Episode 207: The Colorado River Compact, Part III: Hoover Will Run Up Against a Brick Wall

You may have noticed by now that everything related to the Colorado River compact has been contentious. The commission that produced the document only came about because the states were starting to clash with each other over issues of water rights, and it was seen as a cheaper alternative than hashing things out through the court system. The very idea of coming together to form an interstate agreement was proposed because of growing chasms between the various states and their interests. And once the commission actually did come together, they hit an in pass after only four days of deliberations and had to take a break. What followed were months of public meetings, which only introduced more drama into everything, including George Maxwell's Quixotic Quest for the Highline Canal, the Supreme Court making its ruling in favor of prior appropriation to decide disputes between states and California pushing forward with the swing Johnson bill. Finally, everyone came together in November 1922 to hash everything out based on the upper basin lower basin formulation. But even then there was still more back and forth before the delegates all eventually decided they had a compact that they could sign. With all that as context, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that some of the largest bits of contention over the whole compact came after the darn thing had been signed. And it definitely shouldn't be a surprise to anyone listening to this podcast that a good deal those pushing back against the compact were from Arizona. I'm your host David Rakhousen and you are listening to A. Z, the history of Arizona. Episode 207, the Colorado River Compact, Part 3, Hoover will run up against a brick wall. Welcome back everyone. Last time we witnessed the signing of the Colorado River Compact wherein the seven states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California agreed to split the rivers water 50/50 between the four upper basin states and the three lower basin states. As we discussed at the end of that episode, this compact had serious issues that we are only now really beginning to understand, but at the time it was seen as a momentous event and a sign of a brighter future to come. But as I ominously foreshadowed last time in a quote from historian Norris Hunley Jr., signing the compact was one thing, but getting it ratified about the seven state legislatures was another. And guess which legislature would prove to be the most intransigent? Go on, guess, I'll give you a moment. But before we get to that, let's do a roundup of how things went in the other states. First up, we have Utah, which was mainly all for the deal struck in Santa Fe, though it did have one very vocal dissenter. Their delegate to the commission spent a lot of time telling people that the compact would not disrupt any of their development, and that because of return flow or the water that would make its way back into the watershed after it had been used for irrigation and whatnot, they didn't have to worry about coming up short after giving the lower basin their cut. By January 26, 1923, both houses of the legislature had ratified the deal. Next up we have Nevada, which coincidentally would receive the smallest allocation of water from future negotiations, and according to author David Owen is actually still drawing less than that today. There was virtually no debate in both houses of the state legislature, and they unanimously backed the compact based on the prompting of their former governor and their current governor, who had actually been the state's delegate to the Colorado River Commission. Nevada also had its eyes on the prize, the feature Boulder Canyon Dam Project, and they saw the compact as the quickest way to get there. So on January 27, the state approved the compact. After Nevada, we have Wyoming, and here the waters were a little chopper. There was a brilliant lawyer who had actually argued the landmark Wyoming V Colorado case, who raised a whole host of issues with the compact, including that it did not say how much each upper basin state had to send downstream to ensure the obligation to the lower basin, and it didn't take into account the needs of Amerindians, and it certainly didn't take into account Mexico, which he argued should have been figured as part of the lower basin. Finally, as would be a common refrain in these battles, he raised concerns that the estimates the commission was working off of were wrong, and there was less water to go around than they had calculated. It's tempting to look at the people who raised this concern as modern day Cassandra's profits foretelling doom but being ignored, but I personally don't think we can go that far. No one really had good numbers, or enough historical data points, and there were a good many ways to look at what data was available. So while people like this lawyer from Wyoming were right, there was less water. We can't pretend like he knew exactly how much less there was, or exactly what the future would bring. Sorry, it's just something I thought should be said. Anyway, Wyoming's commission delegate, with some help from Arthur Davis at the Reclamation Service, was able to overcome these doubts and both houses of the legislature gave their approval, with the compact being ratified on January 30th. And this brings us to New Mexico, where the sailing was just as smooth as it was in Utah and Nevada. One of this was because New Mexico's legislature was convinced that the compact protected their interest in the San Juan River, a tributary to the Colorado that drains the Four Corners region, before eventually emptying into the bigger river on the eastern edge of Lake Palantin, Utah. But another reason is because Arthur Davis at the Reclamation Service, and Delve Carpenter from Colorado, had actually been working a side deal to solve a dispute between New Mexico and Colorado over the La Plata River, which was a tributary of the San Juan shared by the two states. While working on the Colorado River Compact, Carpenter and Davis had arranged for a two-state compact over the La Plata, which was actually signed just three days after the seven-state Colorado River Compact. So the New Mexico State legislature had no trouble ratifying the compact on January 31st. Okay, so it's now the end of January 1923. Just two months after the compact had been signed, and four out of the seven states have officially ratified this treaty with only small hiccups here or there. That means we can just bang out the other three and call it a day, right? And yes, I know why telegraphed the end to this too much for that joke to land, right? But I'm going to use it as a segue nonetheless. Despite the fact that California would ratify the compact the day after New Mexico, it had a much rockier road to get there. As we discussed before, California had mostly been on board with the compact because, like Nevada, they saw it as the shortest route to get the Boulder Canyon Dam, and their beloved All-American Canal. But many of the states' movers and shakers were not a fan of what their delegate came home with, and were very vocal in their disapproval, including that the compact said nothing about these two very important projects. One of these was Phil Swing, California's representative in the U.S. House from the Imperial Valley, who had introduced the legislation to build the Boulder Canyon Dam the previous year. And he and others decided to push for adding a reservation to the compact, which stipulated that it would not be passed until the Swing Johnson Bell went through. Proponents of the compact absolutely hated this idea, pointing out that a quick clean ratification was the surest path toward the agreement actually being ratified by all seven states. Also if California attached such a reservation, it would open up the whole can of worms of, if I give one to you, I have to give one to everyone else. If California held out for its all-American canal, what special self-interested project would the government have to give to Arizona? And Nevada, and Colorado, and Utah, and every other state. Finally, enough prominent people, including the governor, the state attorney general, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, through their way behind the compact, and the state house will voted to ratify, with the state senate following on February 1. Ironically enough, the compact would meet some of its stiffest resistance in the home state of the very man who had proposed it in the first place. Delph Carpenter had returned to Colorado to show off its shiny new agreement, only defying concerns growing in the state about the compact trampling on their cherished water rights, and more fears that the commission's numbers had been wrong and there wasn't enough water. So we get more rounds of people using different estimates for the river's flow, saying the water was insufficient, while Carpenter used his own estimates to show there was enough. Honestly, it's kind of laughable about how much everyone was lacking good solid data on this issue. But things in Colorado also took a little twist. And the state legislature suddenly took an issue with Article 3B, and Article 8 of the compact. Article 3B is the part that promised the lower basin that additional 1 million acre feet above their annual 7.5 million acre feet allotment, while Article 8 says that 5 million acre feet would take care of present rights in the lower basin. These you Colorado had is that they feared that in the future people might misconstrue the language to say that the 1 million acre feet in Article 3B was cumulative year over year, and that the 5 million in Article 8 would be taken as a special water grant to lower basin. What they wanted was an interpretive clause or preamble added to the compact to clarify that this wasn't the case. Carpenter wasn't having it however, rightly pointing out that no one can make the mistake of believing that Article 3B was saying that the lower basin could keep extending its use by 1 million acre feet every year. If that was the case, then they would claim more than the entire output of the river in just a few years, and that was absurd. Still as January 1923 turned into February 1923, many in Colorado's western basin still wanted their clarifying preamble. Despite Carpenter, Herbert Hoover, Davis, and many others all testifying that their interpretation of the two articles in question was dead wrong. At one point Carpenter was beginning to waver and thinking about just letting them add their clause. But Hoover bolstered his resolve by saying if they allowed Colorado to insert such language, it was possible Arizona's legislature would want to include its own preamble, and who knows maybe their preamble would say the opposite of Colorado's. Finally, after much cajoling, the Colorado State Senate agreed to drop their demand for the preamble if Carpenter agreed to put into the Senate journal a report that contained the correct interpretation of the articles in question. After he did so, it went through the Senate and then went to the House where if I'm reading things correctly, it was finally ratified on March 29, 1923. And now it's time to come to the problem. Six out of the seven states have now ratified and all eyes turned toward Arizona to see what it would do. Unfortunately, Arizona had signaled early on that ratification was going to be an uphill battle to say the least. To understand where the state's resistance is coming from, we need to travel back in time about a year. As I've mentioned before, 1922 was an election year in Arizona, and presaging its prominent role in state politics for the next couple of decades, the Colorado River Compact was a hotly contested issue. The funny thing is that both the campaigns of the incumbent Republican Thomas Campbell and the Democratic challenger, George W.P. Hunt, made development and use of the Colorado River part of their campaigns. However, Malcolm B. Parsons, writing in the spring 1962 volume of the journal Arizona of the West, points out that while the Republicans were focused on bringing cheap hydroelectric power to meet the growing need, Democrats were more concerned about flood control and having irrigation water, with hydroelectricity at secondary concern. Hunt, a populist, was also worried about what government agencies would oversee this proposed reclamation and wanted to make sure that Arizona would not be sacrificing any of her rights to the river. On the campaign trail, however, Hunt didn't directly attack the Colorado River Commission or the Santa Fe meeting when it was announced, but rather made broad statements about protecting Arizona's rights to water. Campbell, however, was on record as supporting the commission and its meeting in Santa Fe, and so in his campaigning, he talked much more about the benefits that would come from the seven state agreement, his personal role in championing reclamation projects and in bringing awareness of the issue to the national level. He also took an opportunity to get in a dig at Hunt, who would just come back from big US minister in Thailand to run for office again, during a campaign stop in Casa Grande, where he said, "Have you ever heard Governor Hunt raising his voice in national conferences in behalf of reclamation and power development?" And yet he comes back from Siam to save the Colorado River for the home folks. According to Hunt Biographer David R. Burman, Campbell tried to get Hunt to debate on the merits of the compact, but could never pin his opponent down on this. In the end, Hunt was able to beat Campbell to claim the gubernatorial chair. For the second time, it must be noted, "A couple of my sources call it a landslide victory, and Hunt did win with 54% of the vote, the highest margin of his entire career. But out of the nearly 68,000 votes cast between the two major parties, the final difference came down to less than 7,000, so it doesn't feel very landslide-ish to me." But what's really important to our story is that within a week of being elected, Hunt finally made a public statement on where he stood on the Colorado River Compact. In this statement, he made several points, including that Arizona would accept no deal that would compromise her own rights to the river. That California would try to rob Arizona of both water and the hydroelectricity that could be produced, and that water from the river needed to stay to irrigate farms in Arizona, not flow down to Mexico where Asian workers would try to raise cheap crops to undercut California and Arizona. You can definitely see the influence of George Maxwell in that last point. He also advocated slowly unrolling the development of Reclamation Projects over the period of 12 to 15 years, a much slower pace than others were thinking. And we have to remember that he's making this statement while the Colorado River Commission was sitting in Santa Fe, working out Carpenter's Upper Basin Lower Basin Deal. The ultimate source of Hunt's antipathy toward the compact is known only to him, but that doesn't mean we can't indulge in a bit of armchair psychology. First off, Hunt believed strongly that Arizona's future would be realigned on the Colorado. Right now, the state's fortunes were all tied to copper mining, but that couldn't last forever. And once that was gone, it would be irrigation and hydroelectricity that would bring in the money. And because the river flowed through or along the state for 580 miles, about half of its total length, that meant Arizona should have one of the largest claims to its water, and it needed to protect those rights from the circling vulture that was thirsty, thirsty California. Secondly, in line with the Democratic platform at the time, he was backing a state's rights view of this issue, that Arizona had to find the best solutions for itself and to be in charge of its own destiny. Third, the newly elected governor had a very non-rushed attitude, as in his mind, development would happen gradually over time as funding became available. That's one reason he really dragged his heels when the other states, and Hoover, began pressing him and the Arizona legislature to sign the compact in the words of a D.H. Jean-Luc Picard, now, now, now, now, now. The final reason I want to highlight is also the most interesting, because it really speaks to the mindset of a politician, and that is, Hunt just didn't know that much about the compact. Remember, he'd been in Thailand for all the lead up to the Colorado River Commission meetings, and learning about things through newspapers and mail. In January 1923, a member of Arizona's Democratic Central Committee would tell US representative Carl Hayden that Hunt was entirely ignorant about the Colorado River and the issues. And Berman writes that this is what allowed Maxwell to get such a hold of Hunt, as he was the first to really articulate a vision for the Colorado River that the governor understood and agreed with. That Democratic Central Committee member would also tell Hayden that pretty much all of Hunt's public statements on the subject were written by Maxwell. The director of the Yuma Valley Water Users Association agreed with this assessment, writing quote, "Maxwell is the only fly in the ointment. Just why Governor Hunt relies so wholly on Maxwell is a puzzle to me." But despite the fact that Hunt was on record as being against the compact, and he directly told Hoover that he wouldn't be able to even think about signing the compact for at least two years, Hoover believed that the state legislature would still pass it. It's a good thing he didn't have money writing on that bet because he would have lost. This is where we get into the back and forth I described last time where Hoover invited Hunt to come out to the commission's deliberations, but the governor declined and offered to send Maxwell instead, which Hoover declined because he doesn't like Maxwell. After this exchange, Hunt would write ominously in his journal quote, "Hoover will run up against a brick wall." The governor began building that wall less than a month after the compact had been signed by the commission, when Maxwell was sent on a speaking tour across the state. From December 1922 to January 1923, he would speak to crowds about how the compact was a scheme to set up an Asiatic colony in Mexico and how this would have dire consequences for everyone involved. He used additional scare tactics such as telling the Salt River Valley Water Users Association that the compact would force them to take a portion of the water impound by the Roosevelt Dam and flush it down the system so Mexico could have it. He also aimed a few broad-sized at Hoover, accusing him of using his prestige to mislead the public to get the compact passed. For his part, Hoover tried not to get into a debate with Maxwell, but he still decided to help counter some of the negative, not to mention false statements floating around. On December 8, 1922, Hoover would speak in Phoenix about the compact and laid out his case and bashed the compact's critics without naming any names, though no one would have missed the point that he was talking about Maxwell. The secretary of commerce even had a private conversation with Hunt about the compact, but after this, the governor announced that his position on the matter remained unchanged. Hoover would later dismiss Hunt as a "blender bus of a governor in Arizona" who knew nothing of engineering. While Maxwell was running round telling everyone about how evil the compact was, Hunt decided to resort to "fabien tactics" to defeat the compact. In his message at the start of the legislature's session in January 1923, he never came right out and said to reject the compact, but he advised considerable caution in that the state should not be rushed into anything. Hunt would say, "Arizona cannot afford to give away her greatest natural resource, with millions of acres awaiting development, and she cannot afford to plunge blindly into a contract that may be unfair to her." He also played the "lack of knowledge" card, arguing that there were so many data points left to be fully investigated that, signing the compact without knowing those numbers would be "inadvisable." In his own words, the governor told the legislators, "We must know how much water can be used in Arizona, how many acres can be irrigated, and what steps are necessary to secure the quantity needed for the adequate development of our state." So he didn't outright call for rejecting the compact, but said that Arizona should take the "wait-in-see" approach. They should gather more information, study the issue, but not be backed into any decisions. Following this speech, the Colorado River compact would be "hotly debated" and there would be a total of 11 bills in the state house and 13 in the state senate, which ranged from outright rejecting the compact to accepting it with additional reservations to unconditional acceptance. One of the major obstacles was that along with Hunt, Arizona's had elected a "super majority of Democrats" to be in the legislature, the vast majority of whom agreed with Hunt's reservations. The state house consisted of 41 Democrats and 6 Republicans, while the senate had 18 Democrats and one "token Republican" in it. But that didn't mean everyone was walking in lockstep. The legislators representing Yuma and Mojave counties broke with Hunt on this issue, mainly because Yuma County wanted flood control and Mojave wanted chief electricity from the proposed Boulder Canyon Dam to run its minds. And these were close personal friends of Hunt who were now turning on him, including senate president Mulford Windsor from Yuma County who had helped organize some of Hunt's early campaign victories. But now Windsor was saying that Hunt's objections to the compact were "flimsy shallow and false" and "smacked strongly of demagoguery." One of the biggest inter-party breaks happened when Carl Hayden threw his weight behind ratifying the compact with no additional reservations. Much like had been done in other states, the legislature was thinking of adding language that would make the compact more palatable for them, but Hayden, like Hoover, Carpenter, and others, felt that this would only encourage other states to try something similar to grab a bigger piece of the pie from themselves. Hayden would write a sharp letter to the state legislature saying "exceptance of the compact with reservations is in fact no approval at all." When he received a flood of criticism for taking this position, Hayden replied back with "any fair-minded person must concede that Arizona alone cannot undertake the development of the great river without the consent of the United States, and with an understanding of the other states of the Colorado River Basin, all of which leads to the conclusion that sooner or later the Colorado River compact must be signed by the state of Arizona." And time would eventually prove him right on that score. Strong support for the compact was also coming from the Republican camp, where former governor Thomas Campbell, former territorial governor and attendee at the Santa Fe meeting, Richard D. Sloan, and the editor of the Arizona Republican, Dwight B. Heard, pushed the idea that the compact would keep the states from going to court about water and would secure the necessary federal funding for reclamation projects. However, hunts objections were enough to form a powerful coalition for defeating the compact. Farmers were afraid it would send needed water to Mexico or California, which would grow cheaper crops and outsell them at the marketplace. The Salt River Valley Water Users Association had plans to sell hydroelectricity from its own projects, and so worried about competition from federally-built power plants. The mining companies, who were usually hunts worst enemies, were also hostile toward the compact, mainly because they had hoped for the state to develop private power utilities, which would then tax and maybe lighten their tax load. No less a figure than state-centered Lewis Douglas, son of James Douglas of Phelps Dodge and namesake of the town of Douglas, introduced a bill into the Senate to tax any hydroelectricity produced by its site along the Colorado River. As far as I can tell, this was the only time that Lewis Douglas and Hunt had ever or whatever agree on anything. Of the 24 bills introduced into the legislature that I mentioned before, three came closest to passing. The first was the bill introduced by Lewis Douglas. It passed the House on February 15, 1923 and contained three amendments to the compact. First was the tax on hydroelectricity, second was a limitation on Mexico's use of Colorado River water, and third was excluding the heat of the river from being counted as part of the Colorado's water count. Another bill originated in the Senate, which also called for the right to tax the hydroelectricity generated along the Colorado, but it didn't call for a specific amount like Douglas did. Both bills would never get passed the next chamber. The Senate bill died in the House and the House bill died in the Senate. Another piece of legislation was introduced on February 15 by those friendly to the compact to just ratified the darn thing with no reservations. This bill would actually still be kicking around when the last day of the legislature rolled around on March 8. When it came time to vote, however, it failed to gain a majority. Indeed, it fell just one vote short and ended up splitting the chamber, 22 votes to 22 votes. And just like that, the legislative session had ended, and Arizona had failed to ratify the compact, becoming the first of the seven basin states to do so. Hunt and his allies had won with a combination of misinformation, looking at U-Maxwell, self-interest, and delaying tactics. Even though the votes to not ratify the compact had been close, Hunt could still cling victory and become more entrenched in his position, which he, of course, did. And that's where I want to leave this week, as the compact has received its first defeat at the hands of a state legislature. But join me next week, as Hunt decided to boldly push forward with a recommendation projects in, for, and by Arizona. While the other Colorado River states suddenly started thinking that if getting Hunt and his state on board was so much trouble, maybe they should look at other options to bypass them altogether. I'm your host, David Rickhausen, and you've been listening to A.Z., the history of Arizona. Goodbye.