Boulder Dam

Whether or not it is ever built to dam water, the proposed 675-ft. Federal power and irrigation dam in the Boulder Canyon of the Colorado River has already backed up an enormous supply of attention, irrigated the U. S. with rushing streams of propaganda and oratory, generated powerful currents of controversy. The purposes for which the actual dam is proposed are:

1) To provide a water supply for Arizona and Utah farmers and for California suburbanites (Los Angeles).

2) To furnish electricity to the seven Colorado Basin States (Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming).

3) To protect from floods the inhabitants of California's Imperial Valley, which is below the Colorado's bed-level.

The causes of Boulder Dam controversy are:

1) The difference in the cultures of Arizona and California--rancher v. realtor.

2) The facts, that only 2 1/2% of the Colorado basin lies in California; that practically no California water drains into the river; whereas about 42% of the basin is in Arizona, whose streams furnish 28% of the river's flow at Boulder Canyon. Reflecting these facts in the provisions of the bill in such a manner as to satisfy Arizona has to date proved impossible.

3) The activities of the U. S. public utilities--the "Power Trust"--private interests opposing the Government's entry to the electricity industry. So widespread, so penetrating, so energetic, so determined, so covert has been the propaganda of these interests that, as it is exposed bit by bit by the Federal Trade Commission's current investigation, the issue between California and Arizona has been twisted from its cultural base.

4) All seven States in the Colorado Basin agree that it would be advantageous to obtain Federal development and control of their common natural resource. But California, a boom state, presses for immediate action. And Arizona, slow-growing, temporizes to protect its future.

The House let the Senators fight it out, this session, and a long fight it was. California's Johnson introduced the bill in the early Spring. Utah's Smoot aided Arizona's Ashurst and Hayden, first indirectly, then directly, in delaying the debate. Maryland's Bruce and Tydings and Tennessee's McKellar helped the Arizonans too. But it was the orotund Ashurst and the dogged Hayden who, with desks stacked high with time-consuming documents, talked and talked and talked the bill to a standstill last week.

In one of his more magnificent sentences, Senator Ashurst enunciated the whole spirit of a filibusterer, as follows: "Although of superb physical strength, you can take the heart even out of an elephant, the stomach out of an ostrich, and you may finally pierce the hide of a rhinoceros if you keep at him so great a time as the long and weary months that I have been practically on the gridiron, trying to prevent the great injustice this bill would perpetrate upon Arizona!"

Senator Johnson's solace in defeat was consent of the Senate to consider the dam again first thing next autumn. A resolution by Senator Key Pittman of Nevada for a quintet of engineers to examine and report on Boulder Dam once more this summer, was also passed. This report will doubtless be decisive.