From the Great Plains to

Hoover Dam
Industry, Environment, Design, and Growth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd2yGiJ04K4
(mega structure video, 15 min.)
 4/4

• Individual Project:
questions?
• Zoom office hours
today at 3:30
• Next week: class via
zoom
 Announcements
– Project: UT Library website is the best place to
start.
– Citations matter. Cite websites properly. Author,
date accessed needs to be in your citation.
– Use online books or journal articles.

• Primary sources: different options.

 Mega Structure video
• Did you watch?

• Want to start with why we needed a dam, 1931-35?

Does the clip tell us?
• Discussion - padlet
– How is the dam described? How are the workers and
working conditions described?
– Whose perspectives are being represented?
 Drought and Culture: Engineering
water solutions in the arid West
• LA Aqueduct to Hoover Dam
– Context: From the failure of the St. Francis Dam to success at Hoover
Dam.
– Context: Growth of CA and agriculture (Steinberg, lecture)

– Great Depression and Drought

– Dust Bowl

– Dam, Modernism, and Modernity

• Bureau of Reclamation: Reclaiming What?

 Context
• More water for California
– 4.4 million acre feet a year (half the river’s total annual flow
would go to CA)
– Why? Primarily agriculture (Steinberg reading)
• Hoover authorized the project to irrigate farmland; supply water to
SoCal, and control flooding.

– It would also produce electricity that could be sold to fund more

infrastructure
– “Cash register” dams
 Dust Bowl
• Strengthened the nation’s resolve and
provided a workforce.
• Where: 100 million acres in KS, CO, NM,
OK, and TX
– The Great Plains
• What: national/planetary disaster
– One of worst ecological disasters - ever
– Only took 50 years
• Why: b/c society was operating as it was
supposed to…
• By 1930s:

• OK: 13 out of 16 million acres of farm land suffered

from massive erosion
• Across the plains, farmers had plowed up native
grasses: some with roots up to 8 ft long.
• (Many had lived in sod houses)

• Economic and ecological decline: Machines made

farmers $ but they cost more. Usually more than small
farmers could afford. Took out loans. When depression
hit, they sold farms to pay debt.
Great Plains
• 1930s: Economic Depression + Drought

• Great Depression: 15 million Americans out

of work between 1930-1933
• Farmers: shielded somewhat from first
stages of Depression
• Then Drought hit
Plains
• Why were they hit so
hard?
– Ecological practices

– Breaking the sod, busting

the land
– Mortgages to pay for new
equipment (tractors,
heavy farm machinery)
 Industrial Land Ethic
• Donald Worster: ”the alienation of man from
the land, its commercialization, and its
consequent abuse.”
• By the time a drought hit, farmers were
already vulnerable due to prior ecological
damage.
 Link to Great Depression
• “Busting” the land? (sod busting)

• Same society produced both ecological and economic

“disaster”
• Similar reasons
– Use of Nature as capital (Steinberg, ch. 11 links to other topics?)

– Ideology: Humans had the right to use land for advancement

– Politics: Social order should permit and encourage this as well as

increase in personal wealth

• Faith in technology: tractors, ploughs, and dams.

 May 9, 1934
• 350 million tons of dirt
blew away
• 12 million pounds of dust
fell like snow on Chicago
• Buffalo, Boston, NY,
Washington
• “black blizzards”
 Storms kept coming
• 1933: 38
• 1934: 22
• 1935: 40
• 1937: 72
• lung diseases
• Blindness
• Death by suffocation
• 1941: rain fell
• Health hazards: dust pneumonia
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
EeeH2CcYCV0
March 25, 2015
 Okies and Exodusters
• What to do?
• Oklahoma: 18% of population
left
– 440,000 people

– farmers left homes/land

• Where did they go?

• Joined other 2.5 million
people who moved:
– West
 CALIFORNIA
• 300,000 went to CA

• Destitute

• Went to work:
– Factories in the field

– Displaced other
workers
– Little Oklahomas
• Others went to Pacific Northwest

• 400,000 went to Washington

• New Deal:

• Dam construction on Columbia River

– Bonneville Dam

– But, also to work on Hoover Dam

• In CA and WA large growers happy to see Okies.

• Others were not

• New Exodusters.

• John Steinbeck chronicles story

Land of Abundance
 Why California? Discuss

• Ads, easy living, “typical” palm trees, orange groves, lush landscape.
Images preceded Hoover Dam. continued afterwards.
• Facilitated idea that abundance would last forever, that there were no
natural barriers to growth in the state.
• Promotion continues into 1940s – but so does the need for water in the
region.
 What Okies symbolize
• Devastation of the Depression
• Broken promises of the American West
• Gap: between people and promises
• The appeal and promise of big
infrastructure, government help.
Workers, Families - Ragtown
Average temperature in July: 116
Eventually 5,000 people would live there
A city had to be built to accommodate workers
Planned community: Boulder City, NV
 Dam Building

• Host of reasons why the 1930s sparked the

era of big dams.
– Faith in technology and growth
• Idea we can control the environment (ironies here?)
• Depression and drought
St. Francis Dam
:https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=_6AvEZO34xI

-1928: March 12 – St. Francis Dam

gave way under hydrostatic pressure
from the full reservoir.
-38,000 acre feet of water surged
down San Francisquito Canyon.
-Hit the town of Santa Paula and the
farms and towns surrounding it.
- Headed toward Ventura and out to
the Pacific.
- Over 400 people died.
- Millions of dollars of damage.
- One of the greatest civil engineering
disasters in U.S. history
 • The idea for these dams:
Water storage/control
– flood/drought control
Damnation - clip
– Irrigation

– To create new agricultural land

Why build dams?
• Power generation
6min10 min.
– To stimulate growth and meet
needs of regional population
193s0s and 1940s

Massive concrete dams become one

of the most unique and important
American structures.
“It is a beautiful tantalizing thing. It is
complex. It has a meaning, not to be
grasped for weeks, or perhaps years. It
is subtle, sometimes cruelly obvious.”
Journalist Theodore White on opening
of Hoover/Boulder Dam.
A new era in
construction: 1930s -
Grand Coulee

Pacific Northwest

“Construction of Grand Coulee Dam

began in 1933 and was completed in
1942. Grand Coulee Dam is the largest
hydropower producer in the United
States with a total generating capacity
of 6,809 megawatts. It is also part of
the Columbia Basin Project, irrigating
more than 600,000 acres, and is the
cornerstone for water control on the
Columbia River in the United States.
Video Transcript PDF 23 kb”

Source; BOR website

Type: Gravity Dam

 Great Dams (and smaller
• Transformed the
ones)
• Also became symbols:
– Of American ingenuity,
continent
prowess, modernity
• Tamed rivers – Of work

• Flood control – Of human mastery over

nature
• New transportation
– New age of power:
routes hydroelectricity (new scale)

• Irrigation – Hubris?
Hoover Dam
• Function of the dam:
• Constructed 1931-1936
(Boulder/Hoover Dam)
• 726 feet high, base 660 feet wide,
1244 ft long, used 5 million barrels of
concrete.
• Massive wall of concrete restrains
the Colorado River
• Forms Lake Mead *(28,537,oo acre
feet of water)
 Function/Design
• Function: engineered structure
– Construction and engineering

– Utilization of advanced technology

• Concrete: works better under compression than in tension

– Wedge shape form had to be thicker at the bottom than on the
top

• Convex – distributed the stress (water weight) by arch

action to the canyon walls and downward
 Place and People
• Location: Black/Boulder Canyon area

• Nevada and Arizona

– Desert: volcanic rock, rattlesnakes, little vegetation

• Las Vegas: small settlement, 30 miles away

• 5,000 workers (21K eventually worked on the

dam) were needed to construct the dam
 Hoover Dam, Art, Culture
• Dam in art and culture
• (Trip to Hoover Dam
video)
• What do you see in the
video?
 4.9.2024

• Today, continue with

Hoover dam discussion.
• Transition to WWII and
1950s.
 Why was the dam needed:

• Rationale: To control the Colorado River

– Why? Despite previous control efforts (levees,
canals) the river would overflow its banks
– So, floods. But, also drought. (Dust Bowl)
– Severe damage: example: Flooding and the
Salton Sea
1905-07 overflow created the Salton Sea
Surprising?
 A look at the Dam

• How do we perceive dams today?

• Purpose?
• How did the film DamNation represent dams?
 But…it was also a self consciously modern
structure.
• Dam illuminates some of
the themes of American • We know who built it:
modernism. • Six Companies, Inc.
• Form: Architectural design
• Frank T. Crowe
– Modernism
• When we look at it
– Efficiency, technology,
abstract and ahistorical what do we see?
images, beneficial results.
Concrete Arch Gravity
Dam

Hoover Dam
Nevada/ California Border
Constructed by Bureau of
Reclamation
 Engineers v. architects
• Engineers: Technical • 1930s: Le Corbusier found
great beauty in such designs
design
• Dams: crest, towers,
• Plan so structure could
bridges, spillway gates,
be built powerhouse, ornaments
• Little attention to and colors resulted from self

visual considerations. conscious aesthetic

decisions.
 Looking at Hoover dam as a symbol and
structure of modernism

• What is modernism:
– Art and film
– literature
– Philosophy
– Architecture
– Engineering?
Picasso and Hofmann
 Organic architecture
• "It is the pervading law of all
things organic and inorganic, of all
things physical and metaphysical,
of all things human and all things
superhuman, of all true
manifestations of the head, of the
heart, of the soul, that the life is
recognizable in its expression,
that form ever follows function.
This is the law.”
• Form and function are one?
 • Accomplished residential designer in
Architect: Gordon B.
Kaufmann (1888-1949) So. Cal
– Designed L.A. Times building

– Trained in Germany, moved to California.

• Designed “typical” Spanish Mission style
homes.
• Worked in art deco style.

• Simplified designs while still retaining

“vestiges of ornament.”

– Hired as consultant for the dam.

• Admired clean lines of engineers but
wanted to bring a more sophisticated
aesthetic to the dam.
 Reconciling art and industry
• Kaufmann’s goals:
• Embrace technical design of
the dam.
• follow the structural demands
of the design.
• ‘clean up’ the design, make it
fitting for a massive structure.
• Create a monument
• “There was never any desire or
attempt to create an
architectural effect or style, but
rather to take each problem and
integrate it into the whole in
order to secure a system of plain
surfaces relieved by shadows
here and there where the plan…
suggested.” Kaufmann
 inspiration
• Kaufmann drew on modernist
sources for inspiration:
– Richard Neutra (architect)

– Hugh Ferris (The Metropolis of

Tomorrow, 1929) Drawings
emphasized light and shadow,
vertical/horizontal setbacks.

• The dam as science fiction

movie set?
 Science Fiction Movie set?

• Kaufmann wanted to draw

attention to the machinery
of the turbines and lighting
of the dam at night, in
(possible) reference to Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis (1927)
• http://www.youtube.com/w
atch?v=5PAdQ5anhZE
• http://www.youtube.com/w
BOR original design
Power house
• Modified by Kaufmann:

• His role: to mold the

facades “into harmonious
statements”
• BOR noted such changes
enhanced the appearance of
“stability, security, harmony
with surroundings.”
 Monuments
• Under Kaufmann, competition was held for a monument to accompany the dam.
Oskar J.W. Hansen won. (Norwegian Immigrant)
– Polished black diorite base,142 foot flagpole

– 2, 30 foot winged seated, surrealistic figures to underscore the “unreality of the dam in
the middle of a hostile desert.”

• Hansen: The figures symbolized universal aspiration of mankind and westward

expansion. Stoic, resembled eagles – modernized.
– A monument to those who settled the West. Why?

• Also included seal of US, zodiac, dates of construction of pyramids, and dam
dedication.
– Why?
 Plaque at the dam
• “They died to make the desert bloom. The United
States of America will continue to remember that
many who toiled here found their final rest while
engaged in the building of this dam. The United States
of America will continue to remember the services of
all who labored to clothe with substance the plans of
those who first visioned the building of this dam.”
Winged Figures of the Republic
 The interior of Hoover Dam:
What do you see? Why these designs?
Can we view Hoover Dam as a monument?
To what?
• Massive dams caught the attention of
Americans
• They suggested humans could control the
environment.
• Signified coming of a new “hydroelectric age”
• But, designers also wanted dam to reflect
ethos of the era.
• So, what was it?
• What can we tell about the era from the
architecture and design of the dam? The
engineering? Discuss?
• Influences and impact?
 With the dam…
What possibilities did the dam open for American society?

Precondition for regional growth.

1931-1936: Largest electrical project ever undertaken in the U.S.

Water guaranteed safety from drought – or so they thought.

Today: Severe drought.

https://climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/western-drought-brings-lake-mead-lo
west-level-it-was-built

Allowed for the development of LA: industrial and residential neighborhoods.

What kinds of debates do people still have about the “big dams” of the era?

One last thought: “Hoover Dam is one of the few structures built to scale with the vast
landscape of the West.” (Wilson, 492)
Lake Mead Water levels
• Transition to new topic
Engineering Defense and Explaining
Growth during the Cold War

The boom in infrastructures

Time lapse: Nuclear Explosions https://www.youtu
be.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
http://www.history.com/topics/hoover-dam/videos/
henry-j-kaiser-builds-hoover-dam-and-us-warships
 Defense and Industry
• Industry and investment in the West
– Investing in the workers
• Regional Military Stronghold
– International events - Korea
– 4 strategic levels
• Economic Booms & Military Budget
– Uranium, Defense Spending
• Industrial innovation: New Character
• Environmental impact
4.16.2024
Industry and Investment:
From Dams to Ships

• Henry J. Kaiser
– Fontana, CA, 1942

– Involved in building Hoover

Dam prior to the war

• Production of Steel in West

• Ship Building
– A new ship every 10 hours
Partnership key to his success

• Investing in workers
– Kaiser-Permanente
Health plan

• Other Partners
– Federal Government

• Banking:
– Amadeo Peter
Giannini
Bank of America
• Giannini - Owned BOA

• Invested in West, California:

– United Artists Studios, Disney,
Golden Gate Bridge

• 1945: BOA, largest commercial

institution in the world
• 1953: “The West hasn’t even started
yet.”
• Soft infrastructure
Other innovations

• 1st bank to computerize

• 1st to issue credit card

– BankAmericard
– Visa
• Kaiser and Giannini
– Built small empires
through federal investment
– What made this possible?
 • Great Depression

Past Forces – Brought people to region

– Hoover dam, improved agricultural
industry and provided the water
needed for growth.

• WWII and Jobs:

– Made West Stronghold of military
build-up
• 1943, So. Cal. Aircraft industry
employed 243,000
• Denver: chemical, ammunition
plants: 40% of population
factory workers in wartime
industries
• Texas: mfg employment
doubles, brought 600,000
people from rural areas to urban
Cold War West

• Cold War: tension between

US/USSR
• No. Korea invades So.
Korea 1950
• Tensions rise

• U.S. response
– 4 layers of strategic defense
 #1
• First: U.S. Presence in Far East (Philippines, Central
Pacific, Korea, Japan) and then:
– Anchor first-line of defense in Alaska

– Distant Early Warning Line of Radar Stations (DEW Line)

• Scientific design/logistical planning

– Expanded Military bases, upgraded ports, railroads, highways,

and airports across Alaska
– 1950s: 1 in 4 Alaska residents were military personnel.
 #2
• The infrastructure of defense: supply
bases, training bases, etc.
– Naval: Seattle, San Francisco, San
Diego, Honolulu
– Air Force: Colorado Springs

– Cities grew - military build-up

– West: home base of operations in Cold

War

• Infrastructure: “the basic physical and

organizational structures and facilities
(e.g., buildings, roads, and power
supplies) needed for the operation of a
society or enterprise.”
#3 –Strike and Defense forces: Great
Plains
• Using the American
Heartland
• Forces commanded from
Cheyenne Mountain
• 1970s: minutemen
missiles pointed at
Moscow and Beijing
 Strategy #4
• Defense system and the production of strategic
weapons
– Manhattan Project: Trinity site, 1945

– Bomb =20 tons of tnt

– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru2PWmGIoB8

– Missiles, atomic war heads, lethal chemicals tested in

deserts: UT, NM, NV
– Time Lapse Map of every nuclear explosion since ‘45:
White Sands Today
Lethal chemicals
• Desert contamination

• Environmental and
human impact

• Mines and weapons

depots across the
region.
 Western Economic dependence

• 1952-62: 25% of state income comes from the Federal

Government
– WA, CA, HW, AK, UT, and CO

• - 12-24% of income comes from Fed.

– NV, AZ, NM, OK, KS and TX

• By 1980: Little change

– Western cities: employ civilians in defense industry

– West had become staging ground

 Links back to highways:
• 1956: National Interstate
and Defense Highway Act
• Eisenhower:
– Past: motor Convoy
(1919)
– Present: Cold War
– Highways “essential for
national interest”
– Overpasses/
underpasses instead of
intersections
– 4 lanes wide
– Make it easy to get out
of cities in case of
atomic attack
 The Atomic Age

suburbanization,
urbanization, highways,
dams, defense, family and
recreation (kind?)
http://www.youtube.com/w
atch?v=wT_A9PFOY18
Long term effects?
 Uranium Boom
• Four corners region
(UT, NM, AZ, CO)
• gieger counters
• Search for yellow
carotite ore
• Prospecting “mania”
• Like other areas:
region linked to
military
 Military Dependence
• San Diego
– Navy added 215,000 people in 1957
– weapons makers brought more

• Social Dimensions
– Community organization
– Air Power Days
 Industry: made region central to Cold War
efforts

• Changing the West

– Economic expansion
– Housing/products for people
• WWII & Cold War: Aerospace industry
– 1950s: Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas,
Wichita: airplanes
– Military contracts
– Space programs: NASA, JPL
 New products, New Era
• Technology changed American life
• Stanford Industrial Park
– 1st step in creation of Silicon Valley

– Dept. of Defense: backbone of Silicon Valley

• Extractive industries waned

• Technology sector thrives; ”start up” culture emerges from Stanford.
– Gov funded universities, research. Stanford encouraged professors to start
companies. DOD funded both. Semi conductor industry a key example.
 Innovation and character

• By 1980s: era of environmental regulation

and regional tourism in the West

• Another link: recreation and suburbanism

 Discussion
• How do Americans think about
infrastructure as part of the
• What have you learned
nation's health/well being?
Whose concerns are from lecture, readings,
heard/ignored? How does what's films, discussion?
happening beyond the nation-
state (i.e. dramatic weather • What themes?
patterns or the Cold War)
• What events could you
influence decisions about
infrastructure? use?
Bonneville Dam
1934-37

Spans the Columbia River and links

Oregon and Washington.