Chapter 12

MVA Versus Behemoth River

Creation of a Missouri Valley Authority and its operation would constitute the greatest peacetime public undertaking in American history, both by virtue of the diversity of its functions and the size of its expenditure.

—Joseph Kinsey Howard

A GREAT and embracing western issue is MVA. The pressures involved are the same as those noted above in discussion of the Columbia Valley Authority, but on an enormously broader scale; the end in view is constitution of an authority for the berserk Missouri, America’s longest river, much like the one operating now in the valley of the Tennessee. In a sentence, the story of MVA is that of an attempt to yoke one of the great rivers of the world and put it to man’s use on a regional basis—“to make the Missouri blue again,” as I heard it put. The issue, again in a sentence, simmers down to the question of who and what should own a river, if not the people as a whole.

I hope this does not sound dull. Certainly the Missouri itself is far from dull. This outlaw hippopotamus, this mud-foaming behemoth of rivers, rises in southwestern Montana and finally meets the Mississippi, near St. Louis, 2,470 miles away. Describing it has provoked some fine and fancy language; it has been called “the hungriest river ever created … eating yellow clay banks and cornfields, eighty acres at a mouthful, winding up its banquet with a truck garden and picking its teeth with the timbers of a big red barn.”¹ Feeding it are tributaries almost as truculent as itself, like the Yellowstone, the Big Horn, the Cheyenne, the Platte; the last has been described as “a mile wide, an inch deep, stand it on end and it will reach to heaven, so muddy that the catfish have to come up to sneeze.” The Missouri drains something like 516,000 square miles, or roughly one-sixth of the entire U.S.A.; it carves its variable and refractory way through seven states, and drains ten, with a total population of thirteen million (the population of the basin itself is about 6,800,000); on its banks are three state capitals (Bismarck, Pierre, Jefferson City), to say nothing of towns like Great Falls and Sioux City, and metropolises like Kansas City and Omaha, Nebraska.

What makes the Missouri most notable and frightening is, however, not its size but its voracity. It wanders obstinately all over the place—one remark is that the Missouri River and a woman’s heart are the two most inconstant things in nature—and eats anything. In the three years from 1942 to 1944 it caused flood damage of more than 150 million dollars; the figure is almost impossible to believe, but it carries with it 550 million tons of irreplaceable silt, gravel, sand, and soil annually. Another calculation puts the loss at one ton of soil per acre per year; several million tons of actual farms are washed into the Mississippi every year. What is soil? It is what makes America live—in the shape of grass, grains, milk, meat.²

Efforts to control the Missouri and modify its appetite have gone on for many years—without much success as the foregoing figures would seem to indicate—and the complicated snarl today between the Pick-Sloan plan and the proposal for an MVA is merely the last, up-to-the-minute chapter in an involved history.

A valley authority on a TVA basis would, its advocates claim—even though an MVA would have to be very much larger than TVA—put the Missouri in order on all sorts of counts. Three separate main problems attend a turbulent river as a rule, irrigation at the source, navigation in the middle, flood control at the bottom. As to irrigation an MVA would probably bring under cultivation something like 4,700,000 additional acres, virtually doubling the present irrigated area. As to navigation it would make practicable a deep-water channel; as to floods these would, in theory, be totally eliminated by an over-all plan for controlling the river far enough up. Aside from this—though this is plenty—there are several other factors, for instance power. An MVA would, it is calculated, provide more than ten billion kilowatt hours annually of electric energy, enough to transform the entire region, by bringing in industry and raising living standards. Or take such a comparatively small matter as fertilizer. TVA, working with less than 5 P^er cent of the phosphate deposits in the country, has developed a fertilizer industry incalculably useful to American agriculture everywhere. The. West has more than 80 per cent of the nation’s natural phosphate, but no fertilizer industry at all with the exception of one plant. Or consider the matter of recreation. Very little has been done to encourage boating, fishing, and the like on the Missouri reservoirs existing at present; they could easily be made into healthful vacation spots. But far outweighing all this is something else—the fundamental concept of valley development as a whole, that of a single authority located within the region as worked out by TVA. Neither God, nature, the Missouri nor the Tennessee recognizes state frontiers. A river cannot be broken into fragments or harnessed piece by piece. Horizontally, vertically, the problem should be tackled as a unit, the river dealt with as an entity from source to mouth, and from the viewpoint of its future potentialities, through control of erosion, conservation, and building up of natural resources.

Another word on electric power and its relation to the health and progress of a community as a whole. Some startling figures are available:

In Montana, only 27.8 per cent of rural homes have electric light, only 14.7 per cent have running water, only 9 per cent have a bathtub or shower. The same figures for North Dakota are 15.5, 6.0, and 4.7; for Colorado 34.6, 21.3, and 12.4; for Missouri 15.9, 6.3, and 4.7. Gentle citizens of Missouri, glance at these figures again; of your farmers, only sixteen out of a hundred can turn on an electric light, only five out of a hundred can take a bath.

I noted in Chapter 11 the decline of population in Montana, and this same problem exists in Nebraska and the Dakotas; these four states have lost 232,000 people in ten years. Montana has sixteen thousand fewer farms than it had twenty years ago, and in some counties the population loss runs to 20 per cent. Remedies? Soil control, irrigation, industry—all the things that an MVA might bring, including fifty thousand jobs. But, says Joseph Kinsey Howard, there has been “a definite conspiracy in Montana to keep industry out of the state.”³ The big companies already there, chiefly Anaconda Copper, don’t want rivals; above all they don’t want competing labor. The forces that tend to prevent industrialization in Montana, and elsewhere in the West, are of course the same forces that opposed public power in Oregon and Washington and that now fight MVA. Again to quote Mr. Howard: “What chances have Montanans who want public power development when they have a state public service commission which decides the private power company is overcapitalized only by 19 million dollars, in the face of a Federal Power Commission order to the company to squeeze 51 million dollars of ‘water’ out of its accounts?”

The Missouri River today is in the joint charge of the Army engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, both of which are of course federal agencies. This cuts some ground from under opponents of MVA who set up wolf cries of totalitarianism and say that more federal authority would be leftist and dangerous. Actually, if things should work out as they did in Tennessee, a valley authority on the spot but under control of Congress might very well prove to be more decentralized, more democratic, and less bureaucratic than the present system which is topheavy with confusions.

The major objection to the MVA idea is fear of socialism. But in all fairness let us outline other items: (1) States’ rights. It is asserted that these might be infringed, but TVA did not do so; in any case it is the federal government, by repeated interpretations of the Constitution, that has final authority over navigable rivers. (2) Taxes. But federal projects built by Army engineers and/or Bureau of Reclamation would also be tax free, and MVA, by terms of the Murray bill, would make substantial payments to local authorities in lieu of taxes and out of revenue from the sale of power and water. (3) The Pick-Sloan plan can do the job. But engineers and Reclamation have been in the area for fifty years; and look at it. (4) MVA might mean patronage, spoils politics, and bureaucracy. This argument is not particularly strong; the great thing about TVA is that it has always kept politics rigorously out. (5) The cost will not be worth it. Again one must turn to TVA, which is nicely paying for itself year by year, and which has to a fantastic degree increased the real wealth of an entire region, of course on a tax-free basis to an extent.

But to proceed now to what is actually happening. For years, there have been rival schools of thought about the Missouri. The Bureau of Reclamation is primarily interested in irrigation, and it worked mostly upriver where this is the biggest problem. The Army engineers, on the contrary, are primarily interested in navigation and flood control; hence for the most part they worked downriver. The engineers did, however, build at Fort Peck in Montana the largest earth-filled dam in the world, and this is upriver; so are other projects that the Army plans. But the two agencies did not, on the whole, co-operate or work very well together; a rivalry developed, and experts for each denounced the plans of the other; the river was in effect cut in half, divided between the two. Eventually two competing plans for development of the Missouri were produced. One was the work of a remarkably able officer, Colonel Lewis A. Pick, who is a general now; during the war he built the Ledo Road in China. The Pick plan outlined projects to cost $650,000,000 (almost two and a half times the cost of Grand Coulee) and to include vast levees, multiple-purpose dams, and reservoirs. But—the details are far too technical for inclusion here—it happened that another Army scheme aroused fierce opposition by upriver people at about this time. This latter, scheme outlined a nine-foot navigation channel from Sioux City to the Mississippi, which, according to upriver calculations, would drain out so much flow that northerly irrigation would be killed; hence violent protests arose to both the Army projects. The upriver people shouted, “You’re trying to steal our river!” The downriver people shouted, “Control the river, or you’ll drown us out!”

The second Missouri plan, more ambitious and studied and the result of careful work over a long period—the brilliant Pick had produced his plan in three months—was largely the work of W. G. Sloan of the Bureau of Reclamation. It called for no fewer than ninety dams in seven states, with the cost estimated at $1,200,000,000, which is about half the price of the atomic bomb.

Then came an interesting development. That splendid crusading newspaper the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke open the whole issue by appealing for an MVA to replace both the Pick and Sloan plans. It appealed for a “One River One Problem” policy. This is one of the comparatively rare cases in recent American history where a newspaper, singlehanded, provoked a considerable national struggle. Senator James E. Murray of Montana introduced a bill for MVA in Congress on August 18, 1944, and President Roosevelt—also a senator named Truman—gave his blessing to the idea.

Now the fight got really hot. An MVA bill, if passed, would have eliminated from the area both Bureau of Reclamation and Army engineers, or at least greatly cut down their functions. Both agencies are extremely sensitive and jealous of their prerogatives in the region, as we know from the history of Bonneville and Grand Coulee, and they joined forces to squeeze the interloper out. Two rival bodies of the federal government combined, in a word, to prevent formation of a third. Their proposal—to forestall MVA—is known as the joint “Pick-Sloan Plan”; it was a compromise, patched up in a hurry with nobody in supreme responsibility, and its critics say that it does not envisage the best possible development of the river as a whole; for instance it includes projects to cost $267,000,000, which each of the partners had previously rejected! This, however, was the price of agreement. Jim Patton, president of the National Farmers Union, called the combined plan a “shameless, loveless shotgun marriage”; the St. Louis Post Dispatch termed it “the second Missouri Compromise.”

Congress, however, delayed action on the Murray bill, and in December, 1944, approved the Pick-Sloan plan, but without appropriations. Then President Roosevelt signed it on the explicit understanding that future development of a true valley authority should not be prejudiced. Opposition to Pick-Sloan grew in the river basin, and Senator Murray reintroduced his bill for MVA, with trimmings, early in 1945. Fierce partisanship was aroused by now; a public petition for MVA with a million signatures was promoted; and enemies of the project, on their side, went into serious action. The new Murray bill was turned over not to one but to three Senate committees, commerce, irrigation, and agriculture, and was finally abandoned for the session without coming to a vote. The man chiefly responsible for burying it was Senator Overton of Louisiana, a strong “private water” man and a relentless enemy of the whole valley authority idea; by strange coincidence he was chairman not only of the Commerce Committee that first held hearings on the bill (though normally it might have been expected to go to Agriculture where it would have had friendlier treatment) but also of the subcommittee of Irrigation that continued the long hearings. The Murray bill is, of the moment, comatose. But operations under the Pick-Sloan scheme have not yet begun on any scale, and Big Muddy is still running across 2,470 miles of land, licking her fine chops.

The MVA fight produced some notably tricky politics, and lobbying on a scale unknown since the days of Antony and Cleopatra. The most seasoned of professionals got to work. One device that confused the issue was creation of something called the Missouri Valley Development Association, with initials MVDA. Regional committees for MVA itself were formed in each appropriate state, and met vehement opposition. Very powerful groups like the Mississippi Valley Association, the National Reclamation Association and a Ten States Committee took sides against MVA, and an imposing list of clubs and such—some thirty in all including such apparently remote entities as the Propeller Club of the United States, the Pittsburgh Coal Exchange, and the Upper Potomac River Board—all joined in. Above all the great power companies came out of holes where they had been hiding since Insull, and began to shout. Not less than 167 different electric and utility companies joined in a national advertising program, with full pages in the weeklies saying LET’S CROSS THESE RIVERS BEFORE WE COME TO ’EM, and calling out that government in any business endangered all business. (As if Pick-Sloan were not the government!) One big advertising agency sent “investigators” all over the valley, and the Post-Dispatch protested that money for this campaign “is said to come … from kickbacks and rebates concealed in the prices that manufacturers … charge the utility companies for materials and equipment.”

The country as a whole—that small minority that was interested at least—was not bowled over by the power companies. The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Life all printed extremely fair presentations of the issue, which on the whole favored MVA. The Post article in particular, which the Reader’s Digest reprinted, blew some of the froth away and gave the authority idea considerable sympathy. Incidentally one of the most consistent and aggressive supporters of MVA is, of all sheets in the world, the New York Daily News, which printed at least four full column editorials warmly advocating it during the winter of discussion. The valley concept is so big, in fact, that it cuts across most categories. For instance such an inveterate opponent of New Dealism, socialism, and Washington bureaucracy as Louis Bromfield is a fanatic partisan for TVA; so is a man who on every other count would be judged an extreme reactionary, Congressman John E. Rankin.

To sum up, supporters of MVA, dormant but still kicking, may take comfort in the odd irony that it was they who served to bring Pick and Sloan together. And all good Americans, keeping their fingers crossed, must hope vigorously that the Pick-Sloan scheme will work well, if indeed MVA should ever be buried beyond resuscitation.

¹ Stanley Vestal, The Missouri, in the Rivers of America series.

² For further word about soil see Chapter 43 below.

³ In a statement to a U. S. Senate subcommittee, September 22, 1945. Mr. Howard is the author of Montana, High, Wide, and Handsome, cited above.