Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The peculiar relationship between the Bureau and the two leading branches of government—in which it can defy the wishes of the branch that supposedly runs it and is largely subservient to the wishes of the other—is something relatively new. Mostly it is a development of the postwar era. In the past, the President often had to champion the Reclamation program against the objections of an eastern-dominated Congress, which found the whole idea a waste of money. Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and even Herbert Hoover all fought with Congress over Reclamation dams they wanted built. As the dams octupled the population of the West, however, and as long-lived members of Congress from the South and West rose into important committee chairmanships, the character of Congressional leadership changed, and its attitudes followed. With Wayne Aspinall and Carl Hayden running the Interior and Appropriations committees, Ike could no more enforce a “no new starts” policy than Jimmy Carter could bounce a $40 million Corps of Engineers dam whose sole beneficiary was to be a private catfish farm in the district of an influential Congressman from Oklahoma. As far as public works were concerned, by the 1950s it was Congress, not the White House, that ran the government. We had become a plutocracy of the powerful and entrenched.