David P. Billington, Donald C. Jackson. Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. vii + 369 pp. $36.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8061-3795-7.
Reviewed by Eliza L. Martin (Department of History, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Published on H-Water (June, 2008)
Big Dams: Rise of the Federally Funded, Multipurpose Dam
Anyone who has ever seen a large dam, such as Hoover or Grand Coulee, has to wonder about the effort and audacity that goes into building such a structure. Beginning in the period where Donald C. Jackson's previous effort, Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West (1995), left off, David P. Billington and Jackson's Big Dams of the New Deal Era provides a political and technological history of large, federally funded, multipurpose dams built in the Colorado, Columbia, Missouri, and Sacramento/San Joaquin river basins from roughly the 1920s to the 1940s. The authors argue that the New Deal acted as a "catalyst" for dam construction, as the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the nationwide urge to put people to work during the Great Depression fueled a federal dam building bonanza (p. 4). The authors use various case studies to demonstrate that although large federal dams can be viewed as symbols of modernization and industrialization, a variety of goals and interests shaped these projects, not just the simplified economics versus environment stance that dominates popular dam discourse today. They also discuss how the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, agencies with jurisdiction over irrigation and navigation respectively, became responsible for federal dam construction projects in the early twentieth century, and how this affected later hydraulic endeavors.
During this period, large dams became part of the national public works infrastructure. Though "federal dam building evolved slowly out of a constitutionally derived authority over navigable waterways," Billington and Jackson point out that the changing political climate during the interwar years had an impact on dam construction (p. 5). Most previous hydraulic projects received funding from private or local concerns. This source of funding changed during the New Deal era, especially with the election of Roosevelt, a president more open to the funding of large federal projects and a supporter of government involvement in natural resource development. Concurrently, dam building became a popular endeavor as a result of the Great Depression and the subsequent urgency to get as many workers as possible on federal payrolls. Big Dams of the New Deal Era offers a smattering of tantalizing insights into the lives of these dam workers. Though dirty and dangerous, these projects employed thousands across the American West; "big dams meant jobs" (p. 156). Other factors, such as periodic devastating, large-scale flooding and the increasing allure of hydroelectric power, also contributed to federal involvement in river basin development. The relatively recent ability to successfully transmit electric power across long distances provided a way for these dams to create revenue to pay for themselves, yet simultaneously created tension between advocates of public power and the privately funded power sector.
The influence of Jackson's previous work on dam designer/architect John Eastwood is evident, as this book also touches on the controversy over what Jackson labels "massive" versus "structural" dam traditions. Yet, instead of placing the focus on the psychology of massive dams as Jackson does in his first book, Billington and Jackson stress the expanded opportunities for employment provided by a massive versus a structural dam, an increasingly important consideration as the federal government strove to put people to work during the Great Depression. Massive dams continued to be constructed over more efficient designs as the government became less willing to wait for engineers to innovate when there were people clamoring for the jobs these projects would provide. And cutting labor costs was antithetical to the project's overall goals. Even after the tragic Saint Francis Dam failure in 1928 in Los Angeles, when the concrete curved gravity dam collapsed, killing hundreds, engineers remained loyal to the massive dam tradition. Yet, even with this similar engineering vision, each river basin provided a different challenge.
The authors do an excellent job presenting technical information for the nonspecialist. While opening a window onto the basic mathematics behind dam design, it does not overwhelm a nonengineering audience. An aesthetically pleasing book, the many illustrations, including photographs, site plans, and schematics, give visual weight to the arguments and help to clarify complicated design concepts presented in the text. To expand their work, the authors could have given more attention to dams as national symbols and monuments to technical mastery over nature, as well as what the legacies of these dams mean for us today. The authors also could have written more about popular responses to these projects. Was there any resistance to building these dams at the time? Billington and Jackson do not explore the impact of the dams after they were built; this is not a book for those looking for criticisms of large dam projects. Yet, they successfully present a wide variety of case studies, giving readers a taste of the politics and engineering behind many different New Deal dam projects.
Big Dams of the New Deal Era makes a valuable contribution to the literature on dams, engineering, and politics in the American West, opening the conversation about New Deal hydraulic projects beyond the standard discussion of the Tennessee Valley Authority. During the New Deal era, big dams and the federal government became inexorably linked in a way not previously experienced. This period sealed the ascendancy of the massive dam tradition over structural designs as well as the importance of hydroelectricity as a key component for federal involvement in dam construction. The predominant role of dams has changed over time--in the 1930s and 1940s, the United States was much more dependent on large dams for power than we are today--but debates over hydroelectricity become increasingly important as we look to possible "green" alternatives to fossil fuel use. It is important that as a society we continue to explore our historic political and social relationship to big dams as we struggle to make informed decisions about our future.
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Citation:
Eliza L. Martin. Review of Billington, David P.; Jackson, Donald C., Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics.
H-Water, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14565
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