Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [32]
While Powell knew that his plan for settling the American West would be considered revolutionary, he saw a precedent. After all, what was the difference between a cooperative irrigation district and a New England barn-raising? One was informal, the other organized and legalized, but otherwise they were the same thing. Communal pasturelands might be a gross affront to America’s preoccupation with private property rights, but they were common in Europe. In the East, where inland navigation was as important as irrigation was in the West, you already had a strong federal presence in the Corps of Engineers. If anything was revolutionary, it was trying to graft English common law and the principles and habits of wet-zone agriculture onto a desert landscape. There was not a desert civilization in the world where that had been tried—and most of those civilizations had withered even after following sensible rules.
Powell was advocating cooperation, reason, science, an equitable sharing of the natural wealth, and—implicitly if not explicitly—a return to the Jeffersonian ideal. He wanted the West settled slowly, cautiously, in a manner that would work. If it was done intelligently instead of in a mad, unplanned rush, the settlement of the West could help defuse the dangerous conditions building in the squalid industrial cities of the East. If it was done wrong, the migration west might go right into reverse.
The nation at large, however, was in no mood for any such thing. It was avid for imperial expansion, and the majority of its citizens wanted to get rich. New immigrants were arriving, dozens of boatloads a day, with that motive burning in their brains. To them America was not so much a democratic utopia as a gold mine. If monopolists reigned here, they could accept that; someday they would be monopolists, too. Forty years earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville had captured the raw new country’s soul: “To clear, to till, and to transform the vast uninhabited continent which is his domain, the American requires the daily support of an energetic passion; that passion can only be the love of wealth; the passion for wealth is therefore not reprobated in America, and, provided it does not go beyond the bounds assigned to it for public security, it is held in honor.” In Powell’s day, that passion for wealth had if anything grown more intense. A pseudoscientific dogma, Social Darwinism, had been invented to give predatory behavior a good name. Darwin could not be taught in the schools; but a perversion of Darwin could be practiced in real life.
The unpeopled West, naturally, was where a great many immigrants hoped to find their fortunes. They didn’t want to hear that the West was dry. Few had ever seen a desert, and the East was so much like Europe that they imagined the West would be, too. A tiny bit semiarid, perhaps, like Italy. But a desert? Never! They didn’t want to hear of communal paturelands—they had left those behind, in Europe, in order that they could become the emperors of Wyoming. They didn’t want the federal government parceling out water and otherwise meddling in their affairs; that was another European tradition they had left an ocean away. Agricultural fortunes were being made in California by rampant capitalists like Henry Miller, acreages the size of European principalities were being amassed in Texas, in Montana. If the federal government controlled the water, it could also control the land, and then the United States might become a nation of small farmers after all—which was exactly what most Americans didn’t want. For this was the late nineteenth century, when, as Henry Adams wrote, “the majority at last declared itself, once and for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery ... the whole mechanical consolidation of force ... ruthlessly ... created monopolies capable