Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [114]
Someday, if anyone has the inclination or the ability to penetrate the wall of secrecy behind which the Corps of Engineers has always managed to carry on its affairs, we may hear from its own mouth—from incriminating letters, memoranda, or confessions of its officials—why it was so eager to develop the Kings and the Kern—to ally itself unabashedly with a handful of huge land monopolies and, in the process, shove the Bureau off two made-to-order small-farm irrigation projects. The only obvious explanation (which is probably the correct one) is that it sensed the growing unpopularity of the acreage limitations of the Reclamation Act. Here was an unparalleled opportunity to establish a beachhead in a region where the natural topography and demand for water could give it new work for decades to come. No stranger to power politics, the Corps knew that its best hope of long-range success was a quick, dramatic demonstration of its abilities. The best way to ensure that was to pick a group of beneficiaries who were nearly as potent a political force as the Corps itself. If this was indeed its reasoning, then it reasoned well.
In 1937, the Bureau of Reclamation was just beginning its detailed feasibility investigations of the Kings and Kern River projects; it had, in fact, already been authorized to build the Kings River Project on the basis of cruder reconnaissance studies alone. In the very same year that the Bureau began its investigations, however, the Corps went to the House Flood Control and Appropriations Committees and extracted an authorization and some money to perform investigations of its own on these same two rivers—rivers which, in effect, had already been promised to the Bureau. It was a brazen act. The Bureau was incensed, and Harold Ickes, the Interior Secretary, was apoplectic. Nonetheless, neither the Bureau nor Ickes could do anything to stop the Corps; they were, in effect, in a race. The National Resources Planning Board, one of FDR’s superagencies, pleaded with the agencies to plan a unified project, then practically ordered them to do so. But they refused. As a result, in 1940, Congress received two separate reports on developing the Kings and the Kern: one on a traditional Reclamation project, the other on a project that purported to be for flood control, but which, by controlling the rivers’ runoff and drying up Tulare Lake, would irrigate a roughly equal amount of land.
It was a bureaucratic battle that was to drag on for more than five years. Sympathies in California, where the Bureau had a lot of support from smaller farmers, were divided—as they were in Congress. The Roosevelt administration, however, was emphatically on the side of the Bureau of Reclamation. FDR felt so strongly about the matter that on the 5th of May, 1941, he wrote a personal letter to the chairman of the House Flood Control Committee, saying, “A good rule for Congress to apply in considering these water projects, in my opinion, would be that the dominant interest should determine which agency should build and operate the project.” Obviously, Roosevelt said, the dominant interest was irrigation. “Not only that, but Kings River had already been authorized for construction by the Bureau of Reclamation; to [reauthorize] would only lead to needless confusion.”
But the Flood Control Committee was practically married to the Corps of Engineers, and ignored Roosevelt’s recommendation; the committee quickly authorized Kings River for construction by the Corps. With Ickes lobbying furiously on behalf of the Bureau, however, the full Congress refused to go along.
At that point,