by Miriam Pawel
On December 2, 1935, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation took over the Central Valley Project, with a price tag of $228 million. Over the next sixteen years, a workforce of more than five thousand built the Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River, twelve miles north of Redding, and then the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin River, twenty miles north of Fresno. Pumping stations propelled the water high enough that gravity did the rest, pulling water through 350 miles of canals. Hydroelectric plants turned the rushing water into energy, and the sale of excess power offset the costs of operations, helping the bureau sell water at far below market rates.
The cheap water came with a catch. The Bureau of Reclamation fell under the Newlands Act of 1902. Designed to encourage family farmers to settle the West, the act restricted subsidies to farms no larger than 160 acres. Many small landowners remained in the Central Valley, but the vast majority of acreage was in large tracts owned by a handful of corporate giants, including the Southern Pacific Railroad and Standard Oil. The federal government agreed to sell the large landowners water if they signed contracts promising to sell excess acres within a certain number of years. They signed—and then promptly began lobbying to void the restriction. The Central Valley grew roughly half the country’s fresh fruit,3 one third of the dried fruit, one third of truck crops, and one third of canned fruits and vegetables; by 1959, the value of California’s two hundred agricultural products topped $3 billion. As California’s prime industry and a supplier of food to the nation, agriculture was a powerful force. The economic wisdom of breaking up large farms became a debate that pitted the Jeffersonian ideal against the reality of mass-produced crops.
Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who oversaw the Bureau of Reclamation, was not receptive to the industry’s complaints. In part, he was influenced by the publication of two seminal books: John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and Carey McWilliams’s treatise Factories in the Field. Published in 1939, both detailed the exploitation of farmworkers in California, where thousands of Dust Bowl refugees lived in shantytowns and struggled to survive. Earlier generations of farmworkers had been primarily immigrants, first Chinese, then Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican. Now many of the workers were Okies like Steinbeck’s Joad family, and their plight evoked widespread outrage. The Grapes of Wrath became a bestseller and then a blockbuster movie. Ickes was unsympathetic to growers who underpaid and mistreated workers and now wanted cheap water on their own terms. The Bureau of Reclamation commissioned an anthropologist at the University of California to study and compare two valley towns,4 Dinuba, which had primarily small farms, and Arvin, which had large ones. The study concluded that the average quality of life and income were significantly better in Dinuba. In 1943, Ickes and Roosevelt reaffirmed their commitment to the 160-acre limitation.
Pat Brown was first exposed to the fierce divisions and passions involving water when he traversed the Central Valley as a candidate for attorney general. By the time he ran in 1950, the deadline for divesting land loomed. Big agriculture was agitating for a state takeover of the water project to get out from under the impending federal restrictions. Failing that, they wanted California to build its own project. The newly created State Water Resources Board had prepared a statewide plan that estimated even with the existing reservoirs, 40 percent of the river water ended up as ocean runoff—or, in the terminology used by advocates of more dams, “wasted.” The myriad environmental consequences of reengineering the powerful rivers were not yet part of the public debate.
Water rights were so complex that the California Law Review devoted its October 1950 issue to water. Academics, engineers, and lawyers analyzed whether the Central Valley Project should be owned and operated by the state, the ramifications of the 160-acre limit, and a dispute over whether public or private utilities should have the first right to buy the project’s excess power. Pat read and reread the law journal several times. He pledged support for a state project, but was noncommittal on details.
One of the first decisions he confronted as attorney general in 1951 was the state’s position on a landmark legal challenge to the 160-acre limitation. The case, known as Ivanhoe, was brought by irrigation districts, which argued that any limit imposed by the federal government violated the California constitution’s guarantee that water be equally distributed. Pat’s predecessor had supported the districts. Pat reversed course and argued the federal government had a right to limit the subsidies and the state had a right to enter into agreements that imposed those restrictions.
The key legal scholar behind the state’s reasoning in the Ivanhoe case was Deputy Attorney General Abbott Goldberg, who became one of Pat’s most trusted and influential advisers. Goldberg had grown up in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard Law School shortly before the United States entered World War II. A stint in the Army ended in illness and recuperation at a military hospital in San Francisco. He fell in love with the city and decided to stay, choosing a job in the attorney general’s office because the work seemed interesting and the state offered good medical benefits, uncommon in the private sector. Goldberg knew nothing about water law when Pat assigned him to research the Ivanhoe case. But he had a fine legal mind and was an expert on relationships between state and federal governments. He argued that the government had the right to impose restrictions and that simply owning more land did not constitute a legal right to a greater subsidy. Although the position angered the large farm interests, Pat gave Goldberg full support. The state lost at every level until the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in California’s favor. The implications of the case for state-federal cooperation went beyond water and established the right of either party to attach conditions on joint projects. It would prove key to Pat’s future water plans.
The second water decision the attorney general tackled that would rebound to his later benefit was the so-called County of Origin opinion, based on a plan adopted by the legislature in 1931. Pat signed an opinion that gave the northern counties the right to stop sending water south if they demonstrated a future need. Pat considered the opinion sufficiently vague as to be meaningless, but necessary to reassure the northerners that they would not find themselves in a situation comparable to the Owens Valley, where the lake and economy had dried up when the water went to Los Angeles. Pat told the north that the decision gave them protection, while he assured the south that the opinion meant nothing because “origin” was not defined.
Perhaps most important for the future, the state reformed the crazy-quilt bureaucracy that governed water. In 1956, an Assembly committee chaired by Republican Caspar Weinberger found more than fifty-two state agencies handled different aspects of water regulations. California had passed seventy laws5 that were used to create 165 irrigation districts, 69 county water districts, 55 reclamation districts, 39 water districts, 35 county waterworks districts, and 19 municipal water districts. Weinberger proposed a single department with centralized power that could efficiently plan and manage water. He asked for backing from Pat Brown, the only statewide-elected Democrat and one who was deeply involved in water litigation. Pat’s endorsement gave the Weinberger plan a bipartisan cast. On July 5, 1956, the Department of Water Resources was created, effectively giving the governor broad control over water policy. Within a year, the department proposed the construction of new dams and aqueducts.
The genesis of the State Water Project had been pressure from the large landowners who wanted to evade the 160-acre limitation. But the explosive growth in California made water a key concern everywhere. California was adding roughly half a million people a year, the new state agency pointed out in a brochure, “Water for a Growing State.” The state had more than doubled from its prewar population of 7 million and projections were for a population as high as 56 million by 2020. Half the people would live south of the Tehachapi Mountains, the dividing line between Northern and Southern California. While 70 percent of the water originated in the northern third of the state, 77 percent of the need was i
n the southern two thirds. In the northwest corner of the state, average rainfall was 110 inches per year. In the desert, it was two.
During his 1958 campaign, Pat supported the idea of a state project, “as essential to the future6 of the northern part of the State as it is to the south.” The state plan called for a dam high up on the Feather River, the major tributary of the Sacramento and the one large river still untamed. Both northerners and southerners wanted the plan approved through a constitutional amendment, in order to guarantee that whatever deal they reached could not be changed by future lawmakers. For the past two years, the legislature had been deadlocked, far short of the two-thirds majority needed to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot.
When Pat became governor in 1959, the Department of Water Resources’s second annual report was ready to be distributed, with an introduction from the director that urged approval of a constitutional amendment. The Brown administration intercepted the booklets at the printing plant and ordered the introduction ripped out of all six thousand copies. Abbott Goldberg had convinced Pat there was an alternative to the constitutional route. If the legislature authorized debt, subject to popular approval, the law could prescribe specific uses of the money, immutable for the life of the bonds. A simple majority vote could provide ironclad guarantees that would satisfy all sides.
A project born from the demands of Central Valley land barons morphed into a mission to address future needs of the whole state, a shift that reflected California’s transition from agricultural empire to sophisticated technological pioneer. Though he had always lived in San Francisco, Pat considered the project particularly crucial for the development of Southern California. He weighed cautionary arguments that less water would force slower growth in a semiarid area not destined by nature to support the thousands who arrived every month. He was convinced that people would come anyway. And they would need water. Pat adopted a line coined by one of his advisers: Better to have problems with water than problems without water. His missionary zeal was matched by Goldberg and other advisers who viewed themselves as following in the tradition of pioneers, conquering the Western wilderness by “doing the Lord’s work”7 to bring communities the element most needed to prosper.
Pat had recognized he would be strongest in the early months, coming into office with his million-vote margin. He asked Warren Christopher to craft a special message on water, which Pat delivered to an unusual joint session of the legislature on January 22, 1959. He framed the issue as one whose solution would strengthen the whole state, rather than tear it apart:
It has become the fashion in recent years to dwell on our water problems as being awesome and impossibly complicated. We have brooded over the expense and become lost in a forest of fear … this stalemate must come to an end.
I would emphasize that our problem lies, not so much in the control and use of our rivers, as in ourselves. Let us resolve to prove that we are one state, one people, and that we can produce one good water program. Let us grow with the strength of unity, as we begin to fulfill our destiny of greatness.8
Pat’s timing was auspicious. Nineteen fifty-nine was a very dry year. Crops withered in parts of the San Joaquin Valley. Groundwater tables had dropped by thirty feet and seawater intrusion was ruining wells. Santa Cruz and parts of San Diego faced potential water rationing by summer. In Southern California, the giant Metropolitan Water District, which supplied Los Angeles and San Diego communities, was a defendant in a suit that threatened to reduce its share of water from the Colorado River. In Palo Alto and other rapidly growing cities south of San Francisco, residents were angry at paying higher rates for Hetch Hetchy water in order to subsidize the city.
The plan Pat sent the legislature in May was designed to meet the state’s needs through 1985 with a bond issue of $1.75 billion, a sum almost as large as the entire state budget. That still would fall short of financing the whole project, but with money from oil tax funds and potential collaboration with the federal government, the bond issue would come close.
Pat was honest about his selfish determination to leave behind a lasting physical legacy. But he was also farsighted in his vision for the state and unusual in his commitment to projects that would be completed long after he left office. At best, water would not flow through the state aqueduct to Southern California for another decade. In a letter to a Central Valley lawyer, he tied the need for water to the state Master Plan—three new universities, ten state colleges, and a medical school all in the works. “In planning a water program I have to think of all of the things, not only for now but in planning for the next twenty-five years,” Pat wrote. “Very frankly, in my opinion there has not been sufficient planning9 at the state level in the past.”
State officials estimated that 27 million acre-feet of water from Northern California ran off into the ocean. The most optimistic projections were that in a hundred years they could use only half that amount. Because all the rivers met and mingled in the Delta, the state plan envisioned the Delta as a pool with a giant spigot that could be opened as needed to funnel water south. Each river contributed only its excess water, so no one area could go dry, as had happened in the Owens Valley. Still, Northern Californians worried they would never get water back if they had need for it. Southern Californians worried they would pay the brunt of the construction costs and then not get enough water. The valley people worried about pressure to take water away from crops if it was needed for people. Pat pointed to the County of Origin opinion, but opposition remained strong, especially in the north.
The state Senate posed the most significant political hurdle. While the balance of power in the state was tilting south, the Senate was immune: Districts were drawn around county lines regardless of population. The lone senator from Los Angeles, representing six million constituents, carried the same weight as the senator from Inyo, Mono, and Alpine counties with a combined population of fifteen thousand. Pat turned for help to Senate President Pro Tem Hugh Burns, a conservative Democrat from Fresno, the largest producer of agricultural products of any county in the country. Burns wanted the industry-friendly state insurance commissioner reappointed. The Republican commissioner kept his job; Burns carried the water bill. His support reassured the agricultural interests in the valley, his most influential constituents.
The major opposition came from the “River Rats”—senators with districts along the Sacramento River and the Delta, who would lose water. The governor called in every favor he had. He promised appointments and cut deals. Senator Pauline Davis demanded small lakes in her district on tributaries of the Feather River; “Pauline’s Puddles” went in the bill and she signed on. The bill was so technical and complicated that in an unusual move, which would later be banned, top aides to the governor sat on the floor of the legislature during the debate to answer questions. Even then, many did not understand what they voted for. “I believe that the bill got through the Legislature as much on the basis of unequivocal loyalty10 to Pat, faith in Harvey and you, and anxiety on the part of most of us to ‘do something’ in solution of the water problem as it did on its merits,” Assemblyman Thomas McBride wrote to one of the two aides.
The bill passed 50–30 in the Assembly and 25–12 in the Senate, with votes split on geographic rather than partisan lines.
“Water bill passed.11 Hurrah,” Pat wrote in his diary on June 17, 1959. “The end of five months of the toughest kind of work.” He noted more personal triumphs the same day, too. His son-in-law Joe Kelly was admitted to the bar. Cynthia went to the reception for her husband four days after giving birth to their second child, fortitude Pat credited to her pioneer ancestors. The only discordant note came from a quarrel with his youngest daughter. “Kathleen wanted to go to a show with a boy. She is only 13 and I said no. She is very unhappy and so am I.”
Pat signed the water bill a few weeks later, calling it the crowning achievement of the legislative session. “This will remove the last great obstacle to California’s full growth and p
rosperity,”12 he said. By 1985, he estimated the project would serve 21 million of 35 million Californians, more than twice the state’s population at the time the bill passed. Though his projections proved high—population growth slowed with legalized abortion and birth control—he correctly foresaw the enormous impact on Southern California.
“Your place in history13 will be assured as the Governor who made it possible for Southern Californians to die of smog, strangulated freeways, and claustrophobia, instead of thirst. Their gratitude should be enduring,” one of the deputies who handled water litigation in the attorney general’s office wrote to Pat. “My place in history14 will be assured after the water bill is passed and the structure built and after I have completely dissipated smog in Los Angeles,” Pat retorted.
The water bond still needed to be approved by California voters. Although the election was more than a year away, Fred Dutton worried they were late in organizing and cautioned that the complicated issue needed to be reduced to its simplest message, “not left as a technical water problem.” The $1.75 billion number scared people; they needed to break it down into smaller, year-by-year expenditures and compare the amount to dollars spent on schools and roads. “The quickest way to beat the bonds is to let the campaign be run by specialists and experts who will make it too complex for the public mind,” Dutton wrote Pat. “You will either settle it on the basis of the need for more water,15 or not at all.”
Construction and planning began with seed money, and Pat presided at a groundbreaking on the Feather River for what would be the first new dam. All the streams in the area had dried up in April, three months earlier than usual. The new reservoir would not only stabilize supplies but create a recreation area. He stressed the urgency of pushing ahead, even in the face of uncertainty about the gigantic bond issue. He was his typical honest self, never overly confident but always ebullient. “I must confess that deep down in my heart I had qualms”16 about whether his water program would pass, Pat said. But he had faith that he could overcome the mistrust that had stymied earlier efforts. “We had been overlooking the one fear that we should have—that the necessary works would not be constructed in time … We must build no matter how the other questions are resolved. For the first time, the State is assuming a responsibility to see that water is available and is taking action to meet that responsibility.” No matter the myriad details that remained, he stressed the campaign motto: “Water for people. For living. For income. For pleasure.”
