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By Root 1665 0

after the Second World War and reached their apogee about the time Dominy became commissioner. As it happened, the Carter investigation found that the vast majority of illegalities were occurring in California and Arizona. But the senior Senator from Arizona was Dominy’s best friend in Congress, Carl Hayden. In California, the Congressmen who represented the region where most of the acreage violations were taking place were three Dominy stalwarts: Bizz Johnson, John McFall, and Bernie Sisk. None of those gentlemen ever showed much interest in enforcing the acreage limitations of the Reclamation Act. They did, however, display a passionate interest in new dams, and their attitudes became Floyd Dominy’s attitudes the longer he remained in office. He had begun as a crusader, a person who at least appeared to possess a sense of fairness and justice, a non-engineer whose outlook was basically agrarian. He ended his term as a zealot, blind to injustice, locked into a mad-dog campaign against the environmental movement and the whole country over a pair of Grand Canyon dams.

The fact is that Dominy knew that scandalous violations of the acreage limit were occurring right around Los Angeles—for example, that the Irvine Ranch, one of the largest private landholdings in the entire world, was illegally receiving immense amounts of taxpayer-subsidized Reclamation water—and did absolutely nothing to stop it. When he was shown the list of violators, compiled during a months-long secret investigation, he put it in his desk drawer and never looked at it again. Though he went to great lengths to try to disprove it, Dominy knew that the Bureau was opening new lands for crops which farmers were paid not to grow back east—cotton being the prime offender. The Bureau could easily have refused to supply new water to a region until it could demonstrate that its crop patterns would not make the nation’s agricultural surpluses worse, but its response, under Dominy, was to launch a belligerent campaign to deny that the problem existed.

When Dominy appeared not to realize was that these three syndromes, often occurring at once—farmers illegally irrigating excess acreage with dirt-cheap water in order to grow price-supported crops—were badly tarnishing the Bureau’s reputation. By the 1960s, the Reclamation program was under attack not only from conservationists but from church groups (who objected to its tacit and illegal encouragement of big corporate farms), from conservatives, from economists, from eastern and midwestern farmers, and from a substantial number of newspapers and magazines that had usually supported it in the past—even from the Hearst papers in California. Dominy was not so blind that he didn’t see this; his fatal mistake was in believing that the protest and indignation amounted to sound and fury signifying nothing: Dominy had a peculiar adeptness at denying reality. And the conservation movement was the reality he liked least of all.

Throughout its history, the conservation movement had been little more than a minor nuisance to the water-development interests in the American West. They had, after all, twice managed to invade National Parks with dams; they had decimated the greatest salmon fishery in the world, in the Columbia River; they had taken the Serengeti of North America—the virgin Central Valley of California, with its thousands of grizzly bears and immense clouds of migratory waterfowl and its million and a half antelope and tule elk—and transformed it into a banal palatinate of industrial agriculture. The Bureau got away with its role in this partly because its spiritual fathers, John Wesley Powell and Theodore Roosevelt, happened to be two of the foremost conservationists of their day—a heritage which, in the right hands, might have all but immunized it against more modern conservationists’ attacks.

The Bureau’s response to the rising tide of conservation, however, was to let them eat cake. It might have learned some valuable lessons from the Corps of Engineers, which at least knew how to build a Trojan horse. While