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Authors: Amity Shlaes
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standing in the world. That same year the New York Times published an interview with Edison, now just on the brink of retirement. It contained the following exchange: NYT: “Do you think President Coolidge will be renominated and reelected?” Edison: “He ought to be.”
Still, evaluating the specific worth of Mellon’s contribution or Coolidge’s reticence remained hard for most. Only a few favored Mellon over Hoover as Coolidge did. To the rest of the country Mellon was a distant figure. To the farmers, he was even the enemy; his gold standard kept grain prices low. As another election approached in 1928, it was Hoover who knew how to put on a political show, and Hoover who was becoming ever the greater figure. His plan for the Colorado River was coming together as the states agreed to the project. Under the Compact Clause of the Constitution, Congresswould approve the dam agreement and allocate funds for it—but the project would also be the states’. Later in the decade, the project to dam Black Canyon was put up for bid. Six Companies, a group of West Coast titans specially put together for the project, won the job. There had long already been a Roosevelt Dam, named after Teddy Roosevelt. Even Coolidge, who so detested displays of public power, would get a dam: in 1924 Congress authorized participation in construction of the Coolidge Dam on the Gila River in Arizona. A town in the area, reclaimed with the erection of the dam, would also be called Coolidge. It seemed obvious that one day the Colorado River dam would be the Hoover Dam.
Hoover’s meticulousness about the legal process for the Colorado dam reflected the tensions of the times. The Muscle Shoals project had certainly employed people, as many as eighteen thousand workers at peak. But the nitrates that had arrived too late were a sort of national joke about the inefficiency of government. Coolidge stood for privatization—he had said that “if anything were needed to demonstrate the almost utter incapacity of the national government with an industrial and commercial property, it has been provided by this experience.” Hoover too opposed a government-owned Muscle Shoals.
The Colorado dam was becoming Hoover’s demonstration that the problem of power could be solved another way than by nationalization. Of his 1927 flood work he summed up: “We saved Main Street with Main Street.” This statement reflected his own nuanced positions on such projects; he had not said, “Main Street saved Main Street by itself.” Washington’s task was to referee.
As the floodwaters receded, the commerce secretary himself withdrew to Bohemian Grove, a retreat for the western elite in the redwood country of northern California. At an all-male powwow, he conferred with political leaders. The papers reported that his following in the South was now so strong that he did not even need the administration’s support to get a share of that region’s electoral votes.
Coolidge was increasingly perplexed. As Hoover later recorded, the two had discovered that there was no getting around the essential difference in their philosophy: “One of his sayings was, ‘If you see tentroubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them.’…The trouble with this philosophy was that when the tenth trouble reached him he was wholly unprepared, and it had by that time acquired such momentum that it spelled disaster.”
Coolidge could see that now the spotlight was on Hoover, and that, looking closer, the country liked what it saw. More than ever, the fact that Hoover was a businessman had an appeal. That he was a westerner—after Coolidge of Vermont and Massachusetts, Harding of Ohio, Wilson of New Jersey, and Theodore Roosevelt of Oyster Bay, New York—was also a plus. If Hoover was more active than Silent Cal, that might not weigh against him. The Engineer, as he was called, seemed to
Still, evaluating the specific worth of Mellon’s contribution or Coolidge’s reticence remained hard for most. Only a few favored Mellon over Hoover as Coolidge did. To the rest of the country Mellon was a distant figure. To the farmers, he was even the enemy; his gold standard kept grain prices low. As another election approached in 1928, it was Hoover who knew how to put on a political show, and Hoover who was becoming ever the greater figure. His plan for the Colorado River was coming together as the states agreed to the project. Under the Compact Clause of the Constitution, Congresswould approve the dam agreement and allocate funds for it—but the project would also be the states’. Later in the decade, the project to dam Black Canyon was put up for bid. Six Companies, a group of West Coast titans specially put together for the project, won the job. There had long already been a Roosevelt Dam, named after Teddy Roosevelt. Even Coolidge, who so detested displays of public power, would get a dam: in 1924 Congress authorized participation in construction of the Coolidge Dam on the Gila River in Arizona. A town in the area, reclaimed with the erection of the dam, would also be called Coolidge. It seemed obvious that one day the Colorado River dam would be the Hoover Dam.
Hoover’s meticulousness about the legal process for the Colorado dam reflected the tensions of the times. The Muscle Shoals project had certainly employed people, as many as eighteen thousand workers at peak. But the nitrates that had arrived too late were a sort of national joke about the inefficiency of government. Coolidge stood for privatization—he had said that “if anything were needed to demonstrate the almost utter incapacity of the national government with an industrial and commercial property, it has been provided by this experience.” Hoover too opposed a government-owned Muscle Shoals.
The Colorado dam was becoming Hoover’s demonstration that the problem of power could be solved another way than by nationalization. Of his 1927 flood work he summed up: “We saved Main Street with Main Street.” This statement reflected his own nuanced positions on such projects; he had not said, “Main Street saved Main Street by itself.” Washington’s task was to referee.
As the floodwaters receded, the commerce secretary himself withdrew to Bohemian Grove, a retreat for the western elite in the redwood country of northern California. At an all-male powwow, he conferred with political leaders. The papers reported that his following in the South was now so strong that he did not even need the administration’s support to get a share of that region’s electoral votes.
Coolidge was increasingly perplexed. As Hoover later recorded, the two had discovered that there was no getting around the essential difference in their philosophy: “One of his sayings was, ‘If you see tentroubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them.’…The trouble with this philosophy was that when the tenth trouble reached him he was wholly unprepared, and it had by that time acquired such momentum that it spelled disaster.”
Coolidge could see that now the spotlight was on Hoover, and that, looking closer, the country liked what it saw. More than ever, the fact that Hoover was a businessman had an appeal. That he was a westerner—after Coolidge of Vermont and Massachusetts, Harding of Ohio, Wilson of New Jersey, and Theodore Roosevelt of Oyster Bay, New York—was also a plus. If Hoover was more active than Silent Cal, that might not weigh against him. The Engineer, as he was called, seemed to
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