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We are here to celebrate the completion of the greatest dam in the world, rising 726 feet above the bedrock of the river and altering the geography of a whole region; we are here to see the creation of the largest artificial lake in the world . . . and we are here to see nearing completion a power house which will contain the largest generators yet installed in this country . . . The mighty waters of the Colorado were running unused to the sea. Today we translate them into a great national possession.
—from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech at the dedication ceremony for the Hoover Dam
The Hoover Dam turns eighty this week, its first kilowatts delivered to the citizens of Arizona, Nevada, and California on October 9, 1936. The dam was an immediate and enduring factor in the economic and environmental transformation of the Southwest, but it generated more than a regional makeover. “The story of America in the last half of the twentieth century,” says Michael Hiltzik in Colossus, “is the story not of the postwar era, but the post-dam era”:
The United States became in that post-dam era a country very different from the United States that built it. It was transformed from a society that glorified individualism into one that cherished shared enterprise and communal social support. To be sure, that change was not all the making of the dam itself; Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, and other New Deal programs forged in the crucible of the Depression played their essential role, as did the years of the war. But the dam was the physical embodiment of the initial transformation, a remote regional construction project reconfigured into a symbol of national pride.
In the hands of the Norwegian-American sculptor Oskar J. W. Hansen, that symbolism was given Art Deco style and Wagnerian scale. He saw his monumental “Winged Figures of the Republic,” flanking the dedicatory flagpole on the Nevada side of the dam, as representations of “the immutable calm of intellectual resolution, and the enormous power of trained physical strength, equally enthroned in placid triumph of scientific accomplishment.” Even the 200 workers who died during construction were orchestrated into Hansen’s heroic national vision: “They died to make the desert bloom,” reads their commemorative plaque.
But the dam has a legacy of division and disruption also, starting with the political squabble over its name — the partisan Roosevelt administration insisting on “Boulder Dam” until President Truman, in a gesture of reconciliation with Republicans, made Hoover Dam official in 1947 (by which time some exasperated citizens were lobbying for “Hoogivza Dam”). Herbert Hoover, as FDR’s predecessor, not only deserves recognition for the dam, argues Glen Jeansonne in his new biography, Herbert Hoover: A Life, but deserves better treatment from history. Contrary to the usual view, Jeansonne says that Hoover’s legislative record shows that he was “neither a do-nothing nor a laissez-faire president” and provided an essential bridge to the New Deal era: “American politics could hardly have leaped from Coolidge to Franklin Delano Roosevelt without Hoover in between.”
In The Profiteers, Sally Denton describes how the Hoover Dam became a different sort of stepping stone, not only ushering in the era of New Deal public works projects but propelling the major builder of the dam, Bechtel Corporation, “into a condition approaching that of a corporate nation-state,” today the largest construction-engineering company in America. The dam was Bechtel’s first megaproject, and it opened the floodgates on profit and influence:
Bechtel has closer ties to the US government than any other private corporation in modern memory. No other corporation has been so manifestly linked to the presidency, with close relationships to every chief of state from Dwight Eisenhower forward. For nearly a hundred years, Bechtel has operated behind a wall of secrecy with its continually evolving military-industrial prototype.
For Marc Reisner, author of the 1986 classic Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, the Hoover Dam symbolized the watershed moment when a blind or blithe nation “began to founder on the Era of Limits.” In The Water Knife, a near-future novel by the prizewinning author Paolo Bacigalupi, those limits have gone so unheeded that the Southwest is in the grip of “Big Daddy Drought” and the water baron thugs who manipulate it.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2dpUMye
Sig Nordal 