Oil in the City: The Fall and Rise of
Oil Drilling in Los Angeles
Sarah S. Elkind
Today oil derricks stand like trees in a forest. . . . Steam pile drivers roar on many
a vacant lot. . . . One hundred and eighty permits to drill for oil have been given
and twenty-five more are in procedure. . . . If this fever continues, as it gives every
indication of doing, one reasonably may expect to see virtually the entire waterfront line of private properties from Washington street to Sixty-sixth avenue or
Playa del Rey dotted with a line of oil derricks.
—“Venice Battle Attests Oil and Water Do Mix,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1930
Thus did the Los Angeles Times describe the Venice Beach–Del Rey oil field in 1930, six
months into an oil boom that displaced homes, polluted beaches, and transformed residential Venice into a petroleum production zone. This drilling frenzy, soon labeled the
“destruction of Venice,” precipitated a vigorous debate over oil drilling and zoning in
Venice, and was invoked by opponents of oil exploitation in Los Angeles for the next two
decades. Debates over oil production in Venice and other Los Angeles neighborhoods
reflect the long struggle of American cities to regulate polluting industries, but with a difference. While slaughtering houses, tanneries, and other nuisance industries could be
relocated away from valuable property and concentrated populations, oil deposits could
not. Additionally, the laws governing the ownership of both land and oil in early twentiethcentury California encouraged dense, rushed drilling, especially in urban areas. This situation handicapped government and industry efforts to mitigate oil-related damage and
highlights the centrality of property rights to industrial regulation.1
Los Angeles began its long struggle over oil with the city’s very first well. Edward
Doheny drilled this well amid house lots about a mile west of downtown. Doheny later
gained infamy in the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s but was eventually acquitted of
charges that he bribed Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall in exchange for oil leases in the
Elk Hills and Teapot Dome naval petroleum reserves. Elected officials soon enacted rules
to keep oil wells from encroaching on public parks. This did little to quell oil prospecting
either downtown or, later, in Venice, because land owners in California faced few limits
Sarah S. Elkind is an associate professor in the Department of History at San Diego State University. She is grateful
to the Huntington Library, the National Science Foundation, and San Diego State University for their support of
this research.
Readers may contact Elkind at [email protected].
1
Christine Meisner Rosen, “‘Knowing’ Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a
Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840–1864,” Environmental History, 8 (Oct. 2003), 565–97.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas079
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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June 2012
The Fall and Rise of Oil Drilling in Los Angeles
83
on their rights to exploit mineral resources. Moreover, under the law of capture, oil
belonged only to the person who “captured” or extracted it, even when an oil deposit
extended beyond property boundaries. In an oil field subdivided into hundreds of
separate properties, as Venice was, these laws practically forced oil companies to lease as
much land, raise as many derricks, and quickly produce as much oil as they could. Public
opinion eventually mobilized against drilling in the aftermath of the destruction of
Venice, but this backlash was cut short by World War II. Oil companies, supported
by federal officials, increased production during the war. They responded to public
opposition by introducing new technologies to mitigate the worst hazards of oil drilling.
The larger significance of this story, however, lies in the way the oil industry deflected
regulatory impulses and, in the process, asserted industry prerogatives in solving urban
environmental problems.2
The Venice–Del Rey Field
Venice is located on Santa Monica Bay, fifteen miles west of downtown Los Angeles. It
began in 1905 as a speculative—and largely unsuccessful—real estate fantasy, complete
with canals and gondolas. In 1926 Los Angeles annexed Venice. When the Ohio Oil
Company struck oil southeast of Venice in December 1929, Los Angeles zoning regulations prohibited oil drilling in residential and commercial sections of the community.
In practice, drilling in these areas could not proceed without a special permit from
the city council. This requirement did not stop oil company agents from immediately
fanning out to negotiate drilling leases in residential Venice. The city council found it
nearly impossible “to forbid a property owner . . . from going after a fortune beneath
his lot,” and by March 1930 it had granted scores of special permits. Zoning restrictions
fell before the tide of public opinion; for the next year, oil development proceeded
“somewhat indiscriminately” because of the law of capture: property owners and
oil prospectors alike viewed any delay as likely to reduce their oil production and thus
their profits.3
The Venice oil boom precipitated a “great conflict of interests” over drilling and property rights in Venice. In the first months of the oil boom, Venice City Council member
J. C. Barthel declared oil drilling “one of the most popular issues with the greatest unanimity
of opinion” he had ever seen. The Del Rey Beach Improvement Association and five
thousand Playa Del Rey and Venice residents demanded an end to drilling restrictions in
Venice. In June some three thousand Venice residents went even further, petitioning
to eliminate restrictions on oil drilling everywhere in the city of Los Angeles. Drilling
advocates argued that land owners had specific rights to exploit their mineral rights and
to lease their property to whomever they wished. But opponents considered oil wells
public nuisances that infringed on the property rights of others. Drilling opponents
sought full enforcement of zoning to protect the “public weal—ignoring individual loss.”
2
Margaret Leslie Davis, Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny
(Berkeley, 1998). “That Oil Ordinance,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 25, 1897, p. 8.
3
Howard Kegley, “Oil ‘Find’ Effect Studied,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 22, 1929, p. A1; “Venice Battle Attests
Oil and Water Do Mix,” ibid., June 29, 1930, p. A1; “Mining and Oil News from Distant and Near-by Centers:
Oil Activity at Venice Gaining,” ibid., March 17, 1930, p. 15. Most observers blame the rule of capture for the
excesses in these fields. See Terence Daintith, Finders Keepers? How the Law of Capture Shaped the World Oil Industry
(Washington, 2010).
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They also claimed that Venice voters approved annexation to Los Angeles in 1926 to gain
the benefits of Los Angeles’s zoning ordinances.4
Those who applied for special drilling permits in 1930 saw zoning and regulations
through an economic lens. They opposed rules that limited their ability to exploit the oil
under their land or to take advantage of oil-driven real estate booms. Council member
Barthel was no exception: his wife filed for a drilling permit under her maiden name even
as he called on the city of Los Angeles to lift zoning restrictions in Venice. Drilling opponents comprised a more varied lot. Venice property owners who feared the negative
impact of oil on the value of their property and on economic growth from tourism, or
who had tried and failed to secure an oil lease, joined the coalition to protect their real
estate investments from drilling on abutting lots. City council member Charles H. Randall,
representing a district near downtown, advocated a statutory ban on all wells in residential Los Angeles because zoning was too easily overturned. Finally, the Los Angeles
Board of Playground and Recreation Commissioners worried that oil would contaminate
recreational beaches.5
Most of the opponents’ complaints about drilling in Venice reflected the problems
common with “town lot fields,” as oil fields with derricks erected on small house lots were
known. All early twentieth-century oil fields featured frequent oil spills, fires, gushers,
explosions, and blowouts. The high gas pressures in Los Angeles oil deposits exacerbated
these risks, as did business practices such as delaying tank and pipeline construction until
wells began to produce, or letting gushers spew wildly, as one Venice firm did, “for advertising purposes.” In crowded town lot fields, the proximity of housing to derricks magnified
these dangers, even as the law of capture encouraged drilling practices that ultimately
reduced the yield from these oil deposits. At the time drilling began in Venice Beach, several
decades of unrestrained oil development in the United States had impelled many oil companies to propose new drilling practices that they labeled oil conservation measures. These
methods were intended to reduce the dangers associated with dense oil fields, to stabilize oil
prices, and to conserve the natural gas pressure that made it possible to extract oil from
underground deposits. Specifically, conservation proponents advocated establishing minimum distances between wells, setting production limits, and apportioning oil among leaseholders before drilling began. Some of these measures would have reduced the impacts of
the Venice oil field, but the push for oil conservation ran afoul of the deep divisions within
the oil industry in California. Major companies such as Standard Oil supported oil conservation, but smaller independent firms opposed rules that slowed or apportioned production and thus threatened their profits. These smaller firms also suspected the major
companies of using conservation to monopolize oil resources and markets.6
4
“Venice Battle Attests Oil and Water Do Mix,” A1; George Acret, “Summary of the Venice Oil Situation,”
communication 879, box A434 (Los Angeles City Archives, Calif.); Spencer H. Horner to Councilman E. Webster,
“Resolution,” Feb. 8, 1930, communication 1308, box A435, ibid.; “Venice’s Oil Pleas Heard,” Los Angeles Times,
Jan. 11, 1930, p. 1; Marcus Roberts to Los Angeles City Council, Feb. 1, 1930, communication 850, box A433
(Los Angeles City Archives); Bertha S. Edwards to Los Angeles City Council and Planning Commission,
Feb. 10, 1930, communication 1307, box A435, ibid.
5
“New Venice Oil Permit Plan Urged,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 7, 1930, p. A5; “Oil Drilling Scotched,” ibid.,
Jan. 30, 1932, p. A4; “Randall Would Restrict Areas for Oil Drilling,” ibid., Jan. 30, 1932, p. A1; “Oil Drilling Ban
Favored,” ibid., Feb. 4, 1932, p. A1; “Venice’s Oil Pleas Heard,” 1.
6
Howard Kegley, “Oil Field Found East of Venice,” ibid., Dec. 20, 1929, p. A1. “Fees on Venice Drilling Asked,”
ibid., Aug. 11, 1930, p. A8. On the unique hazards of these oil fields, see Nancy Quam-Wickham, “‘Cities Sacrificed on
the Altar of Oil’: Popular Opposition to Oil Development in 1920s Los Angeles,” Environmental History, 3 (April 1998),
192. See also Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (Berkeley, 2005), 111–33.
The Fall and Rise of Oil Drilling in Los Angeles
85
In the absence of new drilling rules, community leases offered some hope for rational
development and oil conservation in Venice and other town lot fields. In a community
lease, private land owners let their land as a block to a single company and then shared
the proceeds. Larger leases meant fewer wells spaced farther apart, lower drilling costs,
and greater overall oil production. Community leases also had the potential to distribute
revenues more evenly among land owners by including those who would not otherwise
have profited at all from the oil under their land. Community leases, however, required
land owners to agree on the details of the lease, to share the resulting wealth, to cede a
measure of control over their land to their neighbors, and to accept slower returns from
oil production. These requirements made these leases extremely difficult to arrange, particularly in the middle of an oil frenzy.7
Just two months after Ohio Oil Company discovered oil, the Los Angeles City
Council briefly entertained a variant of the community lease for Venice. The proposed
ordinance would have permitted oil companies to lease entire city blocks, provided a
majority of the residents on that block approved. By reducing the density of derricks
in the field, this block-leasing plan would have achieved many of the goals of oil conservation and might have preserved more of Venice’s residential character. Block-based
development would also have changed drilling from a private economic calculation
into a communal democratic decision. But the proposal received little public or
city council support precisely because it threatened property owners’ immediate
profits and departed radically from the property-rights regime that governed both oil
and leases at the time. The failure of the block-leasing ordinance and absence of community leases or other oil conservation measures left Venice unprotected when land
owners demanded that the city council waive zoning regulations and issue special
drilling permits.8
By June 1930, because of what the Los Angeles Times derided as “indiscriminate” drilling, the oil boom had encroached on the public beach in Venice. The Los Angeles City
Council and the Playground and Recreation Commission, horrified at the oil pollution
and the derricks looming over one of the few public strands in Los Angeles County, proposed that the city lease the beach for drilling and use the revenue to buy more pristine
shoreline elsewhere. According to California property laws, the city owned the oil under
the beach; it irked the commission that not only were private oil companies destroying
the beach but they were also taking oil that rightly belonged to the public. Leasing the
beach, commissioners hoped, would glean some public benefit from the destruction of
Venice. The proposal raised a furious defense of public rights that largely ignored the
realities of the Venice field even as it signaled an important shift away from private profit
and drilling at all costs. Real estate groups such as the Del Rey Beach Improvement Association joined with the local chapter of the Izaak Walton League, a conservation organization, to protest the leasing plan. Lewis Stone, an actor who owned a house near the
beach, brought suit to stop the beach lease on the grounds that oil wells on the beach
would damage his property and “constitute a public nuisance.” The court ruled for Stone
7
For a scathing indictment of the way greed could break up a community lease, see Upton Sinclair, Oil! (1927;
New York, 2007), 23–50.
8
B. M. Hansen to Los Angeles City Council, Feb. 6, 1930, communication 1167, box A434 (Los Angeles City
Archives).
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even though derricks ringed the beach; this foreshadowed a major—if brief—shift toward
regulation.9
By 1932 vast sections of Venice Beach, a town founded as a tourist resort, had been
transformed into the most industrial of places. Real estate that was once valuable because
of its isolation from the nuisances of industrial production and because of its proximity
to the ocean was now surrounded by clattering drills, spilled oil, and the incessant roar of
diesel pumps. As oil transformed Venice Beach, it also forced land owners to reassess their
property. They could no longer derive value from residential and vacation real estate
investments. They speculated in oil if they could, or, if they could not lease their land,
they lost their investments. Los Angeles officials initially recognized mineral exploitation
over other property rights, but as the beach-leasing episode suggested, the destruction of
Venice shifted public opinion.
Los Angeles against Town Lot Drilling
Venice was the last oil field of its kind in southern California. During the 1930s, conflicts
continued between those who asserted their property rights to drill and those who
demanded protection from drilling, but the balance of power between these groups
shifted. Private gain started to pale in comparison to the falling property values and the
rising cost of policing, fire fighting, and infrastructure repairs required in the town lot
fields. Oil production all but ended in Venice by 1932 because the proliferation of
oil wells depleted the underground gas pressure necessary to extract the oil. The rapid
collapse of the field caused still more Angelenos to question the wisdom of favoring the
right to drill over all other priorities; doing so seemed to cause widespread damage for
very short-lived, unevenly distributed profits.10 Residential property values and community interests trumped the private exploitation of mineral rights for the rest of the 1930s.
The first sign of the new oil politics appeared in Santa Monica. At the height of the
Venice–Del Rey frenzy, Santa Monica legalized oil exploration in industrial areas. No oil
was found there, but in July 1931 the Santa Monica planning commission outlawed oil
exploration once again because it believed that the possibility of oil exploration was
depressing property values and slowing new home construction throughout the city. Soon
afterward, a proposal by Ramsey Petroleum to drill an exploratory well near Elysian Park
and downtown Los Angeles foundered when the Vermont-Shire Development Association argued that drilling in residential neighborhoods violated owners’ rights to enjoy
their property. The Wilshire Community Council chimed in, calling urban oil fields
“inimical to the esthetic development of the city as a home-owners’ haven.” The discovery
of new oil deposits in the Del Rey Hills in 1932 and in Redondo Beach in 1936 prompted
similar vociferous demands for protection for residential property. Perhaps the clearest
sign that Angelenos had reassessed oil drilling and property rights came in 1938, when
the Los Angeles City Council approved an exploratory well in an undeveloped section
of Venice. In place of the clamor for unrestrained drilling eight years earlier, the local
9
“Venice Battle Attests Oil and Water Do Mix,” A1; Charles S. Lamb, “Resolution,” May 14, 1931, Communication from Playground and Recreation, communication 3330, box A483 (Los Angeles City Archives); “Fees on
Venice Drilling Asked,” A8; Sabin, Crude Politics, 53–78; “Oil Lease Test Due Tomorrow,” Los Angeles Times, June
30, 1930, p. A9.
10
“Fees on Venice Drilling Asked,” A8.
The Fall and Rise of Oil Drilling in Los Angeles
87
American Legion, Women’s City Club, and 830 Venice residents petitioned against the
new well.11
In downtown Los Angeles, Del Rey Hills, Redondo Beach, and in Venice itself, those
who opposed drilling cited the destruction of Venice in 1930 and 1931. The new campaigns to exclude oil wells from residential areas succeeded in part because business
groups now also supported limits on where and how oil companies could drill. The
business community concentrated on protecting property values in coastal areas
and other places where oil development threatened both real estate speculation and
tourism-related economic growth. For example, in 1927 the business community
helped ban drilling from piers that stretched across beaches. Such drilling blocked public
access and increased erosion along sections of the Los Angeles coast. In the aftermath
of the Venice debacle, communities from Malibu to Palos Verdes repeatedly tried to ban
drilling within 2,500 feet of the water’s edge; business groups enthusiastically joined
these campaigns.12
Efforts to protect coastal property values faced a major setback in 1936, when
Standard Oil sponsored a ballot proposition to legalize slant drilling into underwater oil
pools from dry land. Standard Oil hoped this measure, called Proposition 4, would
allow them to regain access to oil out of reach since the 1927 pier ban. To help overcome
opposition to new coastal oil wells, the oil giant included language in Proposition 4
earmarking a portion of royalties from new coastal wells for state park development.
This canny provision earned Proposition 4 an endorsement from the state park department and support from a majority of Californians. Over the objections of voters in Los
Angeles County, Proposition 4 passed. Newspapers in Venice and Playa Del Rey warned
that legalizing slant drilling would open beaches and neighborhoods to unrestrained
drilling. The Hermosa Beach Chamber of Commerce called Proposition 4 “a medium
for satisfying the private greed of certain large oil interests . . . [and] a vehicle through
which ruin and destruction will be carried to our beaches.”13 Reactions to Proposition 4
in Los Angeles reflected the wholesale reassessment of oil drilling by business groups and
boosters.
Although Proposition 4 permitted slant drilling only along beaches, it raised the
specter of a new oil rush in Los Angeles, which is why so many Angelenos voted against
the measure. The boom did not immediately materialize, however. In 1937, North Dakota
senator Gerald P. Nye proposed that Congress declare underwater oil deposits in
California, Louisiana, and Texas part of the public domain. Later that year, Secretary of
the Interior Harold Ickes proposed making all oil under American territorial waters a
naval petroleum reserve. He eventually forced a lawsuit to determine whether the federal
11
“Beach City May Renew Ban on Oil,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1931, p. A7; “Oil Aftermath Clean-Up
Asked,” ibid., Jan. 20, 1932, p. A5; “Stop That Oily Business,” ibid., July 27, 1932, p. A4; “City Council Takes
Stand against Town Lot Oil Drilling,” Redondo Reflex, May 1, 1936, p. 1; Robert Dominguez to Los Angeles City
Attorney, June 30, 1938, communication 1419, box A674 (Los Angeles City Archives).
12
J. C. Rendler to Los Angeles City Council, July 11, 1930, communication 6094, box A453 (Los Angeles City
Archives); “A. A. Newton to Report on Harbor Probe,” Venice Evening Vanguard, Feb. 20, 1936, p. 1.
13
“City-County Vote,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 4, 1936, p. 1; Glanton Reah, “Warning! Our Beaches
Are Threatened,” n.d., broadside, box 11, John Anson Ford Papers (Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.);
“Ordinance for Protection of Beach Pushed,” Venice Evening Vanguard, Jan. 29, 1936, p. 1; “City Planners Act
following Union Protest,” ibid., Feb. 6, 1936, p. 1. On the reaction of the Hermosa Beach Chamber of
Commerce, see Guy W. Finney to John Anson Ford, Aug. 21, 1936, box 11, Ford Papers; and Glanton Reah to
Ford, Sept. 15, 1936, ibid.
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government or the states had jurisdiction over this oil. Federal claims stranded near-shore
oil deposits, including those covered by Proposition 4, in a legal limbo until 1953.14
Town Lot Drilling Returns
World War II forced Los Angeles residents to reassess again the balance between residential property and urban oil development. War in Europe and the Pacific increased demand
and prices for oil. These higher prices alone might not have changed local oil politics,
given the business community’s position on urban drilling in the 1930s. After the attack
on Pearl Harbor, however, oil was linked intimately with national war goals and patriotism.
In addition, federal officials pressured local governments to permit drilling throughout
Los Angeles and thus challenged local regulations. This sort of wartime reassessment of
environmental regulation was not unique to either petroleum policies or Los Angeles. To
meet military needs, the War Productions Board and Department of the Interior also
permitted salt mining in Death Valley National Monument and tungsten mining in
Yosemite National Park. Unlike mining in national parks, however, oil exploration in
residential Los Angeles continued after hostilities ended. World War II erased the political
impact of Venice Beach.15
Oil companies recognized wartime opportunities immediately after the bombing
of Pearl Harbor. Shell Oil was the first to seek permission to drill a new well in an area
hitherto closed to petroleum extraction. In January 1942 Shell asked the Los Angeles City
Council for permission to drill on a sliver of unincorporated land abutting residential
areas inside city limits. When residents of those neighborhoods protested what they saw
as a scheme motivated by profit rather than patriotism, Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron
vetoed Shell’s permit. Shell responded that the well was necessary for the war effort.
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and the Federal Office of Production Management not
only urged Los Angeles city officials to approve Shell’s well but also called on them to
permit oil exploration everywhere in the city. In late 1942 the Los Angeles City Council,
convinced that the war emergency justified new drilling in residential areas, narrowly
overrode Bowron’s veto.16
In the following twelve months, the Los Angeles City Council received nine more
applications for exploratory wells in residential areas. Seaboard Oil, for example, requested
and eventually received permission to drill in the neighborhood near Elysian Park where
Ramsey Oil had been denied a permit in 1932. In oil-producing Wilmington and Venice,
wartime wells became a major issue in the 1943 city elections and contributed to the
reelection of antidrilling incumbents from those districts. Two city council members in
14
On this controversy, see Sarah S. Elkind, “Public Oil, Private Oil: The Tidelands Oil Controversy, World War
II, and Control of the Environment,” in The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War, ed. Roger
W. Lotchin (Urbana, 2000), 120–42. On the history of offshore oil drilling, see William R. Freudenberg and
Robert Gramling, Oil in Troubled Waters: Perceptions, Politics, and the Battle over Offshore Drilling (Albany, 1994).
15
Gerald D. Nash, World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln, 1990), 158–60; Clayton R.
Koppes, “Environmental Policy and American Liberalism: The Department of the Interior, 1933–1983,” Environmental Review, 7 (Spring 1983), 23, 27. See also Robert Engler, The Politics of Oil: A Study of Private Power and
Democratic Directions (New York, 1961).
16
“Proposed Gilmore Strip Oil Drilling Debated,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1942, p. A1; “Gilmore Island
Oil Drilling Plea Supported by Knox,” ibid., May 27, 1942, p. A2; “O. P. M. Urges Permit to Drill for Oil on
Gilmore ‘Island,’” ibid., May 28, 1942, p. 9; “Mayor Vetoes Oil Ordinance; Gilmore Island Project Voted by City
Council Rejected by Bowron,” ibid., Sept. 22, 1942, p. 1; “Gilmore Island Oil Drilling Program Speeded,” ibid.,
Oct. 30, 1942, p. A1.
The Fall and Rise of Oil Drilling in Los Angeles
89
particular, Wilder W. Hartley and David Stannard, reported that their constituents held
protest meetings whenever the city council seemed poised to allow more wells in their
districts. Meanwhile, Shell, Seaboard, and the other companies that took advantage of
wartime oil politics tried to deflect public fear of another Venice–Del Rey field by arranging
community leases and covering their derricks to reduce noise and spraying oil. These
strategies, they insisted, would permit them to meet wartime needs without “detract[ing]
from the value of residents’ property.”17
Yielding to pressure from oil companies, the Petroleum Administration for the War,
the War Productions Board, and the navy, the Los Angeles City Council approved scores
of new oil wells. Councilmembers insisted that they would not allow drilling to affect
residential property, but they refused to restrict drilling during the war. Mayor Bowron,
in contrast, felt strongly that national war aims should not trump local regulations, property values, or community needs. In addition to vetoing special drilling permits, Bowron
proposed legislation to strengthen drilling safety requirements and to exclude oil wells
from residential areas for the duration of the war. When the city council rejected those
measures, he accused oil companies of unpatriotic profiteering and alternately demanded
and pleaded with them to close their wartime wells when peace returned. He did not succeed in any of these efforts to keep oil from invading residential neighborhoods, in part
because of the persuasive force of military necessity and in part because many Angelenos
saw oil fields, derricks, and drilling as minor inconveniences compared the other sacrifices
necessary to win the war.18
Conclusion
The dearth of drilling regulations in Los Angeles was not simply a by-product of federal
intervention. Like other twentieth-century industries, Los Angeles oil companies worked
hard to control and deflect regulation. Sometimes those efforts took the form of preemptive self-regulation; the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, for example, undertook an
aggressive smog-reduction campaign in 1944 and 1945, and funded research, drafted
legislation, and offered political support to embattled officials in all manner of other
policy debates. In Louisiana and Texas, oil companies wrote state oil conservation regulations to slow oil production and stabilize prices. Conflicts between large and small oil
firms defeated similar conservation regulations in California, even though these rules
could have prevented damage to and increased production in Venice and other urban oil
fields simply by spreading derricks out and apportioning oil among leaseholders. When
California oil companies finally changed their drilling practices in the 1940s, they did
so primarily to preserve their access to Los Angeles’s urban oil fields. By publicly highlighting noise- or fire-reduction technology and oil companies’ voluntary adoption of
oil-conservation practices, the industry decreased public demand for legislative action
17
“Ruling on Elysian Park Oil Drilling Deferred,” ibid., Aug. 11, 1943, p. 2; “Oil Decision Put Off Again,”
ibid., Aug. 18, 1943, p. A2; “Planning Board Backs Elysian Park Oil Test,” ibid., Aug. 25, 1943, p. A2; “Oil
Becomes Factor in City Elections,” ibid., March 29, 1943, p. A2. Quotation from “Gilmore Island Oil Drilling
Program Speeded,” A1.
18
“Ruling on Elysian Park Oil Drilling Deferred,” 2; Fletcher Bowron to City Council, Jan. 31, 1944, p. 3,
Fletcher Bowron Collection (Huntington Library). For examples of Angelenos expressing their support for drilling,
see “Larger Reserve of Oil Urged at Council Hearing,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1943, p. A3; R. G. Winter, “Why
the Delay?,” ibid., Feb. 14, 1944, p. A4; and Olga Dickenson, “Produce It Quickly,” ibid.
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even as it touted nongovernmental solutions to industrial problems as superior to governmental regulation.19
The presence of oil under Los Angeles and residents’ early adoption of the automobile
made southern Californians more familiar than most Americans with the range of consequences of petroleum dependency, from runaway wells and refinery fires to gridlock and
smog. These problems did not lead to a robust regulatory impulse—the Los Angeles City
Council did not even require soundproof derricks until 1945—and this suggests much
about twentieth-century American regulatory politics. Public reactions to urban oil development in the Los Angeles area did change dramatically after the ebullient chaos of Signal
Hill, Venice Beach, and the other town lot fields of the 1920s. The Venice–Del Rey field
was the last of the unrestrained town lot fields because property owners and business
interests came to see other property rights and values as more important for Los Angeles’s
long-term prosperity. However, the destruction of Venice and the danger, damage, and
unsustainability of unregulated urban drilling lost their political impact in the face of
federal invocations of patriotism during World War II. Bowron did not succeed in redefining the wartime oil debate by painting oil companies as opportunistic and unpatriotic
profiteers. Instead, the navy and the War Production Board demanded that Los Angeles
open the city to oil wells and ignored local residents’ concerns about property rights and
the public good. This gap between local and federal priorities ultimately permitted further
oil drilling in developed areas of Los Angeles, fueled resentment, and eroded Americans’
confidence in government solutions to public problems after World War II.
19
Sarah S. Elkind, How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, and Environment in TwentiethCentury Los Angeles (Chapel Hill, 2011), 53–82; Sabin, Crude Politics, 111–55.