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Book Review
| Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics. By David P. Billington and Donald C. Jackson. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. xiv + 369 pp. Illustrations, notes, tables, bibliography, and index.
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| These distinguished academic engineers, who have previously written historical accounts of large structures, seek to explain why gigantic dams arose on many American rivers between the early 1930s and mid-1960s. They portray local boosters and their political allies smoothly realigning their straightforward, customary demand for public pork with the emerging conviction that big dams should operate as hydraulic mainsprings, driving ambitious multipurpose projects to transform vast geographic areas. After 1933, engineers schooled in the Progressive ethos of "efficiency" dismissed single-purpose dams that had either stored water for irrigation or electricity-generation or managed its flow for navigation or flood control. Instead, they rhapsodized about complex infrastructure enterprises—interlocking dams, canals, generators, and locks—to generate hydropower, reclaim deserts, diminish floods, float barges, and, some dreamers even hoped, modernize social relations in depressed regions. |
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Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, according to Billington and Jackson, married local demands to national dollars. Depression-fighting public-works spending ignited a mania for remodeling river basins that persisted long after the original emergency had abated. Big Dams sketches the heritage of American river engineering, but argues that New Deal borrowing to put people to work revolutionized the scope, size, and consequences of dam-building. |
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