Episode 210: The Colorado River Compact, Part VI: Arizona's Characteristic Obsession

Sydney Preston Ozborn spent the vast majority of his life in Arizona politics. He was born in Phoenix in 1884, and would serve as page for the territorial legislature at the age of 14, and was later a secretary to John F. Wilson, the Territories' Delgate to Congress between 1903 and 1905. A graduate of Georgetown University and a fervent Democrat, Ozborn would also be a delegate to Arizona's Constitutional Convention in 1910, and when Arizona became a state two years later, he would serve as its first Secretary of State. For a short stint in the 1930s, he was the state's collector of internal revenue, but really his time was spent on two unsuccessful primary bids for governor in 1924 and 1938, and another unsuccessful bid to unseed Henry Asherst for his spot in the US Senate in 1934. He would finally get into Arizona's big chair in 1940 and would be the only Arizona governor to serve four consecutive terms. However, he was also stricken with ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease and would become Arizona's first governor to die while in office, passing away on May 25, 1948. But there is one more item of note that we can add to this long and distinguished political career that was full of items of note, and that is the fact that it was Sydney Preston, Ozborn, who was finally able to get Arizona to do an abrupt about this place, and signed the Colorado River Compact after 22 years of stubborn obstinence. I'm your host, David Rakhousen, and you are listening to A.Z., the history of Arizona. After episode 210, the Colorado River Compact Part 6, Arizona's Characteristic Obsession. Welcome back everyone. Before we dive into our usual smattering of historically-based fun today, there is an item of business that I need to take care of. During the past week, I received an unusual request regarding a longtime listener of the podcast named David, who is apparently going through all the podcast episodes for a second time. The request actually comes from David's significant other, who mentioned that his birthday was on Thursday, March 13, and since he is such a fan, ask if I could do a special birthday shout-out. Well, David, I know I am three days late, but I wish you the merriest of birthdays. Thank you for being a loyal listener, and, by the way, great name you have there. Okay, with that small bit of joyful business out of the way, we can return to an equally fun topic, interstate arguments over water rights. When last we left our heroes, the year's long dream of California had been realized, as Congress finally passed the swing Johnson Bill in December 1928, which agreed to build a dam at or near Boulder Canyon, more in that in a second, and give them their precious all American canal. As part of this bill, at least six states had to ratify the now six-year-old Colorado River Compact, and one of those states had to be California. There was some last-minute drama, but finally Utah and California got on board, the compact finally passed, and all was right in the world. Except for that one small pesky holdout, Arizona. Now I've debated over the last month or so how I wanted to handle today's topic, and the best way to do it narratively and chronologically. As I've mentioned before in passing, Arizona will not break down and actually sign the compact until 1944, and there were several twists and turns along the way. I originally considered handling those twists and turns in future episodes as they came up in a vain attempt to try and stick closely to a year-by-year accounting of the state's history, but as I was finishing up the last episode, I decided that narratively, that was unsatisfactory because it meant trying to sprinkle in this story throughout coming episodes, and really how long is it going to take us to get to 1944 anyway? So instead of just halting all forward momentum here and saying we'll get to it later, I've decided to just write all eight seconds of this bowl until the end. And for the record, I'm just as surprised as you are that I made a bowl-writing reference right now. Where does all that leave us then? Well, in the spring of 1929, after Congress had approved this Wing Johnson Bill, and as California and Utah were trying to decide whether they wanted to go ahead with the six state version of the compact. You might recall from last week that California originally ratified the seven state version, because it had hopes in ongoing talks happening with Arizona. Those talks were happening in Santa Fe, in February and March 1929, and they originally started off with a good deal of optimism. However, they were kind of doomed from the start due to ambiguity in both the Colorado River Compact and the Wing Johnson Bill. Remember that the lower basin had been given 1 million extra acre feet of water in the compact, mainly to pass a via Arizona. But during the debates over Swing Johnson, Congress had divided the original 7.5 million acre feet of the compact with Arizona granted 2.8 million acre feet, half of any surplus, and all the water from the Hila River. However, the bill didn't say anything about the extra 1 million acre feet promised by the compact. So within that bit of ambiguity, Arizona and California both tried to take advantage of each other. I'm not going to dwell on the proposed numbers because these talks ultimately don't matter. But Arizona proposed that it should get a lot more water than the swing Johnson Bill had granted, mainly because it still wanted to build its high line canal and figured it needed more water to make that scheme a reality. California balked at this, but when their counter-proposal basically said the extra 1 million acre feet promised by the compact should go to those who developed first, it was Arizona's turn to shoot them down. There were more arguments about the All American Canal, Arizona heard that California wanted to sell water from it to Mexico, and about power generation, Arizona wanted higher royalties and to charge for all water-diverted California. Despite the presence of a federal mediator, these talks, like so many before and after, went nowhere. But as 1929 carried on, and California and Arizona couldn't get anywhere close to the same page, the federal government was moving ahead with the Boulder Canyon Dam Project Act, namely getting things in line for the dam itself. And it's here that I want to clarify one thing. For our entire series, I have been referring to the Boulder Canyon Dam, or the Boulder Canyon site, because that's what everyone was talking about at the time. But you may have never heard of the Boulder Canyon Dam, and are wondering where exactly it is. Well, the answer to that is that the Boulder Canyon site was eventually deemed unsuitable for the dam, so the project was moved roughly 20 miles downstream to a place called Black Canyon. But you've never heard of the Black Canyon Dam, either, and that's because the name would constantly change and revert for 17 years before Congress in 1947, eventually voted to give it the name we know today, Hoover Dam. So if you don't mind, I'll just refer to it as the Hoover Dam, starting now. Also, I'm not going to talk about the building of the dam in this episode, but I will in a future one as we move into the 1930s. Okay, as I was saying, starting in late 1929, the secretary of the interior was starting to line up people to buy the power generated by the forthcoming Hoover Dam, because having signed contracts for a 50-year stint was a prerequisite for Congress funding the whole project. The secretary eventually got some California utilities on board, but critically also reserved the right to draw back 36% of the generated power for Arizona and Nevada whenever they came calling for it. California naturally did not like this arrangement, and Arizona and Nevada thought it was too generous to California, so that's how you know it was probably a fair deal. But the secretary also ran into problems here, because answering questions about power invariably concerned answering questions about water allocation, which California and Arizona still really had an answer. This created a real catch 22 situation, as the dam needed power contracts to be built, but power contracts couldn't be signed without first having water contracts in hand. For example, the metropolitan water district of southern California needed electricity to run pumps to send water through its aqueduct, but it couldn't say how much electricity in needed until it knew how much water it would have to pump. If California and Arizona could settle their differences and sign an agreement, then this problem would take care of itself, but that was still a complete non-starter. The two states tried to come together again in January and February 1930 to discuss the matter, but California almost immediately soured the talks by suggesting that part of Arizona's water elotment come from its tributaries. I honestly don't know why they went this route, because for as long as we've been talking about this subject, Arizona had zealously guarded the water in its tributaries and had only been willing to negotiate over water in the main river. This basically tanked any possibility of a deal this time around, even after California agreed to let Arizona have all the water in its own streams. Seeing the two states getting nowhere, the secretary of the interior finally came up with a water formulation for California, though he studiously tried to avoid conflicting with either the Colorado River Compact or the Swing Johnson Bill. However, his final elotment to California, which came out to be nearly 5.4 million acre feet, still managed to take off Arizona. But to be fair, one of the easiest things to do at the time was take off Arizona with a water decision. By this point, however, even Arizona was getting tired of all this fighting over water, so they decided on a bold move to end things once and for all. In October 1930, they filed with the U.S. Supreme Court for an injunction to stop the building of the Hoover Dam. In this filing, the state claimed that the Boulder Canyon Project Act, remember that's the Swing Johnson Bill, was an unconstitutional invasion of Arizona's quasi-Sovarine rights. Since the dam would be half an Arizona, it needed to have the consent of the Arizona state engineer which had not been obtained or so said the injunction. And finally, it said that building the dam would cause grave injury to the state. In his book Water and the West, historian Norse Hunley Jr. also says that the filing went even a step further. It contained a detailed attack on the Colorado River compact itself. Whereas before Arizona had shown a basic willingness to accept the idea of the compact, if not the specific allocations in it, now they rejected the whole notion. It even argued that the compact tried to split the water with the upper basin states equally, but everyone knew that the lower basin could use that water better than those states to the north could. One portion even read that just Arizona itself, quote, "can put to beneficial use more than the total quantity of water which the compact attempts to a portion to the entire lower basin." Unfortunately, the court didn't see it that way, and on May 18, 1931, it handed down an eight to one decision that said basically that the Boulder Canyon Project Act was a valeduce of Congress's power and that Arizona's rights were not being trampled on. Less than a month after this decision was handed down, the first excavation for the Hoover Dam kicked off. Arizona was incredibly bitter over both this defeat, and the fact that they were powerless to stop the dam that was currently being constructed. But since the dam was happening and they were getting nowhere in negotiations with California, state leaders tried getting a water delivery contract from the secretary of the interior. However, talks broke down here because the secretary said that any water allocations would have to be based on the compact, and he still refused to get into the questions of where that extra one million acre feet promised in the compact was to come from and where it would go. And this led Arizona to turn to the Supreme Court for a second time in 1934. This time, however, they didn't file a suit, but rather asked the court to certify some oral testimony that could be used in future actions. What Arizona wanted to do here was prove that the one million acre feet in the compact was meant exclusively for itself. They planned to round up as many living members of the Colorado River Commission as they could, including Delph Carpenter, Herbert Hoover, WS Norville, and Thomas Campbell, and have them say that the allocation in question was meant for Arizona. And humbly makes the point that if they had dug up a copy of the commission's minutes and gotten all this testimony, it would have shown that this definitely was the intent of the commission, who had allocated that water to play Kate Norville and his constituents back in Arizona. However, the Supreme Court again turned the state down, saying that Arizona couldn't assert a claim based on the Colorado River Compact when it had never signed said compact. The court also said the testimony wouldn't be relevant to the Boulder Canyon Project Act either since it had not been brought up in the Congressional or state discussions surrounding its ratification. So another big swing animus for Arizona. But as we all know, things usually come in threes, so we have one last appeal to the country's highest court to talk about. Following a dust up over the building of the Parker Dam, something I again plan to cover in much greater depth when we move into the 1930s, Arizona appealed to the Supreme Court in November 1935. This time Arizona asked that the court divvy up the unopportioned water and to determine once and for all the state's equitable share of the river. It also helpedfully suggested certain things that would go into making sure this alignment was equitable and to them involved making sure California was kept in check. The first was making California stick with the self-limited water allotment of 4.4 million acre feet. It had agreed to when it ratified the compact as part of the passage of the Boulder Canyon Dam Project Act. The second was that California would be liable for any increase in Mexican water use that resulted from "works being constructed by" or "California". You can see here the paranoia from earlier that California would be selling Mexico water from the all-American canal. Water that Arizona argued should be given to it instead. The other basin states were named as "defendants" in this action, and they responded by saying the court had no jurisdiction here because under the doctrine of prior appropriation, no rights could be claimed until an appropriation was made. Arizona hadn't claimed any specific water rights, therefore she had none to defend. For the third time in a row, the court dealt Arizona a blow, saying in May 1936 that it was throwing out the case. And it really did so on a technicality, saying that the federal government, which had vested interest in the river, should have been made a party to the suit. Since the U.S. was not a party to the suit and had not agreed to be sued, and yes, that is a thing called sovereign immunity, but I'm not going to attempt to explain it here because darn it, Jim, I'm a history nerd, not a lawyer, the case was denied. However, the court also kind of told Arizona to stop bringing these cases to it because for a justifiable controversy to exist, it had to show that its rights were actually being violated and its use is restricted. As Hunley Pusset says there were still millions of acre feet flowing in the river, the court seemed to be implying that Arizona would be hard pressed to prove that it was being harmed. Following this third defeat at the hands of the Supreme Court, Arizona went back to Sulk in its corner, and it would sit there for years, stewing in its own anger at the compact and the rapidly rising Hoover Dam. By the time the Supreme Court gave its final ruling, George W.P. Hunt was dead and buried in his white pyramid tomb in Papago Park, but the three governors who succeeded him were all states' rights Democrats, who, like Hunt, viewed the Colorado River as Arizona property. The state was full of elected men who had similar inclinations, though Jack L. August, Jr., writing in the winter 1999 edition of the Journal of Arizona History, says they promised to "save" the river for Arizona while offering few or no progressive ideas about how to develop the state's water resources. Also Fred Colter's Arizona High Line Reclamation Association remained a formidable force in state politics, spending a lot of time yelling about how greedy California was coming to steal away Arizona's water in the middle of the night. Indeed it was said that no one could get elected in the state during this time if they came out in favor of the compact. However, the times, as they say, were changing, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s, internal and external forces started exerting pressure on Arizona to ratify the compact already. To take those internal pressures first, we have to remember there was no large monolithic force called Arizona, instead it was a group of elected individuals staring the state. And as much as many of those leaders leaned away from the compact, there were always those who leaned the other direction. This was particularly true in Yuma and Mojave counties, where they were literally right on the river and realized that their economic livelihoods were often better served by California interests than Arizona ones. And as the years dragged on and the state kept losing legal battles, it became more and more evident that Arizona couldn't keep holding out for better options. This would eventually lead to the election of Governor Osborne in 1940. Once a staunch, state's rights compact hating Democrat, when he was in office, Osborne would launch a campaign to end resistance once and for all. Another part of this was the fact that Arizona just kept on growing. The state's population jumped 67% between 1920 and 1940, growing from 334,000 residents to half a million. Four years later, there was an additional 200,000 on top of that. That was a lot of people demanding water and using up electricity. Back in episode 207, I mentioned three very important groups who threw all their political weight against the compact. Mines, power utilities, and farmers. But by the 1940s, mining opposition to the compact had dwindled, as the heyday of the all powerful mining companies had started to pass. The utility companies would never give up their hostility toward the Hoover Dam, a candle that they would carry up until the moment the compact was a done deal. So that leaves the farmers. Farmers had originally feared that the compact would send water to California's Imperial Valley or Mexico, which would grow crops that would undersell them at the market. But in the 1930s and 1940s, those same farmers started to realize that their continued existence depended heavily on bringing in water from the Colorado River. Why the change of heart? Well, that leads us to those external pressures. The biggest of which was because the state was starting to run out of water. During the late 1930s, extreme drought hit the southwest and hit Arizona hard. The years 1939 and 1940 were some of the driest the state had ever seen, and soon wells were giving out and the state's reservoirs were nearing empty. In addition to the water shortage, this also produced an acutely-felt electricity shortage as reduced steam flow also meant reduced hydroelectricity production. In fact, in 1939, at the plating of the governor and Carl Hayden, the Bureau of Reclamation, the name of the Reclamation Service changed to in 1923, had to build emergency power lines from the Parker Dam to Phoenix in order to relay power from the Hoover Dam. Even then, according to Huntly, the power crisis didn't abate until heavy rains fell in 1941. This decision to accept Hoover Dam power was a big move on the part of Arizona. Even though a portion of the power from the dam was saved specifically for the state, Arizona had so far refused to sign the necessary contracts to accept it. But now, with the power shortage so acutely felt, and the fact that Arizona had one of the highest power rates in the country, many started thinking that their opposite stand was not the smartest move. The final straw that was properly the fact that in the 1940s, the US was close to finalizing a water deal with Mexico, the great boogie man of this entire drama. On February 3, 1944, the two governments formally signed a tree that guaranteed Mexico 1.5 million acre feet of water. California in particular thought this was way more than Mexico deserved, but the state department disagreed. It would take some time, but the US Senate would finally ratify this treaty in April 1945. But while that was being cashed out, lawmakers in Arizona suddenly realized that if they didn't join the compact soon and start developing reclamation projects, then California and Mexico could potentially take all their water. This sense of pressure was made even worse by Bureau of Reclamation Projections released in light of the treaty negotiations that showed a lot less water in the lower basin than had ever been suggested. With all these factors working on them, state leaders really had only one choice. As I said, Governor Osborne had been a state's rights democrat who had staunchly resisted the compact. But by the time he became governor, he also believed that Arizona had exhausted all of its legal avenues, and that it was hopeless to reach an agreement with California that would satisfy both sides. If that was the case, then the only logical conclusion was to sign the compact and apply for reclamation projects to bring water from the Colorado River to where it was needed most. Osborne would tell the state legislature in 1943, quote, "With the passage by Congress of the Boulder Canyon Project Act in 1928, the era of theorizing about the Colorado's riches ended. Whatever our previous opinions about the best place or the best plan for utilizing the water or the fairest basis of dividing its power, we now can only recognize that the decisions have been made and the dam has been constructed," end quote. Unfortunately, Osborne's push that year died in the house after passing the state senate. But the next year, 1944, a special session was called specifically to discuss the issues surrounding the Colorado River. On February 9, the legislature authorized the governor to enter into a deal with the secretary of the interior to get water from the river. This deal basically followed what had been in the swing Johnson bill. Arizona would get 2.8 million acre feet, plus one half of any extra or surplus that might be available. Two weeks later, on February 24, the state legislature finally ratified the Colorado River compact by overwhelming margins. By this point, only the Highline Canal Association, originally organized by Fred Coulter, and the state utilities were resisting this change. Only two members of the state senate and six of the state house voted against ratification. It had taken 22 years, but the Colorado River compact was now officially a done deal. The approval of the compact was a major step in the political history of the Colorado River basin states. It didn't solve every single problem, and as we'll see in coming episodes, Arizona and California have many more rounds in the courtroom over the issue of water. But after literally decades of kicking against the pricks, Arizona was at least in the same chapter, if not on the same page, as everyone else. Jack L. August, Jr., in a May 1989 article in the Pacific Historical Review, sums up Arizona's fight against the compact and the other basin states rather nicely when he says, "As the struggle wore on, the river became a fixation in the Arizona body politic." As a popular writer described the apparently unresolvable conflict and its impact on Arizona, the river has had a traumatic influence in Arizona's history. Whole careers, even lives, have been shaped by it. It has become Arizona's "characteristic obsession," end quote. But it's an obsession that we are now through dealing with for the time being. However, that doesn't mean we are done talking about water or dams for that matter. So join me next week as we turn our attention southward and close out the 1920s by discussing all the machinations that finally put a dam on the Healer River. I'm your host, David Rickhausen, and you've been listening to AZ, the history of Arizona. Good night.