Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [287]
The effect of Casey’s speech was remarkable. “I gave them religion. A few months hadn’t gone by before I heard they were setting up a big new lobby to fight for a rescue project. They called it Water, Incorporated.” Ambitious, perhaps even incredible, as its goal was—a project to rescue even a modest portion of the irrigated plains would be a project more grandiose than any yet built—Water, Inc., had a number of things going for it. California’s voters had just approved the most ambitious and expenseive public-works project ever attempted by a single state in order to save its own agricultural industry. Would Texans countenance that upstart state building something they lacked the nerve to attempt themselves? In the mid-1960s, the age of limits had not yet dawned; a high-plains rescue project was seen by many people as the next logical step in “orderly” water development, something that might even capture the fancy of the nation at large. The generation of politicians then running the country had been suckled and reared on public works. And an astonishing number of them came from Texas.
The President of the United States, for example. As Robert Caro demonstrated in the first volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, Johnson owed his political career largely to the Marshall Ford Dam. Begun under an emergency appropriation during the Depression—begun, just like Grand Coulee and Garrison dams, before it was even authorized, and built on land the government didn’t even own—the dam was to make a reputation and ultimately a huge fortune for a couple of struggling small-time contractors named Herman and George Brown. At the time, however, it was just a big Bureau of Reclamation dam on Texas’s Colorado River a few miles from Austin, a project which had run through its emergency appropriation before it was half built. To anyone else this didn’t matter much—no one doubted that the dam would be completed someday—but to the brothers Brown it was a calamity. They had invested every nickel they owned and scraped together all the collateral they could in order to purchase one and a half million dollars’ worth of construction equipment they needed and didn’t have. (Until then, most of the Browns’ contracts had been for road-paving jobs; what they owned in construction equipment didn’t amount to more than a few fresno scrapers.) If more funds were not approved immediately, they would go bankrupt. But everyone was crying for relief funds, and an unauthorized project with a serious land-title problem in a remote corner of Texas was at a distinct disadvantage among its competition. In desperation, Herman Brown, the fiercely archconservative entrepreneur, pleaded for help from the district’s most important politician, a newly elected twenty-nine-year-old liberal New Deal Congressman whose name was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Using his connections among the White House inner circle and his absolutely shameless flattery of FDR, Johnson managed to get Herman and George Brown a formal authorization, a resolution of the land-title dispute, and another $5 million to finish the dam as their lenders were about to smash down their barricaded door. Profoundly grateful, the brothers Brown poured enough money into Johnson’s subsequent campaigns to catapult him into the Senate at a tender age. Their company, Brown and Root, was to grow into one of the largest construction firms in the world, mining the government just as Johnson mined the