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1. The Conscience of a Conservationist: Barry Goldwater and the Colorado River
- University of Arizona Press
- Chapter
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on the evening of july 15, 1940, Barry Goldwater sat on a sandy beach beside the Colorado River. Contemplating the river running through canyons half a mile high, Goldwater wrote his thoughts on entering the river’s main stream that day. “One can sense the might of this river merely by looking at it, and even here, where it Xows wide and smooth, one knows that this water is diVerent from any we have traveled in.” Even in this calm section, the river’s potential power was evident. “Water that comes roaring through here goes on to sculpt rugged, beautiful formations, and to make a rough, fast, dangerous river that forever will challenge the ingenuity of man.” Both the river’s beauty and its diYculty, he wrote, required protection. In the pages of his journal, he praised Theodore Roosevelt, who saw “what private interests were doing and how far they were going in spoiling the area” and acted to protect much of the river. Even the resources made available by Boulder Dam did not reduce Goldwater ’s feeling that the river required protection. As the light dimmed on the canyon walls, Goldwater closed his entry for Camp 5. “The fact that downstream these waters are quieted by man for his use 1 The Conscience of a Conservationist Barry Goldwater and the Colorado River andrew needham 19 doesn’t impress me now. We are on the Colorado—that means something more to me than electric power or a harnessed river.”1 The Barry Goldwater who sat on the banks of the Colorado seems to bear little resemblance to the Wgure now widely regarded as initiating the conservative revival that has lasted almost Wfty years. Once known primarily for suVering massive defeat in the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater has come to be regarded as the most inXuential loser in American political history, the tip of the spear of a conservative movement that, by the 1980s, would dominate the Republican Party.2 Free-market conservatives, in particular, have claimed Goldwater as their own, arguing he represents an untainted conservatism, free of sentiment or piety. As George Will argued in a recent foreword to The Conscience of a Conservative, free markets and limited government alone mattered to Goldwater. “Conservatisms grounded in religious reverence, nostalgia, and resistance to the permanent revolution of conditions in a capitalist, market society,” Will wrote, were “unintelligible, even repellant, to Goldwater, if he had taken time to notice them.”3 Historians examining Goldwater’s early career have generally agreed, without embracing Will’s hyperbole, that Wghting the New Deal and protecting private enterprise represented the core of Goldwater’s early political philosophy.4 There is much truth in these claims. Goldwater’s Wrst overtly political acts were columns in the Phoenix Gazette excoriating Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. As a Phoenix city council member from 1949 to 1952, he touted business as the model for government. He ran for Senate in 1952, asking, “Do you believe in expanding federal government? Are you willing to surrender more of your liberty? Do you want federal bureaus and federal agencies to take over an ever increasing portion of your life?”5 Goldwater’s early politics seem clear. He was a businessman and conservative crusader, a man of simple principles who saw few contradictions within them. Goldwater’s experiences with the Colorado River show a diVerent side of his early career. In 1940, Goldwater Xoated the river from Green River, Utah, to the headwaters of Lake Mead. Following his trip, he traveled the state, exhibiting a Wlm of the journey and lecturing on the river. Goldwater’s renown as a river runner led to an appointment to Arizona’s Colorado River Commission, a board dedicated to claiming the river’s water for Arizona. Examining these experiences reveals 20 andrew needham a Goldwater incongruous to most portraits. Rather than seeing Arizona as a place that, in Will’s words, “had precious little past to conserve ,” Goldwater aimed to walk in the footsteps of Spanish explorers, Mormon pioneers, and John Wesley Powell, and to understand eternity itself by experiencing the power and danger of the river Wrsthand.6 Rather than championing the market and limited government, he lobbied for federal projects he considered vital to Arizona’s development . These experiences shaped his politics. Service on the Colorado River Commission familiarized him with the key issues of western water development, and running the river helped form his conceptions of freedom and its limits. Knowing the Colorado...