Damnation

Damming the Osage, Damnation, Harry S. Truman Dam and Reservoir, John Margolies, Payton Dam Collection, Stuart Symington, Uncategorized

THE PAYTON DAM COLLECTION

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Catalog for a photographic exhibition created for the University of Missouri Extension

We had two young sons to raise after Leland lost his employment creating photographic exhibits for the University of Missouri Extension. He was let go because of pressure from Stuart Symington. Missouri’s senior U. S. senator was angered because he sicked the Environmental Defense Fund on the Army Corps of Engineers’ Harry S. Truman Dam and Reservoir project that would block the Osage River. The lawsuit didn’t stop the impoundment, but it did force the Corps to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. In detail the documents revealed the project’s adverse effects and poor cost-benefit ratio.

Leland’s traveling photographic shows on Missouri’s natural environment were pleasing to both regionalists and environmentalists.Supported financially by the Kansas City Association of Foundations his work came to the attention of Nancy Hanks, head of the National Endowment for the Arts. She backed his creation of a large exhibit on the state in observation of the Bicentennial. Ms. Hanks was offended when Sen. Symington sent an aide asking her to withdraw support for Leland’s project due to his “stop Truman Dam” efforts. University of Missouri Extension officials were cowed, however, by the Senator’s pressure. When he refused to withdraw as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, he was sacked.

Neither Leland nor wife and mother Crystal had marketable job skills, so they became itinerant, underfinanced antique pickers. As a kid, Leland had collected coins and Indian relics so along with looking for undervalued old stuff they started several collections of stuff that was interesting but cheap. One of these collections was of memorabilia relating to dams motivated by the effect they had had on his life.

The late John Margolies inspired us to collect souvenirs and memorabilia relating to book projects.

While exhibiting at a New York City antiques show, they met John Margolies, the preeminent and well-published roadside photographer. John thought their accumulation of kitschy 1950s lamps was interesting, so he introduced them to Walton Rawls, an acquiring editor at Abbeville Press. In 1989, Turned On: Decorative Lamps of the Fifties was published. It was a modest success.

Weary of traveling to the coasts to buy and sell Art Deco and folk and outsider art to selective customers, the Paytons settled in Leland’s Ozarks homeland. From Springfield, Missouri, they did several more pop culture books then segued to self-publishing projects on regional subjects. To illustrate these projects, their accumulation of Ozarks memorabilia would be mixed with their contemporary location photographs. Several titles centered on the celebrated spring-fed streams of the rugged uplift. Recently Missouri State University Libraries-Ozark Studies Institute acquired their 5,000+ piece Ozark collection.

Hopefully their dam collection can similarly find an institutional home where it can be made available to scholars of water resource development. The stunning graphics of much of this stuff lends itself to exhibition as well. In this post we illustrate some of our material showing the variety of ways dams are perceived. Some we match up with quotes from Imaging Hoover Dam by Dr. Anthony F. Arrigo. All the illustrations in this post are from the Paytons’ dam collection.

Dr. Arrigo acknowledges the power of these diverse representations. He was amazed at how they influenced public opinion but how few scholars recognized this fact:

I was struck by the rhetorical features of these images, as well as their ability to instantaneously arrest my attention and “speak” to me in ways that the text did not or could not. As I began to research the topic in more depth, I found a seemingly endless trove—thousands upon thousands—of images of all sorts published in every conceivable medium. It seemed to me that these images had their own story to tell, and the more images I found, the more diverse the story became, in some cases veering wildly from the received history of the dam that I had casually come to know.

Later in the preface he points out the sneaky way these megabuck endeavors to remake the landscape are advanced:

I trace how its imagery was deployed through advertising, government propaganda, journalism, and other promotional outlets to shape the public’s perception of the project. This discussion ranges from how the dam’s imagery reflects the cultural and ecological imperatives that precipitated its construction, to the influence of religious doctrine and the American agrarian movement in the drive to build the dam, to the visual commodification of the project as a way to sell cars, trucks, vacations, and a variety of other goods and services.

The book laments the neglect of “this endless array of images” by historians.

Although the Hoover Dam project itself has been the subject of hundreds of publications, this mass of related visual material has barely been considered. By foregrounding representations of Hoover Dam that were produced before, during and after its construction, Imaging Hoover Dam shows how this supra-discursive visualizing process was integral to the development of the mythology, indeed the very iconicity, of the dam, and how the use of Hoover Dam imagery shifted over time from ensuring its construction, to its celebration as a sublime engineering wonder, to its utter commoditization as a means of selling everything from whiskey, to cars, to vacations, to space pens.

It was a costly undertaking during the Depression: “Regardless of its potential, luring residents to the harsh, flood-prone, and as-yet-undeveloped Colorado Desert, and persuading a reluctant government deep in the throes of the Great Depression to spend tens of millions of dollars on a giant dam—what some saw as a boondoggle of monumental proportions—would require a massive public relations effort.”

Hoover Dam and Las Vegas are intimately related. This musical snow globe shows Kokopelli (adapted from an ancient Indian petroglyph) cavorting around the base while two Kokopelli dressed as tourists look down into Hoover Dam inside the globe. A cautionary tableau, fabricated into a souvenir. (left) Many souvenirs like the vintage glass ashtray (top right) show both Hoover Dam and Vegas.

Native Americans are the embodiment of primitivism. Surprisingly they appear in conjunction with this icon of modern technology. In Imaging Hoover Dam, the author addresses this strange pairing:

The figure of the Native American is clearly a romantic one, as is suggested by the title of the booklet, but what is also romanticized here is the technological achievement and the materials of modern construction—concrete and steel. The Native American figure is part of the old Wild West romance myth that is so important to the ethos of the American West. But the native also seems to be looking at the dam in wonderment and perhaps resignation. The figure appears to be looking at the dam as one looks at a curiosity. Although the native carries his own technology, an instrument of war and hunting, his bow and arrow are clearly impotent against the modern dam.

Near naked warriors in front of Hoover and other dams are not uncommon, if paradoxical. Arrigo explains: “In these images, the old and new are powerfully contrasted. Native figures in traditional dress—feathers in their hair, and loincloths around their waists—look out onto the ultramodern dam, a symbol of industrial and governmental power, symbolism echoed in the oversized stately building placed at the bottom of the dam. Here we see that the native people are left behind, a romantic legacy of a time long past.”

The conclusion of Imaging Hoover Dam examines the changing public perception of these heroic projects and the future of Hoover and other monumental efforts to control nature:

The dam’s demise may, in fact, come at the behest of the American public if it decides at some future point that Hoover Dam is no longer appropriate in the zeitgeist of a more environmentally concerned society. The frenzy of dam building that the Bureau of Reclamation set into motion in the early 1900s in the United States is over and appeals for movement in the opposite direction have been taking hold.

Fishermen lobby to remove blockages of fish that spawn in headwaters. Reservoirs fill with sediments. Some objectionable dams have been removed. New projects are justified because hydroelectric power is “green.” In the ten years since this book was published, “clean energy” advocates have included hydropower in their suite of proposals. Alas, growing populations need water for irrigation and believe in the promised flood control. At the same time, the movement to remove aging, fish-blocking, sediment-clogged dams has gained momentum. The outcome of these conflicting needs and interests is unknown.

Damnation, Payton Dam Collection

BOOK REVEALS HOOVER DAM FULFILLS CULTURAL AS WELL AS ECONOMIC PURPOSES

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Imaging Hoover Dam: The Making of a Cultural Icon, by Anthony F. Arrigo, (University of Nevada Press, 2014), stands apart from any study for or against that we’ve seen.

This post is a review of Imaging Hoover Dam we submitted to Amazon, here illustrated with objects from the Payton Dam Collection.

Dr. Arrigo, in his preface, states:

In this book I try to answer the question of how Hoover Dam evolved from a pipe dream of land developers and farmers, to an ambitious civil engineering project in the middle of the Mojave Desert, to the visual and cultural icon that it is today. To do this, in contrast to most scholarship on the dam, I provide a significant shift in focus away from chronicled accounts of how it was built and onto its myriad visual representations. In doing so, I trace how its imagery was deployed through advertising, government propaganda, journalism, and other promotional outlets to shape the public’s perception of the project.

Previous books largely ignore dams’ symbolic and cultural significance. Some are for, some are against.

It has been estimated that there are 50,000 large dams in the world. There is no shortage of titles published on the subject of impounding rivers. These mega structures provide benefits. Supporters claim that by controlling wild streams flooding will be reduced. Many produce hydroelectricity. Stored water can be used to irrigate crops. Some of their reservoirs (most often euphemistically called ‘lakes’) develop recreational attractions.

Economics of these costly construction projects are often left to the computation of their builders, who are usually sanctioned and supported by a nation’s central government. Until recently their good was seen to outweigh the loss of farms and towns to their backed-up waters and the blockage of spawning fish was ignored. Cost-benefit analysis is outrageously manipulated by supporters.

Environmentalists point out the environmental degradation caused by some projects. Their effects on a place are more complex and profound than originally suspected. There is now a bookshelf of anti-dam publications matching works that advocate engineering solutions to water resource management. Not only can dams damage the environment, but they also lose storage capacity due to sedimentation as they age. A dam removal movement is gathering momentum in America. China however is building more and bigger dams.

The vitae of this associate professor of writing, rhetoric and communication at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, doesn’t indicate a long career interest in water resources. Dr. Arrigo reveals in his preface why he wrote the book:

A few years ago I was having a casual conversation with someone about a recent vacation to Nevada and California in which I took a side trip to see Hoover Dam. Little did I know that the seemingly inconsequential exchange—a polite “how was your trip” type of encounter that we have with people all the time—would become the catalyst for several years of research culminating in this book.

The unnamed interlocutor, “not being from the United States,” told him, “You must be proud of that as an American.” In further conversation the professor deduced that Hoover (Boulder) Dam was an object of pride in national identity commensurate with Niagara Falls, Mt. Rushmore, and the Statue of Liberty.

This image is from an N.B.C. press release about a program, “It Couldn’t Be Done,” and shows a group of “imposing accomplishments” among which is Hoover Dam.

“The interesting question to me was why.” Arrigo isn’t unaware of the hydrologic aspects of river management or how reservoirs modify landscape. It’s the way images have shaped public opinion of dams that intrigues him. He lists businesses that associate their products with this colossal river intervention. The dam is used as a backdrop for ads for both construction equipment and family cars.

Absurdly, Coca Cola produced a series of items picturing the dam to celebrate Hoover Dam’s Golden Anniversary.  Souvenir stands have dispensed kitsch trinkets decorated with representations of this giant hunk of concrete. Supportive media readily published stories and photographs supplied by the Bureau of Reclamation, the government agency in charge. Hoover Dam became accepted as a wonder of engineering exemplifying America’s mastery of technology and the environment. Negative information and photos were quashed by the BOR.

From Boulder Dam Book of Comparisons, 1937.

Although the Hoover Dam project itself has been the subject of hundreds of publications, this mass of related visual material has barely been considered. By foregrounding representations of Hoover Dam that were produced before, during, and after its construction, Imaging Hoover Dam shows how this supra-discursive visualizing process was integral to the development of the mythology, indeed the very iconicity of the dam, and how the use of Hoover Dam imagery shifted over time from ensuring its construction, to its celebration as a sublime engineering wonder, to its utter commoditization as a means of selling everything from whiskey, to cars, to vacations, to space pens.

Images of Hoover Dam decorate thousands of souvenirs and gifts like this space pen and money clip.

That mention of “space pens” in connection to Hoover Dam sent us to the computer where a Google search revealed a Fisher pen with the image of the dam. It comes in a box with a graphic of the American moon landing suggesting a connection between two disparate examples of our country’s technological genius. It was a nice addition to the collection of memorabilia of many dams we have made. Throughout his book we found mention, and at times illustrations, of stuff already in our horde. Occasionally, as in the case of the space pen, he mentions stuff we could look for.

The author apparently is not a collector of Hoover Dam memorabilia and has relied on institutional collections such as the Boulder City Museum for objects to study. We’ve written and published several books on Ozark rivers and have used photographs of artifacts in our collection to illustrate them. Impounding the clear, spring fed streams of the Ozark uplift has a long and contentious history. Hoover is the centerpiece of this book, but it also critiques the scheme to alter the waterways of the entire Southwest. We were only vaguely familiar with the details of “making the desert bloom” but the manipulation of public opinion to get public support and censor criticism by the dam-building coalitions are very familiar. The methods are the same. Control of wild rivers was, and is, undertaken with fanaticism. Threats to interfere with that sacred mission are dealt with harshly.

After having three titles on pop culture published by major publishers, we founded Lens & Pen Press and produced a group of books on the Ozarks. Damming the Osage (2012) worked in an account of Leland’s punishing experience as a participant in a lawsuit to stop the Harry S. Truman Dam and Reservoir. James Fork of the White Transformation of an Ozark River deals with the way water resource development changes the landscape.

We found out how punishing dam advocates can be. Leland was fired from a position with the University of Missouri Extension for being a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit brought by the Environmental Defense Fund to stop or modify a massive Army Corps of Engineers project on the Osage River in Missouri. In a later post we will tell that tale. The EDF challenged the Corps’ economic calculations and pointed out negative impacts, enlisting the testimony of many kinds of scientists.

Dr. Arrigo repeatedly makes the point that these mega projects are propelled by symbolism and promise to fulfill cultural purposes as well as promising tangible economic benefits. In his first chapter, “Nature, Culture, and Transformation,” the author acknowledges the term “culture” is one of the most complex words in the English language:

The way that I used culture in this book, however, centers on an American tradition of land transformation, one that embodies an ethos of modernity eager to use science and technology to transform or order nature into utilitarian functionality. This perspective frames the Hoover Dam’s construction as a beacon of modernism and the apogee of man’s long struggle against nature, one that spurred a frenzy of dam building in the United States and around the world. It also views Hoover Dam as another in a long line of liturgically motivated endeavors to use technology to re-create or reclaim the Garden of Eden for the profit of humankind, a process I term the “divine right of transformation.”

This mechanism of gaining support for dams isn’t unlike the process Vance Packard describes in his 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders. His motivational research reveals subliminal messaging is used by advertisers and politicians to manipulate expectations and create desire for products or a favorable opinion of candidates. These subconscious promises are more personal and emotional than the manipulations of image for cultural fulfillment in the case of dams.

This book reveals a body of publicity, advertising, and journalism that influences public opinion. For us, Imaging Hoover Dam has served to illuminate our extensive collection of dam memorabilia and souvenirs. More importantly it reveals the power of these hidden persuaders to facilitate the industry of river improvement. If Professor Arrigo’s insights were better known it might make unwise dams more difficult to authorize, fund, and build.

Media has cooperated with agencies that build dams. Magazines and newspapers uncritically published Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers press releases and used supplied images.

Invention & Technology in 1970 praised Hoover Dam, reproducing a Fortune 1933 cover of one of the dam’s hydroelectric generators. Echoing the promotional hype of the 1930s, the article said, “the incomparable triumph” was “a symbol for all that was right and wrong with America.” Recently, some journalists have noted the adverse effects of some projects but overall most media is laudatory.

 

Branding the Ozarks, Damnation

THE FALL OF UNION ELECTRIC’S LOUIS EGAN

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In this press photo of December 30, 1943, Louis H. Egan is not “having the finest time in the world,” as the 1925 profile was titled. With wife Fannie grasping his left arm and deputy U. S. Marshal Davidson holding his right, the tall, disgraced executive clutches a cigarette with a gloved hand. We tell the story of Egan’s glaring error in management that led to his downfall in Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozark and Truman Reservoir:

Cutline on the press photo dated 3-5-42 showing Egan with a federal eagle behind him, posed as if to sink his claws into him: “Louis H. Egan, former president of the Union Electric Company of Missouri entering federal court in St. Louis, Mo., where he was found guilty of violating the Corrupt Practices section of the Utility Act. “

Cutline on the press photo dated 3-5-42 showing Egan with a federal eagle behind him, posed as if to sink his claws into him:
“Louis H. Egan, former president of the Union Electric Company of Missouri entering federal court in St. Louis, Mo., where he was found guilty of violating the Corrupt Practices section of the Utility Act. “

Egan’s downfall began when he foolishly fired a Union Electric vice president named Oscar Funk, who, as the July 29, 1940 Time article put it “knew where the bodies were.” A muckraking St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter named Sam Shelton had suspected the utility had been paying politicians for years. Funk spilled the beans to Shelton who in turn confided the information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The reporter got an explosive series of articles and the SEC got Egan. In the Post Dispatch and in court, it was revealed that Union Electric had been demanding sizable kickbacks from lawyers and contractors. From this slush fund, they bribed newspapermen, paid elected officials, and illegally contributed to political campaigns. Egan and his cronies also enriched themselves. Union Electric sued Egan, VP Frank Boehm, and even whistle-blower Oscar Funk to recover $400,000. Funk sued Union Electric for being unjustifiably fired. Several vice presidents did short sentences for perjury, but Louis Egan was convicted of violation of the Corrupt Practices Section of the Holding Company Act of 1935. Union Electric paid an $80,000 fine. Egan paid $10,000 and was sentenced to two years. His appeals failed and on December 31, 1943, the $68,000-a-year former executive entered the federal penitentiary at St. Petersburg, Florida.

The cut line pasted on the back of the photo of Egan leaving for jail said he was headed for federal prison at Terre Haute. Another source had him released a few months shy of two years later from a penitentiary in Florida. He died in 1950 at his home in Clayton, Missouri at the age of sixty-nine of bronchopneumonia.

The names of Egan and the other felons who managed Union Electric during the building of Bagnell Dam are cast in bronze on this plaque attached to the powerhouse. It was Egan’s pond, but his role in this enormous undertaking has been forgotten.

The names of Egan and the other felons who managed Union Electric during the building of Bagnell Dam are cast in bronze on this plaque attached to the powerhouse. It was Egan’s pond, but his role in this enormous undertaking has been forgotten.

Some of the laws Louis Egan broke regarding campaign financing by corporations were not in place when he began his career. Recently businesses have again been allowed to contribute to political races. Even the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 was repealed in 2005, replaced by a new set of regulations that consumer advocates objected to.

In the text of Egan’s appeal, the court upheld his conviction but noted, “the evidence also tends to show that the whole subject of political expenditure was distasteful to him and that his preference would have been to have nothing to do with such matters.” Nevertheless Egan approved for years the “raising a secret fund for political purposes.”

Sordid as the history of building Bagnell Dam is, we suspect public records reveal only a small percentage of the crimes and skullduggery committed by its creators. When the federal government subsequently took over dam building, they too began to lie and subvert regulation, just like the capitalists. Who regulates the regulators?

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Branding the Ozarks, Damnation

UNION ELECTRIC’S LOUIS EGAN “I’M HAVING THE FINEST TIME IN THE WORLD.”

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Three men were essential to the building of Bagnell Dam, which created Lake of the Ozarks: a banker, a lawyer, and the president of a power company. Only one stayed out of federal prison. The head of Union Electric was not that lucky one.

Louis Henry Egan was born in 1881 in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. Egan followed his father’s profession and graduated from Yale with a degree in engineering. The “moose tall” president of Union Electric, as Time magazine described him, was profiled in the January 1925 issue of The American Magazine as a can-do, overly optimistic executive. The subtitle of the puff piece read, “’There isn’t any job you ever heard of that can beat mine,’ says Louis H. Egan one of the leading public utility men in the Middle West – It was this attitude that helped him at the age of thirty-eight, to become president of a big electric light company.” Above all, the article stated, Egan despised complaining slackers who he called “Whimper Whine-ies,” who are always “crying a pond.”

The concrete obstacle in the Osage River that ponded Lake of the Ozarks was one of the last significant privately built dams in the United States. It was a project birthed in the Roaring Twenties when free enterprise had been released from strict government regulation after an era of “trust busters” and reformers like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Bagnell Dam, as Project No. 459 came to be called, was completed in 1931 just as big government was about to snatch the reins back from hard-charging businessmen who had created both phenomenal wealth and crippling debt and were being blamed for the ensuing Great Depression. Egan, prototypical of these Twenties boomers, had built the St. Louis utility into a profitable part of The North American Company’s holdings.

When equally expansionist Kansas City banker Walter Cravens diverted his Land Bank assets into his speculative dam scheme, he ran afoul of federal law and was forced to sell his overly ambitious, underfinanced project. When his original backer pulled out, Cravens took his project to Wall Street, looking for investors. Many firms passed on the opportunity, but he finally connected with Dillon, Read & Co., an investment-banking company with connections to Stone & Webster, Inc., a New England engineering services company founded in 1889, which specialized in public utility projects, especially hydropower facilities. Together they bought a one-year option to buy Cravens’ valuable permit to impound the Osage. In July, 1929, the license was retroactively transferred to Union Electric ninety days before the Wall Street crash that signaled the start of the Great Depression. Cravens was paid $300,000. He needed a good bit of it for lawyers.

North American Company Annual Report, 1947. Sometime in the late 1920s this octopus of a holding company acquired control of Union Electric’s stock. North American, known for its bare-knuckle practices, encouraged the St. Louis utility to build a slush fund from kickbacks and use it to illegally finance politicians and bribe public officials. This notorious holding company was broken up by the feds in 1946. Many online sources state that Union Electric was divested at that time, but this 1947 report still lists the St. Louis utility as an asset. The holding company for Union Electric today is Ameren.

North American Company Annual Report, 1947. Sometime in the late 1920s this octopus of a holding company acquired control of Union Electric’s stock. North American, known for its bare-knuckle practices, encouraged the St. Louis utility to build a slush fund from kickbacks and use it to illegally finance politicians and bribe public officials. This notorious holding company was broken up by the feds in 1946. Many online sources state that Union Electric was divested at that time, but this 1947 report still lists the St. Louis utility as an asset. The holding company for Union Electric today is Ameren.

The two new project owners had approached The North American Company, among whose holdings was the St. Louis utility, Union Electric. North American also owned ten percent of Stone & Webster. The construction company’s chairman was on the board of the giant holding company as well. Several years earlier Louis Egan had turned down Cravens who was looking for a market for the electricity Project 459 would eventually produce. When a similar proposal came to UE from The North American Company, Egan jumped on board. Union Electric had had no use for the electricity when first approached, and still didn’t, having just finished a huge coal-fired power plant at Kahokia, Illinois near St. Louis. In the late 1920s sophisticated companies like all these involved with the Bagnell Dam project were aware that financial storm clouds were gathering. This $36 million project promised to be one of the last big deals possible before the looming Wall Street deluge of plummeting stock prices.

Had the deal not been expeditiously done, Bagnell Dam would not have been built. Even the reputable construction company was damaged by the crash. Ten shares of Stone & Webster common stock valued at $1,133.75 in 1929 were only worth $62.50 in 1933.

Had the private power company not built the big dam on the Osage River, decades later, the U.S. Army Corps of engineers would have undoubtedly used this superior dam site instead of building their big Osage River dam at the decidedly inferior Kaysinger Bluff site at Warsaw, Missouri. The Miller County location permitted a much higher dam to be constructed, but the capitalist builders were afraid of the political uproar of flooding Warsaw, a town of more than a thousand at the time. Flooding five hundred people at Linn Creek was an overcome-able public relations problem. The disaster that Truman Reservoir became might not have happened if the dam on the lower Osage known as Bagnell had become a larger federal project.

Bagnell Dam, planned in the Roaring Twenties and barely finished as the Great Depression set in, was one of the final privately financed major water resource developments.

Bagnell Dam, planned in the Roaring Twenties and barely finished as the Great Depression set in, was one of the final privately financed major water resource developments.

NEXT POST: THE FALL OF UNION ELECTRIC’S LOUIS EGAN

Branding the Ozarks, Damnation

DICTATORS AND DAMS: Mobutu Dams the Congo River

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Central governments naturally wish to publicize their major public works achievements. This is doubly so if they are repressive and have a reputation for corruption. Such untrusted regimes inevitably have unstable currency. All this, along with the normal cult of personality dictators cultivate, means that the image of dams often appears on their country’s untrustworthy money along with a portrait of the strongman.

Wouldn’t the pharaohs picture a pyramid and Ramses the Whatever on their bills if they had issued paper money?

Mobutu Sese Seko (whose much longer full name means ‘The warrior who knows no defeat because of his endurance and inflexible will and is all powerful, leaving fire in his wake as he goes from conquest to conquest.’) with the help of the United States and Belgium overthrew Patrice Lumumba, elected ruler of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1960. Mobutu shot Lumumba. In 1971, he renamed the Congo Zaire and shortened his name to Mobuto Sese Seko. Before he fled in 1997 to escape a rebellion that three other African countries supported, he amassed a personal fortune some estimate at fifteen billion dollars US.

When Mobutu fled he probably didn’t take much of his own currency with him. While Zaire money didn’t set world records for hyper-inflation, it did reach 24,000 percent in 1994, before dropping to a few hundred percent. One factor that curbed inflation was the firm that printed this money would no longer extend credit to Mobutu’s government.

When Mobutu fled he probably didn’t take much of his own currency with him. While Zaire money didn’t set world records for hyper-inflation, it did reach 24,000 percent in 1994, before dropping to a few hundred percent. One factor that curbed inflation was the firm that printed this money would no longer extend credit to Mobutu’s government.

One of the big construction projects Mobutu looted was the damming of the Congo River at the world’s largest by volume waterfall, Inga Falls. Inga Falls is an excellent location for dams, but the project lacked economic justification.Two enormously costly hydroelectric dams, Inga 1 (1972) and Inga 2 (1982), were built but have been plagued by shoddy construction, breakdowns, silted reservoirs and a lack of paying customers for their electricity. The thousands of natives displaced by the huge reservoirs have yet to receive their promised compensation.  Inga 1 and 2 have still not recouped their costs, are producing 20% of their expected output, and are a continuing drain on the Congo’s economy.

In spite of these difficulties an even larger hydropower plant is moving forward. The Grand Inga Dam if built would produce twice as much electricity as China’s Three Gorges Dam. Apart from the environmental issues, it carries a cost estimate of eighty billion dollars, which is quite disproportionate for a public works project in a very poor country.

Exactly what Mobutu’s personal rake-off of the Inga dam projects is unknown. Such projects have huge budgets and present a massive opportunity for bribery and corruption. Sadly it isn’t only dictators that accept payoffs for water resource projects. Politicians and bureaucrats of democracies are tempted as well. When researching Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, we found evidence of misdeeds by both the instigator and the builder of Bagnell Dam. Walter Cravens, the banker who started the project, and Louis Egan, president of Union Electric, who actually built the dam, both ended up in federal penitentiaries for financial crimes.

Exactly what Mobutu’s personal rake-off of the Inga dam projects is unknown. Such projects have huge budgets and present a massive opportunity for bribery and corruption. Sadly it isn’t only dictators that accept payoffs for water resource projects. Politicians and bureaucrats of democracies are tempted as well.
When researching Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, we found evidence of misdeeds by both the instigator and the builder of Bagnell Dam. Walter Cravens, the banker who started the project, and Louis Egan, president of Union Electric, who actually built the dam, both ended up in federal penitentiaries for financial crimes.

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Leland & Crystal Payton ISBN: 978-0-9673925-8-5 304 pages 7.5×10 435 illustrations For more information on Damming the Osage, click here.

Branding the Ozarks, Damnation

LABOR IN VAIN: A Curious 1901 Anti-Dam Children Story

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What an unusual fable of the folly of blocking rivers is this little story published in an English periodical called The Prize in August 1901. Its lithographed color cover, printed in Holland, shows Georgie Mays and his sisters, Flossy and Maggie, attempting to improve a brook by shoveling rocks and dirt into it so as to create a lake to better sail their toy boats on. Unfortunately their early education has not included courses in engineering and their dam won’t hold. When kindly Aunt Edith comes over to check on the urchins, Georgie looks up and sighs:

‘Oh, dear, Aunt Edith, I wish the water would stop running for a little while. We want a wall strong enough, and high enough, to keep our boats from drifting away.’

Aunt Edith evidences an early environmental sensibility and informs the young would-be water resource developers:

‘Ah, Georgie,’ was the reply, ‘this water started a long, long way off to come to the sea, and it means to reach it, it will not be stopped, dear; your wall is useless.’

This appeal to the poetry and justice of unfettered nature awakens the lad’s organic conscience.

‘Just for a moment Georgie looked vexed, then he laughed, and said brightly, ‘Yes, of course, it has come from far off—miles and miles, and I will not try any longer to hinder it from getting to the sea, where it is meant to go. It is a brave little stream to keep on running, not letting anything stop it, is it not?’

‘Yes, it is,’ agreed the juvenile would-be dam builders. Their wise and eco-informed Aunt closes with a metaphorical platitude comparing free-flowing rivers to moral obligations.

‘I hope, little folk, you will take a lesson from it, and let nothing stop you from going on in the right way, and doing the things which you ought to do.’

It is a “brave little stream” indeed. This admonition to let the waters flow to the sea would seem to go against the spirit of technological progress of the late Victorian era. Of course at the same time there were conflicted figures like Teddy Roosevelt who simultaneously did much to preserve wilderness while building the Panama Canal. We suspect there is far more children’s fiction of this era, especially written for boys, that involves stalwart lads heroically wresting control of nature for the benefits to humanity and rewards to themselves.

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LABOUR IN VAIN.

GEORGIE Mays, with his sisters, Flossie and Maggie, were spending a week with their aunt at Farcombe Bay. One of their favourite places for play there was near the sand-banks, close to the little boat-house, and not far from the foot of Potter’s Hill, down which a stream ran into the river on its way to the sea.

The children loved to watch this stream hurrying along, over mounds and stones, and down the steps, under the little wooden bridge, and they wished to sail their boats upon it, but they had been warned that, if they did so, the boats would most likely be carried out to sea; for the river made no pause, but ran along at a steady pace.

Well, after thinking over the matter, a new idea came to Georgie, and he said to his sisters,

‘I know what we must do; before we try to sail our boats here, we must make a dam—a strong wall, you know, to reach across the stream, then they cannot get away.’

‘I see what you mean, Georgie,’ answered Flossie, ‘and we had better make the wall just here,’ and she pointed where the stream was narrow and shallow.

So a few minutes later the three children had their shoes and stockings off, and tucked up their other garments, so as to have their legs quite free, and then they set to work to make a wall; but although they worked hard for quite half an hour, they did not bring the task near its end, for, as I have said, the water made no pause, and as it ran past them, it broke down their barrier almost as quickly as they built it up, and at last Maggie got vexed and she left off working, and went and sat down, then Flossie left off, too, and stood still in the water, and Georgie kept on working, and as they were watching him their auntie came upon the scene.

She guessed at once what Georgie was trying to do, and she smiled when he looked up and said with a sigh—

‘Oh, dear, Aunt Edith, I wish the water would stop running for a little while. We want a wall strong enough, and high enough, to keep our boats from drifting away.’

‘Ah, Georgie,’ was the reply, ‘this water started a long, long way off to come to the sea, and it means to reach it, it will not be stopped, dear; your wall is useless.’

Just for a moment Georgie looked vexed, then he laughed, and said brightly, ‘Yes, of course, it has come from far off—miles and miles, and I will not try any longer to hinder it from getting to the sea, where it is meant to go. It is a brave little stream to keep on running, not letting anything stop it, is it not?’

‘Yes, it is,’ agreed his companions, and Aunt Edith added—

‘I hope, little folk, you will take a lesson from it, and let nothing stop you from going on in the right way, and doing the things which you ought to do.’