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Interview: Roy Webb

Roy Webb is an author, historian and archivist with the Special Collections department of the Marriott Library at the University of Utah, where he oversees a comprehensive collection of writings and visual materials on the history of the Colorado River. He is the author of Call of the Colorado
KEN VERDOIA:
I was reading one of your books, an annotation, that the Glen Canyon Dam is really in part a reflection of a compromise that grew out of a battle over Echo Park. I wonder if you could kind of give me an overview of how you see that, and take it back as far as you want to in considering the genesis of it.

ROY WEBB:
Well, I think the impetus, the modus for the Colorado River Storage Project goes back to the turn of the century in California where the Colorado River, of course, forms the border of California and Arizona. Southern California, especially around the Colorado, had by the turn of the century, 1900, developed quite a bit. There was a lot of agricultural land, towns had grown up in there. Then about 1905, there was a mistake with a steam-shovel by one of the railroad companies, where they poked a hole in the levy as the Colorado was at flood, and it diverted the course of the Colorado River, and it started pouring into the Salton Sink, which was very developed and there was a lot of, uh, real comprehensive agriculture, towns in there. And it filled up the Salton Sink and that's when it became the Salton Sea. That caused a public outcry -- it was expressed in the 1950s as we should turn a natural menace into a national resource. That was kind of the slogan that was used later in the Colorado River Storage Project. That first sought root, I think, in the 1920s with the signing of the Colorado River Compact, when the various states, the upper and lower basin states that are bordered or are part of the drainage basin of the Colorado River, got together, signed the Colorado River Compact in 1922 in Santa Fe at the urging of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, of course, who later became president. That divided the waters of the basin between the upper basin states and the lower basin states. Then, once they decided how much water there was, and how much was going to be allotted to each state and so on, the next thing to do, of course, was to build a big dam to store it, because the, naturally the river fluctuated back and forth. Some years it would dry up, some years it would be at a big flood. So that led to major surveys in the 1920s, started in Cataract Canyon and the San Juan in 1921. In 1922 they did the upper Green River, and these surveys were also done in conjunction with utility companies. Utah Power and Light, and with Southern California Edison. Then in 1923 was the big survey of the Grand Canyon in the summer of 1923. Well out of that they chose all kinds of dam sites, and some of them were later built, some of the ones that we have now were chosen during those surveys. Then, of course, Hoover Dam was the first one built, started, I think in 1928, finished in 1935. That was such a big success that it gave them the idea that you could develop the rest of the basin. The Bureau of Reclamation, kind of emboldened by that, and it got a real big push with that, then went on to develop, others in the Northwest-- big dams in the Northwest. I think that's when they built the big dams on the Missouri and so on, and then they, they were planning on the Colorado River Dams, but the war intervened. So, of course, the war comes along, that diverts all natural energies for a while. But almost as soon as the war was over that outcry started again to tame the Colorado River, to stop the big floods that they'd had. There had been big floods in the 1920s, and then it had dried up during the dust bowl years, then there had been more floods and so on. And also to store the water for California, that was the important thing, because California, of course, the most powerful politically, the biggest population, the biggest economy of all the Colorado Basin states. They were the ones that really wanted to see the water stored. And so the big part of that, of course, was Hoover Dam, and they liked that because it was close to California. So, California didn't support the upper Colorado River Project as much, but still, they were all for storage of water. So, after the war, then the legislation is reintroduced. It starts up to build dams on virtually every tributary and on the main stems of the Colorado Basin: The Green, the Colorado itself, the San Juan, the Frying Pan River in Colorado, all over. And one of them, what the Bureau always called the wheel-horse of the project, was the way they put it, was the Echo Park Dam, which would have been build about two miles below the junction of the Green and the Yampa Rivers in what's the center of Dinosaur National Monument. Now Dinosaur, of course, was originally just the dinosaur quarry and then in 1938 as part of the big sweeping creation of national monuments during the Roosevelt Administration, Franklin Roosevelt, Dinosaur was expanded from 80 acres to 230,000-something acres, but the Bureau of Reclamation and Utah Power and Light and all of the people that wanted to build the dam, figured that they had a pre-existing withdrawal that dated back to right around the turn of the century, where some of those lands were withdrawn from public lands for, from general land office lands, specifically for water and power development. So they figured they had a prior right. And that's the big thing in the West is prior right. Prior appropriation. That's how water law is structured in the West. So, they just went ahead with the plans to build the Echo Park Dam which would have been, I mean, it was a huge structure. It was 600-700 feet high. It would have flooded virtually all of Dinosaur National Monument, the whole Yampa Canyon, back out into the open parts in Colorado, all the way up Ladore Canyon into Brown's Park; it would have flooded that entire area. And, um, they didn't think there'd be any opposition, first, because they had this existing power withdrawal, and second, because of the predominant local culture in Utah has always favored water development. The old adage of making the desert blossom like a rose. And that's more than just part of the culture, that's almost part of the religion in Utah; that water development is almost a sacred duty. So they went ahead with the plans of the dam. In the meantime, a sort of a grass-roots movement started, based not specifically on the canyons of the, or the Green and the Yampa, which were beautiful places, but not all that well known. Very few people had been down them in terms of numbers like we think of today. But it was based on the fact that it was in a National Monument, or in a National Park. Monuments created by president's proclamation, Parks by acts of Congress, but they're, administratively they're the same, and they're viewed the same by the public. I think that's a more important thing than this. So all of the sudden, here they are, um, planning to build a dam right in the middle of a National Monument, which of course, uh, really goes against the park service's mandate of leave it unchanged for the future. I can't quote it exactly, but of not changing natural landscapes. Actually, that kind of harks back to the Hetch Hetchy fight of, the last thing that John Muir did before he died where the same thing happened. A dam was built in Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Club fought that extensively. This was about 1914. That was to supply water for San Francisco. The Sierra Club fought that. John Muir fought that. They failed. The dam was built, the O'Shaunessey Dam and it's still there today. And there were people involved in the Sierra Club who remembered that fight. And then when this comes up, all the sudden that there's going to be a dam in Dinosaur National Monument, that motivated them.

Now to me its kind of interesting to note who all are involved in this. It wasn't really people from Utah, because they were almost primarily 100% for it. All the legislatures that had the endorsement of the state government. All the various government agencies, Fish and Wildlife, and everybody in Utah were all for it. It was people from outside the state who really got this rolling. And one was an interesting family from Colorado, the Bradley family, Richard Bradley and Steve Bradley and the father, Dr. Bradley. An academic family-- a real outdoor family, involved in a lot of outdoor things, skiing. One of them ran a ski resort in Colorado and so on. They were early, Steve Bradley and one of his brothers were early kayakers in Colorado and various rivers there. A lot of times in those days when people were kind of graduating to more difficult rivers from where they'd started, they'd go to the Green because of Ladore, had a real reputation as a very difficult white-water river. And so they came to do a Ladore trip and they did it with Bus Hatch. And as they were floating along one day, this is why Steve it explained to me, they were floating along ... they actually started up in what's now under Flaming Gorge Reservoir up in a place called Hide-Out Flat in Red Canyon ... floated down through there. As they floated past Echo Park and got into the head of Whirlpool Canyon, Bus said something like, well, this is where they're going to put the dam. And they said, what dam? We didn't know anything about this. And he said, oh, yeah, the Bureau's building a 600-foot dam here. That really energized them. Because they liked what they'd just seen. They didn't want to see a dam build. So they took, they were taking home movies. They came back a couple other times, I'm not sure all the exact sequences, but they came back a couple of times and took more movies, and then kind of went on a stump, just on their own, the Bradley family did. One of them taught at Colorado College; he showed his movies there. Another brother went off, let's see, there was one that went to California and went to the Bay Area, to the Sierra Club, of course where the Sierra Club is founded, and showed the movies there, and I think that's what really energized them and got them involved in this. And then it just started steamroller, and just, a grass-roots movement really. And it's, what's so surprising about the Echo Park Dam, because it was ultimately defeated by a grass-roots citizen's movement was the, uh, some authors have called it the Iron triangle, Western water interests, the utility companies and Western state governments are always in favor of water projects. somehow this grass-roots citizen's movement was able to defeat this dam, really based on that idea, that not so much the dam itself, but just that it's a development in a National Park. The dam was a bad idea as they saw it. And the, but the worst, the larger overriding principle was development inside a National Park. And that's what they did not want that precedent to be started, because they said, if that happens, then what next. Then we'll start having mines and National Parks, we'll build cities in National Parks and so on and so on ...

VERDOIA:
I'm intrigued by the impact of this grass-roots movement. It's been identified to me as really the first demonstrative grass-roots environmental conservation movement in America. It that pretty fair from your standpoint?

WEBB:
I really think it is. Certainly there were people who had opinions about Western development, you know, the killing of the buffalo, the cutting of the forests, the building of the dams and the damming of the rivers and so on, but it had never taken shape like this before and never become a political power and never defeated those entrenched interests, which before had always had their own way. It was almost like you were against mom and apple pie if you spoke against Western water development. And so, that's the really intriguing part, is that movement was able to take force. And I think it shows ... One thing it demonstrates to me is how strong the, uh, the love of National Parks and how American's feel about the National Park system is that they were willing to go to bat for it in this sense and to fight these really strongly entrenched, powerful interests, Western power, Western senators, utility companies, I mean, those were, it really is an iron triangle. They really did have a real grip on Western politics and business.

VERDOIA:
But the defeat of Echo Park, the decision to take that off the drawing board, doesn't mean the end of the Colorado River Storage Project by any stretch of the imagination.

WEBB:
No, not at all, and towards the end of it, as the agitation over the Echo Park Dam grew, you were treated to this real interesting thing of seeing people suddenly start reversing sides, because the people in the surrounding states, who also had projects in this, started to see that their support of the Echo Park Dam, just that one unit of it, of a much larger project, their support was starting to cost them support for their projects. In other words, the Sierra Club was starting to see, and they, I think they were getting exhausted by this time from the fight and they didn't quite see how far they could push this, but they were starting to see that they could have defeated the whole Colorado River Storage Project, or they felt like they could, and so people in Colorado and Idaho, or not Idaho, but Nevada and Arizona with the CAP, the Central Arizona Project, and so on, they started dropping away. Their support ... They started changing their ideas about the Echo Park Dam, because they were afraid it was endangering the entire project. And so one by one, they started dropping out, and finally, it's only the Utah delegation, who I don't remember just who they were right now, I think Watkins was one of the senators. But, um, suddenly they're by themselves and then they finally, people more powerful than them came and said, we're going to loss this whole project if you don't give up your desire for this Echo Park Dam, and so that's finally defeated it.

VERDOIA:
How did that impact Glen Canyon?

WEBB: Well, I have different opinions on that. There are people today who think, who make a comparison that I think is an unfair one. That say, well, we could have had Glen Canyon, but we gave it up just for Dinosaur. And I don't think that's a fair comparison at all, because if you look back at the plans of Bureau, they had planned to dam in Glen Canyon all along. It was going to be later, and it was going to be a different structure. It wasn't going to be quite as big as it is now. Once the Echo Park Dam was defeated, they had to rethink their, all their allotments and their water storage figures and everything, and they decided to make it a bigger dam and they moved it up, they accelerated the construction of it. But it was planned all along, to put one in there, so I don't think you can blame the saving of Dinosaur for the loss of Glen Canyon, personally. It certainly did have an impact in that it moved it up and it, it made it a bigger dam. But, I don't think you can ... To me it's an unfair comparison to say, this is what we got, and it's ... There's a lot of people who seem to feel that that isn't a good trade. And I don't think so personally. I mean, I think Dinosaur is a wonderful place. Um, I would have hated to see the dams there just as I do in Glen Canyon.

VERDOIA:
And let's think about the construction of Glen Canyon because I can find little opposition in those years of '56, '57, '58, even mentioning Glen Canyon.

WEBB:
Yeah, that's very true. And, part of it is that there's the book by the name and the old adage that Glen Canyon was the place no one knew. Now I have problems with that, too, and I'll mention that in a second. But it certainly was the place that not enough people knew and not the right people knew, you might say. As I said, I think the Sierra Club, and I've heard Dave Brower say this, the Sierra Club was exhausted by the Echo Park Dam fight. They weren't really aware of what Glen Canyon was like and they felt like they were pushing too hard. I think they were almost afraid of their own success. That suddenly, here this, they had been at the forefront of this movement to defeat this major project, and um, they were exhausted. They were in awe at what they had done, and they didn't push it to the point, once they said, well, we got to build Glen Canyon, the Bureau said, we've got to build Glen Canyon, the Sierra Club was almost afraid to push it that much further, like they were afraid they would lose the ground they had already gained. Now when you hear that saying, to me, the Glen Canyon is the place no one knew, I think, sometimes I say facetiously it's the place that David Brower didn't know, or it's the place that the right people didn't know, but Glen Canyon actually was one of the best known of the Colorado Canyons. that's what's funny about this. Because it was a place you could get to. The Grand Canyon was very inaccessible. The upper canyons were likewise inaccessible. Of course, below the Grand Canyon was settled, but in the whole rest of the reach of the Green and the Colorado River, the drainage basin, the whole drainage basin, Glen Canyon was the most familiar place. Because there were no rapids. Because it could be approached by land, and because it was a habitable place, as the Anasazi had found, of course. Later, people did too. Now starting in the 1890s there was a huge mining boom, um, rush, I should say, not really a boom, because not all that many people made that much. A few people had found pockets of gold and took it out, but there was a rush down there that started on the San Juan I think in 1893 and went on for quite a few years. And so, every sandbar up and down Glen Canyon had a claim staked on it. Because that's what they were trying to do was get the sand, the gold out of the sandbars, the flower gold, it's called, real fine gold. There were people, that was going on until the dam was built. There were still people trying to get gold out of that. Robert Brewster Stanton in 1898, had two towns that he built in Glen Canyon, Camp Wilson and Camp Stone, and there was a telephone line between them. This was for an outfit called the Hoskineny Mining Company. He built a huge three-story dredge in Wisconsin, took it apart, had it moved to Glen Canyon. It ran, he went totally bust because he didn't get any gold out of it. But still, he, he employed 150 men, I think, something like that. He had horse herds. He had telephone lines, fleets of boats, and so on and so on. Then later on, starting in the 1930s, there was a, almost a recreational boom in Glen Canyon, starting with Norm Nevills. Nevills took his first trip, I think, about 1934. Took his first commercial trip down the San Juan in Glen Canyon, so from the confluence of the San Juan and the Colorado and from there down to Lee's Ferry, that was Nevills, as he became a river outfitter for the next 10, until he died in 1949, that was his bread-and-butter trip. He'd do that 10, 15 times a year, and he'd start out, charge $75 for an eight-day trip. And he'd take, usually 10-12 people, something like that. We have in the library all of his papers. They were donated by one of his daughters a few years ago. And as I was going through those, processing the papers and indexing them, I found a lot of trip lists. You know, he'd keep lists. And fortunately for history, tragically for the family, he died in mid-career and so they kept everything. And we were able to, recreate the kinds of trips he took, the people who went on the trips, and also to calculate, I finally figured out over about a 12-year period, he took something like 6,000 people down the river, and that's just Nevills. There were other outfitters. There was the Boy Scouts. There was Laraby and Elison and many others. Hatch was taking people down through Glen Canyon at the time. So Glen Canyon was not unknown. A lot of people were down in there, but they weren't the right people, I guess you might say. They weren't politically active. And so, when the, when the dam was announced and the plans were made, those people didn't get involved like they had ... and, and in large measure it's not the same group of people that got involved in the Echo Park Dam controversy. They didn't get involved in Glen Canyon because it didn't have any kind of protection. It wasn't a National Park. Now, of course, you probably would point out that it was proposed as a National Monument, the Escalante National Monument in the 1930s, and that was Harold Ickey's, Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior, pushed it and proposed it. And Roosevelt was ready to sign it, but the mining and livestock interests in Utah got to the congressional delegations and they went to the President and that was defeated. So that's why it didn't have that same kind of recognition. It was just general land office land, GLO public lands, and this was before the BLM. and, um, so it didn't have that same kind of recognition. Now, um, let me throw in what to me is a real interesting historical what-if on here. Nevills, as I said, took people down, many trips per year, San Juan and Glen Canyon. In his papers, we have, um, a contract he had signed with the Sierra Club, the alcohol, the Bay Area Chapter of the Sierra Club, the same ones who later organized to defeat the Echo Park Dam. These folks had contracted with him to take a big trip in 1950. He was going to take like 100 people through San Juan and Glen Canyon. And he it all planned out. He had already had the contracts signed. He had it planned out. He was going to tow inflatable boats behind his cataract boats and take all these people down. Well, unfortunately, Norm Nevills was a better boatman than he was a pilot and he crashed a plane in September 1949 and was killed. He had a light plane. Him and his wife were both killed, and he didn't have any, well he had two young daughters, and nobody to take over the company, and so things went into a flux for a few years, and later it coalesced as what was called Mexican Hat Expeditions, so that contract was never filled. Needless to say, of course, the Sierra Club didn't go down, that would have been in the summer of 1950 and he died in 1949. So I always think, what if? They were the same really who five years later were fighting the Echo Park Dam so hard. What if they had gone down through Glen Canyon? What if they had taken that trip with Norm? And people wrote, we have boxes full of journals that people wrote about the beauties of Glen Canyon. What if these people had seen that and then later on when the dam was proposed had been there, actively, already ready and aware of what was down there, to fight it. It's just a ... historians like to indulge in what-ifs now and then, and that's certainly one of them.

VERDOIA:
You've mentioned the name of Bus Hatch a couple of times and when you were routing in Vernal and actually shooting in Whirlpool Canyon and the proposed Echo Park Dam site, you talked with a number of local people that were around back in the 1950s, the name of Bus Hatch can still bring a smile to some people's faces, but it also engenders some animosity because they view Bus as a traitor. Did he pay a price for his role in introducing people to the river country in Echo Park?

WEBB:
Yeah, I think he very much did. Him and his family both. I always joke that if you go into the Sage Cafe in Vernal to this day and you can find some of the old locals sitting around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, I don't think they can do that anymore, but you could still get an argument about the Echo Park Dam. And Bus played a pivotal role in that, and in a large measure, it's kind of funny, because Bus wasn't that concerned with it, I won't say he wasn't concerned with the dam, but Bus's real livelihood was as a contractor in Vernal. He built most of the houses in the east end of Vernal. He built the Safeway store and the Century School and on and on and on. So he was really tied to the community. And he depended on the goodwill of the community. Yet, when the time came that people started wanting to go down the river because-- it's like, today we call it consciousness-raising, Sierra Club wanted to raise the consciousness of people about the beauties of the canyons, but the people who were for the dam, also wanted to go and point out how dangerous it was, that only a skilled river man like Bus Hatch could get you safely down the canyons, therefore, if we built this dam it will be better, because families can come and see it. The same arguments that are still used today for Glen Canyon Dam. Well, Bus was kind of in the right place at the right time, because there was nobody else with the skills, nobody else with the boats, another very important point. Nobody else with the boats who could actually take you down the canyon. So at first, as groups started contacting him, and he had a family of sons. The Hatch's always run to sons, to help him out and run the boats and help him with it, um, Bus took everybody down. He took the anti-dam forces, he took the pro-dam forces, he took everybody what was interested in going down the river. Bus's own opinions he kind of guarded a little bit, um, at first, I think, until the, when the, when the pro-dam sentiment was still really strong in the whole state, in the whole country, not just in Vernal which always was and still is, as you said, um, Bus kept his opinions to himself, but he worked with his son, Don, who lived in Salt Lake at the time, he was a school teacher in Salt Lake City, and had specifically become a school teacher so that he could spend his summers on the river with Bus. And Don actually was the first to really see it as a viable business. Bus, it was just a, a fun way to go down the river with his friends and if he made money at it, great, but he still depending on his contracting business. Don really saw it differently. Don thought you could make a living at this, being a river outfitter. So Bus kind of fed information to Don for a long time until the tide started to change and then I think Bus came out more openly against it. But Don would, or uh, Bus would feed information to Don here in Salt Lake about what the Bureau was going to do and what the, any mistakes they might have made in their calculations and so on, that Bus just picked up locally, and really in a sense, kind of underground, he was sort of the underground, or the fifth column, they would have said, for the people who wanted to defeat the dam out in Vernal. And he did pay a price. Bus, as you said, his name is still not held in very high regard. It's still taken in vain, you might say, to this day in some circles in Vernal. People there, there were people who invested a lot. They brought land that would have been beach-front land up in Brown's Park and um, things like that, and then ended up losing on it because the dam wasn't build. Don told me many times, I was good friends with Don and privileged to know him, told me many times how he got threatening phone calls and letters and people would turn their backs to him. When he'd come back to Vernal to work in the summers and people that he knew, that he'd grown up with, would cross the street so they didn't have to see him, because he was a traitor to his, as you said, he was a traitor to the community and to this idea of this development. He also said some people told him, called him just on the phone and would say, don't come back to Vernal, you're not wanted here, that kind of thing. So feelings were very, very high. Later on as the mood started to shift and the opinions started to shift, I think Bus, his opinions about it came out more openly. But Bus loved the canyons. He loved the river. He had been on them since the 1920s and had hunted and fished and poached and made moonshine and all kinds of things, all over the canyons of the Green and the Colorado and he didn't want to see them flooded. He loved it too much. At the same time he felt like it was hard to go against the opinions of the community when he depended so strongly on the community. But still, he did everything he could.

VERDOIA:
I want you to help me understand the climate. As you've looked at it and studied it as a historian, did this contribute to the building spirit?

WEBB:
Oh, I think very much. I think what it was World War II. We'd gone through World War II, you know, America had been in this Great Depression and, uh, it seemed like we were kind of down and out. Ready for the proletarian revolution, and all of the sudden here comes World War II and that really built that can-do spirit. We can build aircraft carriers, we can ship armies all over the world, we're the, the superpower. That's when America really became a superpower, and there was really nothing that you couldn't do. So then, right after the war, there's all that energy and all that industry that's all geared up to produce and to build, and all these unemployed engineers, I think, I don't know if that's quite true, but all of the sudden, along comes this project, and that was part of it. And it was, it goes back much longer, too. I think it goes back to Manifest Destiny, all the way to the 19th century, into the whole settlement of the West, that the West was there, it was to be developed. It was there to be shaped as man and American culture and Christianity saw it at the time. It was to be shaped. It wasn't to be conserved, except in those little pockets, Yellowstone and Yosemite, and here and there, but it was to be molded, and however you did it, that was good. There was just no question of that, until, really until the Echo Park Dam. There was no question that if you can build a dam and store water for the benefit of all, then, you know, if you can make that natural menace into a national resource, that's good. There was just no ... I think that's one thing that caught the people that wanted to build the Echo Park Dam by surprise. Here was somebody actually questioning this. And they, they weren't bad people, the people in the Bureau of Reclamation. They really felt they were doing this for the highest good of America. To bring water, to bring power, to bring jobs, to bring recreation, all these things to those parts of the West that still weren't developed, and really didn't have any other way to develop, and to this day they aren't, and so, I really thing it was the, all the national energy that was, uh, started up in World War II was really what was then translated, in many other things, too, but one of the ways that it was translated, that energy was refocused, was right back into the building of the Colorado River Storage Project.

VERDOIA:
Is the Colorado River Storage Project important to understanding what has taken place and how the West has been reshaped in the subsequent 40 years?

WEBB:
Well, I think it is absolutely essential. There, if you don't look at the Colorado River Storage Project, you can't really understand the whole settlement of the West in the post-war era because, it's a desert, because west of the 100th meridian, as Wallace Stegner said, beyond the 100th meridian, you're past the point, once you go west from there, you're past the point where you can depend on rainfall. And so, if you're going to develop, you got to have water. I mean that just goes all of the way back to the Fertile Crescent, and the Tigress and the Euphrates and the beginnings of human history, you can't develop without water. And so the West didn't have any water. It had the rivers down in deep canyons. It had big salt water lakes. You can't really build a culture on those. So if you're going to build cities, if you're going to develop as Americans have always wanted to do, you know, full speed ahead, then you absolutely had to have a source of water, and the only way to have water, west of the 100th meridian all the way from the Great Plains to the Sierras, if you're going to do it, you've got to store water. And so, had we not done that, had for some reason we not build those, the West would be very different today. You wouldn't have Phoenix, you wouldn't have Las Vegas, you wouldn't have Los Angeles and all those huge cities, and you wouldn't have the huge agriculture that we do that makes us the absolute truck garden of the world in California. That's all water that was developed, it's not all Colorado River water, of course, but it was water, a big part of that came from the Colorado River, and then Colorado expanded up to do all the, to store the water in the rivers out of the Sierras. So the Colorado River Storage Project, is, you can almost say, is the central event, the defining event in Western American history in the post-war era. It wouldn't have happened had we not had the Colorado River Storage Project. We would have a very different America today.

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