Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [72]
In that same year—1894—Senator Joseph Carey of Wyoming, thinking he had learned something from California’s and Colorado’s mistakes, introduced a bill that offered another approach: the federal government would cede up to a million acres of land to any state that promised to irrigate it. But, by some elusive reasoning, the states were forbidden to use land as the collateral they would need to raise the money to build the irrigation works—and land, at the time, was the only thing of value most of them had. Sixteen years later, using a generous estimate, the Carey Act had caused 288,553 acres to come under irrigation throughout the entire seventeen-state West—about as much developed farmland as there was in a couple of counties in Illinois.
As the private and state-fostered experiments with irrigation lay in shambles, many of the western reclamation advocates heaped blame on the East and “Washington” for not doing more to help, just as their descendants, four generations later, would vilify Jimmy Carter, an easterner and southerner, for not “understanding” their “needs” when he tried to eliminate some water projects that would have subsidized a few hundred of them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. In each case, the West was displaying its peculiarly stubborn brand of hypocrisy and blindness. Midwestern members of Congress were understandably uneager to subsidize competition for their own farmer constitutents, but they had little to do with making reclamation fail; the West was up to the task itself. Its faith in private enterprise was nearly as absolute as its earlier faith that settlement would make the climate wetter. John Wesley Powell, a midwesterner, knew that all the private initiative in the world would never make it bloom. Theodore Roosevelt, an easterner, had returned from the West convinced that there were “vast areas of public land which can be made available for ... settlement,” but only, he added, “by building reservoirs and main-line canals impractical for private enterprise.” But the West wasn’t listening. For the first time in their history, Americans had come up against a problem they could not begin to master with traditional American solutions—private capital, individual initiative, hard work—and yet the region confronting the problem happened to believe most fervently in such solutions. Through the 1890s, western Senators and Congressmen resisted all suggestions that reclamation was a task for government alone—not even for the states, which had failed as badly as the private companies, but for the national government. To believe such a thing was to imply that their constituents did not measure up to the myth that enshrouded them—that of the indomitable individualist. When they finally saw the light, however, their attitude miraculously changed—though the myth didn’t—and the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state.
The passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902 was such a sharp left turn in the course of American politics that historians still gather and argue over why it was passed. To some, it was America’s first flirtation with socialism, an outgrowth of the Populist and Progressive movements of the time. To others, it was a disguised reactionary measure, an effort to relieve the mobbed and riotous conditions of the eastern industrial cities—an act to save heartless capitalism from itself. To some, its roots were in Manifest Destiny, whose incantations still held people in their sway; to others, it was a military ploy to protect and populate America’s western flank against the ascendant Orient.
What seems beyond question is that the Reclamation Act, or some variation of it, was, by the end of the nineteenth century, inevitable. To resist a federal reclamation program was to block