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)