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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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Environmental historians, as well as those studying New Deal politics and society, will benefit from the capsulized accounts of deal-making and earth-moving in four major river basins: the Colorado, Columbia, Missouri, and Sacramento-San Joaquin. Regrettably, Big Dams' scant theoretical foundation in technology history makes the "Massive v. Structural" dam-design controversy distracting to readers who want to know more about the New Deal's profound transformations of both rivers and federal conservation policy. |
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Big Dams celebrates the profession of engineering and, by inference, the expansion of the national state needed to deploy so many engineers. The authors note growing contemporary debates about dams' value, but absolve engineers of responsibility, as environmental costs were "generally unanticipated at the time of construction" (p. 296). Where messy natural events confounded designers' purposes, as did the 1993 floods that overwhelmed Kansas City and St. Louis, Billington and Jackson blame inconvenient rain in unexpected places. Five federal dams on the upper Missouri have "effectively removed floods in eastern Montana and the Dakotas," but this supposed accomplishment ignores the other 90 percent of the basin's population, who figured far more prominently in boosters' postwar campaign to fund the Pick-Sloan scheme (p. 251). |
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Big Dams provides little new primary documentation, although its brief basin histories mark helpful jump-off spots for researchers. Billington and Jackson helpfully cite, but do not reappraise, the extensive secondary literature, preferring to rely on celebratory agency histories, especially from the Army Corps of Engineers on the Columbia and Missouri. |
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Subtler analyses of the four basins' economic, political, and social settings include Paul Pitzer on Grand Coulee Dam (Pullman, 1994); Robert Kelly Schneiders on the Pick-Sloan Missouri project (Lawrence, 1999); Donald Pisani on the Central Valley Project (Berkeley, 1984); and Norris Hundley on damming the Colorado (Berkeley, 1975). Anyone pondering the complex relationship between power and water must consider Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire (New York, 1985), if only to find inspiration to challenge his sweeping generalizations by wading into particular rivers. I did, and my recent study of postwar dam-building in the Pacific Northwest benefited immeasurably. |
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Karl Brooks, associate professor of history and environmental studies, University of Kansas, is a lawyer and former Idaho legislator. He is the author of Public Dams, Private Power: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (Washington, 2006). He is currently completing an account of environmental law's emergence during the postwar era. |
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