Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

And this, as much as the economic folly and the environmental damage, was the legacy of the go-go years: the corruption of national politics. Water projects came to epitomize the pork barrel; they were the oil can that lubricated the nation’s legislative machinery. Important legislation—an education bill, a foreign aid bill, a conservation bill—was imprisoned until the President agreed to let a powerful committee chairman tack on a rider authorizing his pet dam. Franklin Roosevelt had rammed a lot of his public-works programs through a Congress that was, if not resistant, then at least recumbent. A generation or two later, however, it was Congress that was writing omnibus public-works bills authorizing as much as $20 billion worth of water projects at a stroke and defying threats of presidential vetoes. Most members who voted for such bills had not the faintest idea what was in them; they didn’t care; they didn’t dare look. All that mattered was that there was something in it for them. What had begun as an emergency program to put the country back to work, to restore its sense of self-worth, to settle the refugees of the Dust Bowl, grew into a nature-wrecking, money-eating monster that our leaders lacked the courage or ability to stop.