How the Hoover Dam Made America
The Hoover Dam wasn’t always known as the Hoover Dam. As Michael Hiltzik, author of Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century, explained, the battle to name the dam spanned 20 years and several presidential administrations. Options included Boulder Canyon Dam or simply Boulder Dam, even though the dam was 20 miles downstream in Black Canyon. In 1947, a Republican-majority Congress voted to put Hoover’s name back on the Dam, prompting so much controversy that one frustrated Nevadan wrote in to his local paper suggesting the name, …
