Word: dammed
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Abrim with amiability and the verbiage for threescore political speeches, the President was off on a 16-state, 6,400-mile tour. Officially he was going to dedicate Washington's Grand Coulee Dam; actually, he had taken to the hustings and the back platform once more to lay fire on the Republicans, resell his Fair Deal and solicit votes for the Democrats in 1950's off-year congressional elections. Traveling with all the trappings of campaign time (including Mrs. Truman and daughter Margaret, 19 White House aides, 57 newsmen), the President quickly fell into the relaxed, chatty mood...
...years as a nation, the U.S. has produced few such spectacles as the colossal birth throes of the Grand Coulee Dam. Its grey and gargantuan bulk was eight years (1933-41) abuilding, and in that time armies of sightseers wended their way into a scarred and desolate canyon of the Columbia River, 150 airline miles east of Seattle, to goggle at the horrid obstetrics...
...when great batteries of floodlights poured a spurious noontide over the rising, mile-long ramparts of fresh concrete. Listening to the clang and roar of machinery out in the blazing night, skeptics railed at the whole fantastic scene. Many were convinced that there would be small use for the dam's electricity, that only one generator -a little one-would be installed, and that the vast pile would be left, peeping away to itself down through the ages, like a stranded whale with a peanut whistle in its nose...
...skeptics were yelling up the wrong penstock. By this week, as President Truman headed west to dedicate Grand Coulee and the Columbia Basin project, the dam had long since become the world's greatest single source of electricity. When the President pushes a ceremonial button to start its newest generator (13th of 18 to be installed), Grand Coulee will be producing 1,404,000 kilowatts-enough to supply both Cleveland and Cincinnati with all their power. Yet this amazing torrent of energy will not satisfy the insatiable demand...
...Wyoming. It floods in summer, when the high snows melt, and when the desert lands gasp for moisture. In July a spectacular sheet of white water, a quarter of a mile wide, 17 feet thick and twice as high as Niagara, spills over the top of Grand Coulee Dam. In time, this overflow will be channeled off to irrigate half a million acres of desert without sacrificing one kilowatt of electrical output. Only then will the New Deal's resettlement dream come true, in the blossoming in the sagebrush of 12,800 one-family farms (to keep the farms...