Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [96]
There were also some fundamental changes in the Bureau’s approach, in its character. In the beginning, FDR was content to let it be run, as it had been in the past, by engineers. Elwood Mead, who, after John Wesley Powell, was the most illustrious reclamationist in America, headed the agency until his death in 1936. He was succeeded by John C. Page and Harry Bashore, engineers who had come up through the ranks. As commissioners, Mead, Page, and Bashore, remembering Congress’s exasperation over the Bureau’s early failures and cognizant that the nexus of power still lay east of the Mississippi River, tended to be somewhat modest in their ambitions. And if they lapsed from time to time, Ickes, at least in the beginning, was prepared to restrain them himself. “Commissioner Mead, of course, is always in favor of any new reclamation project,” he wrote in a sarcastic memo to Roosevelt bemoaning a Bureau proposal. “That is his job.” As the economics of reclamation played themselves out, however, and the salvation of the program lay in the construction of big public-power dams—which most of the electric utilities and much of the Republican Party regarded as anathema—the role of the commissioner abruptly changed. In the new reclamation era, a commissioner needed to be someone very much like Ickes; a fighter, a public-power ideologue, and, above all, a salesman. There was no better candidate then Ickes’s close friend, fellow newspaperman, and faithful subordinate, Mike Straus.
Public relations and salesmanship, skills few engineers possess, were second nature to Mike Straus. “Born with a gold-plated irrigation shovel ready to be placed in her hands,” reads a Straus press release dated June 5, 1952, “Reclamation’s Golden Jubilee baby arrived at Washington’s Yakima Memorial Hospital at 12:45 today, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Donald T. Dunn of Moses Lake, Washington.... The baby was born on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of federal Reclamation, and the child has been adopted by the National Reclamation Association....
“Michael W. Straus, Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, declared in a congratulatory message that ‘the Reclamation program must be pushed forward with utmost speed so the Dunn child and all the other kiddies born this year will have a happier and more secure life on the land through Reclamation development.... We should be starting today on [new] development so that there will be a Reclamation farm ready for baby Dunn.’ ”
Whether the cost of supplying water to baby Dunn’s ex-desert was utterly beyond reason; whether she even wanted to spend her life on an irrigation farm; whether the country, already suffocating under mountainous farm surpluses by 1952, really needed her production—these were the kinds of questions which the Bureau, after eight years of Mike Straus, would rarely ask again.
To Mike Straus, millionaire dam builder, economic feasibility mattered little, if at all. Once, on a visit to the Bureau’s regional office in Billings, Montana, Straus rented the town’s only theater and demanded that all the employees show up in the evening for a “pep talk.” The Billings office was in charge of the upper Missouri Basin, where the greatest concentration of physically possible but economically unfeasible projects happened to be located. When the employees had filed in and taken their seats, Straus slouched against a lectern on the stage and launched into a tirade against them for doing their jobs. “I don’t give a damn whether a project is feasible or not,” he thundered at his astonished staff. “I’m getting the money out of Congress, and you’d damn well better spend it. And you’d better be here early tomorrow morning ready to spend it, or you may find someone else at your desk!”
The Great Depression and the Roosevelt administration, together with