STATES & CITIES: Crashing Echo

When an economy-minded Congress lopped off a ponderous $83 million from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation, the resulting crash echoed throughout the West like the crash of a felled Sequoia. Four Republican, four Democratic governors of California, Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Utah and Washington rushed to Seattle’s Olympic Hotel to take counsel. Arizona and Nevada sent representatives.

The meeting was short and sharp. Washington’s Mon C. Wallgren declared that such cuts, which hit irrigation and power projects, reminded him of a home-builder leaving a dwelling half-finished. California’s Earl Warren chimed: “These are not appropriations . . . but investments.”

They thought they saw the villain—Eastern capital, which, they said, wanted to keep the West shorn of power, reduced to a mere producer of raw materials for the industrial East. Said Oregon’s Republican Governor Earl Snell: “If the East looks on the West as an insignificant colony, it’s certainly time … to make known the united power of the West.”

At week’s end Governor Warren was in Washington. The others were packing their suitcases.

In Washington, Republican Senators rubbed their chins and looked at the ceiling. Politically, the Western states were on the fence, they recalled. Their loss in 1948 could cost the Republicans the presidency. Perhaps the cut did not have to be all of $83 million. Undoubtedly, something could be worked out.