Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [95]
Franklin Roosevelt said that he wanted to be remembered as the greatest conservationist and the greatest developer of all time. In a country with a population barely greater than Germany’s and with fifteen times the landmass, it seemed possible to be both. FDR’s conservation was not scientific, as his cousin Teddy’s was to a great degree, but instinctive. At Hyde Park, he had spent afternoons planting thousands of little trees. Why not plant millions of them on the high plains to break the wind and conserve the soil? A lot of scientists laughed and said it would never work, but it did. FDR thought up the Civilian Conservation Corps, too, and it became the most popular of all his programs.
What TR and FDR did have in common was an acute awareness of the limits of capitalism. The former Roosevelt saw the seeds of capitalism’s self-destruction in monopoly and rapacious business practice, the latter saw them in chronic depression and unemployment. In 1933, when he assumed the Presidency, nearly a quarter of the U.S. population was without visible means of support. Declaring a bank holiday was one way to arrest the widespread financial panic that was costing millions of workers their jobs, but the only thing that would make a real dent in the horrifying unemployment figures was to build public works: bridges, highways, tunnels, parks—dams.
The person whom Roosevelt put in charge of much of the apparatus of recovery was Harold Ickes, a stolid, round, owlish, combative ex-newspaperman who grew to love his nickname, “the old curmudgeon.” (Because of Ickes’s high-pitched squawk of a voice, Roosevelt, in private, called him Donald Duck.) Ickes ran not only the Interior Department—in which were the Bureau of Reclamation, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service—but the Public Works Administration as well. The PWA was a catch basin of programs with a chameleon identity (it was also known as the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration) and interchangeable leaders (first Harry Hopkins, then Ickes, then Hopkins again). In a few years, it had overseen the building of the Lincoln Tunnel, the Washington Zoo, the Triborough Bridge, Fort Knox, Denver’s water-supply system, a deepwater port at Brownsville, Texas, the huge Camarillo Hospital in southern California, and the causeway to Key West. It built a dozen fantasyland bridges along Oregon’s coast highway. Above all, it built dams.
Under Roosevelt and Ickes, the Bureau of Reclamation underwent some fundamental changes, the most obvious of which was in size. From two or three thousand employees under Herbert Hoover—a very large federal agency in its day—the Bureau mushroomed into an elephantine bureaucracy with a staff of nearly twenty thousand by the time Roosevelt died. Headquarters was the top floor of the gigantic new Interior building in Washington—the Bureau’s offices were above those of the Interior Secretary himself—but the real work was done out of the Bureau’s sprawling engineering complex in west Denver, where it designed its mighty dams. Then there were regional offices, field offices, project offices. When Jim Casey, who was to become deputy chief of planning in the 1960s, first went to work for the Bureau in Nebraska, he found himself amid nine hundred fellow employees. “This wasn’t even a regional office,” remembers Casey. “This was just a field office. I never had the faintest idea what everyone did and neither did they.” And very few of the Bureau’s people had anything to do with the actual physical construction of the dams; that work was contracted out to