Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [54]
On the evening of June 23, Senator Frank Flint left his offices on Capitol Hill for a late meeting with the President. It was a hot and muggy night, and Roosevelt seemed in an irritable mood. Behind him, however, stood a man who seemed a model of coolness and decorum, Gifford Pinchot. Flint, who had just received an intensive coaching from Matthews and Mulholland, began a passionate appeal.
Smith’s so-called compromise, he said, was nothing less than capitulation. Los Angeles had agreed only in despair; it was going to run out of water any day and it couldn’t afford to be filibustered to death in Congress. Smith’s prohibition on using surplus water in the San Fernando Valley left the city no choice but to leave any surplus in the Owens Valley or dump it in the ocean. In the first case, water rights the city had purchased at great expense might revert to the valley under the doctrine of appropriative rights; in the second case, the city would violate the California constitution, which forbade “inefficient use” of water. The real estate bust of 1889 had depopulated the city by one-half. Imagine what a water famine would do! All of the city’s actions in the Owens Valley had been legitimate. It had paid for its water, fair and square, and it wanted to let the valley survive. But there was only so much water, and it was a hundredfold—a thousandfold, said Smith—more valuable to the state and the nation if it built up a great, strong, progressive city on America’s weakly defended western flank instead of maintaining a little agrarian utopia in the high desert.
It was a rousing speech—the kind of speech that Roosevelt liked to hear. It was, in fact, just the kind of speech he would have made.
Roosevelt turned to his other visitor. “What do you think about this, Giff?”
“As far as I am concerned,” Pinchot answered coolly, “there is no objection to permitting Los Angeles to use the water for irrigation purposes.”
It was as simple as that. Roosevelt did not even bother to call in the Interior Department’s lawyers or the Geologic Survey’s hydrologists to ask whether Flint’s argument was sense or nonsense. He never invited Sylvester Smith to give his side of the argument. He didn’t even tell Smith or his own Interior Secretary, Ethan Hitchcock, about his decision; they found out about it secondhand a day and a half later. Hitchcock, a wealthy, principled man in the style of Sylvester Smith, had been profoundly embarrassed by the two-faced behavior of his employee J. B. Lippincott, and had been looking for a way to make amends to the Owens Valley. Flabbergasted and infuriated by the President’s decision, Hitchcock raced over to the White House, where Roosevelt refused to hear him. Instead, he forced him to suffer the humiliation of helping him draft a letter explaining “our attitude in the Los Angeles water supply question.” As Hitchcock stood by, impotent and enraged, Roosevelt wrote, “It is a hundred or a thousandfold more important to state that this water is more valuable to the people of Los Angeles than to the Owens Valley.” The words could have come right out of William Mulholland’s mouth.
The Otis-Sherman-Huntington-Chandler land syndicate was, potentially, enough of an embarrassment to Roosevelt’s antimonopolist image that he felt compelled to add an amendment to Flint’s bill prohibiting the city from reselling municipal water for irrigation use. In the opinion of the House Public Lands Committee, however, the stipulation was “meaningless.” “This water will belong absolutely to Los Angeles,” said the bill’s sponsor, echoing the sense of the committee, “and the city can do as it pleases....” Which it would.
Roosevelt’s support for Flint’s bill was only the beginning of the aid and comfort