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By Root 1520 0

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.

In 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