As much of the foregoing suggests, progressivism, nationwide, was an urban-based movement attuned to meeting the most basic needs - such as water - of city dwellers. The interests of rural, farming communities were often an afterthought in the dynamics of progressive politics, while at times private individuals exploited public water projects for financial gain. As California’s two largest municipalities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, grew in population, provision had to be made for supplying their citizens with an adequate amount of water. The public projects undertaken to do so were sweeping in scope and enmeshed in controversy.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francisco was by far the state’s and the Pacific Coast’s leading city, boasting a population of 342,782 in 1900. With limited nearby water resources and an increasing demand for electricity, the city’s progressive officials eyed Yosemite National Park’s Tuolumne River. If that river’s flow could be impounded in a reservoir to be situated at Hetch Hetchy Valley, as urged by the city’s engineer, San Francisco’s water and power needs could be met far into the future. To that end, Mayor James D. Phelan applied, unsuccessfully, to the U. S. secretary of the interior for authorization to transform the Hetch Hetchy Valley into a gargantuan water storage and electricitygenerating facility.
For more than a decade a fierce political battle ensued among progressive conservationists - a battle between those valuing nature primarily for spiritual and aesthetic reasons, and those valuing nature as consumers, for sustainable and efficient use of its resources. With few exceptions, Sierra Club conservationists, ably led by John Muir (see Chapter 7), fit best into the spiritual and aesthetic group. Phelan and those supporting a Hetch Hetchy reservoir, on the other hand, aligned more with the utilitarian cohort, for which the water and power needs of city residents trumped all else.
To appreciate the intensity of the opposition to Phelan and the Hetch Hetchy project, it is essential to understand Muir’s thinking. His environmental philosophy informed virtually every aspect of his adult life, accounting for his determination to prevent Hetch Hetchy from becoming a reservoir. Muir gravitated toward a naturalistic belief in the goodness, humanness, and sacred beauty of wilderness. “The whole of wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity,” he wrote. “The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic,
Brotherly.” Filling the Hetch Hetchy Valley with water would be equivalent to drowning the valley’s “brotherly” stones and vegetation, or, put another way, to flooding nature’s cathedral.
From 1901 to 1913, Muir and his supporters succeeded in stopping the transformation of Hetch Hetchy into a reservoir. However, with the beginning of President Woodrow Wilson’s first administration in the latter year, a new secretary of the interior - Franklin K. Lane from California - gave permission to proceed with the hydroelectric project. After holding hearings, Congress followed suit with passage of the Raker Act in 1913, which was then signed into law by Wilson. Named after California Representative John E. Raker, the measure granted the City of San Francisco the right to build a reservoir in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, provided that the water and electricity made available by the project would not be sold to any private individual or corporation. Utilitarian conservationists insisted on the sales prohibition. They were intent on preventing Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), a private utilities corporation, from selling water and power derived from a federally owned source for profit. Passage of the Raker Act left Muir worn out and disheartened. He died in 1914.
In the years that followed, the City of San Francisco could not get sufficient votes to pass the bond measures that would have enabled the project to remain entirely publicly owned. PG&E then purchased electricity from the city and resold it at a profit to San Franciscans, a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Raker Act. In 1934 the aqueduct was completed and the city’s inhabitants experienced their first taste of Hetch Hetchy water.
Los Angeles, with a population of 102,479 in 1900 that would double over the next five years, similarly found a water source in the Sierra Nevada - the Owens River, located on the eastern side of the range. The controversy over building an aqueduct that would divert water from that river and convey it 233 miles southward to Los Angeles was even bitterer than that engulfing the Hetch Hetchy project.
In 1904, Fred Eaton, an engineer and former Los Angeles mayor, reported to municipal officials that in Owens Valley he had found a major source of water that could supply the city’s needs into the foreseeable future. William Mulholland, the city engineer and former protege of Eaton, supported the idea strongly.
Eaton expected to enrich himself by transferring to Los Angeles land and water rights he had been buying in Long Valley, located at the upper end of the Owens River watershed. There a reservoir could be built, which would make his property even more valuable to Los Angeles and, consequently, more profitable for himself. For his scheme to work, however, a U. S. Reclamation Service plan to irrigate Owens Valley farms had to be derailed and Los Angeles had to finance the building of an aqueduct.
Both of these obstacles were met and overcome. Joseph B. Lippincott, the Reclamation Service’s supervising engineer, decided that the valley’s water should go to Los Angeles rather than to the federal agency’s planned irrigation project for the area. The fact that Lippincott and Eaton had been close friends who proceeded to work together on Los Angeles’ acquisition of land and water rights for an aqueduct suggests that Eaton may have influenced the Reclamation Service’s willingness to give up the irrigation plan. In any case such influence, if it existed, was not decisive as President Roosevelt favored Los Angeles’ going forward with the aqueduct system. The second obstacle - funding the waterworks - was addressed in 1907 by Los Angeles’ passage of a nearly $25 million bond issue to cover construction costs.
Figure 9.3 The opening of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Aqueduct, November 5, 1913. About 30,000 onlookers attended the aqueduct's opening ceremony. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. © Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Meanwhile, a syndicate of Los Angeles investors led by Harrison Gray Otis and Henry Huntington, among others, confidentially informed of the Owens Valley aqueduct plans, began acquiring options to 16,000 acres of San Fernando Valley land thought to be the site of a reservoir serving Angelinos and nearby farmers. The syndicate paid $35 an acre and later sold the parcels for millions when aqueduct water reached their holdings. Construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct began in 1908 and was completed on November 5, 1913.
Meanwhile, the anger of Owens Valley farmers mounted in the 1920s as dry weather parched their fields and the river flow that had in earlier times relieved drought went almost entirely to Los Angeles. Growers in the water-starved region dynamited sections of the aqueduct in 1924. When Eaton’s envisioned Long Valley dam began operating in 1941, several years after his death, the descendants of the Owens Valley growers were still disgruntled. Signs in public restrooms read: “Don’t flush the toilet. Los Angeles needs the water.” The Owens Valley’s residents could fume as long as they wanted. Their protests made little difference to those living in the metropolitan Southland. With a profitable and reliable supply of water, the business elite and progressives were well on their way to building their “Great Los Angeles,” the Pacific Coast’s new super city.
Pacific Profile: George Freeth, Southern California Surfer Extraordinaire
George Douglas Freeth, Jr. (1883-1919) was born on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. Historian Arthur Verge, an authority on the figure, credits the part-Polynesian Freeth with introducing surfing in southern California and establishing professional lifeguard services along the region’s shoreline. Moreover, his celebrated aquatic feats as a Pacific surfer, diver, and swimmer boosted the Southland’s coastal real-estate development and helped establish the beach culture from Santa Monica to San Diego. In short, he exemplified the ever-growing ties between California and Hawai’i from the gold rush era to the present.
Freeth descended from a prominent family in Hawai’i. Drawn to the ocean from an early age, young George, who taught acclaimed California author Jack London to surf at Waikiki, became known as the preeminent board rider in the islands. Having revived surfing in Hawai’i, which New England missionaries in the islands had once banned for its “immodesty and idleness,” Freeth’s departure for California in 1907 made front-page news in Honolulu’s leading paper, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. The headlines (July 3, 1907) declared that he would introduce “Hawaiian Surfriding to People in California.” Armed with a letter of introduction from the Hawai’i Promotion Committee, which worked to increase tourism from the mainland to the Polynesian archipelago, Freeth shipped to California, where his surfing exploits at Venice beach quickly gained recognition in the local press.
Southern California real-estate tycoons Abbot Kinney and Henry E. Huntington relied on Freeth’s surfing exhibitions to publicize their respective Venice and Redondo beachfront developments. Huntington hired Freeth to perform as a celebrity wave rider and organize lifeguard services at Redondo. The advanced
Ocean rescue techniques Freeth taught reflected the Progressive Era’s emphasis on professionalizing public services. “Innovation” and “efficiency” were his watchwords.
On the afternoon of December 16, 1908, Freeth’s lifesaving skills and courage were put to a major test. A Pacific squaU had whipped up gale-force winds and towering waves off Venice, where several boats carrying a total of 11 Japanese fishermen were in danger of crashing on the rocky breakwater. Diving off the Venice pier into the chilly, stormy sea he single-handedly saved seven of the fishermen at the risk of losing his own life to hypothermia. The remaining four were rescued by the Venice Lifesaving Corpsmen, who had been trained by Freeth. The entire two-and-a-half-hour ordeal had been watched by thousands of beach spectators. Afterward the rescued fishermen awarded Freeth a gold watch, gave him a financial donation, and changed the name of their fishing village near today’s Pacific Palisades from Maikura to Port Freeth. In 1911 a newspaper reporter found that the villagers were performing nightly Shinto rituals in honor of the Hawaiian hero who had saved them. On the recommendation of Abbot Kinney, whose son participated with Venice’s rescue crewmen, and written testimonials from eyewitnesses to the drama of that December afternoon, Freeth was awarded in 1910 the nation’s highest civilian commendation, the Congressional Gold Medal.
His last years were spent in San Diego, where he coached rowing, taught ocean swimming, and, as along Los Angeles County’s shoreline, organized professional lifeguard services. The influenza pandemic of 1918-19 took the life of this aquatic marvel, whose exploits anticipated the increasing importance of southern California’s beach culture and ties to Hawai’i.
World History
