BOOK REVIEW
BY MICHAEL A. MARTORELLI
The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade its Rivers
By Martin Doyle
In telling the story of the nation’ s three million miles of rivers, Martin Doyle weaves elements of history, geography, navigation, financing, taxation and regulation into an entertaining and informative volume with a particularly descriptive subtitle. His introduction suggests that the country’ s 250,000 waterways have shaped American life since the beginning. They still provide the borders of numerous states and cities and serve as important transportation highways in every region of America. Their flows have been lifesustaining, enabling the growth and development of major population centers.
However, as this professor of River Systems Science and Policy at Duke
University also notes, their uncontrolled movements have also disrupted the social and commercial fabric of many communities. All readers will learn how both private and public entities have worked to manage many rivers’ courses( with dams, locks or levees), dredge their channels, and allocate their flows of water to various communities. The Financial History reader will take more note of the importance of many financing mechanisms that enabled and supported those activities over the course of the country’ s 242-year history.
Early in his narrative, Doyle recounts the story of the first public-private effort to tame a river. In 1785, delegates from Maryland and Virginia met to establish rules for governing the business of the Potomac Company as it worked to improve navigation and increase the flow of commercial traffic along the river that separated those two states. As settlers moved inland, more states authorized the establishment of private river navigation companies and canal companies to improve the effectiveness of their own regions’ rivers as highways of commercial activity. They supported those efforts with both loans and direct investments. The cost of construction and the geographic difficulties of terrain caused most of those expensive efforts to fail. Even successful efforts rarely achieved the financial returns envisioned by state legislatures that had authorized more than 85 % of the country’ s public debt by the end of the 1830s. As Doyle notes, the highly-successful Eric Canal was the exception not the norm in those early days of building the nation’ s infrastructure.
Throughout the book’ s 305 pages, Doyle frequently writes as an historian. He notes the 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden decision that clarified the role of the federal government as the regulator of commerce on the nation’ s navigable rivers. That power became even more important as the nation expanded westward. Unlike the rivers in the East, the waterways named after Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois and Ohio flowed largely over vast expanses of flatlands. They regularly inundated the communities along their shorelines with devastating floods.
The US Army Corps of Engineers became the primary agency responsible for establishing locks, dams, reservoirs, levees and dredging projects aimed at channeling the flows of those rivers to serve the needs of their neighboring communities. Doyle tells how governments at all levels needed to help rural and urban communities all across the country in their efforts at flood control, waste treatment and water pollution. They used debt financing and the powers of taxation and regulation to achieve what they perceived as their constituents’ ends. Like any good storyteller, the author emphasizes the actions of many individuals, not just institutions, in describing these efforts.
The Source is more than just a history of America’ s rivers. Doyle intersperses his historical accounts with literary excursions to a towboat in the Mississippi River, a waste treatment plant in Durham, North Carolina, a cattle ranch in Oregon and various backroom debates among legislators and regulators. His concluding chapter on the rise of environmentalism and the need to restore the infrastructure of our waterways is a cautionary one. It provides an effective conclusion to this engaging story of how Americans have struggled to deal with one of Mother Nature’ s ubiquitous natural forces.
Michael A. Martorelli is a Director Emeritus at Fairmount Partners in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, and a frequent contributor to Financial History. He earned his MA in History from American Military University.
36 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Summer 2018 | www. MoAF. org