Hoover Dam has become something of a liberal icon these days. President Obama points to it as an example of the sort of federally funded projects that once “unleashed all the potential in this country” — potential that his next round of stimulus will unleash again. MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow has pointed to the 726-foot-high, 660-foot-wide dam as proof that some projects are just too big for private enterprise. “You can’t be the guy that built this,” she tells the TV screen. Only government can, is the implication.
Well, that would come as a surprise to the guy who did build it – or, rather, the guys who did, with their private companies. In the five-year process they discovered, even back then, that the biggest obstacle they faced in Black Canyon wasn’t nature or the Great Depression, but New Deal Washington.
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The truth was, construction on the scale of Hoover Dam lay far beyond the powers of the federal government — in 1931 or even later. Four and a half million cubic yards of concrete — enough to build a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York — and 19 million pounds of reinforcing steel somehow had to be moved into the middle of the Nevada wilderness to construct both the dam and a 1.2-million-horsepower electric plant. Thousands of tons of loose rock then had to be scraped by hand from the surface of Black Canyon, before massive tunnels could be dug to divert the Colorado River to power the plant and then fill a reservoir 115 miles long with a 550-mile shoreline.
The heads of the consortium of six private construction firms that won the $48 million contract, which came to be known as “the Big Six,” weren’t the kind of business leaders who would appear on a presidential jobs commission today. Idaho builders Harry Morrison and Morris Knudsen (of Morrison-Knudsen), Utah Construction’s Bill Wattis, and California road-makers Henry Kaiser and Warren Bechtel (whose company later became thebête noireof the American Left) had all left school early to do manual labor. Kaiser had quit at 14; as a teenager, Bill Wattis had pounded rail spikes for the Union Pacific Railroad; Pacific Bridge’s Charlie Shea smoked foul-smelling cigars and dressed like one of his workmen. Only the heads of the venerable San Francisco construction firm Kahn and MacDonald had ever attended college, and Alan MacDonald had been such a misfit that he was fired from 15 different jobs before partnering with Felix Kahn.
Indeed, in 1931, only Morrison and his architect Frank Crowe knew much about building dams (at one point Kahn and MacDonald had tried their hand at it and failed).
But what they all did have was experience in big construction projects and mines, and a dedicated knack for doing the impossible. They and their workers and engineers built not only the dam, but also all the roads, railways, and other infrastructure necessary to bring in their equipment and materials. Kaiser and his partners even built an entire town (today’s Boulder City) to house their 5,200-strong work force.
And through it all the Six Companies had a running battle with Washington and the Interior Department.
Interior Secretary Harold Ickes had seen the dam as essentially a federal make-work project for the unemployed. Kaiser and his colleagues had to point out that they needed men with genuine skills, not just people willing to turn up for a paycheck. Ickes wanted the door open to union organizing; the builders convinced him the key to happy workers was paying them well, not giving them a union card. Ickes wanted every federal health and safety regulation to be rigorously enforced, and counted no fewer than 70,000 violations of the letter of the contract. They patiently showed him that applying those standards would mean the dam would never be finished on time, let alone on budget.
Nonsense like fabricated articles? TNR recently had to admit that they could not corroborate any of the writings of Scott Beauchamp, right? There's a history of plagiarism and actual spying for the KGB there too. Try to use fact and not conjecture in your arguements.
If you don't understand this article, I will explain it to you. The government hired contractors to build the dam. The contractors built the dam as a private company would. If the government had their way with union work, unskilled labor, and heavy regulations, it would not have been done on time or under budget.
If you think that this project could be completed today with our government, you are insane. If they required the regulations to be met that are required today, it's not feasible. It would never get off the ground, because a certain field mouse's habitat would be destroyed, and we can't have that for clean energy, can we? Or bureaucrats would get involved and the project would cost 10x it's estimate and take 4x as long to build...and it still wouldn't work (see the Big Dig).
It wasn't government that paid for the dam, it was us. And government didn't do the work. It's not fair to give credit to government where the real credit is the big six and the men who worked on it.
Having worked on many large "government projects" for a major defense contractor for more than 10 years I can tell you that I have yet to meet anyone "who paid for it" who is important outside of their own mind. The truth is they didn't actually pay for it (taxpayers did), which contributes a lot to why they are not important to the success of programs. They are, at their very best, a necessary evil. The more they are involved the more money will be wasted in the effort. The dominant mentality you find at contractors like the Big Six is a desire to create with pride. The dominant mentality you find at government contracting offices is a desire to lord power over others.
What is absolute nonsense is that you think you know what you are talking about.
"The truth is they didn't actually pay for it (taxpayers did)....."
Can I interrupt and say how boring this rhetoric has become? How stale?
If you want to break it down: government = will of American voters. government spending = taxpayer spending.
American voters voted for the government that you loathe. American tax payers, many of us, want to pay for domestic projects and not merely to pay defense contractors for the rest of our days.
Also, if government never created a job, then why do Republicans run for office? In a literal way, they want the jobs that government creates. And Republican presidents usually grow the size of government exponentially. They just don't get called on it by Republicans because they grow the government in the area of defense spending (the Pentagon budget has been the biggest area of government growth in the past 20 years.)
The fact that Democrats want government spending to be on our infrastructure, and not just nation-building in the middle east, why is this so bad? So evil?
Also, in a literal way, if the government never created a job--who do those in the military work for? Who do they serve?
Your rhetoric is empty and incomprehensible to outsiders..
So explain why the debt has increased by over $6 trillion (that's $20,000 PER PERSON) in the last 5 years, we are borrowing 40 cents of every dollar spent and entitlements consume almost half the budget?
Is it all the spending on those not-quite-shovel-ready projects?
Tell my about all those jobs created at Solyndra?
If the government = will of American voters, explain the 2010 election, please.
'The fact that Democrats want government spending to be on our infrastructure, and not just nation-building in the middle east, why is this so bad? So evil?"
No they don't. They want to spend it on everything else. How much of the last stimulus went towards the infrastructure that they claimed it was all going to be for? I think I figured out how to get the democratic votes. Promise things like infrastructure spending, dont do it, say you did and ignore all evidence to the contrary. And bingo, more votes.
IIRC, the biggest area of government growth over the last 20 years hasn't been defense (even with the increase in the security state), but entitlements. According to OMB, in 1975 both defense and entitlements took up about 5.5% of GDP. Today, entitlement spending is estimated to be about 10% of GDP while defense spending is....still about 5%.
Yep. The government had the same role in the construction of Hoover Dam as the well-heeled dowager, who, after paying the architect and the general contractor, tells her friends she "built the house". The dowager can be forgiven for her exaggeration, since she used her own money.
One of my favorite TV shows is "How It's Made" on the Science Channel. I have yet to see one single item highlighted on that show which was made by any government.
Business may have had to argue with the government to get the dam built but in the end their common sense prevailed. It was a different era. Today, the EPA would never have even issued the permits. Today the government has their foot squarely on the neck of American motivation and imagination. Big government is the enemy.
1969 - that was back when Democrats had some connection to principles of reality. Of course, your guy now has grounded NASA and put them in the Muslim nation hand-holding business.
Kennedy and Obama - quite the contrast, eh? The one started us on the path to the moon, and lowered income taxes by 25%, and of course there was Marilyn Monroe - the other one ... well, we all see what he's doing, with the taxpayer as "Marilyn's stand in".
What is laughable is Obama and Maddow touting the Hoover Dam as governmental success, when environmentalists and the EPA wouldn't allow it to be built. And Obama and Maddow would side with the environmentalists!
Bingo! If the Hoover Dam were even proposed today Maddow would do a show on how the government was committing a crime against the environment. Before anyone even poured any cement there would be at least a decade worth of lawsuits in the courts thanks to lawyers from environmental groups and liberal politicians would be doing everything in their power to stop the dam.
The piece makes the point well that a project conceptualized and funded by the government, and put out to bid to private enterprise, can result in a cost effective solution with a quality result.
What is not addressed is that the government committed $48 million to the project.
That is somewhere on the order of $700 million to $1 billion in today's dollars (I will admit that I don't have time to find the ultimate conversion calculator).
What I would like to see from the author is an opinion on whether the government, today, should be conceptualizing, and putting out to bid' projects of this scale.
