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3 NATIONALIZING NATURE The New Deal Legacy of Snake Basin Hydropower F ederalplanstoelectrifyHellsCanyonoriginated during the New Deal. Public power’s transformation of the Columbia Basin inspired activists and ordinary citizens across America to dream of pushing out hydroelectricity’s frontiers. Building new federal dams became more than matters of engineering judgment and cost-benefit analysis: they madeconcretestatementsaboutnationalprogresstowardthebrighterfuture. This New Deal legacy made the Hells Canyon High Dam controversy more than a referendum about northwestern postwar natural-resources policy. Public-power expansion engaged organizations and people far from the region.Powerfulideological,economic,andlegalcurrentsinvestedthisstruggle about a big dam with remarkable durability and ferocity. These currents traced their source far back into the American experience with capital and nature, but the New Deal in the Northwest caused them to collide in the Hells Canyon controversy. In Hells Canyon, after World War II, the Snake River running west met an expansive public-power domain pushing east. Abundant, inexpensive hydroelectricity pouring from Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams had spreadnewindustry,farms,andpeoplethroughouttheColumbiaBasinafter 1935. Almost overnight, Bonneville, built by the Army Corps of Engineers, and Grand Coulee, property of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation , unleashed an unprecedented jolt of energy. Public power transmitted through high-voltage lines built by the Department of Interior’s Bonneville Power Administration, re-created the Columbia Basin between 1935 and 1945. Power over Columbia Basin water, secured during the New Deal, inspired federal agencies and their customers to look upriver, seeking control over Snake Basin hydroelectricity. Most downriver business boosters and elected o‹cials supported the quest by BPA, the Army Engi39 neers, and the Reclamation Bureau to secure more cheap hydroelectricity. Prosaic pursuit of price advantage dovetailed with planners’ and publicists’ hopes to reform virgin territory with public power. Federal turbines now did double duty as growth engines and dream machines. Both wings of the postwar upriver oªensive believed Hells Canyon’s power potential, once annexed into the public-power domain, would make territorial expansion pay. Federalizing Hells Canyon hydropower would enableagencyplannersandtheirregionalalliestoattainfiveinterlinkedpostwar ambitions: extend cheap public electricity into the Snake Basin, irrigate nearly a half-million acres of sagebrush desert on the Snake River Plain, diversify the Snake Basin’s economy, satisfy the Columbia Basin’s boundless energy appetite, and master the Snake’s flow to prevent downstream floods and to carry barges upriver. Each goal enlisted a diªerent segment of the public-power coalition that had redefined the objectives of naturalresources policy in the Columbia Basin. The New Deal Northwest’s grandest monument, Grand Coulee Dam, is central to understanding not only the New Deal in the Columbia Basin but also the postwar Hells Canyon controversy. The Bureau of Reclamation and Bonneville Power Administration used Coulee’s power to drive a planned expansion of irrigated agriculture and industrial manufacturing throughout the Columbia Basin. That same vision inspired BPA and Reclamation planners, as soon as World War II ended, to plan a similar transformation of Snake Basin life. The New Deal’s Columbia Basin strategy pivoted around cheap, abundant Grand Coulee hydropower. Postwar New Dealers’ federal strategy for the Snake Basin likewise depended on cheap, abundant electricity generated by a new federal High Hells Canyon Dam. The expanding public-power domain, formally known after 1946 as the FederalColumbiaRiverPowerSystem,innovatedlegalstrategiesandadministrative techniques to try annexing Hells Canyon. The New Deal bequeathed not so much a new civic ethos about nature as a new administrative regime over nature. Executive agencies, ultimately responsible to the president and his cabinet, became the chief means for adapting nature to society. New Deal jurisprudence rationalized federal administrators’ discretionary authority over nature. Law made during the New Deal magnified the postwar upriver oªensive’s striking power by neutralizing opponents’ capacity to dissent. In targeting Hells Canyon, federal agency administrators deployed quasisovereign power over Northwest water and land. New Deal statutes and administrative regulations committed the United 40 NATIONALIZING NATURE States to delivering cheap public power throughout the Columbia Basin. The trio of federal agencies that administered public power’s domain—BPA, Army Engineers, and Reclamation Bureau—aggressively invoked the new laws to reach beyond the Columbia Basin. Lawmaking that created the public-power domain had often been urgent, ad hoc, driven by national emergencies.Somewhatbelatedly,CongresstriedtorationalizetheNewDeal fusion of federal dams and public power. The 1944 Flood Control Act recognized three distinctive innovations had transformed the Columbia Basin: mammoth multiple-purpose federal dams, subsidized power dedicated to maximizing consumption, and tripartite governance of this federal strategy .1 The act directed the...

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