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.