LETTER: The Hoover Dam rapid construction pace

Having grown up in Southern Nevada and spent a lot of time visiting, teaching and writing about Hoover Dam, I admire it and the people who built it. Megan McArdle (“Infrastructure blues,” Sunday Review-Journal) seems to share my admiration, but she would benefit from learning a little history.

That “Hoover Dam was built in an uninhabited desert” might be news to the people who lived in the area. She admires the dam’s builders who “had to build their own support system, from a road to the site to a town to house the workers.” They did the work, but it might surprise Ms. McArdle to know that both the federal government and private enterprise were also involved, and even worked together. Some Hoover Dam workers were paid well for their time; others, not so much. The highest hourly wage was probably equivalent to an annual salary today of about $75,000. I suspect Ms. McArdle makes more money than that, and I bet she doesn’t have to work in 130 degrees without proper medical treatment to make it. They completed Hoover Dam early and under budget. At what cost? As Ms. McArdle says, “These days, we care more about safety than speed.”

She denigrates a “prevailing wage,” but I suspect she would have been unhappy with what she would have been paid if she had worked on the dam — except, as a woman, she would not have been permitted to hold even the lowest-paying job at the site. For that matter, the government agreement with the Six Companies prohibited what they called “Mongolian labor.” No African Americans could work on the dam, despite efforts by Southern Nevada’s Black community. It helped when Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic administration took over in 1933 and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes — a “progressive Republican” — demanded action, although the number of Black employees remained minuscule.

The dam gives us much to admire. It also gives us pause, or should.

— The writer is a history professor at UNLV.