THEY DIED TO MAKE THE DESERT BLOOM

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Hoover Dam Snow Globe. This impressive desktop ornament is marked on the bottom Three Js Imports JJJ Inc. Northbrook, Illinois USA. Made in China. Like the Las Vegas snow globe with a Hoover Dam feature (see The Payton Dam Collection), it’s probably designed by the same uncredited person. Souvenirs of any kind, even postcards, of this monument to perished dam workers are uncommon. This one is 6 inches tall, very detailed and has a windup music box.

 

Oskar J. W. Hansen, Norwegian-born sculptor, was chosen by architect Gordon B. Kaufmann who had been brought on by the Bureau of Reclamation to modernize the original Greek look of Boulder (Hoover) Dam. They thought Kaufmann, the L.A. modernist, embodied the slick Art Deco style which communicated a Futurist look they sought. Both Pop Modernists did indeed add design elements that projected modernity.

There are probably thousands of printed postcards of these large bronze Pop Deco fantasy figures in the bins of antique dealers. On the back is an explanation: “These two identical bronze figures, designed by Oskar J. W. Hansen, and installed as the principal decoration at Boulder Dam, are 30’ high and are cast in bronze. One sits on either side of the 125-foot flagstaff facing the gorge of Black Canyon of the Colorado River over the crest of Boulder Dam.”

Hansen’s 30-foot-high pair of bronze winged figures flanking the 125-foot-tall flagpole are his best known decorative enhancements. Tourists photographed each other posed by these Futurist expressions. Today thousands of postcards of the winged apparitions are for sale by dealers in vintage postcards.

Little appreciated and virtually unreproduced on postcards is the work Hansen possibly felt was his most profound—the memorial to the workers who perished building Hoover Dam. How many died is not known. Estimates run as many as 90 to 114. Some historians believe the number could be higher.

In Imaging Hoover Dam, Anthony F. Arrigo has a wonderful description of this unusual, sculptured monument:

In keeping with the approach of New Deal artwork, Hansen glorified the laborer. One of his pieces at the dam is a bronze plaque commemorating the men who died while working on the project with the words “They died to make the desert bloom” arcing across the center of the piece. In this image a laborer rests with his legs beneath the waves, his impossibly narrow torso leads up to a broad, muscular chest and shoulders, his face turned upward toward the sun, while the symbols of power, irrigation, and conservation rise above him. The hands of the laborer are stretched upward, suggesting homage to the Great Spirit and to the power required to achieve feats such as building the dam and controlling nature. At the top of the plaque are wheat and gourds, food staples of indigenous peoples that also symbolize the bounty that will result from the continuous supply of irrigation water to the Southwest. These images are described by one writer as expressing “the artist’s belief that productive control over natural forces is obtained through trained physical strength and knowledge of our environment.”

COULEE IS GRAND—BUT IS IT AS GRAND AS HOOVER?

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Stephen Grace’s Dam Nation: How Water Shaped the West and Will Determine Its Future (Globe Pequot. 2012) is an exciting read for a water resource development study. Grace is a novelist who could pass for a hydrologist. Like Anthony Arrigo, he works pop culture imagery of water resource projects in with their science and economics. And like Arrigo, he is sensitive to the political climate of the era in which these gargantuan landscape-altering projects were dreamed up and built. Consider how expressively he depicts the turbulent times in which Grand Coulee Dam materialized:

By the time the Okies began pouring into the San Joaquin Valley, dams were being erected around California, altering the state’s plumbing so that food and fiber could grow in dry lands and jobs could be created for the destitute. Shasta Dam, which blocked the upper Sacramento River and stalled its timeless flow, would stand taller than the Washington Monument. Armies of laborers were required to raise it. But so great was the mass of unemployed humanity in America, and so low were the nation’s spirits, another monumental public works project was needed to generate jobs and to show the world that America was capable of achieving great things. FDR dreamed of a humongous dam holding back the waters of the West’s greatest river—one that pushed more than ten times the flow of the Colorado through the channeled scablands of Washington State, a landscape carved by ancient floods when ice age dams burst apart.

No river as large as the Columbia had ever been impounded by people. Because of its steep gradient, tight canyons, and prodigious volume, the river’s potential for hydroelectric power was enormous. The rich soils that surrounded Grand Coulee, which President Roosevelt and the Bureau of Reclamation were eyeing as a dam site, were perfect for agriculture. Most important to the president, he believed the elephantine dam would create many thousands of jobs through its construction and through the farmland it would bring into production.

Hoover (Boulder) Dam tames a great but smaller river than Grand Coulee Dam, which harnesses the exceedingly-well-watered Columbia. Grand Coulee’s hydroelectric output is exponentially greater than Hoover’s. So too is the volume of material used in its construction. Hoover, on the other hand, is higher and visually more interesting than Grand Coulee. Hoover’s reputation in popular culture and the press is unequaled. Grand Coulee though has many dimensions and such great scale that its reputation is large, diverse, and dynamic as these illustrations show, even if Hoover’s fame eclipses the massive Washington State-Columbia River structure. There is rivalry between local supporters of their respective dams. Both projects have generated a multiplicity of images that come from a wide variety of sources. In Imaging Hoover Dam, Arrigo wrote, “Few projects in America have had such extensive documentation (both textual and visual) as Hoover Dam yet the dam does not have a single representation.” This applies to Grand Coulee. This “range of modalities and accumulation of imagery” phenomena he calls “hypervisualization.”

The press and business community echoed government water resource propaganda. Not only did journalists not report negative impacts of dams, but their purposes were also given moral values, and builders were heroic. Products and individuals posed beside dams suggested parallel virtues.  (click to enlarge image)

 

The images we’ve assembled have little to do with the dam’s purpose or with each other. The cutline of the 1944 press photo (upper left) links the two projects to their designer, “tall, 64-year-old John Lucian Savage … the designer of the world’s biggest dams, Grand Coulee, Boulder.” To the right a smaller photo shows a model of the huge, but undistinguished-looking Grand Coulee Dam.

Other representations link Coulee’s embrace of “new ideas” to a cutout 1949 Kaiser DeLuxe automobile in front of the spillway suggesting the two share “achievement” and are “dreams come true.”

A six-pack of Bud holds back the river in a Madison Avenue surrealistic metaphor.

Then there is the bizarre photograph of a man in suit and tie in front of Coulee’s spillway. “Grand Coulee Dam was born of the same bold imagination that fuels many of today’s emerging growth companies,” asserts the president of a New Jersey bank. How odd that he believes a West Coast water project has the same “bold imagination” as First Jersey Securities.

Like Hoover (Boulder) Dam, Grand Coulee doesn’t have a single dominant image. It’s creatively pictured on postcards, license plate toppers, plates, and souvenirs, and fruit crate labels. Both projects proclaim their Western-ness with objects decorated with cowboys or Indians no matter how irrelevant these Western symbols are to the project’s purpose. (click to enlarge image)

BUILD YOUR OWN DAM

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Build-your-own model dams out of Mini Building Blocks. The Hoover set with 450 tiny pieces sits on top of the larger boxed Three Gorges set with 4,050 pieces. As the 2017 Chinese structure generates around eleven times the hydroelectricity of our esteemed 1936 dam, it seems appropriate their Mini Block sets are proportionally sized. The illustration on the box shows some complex structures on the right that do not appear in any photographs of the dam. We haven’t been able to learn why they were added to the model. Do you have any idea?

Artifacts that picture dams are many and varied. Ashtrays, plates, coffee cups, novelty salt and peppers, pennants, and medals decorated with the image of a specific river control project are created to sell as souvenirs. Among the scarcer of these gewgaws are diminutive models of these massive structures.

Tiny metal model of Bagnell Dam, which backs up the Osage River, creating Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks. Little model dams can be considered “buildings” and they have fans, many of whom are architects. They have bid up the price of the models. A lot of dam memorabilia are unappreciated currently, but souvenir dams are still avidly sought by collectors.

Assembled, this Mini Block model of Hoover Dam is 6 ½ x 3 1/8 x 1 7/8 inches. Its box has a warning: “There is a choking hazard from the tiny pieces.” The box is also imprinted with “for ages 7 and up.” If your second grader can put this together, s/he should be starting MIT.

Recently, kits of Lego-like mini-blocks have been created that replicate dams.  To our knowledge only three projects have been marketed: Hoover, Three Gorges, and Glen Canyon, which has sold out. Assembling these projects requires diligence and considerable dexterity working with very small objects. Though not a standard souvenir, the Hoover Dam model (below) is sold at a reasonable price on location at the National Park gift shop. They charge $17.99 plus tax. The Chinese kit for the larger Three Gorges Dam is available online for a bit over $100 plus shipping. Some offers are from China.

The two available kits (Hoover and Three Gorges) reflect the proportional size of their subjects. Like their real-life subjects, the Three Gorges box and model are larger than those of Hoover. If smaller than the Chinese dam, Hoover (Boulder) is still a celebrated American icon and symbol of our technological prowess.In the 89 years since it first clamped down on the unruly Colorado River, it has relinquished the title of “world’s biggest.” No longer can our press engage in such excessive hype as this Los Angeles Times quote of 1933:

“This great structure presents a picture of massive power, which overwhelms even the modern concept of the great Mayan builders.” Surpassing the Great Wall of China, the Acropolis, Hagia Sophia of Constantinople, and the pyramids of Egypt, the Times declared the dam to be “in fact, the greatest structure ever built by man.”

The Three Gorges set is produced by LUZ, a German firm with a large factory in China. Their catalog shows nano-block collections of birds, air and space, dinosaurs, landmarks, holidays, insects, trains, and art—one art kit is Munch’s “Scream” in 697 pieces.

Dams serve symbolic as well as functional needs as evidenced by the numerous comparisons of Hoover Dam with the celebrated relics of fallen civilizations. In 1937, the Boulder Dam Service Bureau (whoever that was) published a booklet, Boulder Dam Book of Comparisons, price 25 cents. Among the absurd references between the giant hydroelectric project and past-built achievements were factoids like this: two great pyramids could be built from “material excavated to anchor the sides of Boulder Dam.” The gee-whiz aspect of giant construction projects is a fallback for dam publicists. The actual merits of a project are boring. Size matters.

That glorious Hoover has been eclipsed worldwide has not gone unnoticed. Online are numerous references to this fall. It now ranks Number 34 in height. Itaipu Dam between Brazil and Patagonia and Three Gorges on the Yangtze generate exponentially more electricity and Hoover’s reservoir storage capacity ranks Number 28. Even so it attracts millions of visitors and remains an object of wonder for some.

As the American Depression Era engineering miracle was endlessly lauded, China’s Three Gorges Dam is celebrated by its Communist government, but its preeminence may be brief. The People’s Republic has approved a dam in Tibet that will more than triple the electrical production of Three Gorges.

The golden era of unopposed big dams may be over but the tradition of treating massive water resource management structures with reverence is not. Size still seems to be in and of itself newsworthy. Dams are monuments comparable to other big construction projects like the great pyramids. The benefits they provide may be cited but rarely (until recently) have their negative features been covered by the media. The symbolism of dams has not only been neglected by the press, academic writers have, until recently, been blind to the popular mystique of these massive projects.

Even though these symbolic aspects of dams were not written about until recently, dams represented national pride. That began in earnest in the 1930s with the hyper-promotion of Hoover (Boulder) Dam. In Imaging Hoover Dam, Anthony F. Arrigo brilliantly makes this point and laments the cultural aspects of dams have traditionally been overlooked by scholars.

“Dam Jack” Savage (white guy in hat) and Chinese Delegation, on Yangtze River, 1944 (Public Domain photo)

Not only did America’s Bureau of Reclamation’s chief engineer design Hoover Dam, John L. (“Dam Jack”) Savage traveled the world promoting engineering solutions to wild rivers. In an historical irony, in 1944 one of his journeys was to China’s Yangtze River at the invitation of Chiang Kai-shek. Savage was enthusiastic about controlling that river.

He envisioned his “dream dam” there. Decades later, it came to fruition as Three Gorges – outpacing in size and power capacity our own Hoover Dam. He had sold the idea to the nationalists, but the replacement Marxist government actually built the multibillion dollar hydroelectric and flood control project. Dams have been power showcases of strong central governments of more than one political persuasion.

 

John L. Savage’s Proposal for the Yangtze River Gorge Dam, 1945 (Public Domain photo)

OLD GLORY WAVES OVER HOOVER DAM

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The bins of postcard dealers are well stocked with postcards of Hoover (Boulder) Dam. A surprising percentage of these overproduced cards have an American flag adding a patriotic note to the gargantuan concrete structure. Why shouldn’t the Bureau of Reclamation fly our sacred flag? Here America fought and beat the enemy Colorado River. Loyal citizens should make a pilgrimage here to salute this victory. Anthony F. Arrigo explains in his book, Imaging Hoover Dam, how such water resource projects “fulfilled long-held American religious and cultural beliefs.”

The pervasive discourse of man dominating nature in the early 1900s and the resulting ‘golden age” of dam building throughout the American West from the 1930s to the early 1950s has been well documented. This discussion highlights a long-held, religiously sanctioned Western tradition of striving to improve the land through human endeavor augmented by technology.  ….

It is these ideas that have shaped American notions of nature and its role in American culture. Hoover Dam underscores these notions through its depiction as a titanic clash of human labor and technology against the “menacing” Colorado River, the latest and greatest in a long line of man’s struggles against a sublime nature, and a testament to American’s divine right of transformation and the inevitable march of American greatness. The narrative of Hoover Dam—man using technology to tame nature for the betterment of the country—fulfilled long-held American religious and cultural beliefs. Yoked together and displayed in the form of utopian visual and verbal assemblages, these narratives formed a cultural imaginary of Hoover Dam, a shaping mechanism for regional and national identities. Hoover Dam was another step toward American manifest destiny and an undertaking that was projected to transform the land for the betterment of humankind by fulfilling the tenets of Calvinism, Protestantism, capitalism, and high modernism. Without the dam, many said, the Southwest was fated to be the “cactus-covered waste” that it had always been.

 

BUCKLE UP With a DAM Good Belt Buckle

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Like Hoover (Boulder) Dam, all dams and reservoirs, even small ones, can generate images that promote purposes beyond their hydrological justifications. Cultural and symbolic meanings, Dr. Arrigo, author of Imaging Hoover Dam, convincingly asserts, can be perceived in advertising, souvenirs, and a variety of artifacts that celebrate the mystique of that particular river-blockage.

We further his thesis with a group of decorated hunks of metal used to support a fellow’s jeans. Most of the iconography of these belt buckles isn’t about flood control or hydropower but perpetuates Americans’ belief in the restorative power of outdoor recreation—increasingly a selling point for dam building. Some reservoirs (lakes) are in fact popular. These unnecessarily decorated useful accoutrements, like much of the other stuff in this post, are not specifically mentioned in his book. Our explanations may not be lifted from his writing either, but we run with his ideas that dam trivia can have hidden meaning.

Hoover Dam is just such an icon. It is often used to embellish products like this Montana Silversmiths Men’s Nevada State Heritage Attitude belt buckle. This firm produces buckles for all fifty states decorated with their best-known symbols. A reference to Hoover Dam and Las Vegas appears in this one with a cowboy and hunter flanking the state seal. Many buckles have been produced featuring Hoover Dam’s iconic flank alone

Though not specifically mentioned in Imaging Hoover Dam, these decorative belt buckles embody his thesis that structures built for economic reasons have cultural significance. Thousands of smaller dams built by the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, although not as commanding as Hoover, are promoted for the outdoor recreation their backed-up waters provide.

Bonny Dam in eastern Colorado still stands but its reservoir was drained following a 2003 Supreme Court ruling that forced Nebraska and Colorado to release river water as mandated by the Republican River Compact. The dam exists but in 2011, after years of appeals, the lake behind it was drained to the chagrin of local fishermen. This buckle graphically illustrates the affection locals had for its recreational opportunity in an arid and monotonous High Plains landscape.

 

Belt buckles with anti-dam iconography are exceptional. This “Free the Snake River” buckle expresses the goal of an active movement to remove four Corps’ dams on the lower Snake River. They were built to allow barges to move more freely and to generate a minuscule amount of hydroelectricity. They block the spawning runs of several species of salmon, including Chinook. Once these fish were a vital economic resource.

In the next to last paragraph of his book, Arrigo muses over the ironic fact ephemeral images of dams may continue to freely “speak” to future generations “long after the dam is gone.” Bonny Dam has been left but its function is “gone.” In his account of dam-removals the author doesn’t dismiss the usefulness of some dams. Images of dams do not always verify their stated purpose. Builder propaganda and product advertising have no obligation to be truthful.

A solution to blocking spawning runs has been to stock reservoirs above dams with hatchery-raised fish. That program created a popular sport fishery in Lake Sakakawea but at a cost—hatchery raised fish have poor reproductive fitness. If they mix with the more genetically diverse wild population, the offspring will do poorly. More than 300 scientific studies verified that hatchery-raised trout are poorly adapted to natural environments.

Dr. Arrigo cautions readers that dam memorabilia can misrepresent reality. This belt buckle celebrating the hatchery solution to the blockage of spawning runs is an example.

This species of salmonids is big but not as gigantic as the monster on this sculptured belt buckle commemorating the popularity of stocking Chinook in the biggest North Dakota impoundment.

Not far from Tuttle Creek Lake (Reservoir) is the doing-OK town of Leonardville, Kansas, population 429. Early on a railroad came through and today it’s connected by highways. Leonardville, unlike ten other nearby small towns, supported the construction of a Corps of Engineers dam. Those other burgs would be flooded, or nearly submerged, by the Tuttle Creek flood control project. Despite strong opposition from the three thousand who would be displaced, the earthen dam was built, and the reservoir began filling in 1962.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Tuttle Creek plate shows valued recreational opportunities the impoundment once offered to residents. They were benefits,recreational opportunities the impoundment once offered to residents. They were benefits, but they came at a high price.

A Kansas farmer mowed an anti-Tuttle-Creek Dam message into his field.

Water-powered mills were frontier necessities. Families gathered to convert their grain to flour and the small ponds behind the low dams were places the kids played. These low-tech mills were fondly remembered and idealized in popular culture. Artists painted them and sheet music like “Down by the Old Mill Stream” memorialized them. In a limited-edition belt buckle, Chapman, Kansas recalled an “Old Mill Dam” inactive since1903.

 

The preceding plate-style buckles evolved from Army belts of the mid-1800s. As is evident, this type of buckle affords a large space for decoration. Embellished with Western motifs, they were sported by movie cowboys and awarded to winners of rodeo events. These heavily sculpted ornaments were once exclusively male attire, having had a military origin. Construction, like building dams, was exclusively masculine.

 

DAMS AS SOUVENIR MOTIF

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Imaging Hoover Dam: The Making of a Cultural Idol was published eleven years ago but the book only came to our attention recently. Author Anthony Arrigo of course deals primarily with that gigantic plug on the Colorado River that generates electricity and diverts much of the Colorado’s flow to thirsty southern California. Our collection of dam memorabilia contains material imaging Hoover as well as dams across America, even some around the world. We have not only acquired artifacts that comport to Dr. Arrigo’s linkages to American cultural currents, but we have some whose meaning is cryptic.

Cast in pot metal, the ashtray that issues smoke from the openings in the head appears to be a knock-off of a ceramic four-eyed man (drunk?) made by Ensco. Conceivably it was offered long ago to tourists as a souvenir.

The very survival of the then-small Bureau of Reclamation hinged on the successful completion of Hoover Dam. Fortunately for them, the BOR was a publicity-savvy bureaucracy. They flooded the media with interesting images taken by their staff photographers accompanied by glowing press releases praising this symbol of American technological expertise.

One of their first official photographers was Cliff Segerblom hired in 1938. He had never used a camera before but had training as an artist. The Bureau hooked him up for instruction with Margaret Bourke-White and Ansel Adams—both had done contract work for them. Although Segerblom only worked for the BOR for several years he fulfilled their need to control the public opinion of the giant, expensive project.

As for the miniature doll house plastic toilet with a picture of Lake of the Ozarks’ Bagnell Dam, we could easily transfer this from our dam collection to our kitsch collection. Souvenirs are often obscene or scatological, failed humor assaults on good taste. They sometimes say nothing at all about their subject

He posed his wife-to-be, Jean Wines, placidly peering down at the dam to counter his earlier images of construction whose brutality may have given the impression that the dam was a dangerous place to visit. This tranquil view was reproduced in a 1941 Arizona Highways magazine and more recently on the cover of Imaging Hoover Dam.

There are some very different, but similar compositions. A sightseeing day trip to the dam and reservoir is a tradition for Las Vegas visitors. When tourism developed, the BOR lost control of the imagery that they had enjoyed during construction when photographers needed a pass to even see the dam. German art photographer and specialist in erotica, Helmut Newton, doubtlessly cared little what the BOR would have made of his view of Hoover Dam. We have not found out if this were an assignment from Vogue, Vanity Fair, or even Playboy. Las Vegas was a go-to resource for curvaceous females who would disrobe on request. We speculate he may have brought a showgirl in a thong to add pictorial interest to the scene of this great engineering accomplishment.

Contrasting Segerblom’s demure Mormon fiancée with a Vegas showgirl is a rather dramatic illustration of Arrigo’s thesis that Hoover Dam doesn’t have a single picture—its image is a mix of often very different views.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

General view,” photo by Cliff Segerblom (left). Hoover Dam Overlook, Helmut Newton (right).