Damming the Colorado: The Rise of the Lower Colorado River Authority, 1933–1939 by John A. Adams, Jr

Abstract

620 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Damming the Colorado: The Rise of the Lower Colorado River Authority, 1933—1939. By John A. Adams, Jr. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1990. Pp. xvii+161; illustrations, notes, bibliog­ raphy, index. $32.50. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal relief efforts, including the public financing of large-scale water project construction, allowed the creation of the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), formed in 1934 to control and develop Texas’s Colorado River. Initial private efforts to control the river, which had wreaked havoc on central Texas for centuries in its cycles of flood and drought, failed because of inadequate capital and political hascoes. The federal government, through the Public Works Administration and the Rural Electrifica­ tion Administration, provided national purpose to what had been viewed as largely a central Texas problem. The story of the LCRA is similar in many ways to stories of water development and flood control projects throughout the seventeen states west of the 100th meridian—born through political intrigue, built on both technological successes and failures, and, finally, recasting the landscape as rivers were tamed or rerouted through hydroelectric turbines. This monograph on the early years of the LCRA by John Adams, Jr., has an impressive list of sources but largely misses the mark as a chronicle of this important organization’s place in Texas and western history. His thematic approach to telling the story is confusing, because the narrative jumps in time so much the reader is turning pages continually to look back for facts or forward for missing details. A case in point relates to the physical features of the LCRA, the four dams and their corresponding hydroelectric facilities. Although dis­ cussion of the largest of these dams, the Marshall Ford, begins early in Adams’s narrative, the reader Ends no table of statistics until the last chapter (p. 107). Those readers interested in the engineering accomplishments of the LCRA will be disappointed. Despite the fact that Adams has an exciting technical puzzle and political “cover-up” with the Buchanan Dam, he fails to give us more than a superficial view. Buchanan Dam, a multiple-arch design (we know this only through a photograph on p. 65), developed significant cracks in its arches before construction was completed. Although the Bureau of Reclamation had approved the design and was supervising construction, its technical staff posed this solution: delete the bureau’s approval stamp from the design drawings, recall all plans, and write a letter to the LCRA noting that all documents were preliminary in nature (pp. 60-61). The bureau’s main goal was to turn over the project to the LCRA as quickly as possible, absolving itself of any responsibility, to protect its reputa­ tion. Certainly this was a critical and highly charged situation, but Adams gives it very short shrift indeed, failing to tell the reader who technology and culture Book Reviews 621 designed and built the dam and why it cracked or how the matter was resolved. Other issues given insufficient attention are the great battle be­ tween the privately owned power companies and those advocating public power and the court’s finding of negligence on the part of the LCRA in its river operations preceding the great flood of 1938. The reader would also wish for more even biographical treatments of the main characters: while Lyndon Johnson is handled well, others, like Congressman James Buchanan, are described superficially. Additionally troubling are errors of fact concerning the Bureau of Reclamation’s historic role. Adams notes, “In the 1920s [USBR] reclamation projects involved simple irrigation systems consisting of diversion dams and canals. These early structures usually involved no special large-scale engineering requirements other than those pecu­ liar to each site. In like fashion, early storage projects and dams were usually earthen constructions requiring basic engineering procedures and techniques” (p. 26). He writes, too, that the bureau’s initial role under the Reclamation Act of 1902 proved effective “only in smallscale irrigation projects” (p. 25) and that it was not until Roosevelt’s New Deal that the federal government “reversed its role” and took the lead in water development projects in the West. Adams fails to...