Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [218]
The farmers could look in two directions for help: Sacramento and Washington, D.C. The Bureau of Reclamation, which was just completing Hoover Dam, had such a hold on the public imagination and the Roosevelt administration that it could build almost anything it pleased. On the other hand, it was supposed to create new subsistence farms in the West, not rescue the farmers who were already there from the consequences of their short-sighted avarice. Besides, Hoover Dam had been a great gift to California, and the other western states were waiting in line.
Sacramento, then, was the better bet, even if it couldn’t dip into the federal treasury to finance the farmers’ rescue. In 1933, the state legislature succumbed to heavy lobbying from the growers—who had become its biggest source of campaign contributions—and passed the Central Valley Project Act. The legislation was a striking display of ambition for a single state, proposing as it did the control, through dams and reservoirs, of the largest and third-largest rivers in California. The project bonds, however, could not be sold in the middle of the Depression, so the state was forced to let the Bureau of Reclamation take over the Central Valley Project; it was such a gargantuan scheme that the completion of its main features, including four big dams, required eighteen years.
The Central Valley Project was without question the most magnificent gift any group of American farmers had ever received; they couldn’t have dreamed of building it themselves, and the cheap power and interest exemption constituted a subsidy that would be worth billions over the years. It is interesting, therefore, that originally many of the farmers hadn’t wanted the Bureau to build the CVP.
The wedding between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Central Valley farmers was never more than a marriage of convenience, and, like many such marriages, it was soon on the rocks. As a starlet trades a virile but impecunious husband for a wealthy old tycoon, the farmers had, in effect, traded whatever hope they had of becoming agricultural grandees like Henry Miller for a secure supply of water. The Reclamation Act, which would apply, in theory, to the CVP even though it only delivered supplemental water to most, required a farmer owning more than 160 acres of land (320 for a man and wife) to sign recordable contracts to dispose of the excess holdings in order to continue receiving subsidized water. Since a great many farmers owned far more than that, the CVP looked as if it might become the first real land-redistribution device in U.S. history. Leasing acreage above and beyond the 320-acre limit was also prohibited under the act, and all excess holdings were supposed to be sold at their pre-project worth—which, in a valley where no crop could be raised without irrigation, was very little. On top of all this, farmers receiving Reclamation water were required to live on their land, not farm from Fresno or San Francisco, as many of them did. (The Bureau stopped enforcing the residency provision in 1916, but a federal court later determined that it was still valid.) The whole idea was to keep speculators away, and to open up arid land to as many new farmers as possible. “We weren’t even supposed to give them 160 acres if they could make a living on less,” says former commissioner Floyd Dominy. “And in warm states like California you could make a living on a lot less. We were talking about subsistence—nothing more.”
The CVP, in short, was fundamentally different from every earlier Reclamation project. It did not create many new irrigated farms. It