A Devil's Bargain In The Desert: Hoover Dam And The Coming Of The Leviathan State Jul 17th 2013, 10:20
HOOVER DAM ON THE COLORADO RIVER (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Timothy Reuter
The monuments at Hoover Dam to its visionaries, engineers, and laborers are a small acknowledgement of the herculean feat those men achieved. They erected the world's largest dam (726 feet high) at a remote site and subdued North America's most implacable river. In doing so, the dam fulfilled the dreams of 19th Century frontiersman by bringing water and life to a once barren land. Today's western "Sunbelt metropolises" are part of Hoover Dam's imposing legacy.
But, this triumph of American ingenuity amid the Great Depression is also an indictment of the modern regulatory state as the current Lesser Depression continues. The 1930s megaprojects (the Golden Gate Bridge, Empire Empire State Building, and Hoover Dam) have disappeared, regulated out of existence. Now, numerous small-scale projects, little more than graft, are doled out as economic stimulus.
Such irony is unfortunately lost on the author, Michael Hiltzik. He laces an excellent narrative about early 20th Century America and constructing the dam with Keynesian ideology. The post-Great Depression U.S. was "transformed from a society that glorified individualism into one that cherished shared enterprise and communal social support." Degeneration into cronyism was also not far behind. Hoover Dam, and other public works successes, became justifications for increased government intervention in the economy.
Hiltzik's tale begins in earnest with the Colorado River. Its water was central to "reclaiming the desert." Consistent water flow would power agricultural development and population growth on the southwestern flank of the frontier.
Unfortunately, the river was anything but cooperative. Its volume rises and falls with annual precipitation, namely snow runoff from the Rocky Mountains. "No river matched its schizophrenic moods" which oscillated between a "meandering country stream" and "an insane torrent." Coupled with considerable soil erosion downstream, settlers contended with excessive amounts of silt and debris that clogged canals and left settlements vulnerable to floods.
A commercial effort by the California Development Company to irrigate the Imperial Valley, southeast California, ended in failure. Initial success in 1901 began coming apart in 1905 as several punishing floods destroyed levees and jeopardized "millions of dollars in crops." Appeals for financial relief attracted the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was "fully alive to the profits to be made in serving irrigated lands." And, Southern Pacific fared no better. Corralling the river with stronger levees "cost the railroad more than $3 million" in total by February 1907.
The failure of private companies ended with a political twist. Southern Pacific appealed to the federal government for reimbursement after sealing the breach. Congress did not oblige, and President Theodore Roosevelt appropriated the struggles out west for his own purposes. In a January 1907 speech before Congress, he proposed a program of "diversion dams and distributions systems in the Colorado River Valley." This was a plan for "the most audacious deployment of government resources" since the Panama Canal.
Increasing federal activity in reclaiming the desert during the 20th Century was not without merit as Hiltzik argues. At stake were water rights. Seven states in the river basin harbored claims to an "established right on the river," along with suspicions of their neighbors. The role of private actors complicated matters further. Who had what legal right and to how much water?
Avoiding an aquatic tragedy of the commons compelled the federal government to have the parties negotiate an "inter-state treaty." Ironically, then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover led the effort in 1922 "to draft a compact" enabling the states to "share equitably in the waters of the Colorado River." Indeed, this idea of equitable access perhaps made building a dam inevitable. The easiest way to apportion water fairly was out of a reservoir created by impounding the river.
Set against the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties, Hiltzik gives a fantastic account of the negotiations that secured a pact and the bill for the dam's construction. Political machinations by politicians, lobbying by the Reclamation Bureau to federalize the river basin, pleas from settlers, and resistance from wealthy landowners all swirled around the bill. But after six years of political wrangling, President Calvin Coolidge signed off on December 21, 1928.
The crash came ten months later, and President Hoover did not just sit and watch economic agony grip the country. His increased spending for public works was the forerunner of FDR's New Deal, and broke with his predecessors. Presidents Harding and Coolidge kept expenditures down amid three recessions in the 1920s, and each ended inside of two years. Moreover, federal spending was a "negligible 3 percent of gross national product" in the early 1930s. It reached twenty percent by 2000.
Meanwhile, dam construction began in 1931 outside of Las Vegas on the Nevada-Arizona border in Boulder Canyon. Hiltzik superbly recounts the challenges faced by the chief engineer, Frank Crowe, and his men. They had to divert the river from the worksite by blasting diversion tunnels, cut into the canyon walls, excavate the riverbed, and devise a way to pour more cement than was used for all prior dams. Along the way, Hiltzik seamlessly integrates terms such as uplift (upward water pressure from beneath the dam) into his narrative of struggle against the river.
But, Hoover Dam's construction had its ugly aspects. "Racial and ethnic discrimination, profiteering at the company store, and the flouting of health and safety regulations" all existed. Blacks workers were segregated while Asian labor was banned. Poor safety standards led to appalling deaths from heat stroke, badly executed detonations, and carbon monoxide poisoning among others.
The response from Crowe and his underbosses was merciless. Strikes were crushed, the exhausting pace of work continued, and injury compensation was denied. Indeed, fraud was not uncommon. The medical staff, at management's behest, sometimes intentionally misdiagnosed men suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning (contracted from truck exhaust while blasting out tunnels) with illnesses. As Hiltzik notes, diseases such as tuberculosis or pneumonia were "all conditions for which the men were ineligible to claim injury compensation."
YOUR COMMENT
