It will always be "Boulder Dam" to Me
Last edited Wed Jul 4, 2012, 03:19 AM - Edit history (1)
Reading COLOSSUS, the 2010 book about the Hoover Dam. As Secretary of Commerce Hoover was responsible for a lot of the water rights negotiations and for shepherding the idea of large reservoirs on the lower Colorado, so he did lay a lot of the groundwork for what became the dam project, but during the process he did everything he could to discourage a tall dam capable of producing hydro-electric power because that would be socialism.
The idea of federal money being spent to in any way produce electric power was obviously unfair to the electric utility monopolies. The low rates for Boulder Dam electricity would make people look askance at the private utility rates. As the party line went, anything that private industry can do the government has no business doing, and power generation was a private business concern.
Since the dam was surely needed and the only practical way to pay for the dam project was selling the power it could generate, it was a hot issue.
At the time, municipal power, the extraordinary idea that a city might want to make and control something absolutely vital to the ongoing existence of the city and everyone in it, was decried daily as "Sovietism." As always, the Chandler family led the way, with their L. A. Times a daily compendium of horror stories about how government electricity, and tall dams in general, would ruin every man, woman and child in southern California. (As well as threatening to keep water in the USA that was, at the time, watering the Chandler family's vast land holdings in Mexico, though the LAT didn't play up that angle.)
The utility trusts spent big money poisoning public opinion about the Boulder Dam idea. See if this all sounds familiar... they paid college professors to be dam-skeptics, writing anti-dam papers and editorials, they edited public school textbooks to laud the wisdom of privately owned energy, the placed astroturf letters to the editor in every paper, over the names of real citizens who merely signed what they were handed by the utilities, and they bribed cogressmen on key committees.
From Obamacare to global warming it's a familiar tale. What was unlike today, however, was that when the power utilities' efforts to control public opinion were exposed the public was upset. Think about that! A public so delightfully naive as to be upset at the intense corporate brain-washing we take for granted today as just "good business."
It was such a big story that the power company manipulation of public opinion made it into Curtis MacDougall's 1958 book "Hoaxes," alongside the Piltdown man and Barnum's mermaid. Again, think of that...corporate opinion-making being a notable hoax.
Oddly, the Hearst papers led the way in exposing the utility propaganda campaign... probably because Chandler was a rival to San Francisco based Hearst, or just because Hearst's business interests were aligned with the dam, rather than against it.
Public indignation over the manipulation of public opinion was so high that some congressmen actually voted for the project because their constituents demanded that private power not be allowed to win, and/or to show that they were not owned by the utilities.
Anyway... Boulder Dam was (re) named Hoover Dam in 1947. I assume that was one of the signal acts of the Republican post-war "do nothing" congress.
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