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Book Review
| Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935. By Donald J. Pisani. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xviii + 394 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliographical references, index. Cloth $49.95.
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| For most environmental historians who might find themselves playing the word association game, "reclamation" would elicit one, instantaneous response: Donald Pisani. With this second volume in a three-volume history of water in the West, Pisani establishes himself as the historian who has focused the most sustained attention on the development of federal reclamation policy, and Water and American Government not only will fill out our picture considerably, but also will provide plenty of fertile ground for debate about the relationship between reclamation and modern American government. |
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Pisani picks up the story where he left off in To Reclaim a Divided West (New Mexico, 1992), with the passing of the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, and ends with that seeming behemoth of a symbol for Washington's commitment to watering the region, the building of Boulder Dam. Historians like Donald Worster and Marc Reisner have interpreted that arc as indicating the fateful joining of federal power with corporate capitalism, producing the massive western dams that have watered both agribusiness and urban expansion. Pisani provides a useful corrective to this view, however, noting that it has tended to read back into the pre-World War II years the power politics of the "high dam era." In Pisani's rendering, the years between 1902 and 1935 show a continuing tendency toward "fragmentation," as the weak administrative structure of the Interior Department and competing interest groups and politicians undermined larger goals the bureau might have had toward water planning in the West. |
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In ten chapters Pisani unfolds his story with rigorous detail, taking on the angle both from Washington and, in two chapters consisting of case studies, from local communities. As in all his other works, Pisani resides comfortably at the nexus between environmental and political history, illuminating the interplay between nature's contingencies and human agency. |
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It is Pisani's larger conclusion about the relationship between reclamation and American state formation that raises questions. By wanting to counter the now-accepted view that reclamation was evidence of a strong federal state at work in the West, Pisani throws the baby out with the bath water. His inclination is to see the expression of state power in binaries: either it is weak, as in the case of nineteenth-century America, or it is strong and with sizeable pockets of autonomy, as in certain western European bureaucracies. It should come as no surprise that the Reclamation Bureau did not achieve the level of the latter. But Pisani overreaches when he argues that the events in these years should be seen "as evidence of ... traditional nineteenth-century values, rather than as the emergence of 'modern America'" (p. xi). It would have been more valuable for him to frame his book in larger and more fluid terms, identifying the ways in which reclamation created, reconfigured, and concentrated particular nodes of power in the West. Indeed, his case studies of the Yakima and the Pima Indians provide extraordinarily vivid examples of the effects reclamation had on local power relations, although one could pull many other instances from his book. Federal reclamation may be a showcase for the failure of American government to plan effectively, but it was also, as Pisani notes, a remarkably bold program, and the actual details of his book show just how prominent a hand it had in creating the modern West. |
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Reviewed by Karen R. Merrill, Williams College. |
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