Gray Brechin, PhD. Historical Geographer and Author University of California, Berkeley
"Dr. Gray Brechin is an historical geographer, a frequent radio and television guest, and a popular public speaker. He is currently a visiting scholar in the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography and founder and project scholar of California's Living New Deal Project." - Gray Brechin.net
Date of interview: MAY 9, 2011. Can you please describe what role William Hammond Hall played in the debate?
Okay, now I should ask, have you seen my book?
Yes, actually, we just bought it on the Kindle reader, and I read the chapter on Hetch Hetchy and some on the San Francisco debate.
Okay, good. William Hammond Hall was a great water engineer; he actually worked all over the world. But he was mostly based in San Francisco, and his interests were mainly in the West. Although he was a state engineer, he also moonlighted by working for private individuals as a consultant. His dealings were a little bit shady, but it seems like everyone’s were at that time it seems. So he was actually fronting for three men, who were essentially the founders of Pacific Gas and Electric. He had the water rights to Cherry Creek which is a tributary; it may enter the Tuolumne just below the dam sight. But it was essential for the project because Hetch Hetchy is at least as much about energy as it is about water, which something that a lot of people don’t understand. He had the rights for that, but he was fronting for the three large capitalists. They ran into trouble as many people did after the 1906 Earthquake and fire and they sold their interests to his cousin, John Hayes Hammond, who was probably the world’s most famous mining engineer, than Herbert Hoover. Hammond was working behind the scenes with Paul out in front, and it turned out to be a very embarrassing position for Paul to be in. At the same time, I should say that all of Paul’s papers are at the Van Croft library here at UC Berkeley, and I’ve gone through a lot of them, but there’s still a lot that remained to be drawn through. There’s no biography for William Hammond Hall, so once you apply to UC Berkeley, come up here and do an autobiography on Hall. He’s a fascinating character, very human and also very smart. He was constantly adding to his unpublished autobiography, so I got a lot of my information from that. The thing that he said that really struck me, because this is a very smart man, is that the Hetch Hetchy project made no economic sense. The people of SF had no idea what they were being dragged into, involving the original bond measure restoring Hetch Hetchy. And I think that’s one of the most telling things about the project. Now, I just have to do a little aside here. The book was published in 1999, and I think there’s a new book out there. What you learn about history is that it’s constantly being revised, because we learn more things as people do different interpretations. You should look into that book about Hetch Hetchy; there are several environmental histories about the Sierra Nevada. The information that I got is that Paul felt it made no economic sense, and that’s sort of what the conclusion I came to in going through the various proposals for the water supply for SF at that time. There are quite a lot of studies being done in the late 19 century about where a growing SF would get its water from. The Hetch Hetchy source is not often mentioned because it was considered so remote and a difficult engineering project. If you look at a map, the Tuolumne is fairly south of SF, and it makes more sense to get rivers like the American or even the Sacramento, rivers to the North, you could bring them into SF under the Bay. But they didn’t do any of that, because they went to one of the most difficult rivers to get to. In some ways, it’s good that they did that, because SF’s water is some of the purest in the world, because there was no mining on the Tuolumneriver, in some of the other rivers, there was a lot of mining. So SF got a tremendous water supply at a great expense, which is why he said that. So when he said that it made no economic sense, he was somebody worth listening to. So that was a very long answer.
That actually sort of answers another one of my questions about the economic sense of the project. I’m actually trying to reach out to some other people at the Metropolitan water district, but your interview is certainly going to help me a lot.
Oh great, thanks.
Okay, so my next question is which way do you think the debate was leaning before the earthquake in 1906?
Well, SF’s leaders, the point of my book is that cities don’t do anything on their own, they’re driven by a small group of people who make the decisions, and they owned the newspapers and the mass media, so a quote in my book is the “thought-shapers” and it’s about the men who own the newspapers and how they shape the mass opinion, and we can come back to that later on. I think that before the earthquake, they were determined to get water from the Sierra, other people had different ideas, but Phelan was a very powerful man, and he was determined to get the water from the Tuolumne. But I don’t think the opinion was unanimous to get the water from the Tuolumne, there were a lot of other options. Things changed dramatically after the city burned down, then Phelan could solidify the opinion to get it from the Tuolumne, because it is a large river and it would have been an assured supply of fresh water. But it was also going to be a large supply of electricity for SF as well. So I think there’s a real difference before and after 1906. The arguments over Tuolumne all centered on making sure a big fire would never happen in SF again. So before 1906, you couldn’t make that argument.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and clears up some of my thoughts. Do you think that Muir and the preservationists could have used diplomatic tactics in order to win over San Francisco and the rest of the nation?
No, John Muir was just too strange; he’s a very unusual person, especially for that time. When you look at the newspapers and the mainstream opinion at that time, if people believed in conservation, it was the kind of utilitarian conservation that was represented by Gifford Pinchot. If people believed in conservation, it was the kind of conservation they believed in. Muir came out of left field, he believed in preservation. At the time, it was very unusual, Muir was kind of a mystic, and a nature mystic, it all kind of merges with the Christianity that he grew up with, because he saw God in nature. There weren’t many others like him at that time; there were a few people in the Sierra Club. I quote the secretary of the Sierra Club, he wrote a letter saying how dangerous it was for a professional man to side with Muir at the time, because the overwhelming opinion was against Muir and for damning Hetch Hetchy so it was very dangerous. There were still people who did it. Muir’s main support was on the East Coast, he got a very influential magazine called The Century and the editor of that magazine, or the publisher, was Robert Underwood Johnson, who was a very powerful literary figure in the US. So the opposition to Hetch Hetchy came from outside California, and I think that was the main reason it was held up in Washington, because there was strong opposition in Washington. I think that’s one of the reasons Muir was so hated in SF, because he was this break in doing what the leaders of SF wanted to do.
Wow. That was really eye-opening.
Anoushka, do you know the American Experience on PBS?
No.
You can go to PBS.org, it’s a whole series of hour long documentaries, and about three weeks ago, they did a new documentary on John Muir. It’s an hour and a half actually; they have an actor impersonate Muir. You may even be able to watch that on your computer.
Thank you, I’ll look into that, and something that would be really beneficial to me. In what ways do you think the city of SF employed tactics after the 1906 earthquake?
Well largely by using mass media. There were four morning newspapers in SF at that time and the newspapers had tremendous power to shape people’s minds and there was the Chronicle which is the only newspaper we still have. The Examiner was owned by Heart. All of these papers were in the same vicinity, called Newspaper angle, at the third and Marked Street. Nearby was the bulletin, the working man’s newspaper. All of them were in favor of damming Hetch Hetchy, because they saw it as progress, and making SF the leading city of the west coast and the Pacific, and they needed an assured supply of water. All of the very powerful men who owned the newspapers were related to the businesses of the city, like the bankers. What struck me was that they were all unanimous for the Hetch Hetchy supply after 1906. They were constantly running editorials, headlines, and they made very interesting editorial cartoons. They showed how the opinions were molded by the mass media. I think that the bond measure passed by a margin of 20:1, which is extraordinary, which shows how the voters were brainwashed into believing that the Hetch Hetchy alternative was the only one. Remember that $45 million was a huge amount of money at that time, that was 1910 when they voted, remembers it was only 4 years after the city was destroyed. So to vote that much money at that time is an amazing thing, with that 20:1 margin.
I recall you mentioning how SF wanted to become an empire in the US. Do you think that when they lowered the price to $45 million, they were well aware that it would cost almost triple that?
I don’t know that they knew it would triple that, they knew it would cost more. And this is an old trick. You low-blow the bid that the voters vote for, knowing that in fact it will cost more, but once it gets started, you can’t stop it. I’ll tell you a story a friend told me. But he used an oral history that was done, we have here at Berkeley a very good oral history project where interviewers go out and interview powerful people. And the interviewer was interviewing Governor Pat Brown, back in the 1960s, about the California Water Project. She got him to admit that when the voters of CA voted the bonds for it, at that time it was a huge bond measure, he knew that was only the beginning of it and he wanted this to be a monument to himself. He actually said that in the interview. So that’s actually fairly common. We are currently rebuilding the Bay Bridge because of seismic problems here, and it’s costing about 3 times what the original estimate was. Now I don’t know whether they knew it was going to cost so much but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
Do you think an ulterior motive for damming the valley was to raise land values for wealthy land owners?
Yes. And I think I am the first person to say that about Hetch Hetchy in my book. What I propose, is that the reason why they chose this very difficult site is the route of the aqueduct. The aqueduct comes in through what was then the world’s longest tunnel. It’s almost 30 miles long, through the coast range. And it goes through the Santa Clara Valley, and then up the peninsula. Whereas if you had gotten any of the northern rivers, the water would’ve come directly to SF under the bay or at the mid-peninsula. By coming up the peninsula, it immediately raised all of the land value up the peninsula. And many of the wealthiest men in SF owned big estates down the peninsula that ranged from hundreds even thousands of acres, like Senator Stanford, who had 9,000 acres of land down the peninsula. The only thing from keeping those from being sub-divided and separated into more cities was water and electricity too. So one thing was that if you could bring in water and electricity that land becomes a fortune. So it’s really the same story as what happened in southern CA, where the water didn’t come directly into Los Angeles. It made a detour through the San Fernando Valley because the people who were behind that water project had brought up the San Fernando Valley when it was still desert. So when the water and electricity arrived, they became much richer and that included a correspondence with the family that owned the LA times.
How does O’Shaughnessy and Hetch Hetchy compare to Mulholland and the LA aqueduct?
It’s pretty much the same thing. What struck me is how similar they are. The difference is the federal government was actively involved in helping LA get the water from the Owens River because the Bureau of Reclamation had just been formed. At that time, by Senator Newlands who William Hammond Hall was working for. Newlands was a real estate leader when he was in Congress but he always knew that you had to get water to the land to make it worth more money. It was better if the taxpayers did that than if private capitalists did. Water projects are very expensive. So if you can get the taxpayers to cover the overhead. You get the profit without having to spend the overhead. So what happened in the Owens River is that they used the Bureau of Reclamation, which was only supposed to help small farmers who lived on their land, in this first act of the Bureau the water instead helped land speculators build a very large city. It’s an amazing thing. The same thing was going on here, except that the Bureau as far as I know, wasn’t involved in this. However the department of the Interior was. The secretary of the Interior had to give his permission for the valley to be dammed. This is interesting because there were 4 secretaries of the Interior during Hetch Hetchy who kept going back and forth with yes and no. One that I really came to admire was Ethan Allen Hitchcock. He was a man of great integrity and he said that it was absolutely illegal to dam that valley because it was in a protected National Park and it couldn’t be done. He stood firm on that.
What kind of publicity campaigns and newspapers were sort of run for the debate besides those SF newspapers that you listed earlier? And who owned them?
There were the three great families that owned the three major morning newspapers. And then there was a working man’s newspaper, The Bulletin, which was run by Premont Older. All of them were in favor of getting water from Hetch Hetchy.
Earlier we were talking about Muir. Public opinion was turned against Muir, how did this happen?
By constant attacks on him in editorials, and reporting and editorial cartoons, the dirtiest campaign was of muir in a dress trying to sweep back the flood tides of Hetch Hetchy, I think I have the cartoon of him in the book, and he is wearing women’s clothes, even though he has a beard, and that is what you heard all the time, that they would call them would be nature lovers in sierra club where-, short haired women and long haired men, that was the term used- so there was a kind of gender confusion with a bit of suggestion that anyone who did that might be gay and muir was accused of flaunting verbal lingerie. So you can see that it is a not so subtle way of insulting or demeaning him. He is womanly as He thinks nature is more important humans and buildings. That was a very common tactic.
That is so sad.
Muir is a very unusual character, religious mystics, in this case a nature religious mystic will always have a hard time in a very materialistic culture such as ours because people do not understand them and will be always suspicious of them.
Do you think we have enough laws in place today, to prevent another dam in a national park?
There has not been another dam since then, and so I think that is Muir’s greatest accomplishment, unfortunately he did not live to see it. I have been involved too. I am 63, and in my time, I got involved in conservation in high school , probably at your age, around 16, 17 years of age, that was because there was a proposal around that time, to put dams in grand canyon and in various other places too. Glen canyon dam was put in a beautiful canyon, upriver from Grand canyon NP. But it was not a national park at that time. David Bower or modern day John Muir of Sierra club said that if he had seen that before, he would have put an enormous fight, to make sure that the dam did not get built. He felt that in some ways, it was more beautiful than the Grand Canyon itself. But because of the precedence of HETCH HETCHY, those dams were not built in Grand Canyon and other proposals to build other dams were defeated. As I said, We are very materialistic culture, but once you designate a piece of wilderness or sometimes it is not wilderness, when you draw a boundary and call it a national park, it becomes as close to holy land that our culture has, and people regard it very differently, than it didn’t have the line drawn around it.
Yeah, it sort of opens your eyes, how the world saw of Hetch Hetchy, and how less people got impacted and I wish that more people would learn about it.
I think they are learning about it, because there is a campaign to undam Hetch Hetchy, people are learning as people who are trying to get it done are educating them. That is a good thing. Another example like I would be our city parks, in San Francisco it is golden gate, in New York, it is central park and where you are in san Diego, it is the balboa park. If people propose to build things, there will be big opposition to it. People will not like if they try to put enormous buildings in the park now. You are in San Diego, aren’t you?
I have looked into talking with Restore HETCH HETCHY. I have emailed Mr. Marshall at Restore HETCH HETCHY. They gave me new resources and told me about dinners. I wish I lived in San Francisco sometimes because of all the great opportunities they have presented me with
Maybe they will give you a scholarship to come up there…
I have been through your book can you use the images and quotes from your book to use on my website?
Absolutely, that is what knowledge is all about. We need to share it.