Chapter 9 - To Washington

Newlands was elected to Congress in 1892. He came to Washington as an outsider, and he stayed that way. Hoping to ride Stewart’s influence into the Senate as a Republican, Newlands ended up riding the purse of the Sharon estate into the House as a member of Stewart’s Silver Party, itself a reflection of Nevada’s unshakable belief that silver mining could get back on its feet.[1] Smythe ridiculed Nevadans for “the strange delusion” that the glory days of the Comstock were coming back. “No state has been so bitterly derided as Nevada…it has no other mineral wealth…it is ‘flickering out.’”[2]

Newlands enjoyed a long tenure in Congress, ascending, after a decade in the House, to the Senate in 1903. Yet for all his longevity, Newlands never truly fit in—not even with his fellow members of the western delegation. During Newlands’ House term, three Senators led the regional delegation—his Nevada colleague Stewart, who had returned to the Senate after a decade seeing to his affairs in Nevada; Francis E. Warren, the Civil War hero governor-turned-senator from Wyoming; and Henry M. Teller, President Chester A. Arthur’s onetime Secretary of the Interior and Senator from Colorado.

Like the region they represented, each of these Senators was strongly Republican and fiercely protective of states’ rights. All three men had absorbed their zeal for states’ rights when their states were young territories. They bridled at federal interference in most state matters, and few issues raised their hackles like federal involvement in irrigation. As far back as the 1880s, all three men had sponsored legislation to enable the federal government to stimulate private enterprise in irrigation, empower state governments—and avoid the need for federal appropriations. (With the House Appropriations Committee stacked with unsympathetic Easterners and Midwesterners, western members could not hope to get pork appropriations from Congress.) They claimed this could be done if the federal government “ceded” back to the state governments the public lands within their borders. On irrigation issues, Warren was the delegation’s undisputed spokesman.

Newlands, too, came from the West—but there the similarities ended. He was a western businessman, not a western politician. He had no interest in the territorial pasts of the Western states, and he had little affinity for issues involving western state borders. While his fellow Westerners fretted over states’ rights, Newlands’ business background had given him a regional perspective. And there was the matter of party. The delegation was solidly Republican, whereas Newlands’ affiliation had drifted from the Silver Party to the Populist Party and ended up in the Democratic Party. Newlands was a complete outsider, and in the minority as well. “Patrician, worldly, cultured,” wrote the Nevada historian Barbara Richnak, Newlands “appeared on the Nevada scene like a peacock in a chicken yard.”[3]

Given these differences, it was perhaps unsurprising that Newlands did not even socialize with his delegation. Ironically, the consummate Westerner preferred the Eastern social set. He maintained his tony weekend residence in New York City, at 13 Gramercy Park, and rubbed elbows with the city’s upper class.[4] The family belonged to the elite Riding Club and equally elite Racquet Club. Newlands was also a member of the Lawyers Club, a proud bastion of the city’s legal establishment dating back to 1810.

Outsider or not, Newlands found himself in Congress during a pivotal moment. The decade of the 1890s was a hard time for the West. A depression had hit the region in 1893, followed by a drought that stretched from 1898 through the early years of the next century. These hard times changed everything for irrigation. Livestock herds shrank, leaving railroads with less to transport. With the carrying trade sharply down, the railroads got involved in irrigation as a protection against future droughts.[5] They were indifferent to irrigation for agriculture, but became more active in seeking irrigation to protect public grazing lands for stockmen. The Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, the Santa Fe, the Southern Pacific, and the Union Pacific all clamored for dams and reservoirs throughout the West.

The decade was bad politically for the West as well, as the western delegation chose the wrong way to go about promoting irrigation. The fly in the irrigation ointment was a concept known as “land cession,” in which the federal government would cede back to the western states the arid public lands within their boundaries. Under the cession concept, states were expected to sell the lands cheaply to further the principles of the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160 acres of unsettled public land to American citizens who had not fought for the Confederacy and who pledged to farm the land. The Homestead Act has long been counted as “the mythic American law” embodying in one fell swoop yeoman-farmer Jeffersonianism, anti-slavery idealism, and settlement of the American West.[6] This gifted land, in turn, was expected to trigger economic development.

Dreaming of dramatic development within their states, the western delegation sponsored a series of bills calling for land cession, proposing to cede enormous tracts ranging from 1 million to 2 million acres. But the cession concept appeared fatally flawed. No one wanted the parched parcels, no matter how cheap. One of the cession bills, sponsored by Wyoming Senator Joseph Carey, became law in 1894; it produced no leasing claims. Yet cession remained the choice of the stubborn states’-righters, preferred because state governments administered the program and federal appropriations were not needed.

The cession obsession turned out to be the Achilles’ heel of the Westerners. Once cession became vulnerable to attack, so did the idea of state management of public lands and irrigation. Inept administration allowed stockmen to acquire embarrassingly large amounts of rangeland, outraging the public and leading national politicians like William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt to take up the issue.[7] Cession of the public lands, and administration of it by the states, led the western delegation down paths it never foresaw and created heroes it never wanted.

Once the public lands issue made states’ rights vulnerable, the door opened for outsiders to the states’ rights cause to enter the irrigation movement. Experts like Newlands, Smythe, and Maxwell began to rally around the so-called “nationalist” banner.  Unlike the “statists,” who reserved for the state governments the power to locate and build dams and reservoirs, the nationalists wanted the federal government to be in charge. The nationalist cause drew support from the business community; the statist cause was dominated by politicians.

Newlands spoke frequently on the House floor about how states could not be trusted to administer land sales. When he talked about state governments and irrigation, his choice words were “ignorance,” “improvidence,” and “dishonesty.”[8] Always, Newlands was ready with an example of livestock interests tricking the state into allowing one company to amass a large amount of grazing acreage. There was the man in Humboldt County, Nevada, who acquired 14,000 acres of “improvidently granted” land. And there was the ranch in Texas he harped on, which acquired five million acres.[9] Newlands cited the Texas example because Texas, unlike the other mountain states, actually owned its own public lands.[10]

Newlands picked on the livestock industry deliberately. He never forgot how the industry had opposed his cherished irrigation plans in 1889, and he knew that his new political party, the Democrats, liked anti-monopoly politics. Newlands often lamented Nevada’s abuse of a land cession in 1880 where ranchers had “cut the state into ribbons…and acquired nearly all the available range.” The state’s sales plan, Newlands contended, produced “an explosion… in claims for ranching lands… but not one for farming, timber or minerals.”[11]

Newlands spoke so often about state ineptitude that colleagues started challenging him. After all, he was criticizing his own state and breaching congressional etiquette. During the debate in 1901 on appropriations for the popular “rivers and harbors” bill, Massachusetts Congressman William Moody, an influential Republican member of the House Appropriations Committee, challenged Newlands head on. “Does the gentleman think that the management of these arid lands would be improvident and unintelligent under the state?” Moody inquired. Newlands pointedly replied, “I do.”[12]

By 1897, the western delegation’s position on irrigation had fractured. Cession had been tried and failed. States’ rights had withered along with it. Mead’s biographer wrote that “it had become obvious that federal involvement loomed, and attention centered around what form that action would take and who would lead it.”[13] As in all movements in disarray, infighting began to weaken the cause further.

Mead went to Washington to head the Agriculture Department’s fight in the coming federal irrigation program. Yet Mead, who had been surefooted in Wyoming, found himself stumbling in Washington. In Wyoming, Mead was “the expert.” But in Washington, he started tangling with rival bureaucrats, experts in their own field. First, he feuded with Newlands’ ally Frederick Newell, the Chief Hydrographer and head of irrigation at the U. S. Geological Survey. Mead feuded with Newell over which department would do what in irrigation. It became a battle of dams versus ditches, with Newell grabbing control of the conservation of water (the dams and the reservoirs), and Mead securing authority over the application of water (the irrigation ditches). Mead bargained for application because he wanted states to control that phase of irrigation. Mead sought out the short end of the stick because he wanted it to be the states’ rights end of the stick.[14]

Mead did not realize that he had lost his first Washington turf war. He thought he had been shrewd in establishing himself as the point man for “limited federal involvement.”[15] Mead started feuding with Maxwell over what positions should be taken by Maxwell’s National Irrigation Congress, and he voiced his fear that Maxwell was giving the railroads too much power over “the location of irrigation works.”

Then Mead made his big bureaucratic mistake. He picked a fight with Gifford Pinchot, chief of the Forestry Bureau in the Interior Department. Rep. Frank Mondell, a Wyoming Republican and active member of the House Irrigation Committee, was trying to shift Pinchot’s Forestry Bureau away from the Interior Department and over to the Agriculture Department. Mondell’s move was aimed at clipping Pinchot’s power. Mead sided with Mondell in the fight, despite his open contempt for Mondell and his concern that Mondell was the states’-righters’ point man in the House for forestry and reclamation issues, two turn-of-the-century hot topics. Mondell, Mead wrote Benjamin Wheeler, president of the University of California, was “opinionated and bumptious” and should be kept out of forestry and irrigation “because he don’t [sic] know enough about either to deal with them intelligently.”[16]

Pinchot won the fight. And Mead lost a bigger war. He made Pinchot, a formidable federal expert, receptive to Newlands whenever Newlands needed an expert rebuttal to Mead. Pinchot was a close friend of Newell’s, and both believed that an aggressive federal irrigation program required an aggressive forestry program. Newlands, a Newell ally, always made sure that when the House held hearings on irrigation, not only was Newell an expert witness but so was Pinchot. Like Newell, Newlands believed that a successful reservoir plan required a successful forestation plan, because the greater the forestation, the easier to hold back floods. Pinchot never failed to boost his bureau’s motto: SAVE THE FORESTS / STORE THE FLOODS.[17]

The fracturing of the cohesion of the western delegation—and the political zigzagging of western players like Mead, Maxwell, and Mondell—foreshadowed how room was opening up in the western delegation for an outsider and nationalist like Newlands. The western infighting also signaled new opportunities for outsider technical experts like Frederick Newell and Gifford Pinchot to operate in what had been closed western politics. It was fertile soil for a new approach.