Cadillac Desert (44 page)

It is probably pure coincidence that, at about the same time, the mid-1960s, the Bureau—especially its chief—began losing touch with other types of reality.

In the early days, Floyd Dominy had been something of a crusader, if only because he hated being pushed around by politicians and big farmers. Bureau water was by far the cheapest in the West, sold at a fraction of its free-market worth, and if you could manage to irrigate enough land with it you could not only prosper, you could grow rich. Legally, under the Reclamation Act, you could irrigate 160 acres and no more. “We didn’t even want them to irrigate that much land,” says Dominy. “The law was created to pack as many farmers as possible in a region with limited water. If they could make a living on forty acres, we gave them water for forty. We were talking about subsistence.” However, many farmers in Bureau projects were irrigating 320 acres, the result of a liberal interpretation of the act that permitted joint ownership and irrigation of 320 acres by a man and wife. (Married men, it was discovered, made more reliable farmers than bachelors.) In all but the highest and coldest regions of the West, you could make a good living on 320 acres irrigated by subsidized water. If you were in California and raised two cash crops a year with water that cost a quarter of a cent per ton, you could make more money than a lawyer. In 1958, the Fresno Chamber of Commerce published a brochure whose purpose was to lure more farmers to the Central Valley, and which estimated the number of irrigated acres one had to plant in various crops to support a family. The figure for oranges was twenty to thirty acres; for peaches, thirty to forty acres; for grapes and raisins, forty to fifty acres; for figs, sixty to eighty acres. Even a hundred and twenty acres of cotton and alfalfa, comparatively low-value crops, could support a family if you had Reclamation water.

Rumors abounded, however, of corporate farmers illegally irrigating thousands of acres with the super-subsidized water—by inventing complicated lease-out lease-back arrangements, by controlling excess land through dummy corporations, by leasing from relatives, and so on. It is unclear how much the Bureau knew about this and how exact its knowledge was; what is clear is that it did little or nothing to end it. Even a self-proclaimed populist like Mike Straus was afraid to tangle with the giant California farming corporations and the politicians they helped elect. “Straus huffed and puffed about the acreage limit,” Dominy said later, “but he didn’t do a damn thing to enforce it.” (This is largely but not completely true. One of Straus’s worries, which turned out to be well founded, was that the Corps of Engineers, unencumbered by social legislation or much of a social conscience, would gladly step in and replace the Bureau as the major water developer of the West if the Bureau began cracking down too hard on violators.)

At first, Dominy was self-righteous about enforcing the Reclamation Act. In 1954, when the Corps of Engineers, with the acquiescence of Interior Under Secretary Clarence Davis, tried to do exactly what Mike Straus feared—let water from its two biggest California reservoirs run free of charge onto the lands of two gigantic farming corporations, the J. G. Boswell Company and the Salyer Land Company—he was apoplectic. “Special Assistant Frye showed the [Under Secretary’s] letter [of acquiescence] to me confidentially,” Dominy wrote in his professional diary on February 4, 1955. “I blew my top and stated emphatically the detrimental effect that would have on Reclamation’s ability to conclude repayment contract negotiations... with other groups of water users. [A] very plausible legal basis can be made that Congress has directed that irrigation water available as a result of Army construction should be sold pursuant to Reclamation law.”

Later, Dominy, now chief of the Irrigation Division, paid a visit to the Boise regional office and learned, he wrote in his diary, “that there is apparently a rather widespread evasion of the incremental land provisions of the Columbia Basin Project Act.” (According to the incremental-land-value provisions of the act, beneficiaries newly supplied with Bureau water are supposed to sell their excess lands at a price reflecting their worth
before
the Bureau water arrived. Otherwise, speculation would be as rampant as in the old days of the Homestead Acts; people with an insider’s knowledge of future projects could buy land in the project area for $10 or $20 an acre and sell it later for fifty times as much.) “I made it plain,” Dominy wrote, “that it was the Bureau of Reclamation’s responsibility to either (a) energetically enforce the law or (b) ask Congress to repeal it.” When Assistant Interior Secretary Aandahl privately expressed extreme reluctance to prosecute the violators, Dominy wrote, “I am happy to report that this is the first time in my 24 years of Government work that I have heard a top administrator say that he was unwilling to take action to enforce a law which he was sworn to uphold and which comes under his jurisdiction.” Ultimately, there was an FBI investigation, a prosecution, and a conviction in the Columbia Basin case. The sentence was a fine of $850. “The sentence made you feel like a fool,” says Gil Stamm, who worked on the case with Dominy and was ultimately to succeed him as commissioner.

It did gross injury to Floyd Dominy’s image to be made to look like a fool. That may be the main reason why, as commissioner, his indignation over violations of the Reclamation Act appeared to evaporate like a summer cloud. Under Dominy’s tenure, the one serious example of enforcement in the Bureau’s career did take place: the breakup of the huge DiGiorgio Company holdings in California after it was proved that the lands were illegally receiving subsidized water. But the main instigator in that action was not Dominy but Frank Barry, the first Interior solicitor under John Kennedy. And though it is true, as Dominy insists, that the record of enforcement during his reign was at least as good as any other commissioner’s, that isn’t saying much, because the record of enforcement over eighty years has been almost nil. Not only that, but the violations had become more frequent and worse by the time Dominy was appointed. It wasn’t until the administration of Jimmy Carter that a serious attempt was even made to find out how bad the violations were. The conclusion was that they had multiplied considerably after the Second World War and reached their apogee about the time Dominy became commissioner. As it happened, the Carter investigation found that the vast majority of illegalities were occurring in California and Arizona. But the senior Senator from Arizona was Dominy’s best friend in Congress, Carl Hayden. In California, the Congressmen who represented the region where most of the acreage violations were taking place were three Dominy stalwarts: Bizz Johnson, John McFall, and Bernie Sisk. None of those gentlemen ever showed much interest in enforcing the acreage limitations of the Reclamation Act. They did, however, display a passionate interest in new dams, and their attitudes became Floyd Dominy’s attitudes the longer he remained in office. He had begun as a crusader, a person who at least appeared to possess a sense of fairness and justice, a non-engineer whose outlook was basically agrarian. He ended his term as a zealot, blind to injustice, locked into a mad-dog campaign against the environmental movement and the whole country over a pair of Grand Canyon dams.

The fact is that Dominy
knew
that scandalous violations of the acreage limit were occurring right around Los Angeles—for example, that the Irvine Ranch, one of the largest private landholdings in the entire world, was illegally receiving immense amounts of taxpayer-subsidized Reclamation water—and did absolutely nothing to stop it. When he was shown the list of violators, compiled during a months-long secret investigation, he put it in his desk drawer and never looked at it again. Though he went to great lengths to try to disprove it, Dominy knew that the Bureau was opening new lands for crops which farmers were paid not to grow back east—cotton being the prime offender. The Bureau could easily have refused to supply new water to a region until it could demonstrate that its crop patterns would not make the nation’s agricultural surpluses worse, but its response, under Dominy, was to launch a belligerent campaign to deny that the problem existed.

When Dominy appeared
not
to realize was that these three syndromes, often occurring at once—farmers illegally irrigating excess acreage with dirt-cheap water in order to grow price-supported crops—were badly tarnishing the Bureau’s reputation. By the 1960s, the Reclamation program was under attack not only from conservationists but from church groups (who objected to its tacit and illegal encouragement of big corporate farms), from conservatives, from economists, from eastern and midwestern farmers, and from a substantial number of newspapers and magazines that had usually supported it in the past—even from the Hearst papers in California. Dominy was not so blind that he didn’t see this; his fatal mistake was in believing that the protest and indignation amounted to sound and fury signifying nothing: Dominy had a peculiar adeptness at denying reality. And the conservation movement was the reality he liked least of all.

T
hroughout its history, the conservation movement had been little more than a minor nuisance to the water-development interests in the American West. They had, after all, twice managed to invade National Parks with dams; they had decimated the greatest salmon fishery in the world, in the Columbia River; they had taken the Serengeti of North America—the virgin Central Valley of California, with its thousands of grizzly bears and immense clouds of migratory waterfowl and its million and a half antelope and tule elk—and transformed it into a banal palatinate of industrial agriculture. The Bureau got away with its role in this partly because its spiritual fathers, John Wesley Powell and Theodore Roosevelt, happened to be two of the foremost conservationists of their day—a heritage which, in the right hands, might have all but immunized it against more modern conservationists’ attacks.

The Bureau’s response to the rising tide of conservation, however, was to let them eat cake. It might have learned some valuable lessons from the Corps of Engineers, which at least knew how to build a Trojan horse. While the Corps was preoccupied with such mightily intrusive wonders as the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway and its county-size reservoirs in the South, it was proclaiming the 1970s the “Decade of the Environment,” publishing a four-color magazine devoted to wild rivers and fish and swamps, and holding regular palavers with its environmental adversaries to throw them off guard. General John Woodland Morris, who became chief of the Corps in 1970, is regarded by many conservationists as the most brilliant and effective adversary they ever met. Some of the same adjectives are used to describe Dominy—tough, brilliant, formidable—but it is odd how seldom anyone refers to him as “effective.”

Dominy’s problem stemmed from a fatal sin—pride—and a fatal misjudgment: that his despised adversary, David Brower, was the corporeity of the conservation movement—its unanimous voice, its unified soul. To Dominy, anyone who objected to any single thing the Bureau wanted to do was “a Dave Brower type.” He failed utterly to understand that Brower had always been a fringe figure in the conservation movement—respected, admired, but not necessarily followed or trusted or believed. Jack Morris of the Corps understood that, as a rule, conservationists enjoyed widespread public respect—that an endorsement from one conservation organization was worth the endorsements of a hundred Chambers of Commerce. He knew that when it came to a conflict between nature and civilization, millions of Americans automatically turned to the conservation groups for guidance. If such an organization endorsed a compromise proposal, general opposition could die like a puff of wind.

But the last thing Floyd Dominy was going to do was seek a compromise with conservation groups. If he went out of his way at all, it was to antagonize them. On February 13, 1966, he gave a speech in North Dakota lambasting the principle that certain rivers, or portions of rivers, ought to be set aside as “wild and scenic.” Calling the undammed Colorado River “useless to anyone,” Dominy harrumphed, “I’ve seen all the wild rivers I ever want to see.” The speech elicited a testy letter from the state’s fish and game commissioner (who was hardly a Dave Brower type) to Stewart Udall, suggesting that Dominy badly needed some edification about changing American values—not to mention the importance of rivers and wetlands to waterfowl. “Floyd, it seems to me that Commissioner Stuart has a point,” Udall wrote in a short memo with a copy of the letter attached. “My Secretary’s becoming a Dave Brower type,” Dominy sneered to his comrades in arms. A few months later, ignoring his advice, Congress passed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

Under Dominy, the Bureau lost touch with reality so completely that it developed an uncanny knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. At the northern end of Lake Havasu, a few miles south of Needles, California, it had inadvertently created a large freshwater wetland known as Topock Marsh. Migrating ducks and geese that were evicted from the Central Valley soon discovered the marsh and descended on it by the tens of thousands during their winter sojourns. By the late 1940s, Topock Marsh had become one of the most important man-made attractions on the Pacific Flyway, and the Bureau, had it had any sense, would have graciously accepted its share of credit and basked in it. The grasses and duckweed, however, were phreatophytes, and consumed valuable water that could have been sold to Imperial Valley farmers for $3.50 an acre-foot. As a result, the Bureau began trying to dredge the marsh in 1948; when at first the dredging didn’t work, it spent millions of dollars and stepped up its efforts and pursued them so relentlessly that by the 1960s about 90 percent of the food grasses were gone. The marsh’s visiting waterfowl soon diminished from forty or fifty thousand a year to a few hundred or thousand at most.