Cadillac Desert (22 page)

The underlying problems were politics and money. Under the terms of the Reclamation Act, projects were to be financed by a Reclamation Fund, which would be filled initially by revenues from sales of federal land in the western states, then paid back gradually through sales of water to farmers. (It should be mentioned right away that the farmers, under the law, were exempted from paying interest on virtually all of their repayment obligations—a subsidy which was substantial to begin with, and which was to become breathtaking in later decades, as interest rates topped 10 percent. In some cases, the interest exemption alone—which is, of course, an indirect burden on the general taxpayer—has amounted to a subsidy of ninety cents on the dollar.) Section 9 of the Reclamation Act implied, if it didn’t require, that all money accruing to the Reclamation Fund from sales of land in any given state should be spent in that state as well. Frederick Newell, the Service’s first director, was particularly anxious to locate a few projects in each state anyway, because that might dispel some of the antipathy that had attended the Service’s creation. By 1924, twenty-seven projects were completed or under construction. Of those, twenty-one had been initiated before the Service was even half a decade old.

The engineers who staffed the Reclamation Service tended to view themselves as a godlike class performing hydrologic miracles for grateful simpletons who were content to sit in the desert and raise fruit. About soil science, agricultural economics, or drainage they sometimes knew less than the farmers whom they regarded with indulgent contempt. As a result, some of the early projects were to become painful embarrassments, and expensive ones. The soil turned out to be demineralized, alkaline, boron-poisoned; drainage was so poor the irrigation water turned fields into saline swamps; markets for the crops didn’t exist; expensive projects with heavy repayment obligations were built in regions where only low-value crops could be grown. In the Bureau of Reclamation’s quasi-official history,
Water for the West,
Michael Robinson (the son-in-law of a Commissioner of Reclamation) discreetly admits all of this: “Initially, little consideration was given to the hard realities of irrigated agriculture. Neither aid nor direction was given to settlers in carrying out the difficult and costly work of clearing and leveling the land, digging irrigation ditches, building roads and houses, and transporting crops to remote markets....”

Robinson also acknowledges the political pressures that have be-deviled the Reclamation program ever since it was born. The attitude of most western members of Congress was quaintly hypocritical: after resisting this experiment in pseudosocialism, or even voting against it, they decided, after it became law, that they might as well make the best of it. “The government was immediately flooded with requests for project investigations,” Robinson writes. “Local chambers of commerce, real estate interests, and congressmen were convinced their areas were ideal for reclamation development. State legislators and officials joined the chorus of promoters seeking Reclamation projects.... Legislative requirements and political pressures sometimes precluded careful, exhaustive surveys of proposed projects.... Projects were frequently undertaken with only a sketchy understanding of the area’s climate, growing season, soil productivity, and market conditions.”

Congress’s decision, in passing the act, to ignore much of John Wesley Powell’s advice made things worse. Powell had proposed that in those inhospitable regions where only livestock could be raised, settlers should be allowed to homestead 2,560 acres of the public domain—but allocated enough water to irrigate only twenty. The Reclamation Act gave everyone up to 160 acres (a man and wife could jointly farm 320 acres), whether they settled in Mediterranean California or in the frigid interior steppes of Wyoming, where the extremes of climate rival those in Mongolia. You could grow wealthy on 160 acres of lemons in California and starve on 160 acres of irrigated pasture in Wyoming or Montana, but the act was blind to such nuances. And by building so many projects in a rush, the Reclamation Service was repeating its mistakes before it had a chance to learn from them.

All of these problems were compounded by the fact that few settlers had any experience with irrigation farming—nor were they required to. They overwatered and mismanaged their crops; they let their irrigation systems silt up. Many had optimistically filed on more acreage than they had resources to irrigate, and they ended up with repayment obligations on land they were forced to leave fallow. From there, it was a short, swift fall into bankruptcy. Fifty years earlier, the ancestors of the first Reclamation farmers had endured adversity by putting their faith in God and feeding themselves on game. But this was the twentieth century; the game was vanishing, and government was replacing God as the rescuer of last resort. As Michael Robinson wrote, “Western economic and social determinants were changing rapidly. Nineteenth-century irrigation pioneers were better suited to endure hardships than settlers who struggled to survive on Federal Reclamation projects after 1902. In the nineteenth century, wild game was plentiful, livestock could graze on the public domain outside irrigated areas, and the settlers were inured to privation.” And so, after a few years of trial and a lot of error, the Reclamation Act began to undergo a long and remarkable series of “reforms.”

The first reform was humble—a $20 million loan from the Treasury to the bankrupt Reclamation Fund to keep the program from falling on its face. It was approved in 1910, the same year that Section 9—the ill-advised clause promoting the construction of projects where they couldn’t work—was repealed. New projects were also required to have the explicit consent of the President before they were launched. A paper reform, however, is not necessarily a reform in real life. Every Senator still wanted a project in his state; every Congressman wanted one in his district; they didn’t care whether they made economic sense or not. The Commissioner of Reclamation and the President were only human. If Congress authorized a bad project and voted funding for it, a President might have good reasons not to veto the bill—especially if it also authorized a lot of things the President
did
want. Congress caught on quickly, and was soon writing “omnibus” authorization bills, in which bad projects were thrown in, willy-nilly, with good ones. (Later, Congress would learn a new trick: attaching sneaky little amendments authorizing particularly wretched projects to legislation dealing with issues such as education and hurricane relief.) As a result, instead of weeding out or discouraging bad projects, the “reforms” began to concentrate on making bad projects work—or, to put it more bluntly, on bailing them out.

The first of these adjustments came in 1914, when the repayment period, which had been set in the act at a rather unrealistic ten years, was extended to twenty. It was quite a liberal adjustment, but failed to produce any measurable results. By 1922, twenty years after the Reclamation Fund began, only 10 percent of the money loaned from the Reclamation Fund had been repaid. Sixty percent of the irrigators—an astounding number—were defaulting on their repayment obligations, even though they paid no interest on irrigation features.

In 1924, Congress commissioned a Fact Finder’s report on the Reclamation program, which recommended an even more drastic adjustment—raising the repayment period from twenty years to forty. No sooner was that done, however, than the most chronic and intractable problem of twentieth-century American agriculture began to appear: huge crop surpluses. Production and prices reached record levels during the First World War; when the war ended, production remained high, but crop prices did not. The value of all crops grown on Reclamation land fell from $152 million in 1919 to $83.6 million in 1922—as morose a statistic as the number of farmers in default. With their profits shriveling, the beleaguered farmers were reluctant to pay for water they were beginning to regard as rightful recompense for attempting to civilize the desert, especially when the Reclamation Service, in most cases, didn’t dare shut it off when they refused to pay. So Congress took further steps to bail the Reclamation program out, rerouting royalties from oil drilling and potassium mining to the Reclamation Fund on the theory that the West, while being stripped of its mineral resources, ought to get something in return. But even after all these measures had been adopted a number of projects continued to operate at a hopeless loss.

Nonetheless, the psychic value of the Reclamation farms remained high. The only relief in a pitiless desert landscape, their worth was computed in almost ethereal terms, as if they were art. And their investment value to speculators remained high, too. An acre which in pre-project years was worth $5 or $10—if that—was suddenly worth fifty times as much. At such prices, many farmers found the temptation to sell out irresistible; by 1927, at least a third of the Reclamation farmers had. The buyers were usually wealthy speculators who figured they could absorb some minor losses for a while—especially if they could convince Congress to give them tax breaks—as long as they could make money when agricultural prices went back up. The Salt River Project in Arizona was notable for having been all but taken over by speculators. Elwood Mead, who succeeded Newell and Arthur Powell Davis as Commissioner of Reclamation, called speculation “a vampire which has done much to destroy the desirable social and economic purposes of the Reclamation Act.” But the big, distant new owners were often better at paying their water bills than the stone-broke small farmers, so the Reclamation Service, in a number of instances, turned a blind eye toward what was going on. It was a case of lawlessness becoming de facto policy, and it was to become more and more commonplace.

Part of the reason the Reclamation Service (which metamorphosed, fittingly, into the
Bureau
of Reclamation in 1923) seemed so hapless at enforcing its social mandate had to do with the Omnibus Adjustment Act of 1926, one of those well-meaning pieces of legislation that make everything worse. Intended to clamp down on speculation, the act demanded that landowners owning excess amounts of land sign recordable contracts in which they promised to sell such lands within a designated period, at prices reflecting the lands’ pre-project worth. But the contracts were to be signed with the local irrigation district acting as wholesaler of the Bureau’s water—not with the Bureau itself. It was an ideal opportunity to camouflage acreage violations, since the same people who were in violation of the Reclamation Act often sat on the local irrigation district’s board of directors.

A more important and insidious reason, however, had to do with the nature of the Bureau itself. “There was a tendency for some engineers to view public works as ends in themselves,” admits Michael Robinson. “Despite official declarations from more sensitive administrators that ‘Reclamation is measured not in engineering units but in homes and agricultural values’ ... the Service regarded itself as an engineering outfit.’ ”

That may have been the understatement of the year. To build a great dam on a tempestuous river like the Snake was terrifically exhilarating work; enforcing a hodgepodge of social ideals was hardly that. Stopping a wild river was a straightforward job, subjugable to logic, and the result was concrete, heroic, real: a dam. Enforcing repayment obligations and worrying about speculators and excess landowners was a cumbersome, troublesome, time-consuming nuisance—a nuisance without reward. Was the Bureau to abandon the most spellbinding effort of modern times—transforming the desert into a garden—just because a few big landowners were taking advantage of the program, just because some farmers couldn’t pay as much as Congress hoped?

There were to be still more “reforms” tacked onto the Reclamation Act: reforms extending the repayment period to fifty years, setting water prices according to the farmers’ “ability to pay,” using hydroelectric revenues to subsidize irrigation costs. It wasn’t until the 1930s, however, that the Reclamation program went into high gear. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the nation’s nexus of political power still lay east of the Mississippi River; the West simply didn’t have the votes to authorize a dozen big water projects each year. Western politicians who were to exercise near-despotic rule over the Bureau’s authorizing committees in later years, men like Wayne Aspinall and Bernie Sisk and Carl Hayden, were still working their way up the political ranks. (In 1902, the year the Reclamation program began, Arizona was still ten years away from becoming a state.) Presidents Harding and Coolidge were ideological conservatives from the East who sternly resisted governmental involvement in economic affairs, unless it was an opportunity for their friends to earn a little graft. And even Herbert Hoover, though a Californian and an engineer, was not regarded by the western water lobby and the Bureau as a particularly loyal friend.

All of this was to change more abruptly than the Bureau of Reclamation and its growing dependency could have hoped. The most auspicious event in its entire history was the election to the presidency in 1932 of a free-wheeling, free-spending patrician. The second most auspicious event was the passage, during the five-term Roosevelt-Truman interregnum, of several omnibus river-basin bills that authorized not one, not five, not even ten, but dozens of dams and irrigation projects at a single stroke. Economics mattered little, if at all; if the irrigation ventures slid into an ocean of debt, the huge hydroelectric dams authorized within the same river basin could generate the necessary revenues to bail them out (or so it was thought). It was a breathtakingly audacious solution to an intractable problem, and the results were to be breathtaking as well. Between Franklin Roosevelt and the river-basin approach—which, in an instant, could authorize dams and canals and irrigation projects from headwaters to river mouth, across a thousand miles of terrain—the natural landscape of the American West, the rivers and deserts and wetlands and canyons, was to undergo a man-made transformation the likes of which no desert civilization has ever seen. The first, and perhaps the most fateful, such transformation was wrought in the most arid and hostile quarter of the American West, a huge desert basin transected by one comparatively miniature river: the Colorado.