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

Seemingly oblivious to the mounting controversy, Crowe pushed on, and by the spring of 1935, a full eighteen months ahead of schedule, was ready to begin pouring concrete. Oddie, however, was not ready to let the Boulder matter drop, and with Franklin Roosevelt now in the White House, the Nevada Democrat got a full hearing. He also got the 40

BOULDER

support of FOR’s Interior secretary, Harold L. Ickes, who ordered payment in scrip stopped and the launching of a federal investigation into Six Companies’ labor practices. As a result of that investigation, Ickes charged the builders with 70,000 separate violations and fined them a total of $3 50,000.

In response, Kaiser hired a public relations man to turn out a

“quickie” book chronicling Six Companies’ achievements at Boulder in breathless tabloid prose. Hundreds of copies went out to congressmen and federal officials. Leaving nothing to chance, Kaiser also took to the airwaves, and over a radio hookup, told Six Companies’ side of the story to the nation. Kaiser’s media blitz had its desired result. Inundated by angry letters and telegrams, the government commenced negotiations with Six Companies and eventually reduced the fine to $100,000.

At Boulder, meanwhile, the breakneck pace was continuing unabated. On April 10, 1935, the final phase of construction got under way, with the pouring of the. first concrete. Crowe presided over the operation like a symphony conductor, orchestrating the movement and synchronization of each piece of equipment and the dozens of work crews. Blended at Six Companies’ own mixing plants after it was brought to Boulder by train, the concrete was loaded into an unending succession of huge dump buckets, each of which was immediately placed on a waiting Six Companies train and transported to the damsite. There the individual buckets were unloaded and hung from hooks on one of four cable systems. The systems, in turn, functioned like marvelously efficient ski lifts, bearing bucket after bucket to the appropriate vertical column of the dam where the cement was finally poured. As the columns filled, the cement was cooled in summer and heated in winter by steel tubing inserted into it and carrying, depending on the season, cold or hot water-this to prevent the contraction that would have occurred had the concrete been allowed to harden on its own.

One of the uglier facets of Six Companies’ labor practices that Ickes’ investigation uncovered was the company’s treatment of blacks. 12 Until the government brought pressure to bear in 1933, no black workers were employed at the damsite. Thereafter, a token number were hired, invariably to labor at the most demeaning jobs. Six Companies , moreover, refused to provide them housing in Boulder City, and as a result, the blacks were forced to make a 30-mile drive twice each day between the damsite and Las Vegas. The bar against blacks’ living in company-provided housing was finally dropped, but only after fierce complaints by Ickes.

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FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Every few months, Six Companies poured half a million more yards of concrete, until, by the summer of 1935, all 3.25 million yards had been poured and the wedge that would contain the Colorado was in place. “A remarkable record,” one of Crowe’s engineers wrote, in describing the dam pouring for the Smithsonian Institution. “Twelve hundred men with modern equipment had in 21 months built a structure whose volume is greater than the largest