Hoover Dam: An American Adventure by Joseph E. Stevens

Abstract

1062 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE (p. 33)—requires further elaboration to be meaningful. In the section on dams, an explanation and diagram of a turbine (since so many dams are used for power production) would have been helpful. But these are quibbles about a book that, overall, is carefully researched and written. The preservation of bridges and dams presents unique challenges, for their continued survival depends not so much on significance as on safety. While there are success stories—the state of Virginia, for example, early on completed an inventory of its historic metal truss bridges that provided a context for preserving the best examples—the book’s case studies demonstrate just how complex bridge and dam preservation can be. Fortunately, public interest in the preservation of historic bridges, at least, seems to be growing; Jackson acknowledges that dams are such prosaic structures they have yet to attract the attention of preservationists. The book’s physical dimensions—it is tall and skinny—are oddly out of sync with the expansiveness of its subjects. Apparently, the confining format was dictated by the requirements of the National Trust’s Great American Places Series, of which this guide is a part. It necessarily limits the effectiveness of the many stunning black-andwhite photographs. Nevertheless, while one might wish the book could be larger, one cannot wish for a better introduction to the astonishing range of American technology still to be seen along our roads and rivers. Carol. Poh Miller Ms. Miller is a historical consultant in Cleveland. She has documented many of that city’s bridges for the Historic American Engineering Record of the National Park Service. Hoover Dam: An American Adventure. By Joseph E. Stevens. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Pp. ix + 326; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95. Stolidly filling the Black Canyon between Nevada and Arizona near Las Vegas and impounding the floodwaters of the Colorado River, the Hoover Dam is among the best-known public works structures in America. It was originally planned for Boulder Canyon under the name Boulder Dam and formally authorized by Calvin Coolidge in December 1928, but a fault line at the initial site prompted relocation of the structure about 10 miles downstream. During the Hoover administration the politically loyal secretary of interior dubbed it the Hoover Dam, while under Roosevelt’s New Deal the name reverted to Boulder Dam. Finally, the Republican-controlled Congress changed it back to Hoover Dam in the late 1940s. Despite this odyssey of nomenclature, the physical structure remained essentially unaltered TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1063 throughout the construction process. Built by the Six Companies Inc. under the direct authority of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the 726-foot-high concrete dam stores water for agricultural use in California’s Imperial Valley, serves municipal needs in the greater Los Angeles area (under the auspices of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California), generates hydroelectric power (in large part used to pump water to Los Angeles users), and provides flood control for land in the lower Colorado River Valley. When completed in 1935, the massive curved gravity structure was the tallest dam in the world, and, although surpassed in height by several recent projects, it remains an enduring monument in the annals of civil engineering history. Previous works, such as Norris Hundley’s Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics op Water in the American West (University of California Press, 1975) and Beverly Moeller’s Phil Swing and Boulder Dam (University of California Press, 1971), have examined the complex political maneuvering that attended its planning and approval. But aside from popular descriptive treatments, there has been little scholarly examination of the actual construction processes involved in erecting the dam. Now the gap has been filled with Joseph Stevens’s detailed analysis of the physical work and social interaction that occurred in the remote desert canyon between 1931 and 1935. Although Stevens pays close attention to the engineering specifically associated with the Hoover Dam, he is relatively uninterested in dam design issues within any larger technological or comparative contexts. Rather, his well-documented research is tightly focused on the “ad­ venture” of building this single...