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Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century
Free Press
June 2010
On Sale: June 1, 2010
496 pages
ISBN: 1416532161
EAN: 9781416532163
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
As breathtaking today as the day it was completed, Hoover
Dam not only shaped the American West but helped launch the
American century. In the depths of the Great Depression it
became a symbol of American resilience and ingenuity in the
face of crisis, putting thousands of men to work in a
remote desert canyon and bringing unruly nature to heel.
Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Michael Hiltzik uses the saga
of the dam’s conception, design, and construction to tell
the broader story of America’s efforts to come to grips
with titanic social, economic, and natural forces. For
embodied in the dam’s striking machine-age form is the
fundamental transformation the Depression wrought in the
nation’s very culture—the shift from the concept of rugged
individualism rooted in the frontier days of the nineteenth
century to the principle of shared enterprise and communal
support that would build the America we know today. In the
process, the unprecedented effort to corral the raging
Colorado River evolved from a regional construction project
launched by a Republican president into the New Deal’s
outstanding—and enduring—symbol of national pride. Yet the story of Hoover Dam has a darker side. Its
construction was a gargantuan engineering feat achieved at
great human cost, its progress marred by the abuse of a
desperate labor force. The water and power it made
available spurred the development of such great western
metropolises as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas,
Salt Lake City, and San Diego, but the vision of unlimited
growth held dear by its designers and builders is fast
turning into a mirage.
In Hiltzik’s hands, the players in this epic historical
tale spring vividly to life: President Theodore Roosevelt,
who conceived the project; William Mulholland, Southern
California’s great builder of water works, who urged the
dam upon a reluctant Congress; Herbert Hoover, who gave the
dam his name though he initially opposed its construction;
Frank Crowe, the dam’s renowned master builder, who pushed
his men mercilessly to raise the beautiful concrete rampart
in an inhospitable desert gorge. Finally there is Franklin
Roosevelt, who presided over the ultimate completion of the
project and claimed the credit for it. Hiltzik combines
exhaustive research, trenchant observation, and
unforgettable storytelling to shed new light on a major
turning point of twentieth-century history.
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