Hoover Dam's Perpetual Power

Seventy-five years ago this summer, President Franklin Roosevelt journeyed west from Washington to place the New Deal's indelible stamp on an outstanding symbol of governmental might.

The occasion was the official dedication of what is today known as Hoover Dam. As FDR told 10,000 spectators at the Colorado River dam site and 20 million more via radio, the dam meant gainful employment, cheap hydroelectric power, reliable irrigation and protection from the obstinate elements, all ripped from a forbidding desert canyon by the hand of a visionary federal government. Eleanor Roosevelt, who accompanied her husband on his visit to the Colorado River, would tell friends that the trip brought home to her the sweeping achievement of his administration as if for the very first time. That the project had originated with Republicans—indeed, it was originally conceived by her own Uncle Theodore—went unmentioned.

It is customary to think of Roosevelt's New Deal as the driver of the social and economic changes that gripped America after 1945. But this transformation really began a decade earlier, when the completion of Hoover Dam heralded a period of explosive industrial development and population growth in the West that would reverberate nationwide. The story of America in the last half of the 20th century should be seen as the story not of the postwar era, but the post-dam era.

The dam did more than contribute to the physical and economic remaking of its region; it prefigured and inspired a fundamental change in American values—political, ideological, even psychological. The path from an America of self-contained localities, each one trying to address its problems and needs in local isolation, to one in which every state or local issue is seen as a piece of a broad national agenda points us back to Hoover Dam

Yet the history of Hoover Dam warns us, too, that the nationalization of regional public works can come at a cost. As the Sept. 30 anniversary of FDR's dedication approaches, the country is debating, even more vehemently than it did 75 years ago, the place of the federal government in our lives. It was people's concerns about ceding their personal relationships with doctors to a remote government bureaucracy that animated the opposition to the health-care reform bills in Congress. State and municipal officials complain about the strings that almost always come attached to federal program funding—whether it's minimum benefit standards imposed on federally subsidized health and relief programs, or wage or employment rules attached to federally funded public works.

Then there's the infiltration of national politics into local contracting. Consider the case of a $54 million rail project in California's Napa Valley, which went, without competitive bidding, to a contractor owned by an Alaskan Native American tribe in 2008 because of a preference written years ago into federal law by former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.