The Untold Story of the Lower Colorado River Authority by John Williams (review)

In 1934 the Texas legislature granted the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) the right to dam one of the Lone Star State's most deadly and unpredictable rivers in order to control, store, and use its water to generate electricity. For centuries, the Colorado River had alternated between drought and flood stages, and efforts to control it had failed. In 1900 the Austin Dam had been swept away before a crowd of spectators who had gathered to watch raging waters that eventually caused millions of dollars in property damage. John Williams describes the next three decades as an "Era of Frustration," when politicians and businessmen, including utility magnate Samuel Insull, tried unsuccessfully to dam and develop the Colorado. The frustration ended with the coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, growing public support for large dams, and the persistence of Congressmen James Paul Buchanan and Lyndon B. Johnson who advocated federal funding. By the end of World War II, the LCRA was selling power and expanding its customer base from towns to farms, and the people of rural Texas began to invest in modern appliances for the first time. These early days were marked by success and celebration, but they would be short-lived. For the next four decades the LCRA turned its attention to monitoring water quality, managing recreational activity on its famous Highland Lakes, and eventually shifting to natural gas, coal, and oil to produce electricity. The authority's challenges testified to the difficulty that comes with controlling nature.

Williams tells this story with intimacy and with an authoritative voice in The Untold Story of the Lower Colorado River Authority. Relying largely on the LCRA corporate archives, Williams takes readers into the boardrooms and offices of the men who directed the power company's operations since the 1930s. The LCRA photographs he uses copiously throughout the book also bring to life the construction of the dams and capture the scale of the authority's development on the Colorado River. For former employees of the LCRA and for residents of Central Texas, this book should evoke vivid memories of Texas's reluctant embrace of modernization. Social and cultural historians will find Williams's account useful for its discussion of the LCRA's campaign to demonstrate the practicality of electricity for farmers and the emergence of recreational culture on the Highland Lakes. In these two sections especially, the author places this local project into a broader regional context. In other parts of the book, however, Williams dwells too long and too often on the administrative history of the LCRA, which will prove tedious for a general audience. This is a company history in the traditional sense—much of the narrative revolves around the policies and internal politics of various administrators—but it is thoroughly researched and offers a revealing look into the management of water and the production of energy in the twentieth century.