Episode 209: The Colorado River Compact, Part V: The Swing-Johnson Bill

There is a saying floating out there in the public consciousness, a witty affirmism that is generally attributed to that master of a serbic wit, Mark Twain. However, as you dig into it, tracking down its origins is quite convoluted, and it appears that, according to one source at least, its first appearances are more modern and post-date Twain's death by decades. So we see it first pop up in a 1983 newspaper article in South Dakota, quoting the Secretary of the State's Department of Water and Natural Resources. Later that year, it appeared, now attributed to Twain, in an article that ran in the summer issue of Western Wildlands, a Nature Resource Journal. And in March 1984, Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt would even quote it while speaking before a Congressional subcommittee. Babbitt also gave some backstory for the quote, saying Twain had come up with a statement after a trip out west to visit California and Nevada, and possibly Arizona. I should note that the source I read that was trying to run down this quote says that they don't know where Babbitt's got that information from. Even though it's more than likely that Twain never said it, it doesn't stop the quote from having the ring of truth, especially in our present context of the heated debates over the Colorado River. Because as Mark Twain never said, whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting. I'm your host David Rakhousen, and you are listening to AZ, the history of Arizona. Episode 209, the Colorado River Compact, Part 5, The Swing Johnson Bill. Welcome back everyone. This week we covered the absolute stalemate that occurred in the mid-1920s as everyone tried to get Arizona to ratify the Colorado River Compact, only to realize that Governor George W. P. Hunt had no interest in letting that happen. So they then tried to simply go around the opposite governor and his stumbling block of a state, but that opened up its own set of problems. One of those was California demanding the construction of a storage and hydroelectric dam at the Boulder Canyon site along the Colorado in exchange for agreeing to ratify a six-state version of the Colorado River Compact. This only made Arizona more stubborn as it both thought that California was going to steal all its water and power, and that soon California and the federal government would be dictating water policy to them. In fact, when California representative Phil Swing and Senator Hiram Johnson reintroduced their bill to build the Boulder Canyon Dam for the third time in February 1926, it included a provision that would make the six-state Colorado River Compact go into effect. This particular provision upset Arizona representative Carl Hayden, who supported the Compact, supported regional cooperation, and was all for Arizona, Nevada, and California coming to a lower basin agreement. But he couldn't abide, though, was the federal government or California simply imposing the terms of the Compact on his state. In one of his speeches opposing this new iteration of the Swing Johnson bill, he would say, quote, "Congress has no right to force a hearings to the Compact without the full concurrence of the states that would be affected thereby." This would just be the beginning of Hayden's two-year struggle to strike down the bill, or at the very least delay its passage. He would call in favors, write letters, and use every bit of political acumen he had for this purpose. For example, when it was with the House Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation, he questioned Delph Carpenter from Colorado for several days, not to grill him per se, but more as a means of running out the clock without looking too antagonistic. He pointed to the House's crowded calendar as reason to put the bill on the back burner, and said that delaying the bill would help in ongoing negotiations with Mexico over Colorado River usage. Hayden also prepped opposition witnesses, telling Dwight B. Heard to ask that the location of the dam be determined by a panel of engineers, helping to reframe the whole thing as an engineering rather than a political issue. Eventually, in May 1926, he successfully moved to have the bill postponed, thanks to some behind-the-scenes politicking. "Don't worry, though. The battle over Swing Johnson isn't going away just yet. As I said, this was a multi-year battle for Hayden." But for right now, I want to return to basically where we left off last week, and that is the dawn of 1927, and the fact that the upper basin states were all starting to get a little nervous. It had been more than four years since the Colorado River compact had been hammered out, and yet it still had not passed. Even the six-state version hadn't gone anywhere yet because of California's demands. And now, the unity between the states was starting to break down, as could be seen in Utah. Is happening in Utah, you ask? Nothing much, just their state legislature rescinding their approval of the six-state version of the Colorado River compact. The state took this destabilizing move to look after its own interests. The thinking went that California's desire for the Boulder Canyon Dam was probably a "fait accompli," and then they would take pretty much all the lower basin water for themselves. In that case, Arizona would have to go looking for water elsewhere, and as a non-signer on the compact, they didn't have to abide by any water-sharing agreements, so they might go look into tap the upper Colorado, and that worried Utah. There were some other reasons, but it all boiled down to the state looking out for number one, itself. This was alarming to the other upper basin states as everyone only looking out for themselves had led to the mass that had brought them to form the compact in the first place. So in August 1927, another seven-state Colorado River Governor's conference was called to meet in Denver in an attempt to bring everyone together and maybe finally get them all on the same page. You might be thinking, just based on the past few years, that this latest attempt is just as hopeless as the previous ones. Then, you would be right. But at first, there did seem to be a slight ray of hope. While I have portrayed Hunt as being inflexible and stubborn to a fault when it came to sharing the river's water with the other children, he had made some small concessions. For example, in late 1925, he and other state officials had opposed James P. Juran's application to the Federal Power Commission for the proposed dam at the Diamond Creek location on the western edge of the Grand Canyon. Hunt had originally championed this project in the early 1920s, but now he believed that the state should own the site entirely and that it should not be in private hands. It was a decision that was purely in the interest of making sure Arizona got royalties from the electricity the dam would produce, but it did set the upper basin states just a little more at ease. And at this August 1927 conference in Denver, Hunt did signal that he would be willing to agree to the Colorado River compact, but only provided that a subsidiary agreement make it absolutely clear what Arizona had a right to. According to David R. Berman, a hunts biographer, this is a position he had leaned toward starting in late 1926. He had indicated that he wouldn't be opposed to the Boulder Canyon dam site, but only if Arizona's rights were firmly established. This position also put him at odds with Fred Colter, he of the Arizona Highline Association, because the Boulder Canyon site was not right at all for Colter's visions of the Highline Canal to Central Arizona. However, again, things ended up going nowhere as Arizona and California again clashed about the nitty-gritty details. California pushed for its dam, Arizona pushed for its rights to a royalty on electricity produced in its state, and neither could get together on the issue of water allocation. The upper basin states tried to mediate a deal, but it failed to satisfy either side and eventually the conference broke up in October 1927 with nothing resolved and the whole idea of the compact now seeming like a pipe dream. Arizona's Hunley Jr. in his book Water and the West says that following the breakdown of this conference and a few other talks between California and Arizona, the upper basin states now saw the swing Johnson bill as their only hope for securing their water rights. So they started trying to modify the fourth iteration of this bill which was introduced into Congress in December 1927. After again though, we run into Hayden, who was still bound and determined to defeat this bill, though he was no longer fighting it from a seat in the house. Early in 1926, he had announced his intention to run for the Senate seat currently held by our old friend, Ralph H. Cameron. You might recall from episode 197 that by this time, Cameron was mired in a lot of political scandals, including his attempts to illegally claim the entire Grand Canyon for himself. It reflected badly on the administration of Republican President Calvin Coolidge, so much so that it was even rumored that Coolidge actually favored a victory for the Democratic Hayden. Now this is no spoiler, but Hayden ended up beating Cameron and when he entered into the Senate, he said about trying again to kill the swing Johnson bill. But Jack L. August, Jr., writing in the May 1989 edition of the journal Pacific Historical Review, says that by this point, Hayden considered the passage of swing Johnson as "in inevitability." However, hunt and other leaders in the state legislature were ready to fight the bill tooth and ale to the bitter end, so Hayden broke from them and instead tried to get as favorable conditions for Arizona as he could manage. So he wrote up a minority report, a companion document to the bill, not the 2002 Tom Cruise Led sci-fi movie, outlining his objections. And in late January 1927, he gave four straight hours of testimony to the House Rules Committee laying out his various issues with the bill. Among these, in no particular order, were that the bill gave California $31 million for its coveted All American Canal, but not a single cent for reclamation projects in Arizona. It also provided a federally subsidized hydroelectric plan to generate electricity for Los Angeles and its suburbs, but again, Arizona, in which state this dam would partially be built, got nothing. Because of this, Hayden would say that the swing Johnson bill "was purely and selfishly a California measure." Also of concern was the fact that Arizona received no protection in case Mexico was able to establish a prior right claim to the Colorado River. Hayden suggested that the bill have a provision saying that water stored behind the dam was for use in the United States in general and for Arizona in particular. And don't even get him started on how much unprecedented control of the river the bill gave to the federal government. Finally, there was the matter of power generation and making sure that Arizona got its fair share. The logic here is that the river descends more than 2,300 feet as it flows through Arizona, so power plants established along the river should be treated as natural assets belonging to the states. Many deals with California and Nevada should ensure that Arizona got a reasonable return on the use of those resources. He then ended his long testimony by saying that Arizona was opposed to this bill as constituted, and that its passage would only lead to costly interstate litigation over the use of the river. Hayden would say, "Arizona would be compelled to file suit in the U.S. Supreme Court to restrain construction of Boulder, Black Canyon Dam until the water rights of Arizona in and to the Colorado River are determined." Now that's a pretty strong threat, but Hayden was not an unreasonable guy, and like I said, he felt the bill was going to pass, so he was just trying to work out as many favorable conditions for his state as he could. However, when Governor Hunt arrived in Washington, D.C., he came bearing a whole different energy. Heading a small delegation of state officials and members of the Colorado Commission of Arizona, the governor eagerly gave his views of the issue, with his typical "lact of tact." Speaking to a Senate subcommittee in January 1928, Hunt would bluntly say that he "never red or heard of a more outrageous, un-moral or sinister proposal than the measure you are now considering." He went on to say that the bill "reads like a peace treaty which a military autocrat would impose upon a conquered and vassal people. If you expect me to discuss this bill calmly, dispassionately, and impersonally, I must disappoint you. I lead that to other members of our commission who have analyzed its details and who are of a more temperate frame of mind concerning it than I am. I feel a sense of outrage." To top things off, he added that passing the swing Johnson Bill would quote, "Barreau beaten star of Arizona into a surrender of her rights as a sovereign state of this union and drive and compel her to accept the terms of a compact which would dispoil the state of its heritage." In short, it's the typical bluster that we have come to expect from Hunt and is absolutely seething white-hot hatred of the Colorado River Compact. In article in the Pyraotical Dumbars Weekly, described the governor's speech as "a humiliating spectacle, pitiful and pitiable." Hunt was also mocked for not really knowing much about the full details of the bill and constantly having to turn to experts near him when tough questions were asked. While there was no winning over the governor, backers of the swing Johnson Bill decided that they could maybe live with some of Hayden's ideas, and so in this fourth iteration we start to see amendments. When such amendment included power royalties to be given to both Nevada and Arizona, they weren't nearly big enough for Arizona's liking, but Nevada was just fine with them. Other amendments included a provision giving $250,000 to investigate further reclamation projects in every Basin State except California, some additional states' rights language thrown in, and that the dam could only be built if six states ratified the Colorado River Compact, and one of those six had to be California. California also had to agree to limit itself to a portion of the $7.5 million acre-feet promised to the lower Basin in the original Compact. Here I should also mention that Congress finally took it upon themselves to divvy up the $7.5 million acre-feet, seeing as the states themselves had really failed to do so. Their formulation was later modified by an amendment coming from Nevada, which gave 300 acre-feet to itself, 4.5 million to California, which was lower than what California wanted, but higher than what Arizona wanted California to have, and finally 2.8 million acre-feet to Arizona. However, the amendment also promised Arizona exclusive rights to water from the Hila River, with language saying that those rights would never be subject to dominuation by any forthcoming treaties with Mexico. Finally, any surplus waters would be divided evenly between California and Arizona. I should note that there were objections raised about Congress dividing up the waters instead of the states, basically arguing that it was federal overreach. The amendment sponsor said he was just trying to save everyone some time, and merely suggesting away for the states to work out their differences, but they could definitely work out their own agreement if they wanted. The irony is that 35 years later, the US Supreme Court didn't take this as a mere suggestion and actually ruled that it was a statutory requirement, misconstruing the original intent of this part of the bill. Taken all together, these amendments were a perfect example of a good compromise leaving everyone slightly unhappy. California only accepted the allotments found in the amendment begrudgingly, mainly because Arizona had to abide by its terms, too, and couldn't consider it just a request from the Congress. Meanwhile, Carl Hayden objected for the exact opposite reason. He wanted the bill to read that California had to meet the demands of both Arizona and Nevada. But we also need to look outside the narrow confines of Congress and the halls of power to find more opposition and support for the swing Johnson bill. Starting with the opposition, we first have to zoom out to the lowest level of magnification. Here we find some national attitudes that were arrayed against the measure, including those back east who saw it as a giant money suck of a special interest project, and they were also joined by any farmers who didn't live in the west who believed they would only add to an agricultural surplus that would depress food prices. And just to add to the mix, we have speculators who were invested in land in the Colorado River Delta region in Mexico, who opposed the All-American Canal, which would make the current canal arrangements in Mexico no one void. Zooming in a notch, we arrive at the utilities and power companies who feared the federal government getting into the hydroelectricity game. Though the swing Johnson bill authorized the federal government to build dams, what it did with those dams afterward was still up in the air. There was a chance that the government would build the dams and hand them over to public or private interests at the state level. But there was an equal chance that it could just operate the plants itself, and that was the nightmare scenario that kept the power companies up at night. This kind of sentiment ran very high in Utah and Arizona, where leaders wanted complete control over any hydroelectric plants built within their state borders. And wouldn't you know it? One of the bill's chief opponents was none other than this Salt River Valley Water Users Association, which is already handling the power being generated by the 17 year old Roosevelt dam, and claimed that they were perfectly capable of handling all the state's power needs. Thank you very much. Of course, if we zoom in even further, I don't have to tell you how hunt or his political allies felt about this outrageous, un-moral, and sinister proposal. State historian Thomas Shardin tells us that Hayden and Senator Henry Ashhurst led a filibuster in the Senate against the bill that stalled it in the spring of 1928. However, here is where we must jump over to the support column, which was starting to put more and more names down. One of the major things that shifted attitudes were the power royalties conceded to Arizona and Nevada, which removed the principal objection of many bill opponents. A disastrous flood along the Mississippi River in 1927 also helped himmering the idea into everyone that maybe having some measure of flood control in place would be a good idea. The bill was also helped along immensely in the spring of 1928 when the Federal Trade Commission released reports showing exactly how much money was being spent by the utility lobby to defeat Swing Johnson. We are talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here, or millions of dollars in today's money. Most papers ran story after story about this intense lobbying to defeat the bill, and it helped change the public narrative quite a bit. After Hayden and Ashhurst were able to stalled the bill in the spring, it came back in December 1928, but when it did, it had another ringing endorsement. The Colorado River Board, a collection of engineers and geologists, had been created in May to intensely look at the proposed dam from an engineering standpoint and to assess its economic features. When this board presented its findings in December, it strongly endorsed the project in no uncertain terms. The only thing that it did have a problem with were the flow rate estimates at the proposed site of the Boulder Canyon Dam, which it believed were too high, and we all know now that they were right on the money with that one. However, this report hit just two weeks before the Christmas break, so all that most people heard was that the board was saying, "We love this project," and they didn't really dig into the details. Plus with the upcoming holidays and only a couple months left in the legislative session after that, many wanted to just be done with this bill already so they could discuss other important matters. So despite all the objections, and yes, yes, we hear you Arizona, Congress moved to wrap things up. On December 14, 1928, the U.S. Senate passed the Swing Johnson Bill, formerly the Boulder Canyon Project Act by an overwhelming vote of 64 to 11. The House, which had passed the bill seven months earlier, but without all the final amendments of the Senate version, voted to accept the newest version of the bill on December 18 on a vote of 167 to 122. Finally, on December 21, President Calvin Coolidge signed the bill into law. This was a major body blow to Hunt, who was a lame duck when the bill was passed. The state legislature had actually adopted a memorial urging Coolidge to veto the bill, and many joined the governor in expressing their disappointment that the president hadn't listened. While running up the clock on what was left of his governorship, Hunt brooded about this loss, and once wrote, quote, "It makes me sick at heart. After all my years of work, California will grab our water." Here's the thing though. Just because the bill was passed and signed by Coolidge, neither it nor the Colorado River Compact went into a fact, because the language of the act said that it was contingent on the seven basin states of proving the Compact. Or if that couldn't be done in six months, then option B, or six of the states, including California, signing the Compact would be acceptable. And at this point in our story, only four states had ratified both the seven state and six state versions of the Compact without any reservations, while Ming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. So now everyone held their breath to see what California, Utah, or Arizona would do. As you can imagine, now that the Boulder Canyon Dam and the All-American Canal were in their grasp, California couldn't move to ratify the Compact fast enough. The state legislature unanimously passed an emergency measure to ratify, which the governor quickly signed off on. However, they ratified the seven state version because they still didn't want to give up the ghost on getting Arizona on board. But more because they didn't want to limit themselves to the 4.5 million acre feet that was written into the Boulder Canyon Project Act. If they could get Arizona to the table and come to a lower basin agreement, then maybe they could get themselves a better deal. However, by March 1929, they realized that Arizona and mainly Hunt were unwilling to budge on the Compact. So California quickly passed the six state version, including accepting the 4.4 million acre feet and half of any surplus. Part of the reason for accepting this allocation was also to help modify any fares about greedy California gobbling up everyone's water, which was aimed squarely at Utah. Opposition to the Swing Johnson Bill and to the six state Compact had only continued to increase in Utah, including among Reed Smooth, one of its senators, and Elmer Leatherwood, one of its representatives. Now these two raised the whole list of issues with the Compact that we have talked about before, that the bill was uneconomical and would only help development in Mexico, that there was less water than previously suggested that the federal government was muscling in on the power business and that it was a violation of states' rights. Here they actively pointed to Arizona and said that the Compact created a dangerous precedent of the federal government deciding it owned everything and making similar legal end runs around any state they got in its way. There is a lot of politics happening here. For example, Smooth just so happened to be the president of the electric company of Provo Utah, but what it boils down to is Smooth and others holding out for the seven state compact to go forward, which secured all the water rights for Utah that they wanted. And it kind of feels like they were using Arizona's feet dragging as a convenient excuse here, not willing to limit Utah if the state down south won't limit itself. However, Smooth, Loverwood and their allies were only able to hold out for so long. Many in Utah had come to the conclusion that the six state compact was all they were going to get and it was better to have that compact in which California voluntarily limited its water use than no compact at all. So on March 6, 1929, just two days after California had accepted the six state compact, Utah voted to accept it as well. Nearly six and a half years after the Colorado River Commission had signed the compact in Santa Fe, a version of it was finally ratified by the affected states, with one notable holdout. On June 25, 1929, after waiting the required six months written into the bill, new president Herbert Hoover, once the leader of the Colorado River Commission announced that both the Boulder Canyon Project Act and the Colorado River Compact were now both fully in effect. And I think this is as good a place as I need to break for this week. But join me next week for a possibly shorter episode as we wrap up the little saga of the Colorado River Compact. And we jump ahead chronologically a bit as we follow the forces that eventually made Arizona agree to this done deal 15 years after everyone else had done so. I'm your host David Rickhausen and you've been listening to AZ, the history of Arizona. Goodbye.