Democratic Party . . .
community affairs, to what rou 's 0 i' are makmg deCISIon about
weight? (RECORD VERBlmJ. CdIoRcthey gIve the greatest
CODE.) ,LE APPROPRIATE
Local businessmen
Neighborhood ......... " i
Ethnic groups (SPECIFy): 3
Labor unions 4
Heads of ... " 5
L?cal newspapers ......... ::... 6
and county employees .... : :: 7
egroes ............ " . . - 8
Other (SPECIFY) ...... :::... 9
21. agencies ,are policy decisions concern-
weight? (RECORD do they give the greatest
CODE.) , N CIRCLE APPROPRIATE
Local businessmen 1
:::: ::: .. " 2
Ethmc groups (SPECIFY) ...... 3
Labor unions .............. 4
Heads of municipal agencies .:::: 5
Local newspapers ........... 6
and county employees .... : : :- 7
egroes ......... " . " ..... '" 8
Other (SPECIFY) ............. 9
Today many American cities are facing new robl V
fO new that the at large is not
and must bnng these matters to the attention of civic leaders
22. Is there any pers.on or group in this city who was first to brin the
matter of local air pollutIOn to the attention of the public? g
No, bthl.
e
, problen; of air pollution has never been brought to the
pu IC s attentIOn
No, the. problem of I
attentIOn, but not by any specific person or group .......... " 2
yes ................... (ASK A AND B) .................. : 3
IF YES:
A. What person or group was this?
(IF RESPONDENT
POSITION THAT INDIVIDUAL HOLDS IN THE COMMU
-
B. When did they ( he/she
first raise the subject of local air pol-
lution? ---______ (YEAR)
1.'1
200 APPENDIX
23. Have any of the people listed on this card (HAND RESPONDENT
CARD 4) ever talked with you or any other officers of your organization
about theproblem of air pollution in ( ~ ) ?
Yes No
City officials ......................... . 2
Industrial executives .................. . 2
Retail merchants ..................... . 2
Bankers and executives of other financial
institutions ........................ . 2
Other local businessmen ............... . 2
Labor union officials .................. . 2
Officers of local political party organizations
(SPECIFY WHICH PARTY) ....... . 2
Other (SPECIFY) .................... . 2
24. It's often said that there are two sides to every issue. But on some matters,
people may be divided into more than two sides. And in those few cases
where everyone agrees about a subject, there is really only one side repre-
sented. How would you characterize the subject of air pollution, as it has
been discussed in ( ~ ) ? Has only one side been active, two sides, or
more than two?
No sides-the subject has never come up ... (SKIP TO Q. 43) . . .. 1
One side-everyone agrees .............. (ASK Qs. 25-30). . .. 2
Two sides ............................. (ASK Qs. 25-36) .... 3
More than two sides .................... (ASK Qs. 25--42) .... 4
25. Please tell me who are the leading persons and organizations:
IF TWO OR MORE SIDES:
On the side seeking the most extensive air pollution control?
IF ONLY ONE SIDE:
In the air pollution issue? (PROBE FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL'S POSI-
TION IN THE COMMUNITY.)
SUPPORTERS OF SIDE #1
26. What does this group propose doing?
27. Do they want federal, state, or local legislation or no legislation at all?
(CODE AS MANY AS APPLY.)
Federal ................... 1
State ..................... 2
Local .................. '" 3
None at all ................ 4
A
202 APPENDIX
28. Which sources of air pollution is this group most interested in regulating?
(PROBE, UNLESS ALREADY MENTIONED: Would their proposal
regulate factories, automobiles, home furnaces and incinerators?)
29. Why have they said they are in favor of what they propose? (PROBES:
What else did they say about why the community should do this? Did they
say anything about government intervention in the private sector?)
30. In addition to what they said, do you personally think there is any other
reason why they took the position that they did?
IF ONLY ONE SIDE IN Q. 24, SKIP NOW TO Q. 43.
IF TWO OR MORE SIDES IN Q. 24, CONTINUE WITH Q. 31.
31. Please tell me now who are the leading persons and organizations: IF
THERE ARE ONLY TWO SIDES: on the other side of the issue? IF
THERE ARE MORE THAN TWO SIDES: on the side seeking the next
most extensive air pollution control? (PROBE FOR EACH INDI-
VIDUAL'S POSITION IN THE COMMUNITY.)
32. What did this group propose doing?
33. Did they want federal, state, or local legislation or no legislation at all?
(CODE AS ;MANY AS APPLY.)
Federal ................... 1
State ..................... 2
Local ..................... 3
None at all ................ 4
34. Which sources of air pollution is this group most interested in regulating?
(PROBE, UN.LESS MENTIONED: Would their proposal
regulate factones, automobIles, home furnaces and incinerators?)
35. "(by did say they are in favor of this action? (PROBES: What else
they say about why .the should do this? Did they say any-
thing about government mtervention m the private sector?)
IF ONLY TWO SIDES IN Q. 24, SKIP TO Q. 43.
IF MORE THAN TWO SIDES IN Q. 24, CONTINUE WITH Q. 37.
I

204 APPENDIX
37. What about the side proposing the least extensive air pollution control?
Who are the leading persons and organizations on this side?
(PROBE FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL'S POSITION IN THE COMMU-
NITY.)
38. What did this group propose doing?
39. Did they want federal, state, or local legislation or no legislation at all?
(CODE AS MANY AS APPLY.)
Federal ................... 1
State ..................... 2
Local ............... , .. '" 3
None at all ................ 4
40. What sources of air pollution was this group most interested 'in regulating?
(PROBE, UNLESS ALREADY MENTIONED: Would their proposal
regulate factories, automobiles, home furnaces and incinerators?)
41. Why did they say they were in favor of this action? (PROBES: What did
they say about why the cO?Jlll1fI1ity s h ~ u l d do this? Did they say anything
about government illtervention ill the pnvatesector?)
43. Has the ( organization ) taken a position, either formally or informally,
on the matter of local air pollution?
Yes ....... (ASK A).. . . .. .. 1
No ....... (ASKB) ........ 2
IF YES:
A. Does the ( organization ) agree with those who want the most exten-
sive air pollution coptrol program, the least extensive, or does it stand
somewhere in between?
Most extensive ............. 1
Least extensive . . . . . . . . . . . .. 2
In between ................ 3
IF NO:
RIS this. because the members are not interested in this subject, because
they dIsagree among themselves about it, or for some other reason?
Members not interested .. " . . . . .. 1
Disagreement among members ... 2
Other (SPECIFY) ............. 3
, I
~
206 APPENDIX
44. Has the ( organization ) done any of the following in regard to air
pollution?
A. Issued a public statement .......... .
B. Helped to sponsor a study of the prob-
lem .......................... .
C. Gave members' or staff time for a study
of the problem ................. .
D. Gave members' or staff time for a cam-
paign to initiate a program in this
area .......................... .
E. Sponsored public meetings ......... .
F. Printed literature on the subject .... .
G. Sponsored advertising on this subject in
the local press ................. .
H. Organized lectures or discussions on
this subject at meetings of your orga-
nization ....................... .
I. Other activities (SPECIFY) ....... .
Now let's talk about the anti-poverty program.
Yes
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
No
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
46. We don't know if there are two sides to the issue of the poverty program
in or only one side, or more than two sides. How many sides
are there?
No sides-subject has never come up ...... (SKIP TO Q. 56) .... 1
One side--everyone agrees .............. (ASK Qs. 47-49) .... 2
Two sides .............................. (ASK Qs. 47-52) .... 3
More than two sides .................... (ASK Qs. 47-55) .... 4
47. IF TWO OR MORE SIDES:
First, who are the leading individuals and groups on the side which recom-
mends the most extensive community action program?
IF ONLY ONE SIDE:
First, who are the leading individuals and groups in the issue of the poverty
program?
48. What did these people propose in regard to a local poverty program?
(PROBE: Are there some things they wanted that others did not?)
49. How influential would you say ( supporters of side #1 ) ( has/have
been in policy decisions?
influential ............ 1
Somewhat influential . . . . . . .. 2
Slightly "influential .......... 3
Not influential ............. 4
IF ONLY ONE SIDE IN Q. 46, SKIP TO Q. 56.
IF TWO OR MORE SIDES IN Q. 46, CONTINUE WITH Q. 50.
208 APPENDIX
50. IF TWO SIDES:
Who were the leading groups and individuals on the other side of the issue?
IF MORE THAN TWO SIDES:
Who were the leading groups and individuals on the side proposing the next
most extensive community action program?
51. What did these people propose in regard to a local P?verty program?
(PROBE: Are there some things they wanted that others dId not?)
been in policy decisions?
Very influential ............ 1
Slightly influential .......... 3
IF TWO SIDES IN Q. 46, SKIP TO Q. 56.
IF MORE THAN TWO 'SIDES IN Q. 46, CONTINUE WITH Q. 53.
53. Who were the leading groups and individuals on the side proposing the
least extensive action?
54. What did these people propose in regard to a local poverty program?
(PROBE: Are there some things they wanted that others did not?)
been in influencing policy decisions?
Very influential ............ 1
Slightly influential .......... 3
55. Have any of the people listed on this card spoken to you or members of
your organization about urban renewal in ( city )? (HAND RESPOND-
ENT CARD 4.) ---
City officials ......................... .
Industrial executives ................... .
Retail merchants ..................... .
Bankers and executives of other financial
institutions ........................ .
Other local businessmen ............... .
Labor union officials .................. .
Officers of local political party organizations
(SPECIFY WHICH PARTY) ....... .
Other (SPECIFY) ................... .
.Yes
1
1
1
No
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
l
210 APPENDIX
57. Who inside the government is the most influential supporter of urban re-
newal?
58. Which individuals or groups outside of the city government ar<: the m?st
influential supporters of urban renewal in ( ~ ) ? What IS ( his!
group's ) position in the community? (PROBE: Who else is an important
supporter? Anyone else?)
Name
Position in community
1. ______________ ~ - - - -
2. ____________________ __
3. ____________________ __
4. ____________________ __
5. __________________ __
ASK FOR EACH SUPPORTER NAMED IN Q. 58.
59. Is ( he!that group ) a supporter of a city-wide urban renewal program
or is ( his! group's ) support primarily centered on one specific project?
Supporters City-Wide I J ~ ~ ! ~
[A. It specific project: What is the
Program A)
name of that project?
1.
1 2
2.
1 2
3.
1 2
4. 1 2
5. 1 2
. 1
2

60. What would you say has been ( his/group's ) major reason for support-
ing urban renewal?
Supporters Major reason
1. __________________ __
2. ________________ __
3. ________________ __
4. ________________ __
5. ________________ __
61. Why has ( he/group ) been important? That is, what resources or kinds
of influence did they use?
Supporters
Resources or kinds of influence
1. ________________ __
2. ________________ __
3. __________________ __
4. __________________ __
5. ________________ __
62. Has there been opposition to urban renewal in ( ~ ) ?
yes ................. (ASK Q. 63) ........ 1
No .................. (SKIP TO Q. 76) .... 2
63. Has the opposition been directed at the program in general or at specific
projects, or has it been directed at both?
Program in general .... (GO TO Q. 64). . . .. 1
Specific projects ....... (SKIP TO Q. 68) .... 2
Both ................ (GO TO Q. 64) ..... 3
212 APPENDIX
64. Who have been the most influential persons and groups opposing the urban
renewal program? (PROBE FOR PERSON'S POSITION IN COMMU-
NITY.)
Opponents Position in community
1. ____________________ __
2. ____________________ __
3. ____________________ __
4. __________________ __
5. __________________ __
65. What has been the main reason for the opposition of each of these
opponents?
Opponents Reasons
1. ____________________ ___
2. __________________ __
3. ____________________ _
4. ____________________ __
5. ____________________ __
66. Have ( opponents named in Q. 64 ) obtained all or most of their goals,
have they obtained only a few of their goals, or have they obtained none of
their goals?
Opponents All or most A few None
1. 2 3
2. 2 3
3. 2 3
4. 2 3
5. 2 3
67. What resources or kinds of influence did these opponents use to obtain their
objectives?
Opponents Resources or kinds of influence
1. ____________________ ___
2. ____________________ ___
3. __________________ __
4. __________________ __
5. ____________________ ___
ASK Q. 68 IF "SPECIFIC PROJECTS" OR "BOTH" TO Q. 63; OTHER-
WISE SKIP TO Q. 76.
68. Who have been the most influential persons and groups opposing specific
projects? Please tell me for each which projects they opposed.
Opponents
Projects
1. ____________________ __
2. ____________________ __
3. ______________________ __
4. ______________________ __
5. ______________________ __
69. What has been the main reason for the opposition of each of these
opponents?
Opponents
Reason
1. ____________________ __
2. ______________________ __
3. ________________________ _
4. ____________________ __
5. ____________________ __
70. Have ( opponents named in Q. 68 ) obtained all or most of their goals,
have they obtained only a few of their goals, or have they obtained none of
their goals? .
Opponents
All or most A few None
1.
2 3
2.
2 3
3.
2 3
4.
2 3
5.
2 3
I
il
214 APPENDIX
71. What resources or kinds of influence did these opponents use to obtain
their objectives?
Opponents Resources or kinds oj influence
1. ____________________ _
2. ____________________ __
3. ____________________ __
4. ____________________ __
5. ____________________ __
Now, let's talk about the opposition to ( first project mentioned in Q. 68 ).
72. A. First, was there opposition (READ ITEMS (1)-(7) AND CODE
YES OR NO FOR EACH)
Don't
Yes Know
(1) during preliminary planning? .... 0 X
(2) at the time of submission to the
urban renewal board? ........ 0 X
(3 ) at the time of submission to the
city council? ............... 0 X
(4) at the time of public hearings? .. 0 X
federal government? .......... 0 X
(6) at the time of selection of build-
ings to be demolished, rehabili-
tated, or conserved? ......... 0 X
(7) at the time of resale of the land? 0 X
B. To what aspects of the project was the opposition directed?
Don't
Yes Know
(1) The choice of the site? ......... 1 0 X
(2) The priority given to this site? .. 1 0 X
(3) The amount of demolition? ..... 1 0 X
(4) The amount of relocation neces-
sitated? .................... 1 0 X
(5) The type of reuse of the land? .. 1 0 X
(6) The proposed redeveloper? ..... 1 0 X
(7) Any other aspects to which there
was opposition? (SPECIFY) .. 0 X
C. Were the opponents to the project supporters of the general urban
renewal program?
yes ...................... 1
No ....................... 2
D. Were the 0l?ponents of the project supporters of other specific urban
renewal proJects?
yes ...................... 1
No ....................... 2
ASK Q. 73 ABOUT 2ND PROJECT IN Q. 68; IF ONLY ONE PROJECT
MENTIONED, SKIP TO Q. 76.
73. A. How about in ( second project mentioned in Q. 68 )-was there
opposition (READ ITEMS (1)-(7) AND CODE YES OR NO FOR
EACH)
( 1) during preliminary planning? ....
urban renewal board? ....... .
city council? .............. .
(4) at the time of public hearings? ..
federal government? ........ .
tated, or conserved? ........ .
(7) at the time of resale of the land?
Yes
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
(1) The choice of the site? ........ .
(2) The priority given to this site? ..
(3) The amount of demolition? .....
sitated? ................... .
(5) The type of reuse of the land? ..
(6) The proposed redeveloper? .....
was opposition? (SPECIFY) ..
Yes
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
Don't
Know
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
Don't
Know
X
X
X
X
renewal program?
yes ...................... I
No ....................... 2
D. Were the opponents of the project supporters of other specific urban
renewal projects? . .
yes ...................... I
No ....................... 2
216 APPENDIX
ASK Q. 74 ABOUT 3RD PROJECT IN Q. 68; IF ONLY TWO PROJECTS
74. A. In ( third project mentioned in Q. 68 )-was there opposition
(READ ITEMS (1)-(7) AND CODE YES OR NO FOR EACH)
( 1) during preliminary planning? . , ..
urban ren'ewal board? ....... .
city council? .............. .
(4) at the time of public hearings? ..
federal government? ........ .
( 6) at the time of selection of build-
tated, or conserved? ........ .
(7) at the time of resale of the land?
Yes No
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
(2) The priority given to this site? ..
sitated? ................... .
Yes
1
1
1
I No
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
Don't
Know
x
x
X
X
X
X
X
Don't
Know
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
renewal program?
yes ...................... 1
No ....................... 2
renewal projects?
yes ...................... 1
No ....................... 2
. NORC INTERVIEW SCHEDULE 217
ASK Q. 75 ABOUT 4TH PROJECT IN Q. 68; IF ONLY THREE PROJECTS
75. A. In ( fourth project mentioned in Q. 68 )-was there opposition
Yes
(1) during preliminary planning? .... 0
urban renewal board? ........ 0
(3 ) at the time of submission to the
city council? ............... 0
(4) at the time of public hearings? .. 0
federal government? .' ........ 0
tated, or conserved? ......... 0
(7) at the time of resale of the land? 0
(2) The priority given to this site? "
( 4) The amount of relocation neces-
sitated? ................... .
Yes
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
Don't
Know
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
Don't
Know
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
renewal program?
yes ...................... 1
No ....................... 2
renewal projects?
yes ...................... 1
No ....................... 2
218 APPENDIX
IF MORE THAN FOUR PROJECTS MENTIONED IN Q. 68, ASK Q. 75
A-D ABOUT EACH OTHER PROJECT AND RECORD ON CONTINUA-
TION SHEET(S).
ASK EVERYONE
76. Has ( organization ) supported, opposed, or taken a neutral position
with regard to urban renewal?
Supported ................ 1
Opposed .................. 2
Neutral ............... , . " 3
77. Has ( organization ) done any of the following in regard to urban
renewal?
A. Issued a public statement ........... .
B. Helped to sponsor a study of the prob-
lem ........................... .
C. Gave members' or staff time for a study
of the problem ................. .
D. Gave members' or staff time for a cam-
paign to initiate a program in this
area .......................... .
E. Sponsored piIblic meetings ......... .
F. Printed literature on the subject ..... .
G. Sponsored advertising on this subject in
the local press ................. .
H. Organized lectures or discussions on
at meetings of your orga-
ruzation ....................... .
I. Other activities (SPECIFY) ....... .
Yes No
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
78. What about Mayor ( name )? Did your organization support him,
oppose him, or take a neutral position in the last mayoral campaign?
Supported ..... (ASK A) . . .. I
Opposed ...... (ASK A) . . .. 2
Took neutral position ....... 3
A. IF SUPPORTED OR OPPOSED: Did your organization (READ
ITEMS a-g AND CODE YES
OR NO FOR EACH)
a. issue a public statement about the
candidates? .................. .
b. give members' or staff time for the
campaign? ................... .
c. sponsor public meetings concerning
the campaign? ............... .
d. print campaign literature? ........ .
e. sponsor campaign advertising in the
local press? .................. .
f. sponsor lectures or discussions about
the campaign at meetings of your
own organization? ............ .
g. engage in any other campaign activi-
ties? (SPECIFY) ............. .
Yes No
2
3
4
5
6
7
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
TimeEnded: ______________________________________________ __
Interviewer's Name: ______________________ _
Date: __________________________________________________ _
Note: This questionnaire was administered to the presidents of the Chamber of
Commerce and the bar association, union officials, and newspaper editors. Separate
questionnaires were drafted for local health commissioners, mayors, urban renewal
directors, and political party chairmen. The questionnaire reproduced here contains
most of the items that were selected from those others for use in the present study.
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#
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Index
Adrian, Charles, 22n
Agger, Robert, 30n, 174-75
Air pollution: control techniques, 9-10,
51n; costs and benefits of, 85-86, 89-
90, 118-20; health effects of, 7-8, 14;
measurement of, 92-94; public attitudes
about, 11-17, 58, 125-27; sources of,
7-8, 11, 39, 63, 65. See also Photo-
chemical smog; Sulfur oxides; Sus-
pended particulates
Air Pollution Control Advisory and
Appeals Board (East Chicago), 46,
51, 54-55
Air Pollution Control Advisory Board
(Gary), 74
Allegheny County, Pa., 71
Angelidis, Chris, 113; appointed chief of
Gary Air Pollution Division, 73; drafts
air pollution ordinance for Gary, 69-
72; releases results of air sampling
survey, 74; seeks stronger pollution
ordinance, 75
Anti-poverty programs. See Poverty and
welfare
Applegate, George, 51, 79; and introduc-
tion of East Chicago pollution ordi-
nance, 52-53; leads Chamber of Com-
merce delegation in East Chicago
pollution negotiations, 46-48; supports
pollution regulation within Chamber
of Commerce, 48-49
Armour Research Institute, 66, 68-69,
78, 159; asked to draft pollution ord!-
nance for Gary, 67; conduct Gary air
pollution study, 61-62; criticized, 64-
65; recommendations of, to City of
Gary, 63-64
Bachrach, Peter, 21, 23
Banfield, Edward C., 134n, 136, 154, 174
Baratz, Morton, 21, 23
Benedict, Ruth, 22n
Bernstein, Marver, 70n
Bias: in community political agendas,
158, 173, 175-76, 178, 183; mobiliza-
tion of, 22-23, 183; of pluralism, 155;
of political party organizations, 150
Birmingham, Ala., 60
Blough, Roger, 60-61
Board of Public Works and Safety: East
, Chicago, 43-44, 52; Gary, 58
Business and industrial development, 165-
66, 169-72
California, 9
Campbell, Oliver, 48-49
Chacharis, George, 56, 67-69, 76-78,
142-43
Chambers of Commerce: East Chicago,
46-54, 79, 83; Gary, 67, 72, 76-77,
83; in local ecology of organizations,
147-50; positiontaking activities of, 89,
91, 100, 103, 118, 123; respondents in
NORC survey, 31, 87, 95-97, 113,
163
Chicago, m., 11, 50, 64, 69
City council, 90, 97; East Chicago, 44-
45, 52-54; Gary, 36, 56-57, 62, 66,
72-74
Clark, Peter, 149, 156-157
Clean Air Act: of 1963; 10, 75; of 1967,
183
Cohen, Loyd, 43-44, 57, 63, 77, 79, 141-
42; background of, 41-42; drafts air
pollution ordinance for East Chicago,
45-46; negotiates with Chamber of
Commerce, 46-51; presents pollution
ordinance to city council, 52-53
Coleman, James S., 102n
Collective benefits, 137-41, 156, 166-68,
176
Costs of pollution control, 51n, 85-86,
89-90, 118-20
225
l
1
226 INDEX
Cotter, Dr. Edward, 47
Crain, Robert, 31n
Crime: as community issue, 167-69,
172-73
Dahl, Robert A., 4, 20, 107-8, 174-75,
180
Democracy: and industrial influence, 125-
26; pluralist theory of, 20, 107-9, 130-
31, 179-81
Democratic Party, 146-47; East Chicago,
41, 81, 83, 141-43, 147-48; Gary, 55-
57, 81, 83, 91, 140-43, 147-48
East Chicago, Ind., 36, 41, 56, 76, 83-
87, 90-91, 125; emergence of pollution
issue in, 43-44; enacts pollution ordi-
nance, 52-54; enforcement of pollution
regulations in, 54-55; history of, 37;
"politics" in, 42-43; pollution condi-
tions in, 37-39, 55; pollution ordinance
drafted for, 45-51; population com-
position of, 39-40
Easton, David, 22
Ecology of organizations, 149-54, 158
Etzioni, Amitai, 156
Federal intervention, 10-11, 183; fear of,
in East Chicago, 49; in Gary, 72,75-76
Froman, Lewis A., 156
Gary, Elbert, 35, 59-60
Gary, Ind., 55, 57-60, 65-66, 68, 77-87,
90-91, 107-9, 114, 116, 122-24, 147-
48, 159-61, 165; citizens' petition for
pollution ordinance, 67; enacts pollu-
tion ordinances, 73, 76; founding of
35; pollution conditions in, 36-39;
pollution negotiations in, 73-75; pollu-
tion ordinance drafted for, 69-72;
pollution surveys in, 61-64, 74; popula-
tion composition of, 39-40, 56
Gary Land Company, 35
Gary Post-Tribune, 62, 67, 72, 74
Gavit, Albert, 66, 78, 81, 83, 142
Goldrich, Daniel, 30n, 174-75
Guttman scaling, 97-100, 162
Hamburg, Germany, 6
Hammond, Ind., 76
Health departments, YO, 97, 100, 105;
Gary, 36, 39; respondents in NORC
survey, 36, 39
Housing, 56, 159
Howell, Granville, 58-61, 67-68, 72, 78
Hunter, Floyd, l10n
Ideology, Political, 23, 136 173-75
Illinois Institute of 62, 64
Indiana: state pollution laws in, 68,
72-73
Indirect influence: in community politics,
107-10, 122-25, 130, 147, 155, 180-82
Industrial corporations: and costs of
pollution control, 86, 118-20; East
Chicago, 37, 39, 45-55, 77, 79-80;
Gary, 65, 80, 123; indirect influence of,
122-25, 155; opponents of pollution
control, 83-84, 89, 91; power reputa-
tions of, 114-15, 117-18, 122-23, 125-
27, 131, 166
Inland Steel Company, 37, 39, 69
Issue-areas: definition of, 161; and dis-
tribution of political influence, 111-12;
in pluralist theory, 20-21, 24-25, 127-
28, 130, 160-61, 169-70
Issue-ness: definition of, 29-32; measure-
ment of, 94-102
Junior Chamber of Commerce, 66
Katz, Martin, 74
Labor organizations: positiontaking acti-
vities of, 74, 100, 103, 118, 147-48,
150-51; respondents in NORC survey,
32, 87, 95-97, 113, 123, 163
League of Women Voters, 57, 62, 67
London, England, 6-7
Long, Norton, 148, 152
Los Angeles, 8, 45
Lowi, Theodore, 156
Mandich, Peter, 56, 61-62, 64, 76, 142,
159
Mayoral elections, 128-29
Metropolitan government, 167-69, 171-73
Migas, Frank, 45, 52, 54, 141
Molnar, Charles, 47, 50, 54
Municipal bond referenda, 128-29
National Air Pollution Conference (1962)
72 '
National Air Sampling Network, 37-38,
92-94
National Institute of Municipal Law Offi-
cers, 45
National Opinion Research Center, 31
Newspapers: influence of political parties
on, 147-48, 150, 152-54, 158; position-
taking activities of, 83-84, 91, 95, 97,
100, 103, 118; respondents in NORC
survey, 32, 87, 113, 123
New York, N.Y., 1-3,6-7
Northwest Indiana Air Resource Man-
agement Program, 76
Olson, Mancur, 137
Osaka, Japan, 6
Ostrogorski, Moise, 134-35
Photochemical smog, 8-9, 92, 94, 104-6
Pittsburgh, Pa., 11, 45, 60, 65, 69
Pluralism. See Democracy; Issue-areas;
Power; Research methods
Policy benefits. See Air pollution; Collec-
tive benefits; Specific benefits
Political party organizations: East Chi-
cago, 80-81, 147; Gary, 80-81, 147;
indirect influence of, 147-51; as in-
fluence brokerages, 136-41, 146, 152-
53, 155, 166; and newspapers, 152-54,
158; as political machines, 16-17, 133-
36, 139-40; positiontaking activities of,
91, 95-96, 100, 103, 118; power repu-
tations of, 143-46, 148; respondents in
NORC survey, 31-32, 97, 113
Polsby, Nelson W., 26, 110-11, 122
Poverty and welfare, 87, 89-91, 100, 169
Power: definitions of, 33-34; elitist views
of, 18; of non-decisionmaking, 21, 24-
25, 78, 130, 177-79; pluralist views
of, 18-20, 33, 69-70, 110, 112-13;
reputations for, 80-81, 110-16, 177-78,
182. See also Industrial corporations;
Political party organizations
Public education, 164
"Public-regardingness," 174
Pullman Company, 60
Purdue University, 68
Race relations, 56, 159, 167-69, 172-73
Research methods: of pluralists, 18-19,
21, 24, 182; of reputational approach,
. 18, 110-13, 182; for study of non-
decisions, 26-29, 33
Ridker, Ronald, 9n
Rossi, Peter, 31n
Roth, Milton, 60, 66, 78, 81, 113, 142;
background of, 57; drafts pollution
ordinance for Gary, 65; initiates pollu-
tion survey of Gary, 61-62; raises
pollution issue in Gary, 58-59
Rotterdam, Netherlands, 6
St. Louis, Mo., 11-17, 28, 45, 126
Salt Lake City, Utah, 11
INDEX 227
Schattschneider, E. E., 22-23, 73n, 120,
183
School board appointments, 128-29
Schuenemann, Jean J., 51n
Specific benefits, 137-40, 156, 166-68
State intervention, 101, 105; in Gary, 68,
72
Steffens, Lincoln, 134-35, 155
Stouffer, Samuel, 99n
Sulfur oxides, 7-8, 11-14, 38-39, 92-94,
103-4, 106
Suspended particulates, 7-8, 12-13, 38-
39, 45-46, 63, 71, 92-93, 103, 106
Swanson, Bert, 3On, 174-75
Transportation and traffic, 56, 62, 159,
167-69, 172-73
Unemployment, 164, 170
U.S. Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare, 12
U.S. Public Health Service, 12, 36, 72,
75-76, 92-94
U.S. Steel Corporation, 39, 67, 76, 81,
122 124-25, 141; and Armour Institute
repbrt, 64-65; and drafting of Gary
pollution ordinance, 69-73; and found-
ing of Gary, 35; negotiates with Gary
officials, 74-75; power of, 77-80, 107;
responds to pollution issue in Gary,
58-61
U.S. Steelworkers, 74
Urban renewal, 128-29
Visclosky, John, 69
Water pollution, 163, 167-68, 171-72
Whiting, Ind., 76
Wildavsky, Aaron, 3n
Williams, Oliver, 22n
Wilson, James Q., 134n, 136, 149, 156-
57, 174-75
Wolff, Robert Paul, 184
Wolfinger, Raymond, 112
Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company,
39
Zoning, 41, 170
Political Science JOHNS HOPKINS PAPERBACK
"A landrn:ark work in urban politics .... No one who lives in a
large American city can doubt its relevance, and it has enormous
scholarly merit as well."-J. David Greenstone, University: of
Chicago
"The politics of pollution is now both a major field of tirban
controversy and a generator of significant studies ....
A. Crenson's ... study of the air pollution issue, based upon the
experiences of two Midwestern cities, contends that large
industrial and political interests may use the processes of indirect "
democracy to decrease rather than promote public concern."
-Library Journal
"The Un-Politics of Air Pollution is ... a superb work in my
view. It makes a significant contribution in several fields of
political science-to theory that relates to the meaning and
relationship of pluralism and" democracy; to urban politics,
especially that aspect of it that focuses on community power;
" and, more broadly speaking, to the entire field of empirical
theory."-Peter Bacllrach, Temple University "
MATTHEW A. CRENSON is Assistant Professor .of Political
Sc!ence at The Johns University. -
THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS Baltimore, Maryland 21218
ISBN 0-8018-1379-4

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