Legislating the solution to pollution: Congress and the development of water pollution control policy, 1945--1972

“Legislating the Solution to Pollution” examines environmental policy between 1945 and 1975. It presents a case study of water pollution control in order to advance a revised interpretation of American Political development—one that underscores the positive role the United States Congress played in reordering national priorities and reorienting national institutions. To explain the growth of government or the implementation of new regulatory regimes, conventional narratives posit wartime exigencies, assertive executive agencies, powerful interest groups, or broad social movements as the true engines of innovation. Accordingly, they relegate the Legislative branch to the margins of pork and partisanship. The history of water pollution policy offers a different perspective. In two decades, Congress helped transform a little-known by-product of the nation's water development program into the largest Federal environmental regulatory program. This transition from distributive to redistributive politics cannot be understood unless Congress is treated as a dynamic institution, with an evolving capacity to manage knowledge and expertise.; The dissertation refines and reconnects the historical literatures on state-building and the environmental movement, both of which tend to marginalize the Legislative branch. It offers a corrective to an environmental historiography that focuses almost exclusively on the grass roots or a shifting cultural zeitgeist to explain alterations in state policies and priorities. Though these factors were certainly important, “Legislating the Solution to Pollution” demonstrates how traditional political agendas and professional discourses also informed, and even enabled, “new” environmental initiatives, culminating with the landmark Clean Water Act of 1972. The narrative characterizes the legislative branch as an institution finely attuned to this multiplicity of discourses, and the legislative process itself as proactive and independent: responsive to external social, cultural, and political stimuli, but moderated as well by internal priorities, personalities, and pragmatic agendas.