Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century (review)

Michael Hiltzik's history of Hoover Dam has an ambitious subtitle: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century, which suggests a big, ambitious book for a big, ambitious project. At twenty chapters and more than four hundred pages of text, Colossus certainly qualifies as ambitious.

Colossus is not really a thesis-driven book, and not really about "the American Century." Although Hiltzik spends part of the introduction and most of the last chapter discussing how Hoover Dam's control of the Colorado River has facilitated the growth of desert cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, the meat of the book is concerned with the political and business personalities who built the dam and the daunting technical challenges that went into its construction. Political figures such as President Herbert Hoover, flamboyant California Progressive Hiram Johnson, and quintessential New Dealer Harold Ickes loom large. The exploits of the ruthlessly efficient—to the point of disregard for worker safety—construction engineer Frank "Hurry-Up" Crowe are detailed in admiring prose. Hiltzik does a fine job of using oral histories to let the construction workers relate their on-the-job experiences. The sometimes hand-in-glove and sometimes contentious relationship between the federal government and the Six Companies construction conglomerate responsible for building the dam is discussed, as is the development and social life of the company town of Boulder City, Nevada. The book's final chapter notes the alarming rate of diminution in recent years of Lake Mead, the huge reservoir created by Hoover Dam now renowned for its "bathtub ring," showing just how much the water level has fallen as the Colorado has been over-expropriated, giving the book a rather sobering end.

Colossus is not an academic history, nor does it profess to be one. Hiltzik's primary research, consisting of sources in national, university, and local archives, newspapers, and oral histories seems solid, though one wonders why state archives were not consulted. The notes and bibliography suggest a familiarity with key historical works on water in the West such as Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire and Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, though Hiltzik is unconcerned about placing himself in any historiographical context—certainly to the relief of the general reader. Scholars of the American West may be dismayed by Hiltizik's questionable assertion that "As a federal project, Hoover Dam was the first manifestation of the clamorous, ascendant West's expanding influence in Washington" (xii). Although this statement can be understood in such a way that it would be hard to argue that it is exactly wrong, Hiltzik gives short shrift to the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, which committed significant federal resources to developing irrigation in the West decades before the building of Hoover Dam commenced. The dam represented not so much the first, but the grandest manifestation of efforts to provide a regular flow of water to the Arid West that stretched back to the 1870s. The section of illustrations in the book is not clearly placed nor noted in the table of contents; this makes for frustrating reading in the early going when a map would be useful.

Although practically none of the content of Colossus relates to Texas history, it does highlight a neglected subject for Texas historians: the copious dam-building projects on the state's major rivers to regulate water for urban and agricultural use. Many of Texas's booming metropolitan areas depend on water procured by such projects (along with already strained groundwater supplies), and if predictions of higher temperatures and more erratic rainfall in coming decades hold true, Texas's growing population could be just as vulnerable as the far Southwest is now to falling reservoirs and dwindling water supplies. Could our own Colorado prove to be as overextended as the one to the west?