Movies, Pacific fun zones, and other public attractions drew numerous people to California, many of whom stayed, swelling the populations of cities. Naturally, the most immediate need of newcomers was water. Without large quantities of available water California’s metropolitan centers could not provide for their growing populations, the agricultural sector could not prosper, and the oil-refining industry could not have developed as it did, given the fact that some 77,000 gallons of water were needed to refine 100 barrels of petroleum. Simply put, California’s urban and economic growth in the 1920s and 1930s was water-dependent, which necessitated the further development of infrastructure to direct flows to cities, fields, and industrial plants.
The Hetch Hetchy and Owens Valley aqueducts, which, respectively, supplied San Francisco and Los Angeles with water (see Chapter 9), were components of what became, in the interwar decades, the most extensive system of waterworks in the United States if not the world. To these components were added O’Shaughnessy Dam, Boulder Canyon (later renamed Hoover) Dam and its accompanying All-American Canal, the Colorado River Aqueduct, and the Central Valley Project.
While the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct was under construction, San Francisco engineer Michael S. O’Shaughnessy oversaw the building of a huge dam that would impound the waters of the Tuolumne River. Work on the O’Shaughnessy (also known as the Hetch Hetchy) Dam began in 1919. When the mammoth structure’s first phase was completed in 1923, it had attained a height of 227 feet. The hydroelectric power generated by the project supplied more than 80 percent of San Francisco’s needs by the mid-1930s.
The Boulder Canyon Project was necessitated by the phenomenal growth of Los Angeles and southern California, whose water needs soon outstripped flows from Owens Valley and the Imperial Canal farther south. With a population of 576,673 in 1920, Los Angeles surpassed San Francisco and has since remained the state’s largest city. Ten years later Los Angeles’ population had nearly tripled, to 1,470,516. Much more water was needed for both household and commercial use, as, in addition to the water-dependent petroleum refineries, tire manufacturing had come to the city. The Good Year Tire and Rubber Company, for example, required 8 million gallons of water a day to operate its Los Angeles plant. Because of these developments, city engineer William Mulholland urged building an aqueduct from the Colorado River to the City of Angels.
The scale, cost, and benefits of this undertaking were of such magnitude that the federal government oversaw the project that took some 20 years to complete. After considerable negotiation, seven states located in the Colorado River watershed - Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California - signed an agreement in November 1922 ensuring that the first four of these states would receive half of the river flow. Meanwhile, earlier that same year two California congressmen, Representative Phil Swing and Senator Hiram Johnson, cosponsored the Swing-Johnson bill providing for construction of a high dam to be built in Boulder Canyon for the purposes of generating hydroelectric power and preventing flooding. The bill also authorized construction of an All-American Canal (so called because the waterway would supersede the earlier Imperial or Alamo Canal, much of which lay in Mexico) that would be located entirely on U. S. soil just above the Mexican border. Alarmed by demands from the Mexican government for half of the flow through the canal on its territory, California farmers had pressed for an All-American canal to be located entirely on U. S. soil. This new canal would facilitate irrigation of Imperial Valley farmland, turning a desert into a garden.
Concerted opposition from many Republicans and private corporations hindered passage of the measure. Conservative Los Angeles Times editor Harry Chandler charged that the bill was socialistic and, hence, a threat to American capitalism. His ownership of 862,000 acres of Baja land near the defunct Imperial Canal exemplifies the Pacific Rim reach of Greater California business interests in the early decades of the 1900s. This huge land holding may have given Chandler even more cause to oppose the All-American Canal, whose adjacent real estate on the U. S. side of the border would increase in value relative to his Mexican holdings located near the old Imperial Canal. Nevertheless, the election of moderate Republican Herbert Hoover, a Stanford-educated engineer and supporter of the project, to the presidency in 1928 provided the momentum needed to pass the dam and canal bill that same year. Outgoing President Calvin Coolidge signed the measure, renamed the Boulder Canyon Project Act, into law on December 21.
Both the dam and the canal quickened urbanization and agricultural development in southern California. In 1935 Boulder Dam, then the world’s largest, was completed and christened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A year later the Southland began receiving hydroelectric power, mostly publicly owned, generated by the project. In 1947 Congress renamed the water-impounding colossus Hoover Dam (as it has since been called), after the former U. S. president who supported its building. Work on the All-American Canal began in 1934 and the channel was in use by 1940. Today more than half a million acres of land are irrigated by the waters flowing through the waterway, the world’s largest irrigation canal.
Meanwhile, in 1931 voters in the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California approved a $220 million bond issue to construct a 242-mile aqueduct from what would become Arizona’s dam-made Lake Havasu, filled by the Colorado River, to southern California’s Pacific Coast. Los Angeles Basin residents and factories began receiving the pipeline’s flow in 1941.
These extraordinary water projects reflect the energies and reach of a Greater California. Hoover Dam, situated on the Nevada-Arizona border, was largely the handiwork of California politicians, engineers, water and power organizations, and construction companies. “It was. . . for all practical purposes, a California enterprise in conjunction with the federal government,” noted historian Kevin Starr. Arizona’s Lake Havasu is the source of the Colorado River Aqueduct that supplies much of the Southland’s water. In these two instances, the Golden State did not hesitate to cross borders - or to figuratively extend its borders - to meet its water needs.
As in the Southland, large farms in the Central Valley, California’s agricultural heartland, required additional water resources in the 1930s. Because additional land was being cultivated, more water was needed. While the number of farms increased in the 1920s and 1930s, so too did the acreage of the largest growers. For example, by 1935, 70 percent of Sacramento Valley and San Joaquin Valley farmland belonged to agribusiness (large-scale, corporate farming that includes the production, processing, and distribution of crops as well as equipment use) interests holding 1,000 acres or more. Such extensive agricultural development generated a great thirst in this interior region of the Golden State.
Efforts by Progressives in the 1920s to quench that thirst by advancing government-sponsored irrigation projects in the Central Valley were blocked by Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a powerful opponent of publicly owned utilities ventures. Some major growers opposing a statutory 160-acre per person limit on land irrigated by Bureau of Reclamation projects allied themselves with PG&E. However, with 20 percent of Californians on depression-era relief, many politicians and their constituents looked increasingly to government at all levels to create public works programs so that the able-bodied unemployed could earn paychecks.
In response to the needs of farmers and jobless workers, the state legislature overcame PG&E opposition and passed the California Central Valley Project Act in 1933. A statewide $170 million bond measure won voter approval later that same year, but revenues were insufficient to start work until the federal government released emergency relief funds two years later. At that point the Bureau of Reclamation assumed responsibility for the project, on which work was begun in 1937.
When completed in the 1950s, the extensive network of agricultural plumbing included dams, canals, and power transmission lines. Shasta Dam, 602 feet high, impounded flows from the Sacramento, McCloud, and Pitt rivers into Shasta Lake. Other principal components of the CVP included the Keswick, Folsom, and Friant dams, and the Contra Costa, Delta-Mendota, Madera, and Friant-Kern canals. Though owned by PG&E, the transmission lines were made available to the state by an agreement with the federal government. As a result, hydroelectric power generated by the Shasta and Keswick dams could be transmitted to pump water through the Delta-Mendota and Contra Costa canals.
World History
