Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karen M. O'Neill is Assistant Professor of Human Ecology and an associate member of the Graduate Program in Sociology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Masterfully weaving historical details, Karen M. O'Neill traces the unanticipated expansion of the federal government's role in 'controlling' the Mississippi and Sacramento rivers. In this era of rising hurricane-induced floodwaters, she offers deep insight into the tensions between local and national agencies, and between the state and private interests."--Allan Schnaiberg, coauthor of "Urban Recycling and the Search for Sustainable Community Development"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Rivers by Design

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Tables and Maps..........................................................................ixPreface..................................................................................xiAcknowledgments..........................................................................xxiI Rivers and State Authority.............................................................1Chapter 1. Infrastructure Builds the State...............................................3Chapter 2. The Founding Principles of River Development..................................13II Regional Competition and the Rise of the Flood Control Campaign.......................27Chapter 3. The Mississippi River: Becoming the Nation's River............................31Chapter 4. The Mississippi River: Resentment Leading to Civil War........................43Chapter 5. The Mississippi River: Postwar Reunification, Postwar Aid.....................56Chapter 6. The Sacramento River: Miners versus Farmers...................................68Chapter 7. The Sacramento River: Capitalists Unify for Development.......................80III Redesigning Rivers in the National Interest..........................................97Chapter 8. Federal Aid for the Mississippi and Sacramento Rivers.........................99Chapter 9. The Fully Designed River......................................................128Chapter 10. A Nationwide Program for Flood Control.......................................150Chapter 11. Rivers by Design.............................................................179Appendix 1. Mississippi Valley River Improvement Conventions.............................187Appendix 2. Mississippi River Levee Association, Executive Committee.....................197Notes....................................................................................199Bibliography.............................................................................243Index....................................................................................265

Chapter One

The flood control system built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers is rivaled only by the system protecting the Netherlands. But while the Netherlands could scarcely exist without river levees and seawalls, the United States has plenty of land outside of floodplains. It is not obvious why the United States government would take on the responsibility of providing flood control and flood insurance for lands along all major rivers.

As later chapters will explain, demands for federal government flood control aid by landowners, shippers, financiers, and politicians from the Sacramento and Mississippi river valleys made the local and regional problem of flooding into a national responsibility. Far from being imposed by the central government, the flood control program was resisted by Congress and the Army Corps of Engineers. Activists first established laws and public works programs at the local and subnational state government levels to assist private flood control work. Once the federal program was created, federal managers had to work closely with local contractors, levee districts, and subnational state governments to build federal levees and weirs. This activity articulates the central government with local and subnational state government institutions, and it articulates the government with landowners. Organizational articulation is one possible institutional form that arms central government authority in regions that are physically distant from the capital, even though in the case of flood control such institutions were not imposed from the center.

This chapter outlines the broad processes of modern state building and class formation affecting the way the U.S. government manages land and resources, setting a conceptual framework for analyzing why the pattern of articulation emerged in the flood control program. Establishing and sustaining territorial power is a defining feature of modern states. Studying relations between the central government and distant regions is one way of considering how the physical integration of territory contributes to modern state power. Centralizing authorities typically repress internal challengers and set up border garrisons and administrative controls to manage outlying regions. Effective rule depends, however, on a wider range of activities, including economic development projects, changes in the law, and discursive work. These activities produce institutional forms that manage interactions between the central government and outlying regions. In the case of flood control, they produced an institutional form that articulated the federal, state, and local governments.

People in outlying regions influence the nature and timing of activities that build government power, and they even initiate efforts that end up arming central government control. Like many other land and resource programs in the United States, the flood control program was created because provincial elites demanded aid. Landowners, shippers, and merchants from the lower Mississippi and Sacramento river valleys argued that the federal government had a duty to control floods that threatened valley farming and shipping and that hindered participation in the national economy.

Two features relevant to the control of outlying territories are special to this case, namely that it concerns land policy and that it unfolds in a country with a federal system. Land, resource, and infrastructure policies often produce visible symbols of central government power that become essential for sustaining daily life in a locality. These policies also require modifying legal and social systems that regulate access to land. Studying a federal system highlights how the authority and power of a central government can be extended by responding effectively to local demands and by incorporating local institutions.

These features of the flood control case draw our attention to the organizational, legal, and cultural boundaries between the modern state and society, rather than to the central government's bureaucracies, budgets, or armies. The flood control program is what George Steinmetz calls a "structure-changing policy," one which alters the way subsequent policies are produced by altering the perceived boundaries between the modern state and society. The flood control program altered boundaries by redefining the government's political duty to assist landowners, while giving the impression that it was merely ensuring some morally prior landowner right to property that is ready for productive use. In particular, politicians and judges in the early nineteenth century had interpreted the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution as limiting federal river work to navigation projects that facilitated the distribution of goods. By contrast, flood control projects would directly improve the way goods were produced (especially crops), not just the way they were distributed, and would directly benefit landowners.

Flood control activists and sympathetic officials did not set out to change the nature of property and the state. Neither did they anticipate that the path to success would involve temporarily defining levee repair as navigation work, trading votes for regionally specific development aid in Congress, calling for national rather than merely regional flood control aid, emphasizing...