Cadillac Desert (56 page)

The man in the stern is Claude Terry, an expert local river runner. The man in the bow is the governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter.

The lore of the South could not survive without rivers any better than the human body could survive without blood. Rivers wind through Twain’s and Faulkner’s and James Dickey’s prose; they flow out of Stephen Foster’s lyrics. Yet it is the South, more than any region except California, that has become a landscape of reservoirs, and southerners, more than anyone else, are still at the grand old work of destroying their rivers. With one hand they dam them; with the other they channelize them; the two actions cancel each other out—the channelized streams promote the floods the dams were built to prevent—and the whole spectacle is viewed by some as a perpetual employment machine invented by engineers.

The reasons behind the South’s infatuation with dams was somewhat elusive. Precipitation in the South is uniformly ample, the rivers run well and often flood, and good damsites are, or were, quite common. But the same applies to New England, and there the landscape contains relatively few dams. There are water-supply reservoirs and small power dams, but only a handful of mammoth structures backing up twenty-mile artificial lakes, which are encountered everywhere in the South. Whatever the reasons, it is an article of faith in the South that you send a politician to Washington to bring home a dam. The first southern politician of national stature who went on record opposing one may have been Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s misgivings about dams appear to have been rooted in metaphysics, flintiness, and a sense of military honor. As a businessman, a state legislator, and the chairman of the Middle Flint River Planning and Development Council, he was at first enthusiastic when the Army Corps of Engineers announced plans to erect Spewrell Bluffs Dam, a $133 million structure on the Flint, which is one of Georgia’s larger rivers. However, some of Carter’s personal friends belonged to the state’s environmental community, and at about the same time he was running for governor, they introduced him to canoeing and river rafting, a sport with which he immediately fell in love. Caught between political expediency—many of the state’s business and labor interests were equally in love with Spewrell Bluffs Dam—and the appeals of close friends and his own changing values, Carter decided to make up his mind purely on the facts. He got a copy of the Corps’ general plan and environmental statement, closeted himself in a room, and, displaying that passion for detail that was to contribute to his political undoing, read it from cover to cover. He cross-checked its assertions with a number of experts; he did his own math; he graded the Corps’ hydrology (Carter had graduated from Annapolis as an engineer). In the end, he wrote a blistering eighteen-page letter to the Corps accusing it of “computational manipulation” and of ignoring the environment; then, exercising his gubernatorial discretion, he vetoed the dam. According to friends, Carter was deeply incensed by the Corps’ reliance on deception to justify the dam; as an Annapolis graduate, he didn’t believe a military unit would do such a thing. And, perhaps because he did go to Annapolis instead of West Point, he took it personally. “The Corps of Engineers lied to me,” he told his friends. He said it as if a stranger had wandered into his house, eaten everything in the icebox, and then, on leaving, chopped down his favorite tree.

Carter also possessed something rare among American politicians—a sense of history—and, according to those close to him, he began to wonder what future generations would think of all the dams we had built. What right did we have, in the span of his lifetime, to dam nearly all the world’s rivers? What would happen when the dams silted up? Fixed, huge, and permanent, dams were also oddly vulnerable. What if the climate changed? What if there were floods which the dams, their capacity drastically reduced by silt, couldn’t hold? What if there were terrible droughts, and farms and desert cities that owed their existence to dams faced economic ruin? Besides, having already built fifty thousand of them, what were we getting for our investment now? By the time Carter became President, the cumulative federal debt was approaching a trillion dollars and inflation had already visited the double digits, but the federal water bureaucracies were still going through $5 billion every year. One of the first things he was going to chop out of the federal budget was dams.

T
o a degree that is impossible for most people to fathom, water projects are the grease gun that lubricates the nation’s legislative machinery. Congress without water projects would be like an engine without oil; it would simply seize up. If an influential southern member of Congress didn’t much like a program designed to aid a certain part of the Northeast, then it would not be unheard-of for the Congressional delegation from that region to help him get a dam built in his state. If a Senator threatened to launch a filibuster against a particular program, perhaps the program’s advocates could muster support for the Senator’s favorite water project.

In the Congress, water projects are a kind of currency, like wampum, and water development itself is a kind of religion. Senators who voted for drastic cuts in the school lunch program in 1981 had no compunction about voting for $20 billion worth of new Corps of Engineers projects in 1984, the largest such authorization ever. A jobs program in a grimly depressed city in the Middle West, where unemployment among minority youth is more than 50 percent, is an example of the discredited old welfare mentality; a $300 million irrigation project in Nebraska giving supplemental water to a few hundred farmers is an intelligent, farsighted investment in the nation’s future.

Among members of Congress, the intricate business of trading favors is commonly referred to as the “courtesy” system, or, more quaintly, the “buddy” system. Among its critics—a category that extends to include anyone who has not yet benefited from it—it is called log-rolling, back-scratching, or, most often, the pork barrel. (The phrase “pork barrel” derives from a fondness on the part of some southern plantation owners for rolling out a big barrel of salted pork for their half-starved slaves on special occasions. The near riots that ensued as the slaves tried to make off with the choicest morsels of pork were, apparently, a source of substantial amusement in the genteel old South. Sometime in the 1870s or 1880s, a wag decided that the habitual efforts by members of Congress to carry large loads from the federal treasury back to their home districts resembled the feeding frenzies of the slaves. The usage was quite common by the late 1880s; and in 1890 it showed up in a headline in the New York
Times,
assuring its immortality.) Members of Congress who believe in the system—there are many who fervently do, and probably an equal number who dislike it but go along—argue that it benefits the nation as a whole by distributing public-works money to all the fifty states in more or less equal proportion. It doesn’t. Anyway, to say the Congress cannot function without the “courtesy” system is to say that it cannot conduct its business without indulging in bribery, extortion, and procuring.

Ideology is the first casualty of water development. Senator Alan Cranston of California, who is well out on the left of the Democratic Party, spearheaded the successful effort to sextuple the maximum acreage one could legally own in order to receive subsidized Reclamation water. Having accomplished that, Cranston, heavily financed by big California water users, launched his presidential campaign, railing against “special interests.” Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, who built a reputation as one of the most ardent conservationists in Congress, also campaigned mightily for Rampart Dam, which, if built, would have destroyed more wildlife habitat than any single project ever built in North America. In 1980, Steve Symms of Idaho, a right-wing small businessman, ran against and defeated Senator Frank Church, one of the Senate’s most respected liberals; the one thing they ever agreed on was that the Bureau of Reclamation ought to build Teton Dam.

“New Age” politicians who strive to disassociate themselves from the old Left or the old Right seem to fall into the same old habits where the pork barrel is concerned. In 1984, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado ran for president as a neoliberal and a self-proclaimed expert on how to trim the federal budget; he also supported, consistently, a couple of billion dollars’ worth of unbuilt Colorado reclamation and salinity-control projects, most of them sporting costs far greater than benefits. Former Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., of California flew to London at his own expense to attend the funeral of his hero E. F. Schumacher, who wrote
Small Is Beautiful,
then returned to promote what could turn out to be the most expensive single public-works project ever built, the expansion of the California Water Project.

Politicians beach themselves in such ideological shallows for various reasons: the power of money, the selfishness of their constituents, or their own venality. The system thrives as it does, however, largely because of the power and nature of the committee system in Congress. The leadership of the appropriations and public-works committees that approve and fund water projects traditionally comes from the South and West, where water projects are sacrosanct. In 1980, for example, Congressman Jamie Whitten of Mississippi was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee; Congressman Tom Bevill of Alabama was chairman of its Subcommittee on Public Works; Congressman Ray Roberts of Texas was chairman of the House Public Works Committee; Jennings Randolph of West Virginia was chairman of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee; Mike Gravel of Alaska was chairman of its Subcommittee on Water Resources; Mark Hatfield of Oregon was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. In that same year, 1980, 288 individual projects were included for funding in the omnibus Public Works Appropriations bill. Only eight got more than $25 million. All but one of the eight were located in the South or West. The most expensive item on the menu was the $3 billion Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, which was to receive $243 million—in a single year. The waterway is in the districts of Bevill, Whitten, and the immortal John Stennis, who was second in seniority on the Senate Appropriations Committee that year.

Together, the House and Senate committees and the water-development agencies run a remarkably efficient operation. They work in concert, rewarding those who vote for water projects and punishing those who do not, sometimes to the point of stopping virtually any federal money from going into their districts. They would, of course, much rather use the carrot than the stick. In 1978, before he had even set foot in Washington, Senator-elect Alan Simpson of Wyoming was paid a special visit by three high-ranking officers in the Corps of Engineers asking if there was anything they could “do” for him. Once in Washington, Simpson was approached again, this time by the leaders of the appropriate committees, who made him the same offer. Every freshman Senator and Congressman got the same treatment, even Bob Edgar. “The old-boy network comes to you,” says Edgar, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1974, at the age of thirty-one. “They say, ‘You’ve got a water project in your district? You want one? Let us take care of it for you.’ Then they come around a few months later and get their pound of flesh. You actually risk very little by going along. You get a lot of money thrown into your district for a project that few of your constituents oppose. In return, you vote for a lot of projects your constituents don’t know about or care about. Not many of my constituents are going to base their vote for or against me on whether or not I supported Stonewall Jackson Dam in West Virginia. Then everyone wonders why we’re running such big federal deficits, and they cut the social programs, which must be the culprit.”

As it turned out, Edgar did not support Stonewall Jackson Dam in West Virginia, nor did he support dozens of other projects ear-marked for funding in the Appropriations Committee that year. He has even made a concerted effort to have them taken out, year after year. For this, Edgar has become a virtual pariah among his colleagues and a hero among conservation groups. By general consensus, no one among the 535 members of Congress has been quite as willing to risk his political career attacking the pork-barrel system. The reason may have something to do with the fact that Edgar is a former Methodist minister who became a Congressman almost by accident. Well-built, handsome, a picture of rectitude in repose, he was, in the early 1980s, perhaps the most stubbornly principled person in that legislative body, a distinction that has worked against him at every turn. “Some of my colleagues come up to me and say, ‘Bob, I wish I had your guts,’ ” says Edgar. “Then they attack me on the floor.” Actually, Edgar has a built-in advantage in his district. He represents suburban Philadelphia, and it would be difficult for the Corps of Engineers to tantalize his constituents with a water project—where would one build one in the suburbs?—and then see to it that the appropriations committees deny him funds (a strategy which, according to a number of Congressional staff aides, has been used on numerous occasions, with good results). Still, federal public-works money has, in recent years, tended to detour around Edgar’s district. His colleagues have also subjected him to threats. “Tim Lee Carter of Kentucky came up to me once after I fought to remove Paintsville Lake from the appropriations bill,” says Edgar. “He was blazing mad. He punched a finger in my chest and said, ”I know nothing about the Philadelphia shipyard,
but I will.’
Another Congressman told me he hopes I
am
successful in knocking off his project, because then hundreds of his constituents will walk into my district and work for my defeat.”

After a while, it is difficult to remain principled in such an atmosphere, let alone be effective. “Congress as an institution is pretty sick,” says Bob Eckhardt, who was a liberal Congressman from Houston until his defeat in 1980. “It has two diseases: special interestitis and parochialism. My opponent made a big issue out of the fact that I was too generous to the Northeast. He said I voted to guarantee New York City’s loan when the money could have been spent in Texas. He boasted about
not
being a candidate with a national perspective. New Yorkers are just as parochial in their own way. Liz Holtzman of New York feels the question of the Concorde landing at Kennedy Airport is as important as the Equal Rights Amendment. People like Pat Moynihan [the Democratic Senator from New York] oppose western dams but want to waste even more money on a crazily expensive project like Westway. If New York City
had
gone bankrupt in 1975 it would have been a terribly serious blow to the bond markets of many other cities, including places like Boise, Idaho, and Jackson, Mississippi. I didn’t detect that many members recognized that fact, or cared about it if they did. They mainly didn’t want to be accused of spending their constituents’ money on a lousy place like New York.”