The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [267]
Doing all this reclamation legwork for Roosevelt were Pinchot and the young hydraulic specialist Frederick H. Newell, who in June 1902 became chief engineer under Charles D. Walcott, then director of the U.S. Geological Survey. “Pinchot and Newell actually did the job,” the president joked, “that I and the others talked about.”67 (Later, in 1907, when Walcott left the Reclamation Service to head the Smithsonian Institution, Roosevelt had Newell serve as director of a new Department of Interior Reclamation bureau.) In his unpublished memoir, written in 1927, Newell explained his commitment to Rooseveltian conservation, inspired, in part, by growing up in the lumber town of Bradford, Pennsylvania. With an aptitude for geology, Newell attended MIT, graduating in 1885 with a degree in mining engineering.
In 1888 he started working for John Wesley Powell and became Powell’s right-hand man. A regular at the Cosmos Club, Newell was invited, along with Pinchot, to become a member of the “Great Basin Lunch Mess,” where intense discussions were held on western rivers, forestlands, geographical surveying, and soil conservation. As an author Newell was almost as prolific as Roosevelt—only there was no romance of nature in Newell’s utilitarian volumes, such as Oil Well Drillers (1888), Agriculture by Irrigation (1894), Hydrography of the Arid Regions (1891), and The Public Lands of the United States (1895). When modern-day environmental activists attack Pinchot, they often attack his sidekick Newell as well. Whereas Pinchot enjoyed hiking, Newell found pleasure in dynamiting. Unlike others in Roosevelt’s inner circle, Newell never wrote about the inherent beauty of nature. There was the kind of vacancy in Newell’s eyes, that a novelist such as Melville might have described as soullessness. As an entrepreneurial engineer he solely wanted to make money off the land. He had an inability to say no to western politicians. Newell initiated canals and dam projects, at such a rapid pace, that many failed owing to untested soils and unfeasible transportation. Only on his deathbed did he realize that federal reclamation—to which he had devoted his entire life—was unnecessary and even seriously damaging to much of the arid West.68
On June 17, 1902, the Fifty-Seventh Congress created the Reclamation Service (later the Bureau of Reclamation) by approving the Newlands Act (named for Francis Newlands, a Democratic representative from Nevada). Immediately the act was hailed as a triumph for the Roosevelt administration. “I regard the irrigation business as one of the great features of my administration and take a keen personal pride in having been instrumental in bringing it about,” Roosevelt wrote to Hitchcock that very day. “I want it conducted, so far as in our power to conduct it, on the highest plane not only of purpose but efficiency. I desire it to be kept under the control of the Geological Survey of which Mr. [Charles Doolittle] Walcott is the Director and Mr. [Frederick Haynes] Newell the Hydrographer.” 69
The Newlands Act was a revolution for the American West. An overenthusiastic Roosevelt wanted to start with a few large dam projects divided among a few states. Overnight, however, Congressman Newlands was getting great press and Roosevelt grew envious. Why was everybody giving that Democratic fool Newlands all the credit? Roosevelt wanted the western Republicans—for example, William Morris Stewart of Nevada and Francis Emroy Warren of Wyoming—to have the credit for the historic irrigation act. Fuming to Secretary of Agriculture Wilson, Roosevelt threatened to attack Newlands’s reputation through back channels.70 To Roosevelt, Newlands was a shameless grandstander who didn’t deserve to have an important act named after him. Truth be told, as the historian Donald Worster points