“And the same Congress which had once insisted he didn’t need federal help was now insisting that such help be continued, at any cost.” “With huge dams built for him at public expense, and irrigation canals, and the water sold for a quarter of a cent per ton-a price which guaranteed that little of the public’s investment would ever be paid back-the West’s yeoman farmer became the embodiment of the welfare state, though he was the last to recognize it,” wrote Reisner. Reisner described California’s State Water Project as “one of the country’s foremost examples of socialism for the rich.” States were not without culpability either. This Jeffersonian ideal, ultimately, morphed into rank rent-seeking by wealthy growers, big engineering and construction firms and urban water departments- all of whom were adept at “farming the government.” So much of the waste and destruction perpetrated by the federal Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, which were engaged in a dysfunctional competition with each other for decades, were predicated on the “myth of the independent yeoman farmer,” according to Reisner. It was a finalist for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award and inspired an award-winning documentary by the same name which was first broadcast in 1997. The year before Reisner’s untimely death at age 51, Cadillac Desert was 61st on a list of the 100 best nonfiction books in English in the 20th century, as compiled by a panel from the Modern Library, a division of Random House. Recent scientific analysis has confirmed most of the book’s prognostications. It documented the transformation of John Wesley Powell’s vision of a federal irrigation program into a perverse reality of pork-barrel spending and environmental devastation. It was, clearly, advocacy journalism, but journalism of the highest order fortified with a tremendous amount of research, study, and numerous face-to-face interviews.
Marc Reisner’s masterpiece Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water is as compelling today as it was on publication in 1986.
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