Steven Solomon
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Hydroelectric sales underwriting farm irrigation subsidies: This became the working fiscal model for Hoover and the great dam era that it spawned. While American leaders had regularly rejected proposals throughout the 1920s to develop multipurpose dams on the Tennessee River in the eastern United States, since that would make the government a big player in the private electricity business, they were more amenable in the West, where the farming, urban, and railroad lobbying interests from Southern California made a concerted appeal for a giant irrigation, flood control, and hydroelectric dam on the great river that was the lifeblood of the southwest.
Rising in the Rocky Mountains at 14,000 feet and falling toward sea level over its 1,440-mile length through deep canyons—including the Grand Canyon which its torrents had carved over the eons—and deserts, the muddy, turbulent Colorado River flowed within seven states to its delta in Mexico south of the California-Arizona border before exiting through its mouth at the Gulf of California. While its average flow of about 14 million acre-feet per year made it a relatively modest-sized river by volume—comparable in quantity to the eastern Susquehanna, Delaware, Hudson, or Connecticut and only a small fraction of the huge Mississippi and Columbia rivers—every drop was precious because it drained the most arid large basin on the continent. It was the only significant water source within 1,000 miles. For thousands of years its delta of lagoons and earthen mounds, twice the size of Rhode Island, had been a paradise for jaguars, coyote, beaver, a vast assortment of water fowl, fish, and uncountable species of plants.
In its natural, predammed state the velocity of its flow was schizophrenic. When swollen with the springtime snowmelt from the mountains, it sometimes cascaded furiously down from the mountains at 300,000 cubic feet (nearly 2.3 million gallons) per second, tearing away mountainsides and smashing boulders; in the dry season it meandered by at less than 1 percent that speed. The river’s annual volume also varied widely, by over 50 percent, depending upon whether the region was in a wet or drought cycle. Most distinctive, its enormous, wild energy made the reddish-brown Colorado one of the siltiest rivers in the world. Sediment from the hillside during its steep descent accumulated in its lower reaches beyond the Grand Canyon, where the river was 17 times siltier than the muddy Mississippi. The river’s texture was playfully described by southwesterners as “too thick to drink, too thin to plow.” The riverbed was raised by the accumulating deposits year after year until, in a great swell, the river overtopped the sandy bluffs containing it. It flooded violently in new directions, carving fresh channels toward the sea. Before its taming by dams, the Colorado’s rampaging floods periodically turned the dry lowlands of Southern California and Mexico into huge swamps that left behind exceptionally fertile soil when the floodwaters evaporated.
Just such a terrible flood event had been a midwife to the Hoover Dam. In the late 1890s, private developers had begun working on an ambitious scheme to clean out one of the Colorado’s ancient flood channels, known as the Alamo River, and use it as an irrigation canal to draw river water that would transform the low-lying, silt-enriched soils of the Southern California desert, with less than three inches of annual rainfall, into productive farmland. By 1901, the water started to flow. Its path started with a cut from the Colorado just north of the Mexican border, looped southward some 50 miles through Mexico, and then northward into a Southern California depression known as the Salton Sink. As some 2,000 farmers settled in, the irrigated lowland indeed bloomed forth with crops. Reflecting the new confidence and hope brought by the water, the area’s name was changed from the Valley of the Dead to Imperial Valley. By 1904, however, the natural accumulation of Colorado silt began to choke off the diversion channel. While working to dredge it, the irrigation engineers decided to draw river water temporarily from a newly cut bypass. Since it was supposed to be short-lived, the bypass was fitted only with filmsy, wooden control gates. As bad luck had it, the Colorado spring floods arrived two months early in 1905, and ferociously as well. The temporary control gates were washed out—and the full, raging force of the Colorado rushed into the ancient channel. The Salton Sink swelled with water, submerging thousands of acres of prime cropland to become today’s inland Salton Sea. Farmers appealed fruitlessly to Roosevelt for government assistance to close the breach. The powerful Southern Pacific railroad with a strong economic interest in the region, feverishly ferried in rock and gravel. But the breach remained open until 1907. Farming in the region revived slowly thereafter. But the shadow of the 1905–1907 floods galvanized a relentless lobbying campaign for a federal flood control dam on the Colorado. The Imperial Valley farmers also campaigned the government to build an accompanying, “all-American” irrigation canal that would run on the U.S. side of the border and thus eliminate Mexico’s potential leverage over the vital Colorado flow. By 1920, the political drive for the dam and canal had gathered enough momentum to be seriously proposed in Washington.
When the fast-growing city of Los Angeles stepped forward in 1924 with a proposal to build, at its own expense, an aqueduct to tap Colorado River water and to buy hydroelectricity generated by the proposed dam in order to pump the water 200 miles to L.A. over a rugged escarpment, the economics of what came to be called the Boulder Canyon Project became feasible. Los Angeles desperately needed the water. A dusty, farming town of 13,000 at the edge of the desert at the end of the Civil War, Los Angeles owed its early growth to the region’s orange groves and the arrival of the railroads—a Southern Pacific spur line in 1867, and in 1885, a direct link to Kansas City on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. By 1905 its population had grown to 200,000 and was outstripping the available water supply of accumulated groundwater and flow from the small Los Angeles River—a creek for all but a few weeks of torrential precipitation in winter—whose annual flow was a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of California’s total. Los Angeles’s population might have crested around such modest levels had not city leaders pulled off one of the most notorious water supply grabs in history. In events that informed the story line of the 1974 film Chinatown, Los Angeles municipal water authorities ruthlessly gained command of the flow of the Owens River in one of the valleys formed by the old ice age folds in the Sierra Nevada 250 miles away. Between 1907 and 1913, they constructed an impressive aqueduct that brought Owens water to thirsty Los Angeles.
L.A.’s water boss was the salty-tongued, autocratic William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant who had walked the railroad ties across the Panamanian isthmus en route to California as a young man. A self-taught engineer, he worked his way up from ditch cleaner to become the unchallenged potentate, builder, and personification of the modern Los Angeles water system. In the distant Owens River, Mulholland envisioned a water source, among the city’s very few viable options, that could provide L.A.’s hydraulic deliverance for a generation. He and his cronies stopped at nothing to get control of it, including deception, lies, secret agents, spying, and payoffs. With the clandestine collaboration of a paid insider at the federal Reclamation Bureau’s local office who was later hired as Mulholland’s deputy, and some astute politicking in Washington, they outflanked and killed Reclamation’s own farm irrigation plan for the Owens Valley. Posing as cattlemen and as resort developers, they bought farmland that gave Los Angeles the precious associated water rights to the river and gained control of the best site for the future storage reservoir. Adding insult to the injury of Owens Valley farmers, Mulholland rerouted their river water first to suburban Los Angeles’s dry San Fernando Valley, where a syndicate of well-connected city insiders, including railroad and trolley kingpins, utility bosses, newspaper barons, land developers, and bankers had been secretly buying up cheap land options. When the aqueduct route became known, San Fernando real estate values shot up, instantly turning millionaires into multimillionaires. San Fernando Valley soon was incorporated into Los Angeles, enriching the city’s fiscal base for growth. With the actual arrival of Owens River water in 1913, irrigated acreage in the San Fernando Valley blossomed twenty-fi
ve-fold in just five years. In the zero-sum economics of water diversion, Owens Valley withered so that San Fernando Valley could flourish.
Most important, the abundant new supply of freshwater enabled Los Angeles’s prosperity boom to continue. The region’s population surpassed Mulholland’s expectations, reaching 1.1 million in 1920 and climbing to 2.5 million by 1930. By the early 1920s, aggravated by the onset of a new drought cycle in the region, Mulholland realized that once again Los Angeles was facing a water famine unless new water resources could be obtained. That’s when he began lobbying vigorously for the Colorado River water and aqueduct. To alleviate the shortages in the meantime, he decided to squeeze every last drop out of the Owens River. Mulholland’s imperious combination of monetary inducements and strong-arm tactics to buy up more water rights, however, sparked a violent reaction from irate Owens Valley farmers. Between 1924 and 1927, farmers dynamited parts of the Los Angeles aqueduct and stood off against the armed city agents sent to stop them in one of America’s earliest, violent clashes over water between urban dwellers and farmers. But by publicizing the possible specter of a cutoff of Owens River water to Los Angeles, the water war broke the last local opposition to Mulholland’s bid for the Colorado River aqueduct. By 1928 the overriding quest for water led to the creation of a new regional political entity, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, with taxing power to raise funds to buy Hoover’s hydroelectricity to power the aqueduct’s water pumps and for other needs. When Colorado River water started to arrive in the mid-1930s, it literally validated the old adage in the arid west that “water flows uphill to money.”
Before the dam project could get started, there was one further political hurdle to overcome—the sorting out of water rights on the Colorado River itself. Unlike the eastern United States, which followed the riparian legal tradition of granting water usage rights to landowners abutting a river or a stream, an alterative doctrine had developed in the water-scarce West. Known as “prior appropriation and use,” or more colloquially as “use it or lose it,” western water doctrine allocated priority water rights to the earliest and continuous users of a water source regardless of their location. In the early 1920s, when the dam project was taking shape, only California had any prospect of using large quantities of Colorado River water. But the other six states in the Colorado basin wanted to protect their rights for future use, lest California claim the entire river flow by using it before they did. As a result, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, an engineer by training, brokered a landmark compromise among the basin states in 1922 that divided the river into an upper and lower basin and assigned equal shares of river water to each—a governance approach that oddly echoed John Wesley Powell’s original notion of reorganizing the West’s political units around its watersheds. Working with the projection that the river had an average 17.5 million acre-feet per year to share—later proved to be a gross overestimate—some 7.5 million acre-feet were assigned to each basin, 1.5 million set aside for Mexico, and the rest reserved for natural evaporation or storage. The linchpin of the deal was California’s agreement to cap its withdrawals; the limit ultimately was set at 4.4 million acre-feet per year. It took over six years more to bring all the major elements, with required approvals, of the Boulder Canyon Project into final alignment. Finally, in 1929, newly elected president Herbert Hoover was able to launch work on the pathbreaking Boulder Dam that in 1947 would be renamed in his honor.
In contrast to its long political gestation, the physical construction of the giant flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectric power-producing dam took only five years to complete. Despite its name, the dam was located not in Boulder, but in Black Canyon about 20 miles downstream and about 150 miles from the Grand Canyon. The misnomer arose from the original authorizing legislation before the final site was selected.
There was no previous engineering model for building such a dam. Like many other pathbreaking civil-engineering feats in history, it was a leap into the unknown. Solutions were improvised to unforeseen problems as they arose in the finest spirit—and one of the last epic expressions—of Yankee ingenuity. No U.S. construction firm was large enough alone to tackle such an immense project, so a consortium of six builders banded together to make the winning bid—thus helping to launch the future destinies of Bechtel, Kaiser, Morrison Knudsen, and other global construction giants. The first stage, which began in 1931 and took nearly eighteen months to complete, was the blasting of four huge tunnels in the canyon walls through which the Colorado was diverted while the dam was built. With the river diverted and the work site secured by a temporary coffer dam, “high-scalers” suspended from long ropes blasted fresh rock from the canyon walls, while other workers excavated 40 feet down below the dry river until they reached the bedrock that would anchor the dam. Since the hot poured concrete filling the immensity of the dam’s volume would take a century to cool down naturally, engineers devised an instant refrigeration system by injecting frigid water through one-inch pipes that were inserted for that purpose at measured intervals throughout the structure; within two years, the cooling was accomplished. When no U.S. company could supply plate steel pipes large enough to funnel the falling water through the intake valves on Lake Mead to drive the turbines near the bottom of the dam, the builders constructed their own steel-fabricating plant on-site. Labor was nonstop around the clock. Work conditions in the searing heat were hard, and often deadly. When already low wages were cut in mid-1931, workers, organized by the IWW, or Wobblies, went on strike. But the Great Depression had started and the strike was broken, with the federal government’s tacit approval, by the importation of scab labor from nearby Las Vegas.
By 1936 everything was done. Lake Mead began to fill behind the dam. Water began passing through the new turbine-generator units. The dam’s elegant, curved design, art deco flourishes, and 70-story-high grandeur topped off what was instantly recognized as a landmark achievement of civilization. “I came, I saw, and I was conquered,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt orated with a paraphrasing twist on Julius Caesar at the dam’s dedication in September 1935.
Roosevelt, in fact, already had been won over by Hoover Dam as a model for the public works projects that became a signature centerpiece of his New Deal policy to counteract the Great Depression he’d inherited with the presidency in 1932. Across the country, construction crews were mobilized from the 25 percent unemployed and put to work building scores of new dams that harnessed the untapped water resources of America’s rivers. By the mid-1930s, the five largest structures on Earth, all dams, were under construction in the western United States—the Hoover on the Colorado, the Grand Coulee and the Bonneville on the Columbia, the Shasta on California’s Sacramento River, and the Fort Peck on the upper Missouri. Indeed, the Hoover Dam inaugurated a seminal turning point in water history—the age of giant, multipurpose dams. Over the three decades from the mid-1930s, America led the way in what became a worldwide frenzy of dam building that intensified production and transformed human society through the delivery of copious new supplies of cheap irrigation water and cheap hydroelectricity, as well as improved flood control and river navigation. By the 1940s, the United States had greater command of its water resources than any other nation. Its innovative leadership in converting the untapped boon of its river water wealth into productive economic and military output played a central role in its visible emergence as the global superpower in the aftermath of World War II.
While the Hoover Dam and its New Deal–born successors did not provide enough stimulus alone to lift America from the staggering economic collapse of the Great Depression, the hope they inspired lent precious legitimacy to a government beleaguered by faltering faith in the efficacy of the country’s bedrock political economic system. One lasting impact of the giant, state-built dams everywhere was to help usher in an era of enlarged political and economic centralization with many similar characteristics, albeit in modified forms, to the irrigation-based river states of antiquit
y—strong government involvement in the economy, policies implemented by a cadre of technocratic engineering overseers and a large workforce of low wage laborers. Control and mass manipulation of river water likewise was a key element of political power, with the chief beneficiaries of the waterworks’ wealth, as in ancient societies, both reflective and reinforcing of the society’s established power structures—in this case, featuring disproportionate subsidies for politically overrepresented agricultural businesses.
Under the New Deal, all the major river basins of America’s Far West came under intensive, multipurpose dam development. Thanks to the exploitation of water, the Far West became the country’ most dynamic growth region in the postwar era, exceeding Teddy Roosevelt’s vision for it at the turn of the century.
No river in the West was mightier than the Columbia in the Pacific Northwest. It carried nearly 10 times more water than the Colorado and roared out of the glacier-covered mountains and through wide canyons with torrential seasonal force. Its vast potential—especially for hydropower—had long tantalized engineers. Fully exploited, the river could generate enough hydroelectricity for the entire population living west of the Mississippi at the time. One site in particular held colossal potential—the Grand Coulee (“Great Canyon”), a 50-mile-long canyon one to six miles wide within 500- to 600-foot cliffs that were structurally ideal for building a dam.
Yet until the early 1930s the river was completely untamed. Newly elected president Franklin Roosevelt was personally determined to change that. When Congress balked at the extraordinary cost of erecting a high dam at the remote Grand Coulee that would provide far more hydropower and irrigation water than anyone imagined could be profitably used by the 3 million inhabitants of the region, Roosevelt started the project on his own from other relief funds. In the end 36 huge dams would be built on the Columbia and its tributaries between 1933 and 1973—nearly a dam per year. The multipurpose Bonneville in 1938 and Grand Coulee in 1941 were world-class supergiants of their era. Thousands were put to work building them. To help win the public relations battle over the utility of the dam, Roosevelt’s staff hired folk balladeer Woody Guthrie as a research assistant. In his folksy midwestern twang, Guthrie communicated the inspiring grandeur of the dam project, in songs like “Roll on, Columbia,” as the mightiest object ever built by man.