Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture, Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley, 1850–1986 by Robert Kelley

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 403 dedicated reader to find. It is sad, however, that Princeton University Press would publish such a poorly written book without some more drastic editing. Vern L. Bullough Dr. Bullough is SUNY Distinguished Professor at State University College of New York at Buffalo. One of his specialties is the history of medicine and public health. His latest work is a textbook on Nursing in the Community (St. Louis, 1990), coauthored and edited with Bonnie Bullough. Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture, Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley, 1850—1986. By Robert Kelley. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Pp. xxi + 395; illus­ trations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. Here is a book to be enjoyed at one or all of three levels: as a fascinating narrative, an examination of public policy, and an analysis of how political allegiances have defined technological development. Robert Kelley’s narrative traces the challenge faced by newcomers to California who found the Sacramento Valley a fertile region for ag­ riculture during the gold rush era. The area could yield an astonishing abundance of cash crops, but it was also vulnerable to periodic flood­ ing. During rainstorms, the tributary streams draining into the Sac­ ramento River overflowed their banks and created a vast inland sea. Farmers had to deal with the dilemma of a rich agricultural region that could treacherously destroy all of their efforts. Their problem was compounded by the detritus dumped into upstream rivers by hydraulic mining operations. This debris steadily raised the height of the riverbeds, which made the problem of constructing levees ever more frustrating and difficult. To respond to this challenge, Sacramento Valley farmers needed to develop a plan. Working out a solution, however, required more than a half century of trial and error, the shedding of inaccurate assump­ tions about river flows, and far more money than anyone in the 1850s imagined. As Kelley reveals, the solution was a hard time coming. For most of the first half century of California statehood, the Democratic party controlled the state legislature, with a membership that sub­ scribed to the Jeffersonian ideal of local problems being solved by local people. As a result, state policy for the valley often left farmers to their own devices. Large-scale farmers with enough capital built levees that deflected flood waters onto land owned by other farmers. Wealthy or yeoman class, farmers could do little to persuade the legislature to do anything about the destructive nature of hydraulic mining; that problem was finally solved by a landmark decision of the state supreme court. The farmers’ dilemma essentially boiled down to 404 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE whether they were willing to conceptualize a truly regional floodcontrol plan or continue to spend money on levees that failed to provide a coherent solution for the entire community. It did not help matters that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which came to build many of the weirs, channels, and levees, was committed to the idea that the river could be contained within one major channel, a view time and again proved wrong by the realities of the Sacramento River in floodtime. It is in his third level of analysis that Kelley provides some fascinating food for thought. Noting that it was during those brief periods when the Republican party captured the legislature that comprehensive plans were proposed to deal with the problem, Kelley argues that a whig view of government solved the problem of how to furnish the necessary resources to do the job. Jeffersonian common sense and on-the-spot observation were well and good, but private enterprise simply could not envision the scope needed to deal with the challenge. Kelley credits the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, along with some rare good luck, in establishing the flood-control system that would remake the Sacramento Valley in the 20th century. The good luck, incidentally, came from a flood in 1907 that dwarfed all earlier disasters, and that arrived shortly before the expenditure of a large sum of money on a Corps of Engineers project. The flood finally convinced the engineers to go along with"a broadly based program...