Landscape Alteration as National Transformation in 1930s America

Boulder Dam, constructed in the 1930s to impound the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, was widely considered the most ambitious engineering project of its time. Built during the Great Depression, it used state-of-the-art technology to provide flood control, drinking and irrigation water, hydroelectricity, and recreational facilities on a scale unprecedented for any other water control project in the world. Now called Hoover Dam, this structure was heralded by the American government as a monument to American ingenuity and as a model for solving resource challenges through mammoth technological solutions. The dam also ushered in a three-decade frenzy of building large multi-purpose dams that have had profound and lasting effects on the urban, economic, and political geography of the modern American West. Although Boulder Dam was not supported unanimously during its authorization and construction phases, national media sources overwhelmingly championed its benefits. This paper examines the remarkably coherent narrative that emerged in coverage of Boulder Dam’s authorization, construction, dedication, and completion (1928-1936), identifying a rhetoric of national progress that emerged through media attention to landscape change. In mainstream serials with national circulation, writers subtly linked the technological transformations of the Colorado River, Black Canyon, and the wider desert Southwest to the transformation and emergence of the American nation. This narrative effect was so influential that even opponents of the dam felt compelled to endorse its rhetorical undercurrents. In fact, the narrative of rational technological progress through landscape change was so powerfully ingrained in mainstream media representations of Boulder Dam that virtually no opposition to the dam has been possible