Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West

by Donald Worster

When Henry David Thoreau went for his daily walk, he would consult his instincts on which direction to follow. More often than not his inner compass pointed west or southwest. "The future lies that way to me," he explained, "and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side." In his own imaginative way, Thoreau was imitating the countless young pioneers, prospectors, and entrepreneurs who were zealously following Horace Greeley's famous advice to "go west." Yet while the epic chapter in American history opened by these adventurous men and women is filled with stories of frontier hardship, we rarely think of one of their greatest problems--the lack of water resources. And the same difficulty that made life so troublesome for early settlers remains one of the most pressing concerns in the western states of the late-twentieth century.

The American West, blessed with an abundance of earth and sky but cursed with a scarcity of life's most fundamental need, has long dreamed of harnessing all its rivers to produce unlimited wealth and power. In Rivers of Empire, award-winning historian Donald Worster tells the story of this dream and its outcome. He shows how, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons were the first attempting to make that dream a reality, damming and diverting rivers to irrigate their land. He follows this intriguing history through the 1930s, when the federal government built hundreds of dams on every major western river, thereby laying the foundation for the cities and farms, money and power of today's West. Yet while these cities have become paradigms of modern American urban centers, and the farms successful high-tech enterprises, Worster reminds us that the costs have been extremely high. Along with the wealth has come massive ecological damage, a redistribution of power to bureaucratic and economic elites, and a class conflict still on the upswing. As a result, the future of this "hydraulic West" is increasingly uncertain, as water continues to be a scarce resource, inadequate to the demand, and declining in quality.

Rivers of Empire represents a radically new vision of the American West and its historical significance. Showing how ecological change is inextricably intertwined with social evolution, and reevaluating the old mythic and celebratory approach to the development of the West, Worster offers the most probing, critical analysis of the region to date. He shows how the vast region encompassing our western states, while founded essentially as colonies, have since become the true seat of the American "Empire." How this imperial West rose out of desert, how it altered the course of nature there, and what it has meant for Thoreau's (and our own) mythic search for freedom and the American Dream, are the central themes of this eloquent and thought-provoking story--a story that begins and ends with water.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Environment, American History, Politics, Westerns, Ecology

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

its been a long time since i read Cadillac Desert so i cant compare the two very well but i remember that book focusing a lot on the california water wars and the reign of floyd dominy at the bureau of reclamation. by contrast worster mentions floyd dominy mainly in passing and the DWP/mulholland only once (in connection to the collapse of the st. francis dam). the two books overlap in discussing the central valley and the insanity of agriculture in california generally. but worster discusses much more and from a much less sensational/journalistic perspective, with long digressions for discussions of dialectics or literature or legal theory (all very useful).

worster discusses the early uses of irrigated water in the american west, from the hohokam through the spanish and up to the mormons. then he discusses the problems that emerged from private, small-scale agriculture attempting to grapple with the much larger problems of interbasin transfer, salinity, flood control, and storage. the solution, decided on at the end of the 19th century, was massive federal intervention, as long as that intervention favored the largest landowners and as long as it came with no strings attached, not even a vague promise of repayment. the next period worster tackles is the dam-building frenzy from the 1930s to the 1970s, bookended by the spectacular success of the hoover project and the ignominious failure of teton. worster then makes some remarks about the future of the west, cautioning on one page against 'utopianism' (earlier he slags off communists) and on the next page encouraging Concerned Western Citizens to radically excavate john wesley powell's water basin government proposal and graft localism and participatory democracy onto it. in other words, he advises them to create a utopia.

before all of that worster gives us an excellent chapter on the legacy of marx and wittfogel (this is one of the areas where worster's book stands well above cadillac desert - an academic has a lot of advantages over a mere journalist) and the dialectical relationship of humans to their environment. later on he demonstrates how the 'base' of water scarcity modified the superstructure of western capitalism and government, and then how the imperatives of water control and what worster calls 'instrumental reason' fed back onto the base in increasingly destructive and self-contradictory (even by ordinary 'common sense business' standards) ways. the book was written in the early 80s and worster comments that the hegemony of the large farmers and ranchers over federal policy has been broken and the reputation of total water control, after the wild schemes and failures of the 70s, been irreparably tarnished. marc reisner's book also makes a similar observation, that western citizens have begun to defend wilderness areas and have effectively turned the tide of dam construction.

what either of them would have to say about the shift from agriculture to industry and suburbanization would be very interesting (we have to infer what reisner would have to say). what would be even more interesting is something worster mentions in passing during his discussions of the 1930s: he says something to the effect that Marxists have never commented seriously on the american west or its water problems, and so we have to infer from other examples (the one he gives is collectivization in the soviet union) what a communist program for the west would look like. i wonder if that situation has changed in the 30 years now since worster's book. i would be very interested in finding out.

[David Bates · Rating 2 out of 5]

In his 1985 work Rivers of Empire Donald Worster studied the political and social implications of the increasingly extensive irrigation works projects that transformed the arid inland valleys of California into agricultural meccas. The intricate, centralized control of water that made the desert bloom had not, Worster argued, done the same for democracy. Agriculture could not exist without water, and from the late 19th century on the expense of constructing and maintaining irrigation projects had given rise to an increasingly authoritarian political economy in which government bureaucracies operated hand in hand with well-connected agribusiness owners to determine how and where water would be used. The work is theorized by the writings of the post-war sinologist Karl Wittfogel, who argued that the authoritarian nature of Chinese society arose from its irrigation. Like the “hydraulic” ancient societies of Egypt and the Near East which created centralized priestly city states to manage irrigation works, China, and as Worster argues, the irrigated west, tended toward rule by stifling, anti-democratic, managerial bureaucracy. Rather than citizens, the farming districts of California had a labor pool. Worster makes this argument both figuratively in the sense that the technological control of water was operated in the interests of large business farms rather than small holders, and literally, in the sense that ethnically marginalized or non-citizen workers were sought after as a workforce too economically vulnerable to complain. Exploitation of nature and exploitation of people went hand in hand, both the outcome of heavy investment that demanded maximization of returns and a capitalist philosophy that viewed labor and resources as instruments for that maximization. California’s hydraulic civilization is, Worster tells us, “a culture and society built on, and absolutely dependent on, a sharply alienating, intensely managerial relationship with nature . . . the modern canal, unlike a river, is not an ecosystem. It is simplified, abstracted Water, rigidly separated from the earth and firmly directed to raise food, fill pipes, and make money.”

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m bad at rating books. I disagreed with so much in this book, but I really enjoyed reading it. So I’m rating it 5 stars. This book will be very important for my dissertation research. While I’m mostly interested in rivers, and this book is largely about irrigation, there is still so much in here that I want to return to and think through as I proceed with research. There are some interesting comments about the agency of rivers that dovetail quite nicely with Indigenous conceptions of rivers as kin that I've just been reading about in Nick Estes book Our History is the Future.

Worster’s main thesis is that water infrastructure is a significant determinant of political structure. Rather than focusing on factory machinery as Marx did, Worster is primarily interested in irrigation as the means of production that come to shape class relations. He cites three modes of water control: (1) local subsistence, (2) agrarian state, and (3) capitalist. Each increases in scale and becomes more managerial, hierarchical, and despotic. At issue then is the extractive relation between nature and labour (the means of production that enable workers to extract subsistence from nature, such as through irrigation works), and secondly the extractive relation between labour and capital (the class relations and cultural superstructure) that facilitates the extraction of surplus value produced by workers.

In the Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, Isenberg basically calls Worster a vulgar Marxist, who was known for how wedded he was to notions of base (its primacy) and superstructure. This was maybe the case in Worster’s debates with Cronon, but in this book, Worster actually goes on quite a bit about ideology and these interior beliefs about the necessity of ‘total use’ and ‘efficiency’ as being so destructive. His principal critique for example of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was that the issue was merely about ownership for Steinbeck — if the workers owned the fertile farms they laboured on rather than the capitalists, the issue would be resolved. Worster’s argument is that the way water is used to make such plantations a reality is the more fundamental problem. But then to return to the vulgar base-superstructure argument, it is precisely the large-scale water infrastructure that makes these California farms possible that inevitably lead to authoritarian political structures.

I myself don’t consider Worster a Marxist. If he is, it’s definitely within the most moderate ends of Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School. The principle theoretician Worster draws on was Karl Wittfogel, a member of the German Communist Party for a period of time in the 1920s, one of the founding figures in the Frankfurt School, who eventually became a fierce anti-communist and a cheerleader for American hegemony under the guise of spreading democracy. Wittfogel was known for his theories of ‘oriental despotism’ (which postcolonial scholars have had a lot to say about) arguging that the large scale water infrastructure built out in India and China became a strong determinant of authoritarian politics — what he termed the ‘hydraulic society’. Wittfogel is actually just elaborating on Marx’s comments on the so-called ‘asiatic mode of production’, a concept that J. Moufawad-Paul says “every significant revolutionary theorist and historian in the third world has rejected as eurocentric”.

Despite this, Wittfogel is still discussed within a lot of Marxist work. Indian communists Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik discuss Wittfogel in their book A Theory of Imperialism, as does David Harvey in his commentary on their text (included in the same book). Both address Wittfogel dismissively. The Patnaiks:

"Karl Marx recognized both the importance of irrigation and of the state for providing it in his famous remarks on India: “There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments of Government: that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of war, or the plunder of the exterior; and finally, the department of Public Works. Climate and territorial conditions . . . constituted artificial irrigation by canals and water works the basis of Oriental agriculture. . . . This prime necessity of an economical and common use of water . . . necessitated, in the Orient, . . . the interference of the centralizing power of Government.” These remarks of Marx have given rise to some fanciful theories, such as that of Karl Wittfogel (1957) concerning “oriental despotism.” But on the basic issues of the need for irrigation and for the state to take a leading role in providing it, Marx was certainly right."

And this is Harvey using Wittfogel as the vulgar Marxist par excellence to criticize the Patnaiks:

"The point here is... to insist that we not subsume all these features under some simple and misleading rubric of an imperialism that depends upon an anachronistic and specious form of physical geographical determinism. To take such a path reminds me of the disastrous turn within Marxism that occurred with Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism and his theory of the geographical distinctiveness of the oriental mode of production. This is not, of course, Patnaiks’ specific argument, but they at times appeal to the same kind of crude environmental determinism found in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel or in Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time."

Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus claim strangely that Wittfogel’s thesis on hydraulic power had yet to be refuted, though I find their writing vague and difficult to understand, haha:

“Is bureaucracy the same in the Orient? Of course it is all too easy to depict an Orient of rhizomes and immanence; yet it is true that in the Orient the State does not act following a schema of arborescence corresponding to preestablished, arborified, and rooted classes; its bureaucracy is one of channels, for example, the much-discussed case of hydraulic power with "weak property," in which the State engenders channeled and channelizing classes (cf. the aspects of Wittfogel's work that have not been refuted). The despot acts as a river, not as a fountainhead, which is still a point, a tree-point or root; he flows with the current rather than sitting under a tree; Buddha's tree itself becomes a rhizome; Mao's river and Louis's tree.”

I particularly enjoy the Egyptian Marxist, Samir Amin’s, critical take on Wittfogel in his book Global History: A View From The South:

“The proposition goes against the tradition of a banal opposition between the ‘European path’ (that of the famous five stages – primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism, which was not an invention of Stalin but the dominant view in Europe before and after Marx) and the so-called Asiatic path (or, rather, impasse). The hydraulic thesis, as proposed by Wittfogel, then seemed to me overly infantile and mistaken, based on Eurocentric prejudices. My proposition also goes against another tradition, produced by vulgar Marxism, that of the universality of the five stages.”

Because of the nature of rivers, the way people upstream use the river will inevitably affect those farther downstream. Hence the need for some coordinated larger scale apparatus to mediate the conflicts that emerge with water use. This is the mechanism Wittfogel sees as explaining how states garner the sort of consolidated power that they do.

One of the most fascinating parts of the book for me was the involvement of Horace Greeley (the editor of the New York Tribune to which Marx often submitted articles to as a journalist) and how central Fourier socialists like him were to frontier settlements of the West. Greeley strangely visited Mormon settlements and took their irrigation projects as an inspiration for the utopian socialist ones he wanted to establish. There was really interesting commentary in this section on utopian socialist communes that focused on the legal historian Morton Horowitz and how traditional riparianism's anti-development bias (and affinity for local 'natural' use and common ownership) thwarted the proliferation of cotton mills and the establishment of factories powered by waterwheels, but consequently became sidelined and superseded. Rather the doctrine of prior appropriation and excessive use (for say export commodity crops) under private property regimes came to replace riparianism and institute the sort of primitive accumulation that Marx called "anything but idyllic". Yet there were efforts to resist this tendency by utopian socialists, but so much of it was still deeply coloured by the dictates of capital. One of the most prominent ideologues for frontier irrigation projects in the U.S. was the Fourier socialist, William Smythe, who reminded me of the Saint-Simonian socialist de Lesseps who worked on the Suez Canal, described by Hobsbawm in this section from his book, Age of Revolution:

“The extraordinary sect of the Saint-Simonians, equally suspended between the advocacy of socialism and of industrial development by investment bankers and engineers, temporarily gave him their collective aid and prepared his plans of economic development. (For them, see p. 241.) They thus also laid the foundation for the Suez Canal (built by the Saint-Simonian de Lesseps) and the fatal dependence of Egyptian rulers on vast loans negotiated by competing groups of European swindlers, which turned Egypt into a centre of imperialist rivalry and anti-imperialist rebellion later on.”

This issue of imperialist control is at the heart of Worster’s book, as might be evident from the book’s title. Maybe the most interesting example of authoritarian crackdown in the book was the story of the 1930 Imperial Valley lettuce strike by Mexican and Filipino farm workers supported by various communists like Tsuji Horiuchi. The communists who helped organize the strike were arrested and Horiuchi was deported to the Soviet Union eventually (not a detail included in this book, but I was curious and looked him up).

Worster’s subscription to the Marxist categories of first nature and second nature are somewhat wooden to me, and I feel closer to Cronon’s use of those terms. The introduction of this book felt a little embarrassing to read. Worster for example talks about canals void of red-winged blackbirds and muskrats, two animals I myself have seen in a canal that runs through the suburb I live in. I agree much is lost in practices of canalization and urbanization. But I think Worster’s affinity for E.F. Schumacher’s localizing tendencies, the whole small is beautiful thing, which I was very into as a master’s student, is not a tenable way forward. There are people with particular types of bodies who have benefited from various forms of modern medicine and technology that would not be possible if localization was a dogmatic priority. There are particular things that larger scale production affords us (or has the potential to if benefits are equally distributed), and while increased scales have a myriad of problems that require vigilance, they have the potential to make tangible differences in people’s lives under socialized ownership and control. Minimizing the time people have to spend on socially necessary labour to meet their basic needs is commendable goal in my view, and if efficiency helps free up time for people to pursue preoccupations that they actually care about and find fulfilling and meaningful, then I think we should pursue that. I do however agree with Worster though that ecosystems have constraints and practices of maximizing efficiency often externalize factors at great future expense.

[Rob Bauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extended review of this classic and extremely important history of water and the American West.

Occasionally historians use the term hydraulic society to describe the famous civilizations of the ancient world. The empires of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus River Valley, to name a few, all existed by manipulating water supplies and building irrigation works. Few people identify the American West as having anything in common with these ancient civilizations. We consider the governments of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia despotic empires, while in the popular imagination, the American West is known for its freedom and rugged individualism. In his book Rivers of Empire, historian Donald Worster has transformed this mythic picture of the West. To replace the myths, Worster demonstrates that much of the history of the American West consists of the interlocked stories of people, water, and technology.

In his Introduction, Worster clearly establishes two main themes. The first is that the West is “a land of authority and restraint, of class and exploitation, and ultimately of imperial power.” (4) Because the West is arid, control of water gives control over nearly everything else. And secondly, “It is, first and most basically, a culture and society built on, and absolutely dependent on, a sharply alienating, intensely managerial relationship with nature.” (5) Along with political control of water, engineering and technological control are central to the story. After establishing these two themes, Worster describes three kinds of irrigation societies, the local subsistence mode, the agrarian state mode, and the capitalist state mode. It is this last mode that dominates the American West after 1900.

Within the capitalist state mode, water is a commodity people buy, trade, and manipulate like any other, and technology enhances its value. “Where nature seemingly puts limits on human wealth, engineering presumes to bring unlimited plenty.” (52) The drive to acquire material wealth from even the most marginal environment links large-scale agricultural producers with government technocrats and water management bureaucrats. For Worster, this triumvirate of powerful interests creates an unholy alliance: “Democracy cannot survive where technical expertise, accumulated capital, or their combination is allowed to take command.” (57) Because these groups treat water as a commodity, the primary purpose of water use is economic gain and environmental or ecological factors are irrelevant: “It was then rational to destroy a river completely, to send it through canals or tunnels to another watershed altogether, to wherever a man could make money from it. Indeed, it was irrational to do otherwise…” (92)

In addition to the commoditization of water in the West, Rivers of Empire discusses other reasons for the rise of the irrigation society. Some saw irrigation as an engine of American imperialism. To stop short of maximum possible development was to see America fall short of its potential. The most powerful engine for developing irrigation was the federal government. In 1902 it responded to the cries for help by passing the Newlands Reclamation Act. According to Worster, “It has been the most important single piece of legislation in the history of the West, overshadowing even the Homestead Act in the consequences it has had for the region’s life.” (130-131) Further inspiration for the national government to take a role in creating irrigation works came from American observes abroad in the late 1800s, especially those in British India. Unfortunately, while these observers noted the grand achievements of British engineers there, they failed to notice some of the negative side effects—the disruption of native cultures, the ecological problems, and the increasing alkalinity of the irrigated lands generally escaped notice.

Worster describes in intricate detail the results of the Newlands Reclamation Act. The justification for the act was that it would benefit family farmers by setting a 160-acre limit on the size of farms using irrigation. This often did not come to pass, for several reasons. The bill’s authors underestimated the powers of corporate agriculture to find loopholes in legislation and take advantage of them to amass huge landholdings. In addition, farmers on irrigated lands largely reproduced the same crops others grew elsewhere more cheaply without irrigation. Finally, much of the money spent to increase irrigation went toward improving existing private landholdings instead of opening up new areas of settlement for family farmers: “By and large, federalization worked to enrich speculators and enhance the holdings of established owners, not to furnish inexpensive new homes for homeless folk from the overcrowded cities.” (172)

An especially vivid example of the influence of corporate monopoly existed in California. In a situation popularized by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, the United Farmers in California paid a family of migrant agricultural laborers an average yearly salary of $289, when $780 was the minimum subsistence income in California. Any attempts to organize on the part of migrant workers met with armed violence from anti-union brigades aided and abetted by local police: “Year after year of strikes, eruption after eruption of violence, blow after blow rained on workers’ heads – until finally the workers’ militancy had subsided, had spent itself in futile protest, until the growers had won.” (227)

Worster’s description of the role of government technocrats in water management leaves the reader astounded at the level of technological arrogance towards the environment. Backed by the rhetoric that “Irrigation experts are now convinced that the rapidly growing U.S. can expand almost indefinitely within its present boundaries.” (266) the Bureau of Reclamation adopted the slogan “total use for greater wealth.” The Bureau of Reclamation, along with the Army Corp of Engineers, proceeded to dam the Columbia, Colorado, and Missouri Rivers, as well as hundreds of tributaries, in their quest to completely subjugate nature to mammon. “What those northern rivers, the Missouri and Columbia, were still struggling towards, the Colorado had become – a part of nature that had died and been reborn as money.” (276) According to Worster, the net effect was to use tax dollars for giant federal projects that subsidized elite western corporate agribusiness to grow crops that could be, and already were, produced more cheaply in the East. A stinging economic criticism, and yet another example of how the US government provides corporate welfare to those who need it least.

In its conclusion, Rivers of Empire examines some possible future costs of the American Irrigation Empire, and the findings are not optimistic. Worster sees three environmental vulnerabilities. These are the limited quantity of water in the face of increasing demand, declining water quality under intensive water use strategies, and irreversible environmental decline. Worster fears that instead of embracing the simple solution of decreasing demand, people will seek a technological panacea instead. The most grandiose scheme mentioned was a proposal to utilize the waters and glaciers of Alaska and Canada through a monumental series of canals, pumping the water throughout the western United States. Truly, this was a scheme worthy of an Egyptian Pharaoh of the Old Kingdom or a Chinese Emperor of the Tang Dynasty. Worster’s preferred solution is along the lines of the watershed-defined regions first expounded by Major John Wesley Powell.

Rivers of Empire is a very impressive interpretation of water use in the American West. Worster writes in a clear style that is very readable yet direct and often profound, and he makes liberal use of statistics to buttress his arguments. If he seems too critical of the irrigation society he describes, Worster produces facts and interpretation to support his claims. Some may criticize the heavy emphasis placed on the economics of irrigation rather than the cultural implications for the farmers who benefited from it, but this criticism fails to follow the logic of Worster’s argument about the irrigation society. Early on, he claims that corporate interests and agribusiness, not family farmers, derived most of the benefits from irrigation, and corporate interests are all about making money. The only mild criticism I have for Rivers of Empire is that more and better maps would benefit the reader. All things considered, this is an outstanding book. It is difficult to imagine studying the present or future state of water use in the American West without using Rivers of Empire as a central text.

[N.]

Ok, here is an in-depth review that no one asked for. The high level summary is that this is a classic, and for good reason. It is a very good book with plenty of deft analysis. I’m going to be critical for the rest of this review, but I don’t intend to discourage anyone from reading this. Go ahead and read it if you’re interested, but if you were to ask for one book recommendation about Western water, I would discourage you from reading just one book. Then I would suggest Water and American Government by Donald Pisani.

Rivers of Empire is like the Western water apparatus itself: ideological, confounding, sometimes brilliant, sometimes backwards. The book is an extended evaluation of the “hydraulic empire” of the Western US through the lens of once-Marxist German-American theorist Karl Wittfogel. Wittfogel proposed the idea that agricultural systems dependent on large-scale irrigation inexorably led to political tyranny in his book Oriental Despotism. (If that title doesn’t conjure an image of Edward Said, close this tab and go get a copy of Orientalism.) Worster hedges on a full-throated endorsement of Wittfogel’s thesis, though he clearly finds it very compelling. The bulk of the book lays out a history of the region in vivid detail in an attempt to unpack the paradox of Western settlement---how the myth of freedom-loving yeoman farmers and cowboys became captive to a progression of regimes ending in the capitalist state. “The hydraulic society of the West… is increasingly a coercive, monolithic, and hierarchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise,” Worster writes.

The details are where the book shines, offering up a number of notable episodes from around the region in support of the thesis. Not coincidentally, these episodes also hint at alternative interpretations. Unfortunately, there is seldom more than a hint, as Worster's history tends to trim away whatever does not lend weight to an updated Wittfogel thesis. The prior appropriation doctrine, for Worster, represents a way for individuals to claim water as property (through the water right, not the water itself, which Western states claim and manage as a public trust). He offers no comment on the interpretation that the beneficial use provision of prior appropriation was a way to encourage active development of water resources and to discourage idle speculation from afar. There is no explicit explanation, in a generally anti-capitalist analysis, for how prior appropriation better represents capitalist development than, say, enclosing a resource and seeking rents from the people trying to use it for their livelihoods. Oh well. In a brief treatment of Mormon settlement in Salt Lake Valley, Worster gestures toward the centralized, hierarchical church organization but is uninterested in Brigham Young’s declaration that water and land would be held in common---or in the implementation of that doctrine in Utah Territory for decades. Does that nullify the thesis? Not necessarily, but it complicates it. These are just two examples; be aware that there are plenty more unaddressed complications throughout the book.

More significantly, Rivers of Empire employs a kind of sleight of hand, in a similar way to the bestseller published in the same year, Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. Both accounts generate a feeling that somebody somewhere is being bamboozled, though who exactly is swindling whom is not always clear. For Worster and Reisner, agricultural interests colluded with bureaucrats in a burgeoning federal behemoth in order to suck up water and money, with landowners enhancing their wealth and bureaucrats consolidating power. The mechanism for this collusion, the “iron triangle,” was laid out by political scientists in the 1960s. Essentially, the plans for water infrastructure were hashed out behind closed doors, with public money going towards private gain in the form of “pork barrel” projects. But the sleight of hand occurs in identifying only the con artists involved and leaving the victims faceless. According to Donald Pisani in his 2003 article “Federal Reclamation and the American West in the Twentieth Century,” “this one-sided story… attributes far too much power and autonomy to the Bureau of Reclamation and pays far too little attention to the public support water projects enjoyed before the 1970s. The public had a far greater say in these policies than either Reisner or Worster admit.”

There is a clear example of what I mean, not in Rivers of Empire, but in an influential account that used a similar framework. A Ralph Nader study group in 1971 produced Damming the West, a report that critically examined the ecological damage of the Bureau of Reclamation’s dams as well as the agency’s dodgy accounting. In its critique of the Central Arizona Project (widely and appropriately considered by critics to be a boondoggle), the report mentions the broad support the project enjoyed in Arizona’s cities. However, the report claimed that urbanites’ support was “not altogether voluntary” and that the cities had been “forced to accept CAP.” And, “the state legislature could make things easier for the cities, but it seems unlikely to do so as long as agricultural interests retain a decisive influence within it.” The iron triangle theory, which in limited terms can usefully provide a mechanism for the workings of local interests with a powerful federal agency, has been abused for half a century to explain how alfalfa farmers overpower their urban counterparts, forcing them to vote against their own interests.

Rivers of Empire offers a similar example, even if it is less stark. The 1902 Reclamation Act’s 160-acre limit for family farms engendered heated debates over decades; Worster outlines the tiny number of landowners who would have been affected by strict enforcement of the limit and their disproportionate, vocal response. In Utah, senator Orrin Hatch railed against the “continuing process of bureaucratic domination” if the limit was enforced, on behalf of 0.1 percent of irrigable acres that farmers held in excess of the limit. Worster uses this as evidence that the acreage limit would have only impacted a very small but influential segment of farmers, and that this elite group exercised their power through congressional representatives. Yet there is no explicit accounting for the many farmers ostensibly passed over—were they also forced to accept the status quo? Do family farmers have no agency or the ability to make up their own minds?

As Pisani observes, the Bureau of Reclamation did not impose itself on states and irrigation districts. Rather, these entities sought the agency’s cooperation as they tried to develop available water for their growth and progress. By the peak of the Bureau’s power in the 1960s, the fast-growing region was trying to develop water through multipurpose projects that leaned heavily on systems for urban customers, especially to balance the budget for irrigation components which would extend repayment terms for farmers over decades. This issue of “subsidized” water is another sleight of hand popular with critics---these projects gave interest-free loans to farmers, which cost was absorbed by the general taxpayer. The larger subsidy came through the sale of hydropower to cities, and urban residents typically clamored at the opportunity to pay it. In Rivers of Empire, the only ones who seem to have agency are the ones despoiling the region, making critics and opponents anonymous and powerless. It is too convenient and fails to account for not just Reclamation’s boosters in the region but in the rest of the country, where many people responded positively to promoters’ promises of growth and progress in the American West.

Then, in the conclusion, the book falls flat on its face. Having started with an allusion to one of the foremost frauds of American pastoralism, Henry David Thoreau, the book ends with a paean to the all-American dream of remaking society on the frontier, somehow implying that the West was not settled with the same dream. “Approached deliberately as an environment latent with possibilities for freedom and democracy rather than for wealth and empire, the unredeemed desert West might be an unrealized national resource,” Worster writes on the last page---not in a reflection on the past but as a hope for the future. A senior historian who I’m not qualified to critique wants to wind back the clock to “a idyll from an inaccessible yesterday”---I can’t do anything but scratch my head. The head-scratching continues as I read him wish for “redesigning the West as a network of more or less discrete, self-contained watershed settlements.” He is describing the development of water prior to the 1902 Reclamation Act---private mutual irrigation companies, who organized themselves with little state or federal assistance, did the bulk of irrigation projects in the West even into the 1930s. To this day, after billions in investment and a century of engineering, federal reclamation water serves about 20% of farms in the region, leaving another 80% that comes from private and state projects. This network of self-contained, self-organized, bottom-up family farmers virtually begged for federal water, as did cities across the region. If the West’s hydraulic empire installed a dictatorship over the region, it was not imposed on the West from afar.

The conclusion brings something into focus which Worster only hints at in his treatment of the (very important) 160-acre limit debates. He seems to believe that abandoning the family farm ideal was a matter of political will. Or, more accurately, he seems to want to believe this. He astutely squares the critiques of Western water coming from opposite angles---those who advocate for free-market allocation of resources and “public-interest liberals”---with his theory of the capitalist state, which uses government power for the “unlimited accumulation of private wealth.” Similarly, he correctly identifies the contradiction in the state’s promotion of Western settlement, especially through federal reclamation: “the state had in the West the dual role of promoting the accumulation of private wealth through the increase of available water while maintaining social harmony in its distribution.” Yet his conclusion seems to hold open the possibility that things could have developed otherwise, that somehow the drive to accumulate private wealth could have been nullified and the mythical honest yeoman could have carved out a subsistence living for himself.

Seen this way, the relative dearth of attention to Native Americans, in a book about the hierarchical and coercive empire that irrigation has created, makes a bit more sense. I counted three full paragraphs in total that spoke to the issues that Natives have faced. While Worster’s analysis in those scant paragraphs was good, his apparent wish to redo the process of settlement, but to do it right this time, could only ever reproduce the expropriation of Indigenous land and water. It does not seem incidental that Worster hints at the “watershed settlements” that John Wesley Powell proposed in his famous 1878 report---those who have made Powell into a folk hero are still uninterested in or unbothered by his belief, common at the time, that Western Natives would need to be assimilated into Euro-American agriculture through starvation.

For me, this indicates something greater than a refusal to acknowledge the genocidal settlement of the West. The critique stops well short of the ideal, focusing only on its execution. Given a chance to assess the pitfalls of history, Rivers of Empire wants another new frontier with which to experiment. “Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free,” as Worster quotes Thoreau on the first page. There’s the whole problem.

[Billy Marino · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review for class. Not my best work, but it's overall message stands:

Worster’s Rivers admirably aims to explain the entire origin and contemporary situation of the American West, which focuses on a generalized version of Americans’ relationship to their environment. Oddly broken into seven convoluted and chronological parts, the book follows three themes, or stages of the American West: “Incipience,” Florescence,” and “Empire.” Worster’s thesis is that the “American West can best be described as a modern hydraulic society, which is to say, a social order based on the intensive, large-scale manipulation of water and its products in an arid setting.” (7)

Part two discursively explicates the underpinning theories of Worster’s work, especially Wittfogel’s “hydraulic society,” which explained previous empires’ power housed in control of water, and the Frankfurt School’s “Instrumental reason,” or focus on means instead of ends. In addition to this theoretical framework, is the prominent description of the three modes of water control, “Local Subsistence Mode,” “Agrarian State Mode,” and the only relevant one to this work, “Capitalist State Mode.” This last mode creates centralized power through private agriculturalists and bureaucrats alike.

Part three, “Incipience,” focuses on 1847-1890s, and sporadically examines the origins of water control in the west. First, the Mormons settled Utah and constructed the first large-scale, local irrigation systems where American Indians and Spanish did not bother. This local system increasingly gave way to more centralized control attached to the idea of “democratic conquest.” While intriguing, this section skirts the concept of Manifest Destiny that sums up the various motivations Worster attempts to elucidate.
Part four and five, “Florescence,” shift to state and federal control of water between 1902-1940, largely taking power away from private hands. These sections decisively show that agencies such as the Bureau of Reclamation became a class of “technical elite,” especially in areas such as California’s central valley, and successfully commodified the river and created a hierarchy of class in the region.

Part five, “Empire,” drives the message home, and focuses on the “alliance” of private elites and the government agencies, which solidify what Worster views as a hydraulic society unparalleled in history. These “power elites” controlled the technology necessary to control the water needed for the now major cities in the west. These elites were, and are, the only ones with the capital to build technology that can overcome the limits imposed by nature.

Rivers is simultaneously impressive and disappointing. Worster’s goal is complex, and while his West is limited to arid regions, he largely succeeds in proving his point that irrigation is the key to controlling the American West. His examination of America’s “economic culture” is lacking thanks to a continued ignoring of Roderick Frazier Nash and Henry Nash Smith. Without these scholars, Worster only scathes the surface of how Americans’ thought about their relationship to their environment and the West, even while this “cultural” analysis underpins his economic-environment work. He also proudly affirms his reliance on generalizations, which, compounded with digressive and tedious writing, nearly limits the impact of the immensity of the work he’s done. Ultimately, this will remain an important text in Environmental and American West History, but it is something to understand and build on.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Donald Worster recognizes that west of the hundredth meridian, he who has the water rights makes the rules. Or rather, this history of the west posits that the scarcity of water in the arid west made it the most important resource. Therefore, by chronicling how water was controlled and developed by "elites of wealth and technological power," Worster sets out to show how no other factor is more important to the growth and history of the West. Beginning first with a reflection from a ditch in the contemporary Imperial Valley, Worster goes on to explain the "taxonmy" of historical irrigation. He establishes how scholars such as Wittfogel first conceptualized the Marxist theory of "hydrological society" that developed in China and other eastern societies where there was less rainfall and humidity than say in Europe. Worster then creates three categories of these societies: (1) the local subsistence model--small scale and local, (2) the agrarian state model--larger and semi-communal, and (3) the capitalist state mode--ever-larger and economy maximization based.

The next chapter "Incipience" speaks to beginnings of mid-nineteenth century American irrigation communities in the West. In the section "The Lord's Beavers," Worster contends that although the Mormons adopted the bee and hive as symbols of their communal industry, the beaver and dams might have been more appropriate given their network of irrigation ditches and water works. Whereas the Mormons’ success depended upon communal, religious organization, the first networks of irrigation construction in Colorado and California developed under more capitalistic, individualistic auspices. Hence, these beginnings were frustrated largely by greed and contention. But eventually, the ideology of democratic conquest spread from west to east and back again, and the federal government helped to redeem the Great American Desert and turn California and other western states into major agricultural producers and more gradually consumers.

"Florescence: The State and the Desert" deals mainly with federal government aid in western growth beginning with the late nineteenth century reconnaissance surveys of John Wesley Powell. Although his model of a "commonwealth within itself" was impractical due to conflicts among communities both within individual states, across state lines, and even across international borders, his work informed much of the conversations leading to the 1902 Reclamation Act--wherein the federal government assumed the responsibility to manage western water sources to promote maximum settlement. Under the control and direction of Elwood Mead, the Bureau of Reclamation from 1924-1936, the Bureau was redeemed of its initial two decade failure by accomplishing many of its greatest successes including the construction of the Hoover Dam.

Environmental history often comes under harsh critique for being less human-based than other methods of history, but this book seems to prove itself and the field. Water was the resource that determined the settlement of the west. It unites diverse stories and patterns into one rather convincing thesis: limited sources of water challenged Americans to optimize its use at the cost of environmental sustainability.

(pg. 1-188)

[Kirk Astroth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a difficult book to get into. The beginning chapters were too heavy on philosophy, Marxism, and the ideas of Wittfogel among others. there was an extensive historical review of other civilizations dependent on irrigation. Eventually, though, the writing began to coalesce into a message about democracy in the West versus empires built by a small wealthy elite aided and abetted by the Federal government. Major irrigation projects were undertaken to support small family farms and no farm larger than 160 acres was ever supposed to benefit from Federally-subsidized water. The Bureau of Reclamation was created for enforcing this agrarian vision but failed to enforce the 1902 law. Instead, a small wealthy elite which owned thousands of acres benefitted (and benefits today) from this subsided water paid for by everyone

For example--56 farmers in Colorado benefit from a $70 million dollar irrigation project--all funded by US taxpayers and for which no interest would be charged to the big water users for 50 years. The examples in the book are legion. Boondoggle. Here is a great passage:

"For scale of engineering, for wealth produced, the American West had become by the 1980's the greatest hydraulic society ever built in history. It had made rivers run uphill, made them push themselves up by their own energy, and celebrated the achievement in brilliant neon colors playing over casinos, corporate offices, shopping malls, over all it's new-age oases. It had turned an austere wilderness into sparkling serpentine seas where fleets of motorized houseboats circles under cloudless skies, where water skiers turned playfully in and out of once desolate, forbidding chasms. Then it had taken that same water and raised cotton with it, fuller city pools with it, thrown it into the air with fountains and let it blow away. It had made its rivers over to produce art, learning, medicine, war, vulgarity, laughter, stinginess, and generosity. All this it had done with unmatched zeal, and most of it with the aid of the East."

No other major American region had a single federal agency devoted so single-mindedly to so narrowly regional a mission as the Bureau of Reclamation. Bureau projects--far from expanding family farms and democratizing irrigation--had forced out of use at least 5 to 18 million farm acres in the East, sending thousands of rural men and women into bankruptcy. None moved to the West looking to start a new farm life--in large part because land was so expensive and controlled by the water elite.

An eye opening account of Western development built on the domination of nature but now with foreboding consequences.

[Essie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a fascinating perspective on the history of the American West. It's a classic of environmental history, and I can certainly see why. That said, I'm not entirely sure what I think of his narrative style. I love that environmental history tells stories, be Worster quite often goes off on extended metaphors that are sometimes incredibly helpful and sometimes just tiresome. And sometimes his use of tense and narration make it difficult to understand who or when exactly he is talking about and if whatever suppositions he is narrating were actually true or came to pass or what. So I'm ambivalent about how much I enjoyed this book, a good part also because I really get riled up reading US histories.

Other than that, the frustration of reading victory after victory for a small group of people using federal money and the slighting of minorities, broken treaties, and single-minded pursuit of gain and conquest was exhausting. It is essentially a story of a few wealthy speculators and government corruption. I appreciated the analysis of the depression-era writers like Steinbeck that was included. Overall, it's not just a history of the 'natural' environment of the American West. It uses the history of rivers and irrigation as a means to talk about the social, economic, and political history of the region.

Overall, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in 20th century political/economic history, history of the American West from the mid 1800s, or historical and contemporary uses of rivers and ground water.

[Brad Eastman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rivers of Empire is a very good history of the development of water resources in the West wrapped in a classically Marxist view of history as pre-determined and layered with a patina of environmentalism. Mr. Worster believes that to understand the history of the Western United States, you need to look at the history of bringing water to arid lands. He argues that the need to engage in large scale projects to irrigate the West determines the social relations between workers, agribusiness and state and federal governments. Mr. Worster then compares the way institutions developed in the West to the history of water control (what he calls "hydraulic societies") dating back to pre-history. While it is clear that Mr. Worster believes that the development of large water projects in the West leads to social relations of oppression of laborers by large agribusiness, Mr. Worster notes that much of the oppression has been facilitated by an over-reaching federal government - an institution so large and powerful that it is completely divorced from control by others. As an aside, while Mr. Worster's work has a lot of Marxist sympathies, it also reads like the critiques of the federal government espoused by Cliven Bundy, Randy Weaver or any of the other ultra-right wing radicals in the West. I have several specific critiques of this work:

First, Mr. Worster takes a too generalized approach to history. Mr. Worster first posits a mythological free state of nature and people who live in it. He then talks about the rise of social institutions to control water as altering institutions and power dynamics in society and giving rise to governments which can be classified into three or four categories. Mr. Worster then lumps the development of Egypt, China, India, the American West, Europe, etc. into these categories and contends that it happened all the same in every period in every place. He ignores the specific development of each of these areas. He even lumps the development of disparate religions in disparate times together as a species of water control. Reading this work reminds me of the mythological pre-money state of barter posited by economists and economic historians for which there is no actual proof, just supposition (See Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber).

Second, Mr. Worster treats working class folks as too passive. In Mr. Worster's view, the working class folks are simply exploited by the government, large capital providing classes and other institutions. Undoubtedly, naked and brutal exploitation of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and Chinese, Philippine and Japanese immigrants did occur. However, Mr. Worster also believes that the Anglo American settlers of the West were similarly passive sheep who simply were victimized by their own exploitation. He neglects completely the fact that these laborers, individual farmers, etc. were actually active participants in developing the society to which Mr. Worster objects. Mr. Worster does not consider that many of these individuals welcomed and fought for the development that he criticizes as an instrument of their oppression.

Third, the whole work reeks of a quaint Nineteenth Century scientific determinism. In Mr. Worster's view, things are the way they are, because they could be no other way. There is no individual choice of consequence, no crossroads, no randomness. The work is full of quotes like, "Given the institutions of private property and the marketplace, nothing in that chain of consequences, once it was set in motion, could have been avoided." Even in our natural sciences, we have moved away from such deterministic models. Mr. Worster seems to believe that who had their finger on the button during the Cuban Missile Crisis did not matter. Mr. Worster apparently believes the results would have been the same even if Donald Trump was president instead of Kennedy.

Fourth, in his zeal to find rules of universal applicability, Mr. Worster completely ignores any counter-examples. While he briefly talks about the rise of water control in the Netherlands, there is too little detail to understand how a society so different than the American West fits into Mr. Worster's view of water control determining all social relations.

Fifth, Mr. Worster completely ignores the pressures that led to westward expansion by Anglo Americans. In a weird way, Mr. Worster accepts Manifest Destiny. To him, there was a vast expanse of land, therefore Anglo Americans needed to dominate it. Mr. Worster does not at all consider population growth, changing economies, social currents or any other forces that moved the United States west., nor the pressures to develop agricultural economies in arid places.

Finally, Mr. Worster believes too much in false consciousness. In my view, the violence of the Twentieth Century was fueled by false consciousness. This idea that an elite few knew better than everybody else what was in their individual interest. If people did not know what was best for them, then they needed to be coerced into living it by those who knew better. The industrial scale killings of the Viet Nam War, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot were all justified by the notion of false consciousness. Mr. Worster's critique of Western society includes "The naked accumulation of wealth has, for most people, never been a wholly agreeable idea or an adequate explanation of life. Consequently, it has needed dressing up from time to time in more lofty ideas, more noble transcendent rhetoric, even in actual garb." See also, "If they accept those dominating powers as indispensable to their welfare, then the hydraulic trap will not be escaped, at least rational, humane methods." Indeed, Mr. Worster's solution to the environmental disaster and oppression of laborers in the West is a wide-scale migration East to return to ancient cultivation. In this way, Mr. Worster will cure his diagnosed "excess of democracy". I am sure the forced migration Mr. Worster advocates will not be at all like other forced migrations we have witnessed in our and our parents' lifetimes.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed reading this book and learned a lot about the development of water resources in the West, which allowed for the development of today's Western economy. However, the actual history of development has to be separated from the over-generalization.

[Matt Shake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concentrating less on government corruption and waste than "Cadillac Desert" and more on water allocation as a form of social control, Worster's analysis of Western water projects paints--in my opinion--an even scarier picture of the future of the West than "Cadillac Desert." He points out that in an arid environment like ours, he who holds the keys to cheap water holds great power and control. While I do agree with him on this point, I do not know for sure if this system has created as much potential for class conflict as he thinks.

[Donald Linnemeyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that are fascinating or its sheer originality. As an American, I've never really thought about water scarcity, at least not about it actually affecting me. But Worster puts the irrigation history of the west at the forefront of America history, and he places us in that story, still to be decided. Throw in some interesting Marxist analysis of western settlement (water scarcity typically leads to powerful, centralized, oppressive government), and you've got a great read.

[Glen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a tough read. It features quite a few pages on Marx and a German philosopher named Wittfogel who write about what it is that big irrigation projects do to the societies that build them. In the end there is a bit of description of how the Western US could have been settled without Hoover dam and the like. Not a lot of take home value in this environmental history. It did give a good context in which to consider water projects that are under consideration today.

[Feather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fear the Iron Triangle - the alliance between politicians, businesses and the regulatory offices created to maintain standards of safety, sustainablity and democracy. Political and economic systems reliant on this alliance become anti-democratic, anti-environment, and anti-life in thier amoral and unaccountable pursuit of profit and power.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A scathing critique of farm subsidies in the form of water rights, as well as industrialized irrigation. If the good folks at Toro or Rainbird hear about this...

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

An examination of the developments over the 20th century that led to the the American West we know today.

It certainly seems to have played out the way it's described in the book - with a kind of feedback loop beginning with small-scale projects leading to some local managers, and it keeps expanding until you have big government agencies responsible for dams and huge reservoirs, the elite with technical knowledge and expertise that hold power.

There are a lot of thought-provoking passages.

"Direct responsibility is the surest road to carefulness" - the management of water passed from the locals to regional districts and the bureau of reclamation so the resource may not be as carefully managed as it otherwise would have been.

"One cannot have life both ways - cannot maximize wealth and empire and maximize democracy and freedom too" - the people who envisioned the development of the west, it was repeatedly stated were focused on their own accumulation of land and wealth. It contradicts the romantic idea of the west as a place to escape to, reset, and build anew.

The projects were "solutions, aimed at controlling nature, not man." Some of the plans are laughable. Humans are stubborn.

There were already predictions of a water crisis by 1980.

All the above struck me. The following perhaps the most, which was an Inca saying, "The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives." Rational, emphasizes the importance of water. But then, talking about western developers, "Wherever they perceived scarcity they would drive themselves to create abundance. When and where there was abundance they would make scarcity anew." Truly never satisfied, always looking for the next source to tap. They ran the risk "of becoming frogs with no ponds left."

[Tobe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another indispensable book for understanding the elaborate legal and technical structure that has been erected in order to irrigate the arid western states. While Worster's book is now 35 years old, it still has much to say about the wisdom of how water has been brought to the dry western lands. Worster has a strong point of view, but still maintains some distance from his subject which lends the book credibility. Worster's writing style is lively and engaging enough to keep the interest of the general reader.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent complement to "Cadillac Desert," with the vantage of writing after the effects of climate change were becoming clearer.

The title itself should tell you part of what you're in for. It was an empire of manifest destiny, believing that the American world could override problems, from ignoring John Wesley Powell on.

[Michael Phillips]

The American West continues to need irrigation resources but as with the Colorado Flood of 2013 water can sometimes overwhelm the people. Wurster is a prolific author and I wish more of his books were in the Corning, Ia library. So many promising writers out there and I've set my goal to read 10 a month and perhaps write one of my own about the freedom people enjoy in the American West and the stark landscape of mountainous arid terrain,

[Susie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was really good, even infuriating at times... Although it filled in gaps with stuff I didn't know, if you've read other books on water and dam-building, etc. some of the information is already covered. The conclusion was also pretty far-fetched, but overall a really good book.

[Bubba · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author claims that Mormons only settled the great desert in the western US b/c they were under the threat of excommunication from the "shadow theocracy" in Salt Lake. Couldn't have been that they wanted land to farm where they wouldn't be persecuted.

[Lorraine Herbon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad read, all about the making of the American West through water manipulation. But it's a bit gloomy and outdated. Would love to know what this guy thinks after the past four years of drought.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comprehensive research but the conclusion is pretty pie in the sky.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dry topic (environmental history), but it was interspersed with several interesting context points.

[Susan Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding.