Walton, John

English

University of New Mexico

Volume 45 
Issue 2 Spring 2005 
Spring 2005 
Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, 
National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935, by Donald J. 
Pisani 
John Walton 
Recommended Citation 
John Walton, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the 
West, 1902-1935, by Donald J. Pisani, 45 Nat. Resources J. 509 (2005). 
Available at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nrj/vol45/iss2/12 
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at UNM Digital Repository. It has 
been accepted for inclusion in Natural Resources Journal by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For 
more information, please contact amywinter@unm.edu, lsloane@salud.unm.edu, sarahrk@unm.edu. 
settlements are reached and barristers depart. From a legal standpoint,
Fortun's work calls into question normative perspectives of
jurisprudence and traditional forms of conflicts of law theory. Scholars of
law and society, as well as those of the critical schools of jurisprudence,
may find Fortun's work of interest.
Key ethnographic questions permeate throughout Advocacy
After Bhopal, with Fortun asking the reader to consider what double
binds called advocates to speak, and how advocates strategized and
developed their own roles in dealing with the Bhopal Disaster (p.21). In
many ways, Fortun's work demonstrates how societal symbols, norms,
and values can be greatly influenced during the various stages of a
global tragedy. Through examining the Bhopal Disaster from various
levels of concept and description, Fortun has created very interesting
and thought-provoking work in the emergent area of disaster studies
and discourse.
Joseph F. St. Cyr, M.P.A., J.D.
Director
International Society for Justice & Safety Research
Winter Park, Fla.
Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National
Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935. By Donald J. Pisani. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002. Pp. xviii, 394.
$49.95. (This review copyrighted by the American Historical Association.
Reprinted with permission.)
This volume is the second in a series of three by Donald J. Pisani
that began with To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy,
1848-1902 (1992); the author plans a concluding work taking the story
from the New Deal to the 1980s. As the titles and dates suggest, Pisani
has undertaken the most comprehensive survey to date of water policy
in the United States. Focusing on the reclamation era, this volume is
informative, painstaking, firmly rooted in archival sources, by turns both
analytical and descriptive: in short, altogether reliable. It is a book for
specialists in the field of water policy, yet copious detail is also relieved
by engaging case study comparisons and cogent political interpretations.
Underpinning the whole is a bold demonstration of how an ideologically
inspired and politically constructed policy regime results in abject failure
judged by standards of equity and efficiency.
Prevailing scholarship interprets federal reclamation and related
programs for western development at the turn of the twentieth century
as exemplars of a new and progressive era dedicated to administrative
reform and personified in Teddy Roosevelt. Pisani demurs. "The thesis
of this book is simple. Historians have portrayed federal reclamation as a
Spring 20051 REVIEWS
NATURAL RESOURCES JOURNAL
sharp break with the past -as a symbol of modernization .... But it makes
more sense to see the Reclamation Act of 1902 and the events that
followed as evidence of the persistence of 'frontier America'...the
nineteenth-century vision of an America built on the striving of
autonomous individuals, the agricultural model of 1800 or 1850" (p.xi).
Reclamation policy envisioned a set of infrastructure works that would
help to resettle on small farms a growing urban immigrant population,
convert the arid West into economically productive homesteads, civilize
the Indians, and imbue settlers with imagined rural virtues. Reclamation
was recommended as the solution to a variety of America's social
problems (slums and tenements, wage slavery, political radicalism) by
"Back to the Land" and "Homecroft" movements whose reform ideals
were publicized in the official Reclamation Record. Behind such ideolo-
gical justification, however, lurked another diverse set of political
motivations that drove policy and administration: western competition
for federal spending on water works to match eastern investment in
ports and canals; Roosevelt's plan to capture the new and growing
western states for the Republican Party; a professional movement of
"new engineers" ready to bring technical solutions to the problems of
government; and spectators intent on grabbing up improved govern-
ment land to hold, lease to a growing class of tenants, and resell for a
publicly subsidized profit. The Reclamation Service embodied a welter
of conflicting agendas, a complex blend of planning idealism, political
calculation, and profit motive.
How, then, did federal reclamation become simultaneously "the
boldest public-works scheme ever undertaken in the United States [and]
a failed dream" (p. xvi)? Pisani's book develops compelling answers to
this question. The Reclamation Act itself was flawed. Political
considerations written into the law required that 51 percent of the funds
for reclamation works raised through the sale of public lands in a given
state be spent in the same state, whether or not cost-effective projects
existed there. Dams and canals were distributed as patronage.
Government engineers were compromised in the ability to select projects
on technical grounds. No soil analyses were performed, for example, to
determine whether land that would be irrigated had the potential to
support commercial crops. Once undertaken, projects proved far more
costly than originally estimated, and the prescribed means for recovering
costs (beneficiary payments, more land sales, taxes on improved land)
failed to meet expectations. Small farmers required material support in
addition to regional irrigation systems: "laterals" to feed their fields,
farm roads, market centers, and technical assistance. Few succeeded
owing simply to their inclusion within the ambit of reclamation works.
Indeed, ideological justifications aside, federal reclamation benefited
[Vol. 45
Spring 2005]
very few of the landless and poor. It did stimulate land speculation,
driving up prices where irrigation combined with fertile soil and market
access and generally leading to greater concentration of ownership.
When bestowed on Indian reservations, reclamation improved lands that
were subsequently sold to whites while increasing the costs and
reducing the size of Indian holdings. In the end, government works
effectively reclaimed a relatively small amount of land by contrast to the
efforts of private land, power, and canal companies. By the 1920s, costly
reclamation projects moved ahead in the West despite a growing surplus
of arable land in other regions. When the depression arrived, Franklin D.
Roosevelt's New Deal administration recast the Reclamation Service as
an unabashed jobs program and showcased projects like Boulder Dam as
symbols of hope.
Pisani draws from this experience a number of lessons about the
consequences of ill-considered efforts to dominate nature, promote social
engineering, or maintain centralized control over public policies that rely
on local conditions and collaboration. He ends by drawing a provocative
parallel between his study and James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How
Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998),
quoting Scott to the effect that both are "making a case against an
imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary
role of local knowledge and know-how" (p.2 9 5 ). In abundant detail
necessarily excluded from this short review, Pisani identifies a good deal
of local knowledge among Indians, dirt farmers, canal diggers, dam
builders, and the occasional clear-eyed legislator that might have
informed an alternative history.
John Walton
University of California, Davis
Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change. By Michael Collier & Robert H.
Webb. The University of Arizona Press, 2002. 160 pp. $17.95 paper.
Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change, by Michael Collier and
Robert H. Webb, offers an overview of the global environmental forces
underlying and affecting weather's daily mechanisms. Until relatively
recently in history, humans had generally perceived only the immediate
patterns of weather without appreciating such slower-moving and less
detectable long-term processes as oceanic and atmospheric currents or
shifting land masses. In this enlightening book, the authors blend natural
and human history, meteorology, geology, and climatology to offer an
accessible introduction to these enigmatic climate patterns and the
imperceptible forces that cause them.
The authors demonstrate that nature's dramatic events are often
related and result from larger, hidden processes. Floods and droughts,
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Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935, by Donald J. Pisani

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Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935, by Donald J. Pisani

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