Wise Conservation > Opposing the Flood Bill
New technologies created new ways to exploit natural resources, as well as new reasons to protect them. The rise of hydropower, in particular, led to unforeseen stresses in the Chamber’s efforts to forge sound water policies. Niagara Falls possessed the latent capacity to satisfy much of the Empire State’s electricity needs. Utilities companies eagerly plotted to redirect its waters in order to harness this potential. Again, the Chamber was faced with a conflict between supporting private business interests and protecting the public’s resources.
Proposed diversions of the rapids would leave the waterfalls desolate and dry except on Sundays and holidays when the plants would run at diminished capacity. In the pages of Outlook in January 1906, a naturalist warned that, due to the “habit of capital to seize upon every opportunity for profit regardless of sentiments and emotions unconnected with the heaping up of wealth, we have a formidable menace to the Falls of Niagara …” This anti-capitalist screed was reproduced by a Special Committee and distributed approvingly to every member of the Chamber. Inspired, they voted unanimously “against the enactment of any legislation calculated to imperil this great scenic phenomena.”
As in the case of the City utilities law, the members’ efforts were divided between protecting the natural beauty of the falls, and reserving for themselves the possibility of harnessing the potential power of the rapids. Sovereignty of Niagara – ambiguously divided between the United States, New York and Canada – was always an issue.
In the event, the greatest threat to the Chamber’s access to the power of the falls came from Washington. During the American involvement in the Great War – when railroads, coalfields, and food distribution had all been nationalized – President Wilson pushed the Flood Bill, which would have delegated to itself all authority over the waterways surrounding the continental United States.
The Chamber of Commerce’s first reaction was to criticize as unconstitutional the seizure of states’ rights without compensation. But, a desperate telegram sent in October 1918, warned, “IN CONSIDERATION THE ATTITUDE OF PRESIDENT I GRAVELY QUESTION PROPRIETY OF CHAMBERS SUGGESTED ACTION.” In the patriotic atmosphere of the war, even the City’s elite had to accept this inevitable encroachment of federal authority.