California and the Trickle-Down Theory : BATTLING THE INLAND SEA: American Culture, Public Policy & the Sacramento Valley, 1850-1896 <i> by Robert Kelley (University of California, Berkeley: $35; 461 pp; 0-520-06487-9) </i>

For thousands of years, a periodic lake about 100 miles long in the Sacramento Valley would form a miasma of tules, waterfowl and mist rising off the morning waters. No one cared. Then gold was discovered at John Sutter’s place, towns began to pock the Valley floor, fields were plowed, and the lake that came and went with the rains became something new: a problem, a public-policy issue, an adversary in a war that continues to this day. Americans built an agricultural empire on the flat lowlands of Central California and chose to ignore the fact that this place was given to some of the fiercest runoff in the nation.

Robert Kelley, a history professor at UC Santa Barbara, has written a detailed account of this struggle. It is pleasantly written (although hardly a beach book, it does hail from an earlier style of scholarship when history told a story) and buttressed by the requisite scholarly footnotes and imposing bibliography.

Over the course of 20 years, Kelley worked from time to time as a historical consultant on flooding attached to state’s attorney general’s office. Much of the research for his test resulted from those toils.

He presents the story as a case study in public-policy decisions, and at times the book considers various theories of societal behavior, with the usual flutter of theses about human behavior from secondary sources. But the main thrust of the text is the narrative of the people trying to take the valley and the rivers--the Yuba, Bear, Feather--and Sacramento trying to take it back.

He outlines two core political and personal outlooks, Jeffersonian Democrat, locally based and seeking decentralized government, and Whig-Hamiltonian-Republican, worshiping education and a strong central government, and exhibiting a distrust of the actions and morals of the common man. These two belief systems wrestle with solutions for the flooding--whether it is to be solved by the actions of individuals or by the state.

For decades both fail, in part because few can grasp the enormity of the waters coming off the Sierra Nevada. As late as the first decade of this century, the government pegged the maximum possible flow in the Sacramento at 250,000 acre-feet--the flood of 1907 reached 600,000, and that of 1986 may have touched 1 million. This ignorance alone doomed all plans for a solution.

Also, all solutions failed because both cultural outlooks were paralyzed by attitudes about the role of government. Until the turn of the century, hydraulic gold mining in the Sierra clogged the riverbeds with debris, greatly increased flooding; yet no one could stomach putting them out of business because, well, business is not the government’s business.

But the deeper reason was clearly not the size of the runoff, or disputes over various plans, but the attitudes toward government itself--in short, toward power. And here is where Kelley’s history comes alive, in the person of people like Will Green, a Southern Democrat country-newspaper editor, who lived in the valley from the 1850s until his death in 1906 and who grasped both the enormity of the rivers’ flows, and, although completely self-educated, intuited the engineering solution through bypasses (a solution denounced by the Army’s Corp of Engineers for decades) that eventually tamed the rivers in the 20th Century.

Yet, even with this knowledge of the country, his insights into the mechanics of the river, his cracker-barrel feel for the politics of the local people, Green was helpless at putting forth any sensible public policy because his Jeffersonian roots prevented him from believing in a strong central government. The rivers sprawling over various counties, raging off the mountains, mocked any local efforts to keep them within their banks. At one point, Green’s newspaper was recommending vigilante action against rich landowners whose levees threatened the land of smaller owners--actions that repeatedly occurred in the valley as owner went against owner, town against town.

The Republicans peddling a valley-wide plan administered by experts (then as now a red flag to much of the American people) fared no better, in part because they lacked governmental instruments and acknowledged powers like the huge corporate state exhibits today, and in part because they were dead wrong about the size of the floods (off, along with the Corp of Engineers, by at least 100%).

What finally happened? Well, the country changed and with faltering, then faster steps in the early 20th Century, we reached for centralized big government and slammed down federal solutions to problems as local as a river drowning a farmer’s orchard. Look out any window in the West, and the change in our attitudes is visible in every dam, freeway and irrigation district.

What have we learned? For Kelley, reviewing various theories of policy-making, his book tests such as notions as whether political decisions are based on a simple rational calculus, whether they can be understood through single causation or a more complex multiple causation, and so forth. Basically, he successfully knocks down a bunch of straw men and gives the reader a nice overview of two centuries of American political thought and social history. That’s fine.

But the most fascinating features of the book are the rivers themselves, and the text leaves me wondering whether we’ve ever really faced them. For the huge runoffs from the Sierra are not a problem but a fact, and until global weather patterns change, they will continue.

The massive public-works projects to contain the rivers (and they are massive; just opening up the mouth of the Sacramento at the bay in the teens and ‘20s moved more dirt than did the Panama Canal project) still are overwhelmed from time to time, witness the bad flooding in 1986. What we’ve achieved, as Holland has, is a kind of holding action. And we can savor our rice fields, build our houses and admire the orchards for a while. But we can’t change the game, and we do not wish to pause and calculate whether the game is worth the candle.

That would call our whole history into question.