It’s Still Awesome

Imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt being at a loss for words about anything. But that was his reaction to the awesome expanse of Hoover Dam 50 years ago this coming weekend when an aide asked, “What do you think of it?” The President gazed at the impounded waters of Lake Mead on one side and the 726-foot face of the dam on the other, curving down to the newly controlled Colorado River. He said, “I’m speechless.”

Roosevelt was Roosevelt, however. A few minutes later on Sept. 30, 1935, he delivered a dedication address that pictured the dam as a symbol of his New Deal crusade to shake off the effects of the Great Depression. The accelerated construction schedule--the dam was built in 2 1/2 years--had put thousands of despairing Americans to work and helped revive the sputtering engine of private enterprise, Roosevelt said.

The dam would provide electric power and water for an entire region, including Southern California. It would spare the Lower Colorado the ravages of periodic floods and protect it against drought. It would boost agriculture, mining and manufacturing. And its cheap public power would provide a check on private electricity rates. Hoover has done all of that.

But there was more to the New Deal than just flashy giant projects like Hoover Dam, Roosevelt added defensively. Smaller projects, in particular, were being pushed then under Harry Hopkins’ Works Progress Administration. “Can we say that a five-foot brushwood dam across the headwaters of an arroyo and costing only a millionth part of Boulder Dam is a desirable project or a waste of money? Can we say that the great brick high school costing $2 million is a useful expenditure but that a little wooden schoolhouse project costing $10,000 is a wasteful extravagance?”

(Roosevelt insisted on calling it Boulder Dam, and the name Hoover was not officially restored until 1947.)

Today, with the concrete deep within Hoover Dam still curing, the structure remains an active symbol of public water-works projects large and small and the continuing controversy over low-cost public power. This fall the Central Arizona Project finally will begin pulling Hoover-stored water into the Phoenix area to spur on the urban development of the desert Southwest. The controversial Arizona system, its cost expected to run about $3 billion (Hoover Dam was built for $108 million), is thought by many to be the last reclamation project of its scale.

Now the water engineers seek to find supplies in veritable dribs and drabs, the functional equivalents of Roosevelt’s brushwood arroyo dam and the little wooden schoolhouse. They look for water, for instance, by building conservation works for the Imperial Irrigation District. It is water, nonetheless, made available only by Hoover’s ability to store the Colorado’s runoff. Roosevelt, the man of giant dreams and grand hopes, would have approved of such creative little water projects. He prided himself for his own conservation experiments at Hyde Park and Warm Springs.

There are bigger dams than Hoover now, storing even greater amounts of water. Still, visitors will gaze in awe at the dam during this week’s festivities and declare, “They don’t build ‘em like that anymore.” Indeed.