Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

for a mere pittance,”9 the AFL wired the U.S. secretary of Labor, W illiam Doak. The Hoover administration, which tended to view any labor disturbance as “Red-inspired,” was unsympathetic, and aside from halfheartedly pressing Six Companies to better the sanitary conditions, it did nothing. Crowe, meanwhile, stood fast. Cut off from support, with no prospect of victory, the strike finally collapsed. Six Companies agreed to rehire the dissidents, though at only their original salaries, and with no guarantees whatever of improving their plight.

W ith the crew back on the job, work at Boulder resumed in earnest, helped along by a drought that sent river levels to record lows, thus making it easier to control the Colorado and prepare the gorge for the laying of the dam. To accelerate the pace of construction even more, Six Companies brought in the most modern equipment on the market.

Giant aluminum-bodied trucks roared back and forth across the construction site, transporting as much as 50 tons of material in a single load, while jumbo drilling rigs, fitted with as many as thirty different drills, attacked the canyon walls like crazed mechanical monsters, eating through 15 and 20 feet of solid rock in a matter of minutes.

By the beginning of 1932, Crowe was so far ahead of schedule that Six Companies had recouped its initial $5 million surety bond, and pocketed an additional $1 million in contract incentives. And more was yet to come, from savings on building materials-whose cost had 39

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

fallen through the floor, thanks to the Depression-as well as from peculiarities in the contract, which allowed, for instance, an $8 charge for every cubic yard of earth excavated, when, thanks again to the Depression, it was costing Six Companies a third less.

In April, though, the project hit an unexpected snag when, unaccountably, Herbert Hoover, himself an engineer and a product of the West, failed to ask Congress for sufficient funds to carry on the work.

In a panic, Kaiser mounted a whirlwind lobbying effort to get a deficit appropriation passed by Congress. As Kaiser buttonholed lawmakers, pressing on them the importance Boulder would have ‘in relieving un.:employment, Bechtel told reporters in San Francisco that unless funds were soon forthcoming, work on Boulder would be delayed as much as a year, forcing Six Companies to lay off nearly half of its 3, 400-man payroll.

Dad’s dire predictions, coupled with Kaiser’s smooth salesmanship, eventually secured Boulder its congressional appropriation. W ithin months, however, Six Companies was under assault again, and this time from a far more dangerous quarter. In Washington, Senator W illiam Oddie, Democrat of Nevada, charged that Boulder workers were being paid in scrip, spendable only at Six Companies stores, and that Crowe and his bosses were employing two sets of books to conceal pay irregularities and abuses of workers. Oddie’s charges made headlines.

What stung more, they were true.

At first, Six Companies attempted to brazen the situation out, ignoring Oddie. But despite denials from Hoover’s Labor Department, and a marked improvement in worker living conditions brought on by the completion of Boulder City, the charges wouldn’t go away. Moreover, the workers were once again restive. Indeed, another strike seemed imminent. Like the Veterans’ Bonus March on Washington the same summer, Boulder was emerging as a national cause celebre, polarizing left and right, labor and big business. Even novelist Theodore Dreiser managed to get into the fray. In an angry letter to The New York Times, he denounced Six Companies’ management for failing, as he put it, “to