The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (review)

The battle for Hetch Hetchy is the canonical episode in American environmental history. Long familiar to scholars, and still a powerful memory for many Californians, as well as a subject of continuing debate, it is a well-known story. The Hetch Hetchy Valley, remarkably scenic like the fabled Yosemite Valley itself, was adroitly secured by the city of San Francisco for a reservoir site in the early years of the twentieth century, despite the fact that it lay within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park. Once they realized the threat to the Hetch Hetchy, and to the principle that national parks should be inviolate, John Muir and his allies in the Sierra Club fought strenuously to prevent San Francisco from damming it and turned the issue into a national referendum on the uses of nature, which is pretty much how environmental historians have seen it ever since.

That literature, especially Holway Jones's John Muir and the Sierra Club: The Battle for Yosemite (1965), details the convoluted political history of the struggle, which involved multiple secretaries of the interior with opposite opinions on the matter, three presidential administrations, and a cast of characters that included Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the San Francisco earthquake and fire. Drawing substantially on established sources, along with considerable research of his own, Robert Righter goes over all those details again. But where most previous treatments of the subject focus on the debate between Muir and Pinchot—the idealist contending with a utilitarian view of natural-resource usage—this book pits Muir against James Phelan, the mayor who secretly filed for water rights in Hetch Hetchy. And it directly situates San Francisco's engineers in the story, especially Marsden Manson, Michael Maurice O'Shaughnessy, and the city's expensive eastern consulting engineer, John Ripley Freeman.

For the readers of Technology and Culture, some of this is also familiar ground. Three books in particular—Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959), Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift (1964), and Edwin Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers (1971)—have explored the mutually reinforcing relationship between the conservation ideology of the Progressive Era and engineering professionalism. The efficient use of the country's natural resources depended on experts, and acting on that national stage enhanced the engineering profession's claim that it served the public interest. These interconnections turned out to be fundamental in the Hetch Hetchy case, and San Francisco's engineers played a crucial role in it. Marsden Manson proved absolutely dogged in his defense of the city's water rights, employing everything from trick photographs to scandalous language to defeat those he called the "nature fakers." Indeed, engineers framed the terms of debate, in the first instance, and then in the second place they controlled the data on which Congress ultimately based its grant of the Sierra valley to the city. And they could dominate events so successfully because city officials granted them extraordinary authority, both in the political struggle before Congress acted and in the management of the project afterward. Without any kind of defense against Freeman's huge compilation of technical data, Muir and the preservationists were doomed to fail.

Most accounts of the battle for Hetch Hetchy end at that point, as if the story was over once Muir's side lost. But this book chronicles Michael O'Shaughnessy's role in the design and construction of the water and power system, and the ultimate delivery of water to San Francisco, albeit ten years late and at twice the estimated cost. Righter also describes the long and frustrated attempts of the federal government to get San Francisco to live up to the terms of the congressional grant. Contrary to the explicit language of that act, and to a subsequent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, the city still sells Hetch Hetchy electricity to the...