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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.
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| 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. |
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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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Sturgeon gives us a narrowly focused but astute water politician, one of the few to understand the Colorado River's limits. Both authors guide us through the complexity of water politics to portray a skillful legislator who gained the power to demand authorization of five questionable water projects in his own district as his price to approve the Central Arizona Project in 1968. Nevertheless, his brilliant tactical victory came too late, and 1968 proved to be the end of an era, not the hoped for beginning of vast interbasin water transfers. Three of his projects have not been built; California still gets more than its legal entitlement of water; and there have been no significant new reclamation projects. Both authors note Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire thesis; but Aspinall appears more provincial than imperial, a man whose power came from position and personal qualities. |
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Schulte argues Aspinall was a "visionary" (p. ix), "one of the leading congressional forces in conservation policy" (p. 85), whose thinking "was broad, sweeping, and potentially revolutionary" (p. 236). He consistently fought for congressional prerogative and resource development, created and chaired the Public Land Law Review Commission, but failed in his ambitious attempt to rewrite the whole body of public land law. Sturgeon reports that Aspinall's tombstone credits him as the "architect" of the Wilderness Act, a seemingly ludicrous claim; but Schulte shows how Aspinall wrote congressional control of wilderness designation and protection of mining into that law. |
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A sub-theme of both books is rivalry between Aspinall and Stewart Udall, interior secretary from 1961 to 1969. Although Aspinall believed he was more qualified for the cabinet position, Udall developed a conservation agenda, won presidential and public support, and compiled an unmatched record for establishing parks and passing laws on wilderness, wild and scenic rivers, and environmental protection. While Udall's vision grew, Aspinall's seemed to narrow, and Udall would see the chairman as a "brakeman" who demanded constant attention. Both Sturgeon and Schulte gained insights from their interviews with Udall and made good use of his papers, which are indispensable for understanding 1960s environmental politics. |
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The two books provide detailed but clear legislative history while illuminating the changing political process and values of the postwar West. Aspinall arrived in Congress in 1949 to find a disciplined system in which chairmen ruled their committees and junior representatives learned the system and waited their turn for power. Unusually rapid turnover on the Interior Committee sped Aspinall's rise to chair in 1959, and he controlled the committee from hiring its staff to setting agendas and frequently presiding over subcommittee hearings. When congressional reformers changed the rules during his last term, his power weakened. Meanwhile Aspinall kept his faith in the value of economic growth based on resource development guided by experts. When conservation organizations and national media attacked his views as outdated, he mused, "One would be led to think that it is un-American to advocate the conservation policies of Gifford Pinchot" (Schulte, p. 139). Yet even his constituent western Coloradans eventually would question his judgment. A longtime champion of uranium mining, Aspinall had constituents turn on him when they found radioactive mining debris built into their homes and offices. Finally, when the Colorado legislature changed his district boundaries, forcing him to face younger, more urban voters, and conservation groups listed him as the worst of the "dirty dozen" anti-environmentalists, he lost the 1972 primary to a candidate who denounced his outmoded thinking. |
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Schulte and Sturgeon agree that Aspinall had become inflexible, and his power faded when the country moved away from his pro-development, pro-resource user outlook. Views change, however, and he would later help found the Mountain States Legal Foundation, influence the Sagebrush Rebellion, and applaud Ronald Reagan's appointment of James Watt to be secretary of the Interior Department. Thirty years after Aspinall left Congress and twenty years after his death, today's national resource policies seem closer to Aspinall's than to his critics'. These fine studies document his role in shaping the postwar West and suggest that he still casts a long shadow. Environmental historians will learn more about the importance of a man too often dismissed as an inconsequential obstructionist. |
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Charles Coate is emeritus professor of history at Eastern Oregon University and is working on a study of 1960s environmental politics. |
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