Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [94]
All of Paul Douglas’s eloquence and logic, as it turned out, were a poor match for appeals such as O‘Mahoney’s and the growing Congressional power of the arid West. O’Mahoney and Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, representing Colorado Basin states, were powerhouses on the Senate Interior Committee; Carl Hayden of Arizona ruled Appropriations; Wayne Aspinall of western Colorado was the ascendant power at the House Interior Committee. The Colorado River Storage Project also enjoyed overwhelming public support, not just among the western farmers, but among their city brethren, too; conservatives, liberals, Democrats, Republicans—ideology meant nothing where water was concerned. The only serious public opposition came from southern California (which was expected) and from conservationists, who were horrified at the prospect of watching three of the most magnificent river canyons in the West filled by giant, drawn-down reservoirs: Glen Canyon on the main Colorado and Flaming Gorge and Echo Park on the Green. Each of these reservoirs would be as long as smaller eastern states; Glen Canyon would stretch back for nearly two hundred miles behind the dam, not even counting tentacles of water that would reach up side canyons and tributary streams. But in those days conservationists didn’t count for much. The Sierra Club had just one full-time person, whose name was David Brower, on its paid staff.
The outcome was foreordained. California had gotten Hoover Dam, Parker Dam, Davis Dam, the Imperial and Coachella projects, and water and power for Los Angeles. Now the upper basin would get its share. After minimal debate on the floor, the CRSP bill passed both Houses and was signed into law by Eisenhower in April of 1956. The estimated cost of everything was around $1.6 billion, but it would, of course, be substantially more. Never in U.S. history had so little economic development been proposed at such an exorbitant public cost, for all the billions were buying, besides extremely expensive public power, were a few patches of new irrigated lands whose composite size was smaller than Rhode Island. The subsidies, it turned out later, would be worth as much as $2 million per farm, perhaps five times as much as the farms themselves were worth. But even if the Colorado River Storage Project seemed like utter folly, the Bureau of Reclamation and its sometime collaborator and arch-rival, the Army Corps of Engineers, were on a tear.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Go-Go Years
The U.S. economy had fallen flat on its face several times before. In the years after the Great Crash, however, it could not pick itself back up. Things were worse in 1930 than in 1929, worse in 1931 than in 1930. By 1932, millions of people had lost all faith and hope—in the nation, in the capitalist system, in themselves.
The person whom Americans elected to pull the country out of the abyss came across as a genial aristocrat; in some ways, though, he was as close to being a benevolent despot as a democracy can allow. Franklin Roosevelt’s own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, said that the President never saw himself as “anything else but a ruler.” Carl Jung met him and came away saying, “Make no mistake, he is a force—a man of superior but impenetrable mind, but perfectly ruthless, a highly versatile mind which you cannot see.” But the President, a man of greater charm and persuasiveness than ruthlessness, was adored by most of the country no matter what