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.

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.