American Business in American Politics

Fulbright Professor Sarah Elkind, American Business in American Politics: Stories of the Los Angeles Environment in the Twentieth Century

Recent political debates in the United States have revealed, once again, the extraordinary power of the American business community to shape public policy. This talk uses examples from Los Angeles’s efforts to control oil drilling, private development of local beaches, and air pollution to show how the local business community came to wield such power in local politics. This local influence is extremely important because, contrary to what many Americans believe, local policies shaped national policies in very significant ways.

Sarah S. Elkind (University of Michigan, 1994) is an associate professor teaching environmental, political and urban history at San Diego State University. This year, she is a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at Syddansk Universitet. Her forthcoming book How Local Politics Shaped Federal Policy: Business, Power, and the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, explains the roots of business influence on local environmental policy, and shows how this local influence subsequently shaped federal policy. Her first book, Bay Cities and Water Politics (Kansas, 1998), explored regional public works and political reform in Boston, Massachusetts, and Oakland, California, and won the Abel Wolman award from the Public Works Historical Society.