On this week’s episode of Now & Then, “There’s Something in the Water,” Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman discussed the recent Biden administration deal with drought-stricken Western states to cut back on Colorado River water. Heather and Joanne used the agreement as a springboard to discuss the tangled, highly political history of American water access: Aaron Burr’s duplicitous 1798 creation of a bank ostensibly designed to solve New York City’s water crisis, William Mulholland’s 1920s “water wars” to secure out-of-town water for a growing Los Angeles, and the political faultlines that emerged around the New Deal dams of the 1930s. In the CAFE Insider Backstage addition to the episode, Joanne also reflected on living through the brutal California drought of the mid-1970s. A closer examination of this drought reveals many familiar tensions: regional competition, class warfare, and a whole lot of economic opportunism. 

Beginning in late 1975, a large high-pressure front in the Pacific Ocean pushed storms north to Canada and South to Mexico, leaving much of the West without significant rain and snow. Resultantly, 1976 was the third-driest year on record for California, and a longer drought was clearly on the horizon as 1977 began. 

Farmers in the state’s Central Valley were hit early and hard, reporting a $500 million loss in 1976, with particularly water-dependent crops like artichokes drying up almost completely. Hydroelectric power from the state’s dams was down 50%. And reservoirs, particularly in Northern California, were shrinking. By early 1977, with drought projections looking even worse for the next year, Marin County’s Nicasio Reservoir dropped to one-quarter of its normal 17 billion gallon size. 

Marin quickly became a poster child for the water crisis. The county was a mixture of hills and coastline across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. The 170,000 spread-out residents were among the wealthiest in the state, but also had a penchant for progressive values and staunch environmentalism. 

Marin’s county government hit residents with strict 47-gallon weekly water rations per person, complete with hefty fines for going beyond the allotment. The community embraced the challenge, with families often foregoing showers and watering plants with bathwater. In February 1977, water consumption was down 65% from a year earlier. The county’s forward-thinking suburbanites coined a new BYOB acronym, “Bring Your Own Bottle,” to describe their commitment to recycling the scarce resource. 

Residents in the county even embraced the dirtiness that came with reduced washing. “Everyone I know has a dirty house,” one Marin resident told Newsweek in February 1977. “No one is cleaning up anymore.” 

In an appropriately bohemian development, a cottage industry of “water witchers” – entrepreneurs who claimed that they had unique water-locating talents – popped up in Marin, per an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Drought Makes Entrepreneurs’ Business Boom.” One of the “witchers,” Ed Nichols, carried a forked willow branch that allegedly led him to water sources on his clients’ properties. “People will believe anything now that they think we will get them water,” Nichols cynically told the paper. 

Another “witcher,” Gordon Hughes, claimed – seemingly more genuinely – that he had special powers. “It must be body chemistry or ESP or something,” Hughes told the Times. “If you have it, you have it. And if you don’t, forget it.” 

The Marin County “well-witchers” were small-time, but they reflected a legitimate drought-based boon for big business. Across the state, well-drillers were making a killing, bringing in some $500 million between June 1976 and June 1977 while creating 14,000 new wells across California. 

And novel water-saving contraptions  – like toilet dams – led to several fortunes. One toilet-preneur, a formerly-unemployed Vietnam War Veteran named Marshall Rose, made enough from his toilet dams to purchase a new suburban home and an expensive Porsche Carrera. 

In addition to the spike in entrepreneurship, the drought increasingly strained the relationship between Northern and Southern California. The North was initially far harder hit and, on balance, took the problem more seriously. 

At San Francisco International Airport, for example, a P.A. address every fifteen minutes stated, “Due to the water shortage, all persons are requested to conserve water in every way possible while in the airport and the California area.” 

San Francisco followed Marin’s lead and issued a 25% water cutback, becoming the largest American city to ever introduce water rationing. San Francisco Mayor George Moscone poked fun at the limits he had helped to impose, joking, “I also told my children that whenever they get a chance to shower somewhere else they should be sure to take advantage of it.” 

Many Northern California residents thus came to resent the Southland’s cavalier attitude to the crisis. One site of particular controversy was Orange County’s Lake Mission Viejo project, a quest to build an artificial recreation lake containing 1.25 billion gallons of water. Northern Californians also decried a local Malibu promotion that prolific water consumers would receive a discount on their water bill and amplified reports that many Los Angeles firefighters were still washing their trucks daily. 

A February 1977 Los Angeles Times article, “Dry North Looks South, Sees Red,” captured the hard feelings. The piece quoted the General Manager of San Francisco radio station KNBR, who aggressively called out the Mission Viejo project, complaining that Southern California residents “continue to fill their new lakes for recreation while valley farms dry up and blow away.” 

Famed San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen raised some serious questions about the ability of California to come together to fight the drought: “The real question, though, and a serious one, is why Marin and a few other counties suffer a water shortage on their own. Is California, a state, an entity, or 58 principalities, each jealously guarding its resources with no regard for the problems of its neighbors? The answer to that question may be an ugly one.” 

Meanwhile, Paul Grisso – a resident in the small suburban Northern California city of Rohnert Park – was prepared for a more extreme solution: “Northern California seems to have little alternative but to sever its political connections with its gluttonous southern portion and become the 51st state of the union…A toast to the 51st state.” 

As criticism intensified, Los Angeles County began to signal its intention to play ball. Jerry Brown, California’s flamboyant and dynastic 39-year-old governor, had requested a 10% voluntary cutback in water use across the state. Consequently, some Southern Californians began to practice what the Washington Post in February 1977 called “drought chic.” 

Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner, for example, turned off the infamous backyard lagoon at the Playboy Mansion, while famed hair stylist Vidal Sassoon ordered employees at his Beverly Hills salon to offer only one round of shampooing per client. 

The “drought chic” movement, however, quickly devolved into class tension. The Post interviewed the City Manager of Beverly Hills, who explained that the hierarchical chain between residents, maids, and gardeners in the tony enclave had created a crisis of accountability: “Gardeners certainly shouldn’t be chasing the leaves off the lawns and sidewalks with their hoses on full force. But sometimes it’s hard to get the message across because the gardeners get their instructions from the maids, and the maids don’t always understand the problem.”  

And other cultural commentators began to skewer the smug and self-congratulatory tone of the “drought chic.” Northern California comic book artist Shary Flenniken even published a satirical collection entitled Drought Chic. A two-page spread showed party guests commiserating and gossiping about the water shortage. “Who’s the good-looking man in the Pierre Cardin suit?” one well-dressed woman asked her husband. “Our plumber,” the man sourly responded. 

In another panel, Flenniken drew a clean-looking couple next to a dirty-looking one. “We fly to Hawaii for our showers,” the sparkly couple said by means of explanation to the unkempt pair. 

Governor Brown attempted to smooth over the rift between the factions and classes in his state and to tie the shifting cultural tides around water to the other resource-crunches of the decade, including the persistent fears over heating oil and gasoline. “There’s a finite amount of water and people are now beginning to realize that indeed this is an era of limits,” he told Robert McNeil during a February 1977 appearance on the McNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, “And we have to face up to that.” 

Brown balked, however, at setting a statewide standard for limiting water use, arguing that a voluntary cultural zeal would go much further, particularly given California’s size. “The state is so big – this is ten percent of the country – that more paper out of Sacramento is not quite what is needed,” Brown declared to McNeil. “What is required is an outpouring of public spirit that will enable us to weather what is becoming a very difficult burden.” 

Instead of paper, Brown, in an effort to get the state on a more cooperative footing, hosted a March 1977 “Dry Year Conference.” The event took place at the Los Angeles Convention Center, brought together some 800 state politicians and water innovators, and incorporated a presentation of new, water-saving toilets, including the Dial-a-Flush, the Toa-Throne, and the Water Gate. 

“Even without a drought, it’s crazy to use the amount of potable water we do on flushing,” proclaimed California State Architect Sim Van Der Ryn at the conference. “It’s an ass-backwards system.” 

As Summer 1977 arrived, the drought began to create unsafe fire conditions, diverting attention away from toilet innovation and toward combating massive blazes. Over 4,800 forest fires dotted the West. The two most dramatic fires were in Northern California. One, near the Oregon border in Modoc County, was nicknamed “Scarface.” The other, near the Big Sur area in mountains abutting the coast, was nicknamed “Marble Cone.” The two blazes alone chewed through hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and more than $300 million worth of timber. A fire in the Southern California luxury area of Montecito also destroyed some 250 homes, including many palatial estates. 

Yet just as the various infernos were bringing their greatest destruction in August, dramatic rains finally came. The surge began with a tropical storm, Dorreen, and was followed by an unusually rainy and snowy season in the Winter that saw both Northern and Southern California receive twice their typical rainfall. 

In January 1978, Marin County officially ended its water rationing program. Syndicated San Francisco Chronicle columnist Arthur Hoppe joked that the state would have trouble adapting to the resumption of normal water behavior. He maligned the loss of the “cute, scatalogical rhymes instructing guests when to flush,” and asked a pressing social question: “Should the reservoirs fill, the rivers overflow, and the rationing cease, what on earth would Californians discuss at dinner parties?” 

Clearly, state residents found plenty to debate in the post-drought years. Now, however, with much of the West twenty years into a megadrought that is once again transforming customs and political agreements, the anti-drought mobilization – and the acknowledgment of limits that undergirded the successful aspects of the mid-1970s response – may provide a meaningful playbook to combat the current challenges. 

For more on the history and relevance of Western droughts, read B. Lynn Ingram and Francis Malamud-Roam’s 2013 The West Without Water What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow. 

And head to the Twitter account of Now & Then Editorial Producer David Kurlander for supplemental archival threads on each Time Machine piece: @DavidKurlander.

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