"Donald J. Pisani's history of perhaps the boldest economic and social program ever undertaken in the United States - to reclaim and cultivate vast areas of previously unusable land - shows in fascinating detail how ambitious government programs fall prey to the power of local interest groups and the federal system of governance itself.

The federal Bureau of Reclamation grew out of a grand scheme to remodel the society of the arid, unsettled West and jumpstart an economy stalled by the devastating depression of the 1890s. From the adoption of the Reclamation Act of 1902 to the completion in 1935 of Boulder, renamed Hoover, Dam, Pisani traces the story of the federal irrigation program and its relationship to the allotment of Indian land, as well as to hydroelectric power and flood control policy.".

"Unlike most historians, Pisani, views the Reclamation Act's mandate not as evidence of a break with the past but as a continuation of the previous century's laissez-faire natural resource policies. The bureau's bold irrigation plans, he says, were rooted more in nineteenth-century individualism than in the twentieth-century ethics of cooperation and planning, more in a society of competing individuals than in an integrated commonwealth of small farmers.

What began as the underwriting of a variety of projects to create family farms and farming communities had become by the 1930s a massive public works and regional development program, with an emphasis on the urban as much as the rural West."--BOOK JACKET.