National Affairs: Cross Issue

“Here is an issue,” cried California’s white-crested Senator Hiram W. Johnson to some Los Angeles lunchers last week, “on which no man, I do not care a rap who he is, should be silent. It will be the issue in the next Senate, when the fight for Boulder Dam will be up again. No man on earth is so sacrosanct but that his position on the Power Trust and Boulder Dam should be made plain to the people of the United States!”

“Stand aside, ye flabby ones! Stand aside ye fainthearted, ye who fear reprisals from power corporations and their wealthy and powerful allies! Ye who are unafraid will go forward with us in this issue that must be settled right if the Nation is to preserve a Government of the people, free and unfettered!”

As the lunchers well knew, Senator Johnson had been fighting for years to have the Federal Government block up the Colorado River with the Boulder Dam (between Arizona and Nevada) and give Los Angeles a bigger & better water and power supply. They also knew that the Issue forecast by Senator Johnson is against what is commonly called the Power Trust, meaning the potent, propagandizing private interests who have sought to prevent the erection of a Federal project on the Colorado.

The lunchers also knew that this particular speech opened Senator Johnson’s campaign for reelection, a campaign in which he was supposed to be fighting beside and with California’s favorite son, Nominee Hoover. The only conclusion the lunchers could draw was that Nominee Hoover, in conference with Senator Johnson last fortnight, must have agreed to be on the Federal-operation side of the Boulder Dam question.

This conclusion, if correct, constituted one of the week’s large pieces of news. Nominee Hoover is the heir of the Coolidge Administration. The Coolidge attitude on Boulder Dam has never been positively known. Toward the so-called Power Trust, President Coolidge has not, however, been cold. He pocket-vetoed a Muscle Shoals measure calling for Federal instead of private operation. He chose for Secretary of the Interior and ex-officio member of the Federal Power Commission, a man, Roy Owen West, who has long been the friend and frequently the employe of Samuel Insull of Chicago, the most potent public utility privateer of them all.

Considered as an Issue, Boulder Dam is not an inter-party but an intraparty Issue, a cross issue. Loudly as California’s Johnson may roar against the Power Trust, there are other Republicans, for example Utah’s Smoot, equally effective in its defense. Among Democrats, the same split exists. Smith Democrats, if their chief continues consistent with his State record, will be found on the Federal-operation side, with the Johnsons and (unless signs have misled) the Hoovers. Opposed will be old-linesters, like Maryland’s Bruce, who think that the Government should be kept from stepping into fields, or streams, ideal for privateering.