Water Resources People and Issues
long time. Henry Dworshak was their conservative senator before Frank
Church was elected.
Uh-huh. Well, Senator Dworshak you're talking about. He was with Idaho
Power? I didn't know that.
A: No, he wasn't with them, but he supported their position on the Hells Canyon
fight.
I see.
A: So it was definitely a pubic versus private power fight. And Idaho basically
kind of resisted federal power-they wanted to have the Bureau build irrigation
projects and subsidize the projects but they didn't want to have any federal
hydroelectric power; the general tenor of people in Idaho was against, public
power. The support for Hells Canyon came from the Simplots and the people
that could see a chance to make some money and to put some pressure on the
Idaho Power Company to get concessions on power rates and the irrigation
pumpers. They were the ones that supported Hells Canyon, and the municipal
and the REA cooperatives. The preponderance of the testimony in the
congressional hearings was favorable to the project.
But when Eisenhower came in, there was the feeling that the federal
government had gotten too big. The same as, or similar to what Ronald Reagan
said. But it was much less intensive, and I don't think that it ever got to the
stage that the McCarthy hearings did-they were much more on the overall
political issue of communists influencing the government.
Would
Now, Senator Knowland, when he wrote his book,
was where the issue of communism or socialism showed up much
more-in California. But I don't think he was very sincere about it-he didn't
have any problem with the Corps of Engineers building Pine Flat Dam or
anybody building a dam that made water available, as long as you didn't make
the water users pay for it. There wasn't any problem about the government
building dams. It was just the idea of trying to make these people pay, and the
people had an argument with the Bureau.
They said, "We've been pumping this water all the time. We're pumping
now-and you're going to sell us water? We don't want it. We shouldn't have
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