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Show THE THREE-RING CIRCUS 137 raid in history on the Treasury of the United States. It was hoped that in turn thoughtful citizens would pro- test to their congressional representatives. From the first, results of the association's campaign, which used the Central Arizona Project as a prime example of the wasteful programs of the Bureau, were gratifying. As news stories began to circulate, congress- men and senators did begin to hear from their home states and districts, and the attitude toward both the project and the Reclamation Bureau began to change on Capitol Hill. The power of Arizona in the Senate was too great for the project to be blocked there. Senators Hayden and McFarland were in good positions to make deals with other senators, and the western reclamation block held more than a third of the Senate's votes. Hayden was in the driver's seat. He could make it very hard for any senator who opposed him by delaying appropriations and in numerous other ways. It was in the House that California's only hope of defeating the project rested. Arizona's power was negli- gible, and there were comparatively few representatives from western reclamation states, in which populations were small. The association, therefore, concentrated its Capitol Hill campaign chiefly on the House side. Poulson obtained from the Library of Congress a tabulation showing the amount of money appropriated for each reclamation project in the seventeen reclamation states during the years 1939-1949.152 It showed, he pointed out to Congress, "that the actual cost of recla- mation projects exceeds original estimates by two or three times. . . There is no reason to believe the Central |