Before we adjust for inflation, it should be noted that Hoover Dam would probably have been more expensive had contractor Six Companies Inc. not finished the project two years ahead of schedule. That was quite a feat considering the fearsome climate in which the job was done and the need to use construction techniques not tried anywhere before.
According to the Consumer Price Index, the present-day labor cost would be $7,928,881.58, while the construction tab – as computed by USInflationCalculator.com -- would be just south of $2 billion. ($1,982,220,394.74 to be exact.) In 2016 dollars that would be a heckuva bargain, considering that CityCenter cost MGM Resorts International over four times as much.
Over the years there had been three attempts at harnessing the water power of the Colorado River to feed the electrical and irrigation needs of the burgeoning Southwest. In 1922, the so-called Fall-Davis Report considered several sites along the Colorado, before settling upon Black Canyon. The fact that a spur line could be run to the construction site from the railhead in Las Vegas helped clinch the decision. It took another decade for the appropriation to get through Congress, to say nothing of a compact agreement involving seven state governments – unprecedented at the time and mediated by Coolidge administration Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. (Actually, the project managed to go ahead without Utah, whose government sulked on the sidelines until 1944. Only six of the seven states had to sign the compact for it to go into effect.)
In 1928, President Calvin Coolidge signed the enabling legislation, which budgeted $165 million for a three-project package, including Imperial Dam and All-American Canal. Earlier that same year, the St. Francis Dam had collapsed in Los Angeles, causing great loss of life and fueling skepticism that the Colorado River could be tamed. Hoover Dam design engineer John L. Savage responded to such concerns with dam's iconic convex shape, which transferred the stress of the pent-up water onto the canyon walls themselves.
Six Companies received the task of executing Savage's blueprint, having put in the low bid on the job, a wildly optimistic $48.9 million. In Six Companies' defense, that's what the federal government thought it would take to get the job done. Since the country was in the depths of the Great Depression, cheap labor was not hard to find and the population of Las Vegas quintupled from the number of workers who descended upon it. It was a whites-only project, with the exception of 30 African-American men who weren't even allowed to drink from the same water buckets as the other workers.
Since now-President Hoover had ordered construction of the dam to begin seven months earlier than scheduled, Boulder City wasn't in existence yet and the labor force was domiciled in two camps, McKeeversville and Williamsville ("Ragtown" to its inhabitants), located atop the canyon and in the flats, respectively. Privation was extreme: 16 workers died of heat prostration in the first month alone. Temperatures inside the diversion tunnels rose to 140 degrees. Six Companies also exercised a heavy hand with its employees, causing contentious labor-management relations. Twice during the lifetime of the Hoover Dam project workers went on strike to protest wage reductions and both times they failed.
Come back tomorrow for Part II, when we conclude our brief history of the building of the Hoover Dam, and its cost.
