Cadillac Desert (30 page)

It is hard to imagine today, when big public-works projects such as New York’s Westway are held up for fifteen years in the courts, what the go-go years were like. In 1936, the four largest concrete dams ever built—Hoover, Shasta, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee—were being erected at breakneck speed, all at the same time. In Montana, Fort Peck Dam, the largest structure anywhere except for the Great Wall—which took a third of the Chinese male population a thousand years to build—was going up, too. The age of dams reached its apogee in the 1950s and 1960s, when hundreds upon hundreds of them were thrown up, forever altering the face of the continent—but most of those dams were middle-sized, squat, utilitarian, banal. The 1930s were the glory days. No dam after Hoover has ever quite matched its grace and glorious detail. Shasta Dam looks rundown now—the Grecian pavilions are rotting, the face is water-stained—but it was nearly as majestic as Hoover when it was built, and quite a bit bigger.

Symbolic achievements mattered terribly in the thirties, and the federal dams going up on the western rivers were the reigning symbols of the era. A few years earlier it had been the great skyscrapers that served as the landmarks of American achievement. In the late 1920s, they were rising simultaneously, too—the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Bank of Manhattan, 70 Pine Street, the Lincoln-Leveque Tower in Columbus, and the Carew Tower in Cincinnati—but just as they were being finished, the capitalist engine that had built them fell into ruin. In a slip of time, the mantle of achievement passed from private enterprise to public works. The dams announced that America could still do remarkable things; they also said that the country would never be the same. The centralized welfare state that everyone decries, and nearly everyone depends on to some degree, is said to have emerged from the war, the Depression, and the Great Society. It might be more accurate to say that it was born in the rivers of the American West.

Hoover was big; Shasta was half again as big; Grand Coulee was bigger than both together. Many of the workers who came up to build it were those who had just finished Hoover. When they imagined it filling this huge U-shaped canyon, they were speechless. “When they worked on Hoover they thought it made everything else look like nothing,” says Phil Nalder. “When they saw what we were going to build here they said it made Hoover look like nothing.”

After a while, visitors being taken around the damsite became tired of the phrase “largest in the world.” The mass (10.5 million cubic yards) and crest length (four-fifths of a mile) were, for a concrete dam, the largest and longest in the world. The concrete-mixing plant, the spillway, the generators, the powerhouse, the pumps, the penstocks, and the pump lift from the reservoir to the irrigated benchlands would all be the largest in the world, and as the dam went up the engineers were still scratching their heads about how to lift such an immense volume of water thirty stories high. The turbines, the scroll casings, the conveyor belts, the forms, the cofferdams, and the concentration of brothels and bars within a five-mile radius were also the largest in the world. The dam’s dimensions—height and length—were roughly those of the Golden Gate Bridge—it was not quite as high or long—but it was solid, and, at the base, five times as wide. Grand Coulee would use more lumber—130 million board feet—than any edifice ever built, but it was a tiny fraction of the dam’s total mass, and none of it was even visible. Like Hoover, the dam was so massive it would ordinarily have required hundreds of years to cool down, and cooling pipe had to be laid through it at close intervals. Laid out in a straight line, the pipe would have connected Seattle to Chicago.

The astonishing thing about Grand Coulee—about the whole era—was that people just went out and built it, built anything, without knowing exactly how to do it or whether it could even be done. There were no task forces, no special commissions, no proposed possible preliminary outlines of conceivable tentative recommendations. Tremendous environmental impacts, but no environmental impact statements. When Chuck Weil applied for a job on Grand Coulee, he didn’t know the first thing about concrete; before long, he was inspecting more concrete than anyone in history. Phil Nalder was trained as an electrical engineer; he started as a tracer (one rung below draftsman) and, later on, was put in charge of the whole project. Once, well into construction, a mudslide the size of a small mountain came off one side of the canyon and threatened to cover the foundation of the dam. To stabilize it, the Bureau ran around the Northwest looking for the biggest refrigeration units it could find; then it ran supercooled brine through the slide and froze it while construction continued. No one had ever tried it before, but it worked. When one of the cofferdams sprang a huge leak, it was plugged with old mattresses. The dam was finished and in service by September of 1941, an unbelievable sight. The three largest ocean liners in the world could have sat atop its crest like bathtub toys.

Much of the country thought Grand Coulee was marvelous, but it was so gigantic a project that it had to invite some kind of attack. Private utilities, not quite brave enough to lambast so popular a creation, were suspected of bribing journalists to write diatribes against it. One writer, Walter Davenport, went out to see the dam for Collier’s magazine; it was, he reported, in the middle of a “dead land, bitter with alkali,” shunned “even by snakes and lizards,” where “the air you breathe is full of the dust of dead men’s bones.” But Ickes and Mike Straus cooked up the idea of hiring Woody Guthrie as a “research assistant” to write some songs in praise of the dams. Guthrie, an itinerant Okie guitar picker, toured the Northwest like a prince in a chauffeured car, composing paeans to water and power like “Talking Columbia”:

You jus’ watch this river ’n pretty soon

E-everybody’s gonna be changin’ their tune....

That big Grand Coulee ’n Bonneville Dam’ll

Build a thousand factories f‘r Uncle Sam....

’N ev’rybody else in the world

Makin’ ev’rything from sewin’ machines

To a-tomic bedrooms, ’n plastic ...

E-everything’s gonna be made outa plastic.

Uncle Sam needs wool, Uncle Sam need wheat

Uncle Sam needs houses ’n stuff to eat

Uncle Sam needs water ’n power dams,

Uncle Sam needs people ’n the people need land.

Don’t like dictators none much myself,

What I think is the whole world oughta be run by

E-electricity....

What Guthrie sensed, and what Franklin Roosevelt knew by 1939, was that America stood an excellent chance of going to war. It would be a war won or lost not so much through strategy as through production. Germany had the greatest industrial capacity in Europe; Japan’s was the greatest in the Orient. In the balance stood the United States. And since this would be a war of, more than anything, air power, the critical material was going to be aluminum. It would be, at least, until the critical material became plutonium.

I
n the nineteenth century, aluminum had a street value close to gold‘s—a function of the amount of energy needed to produce it and the type of energy required. It takes twelve times as much energy to produce raw aluminum as it does to make iron, and since the process is electrolytic, it has to be done with electricity. Until another process is invented, nothing else will do. The one-thousand-ounce aluminum Pope’s cap installed in the pinnacle of the Washington Monument when it was completed in the mid-nineteenth century was the largest ingot of its day. After the First World War, aluminum became cheaper, though still not common. The raw material, the production flow, the manufacturing patent, and the end uses were pretty much controlled by the Aluminum Company of America, which was to vertical integration what William Randolph Hearst was to yellow journalism. Hearst, at least, had competition; Alcoa didn’t—except from Adolf Hitler, who made Germany the world leader in aluminum production soon after seizing power, for reasons the Allies did not immediately discern. When the first electricity began to flow out of Bonneville Dam, the Corps of Engineers’ big power and navigation dam three hundred miles downriver, the government tried to induce Alcoa’s potential competitors to build plants in the Northwest by offering them bargain rates, but nobody was particularly interested. By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, however, the luxury of persuasion could no longer be afforded. The government simply went out and built the plants itself.

No one knows exactly how many planes and ships were manufactured with Bonneville and Grand Coulee electricity, but it is safe to say that the war would have been seriously prolonged at the least without the dams. Germany’s military buildup during the 1930s gave it a huge start on Britain and France. When Hitler invaded Poland and war broke out in Europe, the United States was, militarily speaking, of no consequence; we had fewer soldiers than Henry Ford had auto workers, and not enough modern M-1 Garand rifles to equip a single regiment. By 1942, however, we possessed something no other country did: a huge surplus of hydroelectric power. By June of that year, 92 percent of the 900,000 kilowatts of power available from Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams—an almost incomprehensible amount at the time—was going to war production, most of it to building planes. One writer, Albert Williams, estimates that “more than half the planes in the American Air Forces were built with Coulee power alone.” After France capitulated, England was left hanging by a thread. It was rescued by a European sky suddenly full of American planes. The Columbia River was a traffic jam of barges carrying bauxite to the smelters in Longview, Washington. By the middle of the war, almost half of the aluminum production in the country was located in the Northwest—nearly all of it going toward the war effort. American planes were being downed almost as fast as they could be produced. German planes, however, were being downed faster than they could be produced. The Nazis had neither the raw materials nor the electricity to produce what they needed fast enough.

In late 1940, when Grand Coulee Dam was being completed, people had been saying that its power would go begging until the twenty-first century. Twenty-two months later, all of its available power was being used and the defense industries were screaming for more. As the first six generators were being installed, the next two units were still being manufactured and wouldn’t be ready for power production for some weeks. The war was at such a critical juncture that some weeks was too long. The Bureau collected every outsize piece of transportation equipment it could find, took the two generators waiting to be installed at Shasta Dam, and laboriously moved them to Grand Coulee instead. Shasta’s generators were thirty thousand kilowatts smaller than Grand Coulee’s, and the turbines revolved in the wrong direction: Grand Coulee’s went clockwise, Shasta’s went counterclockwise. The Bureau solved the problem by installing the Shasta units in the wrong pits and excavating tunnels to the proper ones next door, so the water could surge in from the right side. After the war, the engineers had to invent some mammoth excavation devices to shoehorn them out.

The Westinghouse generators built for Grand Coulee were rated for a maximum output of 105,000 kilowatts each, which was the capacity of a good-sized oil power plant that could run, say, Duluth. For the entire duration of the war, they ran at 125,000 kilowatts, twenty-four hours a day, without a glitch. “We would shut one down only when it was absolutely necessary,” says Phil Nalder. “You’d stand there in the powerhouse and feel that low vibration, that low but incredibly powerful vibration, and you’d feel certain that they were going to burn themselves up. And you’d think that maybe the course of history depended on these damned things. But they never overheated, so we just ran them and ran them. God knows, they were beautifully made. By the end of the war, at Grand Coulee, we were generating 2,138,000 kilowatts of electricity. We were the biggest single source of electricity in the world. The Germans and the Japanese didn’t have anything nearly that big. Imagine what it would have been like without Grand Coulee, Hoover, Shasta, and Bonneville. At the time, they were ranked first, second, third, and fourth in the world. We had so much power at Grand Coulee that we could afford to use two generators just to run Hanford.”

Although few of the people who lived there knew it at the time, the strange squat structures going up in 1943 at the Hanford Reservation, an ultrasecret military installation along the Columbia River near Richland, Washington, were intimately connected to the Manhattan Project. A lot of the history is well-known now: how Niels Bohr was smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark in the wheel well of a British balsa-wood aircraft; how pacifistic Albert Einstein urged Franklin Roosevelt to build the bomb before the Nazis did; how thousands of technicians and scientists descended on the tiny mountain hamlet of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to figure out how to build their catastrophically explosive device. The key material was plutonium-239, an element virtually unknown in nature which has just the right fissile characteristics for an atomic bomb. The problem with plutonium—aside from its being fiendishly toxic—is that its production is energy-consumptive in the extreme. The amount of electricity used by the eight plutonium-production reactors at Hanford is still classified information, but a good guess is fifteen or twenty megawatts each—perhaps 160 megawatts in all. Nowhere else in a country involved in a gigantic war effort could one have found that kind of power to spare.

In the end, the Axis powers were no match for two things: the Russian winters, and an American hydroelectric capacity that could turn out sixty thousand aircraft in four years. We didn’t so much outmaneuver, outman, or outfight the Axis as simply outproduce it.