From the colonial era through the early decades of the American republic, New York City's public water had been so notoriously bad that residents seldom drank it untreated. Instead they consumed it for breakfast as warm beer, in disinfecting alcoholic drinks at the city's many taverns, or boiled in hot chocolate or tea. Well water, often briny and hard tasting, was rarely consumed. Lower Manhattan's single freshwater pond, called the Collect, by the early nineteenth century had become such a dumping ground of sewage, excrement, dead animals, and occasional human corpses that the only available wholesome water came from a lone, pumped spring. Known as the Tea Water Pump because its purity favored its use for making tea, it was sold throughout the city in water carts by "tea men" for a handsome premium that only the well-to-do could regularly afford. By the time New York's population began to swell from the Erie Canal's influence, the water system was already at the breaking point.
Catastrophic epidemics and fire finally broke through the political and business intrigues that for decades had stymied the clamoring for water reform. Yellow fever had killed 2,000 in 1798 and various plagues had visited the city periodically before the disastrous global cholera epidemic struck New York in 1832. The horrible dehydration and rupturing capillaries of the bacteria killed 3,500 New Yorkers-almost 2 percent of the population-and sent 100,000 people, or nearly half the city, fleeing to the greener suburbs north of 42nd street and beyond. The lack of a good water system also had left New York vulnerable to the great fire of 1776 and numerous other successive blazes. In December 1835, with residents barely recovered from the cholera epidemic, a terrible fire, fanned by high winds, destroyed some one-third of the city, including much of its commercial and shipping businesses in lower Manhattan. The blaze exhausted the resources of the city's new fire reservoir, while cisterns froze and river water turned to ice in the pipes of volunteer firemen's hand pump carts.
The disasters of the 1830s finally galvanized the city's resolve to build the 42-mile-long Croton Aqueduct system. Its chief engineer, John Jervis, had learned his trade on the Erie Canal. The aqueduct system included a dam, reservoirs, arched bridges, and tunnels and brought water from the Croton River north of the city to a showy distributing reservoir on Murray Hill at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue at the site later conspicuously occupied by New York's central public library. Designed to look like an Egyptian temple, the reservoir's completion in October 1842 was wildly celebrated with fountains being turned on at City Hall and Union Square, cannons firing from the Battery, church bells ringing, the singing of a specially written "Croton Ode," and a seven-mile parade attended by some quarter of a million people. The mood was captured in the journal entry of a future New York mayor, Philip Hone: "Nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water; fountains, aqueducts, hydrants and hose...It is astonishing how popular the introduction of water is among all classes of our citizens, and how cheerfully they acquiesce in the enormous expense which will burden them and their posterity with taxes to the latest generation. Water! water! Is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses." During the 1850s a sewerage system was begun. Bathrooms became a common feature of New York life. Never again was New York plagued by terrible cholera epidemics and great fires. As in London following its sanitary reforms, childhood mortality plunged and average life spans leaped from historic trend lines.
The Croton water supply had been expected to last for sixty years. Within a decade, however, it became evident that additional supply would be needed to meet the growing population and the surge in per capita consumption that accompanied the sudden availability of freshwater. By 1884 engineers began work on a second Croton aqueduct system with three times the capacity of the original. Even before the New Croton system was completed in 1911, groundbreaking had begun a still larger, new municipal water supply project. The Catskill aqueduct system brought water some 100 miles from the mountains west of the Hudson River to satisfy the thirst of New York's over 3.5 million inhabitants. Completed in 1927, the Catskill system featured a water tunnel 1,114 feet under the Hudson riverbed. Reflective of the era's prevailing Go-Go culture, authorities used high-handed land appropriations to displace entire rural towns and citizens to make way for the system's massive reservoirs.
To carry water throughout the growing metropolis, New York also built its first deep, high-pressure subterranean conduit-City Tunnel Number 1, some 18 miles long-in 1917. Working at perilous atmospheric pressures requiring careful bodily acclimation, workers nicknamed "sandhogs" bore through the solid bedrock under the city and its rivers and harbor at a depth of some 750 feet, or the equivalent of an inverted skyscraper. In 1936 City Tunnel Number 2 added another 20 miles of water distribution capacity far below the city's streets, subways, and buried electrical and gas service pipelines. Work on Tunnel Number 3, one of the world's most monumental engineering projects at the turn of the twenty-first century, started in 1970 and was still being done at the end of the century's first decade.
As the population of New York City climbed toward 8 million in the 1950s, still more water supply was needed. Between 1937 and 1965, the city built its largest aqueduct system with water from the Delaware River that flowed between New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Construction of the Delaware system proceeded only after a 1931 Supreme Court ruling, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, rejecting downstream New Jersey's effort to stop the project. Holmes's opinion established the guiding water-sharing principle of "equitable apportionment without quibbling over formulas" because "a river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it."
In the early twenty-first century, the water system that keeps New York City running is still an engineering marvel. Although leaky and in a dire race to modernize several critical components ahead of a catastrophic collapse, it delivers, almost entirely by gravity, some 1.3 billion gallons to 9 million people each day-enough for over 140 gallons per person-through three primary aqueducts drawing from 19 reservoirs and three managed lakes across a 2,000-square-mile watershed. Its sewerage counterpart of about 6,500 miles of pipes carries away an equal amount of wastewater each day to 14 treatment plants, 89 wastewater pump stations, and other facilities. History had once again repeated itself: as in ancient Rome and other leading civilizations of the past, the water infrastructure of the foremost center of the greatest power of the age was both a bellwether and a key contributor of its preeminence.
By the late nineteenth century, while New York's water system was being rapidly expanded, America had begun to assert its status as the world's awakening industrial giant. Pivotal to its transformation of the 1900s into the American Century was the nation's response to the challenge of harnessing the untapped resources of its remaining two frontiers-its arid Far West, and its seascape alongside the Earth's two largest oceans. The clarion call west had been sounded on January 24, 1848, when workers erecting Swiss emigre Johann Sutter's new waterwheel-powered sawmill on the south fork of the American River near modern Sacramento, California, found 1.5 ounces of gold dust and nuggets in the millrace. On May 4 news of the gold strike spread wildly through the small town of San Francisco. The following year, word reached the larger world. The California Gold Rush was on. By land and sea, "forty-niners" flocked to California to prospect. By 1853 more than 100,000 had arrived, including 25,000 Frenchmen and 20,000 Chinese. Hundreds of thousands more followed. Within a matter of months, San Francisco swelled into a booming city of over 20,000.
Prospectors panned streams and dug shafts into hillsides. But most effectively, they rigged old Roman hydraulic methods to shear away the rocky skin and foliage of the foothills with high-pressure water jets to expose the underlying gold veins. Water was lifted by wooden waterwheels-called hurdy-gurdy wheels by the miners who improvised them-and funneled through pipelines to fill tanks and dams several hundred feet above the mining site. It was then released in torrents through piping and small diameter metal nozzles to generate pressures up to 30,000 gallons per minute. Hillsides everywhere were stripped bare by the environmental carnage. The residue of smashed rocks and topsoil from neighboring farms washed away toward San Francisco Bay. Farmer pressure finally outlawed the practice in 1884. But by that time the gold had been mostly plundered from the hills and the miners had moved on to the next strike. Johann Sutter, meanwhile, died in Pennsylvania in 1880, at the age of seventy-seven, a man ruined by the unstoppable invasion of squatters and lawless theft of his stores and property.
One of the lasting imprints of the Gold Rush on America's western destiny was the blazing of two main transportation routes linking the East with the nation's western frontier. The parched, overland trails across the Far Western deserts and high mountains drew 300,000 to California by 1860, many of whom later settled down as early farmers and merchants. California's precocious development, in turn, hastened the building of the transcontinental steam railroad. When the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were linked up in in 1869, travelers could cross the country in comfort from New York to San Francisco in only ten days.
The search for a faster, cheap sea route to California, meanwhile, spurred the epic quest to build a transoceanic canal passage between the Atlantic and Pacific. Until the building of the Panama Canal, the voyage required 15,000 miles and sailing around South America's treacherous Cape Horn. In a single month in 1850, 33 sailing ships arrived in San Francisco after an average 159 days at sea. Speedier, full-rigged clippers later reduced travel time to about 97 days. Before the Gold Rush, in 1840, President James Polk, inspired by America's growing continental ambitions, had already recognized the sovereignty of Colombia over the Isthmus of Panama in exchange for right of American rail passage through it. If the acquisition of California after the 18461848 war with Mexico heightened momentum for a canal, the Gold Rush gave it urgency. By 1855 the Panama railway bridging to the oceans was completed with American capital. In the next decade, 400,000 people crossed its tracks, including an army of California-bound miners. To compete with the Panama railway, "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, notorious baron of Hudson River steamboats (and later railroads), ran steamers across the large lake at Nicaragua that connected to the Pacific coast by mule and schemed of his own interoceanic canal at Nicaragua; in 1855 one of Vanderbilt's hired associates, William Walker, managed to set himself up as Nicaragua's president. For the rest of the century, powerful interests in the United States and Europe took sides in the mounting high-stakes, multilateral battle to make either Panama or Nicaragua the chosen route for the interoceanic canal that would shape world power in the twentieth century.
CHAPTER TWELVE.
The Canal to America's Century As the 1869 Suez Canal made transparent the supremacy of the steam-and-iron age British Empire, the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 signaled a reordering of the world's power in favor of the fast-rising leader of the mass production technology era, the United States. The interoceanic canal at the Panamanian isthmus created a highway across the central Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, integrating Europe, the Americas, and the Far East into a tighter, global web of political, economic, and military relations. No nation was better placed to benefit commercially and strategically from its transformative impact than America, in whose backyard it was and which controlled access to it. Nor was any other nation as capable and so audacious to take on the gargantuan technical, organizational, and political challenges of building it. Its successful completion was a tangible declaration of America's industrial economic superiority and its growing ambition to take its place among the world's great powers. The fast and inexpensive water passage between the two oceans also had a major, catalytic impact upon America's internal growth. At last, the nation became capable of fully exploiting the advantages of its extensive maritime position. By transforming the Caribbean from a dead end into a transportation shortcut across the continent it created fresh synergy from the intermingling of the Far West's potential mineral and agricultural wealth with the prolific industry and markets of the Mississippi Valley, the Great Lakes, and the eastern seaboard. Not least, too, the canal combined America's Atlantic and Pacific fleets into a single, great power upon the high seas.
The very creation of the canal had been closely interconnected with the evolution of American naval power. As a nation surrounded by oceans on three sides, maritime power and commerce had always played a primary role in American history. Although its fledgling navy was overwhelmingly outclassed by the British fleet during the War of Independence, John Paul Jones's heroic sea victories and marauding of England's coast had instilled national pride and the hope that American prowess as naval warriors could augment the natural moat of the Atlantic to defend the young country's vital interests. From 1794, a small, but effective military fleet was built to safeguard American merchant shipping and diplomatic neutrality amid boiling war tensions between France and England. When the three-year Quasi-War with France erupted in 1798, the U.S. Navy earned the respect of all great European powers by prevailing in several Caribbean engagements against top French warships. The navy won further plaudits for liberating America from the onerous tolls and prisoner ransoms charged by the Islamic states of North Africa in the little-remembered Barbary Wars of 18011806. By Jefferson's presidency, some $2 million, or one-fifth of America's annual government revenue, had been paid to Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco to allow U.S. merchant ships to sail through the Strait of Gibraltar and trade unaccosted in Mediterranean waters. When Tripoli, greedy for larger tribute and underestimating American naval power, declared war on the United States in 1801, Jefferson sent the navy. The resulting bombardments and audacious marine raids on Tripoli created new naval heroes, swelled patriotic fervor at home and steeled American resolve to pay for defense but never again for tribute or ransom.
It was in the War of 1812 that the navy finally established its permanence as America's indispensable military branch. Despite its small size and poorly maintained state at the start of the badly prepared war, the fleet, led by the USS Constitution Constitution (aka (aka Old Ironsides Old Ironsides due to its many protective layers to defend against broadsides), stunned Englishmen and thrilled Americans by winning a series of sea skirmishes against overconfident British warship commanders reveling in England's recent triumphs over French fleets at the Nile and Trafalgar. Most important, U.S. naval freshwater commanders played crucial roles in foiling the concerted British invasion of America in 1814 by winning inland battles on Lake Champlain and Lake Erie. By gaining control of the strategic northern and Great Lakes for America, these victories ultimately convinced England to give up its long-term designs on the Mississippi Valley and instead settle its remaining border disputes with the United States in order to secure the vulnerable borders of British Canada. due to its many protective layers to defend against broadsides), stunned Englishmen and thrilled Americans by winning a series of sea skirmishes against overconfident British warship commanders reveling in England's recent triumphs over French fleets at the Nile and Trafalgar. Most important, U.S. naval freshwater commanders played crucial roles in foiling the concerted British invasion of America in 1814 by winning inland battles on Lake Champlain and Lake Erie. By gaining control of the strategic northern and Great Lakes for America, these victories ultimately convinced England to give up its long-term designs on the Mississippi Valley and instead settle its remaining border disputes with the United States in order to secure the vulnerable borders of British Canada.
After the war, naval power was deployed in America's pursuit of its Manifest Destiny to expand its continental territory to the Pacific Ocean. In 1823, growing confidence in its naval power emboldened the United States to assert its defining Monroe Doctrine, warning European powers not to intervene in the newly independent republics of Latin America because the hemisphere was America's special sphere of influence. In the Mexican War of 18461848, American vessels blockaded Mexican ports and in March 1847 gave crucial landing and bombardment support to the U.S. Army's decisive march on Mexico City from Veracruz. With the 1848 treaty transferring nearly half Mexico's territory to the United States-including most of the Southwest, California on the eve of the Gold Rush, and Mexico dropping its claims to Texas-America's continental expansion was nearly complete.
In the 1840s and 1850s, the U.S. Navy also began to assert itself as a Western imperialist steam power in the Pacific. Trading right concessions were extracted by threat of force from China in 1844 paralleling those won by Britain in the Opium War. In 1853 and 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay with an armed squadron of frightening, smokestack-belching "black ships" that showed its overwhelming force through occasional practice gunnery to convince Japan's leaders to open their nation to foreign trade after two centuries of virtual closure.
America's Civil War of 18611865 in which the industrialized North applied its decisive naval superiority over the agriculture-based South, provided further evidence that no major modern war, and few rebellions, had been won without the advantage of naval power. Union vessels blockaded Confederate seaports while steam gunboats took command of southern rivers. By 1862, the North controlled the vital points along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers all the way to the port of New Orleans.
Yet by the 1880s, waning investment had caused America's navy to slip far behind the rapid technical advancements in ship speed, and artillery accuracy, distance and power of leading European powers, notably England and rising industrial power, Germany. The defensive buffer provided in the age of sail by America's ocean moats had visibly diminished. American officials grew alarmed when fellow hemispheric nations Peru and Chile in their War of the Pacific (18791883) both employed vessels superior to their U.S. Navy counterparts.
America's reaction-the application of its rising mass production industrial might to build a world-class, steel navy-was a decisive turning point that helped tip the balance of power in America's favor and set the stage for the building of the Panama Canal. The gradual buildup of the steel navy from the mid1880s was paralleled by a transformation in Americans' outlook about the nation's appropriate place in the world and the role of sea power in attaining it. Both, in turn, were spurred by the rapid growth in demand for U.S.-manufactured goods on world export markets. As American economic interests expanded outward, U.S. leaders became convinced that America should behave like a European global power and that a strong navy was a vital component of national prosperity and security.
The most influential intellectual exponent of this view was Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. His widely celebrated 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, shaped the policy framework of a generation of leaders through World War I, not just in the United States but also in England and Germany, including Kaiser Wilhelm II personally. A career U.S. naval officer, historian, and president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Mahan traced the rise and decline of maritime nations, most closely those in Europe from the mid-seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries, and concluded that supremacy at sea held the key to international commercial success, prosperity, and national greatness. To Mahan, a favorable seaborne position, properly exploited, provided a cheap, easy, and safe transport highway that advantaged seafaring states in the key commercial struggle to control traffic on the world's sea-lanes and strategic passages. "The seaboard of a country is one of its frontiers," Mahan wrote. "Numerous and deep harbors are a source of strength and wealth, and doubly so if they are the outlets of navigable streams, which facilitate the concentration in them of a country's internal trade." Conversely, Mahan argued, the failure to fully exploit favorable sea geography resources represented a potential national vulnerability. Mahan's unabashed conclusion was that a great nation needed a strong standing navy, with bases at home and abroad, deployed in the interests of enhancing its sea commerce and worldwide influence. Regarding an interoceanic canal in Central America, Mahan held strongly that if built, "the Caribbean would be changed from a terminus...into one of the great highways of the world...The position of the United States with reference to this route will resemble that of England to the Channel, and of the Mediterranean countries to the Suez route." He also speculated hopefully that such a canal might excite America's "aggressive impulse" to exert its influence globally. shaped the policy framework of a generation of leaders through World War I, not just in the United States but also in England and Germany, including Kaiser Wilhelm II personally. A career U.S. naval officer, historian, and president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Mahan traced the rise and decline of maritime nations, most closely those in Europe from the mid-seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries, and concluded that supremacy at sea held the key to international commercial success, prosperity, and national greatness. To Mahan, a favorable seaborne position, properly exploited, provided a cheap, easy, and safe transport highway that advantaged seafaring states in the key commercial struggle to control traffic on the world's sea-lanes and strategic passages. "The seaboard of a country is one of its frontiers," Mahan wrote. "Numerous and deep harbors are a source of strength and wealth, and doubly so if they are the outlets of navigable streams, which facilitate the concentration in them of a country's internal trade." Conversely, Mahan argued, the failure to fully exploit favorable sea geography resources represented a potential national vulnerability. Mahan's unabashed conclusion was that a great nation needed a strong standing navy, with bases at home and abroad, deployed in the interests of enhancing its sea commerce and worldwide influence. Regarding an interoceanic canal in Central America, Mahan held strongly that if built, "the Caribbean would be changed from a terminus...into one of the great highways of the world...The position of the United States with reference to this route will resemble that of England to the Channel, and of the Mediterranean countries to the Suez route." He also speculated hopefully that such a canal might excite America's "aggressive impulse" to exert its influence globally.
By focusing his historical study on the mercantilist age of sail, Mahan's study, in hindsight, suffered intellectually from myopic conclusions about the relationship between sea power, commerce, and international standing. In particular he underestimated the enormous national prosperity and military strength that could be derived from industrialized society and free trade. Nevertheless, many of his general observations about the advantages of sea power, from ancient times to the present, were germane, in varying degrees. But the historical significance of his views stemmed from the fact that leaders of the great nations pursued policies based upon them.
Mahan's most important American adherent was Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt. The future president, who would do more than anyone to turn Mahan's prescriptions into reality, was thirty-one when Influence Influence appeared and wrote a glowing review of it for the appeared and wrote a glowing review of it for the Atlantic Monthly. Atlantic Monthly. The two men had been friendly for several years since Roosevelt had lectured at the Naval War College on the topic of one of his own books, the naval history of the War of 1812. Mahan's recommendation helped Roosevelt win appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy when Republican William McKinley won the presidency in 1896. The two men had been friendly for several years since Roosevelt had lectured at the Naval War College on the topic of one of his own books, the naval history of the War of 1812. Mahan's recommendation helped Roosevelt win appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy when Republican William McKinley won the presidency in 1896.
As assistant secretary, Roosevelt agitated within the McKinley administration for an aggressive expansion of the U.S. naval fleet as well as for the construction of an isthmian canal. Like his mentor, Roosevelt viewed a strong navy as the "big stick" of a new, more assertive American global diplomacy and winning supremacy at sea. As Roosevelt would frame it in speeches as president, "There is a homely adage which runs: 'Speak softly, and carry a big stick; you will go far.'"
Assistant Secretary Roosevelt urged immediate administration of the "big stick" on February 15, 1898, when, amid the Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule, the U.S. battleship Maine Maine blew up in Havana harbor from unknown causes, killing 260. In April McKinley yielded to the bellicose clamor of Roosevelt and other young Republicans inflaming public opinion to "Remember the Maine!" by declaring war on Spain and liberating Cuba. Working off a war plan previously developed by the Naval War College, Roosevelt successfully pushed for a strike on Spain's fleet in the Philippines as well as the blockade of Havana. The U.S. Asiatic squadron promptly steamed into Manila Bay and decimated the antiquated Spanish fleet without a single American death. Roosevelt himself soon decamped with U.S. troops for Cuba and attained national war hero status by leading a charge of his personally recruited band of "Rough Riders" up San Juan Hill. In less than three months of fighting, the United States had seized control of Spain's entire remaining American and Pacific empire. blew up in Havana harbor from unknown causes, killing 260. In April McKinley yielded to the bellicose clamor of Roosevelt and other young Republicans inflaming public opinion to "Remember the Maine!" by declaring war on Spain and liberating Cuba. Working off a war plan previously developed by the Naval War College, Roosevelt successfully pushed for a strike on Spain's fleet in the Philippines as well as the blockade of Havana. The U.S. Asiatic squadron promptly steamed into Manila Bay and decimated the antiquated Spanish fleet without a single American death. Roosevelt himself soon decamped with U.S. troops for Cuba and attained national war hero status by leading a charge of his personally recruited band of "Rough Riders" up San Juan Hill. In less than three months of fighting, the United States had seized control of Spain's entire remaining American and Pacific empire.
By seeming to validate Mahan's arguments about the benefits of sea power, the Spanish-American War triggered a dramatic escalation in the U.S. buildup of the country's steel navy. Naval investment that totaled 6.9 percent of federal government spending in 1890 soared to 19 percent of a much larger base by 1914. On the eve of World War I and the opening of the Panama Canal, America's navy was the third mightiest on Earth, and was poised to soon overtake those of England and Germany.
The Spanish-American War also infused unstoppable momentum to build the isthmian canal, which suddenly seemed indispensable to American national security, by unifying the strength of the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The public case for the canal had been dramatically illustrated during the war by the long delay encountered by the Pacific warship Oregon Oregon in reaching the Caribbean theater because it had had to steam the additional 8,000 miles around South America's Cape Horn. Two presidential interoceanic canal commissions, one organized in 1897 and a second in 1899, recommended building the passage through Nicaragua. Secretary of State John Hay prepared the diplomatic ground by negotiating an agreement with England to supersede an outstanding 1850 treaty affirming bilateral control over any interoceanic canal: England granted the United States the right to build and operate the canal subject only to the Suez Canal neutrality rules of being equally open in war and peacetime to all vessels. The United States could police the route, but not build fortifications. in reaching the Caribbean theater because it had had to steam the additional 8,000 miles around South America's Cape Horn. Two presidential interoceanic canal commissions, one organized in 1897 and a second in 1899, recommended building the passage through Nicaragua. Secretary of State John Hay prepared the diplomatic ground by negotiating an agreement with England to supersede an outstanding 1850 treaty affirming bilateral control over any interoceanic canal: England granted the United States the right to build and operate the canal subject only to the Suez Canal neutrality rules of being equally open in war and peacetime to all vessels. The United States could police the route, but not build fortifications.
It was Roosevelt who led the outraged howls of protests when the treaty was announced in early 1900. He did so from his new platform as Governor of New York, an office to which his war hero status had catapulted him in the 1898 elections. America must not compromise the sea power advantage of an American-built canal by relinquishing the right to fortify it against enemy warships, he insisted stridently. The public was swayed. Hay was forced to renegotiate the treaty. In mid-November 1901 the new Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, omitting the fortification restriction, was signed.
By that time an unlikely set of circumstances had propelled party maverick Teddy Roosevelt himself to the presidency. Irked at Roosevelt's zealous, progressive agenda against corrupt political machines and the big business trusts that dominated the heights of American industry, but eager to capitalize on his popularity, Republican establishment leaders had tried to isolate Roosevelt by persuading him to take the vice presidency in the 1900 elections. Their plans suddenly went awry, however, when McKinley was shot by an assassin at Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901.
At forty-three, Roosevelt was America's youngest president ever and unlike any other. Possessed of boundless energy, a determination for action, an outsized vision of what America should be, and, despite personal arrogance and impetuosity, canny political and self-promotional skills, Roosevelt undertook several actions as president that transformed the course of twentieth-century America and water history. Above all, he mobilized the federal government as a strong, proactive agent of policy, whether as a progressive force to countervail big business trusts' distortion of market forces, to undertake large public interest projects that were beyond the resources or risk appetite of private enterprise, to save wilderness areas, and to fulfill his conviction that the march of civilization demanded the artificial remolding and control of Earth's resources, including indispensable water, to mankind's needs.
The isthmian canal was at the very top of Roosevelt's agenda when he assumed the presidency. At the time nearly everyone, including Roosevelt himself, took for granted that the canal would be built at Nicaragua, which was widely viewed as the American route. Men had dreamed about building a Central American canal ever since the Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa had marched across modern Panama in 1513 and became the first European to set eyes on the "South Sea," as he called the Pacific Ocean. King Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and Habsburg monarch, ordered the first canal survey as early as 1534. Modern interest in the canal began in earnest after 1821 with the end of Spanish rule in Latin America. Several locations were considered, including Nicaragua, Mexico, and Panama.
More than anything else, it was the 1869 completion of the world-changing Suez Canal that finally galvanized action on an isthmian canal. Although U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant had sent seven expeditions to Central America starting in 1870 to thoroughly explore various canal routes and in 1876 chose in favor of Nicaragua, it was the renowned French impresario of the Suez Canal, Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps, who stole the first march to action. In May 1879, de Lesseps unveiled his stealthily laid, private-sector plan to crown his Suez legacy with an isthmian canal at a grand congress in Paris attended by illustrious experts from around the world. The congress's ostensible task was to select the route and technical nature of the canal. In fact, the event was entirely orchestrated, with a predetermined outcome, by de Lesseps. Although seventy-four years old at the time, he still possessed the charisma, vigor, diplomatic cunning, and grandiose self-confidence that had made him triumphant at Suez. While many engineering plans were presented, the final vote of the all-important technical committee endorsed de Lesseps's favored proposal-a sea-level canal at Panama. In fact, de Lesseps had previously lined up an exclusive contract with Colombia through intermediaries to build the canal in its state of Panama.
By being without locks at sea level, the Panama Canal would be a reprise of the canal engineering approach used at Suez-it was, in effect, Suez II. Yet, in reality, Panama was nothing at all like Suez. Suez had been cut through flat terrain in a hot, dry environment where the main problem was the dearth of water. Panama, by contrast, was a sweltering, tropical environment inundated with too much water, swelling rivers, mudslides, and deadly, disease-carrying mosquitoes. Part of the canal had to be cut through the rocky mountains of the continental divide. Although de Lesseps was a visionary entrepreneur and no engineer, he confidently assured the public that he could assemble the engineers, technology, and finances, and that at 50 miles or just half the length of Suez, the Panama Canal would be easier to build.
Despite adoring press and a soaring share price that excited the whole French nation, the venture soon ran into formidable obstacles on the ground in Panama. Most unanticipated was the outbreak of disease epidemics. Malaria and yellow fever debilitated up to 80 percent of the workforce at any given time with shivering fevers, unquenchable thirst and, in the case of yellow fever, intense headaches, back and leg pain and finally the dark, bloody vomiting that preceded death. An estimated 20,000 workers and managers died of these mosquito-borne tropical diseases whose origins were as yet unknown. Nor was any satisfactory solution devised for containing the wild Chagres River, which could rise 30 feet after a day of torrential rain; the estimated size of the needed dam kept rising to be one of the largest on Earth. Most daunting of all were the incessant mountain mudslides and ever-expanding excavation to cut through the unstable mountain geology of the continental divide; simply disposing of so much dirt proved to be an overwhelming logistical challenge. By late 1886, French engineers realized that the existing excavation technology of the age was simply not up to the task of building a canal according to de Lesseps's sea-level design. For too long, de Lesseps refused to consider any alternative-illustrating the fine line separating inspired vision from disastrous obduracy. By the time he relented to a modified plan, it was too late. The company's financing was exhausted and by mid-1889 work at the isthmus terminated. Some $287 million had been spent-over three times more than the entire Suez Canal-on a glorious but failed dream that in the end proved to be too great for the private sector acting alone with the available technology of the age. With so many individuals and families having lost their life's savings, and with French national pride wounded, government investigations into wrongdoing were launched. In the hunt for scapegoats, de Lesseps was convicted of fraud and maladministration and sentenced to prison. Ailing, broken, and partly senile, he died in 1894, at the age of eighty-nine.
Efforts to revive the French canal project during the 1890s failed. As U.S. government action to build a canal at Nicaragua grew imminent in late 1901 when Roosevelt acceded to the presidency, French shareholders became frantic to salvage something of their Panamanian investments. They replaced company management and signaled the Americans they'd sell their assets on work already done for only $40 million-a 60 percent discount on their previous $109 million asking price. Although the U.S. interoceanic canal commission had recently endorsed Nicaragua, it had decided against Panama not on technical grounds but chiefly on the exorbitant cost of buying the French company's assets. Roosevelt, who to this point had stayed publicly aloof from the debate, summoned each commissioner to the White House individually for a consultation on his private views. He then called a secret meeting of the entire commission in his office. With characteristic boldness, he told the commissioners he wanted a supplemental report favoring Panama-and he wanted it to be unanimous. The combination of factors that caused the new president to challenge the powerful Nicaragua lobby is not definitively known. Clearly, he had become convinced that Panama was indeed the superior technical route and that all the causes of the French failure could be overcome. He may also have found it an opportune means to curry favor with the powerful domestic political interests supporting Panama. Another motivation may have been concern that Germany or another competitive foreign power might buy the French assets if the United States did not.
Roosevelt's intervention reignited the ferocious lobbying clash over the canal route between men of influence at the apex of American society. While most senators and the general public initially supported Nicaragua, the Panamanian route was backed by powerful Wall Street bankers, railroad barons, and Republican senator Mark Hanna, McKinley's key political benefactor and the era's towering national power broker. Although canal commission members were grilled at Senate hearings about why they flipped to endorse Panama after talking to Roosevelt, they insisted that both routes were viable and that the economic value of the work already done by the French made the difference. Ultimately, the tight Senate vote in June 1902 to give preference to Roosevelt's Panamanian route tipped on tremors from a visceral but not technically significant factor-seismic activity in the region. Emotional sensitivities had been heightened by a devastating volcanic eruption that had recently struck the Caribbean island of Martinique. Then just prior to the senate vote, there was a rare, minor eruption in Nicaragua itself. The Nicaraguan government tried to head off any propaganda damage by denying, falsely, that the eruption had occurred at all. But Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a former French canal company engineer and project manager under de Lesseps who had come to America to spearhead the Panamanian lobby, trumped them with a deal-clinching theatrical response: On the eve of the vote he sent each senator an irrefutable, dramatic visual reminder of Nicaragua's seismic peril in the form of that nation's own one centavo stamp-featuring a smoking volcano rising from the middle of Lake Nicaragua. The final vote for Panama was 42 to 34.
In January 1903, after months of stalled negotiations, Colombia's head diplomat in Washington reluctantly yielded to Roosevelt's imperious treaty terms when the U.S. administration threatened to abandon Panama and open negotiations with Nicaragua: the United States would receive a 100-year renewable lease for effective sovereignty over the Canal Zone in exchange for $10 million plus $250,000 in annual rent. However the Colombian Senate, bridling at the loss of sovereignty, and insulted by the fact that the French company would get four times more upfront for its Panamanian assets, rejected the treaty in the summer. Roosevelt was furious. Privately referring to the Colombians as "jackrabbits," "bandits," and extortionists impeding a vital highway of human civilization, Roosevelt tacitly signaled his support for a secret plan for Panama to secede from Colombia and then sign the canal treaty with the United States.
The planned Panamanian revolution was brilliantly stage-managed from New York and Washington by the Frenchman Bunau-Varilla and the U.S. Panama lobby. Panama's secessionist leaders were all prominent professionals employed by the American-owned Panamanian railroad. Bunau-Varilla provided virtually everything they needed-a declaration of independence, a military defense plan, a constitution, a national flag, secret communication codes, a payoff of $100,000 for expenses when the job was done, and most important of all, a promise that the U.S. military would back up the revolution. He even designated November 3 as the date for their revolution. His one condition was that he himself would be appointed by the new Panamanian government as its minister plenipotentiary in Washington to negotiate U.S. recognition and the canal treaty.
Bunau-Varilla had assured himself of Roosevelt's military backing at a personal, informal meeting with the president at the White House on October 10, 1903. Within three weeks of the meeting, three American warships were ordered to sail toward the isthmus; on November 2 the commander of the first to arrive was instructed to prevent Colombian troops from landing in the event of turmoil. Early on November 3, before before anything had happened on the ground, the State Department in Washington cabled its consul in Panama of reports about an uprising on the isthmus; the consul's office cabled back that the uprising had not yet occurred and was to take place at 6:00 p.m. It did. A fire brigade was commissioned as the new Panamanian army. Marines disembarked from an American steam gunboat and bloodlessly confronted Colombian soldiers. Seeing the superior American vessels, one Colombian gunboat fired a few shells at Panama City-killing a sleeping Chinese shopkeeper and a donkey-and fled. anything had happened on the ground, the State Department in Washington cabled its consul in Panama of reports about an uprising on the isthmus; the consul's office cabled back that the uprising had not yet occurred and was to take place at 6:00 p.m. It did. A fire brigade was commissioned as the new Panamanian army. Marines disembarked from an American steam gunboat and bloodlessly confronted Colombian soldiers. Seeing the superior American vessels, one Colombian gunboat fired a few shells at Panama City-killing a sleeping Chinese shopkeeper and a donkey-and fled.
Independence was declared on November 4. Two days later, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Panama. A ceremony was conducted at the White House, entirely in English, between Roosevelt and the Frenchman Bunau-Varilla acting as Panama's plenipotentiary. Treaty drafting began promptly, interrupted only by Bunau-Varilla's quick visit to banker J. P. Morgan at his Wall Street headquarters to secure a loan for the $100,000 remuneration he'd promised the Panamanian leaders. With a Panamanian delegation rushing to Washington to try to reclaim the extraordinary powers they'd granted to Bunau-Varilla and the press clamoring about America's high-handed involvement in the revolution, Bunau-Varilla and Secretary of State Hay hastily signed the canal treaty on November 18, 1903. The terms were the same as those previously offered to Colombia, with the addition of several clauses-inserted at Bunau-Varilla's initiative-enhancing America's sovereign rights in the Canal Zone and extending its lease into perpetuity. On the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, another French-American deal had delivered the United States an extraordinary territory that would empower its expansion for much of the ensuing century. As soon as the treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate in February 1904, and the French company guaranteed the $40 million payment for its canal assets, Bunau-Varilla resigned his Panamanian post and returned to Paris.
Roosevelt's brazen use of naval force and his tortured legalistic justifications for intervening at the isthmus and recognizing Panama's sovereignty ignited a torrent of resentment against U.S. imperialism. "Colombia was hit by the big stick, all Latin America trembled," wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison. The United States began aggressively policing the Caribbean as if it were an American lake, frequently intervening in basin countries' financial and foreign affairs, and landing marines half a dozen times between 1900 and 1917. America's growing, imperialistic tendencies were also projected by Roosevelt and his successors outside the Western Hemisphere, highlighted by Roosevelt's swaggering display of sea power in sending a great American fleet around the world in 1907. Latin American resentment smoldered for decades. President Wilson tried to soothe Colombia's outrage at the loss of Panama with a $25 million payment; Panamanian restiveness caused the canal treaty to be revised several times and effective control of the canal was surrendered in stages starting in 1979.
Teddy Roosevelt, however, was unapologetic for his actions in Panama. He viewed the canal as an invaluable advancement of civilization and vital to America's defense and prosperity. While absolutely denying any role in making Panama's revolution, retrospectively he wrote that it was "by far the most important action I took in foreign affairs," and in a 1911 speech, declared with characteristic bravado, "I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress-not to debate the canal, but to debate me." His most famous, instinctive response to his critics was issued shortly after U.S. government engineers took charge of the Canal Zone in May 1904: "Tell them that I am going to make the dirt fly!"
Building the canal was the most monumental, complex engineering challenge of the age, and one of the landmark technological achievements of human history. To complete it required the application of all the qualities underlying America's rise as a great power-prolific industrial production, innovative ingenuity, government financial commitment, tenacity of purpose, and cultural optimism in its ultimate ability to succeed. Although construction lasted through the terms of three presidents, there was no doubt that it was Roosevelt who infused the guiding spirit and was the embodiment of the enterprise. Nothing exemplified this more than the three-day tour through the canal construction sites Roosevelt himself made in November 1906. Like a general inspecting the troops at the front, he trudged in the driving rain through muddy work camps, strode along the ties of the Panamanian railroad, climbed a hill to get a view of the future dam site, peppered everyone with questions, and most memorable of all, spontaneously stopped his touring train during a downpour to clamber into the control seat of one of the huge, workhorse steam shovels that could excavate eight tons of dirt in a single scoop-three times more than the shovels used previously by the French-and unload its contents into a departing railroad car every eight minutes. That no sitting president had ever before traveled abroad magnified the drama of his visit and his subsequent progress report to Congress on America's stupendous endeavor.
After a slow start and a flirtation with reviving de Lesseps' plan to dig a deep trench at sea level across the isthmus, the Americans by 1906 settled on a workable design and methodology for building a lock canal. Dams would be erected to entrap the rain-fed swells of the Chagres River, creating an 85-foot-high artificial lake that bridged much of the isthmus. Ships would ascend the lake through a flight of giant locks at one end and descend through another at the other end. Near the Pacific side, they would pass through a narrow, nine-mile-long canyon that would be excavated through the rocky mountains and rainy forests of the continental divide. Success hinged on managing three main challenges-containing the tropical diseases that debilitated the French workforce, controlling the wildly rising and falling Chagres River, and, hardest of all, cutting through the massive, mudslide-prone mountains. When it was completed in 1914, America's canal construction workforce, which averaged 33,000 to 40,000 annually between 1907 and 1914, had excavated over eight times more earth than their French predecessors.
The eradication of yellow fever and control of malaria attained early on in the Panama project alone merited renown as a notable achievement of the twentieth century. During the French period, the germ theory of disease had been in its infancy and the role of the mosquito in transmitting yellow fever and malaria was only beginning to be perceived. But at the start of the century, American doctors, led by Walter Reed, working in Havana, Cuba, learned how to curb both diseases by attacking the two different mosquito species that carried them. A similar, wider war was waged throughout the jungles and towns of Panama. The silvery, female mosquito transmitting the dreaded yellow fever, which would deposit her eggs only in a container of clean water, depended upon the close proximity to human society for breeding and feeding. By systematically screening all windows and doors, fumigating houses, covering water barrels, oiling cisterns and cesspools, and eliminating standing water everywhere, U.S. Army doctors virtually wiped out yellow fever from Panama by the end of 1905. To attack the more wide-ranging malaria mosquito, sanitary teams also drained hundreds of miles of swamps, installed effective drainage channels, chopped down jungle vegetation, sprayed oil on standing water, and spread mosquito-larvae-eating minnows and mosquito-feeding spiders and lizards near human habitats. While never eradicated, malaria was sufficiently contained so that it didn't interfere with constructing the canal. The success of the disease control program at Panama informed the global wars on yellow fever and malaria that were soon launched in the 1910s and 1920s by the Rockefeller Foundation and other humanitarian organizations.
The Chagres River was controlled by the construction of an immense, wide earthen dam filled with dirt excavated from the mountains. The dam created what was then the largest man-made lake on Earth. The concrete used in the flight of huge, steel-gated locks exceeded the volume of any project until the building of the Hoover Dam in the early 1930s. Some 26 million gallons of fresh lake water-roughly one-quarter of the daily water supply used by New York City in that era-were consumed in filling the innovative flight locks every time a ship was raised or lowered the 85 feet from the lake to the sea. A novel system of towing locomotives guided the ships into and out of the locks. All the tows, valves, culverts, lock gates, and other lock-regulating mechanisms were electrically powered by some 1,500 motors, which were hydropowered by the falling water on site. As a result, the functioning of the canal was centralized and entirely self-contained, requiring no external energy source.
During canal construction, tourists came from around the world to observe what was by far the canal's most Herculean challenge-digging the nine-mile-long, neck-shaped water passage through the mountains of the continental divide. The Culebra Cut that had broken the French was often called the canal's "special wonder." For seven straight years American-managed work crews labored systematically day and night, except Sundays, in the sweltering heat and rain, blasting mountains, hauling away rock and dirt, and relentlessly digging out work equipment that became buried beneath the mountainside avalanches of mud that recurred time and again during the rainy season. The amount of dirt hauled out of the Cut defied imagination. The labor would have been simply overwhelming had not the engineers applied U.S. industrial assembly line methodology and technical ingenuity to the work. The lifeline of the system was the heavy-duty railroad network that operated on precise schedules at different levels within the Cut. Where heavy wheeled vehicles would have become mired in the soft ground, railroads were able to haul in equipment and remove excavated earth at regular intervals. Every day 50 to 60 massive, steam-powered shovels filled 500 trainloads of spoil. Newly invented mechanized excavation equipment that had been unavailable to the French, such as train unloaders and dirt spreaders, accomplished in minutes work that previously had consumed thousands of manual man-hours. Finally, in May 1913, two steam shovels working from opposite directions broke through the last mounds of earth. A few months later, in October 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pushed a signal button in Washington to blow the dike for the final filling of the canal. Ominously, a powerful earthquake had ripped through the Canal Zone some ten days earlier, cracking buildings in Panama City. But the canal passed the final test of nature totally unscathed. It had been finished on time at a total cost of $375 million to the U.S. government. The gala international celebration scheduled for the official opening on August 15, 1914, however, never came off-the start of World War I intervened. Teddy Roosevelt himself never visited the finished canal. He died in early 1919, at age sixty.
By every measure, the canal was a stupendous success. Within a decade, some 5,000 vessels were passing through it every year, as many as through Suez. By 1970, over 15,000 ships made the ten- to twelve-hour journey, paying annual tolls of over $100 million. Periodic enlargements and improvements permitted the passage of large warships and the growing fleet of oil supertankers and giant container ships that formed the backbone of the shipping revolution underpinning the rapid integration of the global economy in the late twentieth century. The canal represented the culmination of the historical transformation of the world's oceans from restrictive boundaries into integrated superhighways that had begun with the European Voyages of Discovery four centuries earlier.
"The fifty miles between the oceans were among the hardest ever won by human effort and ingenuity, and no statistics on tonnage or tolls can begin to convey the grandeur of what was accomplished," summed up David McCullough in his sweeping history of the canal. "Primarily the canal is an expression of that old and noble desire to bridge the divide, to bring people together. It is a work of civilization."
For America, the Panama Canal stood as a beacon of the nation's arrival as a star among world civilizations. It was a national historic turning point when many of the society's dynamic forces coalesced to open a new era. At last, America was in a position to fulfill its continental promise of marrying the maritime resources of its two ocean frontiers. U.S. exports and investment abroad soared after the canal's opening. Overseas markets and raw materials were immediately drawn into the productive circuit of America's prolific industrial economy. By 1929 the United States was producing nearly half the world's total industrial output.
Likewise, the Panama Canal marked the transition between the first and second of American naval history's three eras. It ended the long period when America's navy was focused chiefly on defending the young country's borders and waterways, protecting free trade and market access for its seafaring merchants while opportunistically promoting continental expansion. After Panama, naval orientation projected American power outward to arbitrate affairs within Europe and Asia, while expanding American commercial and military access throughout the world. The United States entered World War I to make the world safe for democracy, as President Woodrow Wilson explained, when German submarines began sinking U.S. and other formally neutral merchant and passenger ships in its effort to break Britain's control of the seas and blockade of its ports. Throughout the third era dating from World War II, the mighty U.S. Navy patrolled the globe's oceans and strategic passages, peerless and rarely challenged, to uphold the international free world order of which America itself was the undisputed leader. American aircraft carriers were the state-of-the-art naval weapon of World War II. Most famously, aircraft carriers played the decisive role in the pivotal Battle of Midway (June 1942) that determined control of the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese navy that had inflicted such a terrible, surprise first strike on the Americans six months earlier at Pearl Harbor never recovered from its Midway defeat; Midway was the first sea battle in history in which the engaging fleets never saw each other and remained from 80 to 170 miles apart throughout. Control of the seas likewise enabled America to carry out the Normandy D-day landings that ultimately reclaimed continental tEurope from Nazi Germany.
America's central position on the world's ocean superhighways, its plethora of good, all-weather seaports, and its naval dominance remained critical advantages in its winning the Cold War against its mostly land-bound Soviet adversary. The USSR's military fleets and supply ships constantly labored against the geographic disadvantages of long distances, bad climates, and confinement imposed by the West's control of key naval passages, such as those in exiting the Black Sea. America's early twenty-first-century capability to project its influence as civilization's unchallenged military superpower continued to hinge upon its worldwide deployment of its dozen world-class, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier task forces. Its dominance was roughly equal to the combined power of the world's next nine leading military nations, and unmatched in Western history since ancient Rome ruled over the Mediterranean world.
By creating an inexpensive, fast water linkage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Panama Canal also pointed the direction arrow toward America's next economic boom region-its underdeveloped, arid Far West, whose store of potential mineral and agricultural wealth suddenly came within easier reach of the expanding industries and markets of the East. As a successful federal government-financed and -run enterprise, the canal, moreover, inspired a ready model for undertaking the large, state-run water projects that developed the Far West into America's twentieth-century growth engine. In contrast to the more orthodox, laissez-faire market economy attitudes prevailing in latter-nineteenth-century England and France, the United States had always been governed by a distinctive "American system" that regarded government as an active agent to assist the private development of the nation's resources. The New York State financing of the Erie Canal, the federal government's early policy of promoting internal improvements, and its incentives to the transcontinental railroads and small farmers who homesteaded lands west of the Mississippi after 1862 exemplified how this mixed economic model had worked in the nineteenth century. With the Panama Canal, a fuller, more activist iteration of this mixed system was inaugurated to meet the gargantuan scale of the challenges and opportunities of the industrial age. Teddy Roosevelt himself was the prime mover of the government-led policies that later in the century, under the presidency of his younger distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt, came to fruition in the giant, multipurpose dams that spectacularly transformed America's scantly populated, arid western landscape with cheap irrigation for farming and hydroelectricity for mining and industry. The publicly built dams, in turn, reinforced the general trajectory of the large, state-led governance that characterized so many leading societies of the twentieth century.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
Giant Dams, Water Abundance, and the Rise of Global Society Developing the Far West presented a radically unfamiliar set of water challenges to the United States. While the continent as a whole had an abundance of water wealth, its best resources were concentrated in its temperate, river-rich, eastern half, where annual precipitation normally exceeded the minimum 20 annual inches necessary for sustaining small-scale, nonirrigated farming. Moving west from the Mississippi Valley into the semiarid, treeless grasslands of the high plains and prairies of western Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas-America's steppes-rainfall tapered off and became more undependable. Beyond the 99th and 100th meridians, water, not free land, was the main limiting factor in development. Only in wet years did the Great Plains have enough rainfall to maintain cultivation. In 1865 the farming frontier ran roughly along eastern Kansas and Nebraska's 96th meridian. Over the following quarter century successive waves of hardy, yeoman farmers tried settling in wet years across the 100th meridian, only to be pushed back by the dry periods that always ensued. Between 1870 and 1880 the population of Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado increased by more than 1 million to 1.6 million. But by 1890, in the third year of a ten-year drought and after the terrible winter of 18851886, Kansas and Nebraska had depopulated by one-fourth to one-half. West of the Rockies most of the valleys and lowlands were deserts drier than North Africa; many were scarcely habitable regions with less than seven inches of annual rainfall, such as those of present-day Phoenix and Las Vegas. Western precipitation, including the winter mountain snows that melted into abundant spring runoff, was also highly seasonal and prone to prolonged cycles of drought. Thus even where freshwater existed in sufficient volume for farming, it was often unavailable when when it was needed. Additionally, most of the Far West's perennial surface water was confined within three large mountain-fed river systems-the Colorado in the Southwest, the Columbia in the Northwest, and the San Joaquin and Sacramento in California's Central Valley-that were often long distances away over rugged terrain from most arable land. it was needed. Additionally, most of the Far West's perennial surface water was confined within three large mountain-fed river systems-the Colorado in the Southwest, the Columbia in the Northwest, and the San Joaquin and Sacramento in California's Central Valley-that were often long distances away over rugged terrain from most arable land.
Water scarcity, in short, was the defining geographical condition of America's Far West. As a result, the struggle for water was inseparable from the naked contest for power and wealth. Water rights were the stuff of family blood feuds, such as depicted in the 1958 Hollywood movie The Big Country The Big Country. In the West, as author and humorist Mark Twain wryly put it, "Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fightin' over." By pioneering the world's first giant, multipurpose dams-the defining water innovation of the twentieth century-America from the mid-1930s successfully converted the West's few wild rivers into dynamic engines of inexpensive irrigation, hydroelectricity, water storage, and flood control. The Far Western deserts were miraculously transformed into the richest irrigated farmland on the planet. The arid western hydrological frontier added potent new impetus to America's rising civilization. Large cities rose in the desert. America's federal government-led development became a standard feature of the national political economy. Very rapidly American dam technology diffused worldwide, spreading the prodigious material benefits deriving from the intensification of man's basic uses of water.
The Far West's water challenge had more in common with the authoritarian, hydraulic societies of ancient Mesopotamia, although over rougher, harsher, and far more expansive landscapes than it did with the rainy, eastern United States, which had helped nurture America's market democracy of independent, yeoman farmers, entrepreneurial industries, and decentralized political power. Indeed, incorporating the arid west into mainstream American civilization, posed political economic and cultural challenges within the purely technical one. These broader challenges were explored by America's great turn-of-the-century historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, whose seminal 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" established the prevailing paradigm that America's uniquely individualistic, democratic, pragmatic, and pluralistic character and institutions had been forged primarily by the frontier experience of continuous westward expansion, rather than by older theories of European values transplanted in the New World or the interplay of conflicting interests between the North and South. In his classic analysis of American history, Turner noted that the effective closure of the free land, farming frontier-which he considered to be virtually complete by 1893-had been accompanied by a gradual trend away from individualism and toward the social tendencies of cooperation, big business combination, and increasing reliance on government assistance. The physical challenges of Far Western settlement, he argued presciently, would inevitably accelerate that trend: "When the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required. In short, the physiographic province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual." Turner predicted hopefully that the frontier spirit of the yeoman farmer might endure by infusing itself in new democratic forms as America faced the historically centralizing, authoritarian tendencies of large states that organized control and distribution of irrigation river water in semiarid landscapes.
American West California Aqueducts [image]
By the time Turner delivered his landmark frontier thesis to the American Historical Association in Chicago, it was already apparent that private irrigation alone could not develop the Far West. Irrigation efforts in the region dated back to about 1200 BC, when indigenous southwest natives began digging irrigation canals to cultivate crops. By AD 500 the advanced Hohokam culture, northern neighbors of the Aztecs and Mayas, was well established with an extensive canal network around central Arizona's Salt River, a tributary of the Colorado. Yet by the sixteenth century the Hohokams had vanished, likely victims of one of the prolonged natural droughts to which the region was prone or of ecosystem depletion caused by the soil salinization byproduct of intensive irrigation. Some of their canals were reexcavated and reopened in the late 1860s when U.S. settlers moved into the region. Modern western irrigation had begun with the Mormons, who migrated to Utah from 1847. Through centralized organization, religious discipline, and arduous work, the Mormons created numerous small, farm communities growing potatoes, beans, corn, and wheat by diverting small mountain streams into short canals. Between 1850 and 1890, they expanded their irrigated cropland fifteenfold to support a total population of over 200,000. Irrigated farming began in earnest in California after the gold rush with the coming of the transcontinental steam railroad in 1869. Speculative real estate consortiums organized communities of small farmers around water drawn through canals, sometimes with the help of privately built dams, from streams and rivers that flowed through California's fertile Central Valley, including the King, the San Joaquin, the Kern, and the Sacramento. Eastern Colorado, settled from the 1870s by people inspired by utopian community ideals, was another pocket of western irrigated farming. As late as 1909, Colorado had more acres under irrigation than California.
All in all, however, nineteenth-century American irrigators had done hardly much better than their Hohokam predecessors in transforming the Far Western landscape into an agricultural garden. By the mid-1880s, the best irrigation sites on most of the region's small streams already were being tapped. If western farming was to be developed on a meaningful scale, bigger dams on the few large, wild rivers were needed. But enormous risk capital had to be pledged, and complex water rights issues settled, for such an undertaking. With the depredations of the late 1880s drought and the great economic depression of 1893, moreover, private financing all but dried up for large irrigation projects and land values fell. The final blow against private enterprise solutions was struck with the tragic collapse in the spring of 1889 of a privately built eastern dam in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that unleashed a flood that killed 2,200. Throughout the 1890s, western private sector and elected leaders increasingly beseeched the federal government to take the lead.
The groundwork for federal irrigation had been built over many years thanks to the pioneering efforts of John Wesley Powell. Born in 1834, Powell had explored the Mississippi River in the 1850s. Although he lost his lower right arm as a Union officer at the battle of Shiloh, he intrepidly led a blind expedition in 1869 of nine men on four wooden boats on the first ever explorative run of the wild Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Parlaying his fame as an explorer into a national platform on western geography and development, Powell in 1874 shocked Congress and the nation in testimony that challenged cherished national myths: He declared that nearly the entire western region of the United States beyond the 99th or 100th meridian was too arid for small-scale, eastern-type agriculture without irrigation, and that even with irrigation the total available supply of water was sufficient to reclaim a much more limited amount of cropland for a much smaller population than irrigation boosters supposed. At the time, many public officials clutched to the comforting but fanciful notion that rain would follow the plow, permitting the unending advancement of small yeoman farmers across the continent. In 1878, Powell expounded his views in greater depth in his influential Report on the Arid Land of the Arid Region of the United States. Report on the Arid Land of the Arid Region of the United States. This led to his appointment as head of a new government bureau to scientifically study western lands and later the irrigation potential of western water resources. This led to his appointment as head of a new government bureau to scientifically study western lands and later the irrigation potential of western water resources.
In this capacity, Powell became a formidable champion of government-led water storage dams to irrigate America's west. His view was that all the waters of every free flowing river should be commandeered from its natural bed in economic service to the nation. Public lands that naturally stored and accumulated water, such as mountain forests, should be conserved in government hands and not be sold to timber companies or other private interests that would deplete them. Powell did not fret that the United States might repeat the authoritarian history of the ancient hydraulic societies. Indeed, he advocated his own idealistic, technocratic program for development based on political units that would be reorganized around natural watersheds. Powell maintained that his plan would enable 1.25 million small farmers to cultivate 100 million acres of irrigable cropland.
Powell's idiosyncratic views, however, rankled vested establishment interests and disturbed the popular political myth that a federal irrigation program could be based upon a simple adaptation of Homestead-type grants of small, public lots to much-idealized, Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. At the second National Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles in 1893, Powell triggered an uproar by declaring, factually, that large private interests already controlled all the best irrigable lands in the West. But by then the irrigation movement had enough momentum from conventional politicians and powerful private interests to be able to divorce itself from the quirky, water wealth administration schemes of the original champion of the irrigation cause. A year later, Powell resigned from the government. In 1902, he died in obscurity in Maine.
Before dying, however, Powell had the satisfaction of witnessing the birth of a federally run western irrigation effort. The prime mover behind the 1902 Reclamation Act was America's great water president, Teddy Roosevelt, who had recently come to office in September 1901 with McKinley's assassination. Roosevelt was an admirer of Powell. He had lived in the West's South Dakota Badlands, and ardently believed in Powell's prescription of federally supported irrigation to develop its fertile, though dry soil. In his very first formal message to Congress on December 3, 1901-even as he was maneuvering to reopen the debate over the route of the sea canal route through Central America-he declared his determination to open the West through federal water conservation and irrigation. "In the arid region it is water, not land, which measures production," he said, echoing both Powell and Frederick Jackson Turner. "The western half of the United States would sustain a population greater than that of our whole country today if the waters that now run to waste were saved and used for irrigation."
Under the 1902 Reclamation Act, money from the sale of public lands in the West was to fund federal irrigation works administered by a new Reclamation Service within the Department of Interior. Only family farms of 160 acres or smaller were supposed to benefit from the government's irrigation largesse-a proviso that, in practice, would be routinely breached over the years. Roosevelt also appreciated the intimate interlinkages between water and forests. Forests served as natural reservoirs, conservers of soil, and restrainers of terrible floods. "The forest and water problems are perhaps the most vital internal questions of the United States," Roosevelt stated. Near the end of his presidency, Roosevelt created the celebrated western public parks system, partly to conserve forest watersheds.
Although the Reclamation Service (renamed the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923) eventually became world history's largest government-run water technocracy-a modern democratic version of the ancient priestly elites of the Middle East and China's professional mandarins-the irrigation program started ineffectually. In its first two decades its total projects covered so little acreage as to barely make a noticeable difference in the expansion of western agriculture. Its economic foundations also seemed dubious. Despite the generous water subsidy and extension of payment terms, over half of irrigation project farmers were defaulting on their water loan repayments by 1922. Wealthy land speculators tracked Reclamation engineers like buzzards, swooping in to buy up public homesteads wherever projects seemed likely in order to resell them later at greatly multiplied values to the new, and quickly overindebted, small farmers. Existing private landholders also enjoyed unearned bonanzas from the federal irrigation projects. Then in the early 1920s, the U.S. agricultural sector went into a depression with sharply falling farm prices, one of the contributing factors of the economy-wide Great Depression of the 1930s. Without the remarkable resilience of public bureaucracies to endure over time despite failure and loss of purpose, the Reclamation Bureau and the western irrigation program might well have vanished at that point as a forgettable footnote of one of history's failed policy initiatives.
What changed everything was the Hoover (aka Boulder) Dam. Reclamation engineers had dreamed about building a dam on the Colorado River ever since the bureaucracy's inception. But it wasn't until the late 1910s and 1920s that the combination of political, economic, and technological forces aligned favorably to impel the first serious steps toward undertaking the world's first giant multipurpose dam on the lower Colorado. Another decade of political maneuvering would go by before construction could begin. The completed dam, which started full operations in 1936, was simply stupendous. It dwarfed all previous dams in history by orders of magnitude in scale and novelty. From ancient Roman and Han times through the nineteenth century few dams had surpassed 150 feet in height. The systematic application of the sciences of civil engineering, hydraulics, and fluid mechanics from the mid-nineteenth century, however, enabled the building of much more complex dam structures.
The concrete Hoover Dam would stand 726 feet, over six times taller than the British-built marvel of the first Low Aswan Dam on the Nile even with its final 1929 extension, and more than twice as high as any other dam on Earth. It created the world's largest man-made reservoir, the 110-mile-long Lake Mead, which could store two times the annual flow of the Colorado, or enough to flood the entire state of Pennsylvania under one foot of water. Its world's largest hydroelectric power plant was capable of generating 1.7 million horsepower, upgraded to 2.7 million horsepower in the 1980s. By 2000, some 30 million southwesterners, almost 2 million acres of prized cropland, and metropolises such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas would be dependent upon the Colorado River's water supply. Its wall contained enough concrete to build a highway across the continental United States. Hoover gave mankind, for the first time in history, the technical means for bringing the world's mightiest rivers under almost total control, converting wild, variable currents and unpredictable flooding into tamed pools of carefully regulated flows and allocated levels. Vitally for American water technocrats, too, the Hoover Dam established a viable economic blueprint for dam projects they could emulate again and again to achieve their mission of transforming the arid West.
In addition to its gigantic scale, the key innovation at Hoover was the dam's successful multipurpose design. Throughout history, most dams and their affiliated waterworks had been built for a single purpose only-usually irrigation or flood control, but also improved navigation, drinking supply, or generating waterpower through waterwheels and, since the 1880s, hydroelectric turbines. Divergent purposes presented competing design challenges-for instance, flood control demanded low reservoir levels to catch flood swells while maximum power generation required full reservoirs; navigation presented still other difficulties. The multipurpose approach had been promoted as early as 1908 by Teddy Roosevelt in an effort to jump-start the flagging development of western irrigation. Despite the ingrained skepticism of the water bureaucracy establishment at the old Army Corps of Engineers, Reclamation officials, hungry to find their raison d'etre, began to experiment with integrating hydropower to its irrigation dams. Their most celebrated early success was the elegant 280-foot-tall dam on the Salt River in Arizona. Completed in 1911 and named after President Roosevelt, the dam provided a visible boon to the economic life of the Phoenix area by both alleviating irrigation water shortages for farms built around the dredged-out canals of the long-gone Hohokam natives, and by generating electricity. Crucially, the electricity sales added enough revenue to pay for the dam.
Hydroelectric sales underwriting farm irrigation subsidies: This became the working fiscal model for Hoover and the great dam era that it spawned. While American leaders had regularly rejected proposals throughout the 1920s to develop multipurpose dams on the Tennessee River in the eastern United States, since that would make the government a big player in the private electricity business, they were more amenable in the West, where the farming, urban, and railroad lobbying interests from Southern California made a concerted appeal for a giant irrigation, flood control, and hydroelectric dam on the great river that was the lifeblood of the southwest.
Rising in the Rocky Mountains at 14,000 feet and falling toward sea level over its 1,440-mile length through deep canyons-including the Grand Canyon which its torrents had carved over the eons-and deserts, the muddy, turbulent Colorado River flowed within seven states to its delta in Mexico south of the California-Arizona border before exiting through its mouth at the Gulf of California. While its average flow of about 14 million acre-feet per year made it a relatively modest-sized river by volume-comparable in quantity to the eastern Susquehanna, Delaware, Hudson, or Connecticut and only a small fraction of the huge Mississippi and Columbia rivers-every drop was precious because it drained the most arid large basin on the continent. It was the only significant water source within 1,000 miles. For thousands of years its delta of lagoons and earthen mounds, twice the size of Rhode Island, had been a paradise for jaguars, coyote, beaver, a vast assortment of water fowl, fish, and uncountable species of plants.
In its natural, predammed state the velocity of its flow was schizophrenic. When swollen with the springtime snowmelt from the mountains, it sometimes cascaded furiously down from the mountains at 300,000 cubic feet (nearly 2.3 million gallons) per second, tearing away mountainsides and smashing boulders; in the dry season it meandered by at less than 1 percent that speed. The river's annual volume also varied widely, by over 50 percent, depending upon whether the region was in a wet or drought cycle. Most distinctive, its enormous, wild energy made the reddish-brown Colorado one of the siltiest rivers in the world. Sediment from the hillside during its steep descent accumulated in its lower reaches beyond the Grand Canyon, where the river was 17 times siltier than the muddy Mississippi. The river's texture was playfully described by southwesterners as "too thick to drink, too thin to plow." The riverbed was raised by the accumulating deposits year after year until, in a great swell, the river overtopped the sandy bluffs containing it. It flooded violently in new directions, carving fresh channels toward the sea. Before its taming by dams, the Colorado's rampaging floods periodically turned the dry lowlands of Southern California and Mexico into huge swamps that left behind exceptionally fertile soil when the floodwaters evaporated.
Just such a terrible flood event had been a midwife to the Hoover Dam. In the late 1890s, private developers had begun working on an ambitious scheme to clean out one of the Colorado's ancient flood channels, known as the Alamo River, and use it as an irrigation canal to draw river water that would transform the low-lying, silt-enriched soils of the Southern California desert, with less than three inches of annual rainfall, into productive farmland. By 1901, the water started to flow. Its path started with a cut from the Colorado just north of the Mexican border, looped southward some 50 miles through Mexico, and then northward into a Southern California depression known as the Salton Sink. As some 2,000 farmers settled in, the irrigated lowland indeed bloomed forth with crops. Reflecting the new confidence and hope brought by the water, the area's name was changed from the Valley of the Dead to Imperial Valley. By 1904, however, the natural accumulation of Colorado silt began to choke off the diversion channel. While working to dredge it, the irrigation engineers decided to draw river water temporarily from a newly cut bypass. Since it was supposed to be short-lived, the bypass was fitted only with filmsy, wooden control gates. As bad luck had it, the Colorado spring floods arrived two months early in 1905, and ferociously as well. The temporary control gates were washed out-and the full, raging force of the Colorado rushed into the ancient channel. The Salton Sink swelled with water, submerging thousands of acres of prime cropland to become today's inland Salton Sea. Farmers appealed fruitlessly to Roosevelt for government assistance to close the breach. The powerful Southern Pacific railroad with a strong economic interest in the region, feverishly ferried in rock and gravel. But the breach remained open until 1907. Farming in the region revived slowly thereafter. But the shadow of the 19051907 floods galvanized a relentless lobbying campaign for a federal flood control dam on the Colorado. The Imperial Valley farmers also campaigned the government to build an accompanying, "all-American" irrigation canal that would run on the U.S. side of the border and thus eliminate Mexico's potential leverage over the vital Colorado flow. By 1920, the political drive for the dam and canal had gathered enough momentum to be seriously proposed in Washington.
When the fast-growing city of Los Angeles stepped forward in 1924 with a proposal to build, at its own expense, an aqueduct to tap Colorado River water and to buy hydroelectricity generated by the proposed dam in order to pump the water 200 miles to L.A. over a rugged escarpment, the economics of what came to be called the Boulder Canyon Project became feasible. Los Angeles desperately needed the water. A dusty, farming town of 13,000 at the edge of the desert at the end of the Civil War, Los Angeles owed its early growth to the region's orange groves and the arrival of the railroads-a Southern Pacific spur line in 1867, and in 1885, a direct link to Kansas City on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. By 1905 its population had grown to 200,000 and was outstripping the available water supply of accumulated groundwater and flow from the small Los Angeles River-a creek for all but a few weeks of torrential precipitation in winter-whose annual flow was a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of California's total. Los Angeles's population might have crested around such modest levels had not city leaders pulled off one of the most notorious water supply grabs in history. In events that informed the story line of the 1974 film Chinatown, Chinatown, Los Angeles municipal water authorities ruthlessly gained command of the flow of the Owens River in one of the valleys formed by the old ice age folds in the Sierra Nevada 250 miles away. Between 1907 and 1913, they constructed an impressive aqueduct that brought Owens water to thirsty Los Angeles. Los Angeles municipal water authorities ruthlessly gained command of the flow of the Owens River in one of the valleys formed by the old ice age folds in the Sierra Nevada 250 miles away. Between 1907 and 1913, they constructed an impressive aqueduct that brought Owens water to thirsty Los Angeles.
L.A.'s water boss was the salty-tongued, autocratic William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant who had walked the railroad ties across the Panamanian isthmus en route to California as a young man. A self-taught engineer, he worked his way up from ditch cleaner to become the unchallenged potentate, builder, and personification of the modern Los Angeles water system. In the distant Owens River, Mulholland envisioned a water source, among the city's very few viable options, that could provide L.A.'s hydraulic deliverance for a generation. He and his cronies stopped at nothing to get control of it, including deception, lies, secret agents, spying, and payoffs. With the clandestine collaboration of a paid insider at the federal Reclamation Bureau's local office who was later hired as Mulholland's deputy, and some astute politicking in Washington, they outflanked and killed Reclamation's own farm irrigation plan for the Owens Valley. Posing as cattlemen and as resort developers, they bought farmland that gave Los Angeles the precious associated water rights to the river and gained control of the best site for the future storage reservoir. Adding insult to the injury of Owens Valley farmers, Mulholland rerouted their river water first to suburban Los Angeles's dry San Fernando Valley, where a syndicate of well-connected city insiders, including railroad and trolley kingpins, utility bosses, newspaper barons, land developers, and bankers had been secretly buying up cheap land options. When the aqueduct route became known, San Fernando real estate values shot up, instantly turning millionaires into multimillionaires. San Fernando Valley soon was incorporated into Los Angeles, enriching the city's fiscal base for growth. With the actual arrival of Owens River water in 1913, irrigated acreage in the San Fernando Valley blossomed twenty-five-fold in just five years. In the zero-sum economics of water diversion, Owens Valley withered so that San Fernando Valley could flourish.
Most important, the abundant new supply of freshwater enabled Los Angeles's prosperity boom to continue. The region's population surpassed Mulholland's expectations, reaching 1.1 million in 1920 and climbing to 2.5 million by 1930. By the early 1920s, aggravated by the onset of a new drought cycle in the region, Mulholland realized that once again Los Angeles was facing a water famine unless new water resources could be obtained. That's when he began lobbying vigorously for the Colorado River water and aqueduct. To alleviate the shortages in the meantime, he decided to squeeze every last drop out of the Owens River. Mulholland's imperious combination of monetary inducements and strong-arm tactics to buy up more water rights, however, sparked a violent reaction from irate Owens Valley farmers. Between 1924 and 1927, farmers dynamited parts of the Los Angeles aqueduct and stood off against the armed city agents sent to stop them in one of America's earliest, violent clashes over water between urban dwellers and farmers. But by publicizing the possible specter of a cutoff of Owens River water to Los Angeles, the water war broke the last local opposition to Mulholland's bid for the Colorado River aqueduct. By 1928 the overriding quest for water led to the creation of a new regional political entity, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, with taxing power to raise funds to buy Hoover's hydroelectricity to power the aqueduct's water pumps and for other needs. When Colorado River water started to arrive in the mid-1930s, it literally validated the old adage in the arid west that "water flows uphill to money."
Before the dam project could get started, there was one further political hurdle to overcome-the sorting out of water rights on the Colorado River itself. Unlike the eastern United States, which followed the riparian legal tradition of granting water usage rights to landowners abutting a river or a stream, an alterative doctrine had developed in the water-scarce West. Known as "prior appropriation and use," or more colloquially as "use it or lose it," western water doctrine allocated priority water rights to the earliest and continuous users of a water source regardless of their location. In the early 1920s, when the dam project was taking shape, only California had any prospect of using large quantities of Colorado River water. But the other six states in the Colorado basin wanted to protect their rights for future use, lest California claim the entire river flow by using it before they did. As a result, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, an engineer by training, brokered a landmark compromise among the basin states in 1922 that divided the river into an upper and lower basin and assigned equal shares of river water to each-a governance approach that oddly echoed John Wesley Powell's original notion of reorganizing the West's political units around its watersheds. Working with the projection that the river had an average 17.5 million acre-feet per year to share-later proved to be a gross overestimate-some 7.5 million acre-feet were assigned to each basin, 1.5 million set aside for Mexico, and the rest reserved for natural evaporation or storage. The linchpin of the deal was California's agreement to cap its withdrawals; the limit ultimately was set at 4.4 million acre-feet per year. It took over six years more to bring all the major elements, with required approvals, of the Boulder Canyon Project into final alignment. Finally, in 1929, newly elected president Herbert Hoover was able to launch work on the pathbreaking Boulder Dam that in 1947 would be renamed in his honor.
In contrast to its long political gestation, the physical construction of the giant flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectric power-producing dam took only five years to complete. Despite its name, the dam was located not in Boulder, but in Black Canyon about 20 miles downstream and about 150 miles from the Grand Canyon. The misnomer arose from the original authorizing legislation before the final site was selected.
There was no previous engineering model for building such a dam. Like many other pathbreaking civil-engineering feats in history, it was a leap into the unknown. Solutions were improvised to unforeseen problems as they arose in the finest spirit-and one of the last epic expressions-of Yankee ingenuity. No U.S. construction firm was large enough alone to tackle such an immense project, so a consortium of six builders banded together to make the winning bid-thus helping to launch the future destinies of Bechtel, Kaiser, Morrison Knudsen, and other global construction giants. The first stage, which began in 1931 and took nearly eighteen months to complete, was the blasting of four huge tunnels in the canyon walls through which the Colorado was diverted while the dam was built. With the river diverted and the work site secured by a temporary coffer dam, "high-scalers" suspended from long ropes blasted fresh rock from the canyon walls, while other workers excavated 40 feet down below the dry river until they reached the bedrock that would anchor the dam. Since the hot poured concrete filling the immensity of the dam's volume would take a century to cool down naturally, engineers devised an instant refrigeration system by injecting frigid water through one-inch pipes that were inserted for that purpose at measured intervals throughout the structure; within two years, the cooling was accomplished. When no U.S. company could supply plate steel pipes large enough to funnel the falling water through the intake valves on Lake Mead to drive the turbines near the bottom of the dam, the builders constructed their own steel-fabricating plant on-site. Labor was nonstop around the clock. Work conditions in the searing heat were hard, and often deadly. When already low wages were cut in mid-1931, workers, organized by the IWW, or Wobblies, went on strike. But the Great Depression had started and the strike was broken, with the federal government's tacit approval, by the importation of scab labor from nearby Las Vegas.
By 1936 everything was done. Lake Mead began to fill behind the dam. Water began passing through the new turbine-generator units. The dam's elegant, curved design, art deco flourishes, and 70-story-high grandeur topped off what was instantly recognized as a landmark achievement of civilization. "I came, I saw, and I was conquered," President Franklin D. Roosevelt orated with a paraphrasing twist on Julius Caesar at the dam's dedication in September 1935.
Roosevelt, in fact, already had been won over by Hoover Dam as a model for the public works projects that became a signature centerpiece of his New Deal policy to counteract the Great Depression he'd inherited with the presidency in 1932. Across the country, construction crews were mobilized from the 25 percent unemployed and put to work building scores of new dams that harnessed the untapped water resources of America's rivers. By the mid-1930s, the five largest structures on Earth, all dams, were under construction in the western United States-the Hoover on the Colorado, the Grand Coulee and the Bonneville on the Columbia, the Shasta on California's Sacramento River, and the Fort Peck on the upper Missouri. Indeed, the Hoover Dam inaugurated a seminal turning point in water history-the age of giant, multipurpose dams. Over the three decades from the mid-1930s, America led the way in what became a worldwide frenzy of dam building that intensified production and transformed human society through the delivery of copious new supplies of cheap irrigation water and cheap hydroelectricity, as well as improved flood control and river navigation. By the 1940s, the United States had greater command of its water resources than any other nation. Its innovative leadership in converting the untapped boon of its river water wealth into productive economic and military output played a central role in its visible emergence as the global superpower in the aftermath of World War II.
While the Hoover Dam and its New Dealborn successors did not provide enough stimulus alone to lift America from the staggering economic collapse of the Great Depression, the hope they inspired lent precious legitimacy to a government beleaguered by faltering faith in the efficacy of the country's bedrock political economic system. One lasting impact of the giant, state-built dams everywhere was to help usher in an era of enlarged political and economic centralization with many similar characteristics, albeit in modified forms, to the irrigation-based river states of antiquity-strong government involvement in the economy, policies implemented by a cadre of technocratic engineering overseers and a large workforce of low wage laborers. Control and mass manipulation of river water likewise was a key element of political power, with the chief beneficiaries of the waterworks' wealth, as in ancient societies, both reflective and reinforcing of the society's established power structures-in this case, featuring disproportionate subsidies for politically overrepresented agricultural businesses.
Under the New Deal, all the major river basins of America's Far West came under intensive, multipurpose dam development. Thanks to the exploitation of water, the Far West became the country' most dynamic growth region in the postwar era, exceeding Teddy Roosevelt's vision for it at the turn of the century.
No river in the West was mightier than the Columbia in the Pacific Northwest. It carried nearly 10 times more water than the Colorado and roared out of the glacier-covered mountains and through wide canyons with torrential seasonal force. Its vast potential-especially for hydropower-had long tantalized engineers. Fully exploited, the river could generate enough hydroelectricity for the entire population living west of the Mississippi at the time. One site in particular held colossal potential-the Grand Coulee ("Great Canyon"), a 50-mile-long canyon one to six miles wide within 500- to 600-foot cliffs that were structurally ideal for building a dam.