Cadillac Desert (27 page)

The most effective opposition, by far, came from Paul Douglas, the urbane Senator from Illinois, who, ironically, had played a pivotal role in the creation of the New Deal. When World War II broke out, Douglas was fifty years old, a former economics professor at the University of Chicago who had become a reform-minded Chicago alderman. He promptly enlisted in the Marines, talked himself out of a desk job, and got to the front lines of the Pacific theater. He was gravely wounded at Peleliu and again at Okinawa, and was lucky to return alive. Elected to the Senate after the war, Douglas brought all of his determination and iconoclastic, brilliant thinking to Washington with him. He was—perhaps because of his economics background—the first architect of the New Deal who seemed to sense that something had gone drastically wrong. And the worst perversion of the New Deal ideas that
he,
at least, had in mind was the Reclamation program, subsidizing high-altitude desert farmers so they could grow the same crops some of Douglas’s farmer constituents were being paid not to grow—so serious had America’s crop-surplus problem become now that Europe was back in production again.

In a series of memorable debates on the Senate floor, Douglas, tall, athletic, and white-haired, went after the Colorado River Storage Project hammer and tongs. At Glen Canyon Dam, he told his colleagues, the cost of hydroelectricity per kilowatt would be $463; at Echo Park Dam, it was over $600; at Central Utah, it was $765; at Flaming Gorge, it was more than $700. “Let us compare that cost with the average cost in the Tennessee Valley of $166 per kilowatt of capacity. At Bonneville, the average cost was only $115. At Hoover, the cost was only $112. At Grand Coulee, the cost was only $90.... [I]t is extraordinary that an administration which has declared public power to be creeping socialism, which has put the lid on additional dams on the Columbia, should go up into the mountains of Colorado and there locate public power projects where the cost will be three, four, or five times what they would be at these other locations.... I am not saying that the administration wishes to have this project fail. But I will say that if the administration had wished to discredit the public power system, it could not have proceeded in any better fashion than it has done in this instance.” And he couldn’t help noticing, said Douglas sarcastically, that certain Senators who opposed public power in the Tennessee Valley and the Columbia Basin had suddenly emerged as great champions of public power when it was to come from cash register dams in the mountains of Colorado.

The power features, however, were, as Douglas knew, not the worst aspect of the storage project, but the best. The worst, by far, was the irrigation. “The original projects,” he lectured his colleagues, “tended to be at low altitudes and in fertile soil, and to involve low costs.... Now we are being asked to irrigate land in the uplands, at altitudes between five thousand and seven thousand feet, where the growing season is short and the chief products will be hay, corn, livestock, and alfalfa.... There exists an interesting tendency for Senators in those States to congregate on the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and the Committee on Appropriations, which consider irrigation and reclamation bills. There is a sort of affinity, just as sugar draws flies.” For the benefit of his colleagues and the Bureau, whose economists had labored mightily to put the CRSP in the best possible light, Douglas had sat down and figured out the per-acre costs of the various projects himself. The Silt River Project in Colorado, for example, would cost $674 per acre; the Paonia project, $873 per acre; the Central Utah Project, the most expensive of the lot, $1,757. If one calculated interest, Paonia would go up to $2,135 per acre, Central Utah to $3,953 per acre. These were the mid-1950s, when land prices in the West were still dirt-cheap. Most of the land whose conversion to irrigation would cost thousands of dollars an acre was not worth more than $50 per acre, and that, in many cases, was being generous. “In my state of Illinois,” Douglas pointed out, “the price of the most fertile natural land in the world is now between $600 and $700 per acre. In the largest project of all, the Central Utah Project, the cost would be nearly $4,000 an acre—six times the cost of the most fertile land in the world.”

If an investment of $2,000 an acre could create reclaimed land worth $2,000 an acre, that would be one thing. But even after being supplied with irrigation water, the upper-basin lands would be worth nowhere near that. “What is to be grown on the land?” asked Douglas. “Of the sixteen projects reported, eight of them were stated as being suitable for livestock only, through the raising of alfalfa and pasture. Seven were stated as being primarily for livestock, but with some fruit and vegetable production ... 95 percent of the projects contemplate the production of alfalfa or grain or are directly or indirectly for the feeding of cattle. As a consequence, this land,
after irrigation,
will not be worth very much, probably not more than from $100 to $150 per acre—$150 per acre at the outside. Yet we are being asked to make an average expenditure of $2,000 an acre on land which, when the projects are finished, will sell for only $150 per acre.”

Douglas’s western colleagues, of course, had no answer to this; his math was correct, his reasoning impeccable. All they could do was stand the rhetoric of their nineteenth-century predecessors on its head; instead of praising the fertile soil and glorious climate of the West, they talked about how miserable and uninhabitable their home states were. “The Senator from Illinois has correctly stated that we have little rain,” said Joseph O‘Mahoney of Wyoming. “I say to him, ‘Pity us. Let us store the rainwater which for thousands of years has been rolling down the Colorado River without use. Please have some pity on the area, which is the arid land area of the country. It wants to conserve the great natural supply of water which the Almighty placed there, for man to use, if he has the intelligence and the courage to use it.’ ”

All of Paul Douglas’s eloquence and logic, as it turned out, were a poor match for appeals such as O‘Mahoney’s and the growing Congressional power of the arid West. O’Mahoney and Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, representing Colorado Basin states, were powerhouses on the Senate Interior Committee; Carl Hayden of Arizona ruled Appropriations; Wayne Aspinall of western Colorado was the ascendant power at the House Interior Committee. The Colorado River Storage Project also enjoyed overwhelming public support, not just among the western farmers, but among their city brethren, too; conservatives, liberals, Democrats, Republicans—ideology meant nothing where water was concerned. The only serious public opposition came from southern California (which was expected) and from conservationists, who were horrified at the prospect of watching three of the most magnificent river canyons in the West filled by giant, drawn-down reservoirs: Glen Canyon on the main Colorado and Flaming Gorge and Echo Park on the Green. Each of these reservoirs would be as long as smaller eastern states; Glen Canyon would stretch back for nearly two hundred miles behind the dam, not even counting tentacles of water that would reach up side canyons and tributary streams. But in those days conservationists didn’t count for much. The Sierra Club had just one full-time person, whose name was David Brower, on its paid staff.

The outcome was foreordained. California had gotten Hoover Dam, Parker Dam, Davis Dam, the Imperial and Coachella projects, and water and power for Los Angeles. Now the upper basin would get its share. After minimal debate on the floor, the CRSP bill passed both Houses and was signed into law by Eisenhower in April of 1956. The estimated cost of everything was around $1.6 billion, but it would, of course, be substantially more. Never in U.S. history had so little economic development been proposed at such an exorbitant public cost, for all the billions were buying, besides extremely expensive public power, were a few patches of new irrigated lands whose composite size was smaller than Rhode Island. The subsidies, it turned out later, would be worth as much as $2 million per farm, perhaps five times as much as the farms themselves were worth. But even if the Colorado River Storage Project seemed like utter folly, the Bureau of Reclamation and its sometime collaborator and arch-rival, the Army Corps of Engineers, were on a tear.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Go-Go Years

T
he U.S. economy had fallen flat on its face several times before. In the years after the Great Crash, however, it could not pick itself back up. Things were worse in 1930 than in 1929, worse in 1931 than in 1930. By 1932, millions of people had lost all faith and hope—in the nation, in the capitalist system, in themselves.

The person whom Americans elected to pull the country out of the abyss came across as a genial aristocrat; in some ways, though, he was as close to being a benevolent despot as a democracy can allow. Franklin Roosevelt’s own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, said that the President never saw himself as “anything else but a ruler.” Carl Jung met him and came away saying, “Make no mistake, he is a force—a man of superior but impenetrable mind, but perfectly ruthless, a highly versatile mind which you cannot see.” But the President, a man of greater charm and persuasiveness than ruthlessness, was adored by most of the country no matter what he did. Had Gerald Ford or Lyndon Johnson tried to pack the Supreme Court, they probably would have been impeached; when Roosevelt tried it, nearly half the country thought it was a good idea. After seeing Roosevelt in action, Republicans who had voted for Hoover prayed to God to forgive them. Even God must have felt humbled by the new President; in a popularity contest conducted among New York City schoolchildren, Roosevelt outpolled Him.

Franklin Roosevelt said that he wanted to be remembered as the greatest conservationist and the greatest developer of all time. In a country with a population barely greater than Germany’s and with fifteen times the landmass, it seemed possible to be both. FDR’s conservation was not scientific, as his cousin Teddy’s was to a great degree, but instinctive. At Hyde Park, he had spent afternoons planting thousands of little trees. Why not plant millions of them on the high plains to break the wind and conserve the soil? A lot of scientists laughed and said it would never work, but it did. FDR thought up the Civilian Conservation Corps, too, and it became the most popular of all his programs.

What TR and FDR did have in common was an acute awareness of the limits of capitalism. The former Roosevelt saw the seeds of capitalism’s self-destruction in monopoly and rapacious business practice, the latter saw them in chronic depression and unemployment. In 1933, when he assumed the Presidency, nearly a quarter of the U.S. population was without visible means of support. Declaring a bank holiday was one way to arrest the widespread financial panic that was costing millions of workers their jobs, but the only thing that would make a real dent in the horrifying unemployment figures was to build public works: bridges, highways, tunnels, parks—dams.

The person whom Roosevelt put in charge of much of the apparatus of recovery was Harold Ickes, a stolid, round, owlish, combative ex-newspaperman who grew to love his nickname, “the old curmudgeon.” (Because of Ickes’s high-pitched squawk of a voice, Roosevelt, in private, called him Donald Duck.) Ickes ran not only the Interior Department—in which were the Bureau of Reclamation, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service—but the Public Works Administration as well. The PWA was a catch basin of programs with a chameleon identity (it was also known as the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration) and interchangeable leaders (first Harry Hopkins, then Ickes, then Hopkins again). In a few years, it had overseen the building of the Lincoln Tunnel, the Washington Zoo, the Triborough Bridge, Fort Knox, Denver’s water-supply system, a deepwater port at Brownsville, Texas, the huge Camarillo Hospital in southern California, and the causeway to Key West. It built a dozen fantasyland bridges along Oregon’s coast highway. Above all, it built dams.

Under Roosevelt and Ickes, the Bureau of Reclamation underwent some fundamental changes, the most obvious of which was in size. From two or three thousand employees under Herbert Hoover—a very large federal agency in its day—the Bureau mushroomed into an elephantine bureaucracy with a staff of nearly twenty thousand by the time Roosevelt died. Headquarters was the top floor of the gigantic new Interior building in Washington—the Bureau’s offices were above those of the Interior Secretary himself—but the real work was done out of the Bureau’s sprawling engineering complex in west Denver, where it designed its mighty dams. Then there were regional offices, field offices, project offices. When Jim Casey, who was to become deputy chief of planning in the 1960s, first went to work for the Bureau in Nebraska, he found himself amid nine hundred fellow employees. “This wasn’t even a regional office,” remembers Casey. “This was just a field office. I never had the faintest idea what everyone did and neither did they.” And very few of the Bureau’s people had anything to do with the actual physical construction of the dams; that work was contracted out to the engineering firms, the Bechtels and Morrison-Knudsens, that had become instant giants after cutting their teeth on Hoover Dam. The Bureau’s nineteen thousand-odd employees merely planned projects, supervised projects, and looked for new projects to build.

There were also some fundamental changes in the Bureau’s approach, in its character. In the beginning, FDR was content to let it be run, as it had been in the past, by engineers. Elwood Mead, who, after John Wesley Powell, was the most illustrious reclamationist in America, headed the agency until his death in 1936. He was succeeded by John C. Page and Harry Bashore, engineers who had come up through the ranks. As commissioners, Mead, Page, and Bashore, remembering Congress’s exasperation over the Bureau’s early failures and cognizant that the nexus of power still lay east of the Mississippi River, tended to be somewhat modest in their ambitions. And if they lapsed from time to time, Ickes, at least in the beginning, was prepared to restrain them himself. “Commissioner Mead, of course, is always in favor of any new reclamation project,” he wrote in a sarcastic memo to Roosevelt bemoaning a Bureau proposal. “That is his job.” As the economics of reclamation played themselves out, however, and the salvation of the program lay in the construction of big public-power dams—which most of the electric utilities and much of the Republican Party regarded as anathema—the role of the commissioner abruptly changed. In the new reclamation era, a commissioner needed to be someone very much like Ickes; a fighter, a public-power ideologue, and, above all, a salesman. There was no better candidate then Ickes’s close friend, fellow newspaperman, and faithful subordinate, Mike Straus.