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By Root 1436 0

and the politicians they helped elect. “Straus huffed and puffed about the acreage limit,” Dominy said later, “but he didn’t do a damn thing to enforce it.” (This is largely but not completely true. One of Straus’s worries, which turned out to be well founded, was that the Corps of Engineers, unencumbered by social legislation or much of a social conscience, would gladly step in and replace the Bureau as the major water developer of the West if the Bureau began cracking down too hard on violators.)

At first, Dominy was self-righteous about enforcing the Reclamation Act. In 1954, when the Corps of Engineers, with the acquiescence of Interior Under Secretary Clarence Davis, tried to do exactly what Mike Straus feared—let water from its two biggest California reservoirs run free of charge onto the lands of two gigantic farming corporations, the J. G. Boswell Company and the Salyer Land Company—he was apoplectic. “Special Assistant Frye showed the [Under Secretary’s] letter [of acquiescence] to me confidentially,” Dominy wrote in his professional diary on February 4, 1955. “I blew my top and stated emphatically the detrimental effect that would have on Reclamation’s ability to conclude repayment contract negotiations... with other groups of water users. [A] very plausible legal basis can be made that Congress has directed that irrigation water available as a result of Army construction should be sold pursuant to Reclamation law.”

Later, Dominy, now chief of the Irrigation Division, paid a visit to the Boise regional office and learned, he wrote in his diary, “that there is apparently a rather widespread evasion of the incremental land provisions of the Columbia Basin Project Act.” (According to the incremental-land-value provisions of the act, beneficiaries newly supplied with Bureau water are supposed to sell their excess lands at a price reflecting their worth before the Bureau water arrived. Otherwise, speculation would be as rampant as in the old days of the Homestead Acts; people with an insider’s knowledge of future projects could buy land in the project area for $10 or $20 an acre and sell it later for fifty times as much.) “I made it plain,” Dominy wrote, “that it was the Bureau of Reclamation’s responsibility to either (a) energetically enforce the law or (b) ask Congress to repeal it.” When Assistant Interior Secretary Aandahl privately expressed extreme reluctance to prosecute the violators, Dominy wrote, “I am happy to report that this is the first time in my 24 years of Government work that I have heard a top administrator say that he was unwilling to take action to enforce a law which he was sworn to uphold and which comes under his jurisdiction.” Ultimately, there was an FBI investigation, a prosecution, and a conviction in the Columbia Basin case. The sentence was a fine of $850. “The sentence made you feel like a fool,” says Gil Stamm, who worked on the case with Dominy and was ultimately to succeed him as commissioner.

It did gross injury to Floyd Dominy’s image to be made to look like a fool. That may be the main reason why, as commissioner, his indignation over violations of the Reclamation Act appeared to evaporate like a summer cloud. Under Dominy’s tenure, the one serious example of enforcement in the Bureau’s career did take place: the breakup of the huge DiGiorgio Company holdings in California after it was proved that the lands were illegally receiving subsidized water. But the main instigator in that action was not Dominy but Frank Barry, the first Interior solicitor under John Kennedy. And though it is true, as Dominy insists, that the record of enforcement during his reign was at least as good as any other commissioner’s, that isn’t saying much, because the record of enforcement over eighty years has been almost nil. Not only that, but the violations had become more frequent and worse by the time Dominy was appointed. It wasn’t until the administration of Jimmy Carter that a serious attempt was even made to find out how bad the violations were. The conclusion was that they had multiplied considerably