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By Root 1509 0

House, Newlands introduced a bill creating a federal program along the lines suggested by Powell. But the bitterness he felt over his huge financial loss was so strong that he described his bill in language almost calculated to infuriate his western colleagues, who were clinging to the myth that the hostile natural forces of the West could be overcome by individual initiative. In a long speech on the floor of Congress, Newlands said outright that the legislation he was introducing would “nationalize the works of irrigation”—which was like saying today that one intended to nationalize the automobile industry. Then he launched into a long harangue about the failures of state reclamation programs, blaming them on “the ignorance, the improvidence, and the dishonesty of local legislatures” —even though many of his listeners had recently graduated from such legislatures themselves. He even suggested that Congress should have no oversight powers, implying that he distrusted that body as much as he did the thieves, opportunists, and incompetents whom he saw controlling the state legislatures.

Newlands’ bill, as expected, ran into immediate opposition. When it came up for a vote in March, it was soundly defeated. Western members then began to support a rival bill, proposed by Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming, that contained none of the features Newlands wanted. By February of 1902, Warren’s bill was finally passed by the Senate and seemed destined to become law. At that point, however, fate and Theodore Roosevelt intervened. Mrs. Warren became gravely ill, necessitating the Senator’s return to Wyoming. In Warren’s absence, Roosevelt leaned on Newlands to tone down his language, and before long the Congressman was describing his defeated measure, which he had already reintroduced, as a “conservative” and “safe” bill. Roosevelt still wouldn’t risk supporting it, but he came up with a brilliant ploy. Announcing his “sympathy with the spirit” of Warren’s bill, he said he would support it with “a few minor changes.” The person whom he wanted to make the changes and lead the bill through Congress was Wyoming’s young Congressman-at-large, Frank Mondell, the future Republican leader of the House. Mondell had a weakness for flattery and a less than athletic mind, and Roosevelt was a master at exploiting both. Before long, he had persuaded Mondell to incorporate as “minor changes” in Warren’s bill almost all of Newlands’ language. Roosevelt then softened up his eastern opposition with some implied threats that their river and harbor projects might be in jeopardy if they did not go along—a strategy that has seen long useful service. By the time Warren returned from Wyoming, Newlands’ bill, disguised as his own, had cleared both houses. On June 17, 1902, the Reclamation Act became law.

The newly created Reclamation Service exerted a magnetic pull on the best engineering graduates in the country. The prospect of reclaiming a desert seemed infinitely more satisfying than designing a steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or a power dam in Massachusetts, and the graduates headed west in a fog of idealism, ready to take on the most intractable foe of mankind: the desert. But the desert suffers improvement at a steep price, and the early Reclamation program was as much a disaster as its dams were engineering marvels.

The underlying problems were politics and money. Under the terms of the Reclamation Act, projects were to be financed by a Reclamation Fund, which would be filled initially by revenues from sales of federal land in the western states, then paid back gradually through sales of water to farmers. (It should be mentioned right away that the farmers, under the law, were exempted from paying interest on virtually all of their repayment obligations—a subsidy which was substantial to begin with, and which was to become breathtaking in later decades, as interest rates topped 10 percent. In some cases, the interest exemption alone—which is, of course, an indirect burden on the general taxpayer—has amounted to a subsidy of ninety cents on the dollar.)