Reading List: Hoover Dam, An American Adventure

Stevens, Joseph. Hoover Dam: an American Adventure. 1st ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

Most are familiar with the tale of the Hoover Dam. Begun in 1931 and completed in 1936, the dam at the time of its construction was the largest dam in the world, and even today stands as an engineering feat of the highest order. Stevens’ award winning social history of the Dam’s construction begins with the early attempts to tame the wild Colorado, the most ambitious of which resulted in the Salton Sea disaster in 1907.

Even years before that, though, Bureau of Reclamation engineers had begun looking for sites at which a dam could be constructed in Boulder Canyon, its steep rising faces guiding the river between Arizona and Nevada. Twenty years later in 1921-22 engineers began the work of finalizing site selection, eventually settling on a site in Black Canyon. Confusing the historicity of the dam is the fact that the original site upon which Congress believed the dam would be built was in Boulder Canyon. Thus, much of the political debate over the funding of the dam, and the naming of the dam stems from the fact that it was always referred to in the halls of government as “Boulder Dam.”

Another interesting part of the tale surrounds then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. The water from the project would be shared by seven states – Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California. Thus, politics over the distribution of the water among the states was a major issue, an issue eventually solved by Herbert Hoover who recommended splitting the water equally between the northern and southern states. This agreement was enough to get the project moving. As an aside, this role of Hoover as the broker of one of the west’s largest water deals places him again at the center of urban history, Hoover of course being known in the urban studies realm as one of the founders of the modern housing industry.

As previously alluded the simple facts of the Hoover Dam have been well covered and need little repeating. As with the involvement of Hoover, for whom the Dam is still named today, the story of the Dam is as much about the human players as it is the engineering and construction spectacle. Frank Crowe as engineer for Morrison-Knudsen – one of the firms that participated in “Six Companies,” which constructed the dam gets most of the billing, but the rest of the Six Companies officials have stories of their own and a cohesive philosophy that bears telling.

Harry Morrison of Morrison-Knudsen put together the consortium of six companies (M-K, Utah Construction, Kaiser, Bechtel, Shea, and Warren Brothers) because no one firm was financially strong enough to get bonding on a project this size. Warren Brothers were the only east coast firm in the partnership, and that was by design. Stevens explains the importance of the western ethic in the minds of these men as he recalls Bechtel’s work at building a team that could bid on the Dam:

First, Kaiser and Bechtel knew and had worked with all the principals in the Morrison combine. They would be dealing with contractors of their own stripe, men W. H. Wattis aptly described as, “our kind.” Second, by joining Utah-Morrison they would forge a group that was, with the exception of the Warren Brothers, entirely western. Ever the visionary, Kaiser saw Hoover Dam as the key to large-scale industrial development in the West, which would create a bonanza of construction work and other business opportunities. He realized that if a coalition of western contractors could build the dam, then pick up the contracts that were sure to follow, it could end longstanding eastern domination of the construction industry and precipitate a major shift of economic power from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific (p. 42).

We know now that Kaiser was correct. Power from the Hoover Dam, in part, led to a boom in west coast manufacturing in which he was a major player. As the war broke out, Kaiser and Morrison built ships on the west coast and workers swarmed to California to munitions, shipbuilding, and aviation plants. Morrison would later then be responsible for building military bases in the Pacific, which helped Allied Forces gain control there. Though Kaiser’s industrial career has been well documented, the stories of the rest of these men who saw themselves as architects of a pacific century, have gone relatively unnoticed.

Stevens does not shy from the difficult parts of the story. Many workers died on the project, many others were sickened. While Crowe and Morrison were at the forefront of construction practice, being among the first to introduce gasoline powered equipment on a job site, that technological advancement came with a cost. Gasoline powered trucks idling in tunnels led to workers being poisoned by carbon monoxide. In lawsuits on behalf of some workers, Six Companies was found to have tampered with witnesses and juries. The federal government under the new Roosevelt administration also pressed Six Companies on racial issues, and overtime pay practices. Union busting on the part of the company was a constant endeavor. None of that however should be understood as being unique to Six Companies. To the contrary: that mirrors much of the economic and labor history of the early twentieth century.

It seems interesting practice to me to write a social history using an inanimate object – a dam, a piece of our built environment – as the focal point. Stevens though writes a brilliant, if uncritical, story of what is one of the world’s great engineering accomplishments. Hoover Dam is no ordinary structure. It can rightly be pointed to as being a prime driver of the boom of the Sunbelt. Without the power and water from this facility there probably is no Las Vegas or Phoenix, and a downsized Los Angeles is all that we might ever know. Even today, nearly all of the power generated by the Dam is sold to those three metro regions. Aside from a first rate book by a talented writer, Stevens has also left a major gift to future historians – the ability to tell the tales of the Harry Morrisons, the Wattises, the Bechtels – the people who were there to make this thing possible.