48 pages • 1 hour read
Marc ReisnerCadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Go-Go Years”
Chapter 5 looks at the go-go years of the big water projects, which began in the 1930s and lasted until the 1960s. In the beginning, President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) used these water projects at the height of the Great Depression to “put the country back to work, to restore its sense of self-worth, to settle the refugees of the Dust Bowl” (168). Federal dams erected in the 1930s became the era’s reigning symbol. They demonstrated that a country hit hard by economic depression “could still do remarkable things” (159).
One such water project was the Grand Coulee Dam in the state of Washington on the Columbia River. In the early 1930s, the Columbia River was the biggest river anyone had thought to dam. Its volume and drop, since a canyon contained it, made the location ideal for hydroelectricity along with irrigation. Originally, the Corps of Engineers, the sister agency and bitter rival of the Bureau of Reclamation, wanted to build a low dam, which would only have been useful for hydroelectricity and regulating navigation flows; t would not have enabled irrigation. Because the Bureau was interested in irrigation, it wanted to build a high dam. Due to the exorbitant cost of the high dam, Congress did not support its construction, especially given the country was still reeling from the Great Depression. However, the Bureau, and possibly FDR (there is no absolute proof), deceived Congress. They used the original sum of money appropriated to the project to lay the foundation for a high dam. Building a low dam was now out of the question, and the Bureau was able to build its high dam. The huge amount of electricity produced by this dam and others in the Pacific Northwest enabled the United States to produce 60,000 aircrafts in four years during World War II. This production capacity helped win the war.
To Reisner, one legacy of what he calls the “go-go years,” besides economic folly and environmental damage, was “the corruption of national politics” (168). Powerful committee chairs who wanted dams could hold up important legislation, such as foreign aid or conservation bills, leading Congress to write omnibus public works bills whereby most members have no idea what is in the bill besides their pet water project.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Rivals in Crime”
This chapter charts the rivalry between the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, which resulted in projects that were economically useless and environmentally damaging. Reisner believes that the fault of this unharmonious relationship lies with the Corps, which he considers “as opportunistic and ruthless an agency as American government has ever seen” (171), and which he believes gave “water development a bad name” (171). Across the American West, the Corps tried to steal the Bureau’s projects and irrigation constituency. One example is the battle over the Kings and Kern river projects in California. While the Kings River project was authorized to the Bureau, both agencies submitted reports to Congress about developing the two rivers. It became a bureaucratic battle that lasted several years, with the projects eventually going to the Corps. This was despite the Truman administration saying that the request to start construction on both projects was “officially eliminated.”
The competition between the two organizations resulted in both participating in activities that were marginally legal. For example, in the 1960s the Bureau was willing to sell massively subsidized water to California on an interim basis. The state could then turn around and resell the water to large corporate farmers, driving many of the state’s small farmers out of business. The Bureau was willing to forsake its small-farmer constituency simply because it did not want the Corps stealing more dam sites. For Reisner, the competition between these two agencies is ironic. Their rivalry prevailed during a time when the United States had the confidence, money, and desire to build large-scale projects. If the two agencies had cooperated, they could have built some truly impressive projects together.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Dominy”
Chapter 7 provides a detailed account of the most colorful commissioner in the Bureau of Reclamation’s history: Floyd E. Dominy, who served as Commissioner between 1959 and 1969. Raised on a farm in Nebraska, Dominy understood the importance of irrigation to Western farmers. He landed his first job with the Bureau of Reclamation in 1946. One of his strengths was his “knack with people” (219), a trait many Bureau engineers, whom he detested, lacked. This trait helped him rise through the ranks in the Bureau from “dirt sampler to waterlord of the American West” (220). In the postwar era, the Bureau became a creature of Congress. Dominy recognized this reality and worked hard to cultivate relationships with congressional members. He kept lists of those members who were close allies and supporters of the Bureau and made sure to reward them by funding their pet water projects.
As Commissioner, “Dominy had a peculiar adeptness at denying reality” (241). The Bureau’s inability to stop farmers from illegally irrigating excess crops with subsidized water tarnished their reputation. By the 1960s, conservationists, church groups, economists, Eastern and Midwestern farmers, and major newspapers and magazine editors criticized the Reclamation program. Rather than clamping down on farmers participating in this illegal activity, Dominy launched a “belligerent campaign to deny that the problem existed” (241).
Dominy also went out of his way to war with conservationists. He was one of the most hated figures by the environmental movement. As an example, Reisner discusses the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, which created Lake Powell and flooded a vast canyon landscape and thousands of years of Native American history and culture. Dominy saw this dam as his crowning achievement, and conservationists saw it as cultural and environmental disaster. Reisner agrees that Floyd Dominy gave the Bureau its reputation for being—in the words of the Bureau’s former deputy chief of planning, who is describing the reaction of a young engineering graduate whom he advised to apply at the Bureau—“nothing but a bunch of nature-wreckers out to waste the taxpayers’ money” (253). Dominy’s pigheadedness blinded him to the reality that Americans were becoming fed up with federally funded water projects.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
One of Reisner’s main intentions in his text is to demonstrate how transforming the desert through water projects damaged the environment and rural communities, particularly Native Americans. The Grand Coulee Dam destroyed one of the greatest salmon spawning runs in the world. The high dam, which included a 50-story wall, blocked their passage. Fish ladders are sometimes built to help fish overcome the walls of dams. However, the cost of building a fish ladder at Coulee was close to the full cost of the dam. Thus, it was never built.
To Reisner, the least-known consequence of water development projects was its impact on Native Americans. For example, when the Corps of Engineers built Garrison Dam in Missouri, it took extraordinary measures to ensure that white towns situated near the river were not flood, but it flooded most of the productive agricultural land owned by the Three Tribes’ reservation. When the tribe asked for compensation, the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs ripped up the Fort Berthold Indians’ version of the bill and wrote its own. The committee version was cruel. The Native Americans were not able to fish in the reservoir, their cattle could not drink from or graze near the reservoir, and they were forbidden from using any compensatory money they received to hire lawyers. The reservoir also split the reservation in two. The Fort Berthold Indians, having lost all sense of cohesiveness and way of life, never recovered from the trauma.
Driving this reckless transformation of the desert were, in part, the commissioners who headed the Bureau of Reclamation. The lack of regard for environmental and conservation efforts by many commissioners was astounding. Topock Marsh, a large freshwater wetland at the northern end of Lake Havasu in California, was one of the most important winter stops for migrating ducks and geese. It was also home to grasses and duckweed, which consumed water that Imperial Valley farmers bought. As a result, the Bureau, led by Commissioner Dominy, dredged the marsh. It spent millions of dollars and wiped out the grasses. The waterfowl all but disappeared from the marsh. The irony in this situation is that there was not demand for the water. Imperial Valley farmers had so much water they applied up to 12 feet annually on their crops, yet Commissioner Dominy and the Bureau at large viewed the operation as a success.
The Bureau, particularly in the postwar years, also became fearful that if it started cracking down on giant farming corporations and the politicians whom it elected for violating land and water agreements, then the Corps of Engineers would step in to become the major water developer in the Western region. In contrast to the Bureau, the Corps was not bound by “social legislation or much of a social conscience” (239). The Corps, in fact, was trying to steal projects from the Bureau and succeeded at times. Bouncing the Bureau off the Kings and Kern rivers projects did result in California’s growers trying to repeal the more constraining features of the Reclamation Act. While this effort was not successful, as Reisner notes, the irrigation lobby throughout the entire West did take notice. This rivalry between the two agencies ultimately resulted in several “worthless” projects being built simply to ensure that one agency stayed ahead of the other. This competition did far more ecological and economic harm than good in the American West.
