Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy

1. Introduction: Hells Canyon High Dam and the Postwar Northwest

1 INTRODUCTION Hells Canyon High Dam and the Postwar Northwest B oth nature and people made Hells Canyon’s postwar history. Fish swimming from sea to mountains and drifting back again weave two diverse watersheds, the Snake and Columbia, into the Pacific Northwest. Water flowing through Hells Canyon links the Snake Basin to the Columbia. Yet, as the twentieth century unfolded, Snake and Columbia Basin people came to value water diªerently. In the Columbia Basin, people used water principally as a tool to make hydroelectricity. By contrast, water stored amid the Snake Basin’s distinctive topography, soil, and climate made irrigated agriculture the predominant relationship between humans and nature. Environmental predicates to the human history of the postwar Hells Canyon controversy deserve study in their own right. Landforms and waterways do not merely reflect cultural impressions from humans who have successively occupied the Northwest. Rather, the Snake Basin’s natural features and forces have continuously influenced human behavior. Though varied peoples have adapted nature to serve their material needs, the Snake Basin’s land and water, its snowfall and fish runs, exercise the prerogative of sovereignty : they make their own history. The Snake Basin’s arable soil, the river’s kinetic energy in Hells Canyon, and the rich anadromous fishery in its chief tributary, the Salmon River, exercised power over the controversy about electrifying Hells Canyon (map 1). They were historical actors before they became natural resources. They remained so even after dams began to rise in the canyon. Northwest histories have begun blurring intellectual boundaries that separate culture from nature. Yet any solid understanding of why Hells Canyon became “a controversy ” must be grounded firmly both in the water that sustains life in this place and in its human inhabitants’ actions. Together, they made Hells 3 Canyon worth fighting for during the postwar years. One human era’s dispute about the Northwest’s natural elements recast land, water, and nonhuman creatures into new relationships. Thus rearranged, nature in the Northwest still shapes succeeding histories. The New Deal after 1932 set the stage for the Hells Canyon controversy by making the Columbia Basin depend more on public hydroelectricity than did the Snake Basin. New Deal hydropower strategy subordinated regional biology to national economy and state sovereignty to federal primacy. A decisivemomentintheColumbiaBasin’shydroelectric transformationcame when Grand Coulee Dam transferred power over the region’s salmon from state to federal hands. New Deal legal innovations erected an administrative state to govern this new public power domain. Industrial production in World War II consolidated federal control over water and fish after 1941. Ambitious and self-confident after easing economic depression and helping win the war, federal hydroelectric managers after 1945 tried to extend their authority upriver from the Columbia Basin. Their postwar oªensive targeted the Snake Basin for annexation into the hydroelectric domain. High Hells Canyon Dam’s hydropower would fuel their push to the Continental Divide. To reach the Snake Basin, federal power agencies first had to claim economic primacy for power supply in the Columbia Basin. Downriver private utility businesses after 1946 conceded to federal agencies the initiative for meeting their future power needs. Then, between 1947 and 1948, federal managers overcame downriver political resistance to new upstream power dams. Federal managers negotiated with Oregon and Washington a fisheryconservation plan that eªectively sacrificed Snake River salmon and steelhead trout to the upriver oªensive. Administrative and technological precedents established at Grand Coulee during the New Deal would limit postwar fish-conservation eªorts to the lower Columbia River. Federal and corporate rivals clashed for hydroelectric authority over the Snake in Hells Canyon. Hells Canyon provoked a fierce ideological and economic contest between public and corporate electricity. Idaho Power Company’s victory came after what amounted to a national referendum against New Deal hydroelectric strategy. Each contestant invested Hells Canyon with symbolic status. Each worked hard and successfully to nationalize the politics of its hydroelectrification. After 1948, Hells Canyon’s fate became a national political issue. Power policy shaped postwar politics when Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential campaign dramatized opposition not only to Hells Canyon High Dam but also to the Democratic Party’s entire 4 INTRODUCTION New Deal hydroelectric strategy. President Eisenhower’s promise to build dams in “partnership” with private business recast the Hells Canyon controversy . Idaho Power and High Dam advocates argued their claims before the Federal Power Commission for eight years. This epic legal case about power and primacy...