From Donora to Love Canal

When President Nixon and his staff walked into the White House on January 20, 1969, we were totally unprepared for the tidal wave of public opinion in favor of cleaning up the environment that was about to engulf us. 

The Donora catastrophe of 1948 made it clear that factory fumes were more than just another species of smoke. The Manufacturing Chemists Association was not alone in bringing new vigor to pollution control. Regulatory initiatives were launched in New Jersey and other industrial states in a sign of the times, the Smoke Prevention Association, composed mostly of local 

What was to be done about the newly urgent hazard The Industrial Hygiene Division promoted its usual remedy more research. But the experts who had been squeezed out of the Donora study—the Bureau of Mines, the Steelworkers union, and independent scientists—were not silenced. The Bureau of Mines in particular grew more vocal about the need to clean up the nation s air. Louis McCabe, now heading its environmental programs, urged a federal air pollution program that went beyond research to control. 

Industry and its allies still sought to limit the federal role. Within a year, Robert Kehoe was lobbying to have the Bureau of Mines air pollution program ended and the field made the exclusive preserve of the Public Health Service. The two agencies competed quietly for control of air pollution programs for another five years.3 

Public worry about the air was propelled by new pollution episodes. A week of killer smog hit London in December 1952, more than doubling the death rate until it cleared.4 In 1954, Republican senators from the smog-afflicted states of California and Indiana submitted legislation to establish a federal program of air pollution research the Eisenhower administration responded by undertaking to draft a bill of its own. 

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