Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy Todd Shallat (bio) Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy. By Karl Boyd Brooks . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Pp. xxvii+290. $35. Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower called it "a massive Snake River monument to political maneuver and federal preemption." In 1952, in Hells Canyon on the Idaho-Oregon border, where government "power zealots" hoped to build the world's biggest dam, Eisenhower denounced the socialist thinking of New Deal federalism. To build a dam in the nation's deepest canyon would be "to make of the West a federal province and make its people economic dependents governed by remote control" (p. 177). Karl Boyd Brooks has written a masterful book about the politics of hydropower. From an era when western dams were symbols of technology's triumph comes a story of a bureaucratic defeat for bigger-is-better construction, a history that helps explain why whitewater still cascades through the Snake River basin and why hostility toward big government remains a raging pandemic in Idaho's Pacific Northwest. [End Page 873] Had Hells Canyon been most anywhere else in the nation it would have been dammed long before Eisenhower denounced the New Deal. Giant New Deal dams at Bonneville and Grand Coulee had already demonstrated that federal engineering could transform the Columbia basin with cut-rate hydropower. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the Bonneville Power Administration saw Hells Canyon as the logical next step for the region's electrification. Upriver irrigators hoped the Hells Canyon High Dam might advance their plan to pipe water through an Idaho mountain, remaking the desert near Boise with 2,500 new farms. Downstream flood protection was another reason to dam the Snake at Hells Canyon. When a murderous 1948 flood hit Vanport, Oregon, President Harry Truman elevated the dam to a plank of his reelection campaign. But linking the dam to President Truman was problematic in a West turning away from New Deal federalism. The ideology pushing the Hells Canyon High Dam—the conviction that economic progress depended on maximum comprehensive development of every last puddle and pond—ran counter to rural suspicion of government experts and western resentment of eastern control. Private companies benefited. Idaho Power Company, a private utility, advanced a more modest plan for three low dams in Hells Canyon. The company tapped a deep vein of capitalist anger against twenty years of New Deal attempts to federalize the development of natural resources. By framing the controversy as local private enterprise versus federal interference, Idaho Power ultimately triumphed. In 1956, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the company's three-dam plan. Today the controversy is nearly forgotten, but the story deserves to be read for insight into America's postwar fears of technocratic control. For Truman's Fair Deal Democrats, the fight was about cheap electricity, regional development, and the exploitation of corporate ownership. For Eisenhower Republicans, it was about the setting of limits on government's power. The dam-that-never-was became, says Brooks, "a national referendum on the New Deal's environmental heritage" (p. 22). The fight also helped pioneer the antifederalism of the future environmental movement. Before the opposition to dams was linked to the preservation of wild species and wild places, Hells Canyon tipped the balance of power. Eventually the dispute led to new legal definitions of the public interest that included protection for migrating fish. Public Power, Private Dams concludes with an irony that will appeal to historians of technology. The federal plan was massive enough to fully remake the wild region, slacking the river for ninety miles. Its defeat was so complete that the feds abandoned plans to dam neighboring streams. The Payette River was spared and so was the Salmon, Idaho's wilderness river, where raging water through granite chasms remains a vital lifeline for anadromous salmon and steelhead trout. Brooks believes that the single-minded [End Page 874] focus on dam building in Hells Canyon diverted money from projects in other places, delayed Idaho's urbanization, and saved the Salmon...