Original subtitles

Tonight...

MAN: Grand Coulee's going to be the biggest thing on earth.

There just seems to be no end

of the good things that can come out of the dam.

MAN: It was an elixir for the Great Depression;

it made the desert into a garden;

and it was a bit of cultural savagery

and environmental butchery.

"Grand Coulee Dam," on American Experience.

NASA ANNOUNCER: Liftoff! The clock is running.

PILOT: They have mass casualties up here.

RINGSIDE ANNOUNCER: Schmeling is down!

American Experience is also made possible by:

And by contributions to your PBS station from:

NARRATOR: It was called "The Biggest Thing on Earth,"

a dam unlike any other,

a wall of concrete that dared to tame the mighty Columbia.

WILLIAM LANG: A river is the most dynamic thing in nature.

To block a river is the most audacious thing

a human being can do.

And when you block a river, you create a new future.

There's no going back.

NARRATOR: Its massive generators would power entire cities,

and the water it captured would make the desert bloom.

It came to embody the promise of America

when many believed their country's promises

had all been broken.

BLAINE HARDEN: It was this idea of manifest destiny,

of Americans asserting their will

on the natural resources of the country.

And people really believed in that.

MARGARET O'MARA: The Grand Coulee Dam starts a process

of transforming the whole river system into a working landscape

like never before.

The New Deal was a radical idea.

Roosevelt really redefined what the balance is

between the individual good and the collective good.

NARRATOR: Its power would help win a war and unite a nation,

but its construction would leave a region bitterly divided.

STEVEN HAWLEY: Who controls the water and the natural resources of the West?

I think there is an attitude

amongst the managers of the river,

and they simply said, "We stole these rivers fair and square

and we're not giving them back, not without a fight."

D.C. JACKSON: It's supposed to be for everyone.

It's easy to say that it's a public resource.

But everyone has a different vision of what they think

that public interest should be.

NARRATOR: For some, Grand Coulee Dam

would be an engine of growth and prosperity.

For others, it would come to symbolize

heartbreak and betrayal.

In the end, it was an outsized statement

of American power and prestige,

a monument to noble ideals and unintended consequences.

RICHARD WHITE: There is a way in which people hate the dams

and are proud of the dams,

ways in which people imagine a Columbia running free,

but they could not live without the Columbia's electricity.

That river is our most profound dreams for what we can become

and our deepest regrets about what we've done.

We've woven them together

and we're never going to be able to take them apart.

NARRATOR: On a blisteringly hot day in July of 1918,

a weathered Model T Ford drove down First Avenue

in the dusty little town of Ephrata, Washington,

and pulled up in front of the offices

of a local lawyer named William Clapp.

On the side of the car,

a small sign read "The Wenatchee Daily World.

The World's Greatest Daily Paper."

The car belonged to a restless 40-year-old editor and publisher

named Rufus Woods.

A part-time school teacher, failed attorney

and veteran of the Alaskan gold rush,

he had finally found his calling at the helm

of eastern Washington's first daily newspaper,

founded in 1905.

Woods had turned the failing paper around

with a mix of shrewd business acumen, a strong regional focus,

and a dash of showmanship.

Early subscribers received a free set of dishes,

others free knives.

Papers were sometimes delivered on horseback, and in one stunt,

Woods painted a pony of his with zebra stripes

for extra publicity.

Three years after buying the paper,

Woods had boosted circulation by 600%.

PAUL PITZER: Rufus Woods, he had a vision.

His vision was to create something of what he called

"north central Washington."

He was in competition with Spokane

on the east side of the state

and, of course, Seattle on the west side of the state.

And he used to travel around looking for stories.

NARRATOR: The town fathers of Ephrata

gathered in Clapp's office that day

were worried about the future of their region,

tired of it being seen as a desolate backwater

without big industries or farms.

Then, Billy started talking about building a dam

on the Columbia River

at the mouth of what was called the Grand Coulee.

HARDEN: Grand Coulee is basically a big ditch, a really big ditch.

And the thought was

that you could divert water out of the river

up into that big ditch and then, using gravity,

feed that water down across the country where the soil was great

and all it needed was water.

LANG: He sells it as a great location

because of this wonderful landscape

that has been completely scoured out by these floods

that ravaged the area thousands of years ago.

And so it creates these huge, dry coulees

and he sees the ability to make these into reservoirs

to capture the water from a dammed Columbia.

And this one spot makes it possible

to dam the river up for miles and miles and miles.

NARRATOR: The plan the boosters hatched called for water

to be pumped out of the lake formed by the dam,

up over the rim of the river's canyon,

and into the Grand Coulee,

which would become a new, huge reservoir.

From there, the water could be fed by gravity

down a sloping plateau to the south,

irrigating more than a million new acres of land.

WILFRED WOODS: In 1918, Billy Clapp told my father about this great idea

of a Grand Coulee Dam.

Well, it was, really, in 1918,

a fantastic dream to build a project of that size.

NARRATOR: That summer of 1918, as Rufus Woods listened

to Billy Clapp and his friends lay out their plans,

Woods began pacing around the lawyer's small office,

unable to control his excitement.

No longer would his region have to suffer

as an isolated backwater.

The hydro-power from this miraculous dam

would transform their region at last.

HAWLEY: It became almost an obsession,

this idea that if they could just control this river,

they could have a kind of Garden of Eden.

You know, the inland empire with crops, orchards, farms,

a kind of Shangri-La

of agricultural and industrial delights

that would build a new civilization.

HARDEN: Rufus Woods pitched the dam

as a scientific marvel,

the answer to all their prayers about the future,

as something that God himself wanted done

and he just needed to get the federal government to come in,

pay for it, and let the locals run with the advantages

that would come from it.

And that's the way he sold it.

NARRATOR: The boosters called themselves the Dam University,

and although they had no technical know-how

and no powerful political connections,

they shared a dream about Grand Coulee Dam

and the waters it would unleash to make their desert bloom.

If they could find the money to build it,

they might at last conquer the wild Columbia.

WOODS: Oh my, what a stream.

My dad called it the imperial Columbia.

And it's true, it's a tremendous stream.

JACKSON: It's just one huge, free-flowing river.

It's the largest in the West, much larger than the Colorado,

just a tremendous waterway.

LANG: We've got an enormous amount of water

because of it catching all of the Pacific snow and rain

and all of this water falling in about 600 miles.

WHITE: This river, quite literally,

it'll eat through mountain ranges.

It will eat through the Cascades,

This is an incredibly powerful natural force,

and it will drop with a power that is almost beyond belief.

NARRATOR: It was the Columbia's raw energy

that Rufus Woods imagined Grand Coulee would convert

to a productive use.

Throughout the 1920s, however,

he often found his crusade for the dam falling on deaf ears.

LANG: Rufus Woods recognized that he had to find a way

to get the government to actually invest in something

as big as he had in mind.

And what he had in mind was huge.

It was bigger than anything else that had been built.

PITZER: The early promoters hoped that a large dam

would generate a great amount of power which could be sold,

and the money from the selling of the power

would be used to support the irrigation.

NARRATOR: Stacked up against Woods

and the other members of the Dam University

were groups like the powerful Spokane Chamber of Commerce

and private utilities such as Washington Water Power Company

and Puget Sound Power and Light, all of which had their own

hydroelectric and irrigation projects and their own agendas.

JACKSON: Private power companies see this as competition.

They don't want this.

And the big argument against it is that it just doesn't make

financial sense.

HARDEN: At the time that he was proposing

building the biggest dam in the history of the world,

there were only a couple hundred thousand people

living in eastern Washington.

WHITE: As critics of the project say about the power,

"Who's the electricity for?

"Is it for jackrabbits?

There's nobody out there to consume it."

And they're right.

WOODS: My dad was fighting the power company in Spokane

all this time.

It was a long, long battle.

And it was a classic case of the little guys against the big guys

and no money against big money.

There were national magazines writing big exposés

about the white elephant in the desert

as well as a lot of Republican legislators in Congress

who were fulminating against the use

of public funds for that dam.

NARRATOR: The nation, it seemed, wasn't ready for Grand Coulee Dam.

Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed,

plunging the country into depression.

Scorching winds turned the drought-ravaged western prairie

into a dust bowl,

which actually brightened the prospects for Grand Coulee Dam.

The economic crisis brought a renewed focus

on large irrigation projects and a new president into office.

As a lifelong Republican,

Rufus Woods had opposed Franklin Roosevelt's election,

but during FDR's frenetic first months in office,

Woods came to appreciate his call for bold action.

The idea for the dam was floating around

in Washington for years.

The Army Corps of Engineers had written a report

about how to dam the river all the way up and down.

Roosevelt was desperately searching

for shovel-ready projects

that could employ lots of people and have long-term use.

The dam made a lot of sense then.

JACKSON: Roosevelt put himself on the side

of these huge resources like the Columbia River.

And so the stake for him was going up against

the plutocrats of Wall Street

that controlled the private power industry.

So he had a real vested interest

in developing these large hydroelectric power dams

as a way of demonstrating the importance of public power.

And the Columbia offered

one of the great opportunities for that.

NARRATOR: In mid-June of 1933,

with the nationwide unemployment rate at 25%,

Congress approved one of Roosevelt's

most ambitious programs: the Public Works Administration.

The president was authorized to spend, at his discretion,

up to $3.3 billion on new infrastructure projects

around the country.

The Bureau of Reclamation,

the huge federal builder of water projects in the West,

came up with a plan for the entire dam and reservoir

at a cost of $181 million.

FDR was determined to get it off the ground,

but was unable to pay for the entire project all at once,

so on July 26, he approved $63 million in start-up funds

for the Grand Coulee Dam.

JACKSON: Once you commit a small amount, small being $63 million,

it's going to be much harder to sort of pull the plug on it.

You commit a sizable amount, but not the total,

to get the project going, with the idea that down the road

you would be able to bring it to completion.

NARRATOR: Half of the dam was to be built

on the Colville Indian Reservation,

home to a confederation of 12 Northwestern tribes,

including the Chief Joseph band of the Nez Perce,

which had fought a famous war

against the United States in 1877.

HARDEN: In the years before the dam construction began,

some lawmakers said,

"How are we going to compensate the Indians?"

because, you know, half of the dam's on their land.

And some grudging consideration was given to this idea,

and some promises were made.

COLLEEN CAWSTON: I've heard that what was implied we would receive

is the ability to irrigate our land

and electricity at a rate that would be much more affordable.

NARRATOR: On July 16, 1933, a group of dignitaries,

including Washington governor Clarence Martin

and Jim James, chief of the San Poil Indians

from the Colville reservation,

gathered on the banks of the Columbia

to mark the start of construction.

With Chief James holding it,

the governor drove in the first stake,

inaugurating what would become the largest irrigation

and hydroelectric project in the country.

To realize its Olympian goals,

Grand Coulee's vast reservoir

would inundate Indian communities,

submerge sacred fishing spspsps and ancestral burial grounds,

and erect an impenetrable barrier,

denying salmon access

to their network of spawning grounds in the upper Columbia.

But none of that mattered during the dark days of 1933.

There was little consideration of the extraordinary changes

that Grand Coulee would have on America's wildest stream--

on its rapids and waterfalls, its fish

and the Native peoples whose world revolved around it.

Rufus Woods and FDR's engineers believed

that they could achieve miracles with the Columbia.

And they were ready to begin.

NARRATOR: By July of 1933, thousands of hungry, desperate men

had flooded into eastern Washington, lured by the promise

that Grand Coulee Dam would create as many as 100,000 jobs.

The Wenatchee World urged the laborers

to wait and file applications with the Bureau of Reclamation,

but the men came anyway.

HARDEN: People came up to the dam, working men,

many of whom had ridden boxcars from other parts of the country.

They slept in their cars.

They slept in the street.

They slept in caves near the town.

They slept in the boxes that dance hall pianos came in.

ED KERN: Well, see, the Depression was so bad, you know,

I was just out of high school.

I was still 19 years old.

And, well, what to do?

I walked down there, hey,

there's a whole block of people waiting ahead of me, see,

trying to get on.

So I just waited and waited and waited,

and finally my turn came.

He looks at me, he says, "What can you do?

Are you a carpenter?" "No."

"Are you a welder?" "No."

"Trade?" "No."

"Well, then, we got nothing for you but labor."

That's when he put me down in the rock gang.

He said, "It's going to be hard, hard work,"

and he proved it to me.

NARRATOR: On August 4, 1934, shortly after construction began,

the Grand Coulee Dam site received a surprising visitor.

HARDEN: Roosevelt showed up, which was completely unexpected

for the president of the United States

to come to this godforsaken corner of Washington state

when there was almost nothing to show for it.

There was just dust and a hole in the side of the river.

But he was there to talk about what could be

and what this big project represented

as part of the New Deal.

NARRATOR: "We are going to see with our own eyes

"electricity made so cheap

"that it will become a standard article of use

not only for manufacturing but for every home,"

proclaimed the president, with his wife Eleanor looking on.

"I know that this empty desert country

"is going to be filled with men, women and children

"who will be making an honest livelihood and doing their best

"to live up to the American standard of living

and American standard of citizenship."

HARDEN: He talked about it as sort of planting a seed

for a new future for that region and for all of the West.

He looked on it as the perfect symbol

of what he was trying to do.

"Look at all these men who have jobs."

MARY HENNING: We're in the midst of this terrible depression

and, I mean, here you are in this open field

and the cars and people were just everywhere.

And they were so excited.

The idea that there was going to be some employment,

there was going to be something to do

and there was going to be a paycheck.

Of course, we believed in Franklin D. Roosevelt.

We just knew something wonderful was going to happen.

NARRATOR: By January of 1935,

Grand Coulee had finally become the epic public works project

that its boosters had promised.

2,500 men worked on the dam,

with hundreds more pouring in every month,

all employed by a conglomerate of three companies

known by the acronym MWAK.

The company's superintendent

was a profane and hard-drinking former ironworker

named Manley Harvey Slocum.

Partially crippled from a gas explosion in his youth,

Slocum's gnarled hands and stooped walk

hid an iron determination.

Known affectionately by his men as Harvey,

he had proven himself on dams in California

and in the jungles of Panama.

Though he never made it past the eighth grade,

what Slocum knew how to do was build.

JACKSON: Harvey Slocum, he's the superintendent at the dam site.

He's in charge of making this thing work, you know,

on a day-to-day level.

He's a bit of a roustabout.

He would go on his binges, he would have his drunks,

and that was, you know, one of those things,

maybe you paid a price.

The workers, they know how to work hard

or not work so hard depending upon

whether they think they're being treated fairly.

And having a superintendent

who is willing to go out on a drunk every once in a while,

well, they might feel,

"Hey, there's a guy who is on our side."

NARRATOR: Slocum's biggest challenge was to divert the flow of the river,

allowing workers to dig out the mud

and expose the granite bedrock on which the dam would rest.

To start, they needed to build cofferdams--

temporary structures that would keep the river at bay.

The first would run along the west bank,

pushing a third of the river out of the way,

and be anchored by a large piece of the foundation

known as "Block 40."

Once the work on the west side was complete,

another set of cofferdams would extend out

from the east side of the river,

diverting the flow over the recently completed foundation.

JACKSON: Once you've built the west side

and then you've got the foundation that's stable enough

so that you can actually run water over it,

then you go and you do it on the other side.

And you use that big center block, that...

that Block 40 as sort of the one that connects the two together.

NARRATOR: Complicating Slocum's already daunting task

was the unpredictable power of the Columbia.

In the spring, the flow of the river

could sometimes surge dramatically

as snowmelt and rain would suddenly turn

the already muscular waterway into a raging torrent.

The cofferdams had to be built quickly

during low water months.

If not finished in time,

the spring runoff would tear them to pieces.

Racing against the clock,

more than 1,200 men worked in continuous shifts

driving huge interlocking steel pilings

deep into the river's bottom with steam hammers,

nervously watching for the river to rise.

On March 23, 1935, only 90 days after they started,

workers completed the west side cofferdam.

And just in time.

That spring, the river peaked at 32 feet

above its normal height.

The fragile cofferdams held for a time,

until one night they suddenly ruptured,

and 15,000 gallons a minute came pouring in.

Roused from his bed, still wearing his red pajamas,

Harvey Slocum rushed to the dam site,

where his men threw anything they could find into the river

to stop the leak:

mattresses, canvas, building materials, even sagebrush.

Only more pilings and a supply of bentonite,

a mineral that forms a thick paste when mixed with water,

finally staunched the flow.

Against all odds,

the cofferdams had controlled the surging Columbia,

but one critical issue remained.

In 1933, FDR had been able to commit

only a portion of the dam's cost,

planning to get the rest from Congress at a later date.

Now, in April of 1935, the president's strategy

were derailed by the U.S. Supreme Court,

which struck down his right to spend money on dams

without Congressional approval.

JACKSON: The Supreme Court,

which is rather conservative at this point,

say to have FDR allocate that money,

that's not going to be enough.

Congress is going to have to specifically vote

to authorize these dams.

NARRATOR: Joining the frantic lobbying with characteristic gusto,

Rufus Woods had the World print an eight-page special edition

that extolled the benefits of the dam,

emblazoned with the banner headline

"Two Million Wild Horses."

He made sure every member of Congress received a copy.

The bill became law on August 30, 1935.

With the river contained by the cofferdams

and its political fate secured,

the dam could now rise to its full height

and attempt to realize its even loftier ambitions.

In December of that year,

as more than a thousand spectators looked on,

Washington governor Clarence Martin,

dressed in overalls and rubber boots,

spread the first bucket of concrete on the dam.

When the ceremony was complete, a representative from MWAK

handed the governor a check for 75 cents,

covering his wages for one hour as a common laborer.

JACKSON: You don't build this as one single massive structure.

If you did that, you would get all kinds of cracks.

Like sidewalks.

You know, concrete, as it hardens,

it will naturally shrink a little bit

and when you build a sidewalk, you build those cracks into it.

At Grand Coulee, they want to make sure

that they don't get cracking.

So you put it into these discrete blocks,

about 50-foot square things,

which there are hundreds of them that make up the dam.

NARRATOR: Trestles built on top of the foundation

brought concrete to the site,

and cranes lowered it down in huge buckets

to be spread onto the dam.

Each new pour added a five-foot layer.

72 hours later, the process was repeated.

KERN: We had to scrub the concrete, like, with big wide brushes--

remember, concrete forms a scum.

And we had to brush it off.

And that's all we did,

we went from one block to the other and kept cleaning up.

I want to tell you that was a 24-hour job

and that contract had to be done at a certain time

and they pushed it and then pushed it.

They worked the death of us, and no breaks.

No breaks at all.

You work till noon and half an hour till night.

That was it.

I got so tired.

Wouldn't I like to have a break?

Oh, my, no, no.

There were no breaks in those days.

NARRATOR: By June of 1937, trestles spanned the entire river.

The following February, the foundation was complete

14 months ahead of schedule.

It would take millions of cubic yards of concrete

to finish the job, but what was being called

"the biggest thing on earth" was at last taking shape.

NARRATOR: For every thousand cubic yards of concrete poured

or million dollars expended, men paid with their lives.

They were knocked off the steep walls of the foundation

and impaled on rebar,

drowned in the frigid waters of the Columbia,

or in one horrible incident,

ripped apart by a heavy conveyor belt.

By the time the foundation was complete, 60 men had died.

In the midst of the Depression,

there were always new workers to take their place.

And they kept on coming,

completely transforming the area around the dam.

In the canyon closest to the river,

the Bureau of Reclamation had erected

two all-electric model communities

for their skilled employees.

Called Engineers Town and Mason City,

they boasted houses with carefully tended lawns,

tree-lined streets, flower growing contests,

and laws against drinking.

Up in the hills, beyond the western edge of the canyon,

the mass of common laborers, who were mostly single,

found what lodgings they could

in the raucous and ramshackle boomtown of Grand Coulee,

which featured a larger collection

of saloons and brothels than any other town in the West.

The heart of this Sodom and Gomorrah in the desert

was B Street, a dilapidated collection

of false-fronted bars and crib houses.

STEWART WHIPPLE: We'd drive up there

and park close to the bars and see all the activity.

Of course I was too young to get into any of those places.

And then they had great jazz music,

and we'd go through... in the alley and listen--

the doors would be all open

because it'd be 100 degrees outside.

Music was going on until 2:00 in the morning.

And then, of course,

we never parked in front of the door of these bars

because the fights would come out

and you didn't want anybody landing on the hoods of the car.

LAWNEY REYES: Lots of times, you'd be walking down the street

and they had these swing doors leading into the tavern

and you'd see two guys fighting,

come rolling out onto the boardwalk.

And they'd be beating each other to death.

And after they got through doing that,

then they'd go back in and drink some more.

HARDEN: Trucks used to go up and down the street

from the state health department,

telling people to be quiet

and avoid activity that spread social diseases.

NARRATOR: Far from the din and depravity of B Street,

the foundation of the dam now spanned the river,

and in the summer of 1938,

the time had come to raise it 550 feet into the air.

Seeking to reduce costs,

MWAK accepted an offer to merge with the huge conglomerate

run by the industrialist Henry Kaiser

that had just finished building Hoover Dam.

The new, even larger corporation

was called Consolidated Builders Incorporated, or CBI.

Their bid of $34,400,442 won the contract to finish the dam,

and over the next year and a half,

the work went on around the clock

as thousands of men per shift swarmed over the structure.

Seen from a distance,

the dam seemed to pulsate with energy,

as if it were alive.

Brightly illuminated

by thousands of floodlights at night,

it was filled with surreal shadows and otherworldly hues.

We had never seen anything like this before.

We had never seen so many people before.

But it was really something to see.

They had at one time close to 8,000 workers, you know, here.

NARRATOR: As the huge structure continued to rise out of the river,

the massive penstocks were installed

to funnel water to the generators,

the cofferdams removed, and the spillway and powerhouses

at the base of the dam constructed.

Superintendent Harvey Slocum never saw the dam

finally take shape.

During one particularly hot spell in Grand Coulee,

he'd sent a government-paid plumbing crew

to install sprinklers on the roof

of his favorite B Street brothel,

called the Swanee Rooms.

Grand Coulee's first air conditioning system

cost Slocum his job, but not his pride,

and he assailed a reporter for the Wenatchee World

for the coverage of his departure.

"You put in that paper of yours

that I was canned because of ill health," he complained.

"Now you know damn well I got canned because I was drunk."

Throughout the late 1930s,

work on the dam continued at a remarkable pace.

But preparations for filling the reservoir,

which would come to be known as Lake Roosevelt,

were another story.

The lake began to fill in March of 1940,

but the Bureau of Reclamation

got a late start clearing the area,

and the construction of the dam proceeded so quickly

that the rising waters behind it caught everyone by surprise.

CAWSTON: The people were given very short notice

that the flood was going to come.

And leadership called the people together

and said the landscape was going to change.

Many of our other traditional foods

that we would gather near the river would be now under river.

Many of the routes that we would take

to go and harvest other foods would be no more.

NARRATOR: One particularly vexing problem

was what to do with Indian grave sites

that were about to be submerged.

The bureau quickly hired a Spokane funeral home

for the removal work,

but more and more sites were discovered.

As they were identified,

scavengers plundered the graves for the artifacts buried there.

With time running out, and just over 1,300 graves moved so far,

the bureau simply ordered the work stopped

and let the waters continue their steady ascent.

REYES: When a lot of them saw the water rising,

they couldn't believe that this is happening, you know.

And the water had stopped flowing totally

and, of course, the Indians knew that the river was dead then.

You know, and this is very hard for the Indians to take

because it was a very beautiful river.

You know, it was moving, had a lot of power,

you know, you could hear it.

I can still hear it.

NARRATOR: As painful as it was for Native people to lose their land

and to suffer the desecration of their cemeteries,

it was equally hard to endure the loss of the salmon

that had defined their lives for centuries.

Every summer, the Colville tribe would gather

under the direction of the salmon chief,

and in a time-honored ritual,

harvest the incredible bounty of fish--

more than 300,000 annually.

The center of this activity

was a majestic series of ledges in the river,

known as Kettle Falls.

Kettle Falls was a renowned fishing village.

It had rocks protruding out over the river

so that you could fish in a traditional manner.

And it took great teaching.

So it was a skill that was taught

from older generation to younger generation.

NARRATOR: The bureau had installed ladders

to get fish over the much lower Bonneville Dam downstream

and considered a similar approach at Grand Coulee,

but the dam was simply too high, and the plans were put aside.

Bureau scientists hoped that hatcheries would be able

to replenish the populations of spawning salmon,

but the experiments failed to live up to expectations.

Now, the rising waters of the reservoir

were going to submerge the falls forever.

For three days, beginning on June 14, 1940,

a large crowd, mostly Native people,

but also reporters, politicians and local whites,

assembled at Kettle Falls.

The Indians called their gathering the Ceremony of Tears.

But in some respects, it was a surprisingly upbeat event.

There was a carnival, an all-outdoor Indian dance

and boxing matches.

In a speech heralding the arrival of cheap electricity,

Washington senator Clarence Dill hoped

that "Indians of future generations

will find the change made here a great benefit to the people."

The Spokane Spokesman-Review reported that, for their part,

the chiefs "told of their sadness

"of the passing of the falls, and some thought the government

should reimburse them for their loss."

CAWSTON: The loss of Kettle Falls

took away a part of the fabric of who I am,

because no longer can I bring my children to this place.

And no longer will they ever be able to see a river turn red

from the backs of the salmon,

because that's how thick they would run through Kettle Falls.

WHITE: What'll happen is once those dams start to back up,

these worlds where people had fished,

where families had rites,

where there are certain rituals that are exacted,

gradually as the water backs up,

those things vanish under the water.

REYES: You look at Lake Roosevelt today, it's dead.

To me there's no beauty whatsoever in Lake Roosevelt.

Some of the people I worked with, you know,

they'd take a large boat up Columbia

and spend a couple of weeks.

And they'd come back and tell me

they have never seen so much beauty, you know.

And I told them, you don't really know what beauty is,

you know, because I am old enough

to have seen it when it was alive.

NARRATOR: One anthropologist,

who had lived on the Colville reservation in the 1920s,

was stunned by the effect of Grand Coulee Dam.

It was built with

"a ruthless disregard for Indians as human beings,"

he wrote, creating a blockaded river

that "drowned the culture it had nourished."

HARDEN: For years they didn't have phone service.

They never got the cheap electricity

that the white people down where I lived got.

They were really, really dispossessed of everything

and were always an afterthought.

It took the federal government about a half-century

before they began to even pay the Indians

for the use of their land.

They got a settlement in the '90s,

gave them more than $50 million

plus $15 million a year.

REYES: It took us over 50 years to get the first payment, you know.

Now we know that we got screwed...

(laughs)

...because that electricity is worth a lot more than that.

But we have no power to fight, you know.

NARRATOR: By the close of 1940,

Grand Coulee Dam was nearing completion,

yet Roosevelt and his New Deal supporters

were on the defensive.

FDR's attempts at balancing the federal budget

in his second term had pushed the nation

back into recession.

For the next two years,

unemployment once again soared to as high as 19%.

All of the old arguments against Grand Coulee were resurrected.

The dam was ridiculed as an expensive boondoggle,

with no market for its electricity.

Even less popular was the idea

of an ambitious and costly irrigation scheme

whose benefits seemed less tangible every day.

Representative Culkin called the entire project

"a colossal un-economic folly born of deceit

of the distinguished occupant of the White House."

To date, the dam had dislocated the Colville Indians,

devastated the Columbia's salmon, and little else.

Seventy-two men had died on the project.

It appeared as though the critics

of the "white elephant in the desert"

might have been right after all.

March 22, 1941, marked the formal dedication

of Grand Coulee Dam.

Close to 8,000 people watched from the hills

as the band from Grand Coulee High School led a parade

before the official start of two small in-house generators.

Speeches were made, and a congratulatory telegram

from Roosevelt's interior secretary hailed the dam

as "the greatest single structure man has built."

HARDEN: One of the ways of selling it

was by talking about how big it was.

The Bureau of Reclamation described it

as simply the biggest thing on earth.

NARRATOR: The dam contained 11 million cubic yards of concrete,

enough to fill 50,000 boxcars in a train 500 miles long,

or pave a highway from New York City to Seattle,

down to Los Angeles and back to Manhattan again.

It had cost almost $163 million,

and CBI had finished it so fast

that $16 million in savings was returned to the U.S. Treasury.

Despite the impressive numbers, however,

the Roosevelt administration felt the need

to justify the dam to the American public

and turned to an unlikely ally.

In early May of 1941, a car pulled up in front of the dam

and out stepped the folk singer Woody Guthrie.

He had been hired by the Bonneville Power Authority,

the agency responsible for managing the electricity

generated by Grand Coulee

and the smaller Bonneville Dam downstream.

The BPA wanted to make a documentary film

promoting the virtues of public power,

and a musicologist at the Library of Congress

had recommended Guthrie's songs

to enliven the film's soundtrack.

Well, you know, Woody Guthrie was broke, too.

He auditioned in the offices of the BPA administrator

and got a contract.

I think Woody was also intoxicated

by the vision of the dam as providing the greatest good

to the greatest number of people,

and Woody as kind of an activist

on behalf of the working man,

that vision really appealed to him.

NARRATOR: Warned to avoid overtly political themes,

Guthrie was paid $266 and given a car for a month

to see what inspirational poetry he could extract

from the largest piece of concrete

ever created in America.

GUTHRIE: ¶ Roll on, Columbia, roll on ¶

¶ Roll on, Columbia, roll on ¶

¶ Your power is turning our darkness to dawn ¶

¶ Roll on, Columbia, roll on. ¶

HARDEN: He wrote 26 songs, many of them forgettable.

But he wrote one really good one, "Roll On, Columbia,"

which somehow captured the essence

of what they were trying to do.

¶ Roll on, Columbia, roll on... ¶

NARRATOR: But in the end,

it would not be Woody Guthrie's inspirational songs

that would earn Grand Coulee Dam its legitimacy.

(explosions, bombs whistling)

Only two months after the Bureau started up

its first massive generator inside the dam,

the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America was at war.

The "White Elephant Comes into its Own,"

announced the Saturday Evening Post,

admitting that the dam had gone "from a magnificent daydream

into one of the best investments Uncle Sam has ever made."

HARDEN: So all the critics of Grand Coulee Dam,

from the engineers in the East Coast

to some critics in the press to Republicans in Congress

to the private utilities,

they all shut up because all of a sudden you could see

that this was a strategic godsend for the war effort.

HAWLEY: Roosevelt and his boosters looked like geniuses.

It was really one of the most amazing coincidences

in American history.

The industry that becomes the major consumer

of Columbia electricity is the aluminum industry.

The aluminum industry is critical for the war effort.

We need it for bombers, we need it for all kinds of things.

It takes huge amounts of electricity to produce aluminum.

The Columbia is producing electricity.

NARRATOR: Grand Coulee's turbines helped

the Boeing Airplane Company in Seattle

churn out a third of the planes used in World War II,

as many as 16 Flying Fortresses a day.

In Portland, the dam's power

put 750 big ships on the high seas.

NARRATOR: The conflict had delayed the irrigation

of the Columbia Basin, but by any measure,

Grand Coulee played a significant role

in powering the American arsenal of democracy.

Like the current from some magic wand,

the dam's electricity

reached the modest cities of the Pacific Northwest

and sparked an astonishing fluorescence.

Over the course of the war,

Seattle's population swelled by more than a third,

and Portland's grew to nearly half a million residents.

A regional economy that had once been dominated

by fishing and timber now boasted an industrial base

to rival other major metropolitan areas

of the country.

O'MARA: Grand Coulee Dam, creator of cities.

These great dams of the West

are why we have the metropolitan areas of the West.

It is providing cheap power.

It is providing water not only to go in pipes,

but also to water lawns.

It's really fueling the suburban revolution.

NARRATOR: Grand Coulee's success created

an insatiable demand for electricity,

and in the ensuing decades

nine more dams were erected on the Columbia.

Even Grand Coulee itself was upgraded,

with a massive third powerhouse

that almost tripled the dam's output.

NARRATOR: Rufus Woods would live to see his dream

of Grand Coulee Dam completed,

but not the waters of the Columbia

flow onto the land he loved,

having died in 1950 at the age of 72.

WHITE: For Rufus Woods, the Grand Coulee Dam

was really ultimately about Wenatchee.

The problem is, Grand Coulee Dam

is not ultimately about Wenatchee.

HARDEN: Wenatchee was hoping to become an industrial center.

But it more or less became a place

where they were growing apples, which is what it was before.

And the cheap power went over the mountains

to Seattle to power the birth of a prosperous Pacific Northwest.

NARRATOR: All along the Columbia, the story of Grand Coulee Dam

has been one of dramatic achievements

and never-ending controversies.

Reviled by many for its mastery of the river,

it now generates enough clean power

to run the entire city of Seattle two times over.

The creator of a vast agricultural heartland,

its irrigation network now supports

less than 2,200 landowners.

Hailed for its power to transform a region,

it now serves as a reminder of the price of progress.

HARDEN: The Grand Coulee Dam is

the most wonderfully mixed metaphor you can imagine.

You know, it was a club to defeat the Japanese,

an elixir for the Great Depression,

it made the desert into a garden,

and it was a bit of cultural savagery

for the Indians affected

and environmental butchery for the salmon.

Amends have been made for some of the mistakes

and lessons have been learned.

And the benefits continue.

HAWLEY: I think if you look back at what was happening

in the country at the time, it was a country in crisis,

it was a people that no longer trusted their government

or felt that it worked,

and it was an effort by the federal government

to furnish the greatest number of people

with the greatest amount of good.

In that sense, yes, it was worth it.

But what are those consequences?

What are the values that were left behind?

What are the new values that we learned in the 70 years

since Grand Coulee was built?

It's easy for me to object to what we did to the river.

It's much harder for me to object

to what we hope will come out of what we did to the river.

And so I have the same ambivalence

as when I walk into those dams.

It's both a structure which seems in many ways

to have done great harm, but when you're in the middle of it,

you can't believe how powerful they are

and what a tremendous human accomplishment they are.

Both of them are true.

an Experience

is provided by:

American Experience is also made possible by:

And by contributions to your PBS station from:

.wgbh.org

There's more American Experience online at pbs.org,

where you can find out how to join the discussion

on Facebook and Twitter.

American Experience: "Grand Coulee Dam"

is available on DVD.

To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-play-PBS.

American Experience is also available for download

on iTunes.