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7. Forging Transcontinental Alliances: The Sacramento River Valley in National Drainage and Flood Control Politics, 1900–1917
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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135 In August 1903, the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress met in Seattle, Washington . Dedicated to promoting economic growth in the western United States, the congress adopted resolutions pertaining to water, forest, mineral, and rangeland conservation. One of the most strongly worded resolutions implored the federal government to develop the Sacramento River valley. Decades of ineffective local policies and conflicting water laws delayed flood control, irrigation, and wetlands drainage, causing the valley to languish as the country’s biggest untapped source of wealth. The sheer scale of the valley’s environmental problems, the congress concluded, justified intervention by the embryonic administrative and regulatory state. Once drained and irrigated, the valley would serve as an emblem of national power, progress, and prosperity. The resolution stated, In the great interior central valley of California the problem of the control of the floods of the Sacramento River, which would furnish water enough to irrigate 10,000,000 acres of land, if conserved and utilized, should be treated as a single problem involving arid-land reclamation, flood control, navigation, and drainage, and while the improvements of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers should be continued and extended by the National Government to fully develop the navigability of those rivers, the necessity of coping with the problem in its broadest aspects should be . . . prepared without delay by the engineers of the Reclamation Service and of the War Department.1 The Sacramento River valley’s ensemble of water resource problems and status as an intrastate navigable river captivated early twentieth-century federal conservaCHAPTER 7 Forging Transcontinental Alliances THE SACRAMENTO RIVER VALLEY IN NATIONAL DRAINAGE AND FLOOD CONTROL POLITICS, 1900–1917 Anthony E. Carlson 136 anthony e. carlson tionists, hydrologists, and members of Congress. Aside from the Columbia River, the Sacramento River was the far West’s only navigable watercourse. All of its tributaries were intrastate, meaning that federal agencies dealt only with the California state government regarding water rights. In the early 1900s, the Sacramento Valley emerged as the centerpiece of the US Geological Service’s (USGS) strategy of institutional aggrandizement, which emphasized exporting its land reclamation program outside of the arid American West. The USGS sought to curry favor with midwestern and southern policy makers, build a national constituency, and supplant the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in drainage and flood control by using the Sacramento Valley as a staging area to showcase its managerial capabilities. Seeking to unify the arid and humid halves of the United States under a single water program, the USGS transformed the valley into a political battleground where it could seize power and funding from rival agencies. In order to carry out the USGS’s institutional power grab, a handful of littleknown USGS engineers and topographers with experience in California water politics encouraged Sacramento Valley booster organizations and Congress members to forge alliances with southern communities. They argued that comprehensive drainage and flood control legislation would never be possible without robust regional political alliances. The Sacramento Valley’s broader significance in Progressive era water politics was its budding, and uneasy, relationship with the Mississippi River valley, which was sealed during a string of catastrophic floods in 1912–13 in the lower Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. Natural disasters cemented the marriage of convenience between both valleys that the USGS initially cultivated and fostered. This essay takes a fresh look at national flood and drainage policies from the perspective of the Sacramento Valley. It argues that the Sacramento -Mississippi valley alliance revolutionized and accelerated the federal state’s role in national water resource planning by paving the way for the passage of the Flood Control Acts of 1917 and 1928.2 Progressive Era National Water Politics The federal government acquired new administrative and regulatory powers around the turn of the twentieth century. In response to urbanization, unprecedented immigration, the excesses of industrial capitalism, and growing disparities in the distribution of wealth, federal agencies intervened more forcefully in economic , environmental, and social affairs. Attempting to expand the federal government ’s managerial powers over the nation’s waters, forests, and public lands, a group of university-trained engineers and scientists rose to power in Washington in the 1890s. Harnessing the authority of the emergent administrative and regulatory state, these conservationists linked efficient natural resource management to solving environmental problems through the application of scientific principles. By casting localism, legislative compromise, laissez-faire economics, and limited [35.153.106.141] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:00 GMT...