Case:                            Damming Rivers

 

Theme:             Industrial and Technological Change

 

Time Period:    Great Depression/New Deal (1929-1939)

 

 

I.  Overview of Case Topic:

 

 

The Great Depression was widely viewed as a systemic collapse of American society and commerce that required a systematic response from the federal government. Unemployment and the stock market crash were symptoms of a more fundamental problem with the nation as a whole, one that stemmed from what President Roosevelt called "a decade of debauch, of group selfishness—the sole objective expressed in the thought—'every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.' And the result was that about 98% of the American population turned out to be 'the hindmost.'” While the consequences were apparent in soup kitchens and foreclosures, they were even more dramatically manifest in images of great river floods in the Mississippi Valley, dust storms on the plains, and the internal migrations of the landless refugees to California and the Pacific Northwest. These were not “natural disasters,” but human caused tragedies that resulted from the wholesale exploitation of soils, rivers, and forests –and the economic and legal systems that made such exploitation both necessary and temporarily profitable. In short, America was broken –economically, socially, and physically. The goal of New Deal was to use federal authority to fix the nation in a way that would allow for a more stable and sustainable development that fostered private enterprise while keeping the more destructive aspects of individualism in check. Broken economic systems would be re-aligned, broken environments would be re-engineered, and broken people would be restored. The Pacific Northwest fit within this broader scheme in a unique way. It was not broken, but it could be made to serve the nation as a whole through the engineering of the Columbia River system. Doing so would irrigate lands for landless refugees from the Midwest, energize commerce through cheap river shipping, and spur industrial development through cheap and plentiful hydroelectricity. The Pacific Northwest could also be a chance to get things right; before it was exploited by the “group selfishness” that had ruined much of the nation’s rivers and forests, the region could be developed in accord with American virtues of fair play and equal chances across the generations. The result would be the modernization of an “underdeveloped” and “underpopulated” region, and its effective integration with the rest of the nation.

To Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New Deal was almost more about natural resource management than anything else. Soil conservation, reforestation, irrigation, scientific agriculture, and parks were all subjects close to the President’s heart and almost continually on his mind –and nothing captured his imagination quite as much as large-scale river development. Unlike some New Deal projects, which Roosevelt admitted could be just well intentioned mistakes, engineering rivers was an unalloyed good. “We think of our land and water and human resources … as life giving assets to be administered by wise-provision for future days,” he declared in “A Message to the Congress On the Use Of Our National Resources.” River development was central to a vision of using “our natural resources not as a thing apart but as something that is interwoven with industry, labor, finance, taxation, agriculture, homes, recreation, good citizenship. The results of this interweaving will have a greater influence on the future American standard of living than all the rest of our economics put together.” The huge multi-use dams built by government for navigation, flood control and navigation would become the icons and legacies of this vision, and images of concrete walls rising above the boiling waters of “untamed” rivers expressed both pragmatic and romantic qualities that commanded an almost universal sense of wonder, hope and excitement. Nowhere was this more true than at Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams on the Columbia River. To know these dams is to know the New Deal; its purposes, its achievements, its shortcomings, its vision of society, nature and nation.

 

 

II.  Connection to Theme/Time Matrix:

Technology is not the result of an inevitable process of advancement and progress, it is an expression of culture. This is certainly the case with dams in the Columbia Basin, which grew out of the hopes and concerns of the Great Depression. Technology can also create common experiences, and when marshaled by a central government authority it can incorporate those experiences into a broader regional or national identity. Before the dams, the Pacific Northwest was less a region than an assortment of economically isolated communities. Since the dams, however, it is a readily identifiable region of the United States that has been integrated around the engineering of the Columbia and its major tributaries. Hydraulic engineering can alter and integrate physical environments as much as human communities. The 400 dams that regulate the flow of the Columbia, Snake, Yakima, Deschutes, Willamette and other rivers and tributaries have profoundly altered the landscape in ways both planned and unplanned. In either case, the engineered environments of the basin reflect the values of an earlier age that are now often rejected as destructive or environmentally naïve. Removing or significantly altering the current hydraulic regime is not an option, however, and so new technological applications are piled on to what the historian Richard White has called an “Organic Machine.”

 

 

III.  Historical Questions:

 

What kinds of economic benefits can people derive from a river?

 

What kinds of non-economic benefits can people derive from a river?

 

What can it tell us about a society when it views undammed rivers as inefficient and wasteful? What view of Nature does such a view convey?

 

What would it take to remove all of the dams on the Columbia River? How does imagining that task give a sense of the planning, organization and conviction that went into engineering the river in the first place?

 

What have been the consequences of dams for Native peoples and salmon?

 

How might people have rationalized dam building when they knew it would break treaties, dispossess Indians, and undermine the most productive and profitable fishery in the world?

 

Did dams create the kinds of small farms envisioned regional planners? If not, why not?

 

Who opposed federal dam building on the Columbia in the 1930s?

 

How is federal river development  on the Columbia and Willamette River different from Pacific Power’s project on the North Umpqua?

 

In addition to providing employment to thousands of unemployed people during the depression, engineering the Columbia river was promoted in the 1930s for 4 basic reasons: to provide irrigation for the arid Columbia Basin, which would encourage small, family farms in the region and provide a home and livelihood for dustbowl refugees; provide electric power, at cost, to average citizens including those living in rural locations; improve navigation and open ports as far east as Idaho; and control flooding. How well have the dams in the Columbia Basin lived up to these promises? How important is it to maintain any or all of these efforts?

 

 

IV.  Resources:

 

A.      Secondary Sources:

 

Cone, Joseph. A Common Fate: Endangered Salmon and People of the Pacific Northwest. Oregon State University Press, 1996.

 

Dietrich, William. Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River. Simon and Shuster, 1995.

Fisher, Lorena S. The Bonneville Dream. Binford & Mort, 1991.

 

Lang, William L. ed. The Columbia River Reader (Washington State Historical Society,1992)

 

                        . “Failed Federalism: The Columbia Valley Authority and Regionalism; in The Great Northwest: The Search for Regional Identity, William G. Robbins, ed. Oregon State University Press, 2001: 66-77.

 

                        . “What Has Happened to the Columbia? A Great River’s Fate in the Twentieth Century;” in Great River of the West: Essays on the Columbia River, William L. Lang  and Robert C. Carrikereds. Washington Historical Society Press, 1999: 144-168

 

Lowitt, Richard. The New Deal and the West (Chapter 6) University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

 

Palmer, Tim. The Columbia: Sustaining a Modern Resource. Mountaineer Books, 1997.

 

Pitzer, Paul C. Grand Coulee: Harnessing a Dream. Washington State University Press, 1994.

 

Robbins, William. "The Willamette Valley Project of Oregon: A Study in the Political Economy of Water Resource Development." Pacific Historical Review 47 (1978): 585-605.

 

Taylor, Joseph E. Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. University of Washington Press, 1999.

 

White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. Hill and Wang, 1995.

 

Willingham, William F. Army Engineers and the Development of Oregon: A History of the Portland District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (chaps. 7 & 8) USACOE Portland District, 1983.

 

Film: Roll on Columbia: Woody Guthrie and the Bonneville Power Administration. University of Oregon, 2000.

 

 

B.      Primary: Print (Available locally and through the TAH Website)

 

“Dams and dollars broaden the federal sovereignty.” Newsweek 10:9  Oct. 11, 1937.

 

“Power, dams and politics.”  Nation  148:317  Mar. 18, 1939

 

“Power play: who is going to sell the electricity produced by harnessing the Columbia River?”  Collier’s  102:12-13+ Oct. 22, 1938.

 

“Sneak play, maybe …”  Oregon Voter  101:1034-43  Oct. 4, 1941.

 

Cain, H.P.  CVA: its background and issues.  Congressional Digest  29:5012+  Jan, 1950.

 

Davenport, W. “Power in the wilderness; Grand Coulee and Bonneville.”  Collier’s  96:10-11+  Sept. 21, 1935.

 

C.      Primary: Websites

 

Letter of Transmittal Accompanying the “308 Report” (House Document No. 308, 69th Congress, 1st session). http://www.ccrh.org/comm/umatilla/primary/308rprt.htm

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt, “A Message to the Congress On the Use Of Our National Resources, January, 24 1935,” The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Volume Four: The Court disapproves, 1935, ed., Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Random House, 1938), 59. Available online at The New Deal Network website: http://newdeal.feri.org/speeches/1935c.htm.

 

FDR, “A Suggestion for Legislation to Create the Tennessee Valley Authority, April 10, 1933,” in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Volume Two: The Year of Crisis, ed., Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Random House, 1938), 122-29. Available online at The New Deal Network website: [http://newdeal.feri.org/speeches/1933j.htm]

 

FDR, “Portland Speech: Public Utilities Hydro-Electric Power,” reprinted in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Volume One, The Genesis of the New Deal, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman (New York City: Random House, 1938), p. 727. Available online at The New Deal Network website: http://newdeal.feri.org/texts/60.htm

 

FDR, “Address at Bonneville Dam, Oregon” September 28, 1937 http://www.ccrh.org/comm/camas/primary%20docs/1937speech.htm

 

Neuberger, “The Columbia Flows to the Land,” Survey Graphic 28 (July 1939), 440. Available on line at The New Deal Network website: http://newdeal.feri.org/survey/39a08.htm.

 

D.     Primary: Films

 

Hydro: The Story of Columbia River Power, prod. and dir. by Gunther V. Fritsch, 34 min., Bonneville Power Authority, 1939.

Hydro: The Story of Columbia River Power (Bonneville Power Administration, 1939, 34 min.

 

The Columbia (Bonneville Power Administration,1949) 22 min.