Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [92]
It wasn’t, however, the mere magnitude of the project that set it apart. What set it apart was the way irrigation and power production were linked. The earliest projects were designed exclusively as irrigation projects; if any power was incidentally generated, it was sold to project farmers at bargain rates. With Hoover Dam, the Bureau took a big plunge into public power; nearly two-thirds of its hydroelectricity went to light Los Angeles. However, when Angelenos paid their power bills, they weren’t subsidizing the farmers in the Imperial and Coachella valleys who were irrigating with Lake Mead water; they were merely paying back the cost of the dam.
The Colorado River Storage Project would be utterly and fatefully different. Anyone who bought electricity at market rates from the dams—and 1,622,000 kilowatts, an enormous amount at that time, was planned—would be subsidizing irrigation in the upper basin. Eighty-five cents of every dollar spent on irrigation features would be subsidized by power revenues. Every time they flicked a switch, electricity consumers in the region would be helping a farmer plant alfalfa at six thousand feet to feed a national surplus of beef.
The Bureau was strikingly candid about the dismal economics of irrigation in the upper basin. “The [upper basin] farmers can’t pay a dime, not one dime,” lamented the Bureau’s chief of hydrology, C. B. Jacobsen, to a Congressional committee. And as if to demonstrate how far Congress had come in accepting the subsidization of an entire region, Jacobsen’s words fell on sympathetic ears. Western members, even those whose districts were well outside the basin, lined up to support the bill—perhaps because they expected their own uneconomical projects to be supported in return. For the first time, a majority of eastern members seemed indifferent, neutral, or even sympathetic—perhaps because they had Corps of Engineers projects they wanted built which might require the western members’ support. Even the Eisenhower administration decided to give the Colorado River Storage Project lukewarm support, though it violated every conservative principle Ike had ever espoused.
The most effective opposition, by far, came from Paul Douglas, the urbane Senator from Illinois, who, ironically, had played a pivotal role in the creation of the New Deal. When World War II broke out, Douglas was fifty years old, a former economics professor at the University of Chicago who had become a reform-minded Chicago alderman. He promptly enlisted in the Marines, talked himself out of a desk job, and got to the front lines of the Pacific theater. He was gravely wounded at Peleliu and again at Okinawa, and was lucky to return alive. Elected to the Senate after the war, Douglas brought all of his determination and iconoclastic, brilliant thinking to Washington with him. He was—perhaps because of his economics background—the first architect of the New Deal who seemed to sense that something had gone drastically wrong. And the worst perversion of the New Deal ideas that he, at least, had in mind was the Reclamation program, subsidizing high-altitude desert farmers so they could grow the same crops some of Douglas’s farmer constituents were being paid not to grow—so serious had America’s crop-surplus problem become now that Europe was back in production again.
In a series of memorable debates on the Senate floor, Douglas, tall, athletic, and white-haired, went after the Colorado River Storage Project hammer and tongs. At Glen Canyon Dam, he told his colleagues, the cost of hydroelectricity per kilowatt would be $463; at Echo Park Dam, it was over $600; at Central Utah, it was $765; at Flaming Gorge, it was more than