Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [115]
To the Corps of Engineers, the Bureau’s inability to move represented a last chance. In 1942, without any clear authorization from Congress, it began to construct an “emergency” flood diversion structure on the lower Kings. Although its action outraged those members who sided with the Bureau, and who saw what the Corps was trying to do, they could not bring the full Congress, now utterly preoccupied with the war, to waste its time debating such a trivial issue. Besides, the Corps’ works didn’t seem like much, a mere diversion gate. But it wasn’t the size of the works so much as the fact that the Corps had established its beachhead in the Tulare Basin before the Bureau ever got to turn a shovelful of earth. The Corps also made sure the floodwaters were diverted where they could do some economic good—toward the lands of the big growers.
Nothing much happened with the Kings River and Kern River projects during the middle war years. By 1944, however, Europe’s farmlands and economy were in ruins; overnight, the United States had become the breadbasket of the world. Now, at last, the two projects seemed to make some sense. In his budget request for fiscal year 1945, FDR included a request of $1 million to permit the Bureau to begin work on the Kings River. The House, dominated by the Flood Control Committee, immediately took the appropriation out; the Senate threw it back in. Finally, hearings had to be scheduled to try to resolve the matter.
It was at those hearings that the Corps of Engineers demonstrated where its true loyalty lay. Although the White House had left absolutely no doubt that it was strongly behind a Reclamation project, and expected the rest of the administration to support its position, the Corps of Engineers chose not to; instead, Chief of Engineers Raymond A. Wheeler displayed outright defiance of his commander in chief. Testifying at the hearings, Wheeler gave no support at all to the Roosevelt position, a breach of loyalty that made Harold Ickes, the ultimate Roosevelt loyalist, absolutely livid. Meanwhile, the deputy chief was busy undermining the administration’s position back in California. In a speech to a group of business leaders in Sacramento, Major General Thomas Robins said that Californians were being denied “necessary flood control” by “a lot of arguments that are neither here nor there.” If the state would only “wake up and get the water first and then decide what to do with it,” he said, “she would be a lot better off.” Otherwise, by the time the dams are built “we may all be dead.” What Robins didn’t say is that most Californians wouldn’t be able to use the water in the Kings and the Kern if the Corps built the dams. It had already announced that it would build dams, but not aqueducts; therefore, the water couldn’t go anywhere but down the river channels, and the big growers owned nearly all the land on both sides. The Corps had also announced that if its projects offered incidental irrigation benefits, it would not apply the Reclamation Act and its acreage laws. What all of this meant was that if the Corps built the Kings and Kern dams, nearly all of the water could be used by four agribusiness giants and a handful of oil companies owning land nearby—which were to become agribusiness giants themselves.
In the end, the hearings resolved nothing. Congress was still deadlocked. Sensing this, it came up with an inimitable solution to a paralysis of its own making: it authorized the Kings River Project for construction by both the Bureau and the Corps. Whichever could convince the appropriations committees to give it money first