Money and Thoughtlessness.

A
Genealogy and Defense of the
Traditional Suspicions of Money and
Merchants Justin Pack
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Money and
Thoughtlessness
A Genealogy and Defense
of the Traditional Suspicions of
Money and Merchants
Justin Pack
Money and Thoughtlessness
 Justin Pack

Money and
Thoughtlessness
A Genealogy and Defense of the Traditional
Suspicions of Money and Merchants
Justin Pack
Philosophy
California State University, Stanislaus
Turlock, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-22260-3    ISBN 978-3-031-22261-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22261-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Money,
 Myths, and Thoughtlessness 27
A Note About Anti-Semitism  28
The First Debate: The Nature of Money and the Myth of Barter  29
The Second Debate: The Cult of Neoliberalism and Economism  35
Thoughtless Cognition  39
Hyper-complex Abstract Systems and Thoughtless Cognition  41
Money and Thoughtlessness  45

3 The
 Neolithic Revolution: From Social Currencies
to Debt 51
Money in the Pre-Axial Age  52
Hunter-Gatherers  55
The Neolithic Revolution: Agriculture and “Civilization”  61
Sacrifice, Hierarchy, and Cosmic Imbalance  67
“Primitive” Money  69

4 The Axial Age 75

The Axial Age  75
The Axial Age and Money  77
The Suspicion of Money and Merchants  81
Protean Money, Protean People  83

v
vi Contents

The Axial Age, the Denunciation of Wealth, and the Praise of

Poverty  87
Robbing the Common World  90
Ambiguities and Aporias of Money and Abstract Thought  92
Conclusions  95

5 Animist
 Ontologies, Abstraction, and Slavery 99
The Moral Limits of Markets in Contemporary Thought 101
Anthropocentrism, Quantification, Abstraction 103
Power in the Living Cosmos: Native American Ontology 105
Animist Ontologies: Kinship with the Living Cosmos 108
The Force of Things 111
The Modern Ontology of Death 113
Slavery, Abstraction, Disenchantment 115
Initial Conclusions 117

6 Mastering
 Money: Usury, Governance and Science in
Medieval Europe121
The Theological Power of Money and Christian Empire 123
Mastering Money 126
Money, Quantification, Proto-Science 130
The Colonizing Empire of Homo Economicus  134

7 The
 Modern Attacks on the Traditional Suspicions of
Money and Merchants139
Political Arguments Against the Traditional Suspicions of
Money and Merchants 140
Religious Arguments Against the Traditional Suspicions of
Money and Merchants 143
Aesthetic, Cultural, and Epistemic Arguments Against the
Traditional Suspicions of Money and Merchants 146
The Elided Moral Sources of Modernity 149
Homo Economicus and Meritocracy as Epistemologies of
Ignorance 154
Money and Thoughtlessness 159
 Contents  vii

8 Against Homo Economicus: Mauss and Gift Cultures163

Mauss and Gift Cultures 165
The Dialectic of Purity: Purely Economic Versus Pure Gifts 167
Agonistic Gift Cultures 169
“Pure” Gifts 171
Receiving Gifts: Grace 173
Gifts in a Living Cosmos 176
Conclusions 178

9 The
 Hermeneutics of Suspicion and Contemporary
Cynicism183
The Hermeneutics of Suspicion Versus the Modern Pretentions
to Objectivity 184
The Hermeneutics of Suspicion Versus Moral Purity 187
Bourdieu: The Strategies of Gift Giving 189
Zelizer Against Quantitative Money 192
Defending Gifts from Cynicism 196
Against Cynicism 198

10 Money
 and Thoughtlessness: Abstraction,
Quantification, Adiaphorization201
Abstract Money, Quantitative World 201
Abstraction 203
Quantification 208
The Numbers Game 210
The Adiaphorizing Effects of Hyper-Complex Abstract
Systems 215

11 Conclusions221
Thoughtlessness 222
The Capitalist Schema 223
Money and Thoughtlessness: Is There an Alternative? 225
A Defense of the Traditional Suspicions of Money
and Merchants 228

Bibliography231
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Shortly after the 2008 recession, Michael Sandel warned that we face a
dilemma: continue down the path of what he calls “market triumphalism”
or better recognize the “moral limits of markets” and change our ways.
He argued that markets often “crowd out morals” and are encroaching on
spheres of life like democracy and education that traditionally excluded or
limited the logic of the market.1 Nonetheless, he hoped the recession
would shake us out of our faith in the infallibility of markets and motivate
us to place proper limits on markets.
Sadly, not only has this not happened, but the situation is getting much
worse. We find ourselves caught in a pervasive neoliberal thoughtlessness
in which we fail to recognize alternatives to utopian free markets and have
forgotten the traditional suspicions of money. We are now so used to
money that we forget, most of the time anyways, that commercial money
was viewed as a very dangerous force in many traditional societies, includ-
ing both ancient Greece and Christianity.
According to the anthropologist David Graeber, “this is what money
meant to the majority of people for most of human history: the terrifying
prospect of one’s sons and daughters being carried off to the homes of
repulsive strangers to clean their pots and provide occasional sexual ser-
vices, to be subject to every conceivable form of violence and abuse, pos-
sibility for years, conceivably forever”.2 Graeber claims that for most of
human history, money—especially through debt—was used to entrap

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
J. Pack, Money and Thoughtlessness,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22261-0_1
2 J. PACK

other human beings into servitude and served as a force that tore human
communities apart.
This capacity to undermine communities, among other things, is why
Plato banned the merchants from the ideal city described in The Republic.3
Aristotle would not go that far and recognized there was indeed a need for
trade, but agreed with Plato that the influence of the merchants had to be
kept away from the citizens insofar as possible.4 Arendt claims this attitude
extended to the craftsmen—they were needed to make the great art of the
Athenian polis, but needed to be kept away from the political activity that
went on there or else their utilitarian orientation might undermine the
freedom of the polis.5
The Bible is full of condemnation of inequality and riches. Recall the
famous claim that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy
6:10) or observe St. James’ denunciation of the rich and their wealth:

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon
you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold
and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you
and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days.
Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept
back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have
reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. (James 5:1–4)

We could multiply this with many similar quotes from the Old Testament
that repeatedly condemn the wealthiest and call for help for the poorest,
the widow, and the orphan.6 The Jubilee Year of Mosaic Law mirrored
ancient Mesopotamian periodic debt forgiveness, releasing debtors from
wealthy creditors in order to alleviate social tensions and decrease the
power of aristocratic predatory lenders.7 Similarly, Imperial China saw
merchants as necessary but dangerous and therefore treated them as the
lowest of the four occupations.8
These are just a few initial examples. While the suspicion of money and
merchants in the ancient world varies in different cultures and at different
times, it was widespread and multipronged. If we are to believe many of
the ancients, there is good reason to be worried about money and its influ-
ence on human communities.
Or at least that is what humans thought through most of our history.
The story we hear now sounds more like the historian Niall Ferguson
claiming that “money is the root of most progress” and that “financial
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

innovation has been an indispensable factor in man’s advance from

wretched subsistence to the giddy heights of material prosperity that so
many people know today”.9 For Ferguson, and indeed many other enthu-
siasts of modernity and capitalism, money is not something dangerous but
a driving force in human progress.
Ferguson stands in a long line of optimists about modernity whose
basic strategy is to argue that most everything before modernity was ter-
rible, backward, and stupid, while generally everything is progressing in
modernity thanks to capitalism, reason, and science. Economists in par-
ticular love to attempt to find ways to quantifiably measure the quality of
life and prove how better things are now that we have abandoned old
traditions, including the suspicion of money. In fact, if we are to believe
another optimist about modernity, Steven Pinker, life has never been bet-
ter. In Enlightenment Now, in “seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker
shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness
are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide”.10 To whom do we
owe this progress? “This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It
is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can
enhance human flourishing”.11 Thank reason and science! Have we fixed
it all? No, of course not. But in terms of health, wealth, inequality, peace,
safety, equal rights and others, everything is improving—we are told.
Despite those 75 graphs, I have my doubts. Recently I read that the last
male Sumatran Rhino in Malaysia died.12 It doesn’t look good for the
estimated remaining 80 individuals. Nor does it look good for cheetahs,
gorillas, tigers, lions, pandas, gibbons, orangutans, the Philippine eagle,
the Great Barrier Reef, and on and on which are all in steep decline. It is
all a part of the human-caused mass extinction going on all around us
every day.13 In 2018, we were warned that we may have only 12 years to
change our current trajectory before the changes occurring with global
warming and climate change are irreversible.14 Desperate headlines warn
that “a climate change apocalypse could start by 2050 if we don’t act”.15
Despite these difficulties, Pinker claims we should not allow ourselves to
heed the “many commentators, committed to political, religious, or
romantic ideologies” that “fight a rearguard action against [the
Enlightenment]”, because “environmental problems, like other problems,
are solvable, given the right knowledge”.16 In other words, we’ll fix these
issues too soon enough with more science, reason, and capitalism.
There is something deeply thoughtless and naïve about this optimism—
not only about our critical environmental crisis, but about the Enlightened
4 J. PACK

civilization we have made supposedly all by ourselves. It either does not

seem to see some of the basic reality around us or diminishes critical prob-
lems so that they appear less ubiquitous or less severe. I would claim that,
for starters, modern optimism of this kind fundamentally misses the wide-
spread exploitation, alienation, and inequality in our consumerist world.
These are unbearably omnipresent, but have been downplayed, hidden,
and excused so that many people don’t seem to see them or be bothered
by them, despite being constantly surrounded by them. This is similar to
how some people claim racism and sexism are not real issues and fail to see
either institutional or concrete everyday instances of racism and sexism. It
is as if what is here is not here.
Charles Mills has argued that what we find a work here is an epistemol-
ogy of ignorance.17 He means by this that some groups are systematically
taught, or mistaught, to not see or recognize certain aspects of our experi-
ence. Mills has primarily focused on “white ignorance”, but other scholars
have pointed out that this is a useful way to understand the kind of system-
atic ignorance we see with other issues like gender.18 A similar kind of
learned ignorance is occurring with regard to economic inequality, exploi-
tation, modern world alienation, and the environmental crisis—we are
being taught not to see them. This is why Daniel Wildcat claims that
“Advanced societies, with their powerful rationality and technologies, evi-
dence an adherence to a body of myths and romanticism that eclipses
anything imagined in tribal worldviews and lifeways”.19 The romanticism
he refers to here is Western anthropocentrism and Western deification of
technology and science.
If we take off the lenses of modern optimism, we will see not only
global warming and mass species die off, but also an economic system
built on exploitation. At the time of this writing, I live and teach in the
Central Valley in California. I am in the middle of 500 miles of fields that
are harvested largely by exploited immigrant labor. Like most modern
consumers, the clothes I wear are mass produced by exploited labor, the
food I eat is produced by exploited labor, the toys my kids play with are
produced by exploited labor, and so on. Most of us are surrounded by
objects that are embodied exploited labor. We live and breathe in an atmo-
sphere suffused with intense, elided exploitation and do not seem funda-
mentally disturbed by this. The economists and optimists will tell us that
these exploited individuals are better off than they would have been oth-
erwise and recount the horror tales of pre-capitalist life. We are told that
what we have isn’t perfect, but it is the best we have and the best humans
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

have ever had it. There is no alternative. Poof! The ubiquitous exploita-
tion disappears.
It isn’t just exploitation. Modern progress has brought widespread
alienation. I don’t just mean this in the traditional Marxist sense, but also
that modern humans tend to be alienated from each other and the physical
world around us.20 There is very little community left in most modern
places, and we are woefully out of touch with the natural world. I live in
an environment that has been largely destroyed and radically altered. My
students have no idea what the environment here was like previous to it
being changed to farmland, and they have little knowledge of the history
of this place. They don’t know the names of the Native American tribes
that lived here. They are always surprised to learn that the bear in the cen-
ter of the California state flag is an extinct subspecies of the grizzly bear.
They have no idea the rivers here used to be so full of salmon they kept
settlers up at night. Not to pick on my students, but there is something
thoughtless about this—to live in a place and not know it nor its history.
There is also a disturbing, pervasive lack of concern in modern society
about inequality. To give just one example: I recall a posh golfing com-
munity surrounded by a large wall. On one side of that wall there was a
shanty town built of corrugated tin shacks, much of which abutted the
golfing community wall. Often golfers would hit a ball astray, and it would
sail over the wall and into the tin shanty town, banging tremendously as it
pinballed around. The wealthy golfers obviously heard the noise and had
even sought to have the shacks removed. I wondered at the dismissive
attitude of the wealthy golfers. What kinds of justifications allow for those
who are wealthy to feel comfortable with their wealth and to not feel they
should share it with those who are in need? How is it possible for some to
feel morally and intellectually at ease in large homes with many comforts
while others can barely pay rent or get enough to eat? Even if we shut
ourselves in gated communities, inequality is everywhere around us—and
yet there seems to be little fuss about it.
These moral failings are often obvious to outsiders, like the Osage chief
Big Soldier, who in 1820 said the following:

I see and admire your manner of living, your good warm houses, your
extensive fields of corn, your gardens, your cows, oxen, workhouses, wag-
ons, and a thousand machines that I know not the use of. I see that are able
to clothe yourselves, even from weeds and grass. In short, you even do
almost what you choose. You are surrounded by slaves. Everything about
6 J. PACK

you is in chains, and you are slaves yourselves. I fear if I should exchange my
pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.21

And yet, looking at capitalist modernity, Ferguson and Pinker see

unprecedented progress and are unabashedly proud. The world and the
things in it seem to appear differently to them. They see and experience
the same world others do very differently than Big Soldier or Daniel
Wildcat.
The contrast between the traditional suspicions of money, merchants,
and strategic money-making and the contemporary embrace of money is
remarkable. Indeed it was a century ago that Max Weber expressed amaze-
ment and sought to answer the question of how accumulation-driven
modern capitalism arose in the West, which for so long seemed to have
such a deep antipathy to these things. In Albert Hirshman’s words: “How
did commercial, banking, and similar money-making pursuits become
honorable at some point in the modern age after having stood condemned
or despised as greed, love of lucre, and avarice for centuries past?”22
These questions were once stated with wonder and awe, but the
remarkable-ness of the shift from “suspicion of money” to “money as a
foundational part of modern progress” is fading. In other words, as these
traditions recede, money and its effects on us have become natural and
mostly unquestionable. We have created a society that is monstrous by
many traditional moral standards but seem to have lost the capacity to
genuinely comprehend alternatives or see our own situation.
This is “neoliberal thoughtlessness”. Let me briefly discuss what I mean
by both parts of this term. By “neoliberalism” I am referring to the politi-
cal and social reassertion of economic liberalism that was implemented by
figures like Thatcher in England and Reagan in the US around 1980 and
the ensuing unleashing of the predatory economic practices of Wall Street
and the malignant spread of its speculative financial logic.23 Historically
economic liberalism has always aggressively sought to free markets from
traditional restraints, to promote their spread throughout society, and to
discipline humanity into accepting and acting within markets. This has
been a violent process of both internal and external colonization: seeking
to radically change humankind everywhere into homo economicus—the
productive, money-focused individual of modern capitalism. This involves,
of course, extensive social reorganization and the erasure of the traditional
suspicions of money and traditional moralities. The era of neoliberalism,
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

then, is the era of money and the utopian freeing of markets from tradi-
tional moralities which would limit it.
The advocates of economic modernity are not unaware of the exploita-
tion, alienation, and inequality of modern life, but tend to demonize the
past so thoroughly that the present looks sparkling in comparison. Anyone
who doesn’t agree with the narrative of modern progress is accused of
romanticizing the past. Unfortunately, when you demonize the past, you
are likely to not be very interested in understanding it (except as a prede-
termined negative foil) and to throw out the moral arguments that were
made in the past—including the widespread suspicion of money. Not only
is the ancient world portrayed as backward and uninteresting, the colo-
nialism and extreme violence of modernity is downplayed, justified, and
often ignored. Karl Polanyi thus observed that free market utopians tend
to ignore the “near-indigency of the mass of the citizens as the price to be
paid for the highest stage of prosperity”.24
The term “thoughtlessness” comes from the philosopher Hannah
Arendt, who in 1958 declared that “thoughtlessness” is “among the out-
standing characteristics of our time”.25 Thoughtlessness, among other
things, is the inability to see what is happening right in front of us and all
around us. But thoughtlessness does not mean stupidity for Arendt.
Indeed, extremely smart people can be thoughtless. Instead, thoughtless-
ness often involves being caught up in a particular logic, a particular sys-
tem, or a particular set of practices without questioning the game one is
playing. The Nazi Adolf Eichmann was paradigmatic of thoughtlessness
for Arendt.26 Eichmann excelled at what he did but did not seem to have
the moral fortitude to question whether what he was doing was wrong or
right. For Arendt, this was not a Nazi aberration but a reflection that
modern systems are so hyper-complex that they require and educate for
hyper-specialized, narrow-minded technicians.
Thoughtlessness then occurs both at an individual level—thoughtless
people—and at the level of an entire society. A thoughtless society is one
that is caught up processes that it does not comprehend, either because
these processes have now gone beyond their original intent or because
they were not clearly intended at all in the first place. For example, Arendt
was one of the first thinkers to recognize the rise of a modern consumer-
ism. Ostensibly consumerism is a response to highly successful mass pro-
duction enabled by the assembly line and other industrial methods, but
Arendt argued we are actually consuming the world, by which she means
not only the Earth we live on, but especially the historical and cultural
8 J. PACK

traditions that make up human worlds.27 Modern consumerism, on her

reading, is destroying the ground beneath our feet. When we eat away our
own history and that of all others, we are left with no alternative to the
present and the status quo—the machine just seems to accelerate mind-
lessly, and it is not clear that even if we wanted to stop it we could.
I have previously analyzed Arendt’s concept of thoughtlessness and
used it to critique the neoliberalization of higher education.28 This argu-
ment was primarily focused on thoughtlessness in a particular institution.
More recently I have written about the phenomenon of modern world
alienation that Arendt diagnoses.29 This analysis concerns one of the
results of our modern society-wide thoughtlessness, particularly the
replacement of a living cosmos with a disenchanted, objectified, and dead
universe. The argument I will make here is broader and turns to the ques-
tion of the nature of the thoughtlessness of modern neoliberal society. My
claim is that money is at the heart of this modern thoughtlessness, and the
traditional critiques of money were well founded. Let me offer a primary
indication of why this is the case.
The traditional suspicions about money vary in different traditions and
include concerns about inequality and exploitation (Judaism, Christianity,
China), the unnatural nature of money (Aristotle), the addictive and end-
less nature of accumulation, how money could both corrupt character and
disrupt tradition and culture, how it can lead to alienation from each other
and the world, and so on. Obviously not every culture articulated these
concerns the same ways, felt these concerns to the same degree, or were
confronted with commercial money in the same manner. And yet we find
some common features in premodernity that contribute to this widespread
suspicion of money. It might seem surprising to say there are common
features among so many different cultures and traditions, but this is less a
claim about the similarities of the great diversity of premodern peoples
than one about the historical oddity and radical deviance of modernity
itself. In other words, it is not that these cultures are so similar to each
other, but that modernity is so different from them.
For all the remarkable differences in ancient, premodern, and non-­
modern societies, anthropologists have shown that economic concern
always took a back seat to other concerns. According to Hénaff, “In clas-
sical [Axial] societies the order of production and exchange remained sub-
jected to the priorities of the political order. In traditional [pre- and
non-Axial] societies all subsistence activities and their surpluses are directed
toward reinforcing reciprocal bonds (through gifts, festivals, and in some
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

cases sacrifices)”.30 Graeber complains with great exasperation that phi-

losophers, political theorists, and economists, following the lead of figures
like Adam Smith, continue to promote a narrative of “barter and trade”
among basically all “primitive” peoples, despite there being no anthropo-
logical evidence that barter and trade of this sort occurs in any such
groups.31 In other words modern thinkers have tended to misread their
own economic and moral assumptions back into history and then used this
colonized “history” as evidence for their positions. Not only is this self-­
serving and bad anthropology, but it also obscures the moral force of the
traditional suspicion of money.
Premodern societies were focused on many things: ritual, play, politics,
and, yes, wealth and recognition—but wealth and recognition was not
tied to having more money; rather it was more likely tied to having more
people (slaves, servants, vassals, wives).32 Many of these societies had no
money at all—or what money they did use was ceremonial money and not
for commercial purposes.33 Commercial coinage only began to be used
widely in the Axial Age and may have been initially primarily a way of pay-
ing soldiers in times of war.34 (Note that commercial money appears at the
same time as the major world philosophical systems. This is not an acci-
dent according to Seaford).35 But when wars died down, communities
would often return to a money-less state.36 If we are to speak of an econ-
omy at all, there was often a “human economy” instead of a money econ-
omy: humans changing allegiance to other humans, being married to
other families, being and becoming indebted to other humans, recogniz-
ing other humans, performing rituals with other humans, and so on.37
Even the description of a “human economy” instead of a commercial
money economy does not go far enough, because of what the anthropolo-
gist Viveiros de Castro calls “animist ontologies”.38 This involves three
interconnected aspects of premodern reality: (1) the cosmos is alive and
full of living beings, (2) humans are intimately connected and related to
these non-human beings, and (3) humans must establish and continue
personal gift relationships with these non-human beings. Let me briefly
elaborate each of these point in order to show how they are the key to
understanding such a widespread suspicion of money and merchants.

1. The cosmos is alive and full of gods, spirits, animals, plants, and oth-
ers. This is what Weber was emphasizing with his distinction between
the disenchantment of modernity and premodern enchantment.
Jonas rephrases this to a distinction between the living cosmos and
10 J. PACK

the dead universe.39 Viveiros de Castro emphasizes that a living,

enchanted cosmos is one that is full of magic. Magic here means
something like what David Abram describes: magic, “in its perhaps
most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made
up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one per-
ceives—from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of
grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself—is an experiencing form,
an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensation
that are very different from our own”.40
2. To use the language of Charles Taylor, the premodern understand-
ing of the self was “porous” as opposed to the modern “buffered”
self.41 The premodern human experiences herself as open to and
intimately connected with the world around her. Viveiros de Castro
says there is a kinship with the world: “The objective world of a gift
‘economy’ is an animistic ontology of universal agency and trans-­
specific kinship relatedness, utterly beyond the grasp of the genea-
logical method—a world where yams are our lineage brothers and
roam unseen at night, or where jaguars strip away their animal
clothes and reveal themselves as our cannibal brothers-in-law”.42
3. Because of the way humans are thoroughly connected and even
interpenetrated with all the human and non-human beings in the
world, we must maintain proper relationships with them. And the
proper relationship is a gift relationship—both in the religious sense
of offerings to gods and also in the interpersonal sense of using gifts
to establish and maintain friendships or relationships with others.
But since the enchanted, living cosmos is full of persons and not
things, “all gift exchange is an exchange of persons—a personifica-
tion process”.43 Gifts establish and maintain our interdependency
and debt toward the many peoples (human and non-human) all
around us—it affirms the life and personality of these peoples.

Chris Gregory offers a succinct description of the difference between

premodern gift “economies” and modern commodity economies. He
defines gift exchange as “an exchange of inalienable things between per-
sons who are in a state of reciprocal dependence” in contrast to commod-
ity exchange as “an exchange of alienable things between transactors who
are in a state of reciprocal independence”.44 The former “establishes a
relationship between subjects”, while the latter “establishes a relationship
between the objects exchanged”.45 Gift exchange establishes a relationship
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

between two people by giving something personal (or a person).

Commodity exchange not only treats the object being traded as a thing I
trade to get a thing I want, but also tends to treat the other person as a
thing that has the thing I want. Thus: “Things and people assume the
social form of objects in a commodity exchange while they assume the
social form of persons in a gift economy”.46
This fundamental difference between a living cosmos of persons that
we must have personal relationships with and a dead universe of things
that lack such personhood is key to understanding the traditional suspi-
cion of money and merchants. Of money and merchants, merchants were
more visibly/comprehensibly in opposition to the traditional moral order
than money. The merchant was often viewed with suspicion because the
merchant was often a go-between different communities—a stranger who
came from somewhere else and was often not committed to the humans
and customs of a particular community. The merchant is likely not looking
to help us but to profit for themselves. But the merchants hide this, acting
like a friend, acting like they care, but ultimately looking out for them-
selves and their profits. According to Agnew, this two-faced-ness of the
merchant introduced a new dynamic of mistrust and strategic interper-
sonal manipulation that was profoundly disturbing to many traditional
communities.47 Ultimately, the duplicitous merchant deals with things and
ultimately tends to treat people as things. Because of this, markets were
often set up on the outskirts of town, and market times and spaces were
clearly delimited: the logic of the market could not be allowed to spread
to the community.48 It was understood that to run a society like a market
would turn us all into competitive and manipulative strangers.
This also affects the nature of the goods that the merchant buys and
sells with money: they become abstract, disconnected from their origins.
If the merchant works on a small scale, then it might be obvious that they
come from the next town over, from people we know through practices
that might be familiar—but on a large enough scale these objects become
like the merchant or commercial money itself: strange, abstract, discon-
nected things.
To the person living in a living cosmos, commercial money perhaps
would have appeared as a person (i.e., meaningful, symbolic, and per-
sonal), and the full implications of money as the potential harbinger of a
dead, abstract world might not have been clear. Merchants, however, were
emblematic of what can happen when one uses commercial money or
becomes too focused on commerce: money changed them and turned
12 J. PACK

them into duplicitous actors preying and profiting on others. From the
Sophists to Imperial China through the European Middle Ages, mer-
chants and money have been the object of close scrutiny and suspicion
precisely because the influence of money has the potential to alter human
character, human community, human nature, religion—seemingly every-
thing—and it tends to do so in a way that eliminates the thoughtful aware-
ness of historical, social, or possible alternatives. According to Graeber,
the challenge of the changes caused by money “was not just a philosophi-
cal question; it was a matter of moral rivalry. Money always has the poten-
tial to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand and it can
quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in
comparison”.49
Commercial money, then, is not just coinage, capital, or currency—and
it is certainly not merely a neutral tool. Georg Simmel argues in The
Philosophy of Money that “money is the pinnacle of a cultural historical
series of developments which unambiguously determines its direction”.50
In other words, abstract, quantitative commercial money embodies the
“major tendencies” of modern life toward abstraction and quantifica-
tion.51 This is another way of describing the difference between a living,
personal (qualitative) cosmos and a dead, objectified (quantifiable) uni-
verse.52 Indeed it is hard for moderns to fully grasp the moral implications
of abstraction and quantification because we tend to be alienated from the
world and accustomed to a disenchanted, objectified universe instead of a
rich, spiritual, living cosmos. We have not just lost a sense of being a part
of an interconnected, interdependent world, but have largely forgotten
what that would even be.
Abstraction and quantification, which Simmel correctly says are embod-
ied in modern money, are key components of contemporary neoliberal
thoughtlessness. The spread of money and markets is the spread of abstrac-
tion and quantification, the de- or im-personalization of the world, which
is to say, the death of the cosmos and the reduction of reality to things
(that can potentially be traded, bought, sold and used). This association of
numbers and abstraction with death and impersonality is one that is strik-
ingly apparent if we make a better effort to understand the premodern
living cosmos and the traditional suspicions of money and merchants. This
explains why Chief Osage claimed despite the comforts of modern life,
European settlers have surrounded ourselves with slaves—that is, they
have turned the world into slaves. This makes sense if we remember the
slave, according to Orlando Patterson, is a person/thing torn from their
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

context (family and tradition) and thus abstract (Latin: pulled away or
detached).53
Typically abstraction and quantification are viewed now as neutral tools
that are essential to science and economics and, in light of the good things
brought to us by science and modern economics, morally good. And
indeed, from a certain narrow perspective that values technology, power,
and GDP, this seems true. But if we can step back and take a broader or
older perspective (older here referring to pre- and non-modern views), we
will find an accelerating, impersonal, hyper-complex society that is con-
suming the world from under its own feet and seemingly powerless to
think where it is headed or what it is doing. We have killed the world and
turned it into things/slaves. This predicament is the thoughtlessness I
want to examine.
Considering that money and merchants were such a prominent concern
in premodern morality, why is it not now? We could ask with Jean-­
Christophe Agnew: “Why do we lack anything approximating a phenom-
enology of market experience?”54 It is especially odd that contemporary
philosophy in particular seems to have so little to say, despite the rise of
ancient philosophy occurring at the same time as the spread of ancient
coinage,55 the common concern of ancient and medieval philosophers
about money,56 and Socrates’ emblematic defense of his case—that he had
no money. For much of Western intellectual history, money and philoso-
phy were viewed as opposites.57
The classic work on the topic, The Philosophy of Money, was written by
the sociologist Georg Simmel, who is rarely read by sociologists, much less
philosophers. Marx, of course, discusses money, and money is a concern in
critical theory and contemporary work on neoliberalism. In sociology we
find a sub-discipline of thinkers devoted to the sociology of money that
started in the 1990s with the works of Zelizer.58 The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy includes a very recent entry on the philosophy of money and
finance, which was first published in late 2018, thus reflecting perhaps a
budding new field but that seems to have little connection to anthropol-
ogy or phenomenology.59 The recent work of Christian Lotz on The
Capitalist Schema does specifically draw attention to the way that money
shapes how we perceive the world.60 The clearest and most powerful
recent attempt to draw attention to these issues is Marcel Hénaff’s The
Price of Truth: Gift, Money and Philosophy, but unfortunately this impor-
tant work has not led to sustained discussion of these topics. Other impor-
tant discussion about the nature of money and the cultish religiosity of
Another random document with
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work, or deriving revenue from its operations. All they aimed to do
was to see that the money loaned was honestly and judiciously
spent. The financial management of the company, had not previously
been above criticism, to say the least; and Mr. Harriman was fully
justified in taking such control as might be necessary to ensure
proper expenditure of the funds that the Southern Pacific Company
furnished. From the representations made by the Development
Company at that time, it was thought that the lower Mexican intake
might be closed at a cost of not more than $20,000, and the
Company proposed to use the remainder of the $200,000 loan in
“completing and perfecting its canal system,” under the direction of
its own technical experts. When, however, President Randolph made
a personal investigation of the state of affairs, shortly after his
appointment, he found the situation much more serious than the
Development Company had represented it to be, and telegraphed
Mr. Harriman that the Imperial Valley could not be saved by the
expenditure of $200,000. To control the river, he said, under the
conditions then existing, would be extremely difficult. Nobody could
foresee what would be the ultimate cost of the engineering
operations, but it “might easily run into three quarters of a million
dollars.”
Mr. Harriman could have insisted, even then, upon a return of the
unspent loan, and could have withdrawn from the financially
hazardous undertaking; but instead of doing this, he telegraphed
President Randolph: “Are you certain you can put the river back into
the old channel?” Mr. Randolph replied: “I am certain that it can be
done.” Then wired Mr. Harriman: “Go ahead and do it.”
As Chief Engineer Rockwood was thought to be familiar with the
problem of river control, and quite competent to deal with it, he was
allowed, at first, to take such measures for closing the intake as
seemed to him best. He had made the cutting long before the
Southern Pacific had anything to do with the irrigation of the Valley,
and upon him, primarily, devolved the responsibility of averting
consequences that might be disastrous.
Although the Mexican cutting, at that time, had virtually become a
crevasse, the flow through it was not great enough to endanger the
cultivated lands of the valley. The excess of water overflowed the
banks of the canal—the old Alamo barranca—but it ran into the
deepest part of the Sink, where it slowly accumulated without
flooding anything except the works of the New Liverpool Salt
Company. Civil Engineer C. E. Grunsky, of the U. S. Reclamation
Service, who made an inspection of the intake three days after the
loan to the California Development Company, described the situation
as “not serious, but sufficiently alarming to require some attention.”
The most disquieting feature of it was the steepness of the incline
toward the Imperial Valley as compared with that toward the Gulf of
California. The fall of the Colorado from the intake to the Gulf was
only one hundred feet, while that from the intake to the bottom of the
Valley was nearly four hundred feet. As the distance was about the
same, either way, the Valley incline was approximately four times as
steep as the riverbed incline, and if the whole stream should break
through the intake and go down the steeper slope, the velocity of the
current would make the stopping of it extremely difficult, if not
absolutely impossible. When a turbulent river, in flood, discharges at
the rate of 100,000 cubic feet per second down an easily eroded and
comparatively steep declivity into an immense basin four hundred
feet deep, it soon gets beyond control.
The difficulty of dealing with these conditions was greatly
increased by the impossibility of predicting or anticipating floods. The
annual rise of the Colorado, above its junction with the Gila, begins
in the spring, reaches its maximum in July, and subsides to normal
about the middle of August. This period of high water is fairly regular
and may be counted upon. Floods in the drainage basin of the Gila,
however, are capricious, occur at all seasons of the year, and are
particularly violent in the fall and winter months. “These floods,” as
Mr. Cory says, “are far more to be feared and reckoned with, in
preparing and conducting engineering work along the lower
Colorado River, than anything coming down the Colorado River
proper,” partly because they come suddenly and unexpectedly, and
partly because they carry immense quantities of driftwood. During
the Gila flood of November 29-30, 1905, the water at Yuma rose ten
feet in ten hours, with a maximum discharge of 102,000 cubic feet
per second, while driftwood almost completely covered the water
surface. Such floods, coming with little or no warning, are almost
irresistible.
When, in July 1905, the summer flood in the Colorado began to
subside, Chief Engineer Rockwood determined to fend off the main
current, and lessen the pressure on the crevasse, by means of a
jetty. Just opposite the intake was a bush-overgrown island, five
eighths of a mile long by a quarter of a mile wide, which split the river
into two channels. Across the western channel, from the head of the
island to the bank, a semi-barrier was built, of piling, barbed wire and
brush. This obstruction, it was thought, might check the flow into the
western channel, cause a deposit of heavy silt, and eventually create
a bar which would deflect the main current around the northern end
of the island and thus carry it away from the mouth of the crevasse.
The attempt was only partly successful. A bar was formed, but it did
not completely close the channel, nor deflect the main current. There
was still an opening, about one hundred and twenty five feet in width,
through which the rush of water was so great that it could not be
controlled. The attempt to deflect the main current into the eastern
channel, by means of a jetty, was then abandoned.
Up to this time, the Southern Pacific Company had not taken part
directly in the work of river control. After the failure of the jetty,
however, in August 1905, President Randolph sent his assistant, Mr.
H. T. Cory,[11] to the scene of operations, with instructions to confer
with Chief Engineer Rockwood and ascertain what his views and
intentions were. Mr. Rockwood, at that time, did not regard the
situation as at all alarming. The flow through the crevasse, he said,
was doing useful work in scouring out and deepening the main canal
(the old Alamo barranca) and there was little danger that the whole
river would go that way. He was not in favor of closing the enlarged
intake altogether, because that would shut off the water supply of the
Imperial Valley and cause more damage than was then being done
by the river. The deeper part of the Salton Sink, he said, was a
natural drainage basin, and as it was much below the zone of
cultivation in the valley as a whole, the accumulation of water in it
was not likely to do a great amount of damage.
 “I told him,” Mr. Cory says, “that I thought the situation was
serious, even granting all he said were true; that he would better
shut the break right away, for while the water might be doing good
work in enlarging the canal of the California Development Company,
the situation was dangerous; that it was playing with fire.”
Throughout the month of August 1905, the intake continued to
widen, with the caving away of its banks, and in September Mr.
Harriman and President Randolph decided that another effort must
be made either to close the break, or to regulate and control the flow
of water through it. About the first of October, at the suggestion and
under the supervision of Mr. E. S. Edinger, a Southern Pacific
engineer, an attempt was made to close the channel west of the
island by means of a six-hundred-foot barrier-dam of piling, brush-
mattresses and sandbags. This dam, which was built in October and
November at a cost of about $60,000, might perhaps have checked
or lessened the flow through the crevasse if nothing unforeseen had
happened; but on the 29th-30th of November a tremendous flood,
carrying great masses of driftwood, came down the Gila and
increased the discharge of the Colorado from 12,000 to 115,000
cubic feet per second. The dam could not withstand such pressure,
and even before the peak of the flood was reached it went out
altogether, leaving hardly a vestige behind. As a large part of the
island was eroded and carried away at the same time, further
operations in this locality were regarded as impracticable. The
crevasse had then widened to six hundred feet, and nearly the whole
of the river poured through it into the deepest part of the Sink, where
there was already a lake with a surface area of one hundred and fifty
square miles. The main line of the Southern Pacific, in many places,
was almost awash, and the whole population of the Valley was
alarmed by the prospect of being drowned out. If the break could not
be closed and the river brought under control before the period of
high water in the spring and summer of 1906, it seemed more than
probable that sixty miles of the Southern Pacific track would be
submerged; that the irrigation system of the California Development
Company would be destroyed; and that the whole basin of the
Imperial Valley would ultimately become a fresh-water lake.
 The difficulty of dealing with this menacing situation was greatly
increased by the necessity of furnishing an uninterrupted supply of
water to the farmers of the valley while engineering operations were
in progress. It would not do to shut the river out altogether, because
that would leave without irrigation nearly two hundred square miles
of cultivated land. The Colorado must be controlled, but not wholly
excluded. Several methods of solving this problem were suggested,
but the only two that seemed likely to succeed were advocated by
Consulting Engineer Schuyler and Chief Engineer Rockwood. Mr.
Schuyler proposed that a new steel-and-concrete head-gate be put
in near Pilot Knob, where a solid rock foundation could be secured;
that the four miles of silted channel be re-excavated and enlarged by
a powerful steam dredge specially built for the purpose; and that the
whole low-water flow of the river be then turned through this head-
gate into the enlarged canal and thence into the Alamo barranca
west of the break. By this means the settlers would be continuously
supplied with water, while the crevasse-opening would be left dry
enough to close with a permanent levee or dam. The whole work, it
was thought, could be finished in three months, or at least before the
coming of the next summer flood.
Chief Engineer Rockwood’s plan also involved the building of a
new head-gate, but he proposed to locate it on the northern side of
the intake, and to carry the whole low-water flow of the river through
it by means of an excavated by-pass. This, too, would keep the
settlers supplied with water and leave the crevasse-opening dry
while it was being closed. The chief objection to the latter plan was
that the head-gate would necessarily be of wood, and would have to
stand on a treacherous foundation of easily eroded silt which might
possibly be undermined. Late in November, after full consideration,
President Randolph decided to try both plans and to work on them
simultaneously. Contracts for the structural steel and iron work for
the concrete head-gate were let in Los Angeles; the machinery for
the 850-ton floating dredge “Delta” was ordered in San Francisco;
materials for the Rockwood head-gate were collected on the
northern side of the intake, and work was pushed on all of these
structures with the greatest possible energy throughout the winter. In
spite, however, of all efforts, none of them could be finished in the
allotted time. The steel-and-concrete head-gate was not completed
until the 28th of June; the dredge “Delta,” owing to the partial
destruction of San Francisco, was not ready until the following
November, and even the Rockwood gate, on which alternate shifts of
men had worked night and day, was not in working order until the
18th of April. Meanwhile, the summer flood of 1906 had begun, with
a discharge of 32,200 cubic feet per second through the crevasse.
This flow would have exceeded the capacity of the Rockwood gate,
even if it had been possible to turn the river through the by-pass that
led to it, and the attempt to bring the Colorado under control was
again temporarily abandoned.
 Lower Intake in Spring of 1906 (showing site of Rockwood
head-gate and first three attempts to close the break)
Then a long series of misfortunes and catastrophes followed, one
after another. On the 18th of April, 1906, San Francisco was partially
destroyed by earthquake and fire, and Mr. Harriman hurried to the
scene of the disaster for the purpose of affording help. President
Randolph soon joined him there, and, at the first opportunity,
described to him the almost desperate state of affairs in the
Colorado delta. The California Development Company had used up
the $200,000 loaned to it by the Southern Pacific the previous year;
the river was still uncontrolled, and the impending flood threatened to
inundate the Valley and deprive 12,000 people of their property and
homes. Mr. Harriman was not a man to be daunted or “rattled” by a
sudden and menacing emergency. “There, in the bustle and
confusion of temporary offices, with the ruins of San Francisco still
smoking, with the facilities of his roads taxed to the utmost in
carrying people away from the stricken city, with the wonderful
railway system which constituted his life work crippled to an
unknown extent, and with the financial demands resulting from the
disaster impossible to determine,” he consented to advance an
additional sum of $250,000 for controlling the Colorado River and
protecting the Imperial Valley. “It has always seemed to me,” writes
Mr. Cory, “that this was really the most remarkable thing in the whole
series of extraordinary happenings.”
With the promise of this additional sum of $250,000, President
Randolph returned to the Imperial Valley to take up again the fight
with the runaway river. The flood, at that time, was steadily rising; the
width of the crevasse had increased to a quarter of a mile, and the
Colorado was pouring into the Salton basin more than four billion
cubic feet of water every twenty four hours.
On the 19th of April, 1906, the day after the San Francisco
earthquake, Mr. C. R. Rockwood, who had been the chief engineer
of the California Development Company for about four years,
tendered his resignation, and Mr. H. T. Cory, President Randolph’s
assistant, was appointed in his place. The Southern Pacific
Company then assumed full control and direction of defensive
operations, and all subsequent work was planned and executed by
its engineers, with the powerful support of Mr. Harriman and his
great railway system.
 Agricultural Sands Eroded and Destroyed by Flood Water
The task set before Messrs. Randolph, Cory, Hind and Clarke was
one that might well have daunted even engineers of their great ability
and experience. As the summer flood approached its maximum, in
the latter part of June, the crevasse widened to more than half a
mile, and the whole river, rushing through the break, spread out over
an area eight or ten miles in width, and then, collecting in separate
streams as it ran down the slope of the basin, discharged at last into
the Salton Sea through the flooded channel of the New River
barranca. Thousands of acres of land, covered with growing crops,
were inundated, and thousands of acres more were so eroded and
furrowed by the torrential streams that they never could be cultivated
again. The works of the New Liverpool Salt Company were buried
under sixty feet of water; the towns of Calexico and Mexicali were
partially destroyed, and in many places the tracks of the Inter-
California Railroad (a branch of the Southern Pacific) and the
Holtville Interurban were deeply submerged or wholly carried away.
The wooden flumes which carried the irrigating water over the New
River barranca were swept down into the Salton Sea, and 30,000
acres of cultivated land in the western part of the Valley became dry,
barren and uninhabitable. At the height of the flood, the Colorado
discharged through the crevasse more than 75,000 cubic feet of
water per second, or six billion cubic feet every twenty four hours,
while the Salton Sea, into which this immense volume of water was
poured, rose at the rate of seven inches per day over an area of four
hundred square miles. The main line of the Southern Pacific was
soon inundated, and five times in the course of the summer the
company had to move its track to higher ground.

A Flood Waterfall in Imperial Valley, Cutting Back

 Nearer View of Flood Cataract in Imperial Valley, Cutting Back
The most dangerous and alarming feature of the situation was the
“cutting back” of the torrents into which the flood-water collected as it
rushed down the delta slope toward the Salton Sea. The fine silt of
which the soil was composed washed out like powdered sugar, and
wherever there happened to be a strong current, the flow soon
produced a miniature rapid. The rapid then became a cascade, the
cascade grew into a fall, and the fall finally developed into a roaring
cataract, which “cut back,” upstream, at the rate sometimes of four
thousand feet a day, widening as it receded, and leaving below it a
deep gorge with almost perpendicular walls. Some of the gorges
eroded in the light friable silt by these receding waterfalls were fifty to
eighty feet deep and more than a thousand feet across. It was
estimated that the channels thus formed during the floods of 1906
had an aggregate length of more than forty miles, and that the solid
matter scoured out of them and carried down into the Salton Sea
was nearly four times as great as the whole amount excavated in the
digging of the Panama Canal. But the damage actually done by
these receding waterfalls was unimportant in comparison with the
damage that they threatened to do. If one of them should “cut back”
far enough to break into the irrigation system of the California
Development Company, all the water in the latter’s canals and
ditches would instantly flow down into the deep gorge below the
cataract, and bring about a disaster almost unprecedented in history.
The twelve thousand settlers in the desert oasis were wholly
dependent upon the irrigation system for their supply of drinking
water, and if that supply should be cut off, they would be compelled
by thirst either to camp around the margin of the Salton Sea, which
was ten or fifteen miles away from most of them, or else get out of
the valley within forty eight hours in a wild precipitate stampede.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the danger of being driven out by lack
of water was even greater and more immediate than the danger of
being drowned out by the rising flood.
The changes in the topography of the Colorado delta brought
about by the crevasse and the floods of 1906 were greater than any
that had occurred there in the three preceding centuries of recorded
history. In referring to them Mr. Cory says:
“The effect of this flood, in a geological way, was of
extraordinary interest and very spectacular. In nine months,
the runaway waters of the Colorado had eroded from the New
and Alamo River channels and carried down into the Salton
Sea a yardage almost four times as great as that of the entire
Panama Canal. The combined length of the channels cut out
was almost forty three miles, the average width being one
thousand feet and the depth fifty feet. To this total of
400,000,000 to 450,000,000 cubic yards must be added
almost ten per cent for side cañons, surface erosions etc.
Very rarely, if ever before, has it been possible to see a
geological agency effect in a few months a change which
usually requires centuries.”
Channel Cut by the Runaway River on Its Way to the Salton Sea

FOOTNOTES:
[9] The sill of the Chaffey gate proved to be too high for low
stages of water, and a canal, at a lower level, was cut around the
structure and closed every year with a brush-and-earth dam
before the approach of the summer flood. G. K.
[10] Mr. Randolph was a distinguished civil engineer and
railroad manager, who had been, at one time, superintendent of
the Tucson division of the Southern Pacific under Mr. C. P.
Huntington. After the latter’s death, he went to Los Angeles,
where he built and managed Mr. H. E. Huntington’s interurban
system of electric railways and where he made the acquaintance
of Mr. Harriman. Finding that his health would not permit him to
live in the climate of Los Angeles, he returned in 1904 to Arizona,
where he was appointed president of the Arizona Eastern
Railroad Company and the Southern Pacific Railroad Company of
Mexico—Harriman lines. Mr. Randolph, at that time, was
regarded as one of the ablest civil engineers in the United States,
and he had already had much experience in dealing with river-
control problems in the South. He was also one of Mr. Harriman’s
most trusted counsellors, and it was upon his recommendation
that the Southern Pacific Company’s lines were extended into
Mexico.
[11] Mr. Cory was a talented civil engineer who had left his
professorial chair in the engineering department of the University
of Cincinnati to enter the service of the Southern Pacific Railroad
system. Just prior to this time—in May 1905—he had been
appointed assistant to President Randolph, with headquarters at
Tucson.
 THE SAVING OF THE VALLEY
When the Southern Pacific engineers undertook to avert the peril
that menaced the Imperial Valley in the summer of 1906, they found
little in recorded history to help or guide them. Inundations, of
course, had often occurred before, on the Mississippi River and its
tributaries, in the valley of “China’s Sorrow,” and in many other parts
of the world; but these floods were merely overflows on a relatively
flat surface. The cosmical plunge of a great river into the dried-up
basin of an ancient sea was an unprecedented phenomenon, and
one which raised engineering problems that were wholly new.
Nobody had ever before tried to control a rush of 360,000,000 cubic
feet of water per hour, down a four-hundred-foot slope of easily
eroded silt, into a basin big enough to hold Long Island Sound.
There was nothing in the past experience of the world that could
suggest a practicable method of dealing with such conditions.
Neither was much help to be obtained from the advice of hydraulic
experts. Of the forty or fifty eminent engineers who visited the
Colorado delta in 1905 and 1906, hardly any two agreed upon a
definite plan of defensive work, while almost everyone found
something objectionable in the measures suggested by others. All
admitted, however, that “the situation was a desperate one;” that it
was “without engineering parallel;” and that “there seemed to be only
a fighting chance of controlling the river.”
Mr. Harriman, who believed and who once said that “nothing is
impossible,” never doubted that the control of the Colorado River
was within human power and human resources. In building the Lucin
cut-off across the Great Salt Lake of Utah he had successfully
carried through one “impossible” enterprise, and he did not hesitate
to undertake another. Inspired by his invincible courage, President
Randolph and his engineers set about their herculean task.
In preparing for a fifth attempt to bring the Colorado under control,
they determined to modify the plan of operations previously followed
by substituting rock for the materials that had before been used in
the construction of dams. Practical experience had shown that piling,
brush, sandbags and earth could not be made to support the
pressure of the river in full flood, while a series of rock-fill barrier
dams, of sufficient width and height, might be strong enough to stand
even a flood discharge of 115,000 cubic feet of water per second. In
making this change of plan, Mr. Randolph acted on his own
judgment and in direct opposition to the views and advice of experts
who were acquainted with the situation. Almost all of the engineers
who had visited the break, including many of national and
international reputation, regarded a rock-fill barrier dam as wholly
unworthy of consideration, for at least two reasons. First, the rock
would probably sink into the soft silt bottom, and keep on going down
indefinitely. It might perhaps be supported by a strong brush-
mattress foundation, but even then, the mattress would be likely to
break under the weight of the load and thus fail to answer its
purpose. Second, the water going over a rock-fill dam, while it was in
course of construction, would almost certainly wash away some one
rock at the top. This, by increasing the overflow at that point, would
dislodge more rocks, and finally create a breach that could not be
closed. President Randolph who had used brush-mattresses and
rock-fill dams on the Tombigbee River in Alabama many years
before, fully considered these objections but did not find them
convincing and steadfastly adhered to his own plan.
The preparations made for the summer’s work were far more
thorough and comprehensive than any that had ever been made
before. Realizing the importance of adequate transportation,
President Randolph and his engineers immediately began the
construction of a branch railroad from the main line of the Southern
Pacific to the scene of operations at the crevasse, with ample sidings
and terminal facilities at both ends. Then they borrowed from the
Union Pacific three hundred of the mammoth side-dump cars known
as “battleships,” which had been used in the construction of the
Lucin cut-off, and which had a carrying capacity of fifty or sixty tons
each. The California Development Company had three light-draught
steamers and a number of barges that could be used on the river,
and the Southern Pacific Company furnished complete work-trains,
from time to time, until a maximum of ten was reached. The next
requisite was material for levees and dams, and this they secured by
drawing upon all the rock quarries within a radius of four hundred
miles, and by opening a new one, with a face of six hundred feet and
a height of forty feet, on the granite ledge at Andrade near the
concrete head-gate. Clay they obtained from a deposit just north of
the Mexican boundary, and gravel they hauled from the Southern
Pacific Company’s “Mammoth Gravel Pit,” which was situated on the
main line about forty miles west of the crevasse spur. From Los
Angeles they brought 1100 ninety-foot piles, 19,000 feet of heavy
timbers for railway trestles, and forty miles of steel cable to be used
in the weaving of brush-mattresses. The Southern Pacific Company
furnished pile-drivers, steam shovels for the granite quarry and
gravel pit, several carloads of repair parts, and a large quantity of
stores and materials of various kinds. It also detailed for service on
the spur railroad and at the crevasse as many engineers, mechanics
and skilled workmen as were needed. The chief reason, Mr. Cory
says, “for having the railroad company supply so great a quantity of
labor, equipment and supplies, was that it afforded an opportunity to
assemble quickly a thoroughly organized and efficient force of men;
the advantage of obtaining material and supplies through the
purchasing department of the Harriman systems; immediate
shipment of repair parts not kept on hand; and the ability to increase
or decrease rapidly the force and equipment without confusion.”
The requisite most difficult to obtain, in sufficient amount, was
unskilled labor. An attempt was made to get five hundred peons from
central Mexico; but it did not succeed, and Mr. Cory was finally
compelled to mobilize all the Indian tribes in that part of the
Southwest—Pimas, Papagoes, Maricopas and Yumas from Arizona
and Cocopahs and Diegueños from Mexico. These Indians
fraternized and got along together amicably, and constituted with
their families a separate camp of about two thousand people. The
rest of the laborers were Mexicans from the vicinity, and drifting
adventurers from all parts of the United States who were attracted to
the place by the novelty of the work and the publicity given to it in the
newspapers. Arrangements were made with the Mexican authorities
to put the whole region under martial law and to send a force of
rurales with a military commandant to police the camps.

Situation in June, 1906 (whole river going into Salton Sink)

Active work began on the 6th of August, 1906, when the summer
flood had fallen enough to reduce the flow through the crevasse to
about 24,000 cubic feet per second. By that time the receding water
had left exposed extensive sand-bars on both sides of the river,
which narrowed the channel to 600 or 700 feet, and President
Randolph’s plan was to dam this channel sufficiently to throw all or
most of the water through the by-pass and the Rockwood head-gate,
and then permanently to close the break. As it was deemed essential
to blanket the bed of the river with a woven brush-mattress, to
prevent bottom erosion and to make a foundation for the rock, two
shifts of men were set at this work. In twenty days and nights, they
constructed, with baling-wire, steel cable and two thousand cords of
brush, about 13,000 square feet of mattress, which was enough to
cover the bed of the river from shore to shore with a double
thickness of blanketing about one hundred feet in width. When this
covering had been completed and sunk, a railway trestle ten feet
wide was built across the crevasse, and on the 14th of September
work-trains of “battleships” began running across it and dumping
rock on to the mattress at the bottom of the stream. Meanwhile, the
by-pass to the Rockwood head-gate was completed and enlarged,
and in less than two weeks the dam was high enough to close the
crevasse in part and thus divert water through the by-pass and gate.
On the 10th of October, nearly 13,000 cubic feet of water per second
was passing through the gate, while only one-tenth of that amount
was flowing over the dam. The gate, however, under the pressure to
which it was subjected, both by the water and by great masses of
accumulated driftwood, began to show signs of weakness, and at
two o’clock on the following day two-thirds of it gave way, went out,
and floated down stream. The by-pass then became the main river,
while the top of the diversion dam was left practically dry. Thus
ended, in almost complete failure, the fifth attempt to control the
Colorado. The river had been barred in one channel, but it burst
through another, carrying with it a 200-foot head-gate which
represented four months of labor and an expenditure of $122,000.
Mr. Harriman and the Southern Pacific engineers were
disappointed but not disheartened. The steel-and-concrete head-
gate at Andrade had been ready for use since June, and powerful
dredges were set at work clearing out and enlarging the four miles of
silted-up canal south of it, so that water might be furnished to the
Imperial Valley by that route while another attempt was being made
to close completely both the Rockwood by-pass and the original
intake.
 An inspection of the rock-fill dam, which had been left exposed by
the diversion of the river, showed that the objections made to a
structure of this kind were not well founded. The brush-mattress had
not been broken by the weight of the rocks; the rocks themselves
had not sunk out of sight in the soft silt of the bottom, and the dam
had not been breached or seriously injured. It leaked a little, but its
good condition in other respects suggested the possibility of quickly
closing the by-pass and the intake with rock barriers of this type.
Additional trestles were built across both waterways; ten trains of flat
cars and “battleships” were set at work bringing rock from three or
four different quarries, and the laboring force was increased to about
a thousand men with seven hundred horses and mules. Operations
were pushed night and day, and in a little more than three weeks,
high rock-fill dams were built across both intake and by-pass, and
were connected by massive levees so as to make a continuous
barrier about half a mile in length. Leakage through the dams was
stopped by facing them with gravel and clay, forced into the
interstices and puddled with streams of water from powerful pumps,
and the levees at both ends were connected with those that had
previously been built up and down the river by the California
Development Company. In the course of the work there were used,
first and last, about three thousand carloads of rock, gravel and clay,
while 400,000 cubic yards of earth were moved by dredges and
teams.