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By Root 1415 0

the ancestors of the first Reclamation farmers had endured adversity by putting their faith in God and feeding themselves on game. But this was the twentieth century; the game was vanishing, and government was replacing God as the rescuer of last resort. As Michael Robinson wrote, “Western economic and social determinants were changing rapidly. Nineteenth-century irrigation pioneers were better suited to endure hardships than settlers who struggled to survive on Federal Reclamation projects after 1902. In the nineteenth century, wild game was plentiful, livestock could graze on the public domain outside irrigated areas, and the settlers were inured to privation.” And so, after a few years of trial and a lot of error, the Reclamation Act began to undergo a long and remarkable series of “reforms.”

The first reform was humble—a $20 million loan from the Treasury to the bankrupt Reclamation Fund to keep the program from falling on its face. It was approved in 1910, the same year that Section 9—the ill-advised clause promoting the construction of projects where they couldn’t work—was repealed. New projects were also required to have the explicit consent of the President before they were launched. A paper reform, however, is not necessarily a reform in real life. Every Senator still wanted a project in his state; every Congressman wanted one in his district; they didn’t care whether they made economic sense or not. The Commissioner of Reclamation and the President were only human. If Congress authorized a bad project and voted funding for it, a President might have good reasons not to veto the bill—especially if it also authorized a lot of things the President did want. Congress caught on quickly, and was soon writing “omnibus” authorization bills, in which bad projects were thrown in, willy-nilly, with good ones. (Later, Congress would learn a new trick: attaching sneaky little amendments authorizing particularly wretched projects to legislation dealing with issues such as education and hurricane relief.) As a result, instead of weeding out or discouraging bad projects, the “reforms” began to concentrate on making bad projects work—or, to put it more bluntly, on bailing them out.

The first of these adjustments came in 1914, when the repayment period, which had been set in the act at a rather unrealistic ten years, was extended to twenty. It was quite a liberal adjustment, but failed to produce any measurable results. By 1922, twenty years after the Reclamation Fund began, only 10 percent of the money loaned from the Reclamation Fund had been repaid. Sixty percent of the irrigators—an astounding number—were defaulting on their repayment obligations, even though they paid no interest on irrigation features.

In 1924, Congress commissioned a Fact Finder’s report on the Reclamation program, which recommended an even more drastic adjustment—raising the repayment period from twenty years to forty. No sooner was that done, however, than the most chronic and intractable problem of twentieth-century American agriculture began to appear: huge crop surpluses. Production and prices reached record levels during the First World War; when the war ended, production remained high, but crop prices did not. The value of all crops grown on Reclamation land fell from $152 million in 1919 to $83.6 million in 1922—as morose a statistic as the number of farmers in default. With their profits shriveling, the beleaguered farmers were reluctant to pay for water they were beginning to regard as rightful recompense for attempting to civilize the desert, especially when the Reclamation Service, in most cases, didn’t dare shut it off when they refused to pay. So Congress took further steps to bail the Reclamation program out, rerouting royalties from oil drilling and potassium mining to the Reclamation Fund on the theory that the West, while being stripped of its mineral resources, ought to get something in return. But even after all these measures had been adopted a number of projects continued to operate at a hopeless loss.

Nonetheless, the psychic value