Grand Coulee Dam: The "White Elephant" That Helped Win World War II

In 1935, a congressman said the only customers for Grand Coulee Dam's power would be "rattlesnakes, coyotes and rabbits." America built it anyway: twelve million cubic yards of concrete in a remote Washington canyon, in the middle of the Great Depression. In 1934, standing at the site, President Roosevelt bet out loud that buyers would come. They froze a hillside solid to save the foundation. Five thousand men lived where three years earlier there had been only coyotes. By 1941 the critics' "white elephant" was powering aluminum plants for warplanes, and in 1943 a block of its electricity began flowing into the desert, to a secret site called Hanford. 0:00 Power for Rattlesnakes 1:45 Four Hundred Million Dollars 7:01 A City Where the Coyotes Were 9:46 The Frozen Hillside 12:13 Twelve Million Cubic Yards 15:14 Called a White Elephant 17:53 The Power That Disappeared ▶ Watch next Hudson River Tunnel, 1927: They Breathed the Poison First    • Hudson River Tunnel, 1927: They Breathed t...   Mackinac Bridge: The Day Wall Street Said No (1953)    • Mackinac Bridge: The Day Wall Street Said ...   Sources: • Bureau of Reclamation, "The Columbia Basin Project" (Simonds, 1998): https://www.usbr.gov/pn/grandcoulee/p... • National Park Service, "Washington: Grand Coulee Dam": https://www.nps.gov/articles/washingt... • HistoryLink.org, "Grand Coulee Dam": https://www.historylink.org/File/7264 • Franklin D. Roosevelt, informal remarks at Grand Coulee, August 4, 1934 (FDR Library, Speech File 720) • Newspapers 1936–1941 via Chronicling America, Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/collections/chron... Archival photographs are labeled ARCHIVAL on screen with their source. Everything labeled VISUAL RECONSTRUCTION is AI-generated for illustration and is not a historical record. Narration is AI-generated. #GrandCouleeDam #GreatDepression #NewDeal #History #Engineering