The Dreamt Land by Mark Arax

Author:Mark Arax
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

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In the winter of 1935, Edward Hyatt, the state engineer who had authored a report titled “Water Is the Life Blood of California,” sat in front of Congress for the first of many hearings on funding the Central Valley Project. California had tried and failed to sell the $170 million in construction bonds on its own. If the project was going to get built, the federal government would have to cover the entire cost. Congress and the White House seemed inclined to do so, but first the legislative committees needed to hear from Hyatt that it would be a federal project and not a state project. Would the citizens of California defer to either the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, the two federal builders of dams, to design, construct and operate the project? Hyatt squirmed in his chair. He knew that pleading for federal dollars while insisting on state control was not good form, but a lot of important people in California didn’t want Washington to have any say on how they used their water.

“The state wants this project before the country dries up and blows away,” Hyatt testified. “My personal view is it would be handled better under state authority than it would under federal authority.”

Congressman Riley J. Wilson from Louisiana pressed him on this: “It is your view that this project should be undertaken as a federal project with state assistance or as a state project with the assistance of the federal government?”

“This is a matter of secondary interest in California,” Hyatt replied. “California wants the project constructed, and if the federal government desires to take charge of it, I am sure the people of California will say well and good. They are desperate.”

Over the next several years, Hyatt testified multiple times before Congress to push the project forward, first through the weary of the Depression and then through the anxiety of the Second World War. He was joined by California’s political leaders and big farmers who grudgingly accepted federal control, too. But with each round of questions and retorts, the project’s ambition—how many acres of farmland it might save—seemed to grow. These changes were subtle enough that no congressman called out California’s delegation for supplanting one bold vision with an even more far-reaching one. Hyatt was no longer pledging that the project would save only two hundred thousand acres from the ravages of a Dust Bowl come west. “It will save one-half million irrigated acres from returning to desert and prevent the extinction of a high-type of civilization on this vast area,” he testified. “It will save fifty thousand American citizens from abandoning their homes.”

To the skeptical committee member, this last figure seemed to be pulled right out of his backside. “If this irrigation project goes through, it will put more acreage into production, will it not?” asked James Fitzpatrick, a congressman from New York.

Hyatt’s equivocation was engineer-like: “No sir, it is not so designed. The canal capacities and the amount of water are all designed to serve only the land that is now under irrigation.

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