Chapter 8

Highways in the Sky

Indebtedness to oxygen

The chemist may repay,

But not the obligation

To electricity.

—Emily Dickinson

A DOMINANT issue all over the Northwest is power—its production, control, and use. First I went to Bonneville, to get some glimpse of what public power means, and then to Grand Coulee, the biggest structure ever built by man.

The Columbia River drops 1,290 feet in its swift, heavy, six hundred mile flow through the state of Washington. Its stupendous weight of water, controlled by dams, is the greatest single source of power in the United States and probably the world. Not less than 42 per cent of the total potential hydroelectric energy of the entire country is contained in the Pacific Northwest, and its potential annual output is not less than 120 billion kilowatt hours. This means that it can produce considerably more electricity than the whole United States consumed in the year 1929.

The Columbia rises in the Canadian Rockies, and flows 1,214 miles; at the point known as the Dalles its mean flow is 195,000 second-feet, which is double that of the Nile at Assuan. It is full of anarchical bends, twists, troughs, and gorges, and it is fed by astonishing tributaries like the Snake. One canyon bitten out by the Snake, which is itself 1,038 miles long, is deeper than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado by a thousand feet.

Two great federal dams, built like beautifully articulated plugs, block the fruitful torrent of the Columbia. The first of these, Bonneville, named for an early explorer, lies forty miles east of Portland, on the Oregon-Washington frontier; the second, Grand Coulee, is 380 miles further up, near Spokane in the heart of northeast Washington.

These dams are what make the power; they make much else, too, including some fancy politics. Power—electricity—flows out from Bonneville and Grand Coulee in a ductile stream almost as tremendous as the river itself. It loops complexly into a power transmission grid system of more than 2,800 circuit miles of line, most of which operates at a rated capacity of 230,000 volts; it lights cities in four great states, manufactures metals, irrigates farms, and keeps your toaster going. Across the gray-blond mountains and the copper-colored wheat fields, the steel towers carrying this power look like huge Meccano toys, or the dancing men of Sherlock Holmes. The transmission lines are a kind of sky highway—a taut and almost invisible network of highways giving life to industry, water to dry fields, health to man.

The present installed capacity of Columbia River power is about 1,226,400 kilowatts, and it will eventually reach 20,000,000 kilowatts, the experts say. Where does all this come from? The answer is both simple and, when you come to think about it, astonishing. It comes from ice, rain, and melting snow in the Rockies. Another point is that Columbia power is not only abundant; it is cheap, and Bonneville’s rate for electricity—$17.50 per kilowatt year—is the lowest in the country. Still another is the newness of the whole development; both Bonneville and Coulee date from the middle 30’s. New? A booster pamphlet on the region bids us remember that “Electricity itself is only 62 years old in the Pacific Northwest—less than one man’s lifetime.”

Columbia power not only made possible the production of the Kaiser shipyards at Vancouver and the Boeing plants at Renton and Seattle; it helped create overnight a new light metals industry in the West which in turn produced some thirty thousand combat planes, one-third of total United States production during the war; above all, it played an indispensable role in making the atomic bomb. The bomb is, in truth, a kind of apocalyptic, demonic child of the Columbia. The army selected Hanford, Washington, near Pasco, as the site for its great plutonium plant because of the availability of Columbia power in illimitable quantities. Here the stuff that went into the bomb was actually made, in a witch’s pot that cost 350 million dollars.

The activities of this Hanford plant were secret in the extreme—naturally. The most extraordinary and sensitive precautions were taken, but nobody could altogether hide an operation of such size. Plenty of people knew that unprecedented amounts of energy were being used; few could have realized that the temperature of the entire river rose, so enormous was this amount. I began to hear tidbits of gossip from the time I reached Seattle, just as in New Mexico I had heard bizarre rumors about Los Alamos. One of the most prescient men I ever met—who had absolutely no connection with the project and who had no secret information of any kind—suggested at lunch in Seattle three weeks before the first bomb was detonated, that one part of the “thing” (whatever it was) was being made in New Mexico, another in Washington, and that it would be assembled somewhere else. This was pretty good guessing, though wrong in one particular. Most people in the area thought that the Hanford project had to do with a kind of poison gas—which indeed the atom bomb does produce in effect—inasmuch as du Pont people ran the plant.

But today the Northwest prefers to think of the Columbia area in terms of peace, not war. The region has an industrial and social future without parallel in the nation. Reason: public power from the Columbia.

Trip to Bonneville

Energy is eternal delight.

—William Blake

We drove out to Bonneville from Portland on a hot, cloud-heavy summer day, along a crest of road—the route of the old Oregon Trail—winding parallel with the Columbia. Waterfalls are set back in piney clefts, and fling their silver out like jabots. We crossed the Sandy River, where the smelt run comes once a year. The little fish, sucked in from the Pacific, are thick enough to walk on; people come from miles around and scoop them out in everything from bird cages to butterfly nets to their bare hands; anybody is allowed fifty pounds per day. We paused a moment at Crown Point, where the river bends like a broad curved sword, and passed Multnomah Falls, a lovely sight. And we were careful not to smoke. Summer is a time of year famous for big “burns”—forest fires.

The Bonneville power house, with its ten forty-eight foot generators, is a high narrow hall a thousand feet long that reminded me of a cathedral; there is no noise but the slightest hum. What this is is an electricity factory. Generators Nos. 1 and 2 have a name-plate capacity of 43,200 kilowatts; Nos. 3 to 10 have 54,000 each; during the war they were pressed to produce much more. The juice—electricity—flows out as smooth as milk; and it has power enough to tear Mars apart. Deep below are the turbines, which eat up 14,000 cubic feet of water per second. The fall of water on the blades does all the work; no fuel of any kind is necessary. Even a log, sucked into these giant turbines, wouldn’t make a dent. The whole establishment is run by exactly eleven quiet engineers. I was amused by the small printed sign under Alternating Current Generator No. 1, a machine as big as a house: “13,800 volts. 48,000 KW. Caution: Before Operating Read Instructions.”

Bonneville and Coulee are part of the same system, and both are operated by the federal government, but there are important differences between them. Bonneville is a project not only designed for power but for navigation—hence the locks; Coulee is made for irrigation and reclamation as well as power. Bonneville was built by the Engineers Corps, U.S. Army, and is operated by the Army; Coulee was built and is operated by the Bureau of Reclamation of the Department of the Interior. A third entity known as the Bonneville Power Administration, also an agency of the federal government under the Department of the Interior, markets power from both Bonneville and Coulee; it is the jobber, so to speak. Both the great dams produce power; the BPA alone transmits it. It “transmits” power—yes—but it does not “distribute” power. The BPA is not in the retail power business. It takes the electricity over at the bus bar atop the Bonneville power house and from the switching station on the bluff above Coulee and then sells to both private companies and public agencies, also of course to industry. It supplied roughly 50 per cent of the entire power load of both Oregon and Washington in 1944.

The Bonneville project has a mixed parentage—Army engineers, Senator McNary, the ghost of George Norris, the early New Deal, Roosevelt’s deep personal interest; it was authorized in 1935, and to date has cost about $80,000,000. The act creating the Power Administration was passed by Congress two years later and is one of the most striking pieces of social legislation in the history of the United States, in that it specifically requires the administrator “to encourage the widest possible use of all electric energy that can be generated,” and, on selling it, at all times to “give preference and priority to public bodies and cooperatives.” The private utility companies come second.

The Bonneville administrator is Paul J. Raver, an engineer by profession. For a time he was professor of public utilities at Northwestern University, then a member of the Illinois State Rural Electrification Committee, and finally chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission. Ickes gave him the Bonneville job in 1939. They had never met, and Ickes asked him just one question, “Do you believe in public power?” Raver did—and has been working on BPA ever since.

The great power house at Bonneville is well worth visiting, and electricity is not the only thing to look at. In fact, the really star attraction is the fish.

Fish Story

Let us explore. The Pacific coast Chinook salmon is a very remarkable fish indeed. It will perpetuate itself only at the place where it was born—something unique in nature—and it dies immediately after the act of procreation.

The cycle goes like this. The mature fish, about four years old, swims in from the Pacific; this is when he is best to eat, and twice a year millions of pounds of fish are caught in the great salmon runs and are processed and canned and sold as food all over the earth. The Northwest’s fishing industry is worth 100 million dollars per year. But for this to be maintained, fish must also be maintained; they must be given opportunity to reproduce themselves. The Chinook goes about this in a very peculiar way. He cannot or will not spawn in the sea. So with his female counterpart he swims up the Columbia toward fresh water. Then, by a marvelously developed instinct, he looks for the exact fresh water stream where he himself was spawned four years before. During the tremendously fatiguing swim upstream—against a heavy current for hundreds of miles—the salmon eats little, because the stomach starts to atrophy when he hits fresh water; he lives off his fat, and saves every bit of surplus energy for spawning.

The fish pair off in the correct fresh water stream when they find it, and the female, making a nest with her tail, lays her eggs on a bank below the surface; this nest may be as big as three feet across and several feet deep, and the female can lay as many as five thousand eggs in a day or so. The male then swims alongside and, floating closely over the female, deposits his milt; the water will kill the live milt in less than a minute, and the operation is carried on with extreme efficiency and dispatch. Their job done, both male and female die. This is the first and only time they have conjunction, and the act kills them. They themselves do not survive the giving of new life; the flesh sloughs off afterward, and the corpses rot and disappear. Meantime the new life cycle has begun. The baby salmon, called fingerlings, are big enough to start the long voyage downstream after five to eight months. They reach the ocean, grow to maturity and, then, duplicating the pattern of their parents, fight their way up the river, seek their birthplace, pair off, spawn, and die in turn.

Bonneville enters this story because—so a lot of people feared—the salmon obviously would not be able to get over the dam, hence they could not spawn, and hence the Columbia fishing industry was doomed. In particular the private power interests, who at the beginning fought Bonneville with vehement intensity, predicted this disaster. But nowadays a dam is much more than merely a dam, more than just a beam of concrete across a river. Bonneville learned well from the example of TVA. The engineers looked at their job in the widest possible perspective, knowing, in the words of a Department of Interior booklet, that “what happens to a river, what happens to the land—forests, minerals, farms—is all part of one indivisible process,” that river development means not only electricity and navigation and flood control, but saving the topsoil on hillsides, reforestation, techniques in restoring fertility to barren or exhausted land, and industrial development. So it is not surprising that the Bonneville builders kept the fish in mind. What they did was to build ladders for the fish to climb, around the edges of the dam.

These ladders are among the most ingenious things I have ever seen, and to watch the salmon climb them is a unique experience. “All we have to do,” smiled my guide, “is lure ’em upstairs. The dam blocks ’em off, so the job is to try and sneak ’em over.” The salmon is a smart fish. But a clever manipulation of currents sets him in a sidestream, where a series of shallow steps acts as a challenge to his gameness, his fighting blood. Yet, the current must not actually help him along, because then the salmon won’t swim at all. The north fishway is about a mile long, with a series of crossbeams and steps in a twenty-foot canal, with traps where the fish are guided upstream by the force of the current. The water is eight feet deep, and there are submerged orifices on alternate sides, to make the flow eccentric and fool the fish into jumping farther. It takes a lively salmon about three hours to make the trip. The fence along the ladder is twelve feet high, to keep the big ones from jumping out.

These Bonneville fish ladders have for the first time produced an accurate census of the Columbia’s river life. A white board is set under the first trap; here a girl sits with a counting device, checking off each fish. On the day I visited it, 471 Chinooks went over the dam, 38 “jacks” (immature salmon), 192 steelhead trout, 379 blueback salmon, 487 whitefish, 4,015 shad, 72 carp, and a great variety of others. Also there were lampreys, fascinating to watch; they slide themselves along by hanging to the concrete sides. This total of 471 Chinooks is as nothing. In the great “fall run,” as many as 30,000 may climb the ladders in a day, and sometimes the traffic is so crowded that salmon sleep at the bottom all night, awaiting their turn to get through. The fingerlings, downstream travelers, are also helped along, in the opposite direction; 314 went down the day I was there.

A word finally on what Bonneville has done for navigation. The river was unnavigable beyond this point before, except for low-draft boats. When the dredging project is complete, deep draft ships will be able to pass through the locks and proceed upriver as far as the Dalles, 175 miles from the ocean, and barges will get through all the way to Pasco (300 miles) at the confluence of the Columbia and Snake. Lumber and wheat will go downstream, and petroleum will go up. The “inland empire,” much of it inaccessible to railroads, is being tapped at last.

Largest Single Structure Built by Man

The water breaks over in a smooth green moving wall, and then bursts into a churning foam of white. The green water sliding down is solid and smooth like a broad conveyor belt. Eleven blindingly white waterfalls intersect the swelling bulge and, propelled forward as if by giant hoses, spill out and down. The white curtain of spray is 30 feet thick, and the roar of the mixing waters can be heard for miles.

Frank E. Banks, the supervising engineer, Grand Coulee Dam, who saw the project through its construction stages, told us about the mammoth job, and Major S. E. Hutton, his assistant, took us around. Major Hutton is a character, a small peppery man with a small peppery beard who is the kind of public servant America should be proud of. He is a builder, full of vision and ideals. And he loves the Brobdingnagian dam as a father loves a growing child.

Let us stagger through some superlatives first. Grand Coulee dam is 4,300 feet long at the crest, the height above bedrock is 550 feet, and the drop of water about 330, which is twice that of Niagara. It cost about 200 million dollars to build and required more than 10,000,000 cubic yards of concrete, 20,000,000 cubic yards of excavation. One can have fun with figures like these. A writer in Fortune has calculated that this amount of concrete would build a highway completely encircling the United States; Stuart Chase points out that the structure weighs 23,000,000 tons, three times as much as the Pyramid of Cheops; Bruce Bliven mentions in a recent New Republic that the whole population of the United States would fit into the space of the dam, that the irrigation pumps could suck up “the entire flow of any American river except the Mississippi,” and that “the poured concrete would put a floor over three states as big as Pennsylvania.”

Behind Coulee is the artificial lake it made, the storage reservoir known now as Roosevelt Lake. This is 151 miles long, and it holds 436,000,000,000 cubic feet of water. The drainage area is 74,000 square miles, which is almost as big as Nebraska and three times the size of Ireland. In prewar times the Dnieper installations in Russia were generally considered the most powerful of their kind on earth; Dnieperstroi generated about 500,000 kilowatts. Grand Coulee has a capacity of 648,000 kilowatts, which equals 868,600 horsepower. When all fifteen of its generating units are finally installed, this will give an ultimate name plate capacity of 1,620,000 kilowatts. This is more than that of Boulder Dam and almost as much as all of TVA.

The dam was completed on June 2, 1942, when the first spill of water came down like a strictly harnessed ocean; but concrete in its middle is still cooling, and won’t be finally cold for seventy-five more years. Once during the construction the engineers had to “freeze” part of a mountain, in order to secure one end of the dam into soft rock. This was done by running actual refrigeration apparatus under the surface. The Grand Coulee approach was, as Major Hutton says, “If a hard mountain gets in your way, move it. If it’s just a soft mountain, freeze the darned thing, forget it, and keep on going.”

At the bottom of what seemed to be a kind of quarry, we saw work beginning on the future pumping station. Each pump will be big enough to provide the entire water needs of New York City. There will be ten such pumps at Grand Coulee. Crossing the dam top—where thousands of sheep may placidly walk—we encountered an eighty-foot crane, painted pale green, that weighs I don’t know how many tons. It was used to hoist the 115-ton penstock gates. It started to move. It approached us slowly but with determination. It is the largest single thing I ever saw move, except the Queen Mary.

Coulee is the creation of (a) three men, and (b) the idea of planned economy. The three men were, and are, William Clapp, a lawyer in Ephrata, Washington, James O’Sullivan, an engineer on the Columbia Basin Commission, and Rufus Woods, the pertinacious publisher of the Wenatchee World.¹ In about 1918, Clapp brought forward a new notion to Woods, that a dam at Grand Coulee would not only create power but could irrigate thousands of near-by acres dying for lack of water. Woods promptly wrote a story launching the idea. Everybody, or almost everybody, laughed at him scornfully, but he became further stirred and stimulated, and for fifteen years never let the project drop. Gradually the idea took formal shape; there was great dispute, however, as to the exact site. The Army engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation became interested and, in 1920, O’Sullivan met Franklin Roosevelt in Spokane. He told him about the idea, and FDR—who was then campaigning for vice president—mentioned it in a speech at once and never forgot it. Work finally began in the autumn of 1933.

“Our philosophy comes out of our experience,” Major Hutton told me. Anybody can dig for coal. But a river system is too big for private exploitation. Only the government—working harmoniously with private contractors and the like—can handle a project so enormous on so many levels. Stuart Chase wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1938, “The big dams … are not primarily power projects, but something more fundamental. In the last hundred years, man has all but wrecked the balance of nature in the North American continent. Flood, drought, dust storms, erosion, the destruction of forest and grass cover, are making hideous inroads on the organic stability of the United States. Some 10,000,000 Americans have already lost their living from natural resources. The chief purpose of the great dams is to restore the equilibrium.”

Aside from generation of power the main purpose of Grand Coulee is irrigation. The Columbia Basin Reclamation project will, it is hoped, reclaim about 1,200,000 acres of land—most of it south and east of the Big Bend—-in the next twenty-five years, on which some forty thousand families can be settled, at an estimated cost of $280,000,000. There will be four thousand miles of canal, the pumping station, and enough water to make this whole arid hinterland blossom. The land, which grows very little now, is expected under irrigation to produce as much as forty-five million dollars worth of crops per year, and each farmer will have forty years to pay off his share of the construction costs (eighty-five dollars per acre) without interest, atop a maintenance fee which is estimated at only $2.60 per year for 160 acres. All the holdings will be small, to encourage newcomers. What a paradise this could be for returned veterans, say, caught in the merciless housing shortages of the towns! The first vote on putting the project into effect took place in August 1945, when landowners voted for irrigation according to the government’s plan by 2,342 to 52.

One thing Coulee could not do. Nobody, no matter how ingenious, could devise a fish stairway that would let salmon climb 330 feet. Not even Chinooks can cross anything that high. So a remarkable experiment in artificial semination has begun under auspices of the Fish and Wildlife Service. The salmon that might spawn beyond Coulee are collected, kept alive with oxygen and dry ice, sent to a fertilization station, and there propagated artificially.² The fingerlings are then developed in a hatchery, and eventually discharged downstream. Moreover—believe it or not—these fingerlings are so conditioned that, when they grow up and return upriver to spawn, they are content to do this in the substitute hatcheries, and so do not attempt to cross the Coulee barrier.

Public versus Private Power

Power, like a desolating pestilence,

Pollutes whate’er it touches.

—Shelley, Queen Mab

This chapter is hardly the place for any extended discussion of the question of public vs. private power on a national scale. Let us merely touch on a few details with particular reference to the Northwest.

Privately owned utilities are a thirteen billion dollar business in the U.S.A. The industry has taken a severe beating in the past twenty years, and in part this was its own fault; no one is likely to forget the depredations of Mr. Insull. In 1935 came the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and since that time the Securities and Exchange Commission has torn no fewer than 344 subsidiary companies (with assets of more than four billion dollars) away from their parent combines. Company after company was found grossly overcapitalized, with consequent inflated rates. Squeezing the water out of all these corporations was a long, thankless, and useful job.

In 1929 seventeen great holding companies controlled 85.76 per cent of the nation’s power. Electric Bond & Share alone held 15.26 per cent, Insull 10.40 per cent. Since that time the winds have stringently changed. Over the country as a whole far more power is still generated and sold by private companies than by public agencies, but the gap is not so big. Today, of the total central station capacity of the nation, about forty million kilowatts are private, about ten million public.

The growth of public power—both as a social concept and a business operation—has been more notable in the Pacific Northwest than anywhere in America except the valley of the Tennessee. Public power projects in Washington and Oregon increased their total kilowatt capacity from 313,813 to 1,715,000 between 1935 and 1943, an increase of more than 400 per cent. Private power meantime fell from 917,649 kilowatts to 881,553. Politically this became an extremely important issue. All four contenders in the Oregon senatorial race in 1944 were invited by the state Grange to answer the question: Should the government own and operate transmission lines to bring power from the point of origin to market? All four said yes. Why? They wanted votes. And the voter—the consumer—knew on which side his electricity was buttered. According to the Department of Public Services at Olympia, the average cost last year to the Washington consumer of private power was 1.1 cent per kilowatt hour, that of public power about half a cent. In other words the consumer could get twice as much public power as private for roughly the same cost. Of course the private power people will point out in justification of their price levels that they had to pay stiff taxes, whereas public power did not. Public power sold, in 1943, three billion more kilowatt hours than private, and charged six million dollars less. Think that over, ghost of Insull.

There are five large private utility companies at present operating in the Northwest. They are:

1. The Portland General Electric Co., an independent local concern.

2. Puget Sound Power and Light Co. Recently reorganized. It furnishes power to Seattle, Tacoma, and so on in competition with the municipal systems, as we shall see.

3. Washington Water Power Co., Spokane. Subsidiary of Electric Bond & Share.

4. Pacific Power and Light Co. Operates in Central Washington and Oregon. Subsidiary of Electric Bond & Share.

5. Northwestern Electric Co. Operates in Portland and southern Washington. Subsidiary of Electric Bond & Share.

Electric Bond & Share spreads over into several states, and each independent unit and subsidiary has its own marked-out domain; they own their own dams and hydroelectric plants or steam generators; they sell direct to the consumer, and the consumer—except in certain exceptional communities—has no choice but to buy at the rate set.

What Bonneville did when it entered the picture was of course to force rates down. The private utilities had to buy from BPA or do without, since the whole area—especially during the war—was power short and power hungry. And inasmuch as BPA rates were low, they had to keep theirs low too, even if this meant cutting profits, and in spite of taxes. The cumulative total of private utility rate reductions in Oregon and Washington was nearly $45,000,000 between 1938 and 1945. Consider however some other figures that apply to the rest of the country. Seattle and Portland both pay $5.70 for 500 kilowatt hours of electric service. Chicago pays $9.15, and New York $13.46.³

Also Bonneville served to increase consumption. The Alcoa plant at Vancouver, Washington, for instance, bought more power in 1944 than did the entire city of Portland (and incidentally produced more aluminum than the entire United States before the war), even though Portland’s own consumption increased considerably.

Most of the private power executives I met, not only in the Northwest but elsewhere in the country, wore a somewhat apologetic mood, and were inclined to be on the defensive. When, however, they state their case, they invariably raise two main points. First, taxes. Their properties are, they point out, taxed, but a federal project like Bonneville is not. They are, therefore, at a serious disadvantage in financial competition. The tax issue is enormously complex; merely to lay out the main lines of dispute would take a page. Public power adherents answer the tax argument by making the point—among others—that Bonneville is, in effect, owned by the people and therefore should no more be taxed than the federal post office—or a road or river.⁴ Second, advocates of private power say that the fact that their companies are “regulated” prevents abuses. Not only do all utility companies live under the coldly scrutinizing eye of the Federal Power Commission and the SEC, which carefully regulate their profits and behavior; almost every state has its own state power commission. Budgets of utility companies must as a rule be filed with the state authorities, and profits and dividends are generally limited to a fair return. On the other hand, in some states the power commissions are weak and venal, and under the control of the companies’ own lobbyists. It is the life blood of a private utility to have a favorably inclined state power commission.

Private power hates public power for two overriding reasons. (1) Greed. Public power—or the possibility of public power—keeps profits down, by adducing the threat of cheaper rates. And if a private utility cannot meet public rates, it is doomed. (2) Fear of government. Private power thinks it is being swallowed up by a federal bureaucracy.

The case for public power, on its side, has been amply and eloquently stated many times, and rests on three foundations.

(1) The tremendous hydroelectric potential in American river valleys, an essential national resource, belongs as of right to the people as a whole, not to any vested interest. A power line, like a highway, is a means of transporting a common necessity; nobody should have the right to monopolize a necessity so universal. Electricity is like water. It should be available to all for a modest service fee. Scarcely any municipality in the country has “private water” any longer,⁵ and private power is almost as crying an anachronism.

(2) As noted above, no private company can possibly be big enough or inclusive enough to undertake the overall development of a whole river, involving huge multiple-purpose projects and crossing state lines and various economic frontiers.

(3) In the immediately practical realm, public power is cheaper. This is more than just a matter for housewives. A difference of one mill in the kilowatt rate can make a difference of millions in the cost of industry, and can immensely promote or impede the general prosperity of a community.

Above and beyond all this is something else and bigger; what really lies at the heart of the public-private power controversy is the major question: What kind of society is to be built in the United States? Private power, say the public power adherents, serves to confirm or resurrect trends toward monopoly, exploitation, and abuses of the system of free enterprise. Public power, say the private power adherents, means a trend toward socialization, bureaucracy and planned economy.

Some of the utility magnates may seem worried and defensive, but they represent what is probably the most keen-witted, ruthless, and effective lobby in the United States. There is no other lobby that one meets at every level—city, county, township, state. Fifty or sixty years ago one of the greatest struggles in American life was, as we know, that between the people and the railroads, between grossly overcapitalized agglomerations of railway power and individual human beings. Something of the same kind of struggle is going on now, between the people and the utility companies, though the utilities can no longer go berserk as the railways did.

J. D. Ross and City Light

Public power is an old story in Seattle, and Seattle is one of the few cities in the country with public and private power both—City Light, as the municipally-owned system is called, and the Puget Sound Power and Light Company, the private company. They push each other hard. Let a newcomer move into a Seattle house, and importuning salesmen from each will be on the doorstep the next minute. After forty years of lively and acute competition City Light today has 71.2 per cent of the city’s total electric business. Here is an instance of public power and private power fighting it out openly and above board with public power the overwhelming winner. Such a fight is of course an excellent thing for the consumer, whether household or industrial. Seattle’s rates for electric energy are, we have seen, the lowest in the United States.

The story behind City Light is the story of J. D. Ross. This was a remarkable man. Briefly he served on the Securities Exchange Commission and he was Bonneville’s first administrator, but practically nothing was known of him nationally. Yet twentieth century America has produced few more interesting careers. Ross, who died in 1939, was born in Canada. As a young man he got a job as an electrician with the Seattle municipality which was then building its first power plant. This was in 1902. For nearly forty years thereafter the lives of J. D. Ross and City Light were synonymous. He was the first great pioneer of the public power idea; he was marketing power years before TVA and Grand Coulee were dreamed of. When City Light started operations the citizens of Seattle paid twenty-three cents per kilowatt hour for electricity! Year by year, Ross—whose title was simply superintendent of the lighting department of City Light—managed to produce and sell electricity more and more cheaply, and year by year he forced down competing rates. He was a Republican and a Presbyterian, whose “love for mankind expressed itself in kilowatts,” it has been said.⁶ He was a first-class mathematician, a whipsaw of a businessman, and an old-style western evangelist all in one. City Light is today one of the most successful businesses in the country, worth $71,000,000, but Ross’s own salary was never bigger than $7,500 a year. The private power people did everything possible to get rid of him, and once did so. A forgotten mayor, Edwards by name, discharged “Jaydee” in 1931. A few weeks later the issue was put to the polls and Edwards was recalled by the massive vote of 125,000 to 15,000. Like most great men, Ross was full of quirks and oddities. Not only did he build a dam and power plant at Skagit, a hundred miles north of Seattle, as a source of energy for his precious City Light; he made it a municipal camping ground on a nonprofit basis. Not only did he build parks and ornamental gardens; he installed hidden loud-speakers in the woods to play bird songs, in case the birds themselves didn’t feel like singing.

Ross’s great contribution is, however, something else. Quite independently, he discovered what Henry Ford discovered, that the cheaper you make a good commodity, the richer will be your returns. He made power cheap, and so more people were able to buy more of it. This produced a pleasantly nonvicious circle, in that the more power you continued to sell, the more you could afford to reduce rates further. The most impressive of all Seattle statistics is not the relative cheapness of its power, but how much it uses. It is that Seattle consumes an average of 3,012 kilowatt hours per customer per year as against a national average (residential consumption) of 1,056.

Rural Electrification and the PUD’s

There must be brief word on the PUD’s. These are the Public Utility Districts in Washington, Peoples’ Utility Districts in Oregon. The PUD’s are, in a word, “the rural equivalents of a municipal power authority.”

This serves to bring up a question as important—and controversially abstruse—as any in the United States, that of rural electrification. Not one American urban dweller in ten thousand realizes it, but 63 per cent of all farms in the United States are still without electricity. The very pigpens in Denmark and Sweden, I have heard it said, have more access to electric power than all but a minority of American farms. Consider some consequences of this. The farmer has no telephone, no electric light, no washing machine, no power with which to operate pump or well or provide hot water, no energy with which to put to use everything from a churn to the fixtures of a modern chicken coop. Something like four million American farms have no electric service of any kind.

No one can say that this is entirely the fault of the power companies. Yet for years the private utilities were extremely reluctant to build lines out into the countryside; when they were willing to do so, the cost was likely to be prohibitive and the rates exorbitant. This is of course because country traffic is not, as a rule, lucrative. The “country load” does not pay anything like the “city load.” The work of the Department of Agriculture, through the Rural Electrification Administration, to improve this situation and bring power into farming areas, has been one of the most stimulatingly successful adventures in social progress made in this country in many years. The PUD’s are, however, something different.

In about 1930 citizens of various Washington and Oregon communities began to get together, and by initiative to the legislature established their right, if the majority of people so decided, to create their own power systems. Today twenty-nine out of the thirty-nine counties of Washington have strong, flourishing PUD’s. They buy power from Bonneville or elsewhere, and distribute it co-operatively, under a completely democratic procedure: each PUD is autonomous, and its commissioners are elected by the people. The PUD’s have become big business; they serve some forty thousand customers and two hundred thousand people in various areas of the state, and operate about twenty million dollars worth of property. Moreover they have stayed above water financially, proving the Ross dictum that electricity will always pay if you can use enough of it. The PUD’s are so strong, in fact, that fourteen of them banded together in 1945 to attempt to buy out that goliath of private power, Puget Sound Power and Light. The private companies have of course fought them bitterly. For example there was Referendum No. 25 in 1945, which proposed extension of PUD activities. As the law is written at present, no PUD may operate outside its own county limits. Yet there are several districts where, if they could link up, there would be a considerable saving. “Operating separately,” says a recent PUD publication, “each district carries on its own negotiations for the portion of a utility system which happens to fall within its boundaries. Naturally a big company is unwilling to lop off pieces of its system, one here and one there. As a consequence, it asks large sums as compensation. Referendum No. 25 would make the whole process more rational. It would save the public millions of dollars in separate suits, severance damages, and interest charges.” But Referendum No. 25 was beaten by a narrow vote. The private utilities spent large sums to knock it out.⁷

Columbia Valley Authority

When Paul J. Raver, the BPA administrator, visits the Bonneville installations, he is a guest of the U.S. Army engineers; when he visits Grand Coulee, he is a guest of the Bureau of Reclamation. At least twenty different federal agencies have various overlapping functions in the Columbia valley, under three great government departments, Army, Interior (Bureau of Mines), and Agriculture (including the Forest Service). Yet a river does not recognize bureaucratic frontiers—any more than it recognizes state lines. Above all, the region as a whole needs systematic research, over-all research co-ordinated with a plan which can in turn be converted into a co-ordinated program under a single budget. But this is almost impossible under the present arrangement, with its duplication of authority and lack of integrated leadership. Each federal agency reports individually and separately to Washington, and the result is crippling. No one knows what is going on in the other agencies, and no one wants to intrude. The single step so far taken toward a solution of this problem has been the voluntary institution of the Columbia Basin Inter-Agency Committee, which includes representatives of Agriculture, Interior, Army, the Federal Power Commission, and the BPA. But this functions without Congressional sanction and with neither specific responsibility nor authority.

Perhaps all this is to overstate the picture. The fact remains that a strong movement has begun for creation of a Columbia Valley Authority, modelled in part on TVA, to take over development of the region as a whole—279,000 square miles—under a single administration and a single long-range plan. We shall see the same thing later in connection with MVA and the Missouri.

But powerful forces are arrayed against the CVA idea, including the privately owned utilities in particular. Also the Army engineers—a very conservative and tight-knit group who have been working in this area on their own for forty years—don’t want to be squeezed out, and the Department of the Interior holds jealously to its prerogatives. (CVA adherents say, in rebuttal, that none of the existing federal agencies would have to be displaced; they would simply be co-ordinated better.) Private interests fear socialism and “regimentation,” and everybody who hates Washington says that states’ rights will be infringed and local authority destroyed—though the example of TVA is to prove the exact contrary. One of the great things about TVA is the decentralization it insists on and promotes. Some opponents of CVA also claim that there is such a thing as an agency being too big, though here again the TVA example indicates the opposite. Finally, almost everybody who sees Communism, New Dealism, and the bogey of planned economy under every bed looks at the idea of a CVA in horror not unmixed with trepidation.

Three separate bills to create a CVA were before Congress in 1946. The most important was that sponsored by Senator Hugh Mitchell. It died with the adjournment of the seventy-ninth Congress, and Mitchell himself was beaten.

Men like Raver—the real kilowatt zealots—go beyond the idea of CVA. They show you maps which, in their potentialities, are indeed novel and thrilling—maps which show neither roads nor states nor railways, but only the power lines and their network in the sky, power lines that can be increased multitudinously and that could knit the entire West into a single enormous circuit, giving useful energy to everybody.

Be that as it may be, the basic issue presented by CVA remains—whether or not a river valley should belong fully to its people.

¹ The motto of this paper is “Published in the Apple Capital of the World and in the Buckle of the Power Belt of the Great Northwest,” and it calls itself the “greatest daily in the world for cities under 15,000.” In June of last year, it temporarily ran out of paper. Mr. Woods rounded up members of his staff, went out into the woods, and cut logs that made forty tons of newsprint.

² Cf. “The Great Salmon Experiment,” by Richard L. Neuberger, Harper’s, February, 1945.

³ Some other cities rank as follows:

Los Angeles	$6.74
Memphis	7.90
San Francisco	7.92
Cincinnati	8.05
Atlanta	8.62
Washington, D.C.	8.62
Detroit	$ 9.00
Denver	9.30
St. Paul	9–63
Dallas	9–95
Baltimore	10.68
Boston	12.40

Figures from the Federal Power Commission, as printed in PM, June 5, 1946.

⁴ Also Bonneville does make payments “in lieu of taxes.” For a discussion of the same situation in regard to TVA, see Chapter 43 below.

⁵ Butte, Montana, is the most conspicuous of those that do.

⁶ See “J. D. Ross, Public Power Magnate,” Harper’s Magazine, June, 1940, by Carl Dreher, a full and admirable sketch.

⁷ In November, 1946, however, Initiative No. 166, which would have severely hurt the PUD’s, and which the power companies supported, was likewise beaten.