Barreling along with John L. McClellan

Some mornings I walk over to Capitol Avenue and Ferry Street to look at the sunrise. Southbound from the new I-30 bridge, cars speed along the temporary off-ramp, driven by people bound for work. If they’re coming in from Cabot, they’ve already driven for at least 20 minutes, passing through very close concrete barriers and a nerve-wracking construction zone.

Driving requires attention. It’s work. It adds up.

To modify a line attributed to Churchill, we make our infrastructure, and afterwards our infrastructure makes us. So every existing work of infrastructure deserves our retrospective attention, our historical scrutiny. What is it, what’s it for, who designed it, who built it, who paid for it, and why? What was there before?

Tuesday will be the 60th anniversary of the dedication of the Greers Ferry dam, which was attended by John F. Kennedy just weeks before his assassination. Oct. 4 will be the 55th anniversary of John L. McClellan’s dedication of the David D. Terry Lock and Dam at Little Rock. And on Oct. 12, at the Old State House Museum’s Annual Supper, a panel (Ed Bethune, Austin Booth, French Hill, Joe David Rice, and Archie Schaffer) will talk about the fight to stop the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from building two dams on the Buffalo River.

The history of major dams in Arkansas begins not with the Corps of Engineers but with Arkansas Power and Light Company. On the Ouachita River, AP&L built Remmel Dam in 1924 and Carpenter Dam in 1931; those dams impounded Lakes Catherine and Hamilton respectively, but the generation of electricity was the sole purpose for their creation. They have little flood control capacity, and recreational use of the lakes was an incidental benefit. (Remmel Dam was not the first hydroelectric dam in Arkansas. The dam at Mammoth Spring, originally built in 1888, was converted to hydroelectric power in the early 1900s, but its impact on the geography of its surrounding area was comparatively minor.)

Later and more elaborate dam-building projects would be paid for by the federal government and justified initially by the need for flood control, though their missions expanded to include navigation, hydroelectric power, and recreation.

Arkansas has known some terrible floods; the worst were in 1927 and 1937. To anyone familiar with the histories of those floods, it might seem an act of cold-hearted misanthropy to question the wisdom of federal flood-control infrastructure programs. But I would love to read a study that sought to determine if direct aid to flood victims, followed by a generous program of crop insurance, would have been less expensive than attempting to prevent losses by building dams.

Floods do have their purposes. As William Alexander Percy said of the Mississippi, “Every few years it rises like a monster from its bed to vex and sweeten the land it has made.”

★★★

“Striking opposites left mark on state: McMath set an example in valor and principle, while McClellan’s contribution was literally more concrete.” So reads the headline of a 1991 column by Tom Dearmore, a Mountain Home native who cut his teeth at the Baxter Bulletin before writing for various eastern publications, the Arkansas Gazette, and, finally, the San Francisco Examiner.

In the column, Dearmore considers a list made by a panel of academics in response to a question from the Gazette: Who were the 20 people who made the greatest impact on Arkansas in the 20th century? Dearmore objects to the list’s exclusion of Sidney Sanders McMath and John L. McClellan. Dearmore’s praise for McMath is heartening, but greatest impact does not necessarily mean most desirable impact. What drew my attention was the part of the subheading about McClellan and concrete.

A native of Grant County, McClellan served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and in 1942 was elected to the Senate, where he served until his death in 1977; he was the longest-serving U.S. senator from Arkansas. On the race question, McMath was a reformer. McClellan was not.

“McClellan’s mark was in material achievements,” Dearmore says. “Those of us who failed to defeat him must admit now that he brought a great deal of concrete to Arkansas. With his awesome seniority, he was a powerful puller of levers in Washington. Dams, locks, bridges, public buildings and other benefits were to a sizable extent won by the late senator’s exertions amid the engines of influence and favor in the capital.”

In “John McClellan and the Arkansas River Navigation Project” (Arkansas Historical Quarterly, summer 2010), Sherry Laymon delivers a straightforward history of what would become the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System (MKARNS), though she is overtly pro-McClellan and pro-MKARNS.

McClellan began lobbying for a comprehensive flood-control system on the Arkansas during the 1930s; at the time, shipping lobbies were already organizing (the Mississippi Valley, Arkansas Basin, and Arkansas Associations) to promote navigation infrastructure for international exports from the interior.

In the House, McClellan helped draft the Flood Control Acts of 1936 and 1938. He was in the Senate by the time the Arkansas River inundated 1.5 million acres of Oklahoma in 1943. Part of a Senate bill he drafted that year became part of the Flood Control Act of 1944. He would spend the next two decades wrangling funds a few million dollars at a time until 1961 and 1962, when Congress appropriated $170 million for the project, which by its official opening in 1968 cost $1.3 billion.

McClellan claimed in 1962 that “nothing the federal government has ever done or could ever do will be as big a boon to our state as this,” and historian Charles Bolton, in his 1995 history of MKARNS, agrees.

Life magazine, on the other hand, ran a feature in August 1963, calling it “the most outrageous pork-barrel project in United States history.”