Cadillac Desert (26 page)

“Enthusiastically” is a bit of an understatement. The beauty of river-basin “accounting,” from the Bureau’s point of view, was that it would be literally
forced
to build dams. The engineering mentality which, Robinson himself admits, came to dominate the Bureau’s thinking in the 1930s and 1940s created an institutional distaste for irrigation projects. They were a necessary nuisance that provided the rationale for what Bureau men really loved to do: build majestic dams. In the past, however, the infeasibility of many projects put a damper on their ambitions, because if a project didn’t make economic sense, they lost the rationale they needed to build a dam to store water. With river-basin accounting, the equation was stood on its head: a lot of bad projects—economically infeasible ones—created a rationale for building
more,
not fewer, dams. The dams—all with hydroelectric features, of course—would be required to compensate for the financial losses of the irrigation projects; the losses would miraculously vanish in the common pool of revenues.

River-basin “accounting,” then, was a perversion of a sensible idea—that idea being to plan the “orderly” (a favorite Bureau word) development of a river basin from headwaters to mouth. But even if it subverted logic, economics, and simple common sense, it was essential to the Bureau’s survival as an institution and to the continued expansion of irrigation in the high, arid West. On the other hand, it was something akin to a blanket death sentence for the free-flowing rivers in sixteen states.

What the upper basin of the Colorado lacked, because of its elevation, in feasible irrigation projects it more than made up—for the same reason—in sites for cash register dams. High and mountainous, geologically young, the basin had deep valleys and tight plunging gorges ideal for dams—gorges in which ran rivers that fed the main Colorado and could be included, under the bizarre new logic of river-basin accounting, in any grand basinwide scheme. The rivers, draining arid and semiarid regions, may not have held much runoff, but a very high dam on a small river can yield as much hydroelectricity as a low dam on a much larger one; that is the beauty of what dam engineers call hydrologic head: velocity of falling water does the work of volume, of mass. There was Glen Canyon on the main-stem Colorado, Powell’s favorite riverine haunt, an ideal site for a six-hundred-foot dam. There was Flaming Gorge on the Green, and Red Canyon—each a perfect site for a gigantic curved-arch, thin-wall dam approaching Hoover in size. There was the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, an almost sheer thousand-foot gorge with several sites for high dams. The Dolores, the Yampa, the White, even smaller streams like the Animas and San Miguel and Little Snake—each had at least one site for a cash register dam. Since the dams would have to be large compared to the meager river flows, they would be expensive to build. But that wouldn’t matter; the Bureau had the Treasury at its disposal.

All the upper basin needed, then, was Congressional clout—that, and a Reclamation Commissioner who believed in dams for dams’ sake. And it was the upper basin’s further good fortune that, near the end of his third term, Franklin Roosevelt would appoint such a man as his Commissioner of Reclamation. His name was Michael Straus.

Mike Straus was the unlikeliest commissioner the Bureau ever had. For one thing, he was an easterner; for another, he was a newspaperman. On top of that, he was rich. By temperament, Straus was an exact opposite of the slide-rule engineers who had guided the Bureau during its forty-odd years. He was an anomaly down to his very genes. Straus had married into the Dodge family, and his brother-in-law was Eliot Porter; he had wealth and social connections, too. While typical Bureau of Reclamation families spent their vacations on houseboats cruising the reservoirs that Daddy built, Straus went to the family retreat at Spruce Head Island, on Maine’s Penobscot Bay. It was their island—all of it. Straus could have spent his life clipping coupons, safari hunting, or writing the hyperventilating prose that was his second love. But there was nothing on earth that gave Mike Straus quite as much boyish, exuberant satisfaction as erecting dams. In eight years as Commissioner of Reclamation, he would become responsible for as many water projects as any person who ever lived.

Straus had been selected at the close of the war by Harold Ickes, himself a newspaperman, after the Roosevelt administration had endured twelve years of relatively plodding Bureau leadership under Elwood Mead, Harry Bashore, and John Page. Straus was Ickes’s alter ego—a newspaperman, a liberal, a fighter, a curmudgeon. Franklin Roosevelt, who equated wealth with energy and idealism, heartily endorsed the appointment. It was a brilliant stroke. For all his man-of-the-people reputation, FDR felt paranoia about the common man. His secret fear was that the Depression would begin anew after the war, and the returning veterans would be unable to find jobs; ultimately, they might revolt. In the Bureau of Reclamation, FDR had a vast job-creating engine, an agency that remade the western landscape into a place where the dispossessed could go. In Mike Straus, he had a commissioner who would stoke the engine until the rivets began to pop.

Like a lot of people who inherit or marry wealth, Straus viewed money abstractly. A million was a number, budgets were a nuisance, feasibility reports were a waste of time. And, having abandoned a career that asked for a constant objective adherence to facts, he soon acquired an easygoing way with the truth. “Facts,” said one of his successors as commissioner, Floyd Dominy, “didn’t mean a goddamned thing to him.”

Straus was a spectacle. He was shambling, big as a bear, a terrible dresser, and a slob. “The characteristic Mike Straus pose,” remembered Dominy, “was for him to plant his feet on his desk, almost in your face, and lean back in his swivel chair flipping cigarette ashes all over his shirt. At the end of the day, there was a little mound of ash behind his seat. He was an uncouth bastard! He carried one white shirt with him on trips. I remember one night when Reclamation was throwing a party, and a cub reporter came by and asked me where to find Mike Straus. I just said, ‘Go upstairs and look for the guy who reminds you of an unmade bed.’ ”

There was something else about Mike Straus: his arrogance. Once, in the very early 1950s, he got on a plane without reconfirming his reservation, which one was required to do in those days. The plane turned out to be overbooked, and since Straus had not reconfirmed, he was the one who was supposed to be bumped. The flight attendants invited him off the plane, but Straus refused to budge; he pretended not to hear. As a whole plane full of passengers cursed him under their breaths, Mike Straus sat there like a pig in goo. Finally, the captain had to ask for volunteers to bump themselves so that the plane could take off. There weren’t a lot of flights in the early 1950s, and the passengers would have to wait a long time for another one. But Straus appeared unmoved; he wasn’t even embarrassed. “It didn’t faze Mike a bit,” said a Reclamation man who was with him. “He thought he was performing the greatest work in the country, and he felt like the holiest bureaucrat in the land.”

Cavalier, arrogant, mendacious, and whatever else he was, Mike Straus was also an idealist. A good stalwart liberal in the New Deal tradition, he believed in bringing the fruits of technology to the common man. He bore a ferocious grudge against the private utilities of the West, who denied reasonably priced power (or power at all) to rural areas struggling against adversity on every side, and who bought space in magazines and (he was convinced) bribed reporters to rail against the Bureau’s public-power dams. Straus also made some tentative efforts to crack down on the big California growers who were setting up dummy corporations and trusts in order to farm tens of thousands of acres illegally with subsidized Bureau of Reclamation water. In so doing, he infuriated the growers’ and the utilities’ friends in Congress, and a group of them finally decided to get rid of him. Since Straus served at the President’s whim and had Harry Truman’s blessing, it was useless to demand he be fired, so the politicians tried another tack. In 1949, they pinned an obscure rider onto the public-works appropriations bill that specifically withheld the salaries of Michael Straus and his regional director in California, Richard Boke. The independently wealthy Straus remained as commissioner—without pay. His enemies were upset, and that is putting it mildly. “Straus made them so mad I thought they might put out a contract on his life,” says Floyd Dominy. “I have done what no good Republican has been able to do,” Straus wrote to his friend Bill Warne, a former assistant commissioner then in Iran, “and that is to unite the Republican party on at least one platform and provide them with one program—to wit, who can fire Straus first.”

However, as the big growers in California and the private western utilities were trying to get rid of Mike Straus, the upper basin was cultivating him just as assiduously. The population of the basin had grown substantially since the Colorado River Compact was signed, but the growth of irrigated agriculture had remained well behind. Most irrigation was by simple diversion, without benefit of reservoir storage. During droughts, the farmers were flirting with disaster; during floods, they watched millions of acre-feet escape to the lower basin unused. The farmers on the other side of the Front Range, on the perfectly flat expanse of the plains, had topography working for them; they could easily lead a diversion channel out of a river such as the Platte, fill a small offstream basin, and have a ready-made storage reservoir for a fraction of the cost of an on-stream dam. The West Slope farmers—those sitting in the Colorado River drainage—were at a terrific natural disadvantage, having no way to store their water and (in the case of some) being at a higher elevation besides. Meanwhile, California was now using up its entire entitlement and still growing by leaps and bounds. If the upper basin didn’t hurry and begin using its own entitlement, California seemed certain to try to “borrow” it; if it succeeded, and millions of people then depended on that water, how would the upper basin ever get it back? But how, on the other hand, were Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming ever to use their share of the river if they couldn’t afford to build dams themselves and if high-altitude Reclamation projects could never pay themselves back?

The answer, frantically conceived by Mike Straus’s Bureau during the last days of his reign—much of it was laid out in the weeks after Eisenhower, who was certain to fire Straus, was already President-elect—was the Colorado River Storage Project. Behind the innocuous name was something as big as the universe itself. In a press release that accompanied the legislation’s transmittal to Congress in early 1953—days before Ike’s inauguration—Straus described it rather modestly as “a series of ten dams having a storage capacity of 48.5 million acre-feet.” What he failed to mention was that 48.5 million acre-feet was more than all the existing reservoirs on the main-stem Colorado and all the tributaries could hold—more than the combined capacity of Lake Havasu, Theodore Roosevelt Lake, Apache Lake, Bartlett Reservoir, San Carlos Reservoir, Painted Rock Reservoir, plus the then largest reservoir on earth, Lake Mead. The ten dams would, according to Straus, capture “several times the total annual flow of the river.” In fact, with the lower basin reservoirs already holding close to forty million acre-feet, between
five
and
eight
times the long-term annual flow of the river would be captured, depending on whose estimate you believed—a storage-to-yield ratio that was not approached by any other river in the world, no matter how used. The annual evaporation from all these huge, exposed bodies of water, languishing under the desert sun, would itself exceed the storage capacity of all but a few reservoirs in the nation.

It wasn’t, however, the mere magnitude of the project that set it apart. What set it apart was the way irrigation and power production were linked. The earliest projects were designed exclusively as irrigation projects; if any power was incidentally generated, it was sold to project farmers at bargain rates. With Hoover Dam, the Bureau took a big plunge into public power; nearly two-thirds of its hydroelectricity went to light Los Angeles. However, when Angelenos paid their power bills, they weren’t subsidizing the farmers in the Imperial and Coachella valleys who were irrigating with Lake Mead water; they were merely paying back the cost of the dam.

The Colorado River Storage Project would be utterly and fatefully different. Anyone who bought electricity at market rates from the dams—and 1,622,000 kilowatts, an enormous amount at that time, was planned—would be subsidizing irrigation in the upper basin.
Eighty-five cents
of every dollar spent on irrigation features would be subsidized by power revenues. Every time they flicked a switch, electricity consumers in the region would be helping a farmer plant alfalfa at six thousand feet to feed a national surplus of beef.

The Bureau was strikingly candid about the dismal economics of irrigation in the upper basin. “The [upper basin] farmers can’t pay a dime, not one dime,” lamented the Bureau’s chief of hydrology, C. B. Jacobsen, to a Congressional committee. And as if to demonstrate how far Congress had come in accepting the subsidization of an entire region, Jacobsen’s words fell on sympathetic ears. Western members, even those whose districts were well outside the basin, lined up to support the bill—perhaps because they expected their own uneconomical projects to be supported in return. For the first time, a majority of eastern members seemed indifferent, neutral, or even sympathetic—perhaps because
they
had Corps of Engineers projects they wanted built which might require the western members’ support. Even the Eisenhower administration decided to give the Colorado River Storage Project lukewarm support, though it violated every conservative principle Ike had ever espoused.