Reflections on Arizona's Legislative Watermaster: Carl Hayden and the Central Arizona Project
By
Jack L. August, Jr., Ph.D.
Northern Arizona University-Yavapai Statewide Campus

For the Arizona Humanities Council December 2001 newsletter:

As a young boy growing up in the desert oasis of Phoenix, Arizona, in the 1960s, I found it difficult to escape the economic and political significance of water.  A land developer's dream, Phoenix reveled in its newfound importance as a resort center, crossroads of regional commerce, and desert metropolis.  An ideology of growth and development permeated the city; happy sunbaked political and business leaders crowed about optimistic growth projections and an unlimited economic future.  On the occasional two-hour drive from Phoenix to Tucson, back then, the importance of water was even more pronounced.  Vast sections of central Arizona that had once been arid desert had been turned into productive fields of cotton, sugar beets, and cantaloupe, largely because of the complex irrigation and delivery systems spiraling out of the various dams erected by the federal government during the first half of the twentieth century.

Water is the environmental factor that above everything else has made possible the settlement of the American West.  Entire communities - from Phoenix to Tucson to Denver to Los Angeles‹have been built upon the availability of relatively inexpensive "federal" water.  Diverting that water to once arid regions, however, has required the construction of enormous dams and aqueduct systems, such as Grand Coulee, Hoover, Glen Canyon, and the recently completed Central Arizona Project, which supplies Colorado River water to the desert urban centers of Phoenix and Tucson and the agricultural reaches in between these cities.

These monuments to the engineering profession have resulted in the creation of a remarkable infrastructure that, in turn, has tapped most of the existing water sources in the American West.  At the same time farm communities and post-World War II industrial developments have a growing need for increasing amounts of water.  Indeed concerns have arisen among public officials, politicians, business leaders and environmentalists as to whether the water-based communities of the western U.S. can continue to expand as they have in the past. 

According to former Arizona governor and Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, we have entered the final phase of a productive century of federally sponsored reclamation in the American West.  With the development of a few authorized dams and delivery systems, the era of the construction of the great reclamation project will come to an end.  A major contributor to this twentieth century phenomenon was longtime senator Carl Hayden (1877-1972) of Arizona.  A native of the Salt River Valley, Hayden experienced the often-cruel vicissitudes of flood and drought in the arid Southwest.  He saw Arizona grow from a raw territory of a few thousand hardy pioneers to a vigorous state with millions of citizens within its borders. 

Central to Hayden's efforts in the service of his Arizona constituents was the development and use of the Colorado River, the controversial interstate stream that serves the needs of seven basin states (Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico) and Mexico.   The most striking feature of Hayden's political career, perhaps, was its longevity.  He spent sixty-seven of his ninety-four years of life in public office.  Between 1900 and 1912 he learned the art of politics by serving in a variety of local and county offices; Tempe town councilman, Maricopa County treasurer, and Maricopa County sheriff.  When statehood was achieved in the latter year, voters elected their native son  to the House of Representatives, kept him there for seven terms, then in 1926 promoted him to the U.S. Senate, where he remained until his retirement in 1969.

While Hayden developed a renowned expertise in the field of federal reclamation, he could also boast of several other areas of legislative proficiency that aided the growth and development as well as the conservation and preservation of the American West.   Hayden, for example, was one of the great leaders in federal highway legislation, co-authoring the New Deal measure, the Hayden-Cartwright Act of 1934, which established the formula for the distribution of federal aid for highways to the states on the basis of area rather than population.  This legislation helped tremendously in providing transportation links between the West's far-flung cities.  He was a sponsor in 1919 of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, extending the right of suffrage to women, and he sponsored and managed the House bill to establish Grand Canyon National Park.  Other broad areas of federal legislation attracted his attention: forest conservation, national parks, labor, public lands, agriculture, and veterans affairs, to name a few.  Significantly, most of these issues were crucial to the growth and development, as well as to the conservation and preservation of the American West. 

Water, however, and its use and distribution, more than any other issue, lay at the heart of Hayden's public career.  He became most famous as a statesman who helped bring water and life to a vast region of the country.  Unquestionably, the fortunes of his Arizona pioneer family were tied to water, or more specifically, its diversion onto land.  During his first term in the House (1912-1914) he further displayed his understanding of the importance of water to his home state by obtaining authorization of an engineering study that led to the construction of Coolidge Dam on the Gila River and the San Carlos Irrigation Project.  He also helped shape federal reclamation policy in its early years by writing and securing passage of the provision that allows local water-user associations throughout the country to take over the care, maintenance, and operation of federal reclamation projects.  In nearly six decades in Congress, reclamation issues occupied more of his attention than any other legislative subject, and Colorado River development took up a significant portion of that time. 

On February 14, 1962, on the fiftieth anniversary of statehood, Hayden, in an exceedingly rare instance of public self-evaluation, commented upon his most important contribution to Arizona‹bringing federal reclamation to the Grand Canyon State.    "The basic factor in making Arizona's spectacular agricultural and industrial development was the Reclamation Act of 1902, sponsored by the great and energetic president, Theodore Roosevelt," he told the Phoenix Arizona Republic.  That law made possible the use of federal funds to develop water for irrigation and hydroelectric power, both of which were essential to the state's prosperity.  "Needless to say," Hayden added, "I have helped that basic program move forward."  The then eighty-four year-old senator concluded his comments, not by dwelling on past accomplishments but rather urging Arizonans to look toward their future. "I hope to see the day when central Arizona and other important areas of the state have the water required to continue the pattern of growth and progress attained in the first half-century," he challenged his constituents. 

The senator alluded to Arizona's decades-old obsession, the Central Arizona Project (CAP), which today channels Arizona's hard-won share of Colorado River water to the central portions of the state, including the growing metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Tucson.  The recently completed project not only will reshape the nature of federal reclamation in the West in the twenty-first century but also will impact the delicate desert environment in countless ways.  Today, Arizonans take for granted CAP, yet know little of its historical and legislative origins, many of which reach deep into the early history of the arid Southwest. 

Hayden won his most gratifying legislative victory in 1968 when CAP was authorized through passage of the Colorado River Basin Project Act.  Yet the man described by one California historian as the country's "legislative water master" and architect of the New West was a product of the legendary Old West.  Carl Hayden, born at Hayden's Ferry, Arizona Territory, on October 2, 1877, reached adulthood before the twentieth century; before women's suffrage, or collective bargaining; before Anzio or Alamogordo.  He grew to maturity on the edges of the American frontier, where his parents and austere desert environment shaped his character.   Undeniably, Hayden focused his considerable energies on the single, most important factor confronting his arid land constituents‹the search for large quantities of fresh water.

Throughout his congressional career he represented the "heart of the West," which was to historian Walter Prescott Webb, "a desert unqualified and absoluteŠa gigantic fire," that defied human settlement and economic development, yet vividly defined the region as a unique place on the American landscape.  From Hayden's perspective, Arizona and the Southwest were deficient and the most notable deficiency was water.  Much of his public career, as expemplified in the fight for CAP, was devoted to rectifying this deficiency.

Underlying the mad scramble for Colorado River water was the peculiarly western obsession with economic growth and development.   This almost myopic quest in the environmentally sensitive central Arizona desert has come under close scrutiny in recent years.  Scholars from a variety of disciplines have revisited the era of the western water wars and the orgy of dam building and have come away with profound questions regarding the long-term effects of environmental manipulation and the ultimate fate of the Colorado River, which one interpreter describes as "A River No More."  As scholars and politicians reassess and revise their environmental and economic interpretations of federal reclamation in the twentieth century, Carl Hayden will stand out as one public figure who in many ways symbolized this historical process in the American West.  Without question water has been among the region's most critical concerns throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  No doubt it will continue to influence the direction of public policy in the region in the twenty-first century as well.