| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Wayne Aspinall and the Shaping of the American West. By Steven C. Schulte. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002. xiii + 322 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $29.95.

The Politics of Western Water: The Congressional Career of Wayne Aspinall. By Stephen Craig Sturgeon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. xxii + 243 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $45.00.

From 1959 to 1973, no reclamation project authorization, national park, or public land use policy became law until Wayne Aspinall reported it out from his House Interior Committee. A stickler for detail, Aspinall shaped legislation to square with his Progressive-era utilitarian philosophy, protect the interests of resource users and his western Colorado constituents, and assure House passage. These two thoroughly researched and persuasive studies demonstrate his enormous influence on the environmental agenda, analyze the sources of his power, and attribute his 1972 primary election defeat largely to his inflexibility in the face of new currents of environmental thought.

Both books are brief on biographical detail, and we learn little about the influence of friendships, interest groups, or relations with other congressional leaders. We do see a compulsive worker, a young man who simultaneously taught school, drove the bus, and opened a law practice, and later a congressman who arrived at work before the staff and demanded visitors be punctual to the minute. During the 1960s, he would outrage conservation organizations and national media by delaying wilderness and parks legislation, but his sense of his own righteousness left him inflexible and unable to understand the growing political power of the environmental movement. Although he could command the attention of presidents, legislative leaders, and resource users, Aspinall emerges from these studies, most explicitly from Sturgeon's, as a loner who relied on his own expertise and political instincts. Indeed, when he concluded bills were not ready to report, either because of their flaws or their lack of support, he simply adjourned his committee and went home.

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