Western Reclamation Efforts:
Cadillac Desert | Cadillac Desert 3-4 | Cadillac Desert 6 | Arid lands
How was Jefferson's agrarian vision of a nation of small farms available to people in the desert?
Great Depression 1929-1939 | Go-Go Years | Conservation | Dust Bowl | Dams | Economic Recovery | Politics
The American Nile as the arid watershed of the Colorado River
"The Colorado's modern notoriety… stems … from the fact that ….It …has more people, more industry, and a more significant economy dependent on it than any other comparable river in the world."
"It is one of the siltiest rivers in the world…the wildest."
"four years of carryover capacity in the reservoirs before you [might] have to evacuate most of southern California, Arizona, and portions of 4 western states."
"The river system provides over half the water of greater Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix;"
"it grows much of America's domestic production of fresh winter vegetables;"
"The Colorado is so used up on its way to the sea that only a burgling trickle reaches its dried-up delta at the head of the Gulf of California,"
"To some conservationists, the Colorado River is the preeminent symbol of everything mankind has done wrong…" or "it is the perfection of an ideal."
conserve means to retard loss; to keep from harm, loss or decay.
Reisner, pp. 120-44.
Great Depression 1929-1939 | Go-Go Years | Conservation | Dust Bowl | Dams | Economic Recovery | Politics
Reisner pp. 145-66.
financing the unaffordable in places that are inhospitable
“pork barrel politics” of water projects
Great Depression 1929-1939 | Go-Go Years | Conservation | Dust Bowl | Dams | Economic Recovery | Politics
The Great Depression 1929-1939
Franklin D. Roosevelt (married Theodore Roosevelt's cousin Eleanor Roosevelt He was undersecretary of the Navy during World War I, ran and lost as vice-President in 1920; contracted paralysis due to the polio virus; and became Governor of New York in 1928), tree planter and believer in conservation as a replacement for the frontier which had figuratively closed in an earlier generation as revealed by the census figures of the 1890s.
Economic collapse
capitalism on trial: stock crashed in November, 1929, destroyed 1/3 of the money in the nation by 1932. One in four people were unemployed by 1933 and banks had no cash with which to pay depositors.
Unemployed and homeless people took to living in tent camps, such as this one in Seattle.
Great Depression 1929-1939 | Go-Go Years | Conservation | Dust Bowl | Dams | Economic Recovery | Politics
The greatest national conservation effort since 1900 commenced under Progressive Republicans. It was championed by a Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt.
Harold Ickes, as Secretary of the Interior, expanded funding & bureaucracy:
PWA -- from the Lincoln Tunnel to overseas causeway national block grants
TVA -- comprehensive river basin (watershed) planning
CCC -- work for the unemployed urban youth & adults
USF&WS -- brought together biology, protection, and funded reserves
NPS expanded -- visitor centers, roads, tunnels, & scenic vistas built
Rural Electrification Agency -- promoted owner operated cooperatives
NFS - multiple use regulations, wilderness dedication, reforestation
Taylor Grazing Act -- ended homesteading & set limits on livestock leases on federal, public lands.
Reclamation: Elwood Meade died in 1936, Harold Ickes friend Mike Straus took over reshaping the agency to promote large construction of "big public-power dams," to compete with private electric utilities.
Great Depression 1929-1939 | Go-Go Years | Conservation | Dust Bowl | Dams | Economic Recovery | Politics
Then came the "Dust Bowl" drought since 1928 (cyclical) on the great plains destroyed the capacity of marginal lands [developed since 1915] to sustain farming, farmers, towns and grain silos, Chicago commodities exchange.
Dust Bowl
Winds & aridity caused the topsoil to literally blow away -- darkening skies in St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland and even Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.!
756 counties in 19 states (mid-west) were affected by the Spring of 1934.
35 million acres lost, 125 million acres debilitated, another 100 million acres were threatened!
255 million acres were at stake: nearly a million people migrated to California where ground water (tables dropped from 100-300 feet) irrigated coastal & interior valleys for orchards, produce, & grain.
1935 Bureau of Reclamation took over California state's Central Valley Project the first irrigation scheme to relocate water from the arid north to the desert south centerpiece of the project was Shasta Dam in the Cascades.
1931-1933 Columbia River (fourth largest in the United States) could generate enough electricity for "every person west of the Mississippi River." (155)
Army Corps of Engineers "cut its teeth" on the Grand Coulee & Bonneville dams at more than $270 million each (low dam -- navigation; high dam --irrigation & electrical power) Bonneville's fish facilities cost $65 million 1/4 the cost of the power generated (158); the Grand Coulee was the largest, in terms of height and concrete, Dam in the world at that time. 13 dams/40 years.
Smallest to largest dams:
Bonneville Dam ----- Hoover Dam ----- Shasta Dam ---- Grand Coulee Dam (seen below).
130 million board feet of lumber in the Grand Coulee alone to generate 105,000 kilowatts of electricity per generator!
There arose a serious issue in the law between the low rise dams for irrigation only that fish could get over by use of "fish ladders" and the high dams used to generate electrical power.
Great Depression 1929-1939 | Go-Go Years | Conservation | Dust Bowl | Dams | Economic Recovery | Politics
Priming the national economic pump
Benefactors:
aluminum industry {Alcoa's competitors -- Reynolds & Kaiser)
war defense plants (WWII) -- ships -- guns -- armaments -- tanks -- bombers
Hanford nuclear facility -- Plutonium bomb (dropped on Nagasaki)
By 1952 Congress had authorized 110 separate dam appropriations on thousands of rivers!
$194.00 worth of power in NYC would have the equivalent $24 in Seattle!
"If there was a free flowing river anywhere in the country, our reflex action was to erect a dam in its path." (167)
Great Depression 1929-1939 | Go-Go Years | Conservation | Dust Bowl | Dams | Economic Recovery | Politics
Logrolling
"The whole business was like a pyramid scheme -- the many (the taxpayers) were paying to enrich the few -- but most members of Congress figured that if they voted for everyone else's dams, someday they would get a dam, too."
"economic folly and the environmental damage…the corruption of politics… Water projects came to epitomize the pork barrel; they were the oil that lubricated the nation's legislative machinery.…public works programs ….that…. grew into a money eating monster that our leaders lacked the courage or ability to stop."
Reisner, chapters 4 & 5.
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986.
Great Depression 1929-1939 | Go-Go Years | Conservation | Dust Bowl | Dams | Economic Recovery | Politics
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Essay due:
Would you flood parts of the Grand Canyon with two dams?
