The Savannah River valley’s residents were accustomed to the river running dry or high in the twentieth century. Augusta’s factory managers had sent workers home for weeks after shutting down waterpowered operations along the Augusta Canal during previous droughts. And the 1908 flood alone had done enough damage to convince the city government to investigate, finance, and construct an eleven-mile levee to keep the Savannah River’s almost annual flood surges out of the city.1 Given these past weather events, the prolonged, heavy, and cold rains of September 1929 surely looked threatening to residents of Augusta, Georgia, and Hamburg, South Carolina, who had lived through previous bouts of water anxiety and insecurity.
The Savannah River valley’s weather swung hard in the direction of rain after the New South’s 1925 drought of record. Over the course of thirty-six hours beginning September 26, 1929, nearly nine inches of rain fell across the upper Savannah River valley’s landscape. Countless dry gullies, numerous small creeks, and broad rivers swelled beyond capacity and sent a forty-six-foot flood crest down the Savannah River’s main channel. The surge breeched the Augusta levee a few miles below the central business district. Water flowed from the river through the levee and into the city and proceeded to back up the city’s stormwater drains and flood homes and businesses. The first flood wave passed, and the rain briefly abated. Then, on October 1 and 2, a second storm—this time the tropical remnants of a Category One Gulf of Mexico hurricane—moved across the southeast from Apalachicola Bay in the Florida panhandle to Augusta and dropped another eight inches of rain on an already saturated landscape. Unable to absorb any more water, the land shed the deluge, and the Savannah River rose again to send a second, larger flood crest downstream to the Augusta metro area. The Great Flood of 1929 plowed through the Piedmont, easily surged over the low Stevens Creek and Augusta Canal dams, but broke the Augusta Canal’s bank above the city and washed away bridges intentionally loaded down with heavy freight trains. Across the Savannah River from Augusta, William Gregg’s antebellum-era Graniteville and other Horse Creek valley mill dams broke loose and washed a handful of South Carolina factory homes from their foundations. Despite fears that the sodden and compromised Augusta Levee might fail catastrophically during the flood, it did not.2
The small town of Hamburg, immediately across the Savannah River, was not so lucky. The South Carolina community had attempted to surpass its colonial-era Augusta neighbor in an economic rivalry over which town would serve as the upper valley’s commercial and transportation hub before the Civil War. Henry Shultz, a white German immigrant, founded the small town in the 1820s, named it after his German birthplace, and invested significant personal capital to promote its economic development. He secured exclusive rights to operate the Savannah River’s only riverboat between his town and Savannah, Georgia, and the town briefly served as the terminus for the Charleston and Hamburg (S.C.) Railroad before an 1834 bridge carried trains directly into Augusta.3 After the Civil War, Hamburg’s demographics shifted, and the town soon lost its economic luster in the shadow of Augusta. Hamburg became known as a center for African American political activity and was the site of a dramatic riot instigated by armed white men who “attacked a legally constituted black militia” on July 4, 1876.4 This incident made national headlines and signaled the beginning of the end for Reconstruction and how whites would redeem the South from what many called northern aggression; it foreshadowed the violent rise of white supremacy. With no political power, Hamburg remained an unleveed town in the Jim Crow South until 1929.
The Great Flood’s second crest, which topped out at nearly forty-five feet, settled any lingering antagonism between the two river communities once and for all and completely swept the unleveed “negro [sic] settlement” away after the residents had already fled. Multiple facilities associated with brick manufacturing, a store, two churches, three filling stations, a railroad yard, and “many of the houses of Hamburg … were carried away” or damaged, thereby rendering the “occupants … homeless.”5 The Savannah River’s historic floods and droughts of the 1920s illustrated dramatic weather, human sacrifice, the inequity of the regional political economy, and water insecurity in one place. The response revealed persistent racial friction as well as new solutions. Hamburg’s story also revealed how race, liberal politics, and the hydraulic waterscape were historically bound on the eve of the Great Depression and would remain linked in the Savannah River valley’s near future. Hamburg was an example of how white New South citizens, like their national neighbors, had haphazardly managed river systems to meet private needs while serving self-identified public goods.
During the interwar years (1918–41) an alternative emerged. Massive federally backed multiple-purpose dams evolved into the ideal technological tools for organizing river basin resources equitably and managing risk. Above all, these structures delivered to the devoted a trio of benefits—hydroelectric production, flood control, and improved navigation—that New South capitalists had conveyed inefficiently at best. Progressives and New Dealers in Georgia and South Carolina leaned on structural solutions first developed by New South free enterprise to generate energy, but they now coveted designs that managed a variety of needs. From this new policy ecosystem emerged a national New Deal big dam consensus—buttressed by Muscle Shoals (completed in 1924 on the Tennessee River), Hoover Dam (1936, Colorado), and Bonneville Dam (1938, Columbia)—that championed mammoth Corps and Bureau of Reclamation public works projects to tackle interlocking cultural and natural challenges.
In the Southeast, the legacies of New South capitalism shaped New Deal liberalism as Americans redesigned the nation’s waterways and energy infrastructure during depression and war. U.S. Army Corp of Engineers staff recommendations contributed to this process but held the agency back from energy, water, and multiple-purpose river dam development in the Savannah River valley. Droughts, floods, and economic crisis were not enough to persuade the Corps to switch from river studies to actual implementation of the studies’ recommendations. Only orders from above could, and eventually did, set in motion plans to build upon the New South’s piecemeal and fragmented waterscape.
Like many other American institutions old and new, the forces and individuals who advocated for the big dam consensus were reacting to social, economic, and environmental conditions during the Great Depression. New Dealers responded to the free market’s failure and ensuing global Great Depression by systematizing the big dam consensus in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). As a grand experiment, one of the TVA’s express goals was to limit New South capitalism’s monopoly power in the energy sector while simultaneously improving southern social and environmental conditions. Regional planners and southern Democrats enthusiastically embraced big dams as cornerstones for an equitable postdepression economy that would balance production and consumption in urban and rural areas. As the national New Deal big dam consensus lurched forward in the coming years, it would, however, encounter resistance from within the New Deal Democratic coalition and the private sector.
The New Dealers’ water and energy agenda began to change form nationally after 1935, and this movement was a reflection of how significant natural resource and energy policy had become to the administrative strategy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR).6 Southern Democrats resisted some elements of New Deal liberalism but generally accepted multiple-purpose dams and rural electrification. By the mid-1930s, conservative Democrats were willing to accept limited agricultural relief and improved rural equity for the greater regional benefits that large federal infrastructure projects delivered.7 The Savannah River valley’s residents had clearly experienced natural disasters, but these disasters were only partly natural. Floods, like droughts, revealed “human complicity” in constructing a landscape subject to nature’s fury and whim where the human victims were often poor and the beneficiaries were often economically powerful. Augusta’s citizens accepted flooding and drought as temporary inconveniences, and they initiated narrowly focused projects like a bigger Augusta Canal that produced more waterpower and a taller Augusta Levee to manage localized flooding. Levees, funded by either community or federal sources, represented one form of technology for risk management and, as environmental historian Ted Steinberg and Hamburg residents might recognize, “risk-production.”8 As the United States entered the Great Depression, a great debate emerged over who was best suited to manage a river valley’s water and energy resources and to manage the hydraulic waterscape. Since the region’s flooding and drought problems were partially manufactured, the individuals and institutions that shaped the conversation about causes and solutions exerted considerable influence.
Southern Democrats contemplated their water and energy choices and calculated any pushback as their national party struggled to hold together a coalition of black and white workers and farmers. Anxious to block continued liberal attempts to advance civil rights and labor reform, but still hungry for federal investment in infrastructure, southern politicians repackaged the New Deal big dam consensus. They turned over flood, drought, and energy futures of the Savannah, Chattahoochee, and other river valleys to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps, with new power and practical New Deal training, separated the TVA’s idealized social planning from the more practical trio of benefits. Corps engineers operating within their old agency emerged as the new arbiters responsible for balancing the legacies of New South laissez-faire and New Deal liberalism to meet the Sun Belt’s anticipated energy demands and water needs after 1944. Before the Corps fully launched this new mission, private and public debate over a place called Clarks Hill disrupted the Corps’ self-imposed limits and dragged the agency onto center stage at a time when southerners were growing increasingly frustrated with the region’s water problems, the old New South corporate models, and the New Deal’s faltering liberal solutions. The American South’s water and energy future remained central to this debate as New South capitalism and New Deal liberalism squared off.
A long history of floods convinced Augusta residents, congressional representatives, and federal agents to further evaluate local flood control solutions in the late nineteenth century. Augusta, located at the fall line that divides the Piedmont and the upper Coastal Plain, had experienced high water as far back as 1800. Early Corps surveys, including Lieutenant Oberlin Carter’s 1890 investigation, studied flood control and water storage options throughout the Savannah River valley in conjunction with the Corps’ primary function: navigational improvement and keeping the nation’s waterways open for boats and barges by clearing debris, dredging channels, and battling shifting sandbars.9
Carter and his assistant, George Brown, hedged when they considered separating human and natural activity while identifying water problems and offering solutions in the Savannah River valley. They reported in 1890 that “it does not lie within the power of man to remove the causes of the destructive floods in the Savannah River valley, although their evil effects” could be “lessened” with improved agricultural and forestry practices in a region still arrested by globalized King Cotton. Their 1890 report noted river bottoms covered in willow, poplar, and sycamore with dense island canebrakes, in addition to the river’s obvious shift from clear to muddied water. The “small gullies” that evolved into “deep gorges” produced turbid water and eliminated “many varieties of fish.”10 Beyond recommendations they could never enforce, such as improved land treatment programs to combat erosion upstream of Augusta, the two men recommended structural engineering solutions: deeper river channels below Augusta to move high water more quickly, protective levees around the city, and flood control reservoirs in tributary streams above Augusta if such structures could be economically justified. However, this 1890 federal risk assessment resulted in no action from federal authorities. The Corps’ leadership had historically refrained from using levee and multiple-purpose technologies to manage flooding risks if such improvements did not enhance navigation, serve national defense objectives, or meet basic cost-benefit evaluations. Colonel Dan Kingman of the Savannah District engineers’ office, like other Corps colleagues, rejected multiple-purpose flood control options in the Savannah River valley because they were “enormously expensive, and their effect uncertain.”11 The 1908 flood did provide Augusta’s leadership with enough justification to plan, finance, and complete the city’s levee by 1915.12 This new structural flood control solution protected the city in 1918 from a thirty-five foot flood surge and nearly failed catastrophically during the great flood of 1929. But the city’s levee institution successfully managed their only defined risk: The Augusta Levee Commission maintained and reinforced a functional levee with occasional congressional funding distributed through the Corps.13 As such, Carter, Kingman, and other Corps engineers limited their own agency’s activities to flood control and navigation in the Savannah River valley well into the 1930s.
National disasters tend to influence institutional momentum. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 helped clear the way for Congress to empower the Corps to move, on a national scale, beyond single-purpose navigational strategies and into the realm of multiple-purpose navigation and flood control work. Under the terms of the Flood Control Act of 1928, Corps engineers assumed increased responsibility for planning, coordinating, constructing, and maintaining the Mississippi and Sacramento valleys’ flood control apparatus; they replaced underfunded and poorly coordinated local levee commissions.14 Colonel Kingman, however, did not move as quickly into flood control in his valley as Corps engineers did in other basins. Since Corps and Augusta operatives continued to focus only on levee engineering along a single, isolated section of the Savannah River, the city’s residents and those with no levee protection continued to face threats associated with flooding and drought because the Piedmont and the central Savannah River valley were not important enough to the nation’s economy or defense to warrant any federally organized, basinwide improvement.15 Major flooding in the Mississippi and other river valleys did not inspire action among Corps officials in Georgia and South Carolina.
Corps and private sector engineers thought narrowly about their water projects before 1930. Until then, there were just a few comprehensive or multiple-purpose domestic and international examples to study.16 One was actually a Corps experiment: the Upper Mississippi River Headwaters navigation project. Congress approved construction of six dams in Minnesota—three in the headwaters and three more on tributaries between 1880 and 1912—that only marginally regulated the river and navigation for St. Paul, 200 miles downstream.17 Another example of multiple, single-purpose dams was Arthur E. Morgan’s flood control project in Ohio. Morgan, who would later become one of the future TVA’s founding directors and lead engineer, designed five single-purpose flood control dams and basins in the Miami River valley to protect Dayton and surrounding communities. The Miami Conservancy District program gained national attention when completed in 1918 because the institution was financed without federal funding.18 Finally, there were multiple-dam developments such as Georgia Power Company’s Tallulah-Tugaloo project and Duke Power Company’s activity on the Catawba River.19 As single-purpose hydroelectric dams, these dams did not provide navigational or flood control benefits; in flood conditions, excess water poured over the dams’ crests, rolled down spillways, and flowed downstream, the consequences of which could include Augusta’s Great Flood in 1929. In this example, Georgia Power’s corporate goal—using specific technology to store water and generate electricity in the hinterlands for urban centers like Atlanta—could never provide public services such as flood control or improve navigation in the lower Savannah River valley.
Talented engineers had initiated more serious experiments with the United States’ first modern, multiple-purpose dams in Arizona, Georgia, and Tennessee. The Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association, in conjunction with the Bureau of Reclamation, completed the Salt River and Roosevelt Dam project between 1909 and 1911, which was the bureau’s first multiple-purpose reclamation (irrigation) and power project.20 By 1914, single projects in the Tennessee (Hales Bar), Savannah (Stevens Creek), and Mississippi (Keokuk) river valleys combined run-of-river dams, hydroelectric generation, and navigation locks.21
Early-twentieth-century civil engineers in the public and private sectors clearly understood how to build multiple-dam projects to manage specific risks or generate specific benefits, but they did not necessarily have the capacity to construct multiple dams to serve multiple purposes. The capital required for multiple multipurpose dams was simply beyond the reach of private investors, and the federal government remained noncommittal to public-private power projects due to the construction and environmental challenges encountered at Hales Bar (see Chapter 2). The post–World War I Muscle Shoals political controversy also made the Corps wary of public power projects. And as long as rail transport remained a viable and cost-effective means of moving freight long distances at low cost, waterborne navigation investment could only justify itself in major corridors like the Mississippi River.
Given these national examples and realities, private and public sector engineers had yet to combine multiple dams with multiple purposes anywhere in the United States before 1933. As an institution, the Corps did not want to manage the Savannah River valley on the scale found in Arizona or Tennessee, nor did the Corps leadership desire to radically reshape the valley’s energy and water landscape in the 1930s as Georgia Power and Duke Power had elsewhere. Furthermore, managing flood risks remained a peripheral objective Corps engineers met with levees and not with dams. What dramatically changed for the dam-adverse Corps leadership, and why did they embark on a program to build the massive multiple-purpose flood, drought, and energy structures that exist today in the Savannah River valley and throughout the nation? In short, complex environmental and economic disasters accelerated institutional change already under way.
Legislative representatives who believed in the power of the conservation state approved multiple hydrologic, geographic, and forestry investigations that efficiently cataloged the environmental resources of the nation’s river valleys, including the Savannah, between 1900 and 1930. Federal and state professionals looked at the landscape with lenses configured to see flood control mechanisms, navigation structures, and electrical generation facilities, among other things. To grasp the range of the basin’s environmental resources, congressional committees relied on trained specialists and engineers to catalog the actual and potential assets, as well as the liabilities and risks, of rivers throughout the country.22
Corps officers and engineers continued to harbor skepticism of multiple-purpose dams and reservoirs as viable technologies well into the 1930s and only began to think systematically beyond single-purpose water management options when forced by legislators to explore comprehensive river development. Congress also acted in response to mounting evidence generated by Progressives and populists that utility monopolies were growing not just in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina, but across the country.23 Congressional representatives decided to participate in this national water management and conservation boom in 1925 and instructed the Corps to estimate the cost for a national river and hydroelectric power survey. In what was also known as “House Document 308,” the Corps recommended that Congress move quickly so federal agencies could get a head start, or perhaps work in conjunction with companies, in order “to secure adequate data to insure that waterway developments by private enterprise would fit into a general plan for the full utilization of the water resources of” any study river. Congress approved funding in 1927, and over the next decade agents of the conservation state efficiently cataloged nearly every river in the country and produced professional reports affectionately called “308 Reports” in reference to the congressional document that initiated the survey process.24
The Savannah River’s 308 Report study assimilated corporate and public data that ultimately shaped New Dealers’ liberal vision for southern rivers. The Savannah District’s engineers reached out to corporate executives and engineers to better understand the New South’s energy and water infrastructure. Corps engineers incorporated data, plans, strategies, and information accumulated by corporate representatives during the 308 study. For example, William States Lee, Duke Power’s chief engineer and one of the leaders since the company’s creation in 1904, explained to Major D. L. Weart how the company managed the thirty-five-mile-long Catawba Station “pond” and hydroelectric facility in North Carolina to control downstream flooding.25 Beyond correspondence over flood control operations of the New South’s dams and reservoirs, Corps and private representatives also shared sedimentation information, blueprints, topographic maps, soil-core samples, and stream flow data related to potential Savannah River valley hydroelectric dam sites.26 By the 1930s, private and public engineers appear to have communicated more frequently as the Corps gathered information for the 308 Report. The correspondence did not stop with technical or hydraulic data.
As the Savannah District engineers prepared their 308 Report, they also asked Georgia Power Company executives to reevaluate their own water and energy plans for the Savannah River. One particular site, known as Clarks Hill and soon to become a major locus of public and private organizational attention, generated real-estate-related correspondence between Major C. Garlington and J. B. Parker of the Commonwealth and Southern Corporation. The Savannah River Electric Company was a subsidiary of Georgia Power Company, which was part of the Commonwealth and Southern Corporation holding company, one of the nation’s largest. It was comprised of more than ten utility companies scattered throughout the nation. Since 1926, the Savannah River Electric Company had planned to build a 90-foot-tall and 2,400-foot-long dam about twenty miles upstream from Augusta, possibly with a navigation lock, and a reservoir capable of holding 9 billion cubic feet of water that would inundate 45,000 acres.27 Major Garlington wanted to know how much land the company had acquired, how much money the company had spent on property acquisition, and if the company had initiated any condemnation proceedings. Finally, did the company know if the Clarks Hill project would “be undertaken when” the market demanded more electricity? Parker, perhaps keen to the implications of his answers, replied that the company had acquired about “two thirds of the necessary” land for the reservoir but claimed it was “impossible for us to supply the” financial information as requested. And given the nation’s declining economic status in early 1933, Parker also noted that “a present overcapacity” of available electrical supply made it impossible for the company “to tell when the” Clarks Hill “development will be needed,” since it was “entirely dependent on the pickup in business” and demand.28 The conversations also initiated Corps engineers to some of the practical functions and operations of these corporate-technological systems. At this moment, New South capitalists provided ample information that would ultimately influence the path of the Corps’ New-Deal-inspired energy and water projects. One additional and important moment reflected New South capitalism’s legacy, the New Deal’s liberal trajectory, and the Corps’ 308 Report for the Savannah River.
The TVA, authorized by Congress in 1933, enshrined the New Deal big dam consensus in policy. The TVA’s initial program demonstrated how several multiple-purpose dams could reshape a river valley’s physical, social, and economic environments with large hydroelectric dams that incorporated navigation locks, generated electricity, controlled floods, and regulated river levels to facilitate transportation. Between 1933 and 1945, TVA engineers oversaw construction of one dozen massive dams and reservoirs to deliver the trio of benefits. The TVA’s greatest objective was manufacturing cheap electricity: Electrified farms could embark on a new round of mechanization; electrification would make decentralized industrialization possible and thus mitigate urban and labor woes; and electricity would make mass-produced fertilizer affordable for farmers. The regionally focused programs would heal a poor land and rescue poor farmers from their gullied and unproductive lands. The TVA, however, was not just a regional planning or high-modernist success story.29 As a federal response to the Great Depression, the TVA made waves and motivated other federal agencies to reevaluate their missions and react accordingly. For example, New Dealers from South Carolina eventually secured Public Works Administration (PWA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) funding for the Santee-Cooper project in 1935, a public power and flood control scheme that was also supposed to facilitate shipping between the landlocked capital in Columbia and Charleston’s harbor.30 The Corps’ 308 Report could have functioned as an important self-promotional piece, given the TVA’s and Santee-Cooper’s practical examples of the New Deal big dam consensus in action. But it did not.
Congress received Major C. Garlington’s official 308 Report, Report on the Savannah, in 1935 as the TVA’s first four multiple-purpose dam projects moved through planning and construction phases.31 The Corps’ Report on the Savannah reached some predictable and striking conclusions as the Great Depression deepened. The report provided an extensive flood history, but there was little discussion about drought history. On flood control, the Corps continued to view the Augusta Levee Commission’s locally managed eleven-mile levee as satisfactorily maintained but also in need of improvement.32 Next, the Corps lumped hydropower and navigation together in the report. The Corps engineers simply recapped what Georgia Power executives had conveyed in March 1933: “Certain power developments may be economically justified when and if a suitable market” emerged, but until then hydroelectric dams did not make economic sense or deserve federal investment. Then the report identified eighteen potential multiple-purpose dam sites throughout the Savannah River basin above Augusta along the Savannah itself and in its tributaries. The Corps also acknowledged that a coordinated “power and navigation” project at Clarks Hill might be organized by an unnamed private power company and the federal government at some point in the future. This suggestion was not radical, and the Alabama Power Company had proposed a similar arrangement during the Great War and the Muscle Shoals controversy. Ultimately, the Corps hoped private interests would develop the Clarks Hill hydroelectric dam and storage reservoir, which would also “provide a minimum continuous regulated flow” to enhance navigation downstream between Augusta and the port of Savannah. But in the end, Major Garlington recommended “that there be no participation by the United States in the problems of irrigation and flood control” on the Savannah River, that any power projects include navigation improvements, and finally, “that no improvement of the Savannah River below Augusta be undertaken at the present time.” New South enterprise and local municipalities successfully managed the river’s flooding, droughts, and energy needs while serving industrial and residential customers. In conclusion, the Corps’ engineers believed federal involvement in the Savannah River basin was “unwarranted” and that the Corps of Engineers’ services were unneeded. By this token, the Depression-era Corps limited its own involvement in directly shaping the river basin for the second time since Oberlin Carter’s 1890 survey and in the wake of the Great Flood (1929).33
The Savannah River valley’s power brokers who valued the Clarks Hill concept found the Corps more relevant than the Corps found itself. In August 1935, about seven months after the Corps released the Report on the Savannah River, Augusta’s chamber of commerce mobilized the city’s boosters to woo New Dealers and their federal dollars. Lester S. Moody (1893–1972) had moved from Jacksonville, Florida, to Georgia in 1926, assumed leadership of the Augusta Chamber of Commerce, and henceforth linked the river to Augusta’s economic future. He would later be anointed the “Father of Savannah River Development.”34 In 1935, Moody and the Savannah River Improvement Commission formally asked FDR to appoint a PWA commission to reevaluate the 308 Report’s findings. Moody’s cohort specifically wanted to revisit the Clarks Hill project’s ability to deliver multiple benefits such as “flood control, navigation, prevention of soil erosion, and power development.”35 Citing reports from the Federal Power Commission (FPC), Moody and his team refuted assertions made by Corps and Georgia Power Company officials about regional energy needs. The boosters argued that Georgia and South Carolina actually faced a future electrical deficit. Furthermore, Moody explained, the Georgia Power Company was unlikely to complete Clarks Hill. Moody’s faith in the Corps and skepticism of Georgia Power were not without justification.
Between the Great Depression and the end of World War II, energy utilities all over the nation faced an uncertain future and shrinking industrial service demand. Many companies put hydroelectric power projects on hold for at least a decade or tabled plans indefinitely.36 But a shifting economy also contributed to an energy transition and consumer behavior. The Georgia Power Company continued to make use of the region’s water after completing the well-publicized Tallulah-Tugaloo River projects in the early 1920s. For example, the company’s massive Atkinson fossil fuel plant on the Chattahoochee River seven miles upstream of Atlanta placed the first of four units online in 1930. While the plant burned coal or natural gas to generate electricity, the plant’s boilers used 90,000 gallons of water to produce steam. And to cool the plant’s condenser, Georgia Power withdrew 5 million gallons of Chattahoochee River water every hour, which was “four times as much water as the entire city of Atlanta” used in a few hours, according to Snap Shots, the company’s in-house magazine.37 Fossil fuel plants looked more reliable and efficient than hydroelectric dams after the 1920s droughts, but even shifting to black coal technology was risky and manufactured potential risk, since the region could never escape its dependence on river water to generate electricity for industrial transplants that brought jobs, and for a growing consumer sector.
Everyday urban Georgians—in Augusta, Athens, and Atlanta—initially benefited from an electrified transportation sector. Georgia Power, for example, got its start in the streetcar business. During the Great Depression, as industrial customers reduced production schedules and manufacturing output, utilities like Georgia Power and Duke tapped a new market to generate revenue. Despite the state of the national economy, Georgia Power and Duke Power launched campaigns to increase residential electrical consumption, a sector that had always been considered secondary. Through a variety of merchandising, layaway, and incentive programs, southern utilities convinced women and men to electrify their homes and to invest in electric irons, refrigerators, water heaters, and other home appliances. Residential electric consumption reportedly doubled between 1934 and 1940.38 Advertising executives helped generate customers, but the revenue only barely helped keep utilities afloat.
While company engineers completed the organic and fossil fuel projects that depended on water to generate electricity, Georgia Power executives simultaneously acquired land for potential dam and reservoir sites along the Chattooga River—a tributary of the Tugaloo River—in 1911.39 But rather than reproduce the Tallulah and Tugaloo hydroelectric dams and reservoirs along the Chattooga River as the company originally had intended to do, the Georgia Power Company shifted construction to the Piedmont in a decision that proved to be a fortuitous choice for the company and the future Chattooga Wild and Scenic River. The New South company also moved out of the mountains and into the Piedmont to diversify geographically and to diversify the company’s collection of generation facilities.
In addition to purchasing Chattooga River valley waterpower sites and completing the Atkinson steam plant, the Georgia Power Company also turned to Furman Shoals and the Oconee River to balance the company’s energy mix. In 1929, the company began building this Piedmont and fall-line project—now known as Lake Sinclair and Dam in Georgia’s “Lake Country”—about four miles north of the state’s old capital of Milledgeville. In September, the company’s president announced plans for a 3,000-foot-long and 90-foot-tall dam to create the state’s largest artificial reservoir (12,000 acres of surface area) and to house the company’s third-largest hydroelectric generation facility.40 One month later, Black Tuesday wiped out Wall Street in October, and the company newsletter made no mention of the downward economic spiral. Instead, the company pressed on with construction activities at Furman Shoals.41 Despite the emerging depression, the company announced plans to spend $16 million on new projects in 1930 “to keep constantly in step with the progress of the state,” according to Snap Shots writers.42 Almost a full year would pass before the Georgia Power Company abandoned the Furman Shoals project on the Oconee River on November 30, 1930, because the company could no longer ignore the global Great Depression.43 The economies of the world and the state not only stalled Georgia Power’s plans for Furman Shoals but also had repercussions for the company’s other projects in the Savannah River valley.
Lester Moody saw an opportunity to balance New South capitalism and New Deal liberalism at Clarks Hill. When Georgia Power executives placed Blue Ridge and Piedmont projects on hold during the Great Depression, the door opened slightly for another party—the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—to take part in shaping the South’s hydraulic waterscape. Furthermore, Georgia Power officers had “surrendered” their Clarks Hill FPC license in 1932 “because of unfavorable economic conditions and consequent lack of demand for power.”44 At this moment of economic insecurity the Great Depression provided a wedge for the Corps to move into the valley, and people like Augusta’s chamber of commerce secretary took advantage of FDR’s interest in public works projects that could move the nation’s economy forward by any means possible. Private utilities worked to block Clarks Hill at the same time that they battled FDR’s TVA.
FDR, eager to see New Deal programs benefit southerners, wasted no time reevaluating the Savannah River’s 308 Report and Clarks Hill. The president requested that a special Savannah River board reassess Clarks Hill’s fate in mid-August 1935. The special board’s members offered a number of recommendations to move the project forward, including an option that would benefit FDR and Georgia Power.45 The former wanted a project that would provide unemployment relief, and the latter still owned thousands of acres of land on the proposed Clarks Hill site.
Georgia Power president Preston Stanley Arkwright Sr. (1871–1946) walked a fine line as a powerful stakeholder who worked at the junction of energy and water in the American South. Arkwright, a long-serving Georgia Power executive (1902–45), did not publicly reject a federally financed Clarks Hill project, and he eventually backpedaled on his company’s initial claim that no utility would purchase the federal project’s electricity. He asserted that the Georgia Power Company would at least be ready to buy all the electricity, since the company served the vast majority of Georgia’s electrified consumers. When the Savannah River Special Board held a 1936 public hearing, Arkwright—perhaps disingenuously—claimed the Georgia Power Company primarily served rural customers: “It is a rural company. It is a rural state. It is substantially a rural supply company.”46 Georgia was predominantly rural, and the company did indeed serve rural customers; but in the 1930s Arkwright’s company primarily envisioned Clarks Hill as a means to serve industrial consumers in urban or isolated rural communities. His statement about rural customers was, however, a critical one for southern Democrats.
With a united front, liberal and conservative New Dealers, picking up where Progressive reformers had left off, condemned corporate energy sector monopolies for refusing to serve rural customers. TVA energy projects and the Rural Electrification Administration (1935)—modeled after the 1920s Giant Power concept—subsidized electrical generation, transmission, and distribution service in rural markets where private energy companies had refused to establish service because “the investment required to serve farms with electricity is very great; the revenue small,” according to one of Georgia Power’s founding executives, Henry M. Atkinson (1862–1939).47 Preston Arkwright did suggest that if Georgia Power could purchase Clarks Hill energy and use the company’s existing distribution lines, then the federal government would not have to invest taxpayer dollars in a duplicate transmission system. Arkwright was simultaneously defending free enterprise while seeking access to federally subsidized infrastructure that could benefit Georgia Power’s monopoly in the short term and the long run. Georgia Power executives—and all of the nation’s investor-owned utilities—wanted to maintain market share during the Great Depression and defend themselves from New Deal liberalism.
Clearly not content with the direction in which Clarks Hill appeared to be moving, Georgia Power spokesmen launched a new discussion about plans to revive their own Clarks Hill project and reapply for an FPC license. The Augusta Chronicle continued to report on—and advocate for—the federal plans to build a high multiple-purpose dam for navigation, flood control, reforestation, recreation, and energy. Augusta boosters who understood the complexities of multiple-purpose planning and engineering were “doubtful” that the Georgia Power Company “could duplicate the vast program planned under the federal project since the latter involved development of the entire Savannah River valley.”48 The company, after all, still owned a half-completed hydroelectric dam at Furman Shoals on the Oconee River in 1939. Moody and others certainly asked, If the company could not complete Furman Shoals, once billed as the third-largest power project in the company’s portfolio, how could the Georgia Power Company again propose to start and finish an even larger and more comprehensive Clarks Hill project?49
The real conflict between those in favor of a federal power project and those in favor of a private power project was not new and echoed the arguments surrounding the Muscle Shoals controversy. The Savannah River’s Clarks Hill project also illustrated the political minefield FDR confronted when his New Deal administration attempted to right the ship of an overturned economy of the 1930s. If there was one New Deal plan that politicians initially accepted, it was the TVA. Many southerners had welcomed the idea to remake the Tennessee River valley into a decentralized industrial heartland, to control the flooding, improve navigation, and to produce fertilizer to reclaim degraded farmland. The TVA initially looked like a set of programs targeting regional poverty and unemployment while also healing a sick land.50 But New South free enterprise advocates were not interested in more TVAs. After 1935, their opposition had increasingly tarred the organization as socialistic and anticapitalist and as an institution insulated from competition and protected by government subsidies.51
As Georgia Power and Corps staff negotiated Clarks Hill’s fate, Commonwealth and Southern’s president and future U.S. presidential hopeful Wendell Willkie engaged the TVA’s directors on multiple fronts to limit the New Deal’s liberal regional planning expansion into the territories of Commonwealth and Southern’s subsidiaries. Alabama Power—a subsidiary like Georgia Power—had acquired significant land and ideal waterpower sites along the Tennessee River in the Muscle Shoals area before the Great War, begrudgingly donated the Wilson Dam property to the federal government in 1918, and then entered short-term contracts to purchase federally generated hydroelectric power from the site after 1925. Soon after Congress and the president created the TVA in 1933, Willkie negotiated additional short-term contracts and agreed to sell specific utility properties including Alabama Power’s Wheeler Dam site to the TVA for $2.9 million. This agreement set off the Alabama Power shareholder-led lawsuit Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority in 1936. Given these complicated relationships between private utilities, their shareholders, and emerging public energy utilities like the TVA, Georgia Power and other energy companies, not to mention Corps engineers, across the country watched Willkie and the TVA board of directors engage in a private-power versus public-power battle that had implications for New Deal liberalism, the nation’s rivers, and the Savannah River valley’s Clarks Hill site.52 By the mid-1930s, the TVA looked increasingly like a onetime experiment, but the legal route critics pursued in hopes of testing the constitutionality of and dismantling the TVA failed in 1939. And lobbyists on all sides continued to fight over energy and water, over who would protect private needs and public goods, and over how to manage environmental conditions like droughts and flooding. Clarks Hill was bound up in the TVA fight.
Critics within and outside FDR’s administration—particularly within the Department of the Interior and the Corps of Engineers—also expressed concern over TVA expansion beyond electric generation and river planning into forestry and soil conservation. As FDR’s programs failed to deliver significant relief or threatened local political structures, agricultural and antiliberal critics derailed the New Deal’s water program by lobbying Congress to approve the Flood Control Act of 1936.53 This legislation called into question the viability of future TVAs and regional planning by dividing comprehensive watershed management between the Corps and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Congress ultimately designed the 1936 act to limit the expansion of additional valley authorities. The act, however, was an example of legislation born out of bureaucratic conflict because it divided flood control within river basins between the Corps and the agriculture department’s Soil Conservation Service. The Corps retained flood control responsibilities on navigable waterways, and the conservation service assumed responsibility for the nonnavigable streams and headwaters. Most important, by dividing watershed responsibilities between the Corps and the conservation service within a given watershed, Congress dealt regional and comprehensive planning a mortal blow.54 This division delineated agency boundaries to eliminate bureaucratic infighting, but it also presented future critics of the Corps with another wedge. The TVA had solved some of the South’s water problems but remained a risky model for regional and global modernization.55
FDR faced opposition from other quarters as he attempted to hold the New Deal coalition together with the big dam consensus. This was particularly the case in the “Solid South” where the Democratic Party was euphemistically unified. In reality and like many coalitions, the New Deal coalition was tenuous at best. Utility executives—including those from Georgia Power—rejected the New Deal big dam consensus and liberalism because public power projects threatened corporate profits and shareholders’ returns. But white southern Democrats with rural ties had little empathy for the utility monopolies that refused to electrify farms; their primary source of antipathy to FDR and the New Deal rested someplace else. Farmers—independent, tenant, and sharecroppers—and low-wage textile mill workers, black and white, formed the base of the Democratic Party. While African Americans—initially devoted members of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party—found a new home in the Democratic Party during the Great Depression, relations between FDR and conservative white southern Democrats were increasingly strained when New Deal agricultural, labor, and social programs threatened to erase the divisive color line.
FDR commissioned the 1938 Report on Economic Conditions of the South because of frustration over southern intransigence toward New Deal programs and because the New Dealers saw no clear indication that the southern economy had improved. The Agricultural Adjustment Act had injected cash into communities and reduced the total acreage in cultivation, but it also adversely affected tenant farmers and sharecroppers, particularly African Americans. If planters and landlords were able to make the Agricultural Adjustment Administration work for them, then southern industrialists found the National Recovery Administration untenable. They disliked the recovery administration because it elevated wages for all laborers—African American and white—and thereby threatened the racial status quo as well as company bottom lines.56FDR turned primarily to southern liberals like Howard W. Odum to help write the Report on Economic Conditions of the South. The Report noted that thirteen southern states—from Texas and Oklahoma to Virginia and Kentucky—produced much of the nation’s mineral fuels in 1938: one-fifth of the “soft coal,” two-thirds of the natural gas, and two-thirds of the crude oil. Southern energy companies also produced 85 percent of the region’s electricity organically via “waterpower”; by comparison, only 37 percent of the total power produced in the United States as a whole came from hydroelectric sources.57 Despite abundant water resources and a variety of energy regimes, the report characterized the South as a colonial economy and a place of abundant yet mismanaged human and physical resources. As one historian concluded, “Disguised as an objective analysis of the regional economy, the Report on the Economic Conditions of the South was a manifesto” to justify New Deal liberalism’s intervention in the southern economy.58
White southern Democrats likened the report and the New Deal to another Reconstruction imposed on the region. A number of Democrats—including Senators Walter F. George (Ga.) and Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith (S.C.)—accepted some New Deal programs. For example, long before the creation of the TVA, Smith had advocated for federal involvement in fertilizer manufacture at Muscle Shoals to benefit southern farmers. But when New Deal liberalism threatened to disrupt white supremacy, conservative Democrats turned against FDR. As a result, the president attempted but failed to influence local elections by purging conservative white southern Democrats—including George and Smith—from the party during the 1938 election because of their reluctance to support his full slate of New Deal liberalism.59 New Deal politics, involving energy, water, and civil rights, revealed a fractured southern wing of the Democratic Party. And where discussion about future TVAs—including a proposed Savannah Valley Authority—failed to generate traction, support for the Corps was more easily secured.60 Conservatives dismantled regional planning as embodied in the TVA’s mission while elevating the Corps’ water and energy program. Where the TVA concept talked about community building and equity, the Corps was directed to address only parts of a whole.
Hamburg was one part of the Savannah River valley. The South Carolina community’s path after the Great Flood and on the eve of the Great Depression embodied the consequences of New South capitalism and the possibilities of New Deal liberalism. Recommendations reached in the Corps’ 308 Report (1935), the Clarks Hill Commission’s advocacy for the dam (1936), and the Report on Southern Conditions (1938) would have resulted in limited direct improvement for Hamburg’s residents. The Great Flood of 1929 did not produce any structural change for Augusta, a response from the Corps, or a New Deal rescue. The Great Flood did result in change for African Americans who had received no direct benefit from levees or hydroelectric dams but were all too familiar with the tenuous relationship between water, power, and risk. Hamburg African Americans “rendered homeless” by the Savannah River’s Great Flood and Augusta’s levee were also casualties of racial politics; they sacrificed personal property for the public good of Augusta. While they suffered the consequences of living in an inequitable society, some Hamburg residents also benefited from a unique nonstructural flood control solution in 1929. South Carolina citizens who lived across the river from Augusta were relocated, but not by the federal government and not to make way for a massive structural flood control project.
Floods had inundated Hamburg prior to the Great Flood of 1929. The headquarters and local chapters of the American Red Cross had rendered aid on multiple occasions to about eighty African American families. Most of the men worked in brick manufacturing, and many of the women cultivated large gardens and sold produce across the river in Augusta markets. After one spring flood a Red Cross official took the time to explain why African Americans continued to return to the floodplain after floodwaters receded. Residents did not like living in harm’s way, but they occupied their homes “practically rent free.” Other Red Cross personnel expressed frustration over the residents’ perceived “indifference and insistance [sic] in residing in this constantly threatened territory.” White observers, however, missed African Americans’ pragmatic and rational economic decisions; they were “not only out of sympathy with [African Americans] but are really indignant,” according to the Red Cross’s John T. McMullen.61 In essence, the first responders blamed the victims without considering the broader racial, economic, and structural factors that influenced African Americans’ settlement in a vulnerable place like Hamburg. None of the Red Cross responders identified Augusta’s levee as a risk management technology that produced the risk of flooding in Hamburg. And Hamburg’s African American residents had limited housing choices and economic reasons not to relocate after previous floods. The consequences of the double storms and Great Flood of 1929, however, were different.
The collective labor of black and white citizens working across the “color line” saved the Georgia levee from total collapse and paved the way for a new Hamburg in South Carolina.62 When the floodwaters began to recede and the Augusta levee held, the Aiken and Augusta Red Cross chapter members balked at providing aid that would encourage Hamburg residents to reoccupy the floodplain. Less than one month after the Great Flood of 1929, a solution emerged. Charles W. Carr, the official Washington, D.C., Red Cross envoy in Augusta, and white and black businessmen all agreed that relocation was “the only way to solve the problem.”63 He recommended that the Red Cross facilitate relocation of residents from Hamburg to Carpentersville on Shoats Hill, about one mile away and eighty feet above the floodplain on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. The assumption was that the Red Cross could purchase and subdivide six acres into at least twenty-two individual properties. Given the options, the history of flooding, and the legacy of floodplain occupation, the Red Cross chose a decidedly nontechnological option to remove people from harm’s way.64
Newspapers soon began to report on a new Hamburg on the plateau above the Savannah River’s floodplain after the Red Cross agents negotiated purchase of a few acres that had been subdivided by an unnamed “local real estate man.”65 In paternalistic, patronizing, and misleading language, an Augusta journalist explained that “the land on which these humble negroes [sic] have elected to call new Hamburg was given them through the generosity of the American Red Cross and the white people of Aiken county [S.C.].”66 In truth, the Hamburg relocation was only possible with help from Augusta’s well-established African American business community. Hamburg’s eighty-two families had received food assistance from multiple sources over three weeks, including William “Will” Carpenter, a prominent African American with an extensive social and business network. Carpenter was an Augusta grocer, president of the Georgia Mutual Life and Health Insurance Company (founded in 1908), and president of the Penny Savings and Loan Company.67 Carpenter did more than provide groceries and food for Hamburg residents; he eventually received many of the construction contracts to build new homes with American Red Cross subsidies.68 Perhaps most important, Carpenter owned the land under the new Hamburg. He served on the board of directors for the Southern Realty Company, a real estate firm that worked for the African American community, and O. M. Blount, the company’s president, was the unnamed “local real estate man” who subdivided the new Hamburg property, which was named Carpentersville.69 The end of Hamburg’s story, however, is complicated.
Haphazard management of the Savannah River valley’s water, white supremacy, and the Augusta levee’s technology contributed to the manufactured risk in Hamburg and the community’s ultimate dissolution. The Augusta levee project protected the city’s public welfare but not the South Carolina families—the African American market gardeners and brick makers—who contributed to feeding and building Augusta. For Augustans intent on managing the Savannah River for drought and flood, the obvious solution was to move Hamburg, thereby saving lives and money well into the future. At the time, this move was undoubtedly for the public’s—and Hamburg’s residents’—best interest, or was it? Belching factories and hazardous landfills have historically shadowed poor and minority communities due to a variety of structural and demographic factors, some intentional and others that evolved gradually over time. Many of these spaces had also been marginal environments to begin with, making them less resilient to natural disasters.70 The Hamburg postflood resolution was significant because the Red Cross managed a community relocation project that moved an African American community out of harm’s way. The solution was not to build levees or other expensive and marginally successful flood control structures that many white communities and urban boosters have historically demanded elsewhere (i.e., in the Mississippi Valley and New Orleans). Instead, the Red Cross successfully engineered a nonstructural solution to eliminate future flood disasters within one minority community with material and financial assistance from local white and black businesses.
The dissolution of Hamburg, however, left former residents without easy access to the same fertile floodplain soil, and the brick factories were gone. It is unclear how the new Carpentersville residents made a living after the Great Flood of 1929. But what is clear is that sixty years later the old Hamburg—safe for white resettlement after Clarks Hill’s federally subsidized flood control eliminated a perception of risk—was eventually populated with “executive homes” between the riverfront and the River Golf Club in the late 1990s. Carpentersville—isolated on the hill over the river—was eventually surrounded by industrial facilities and deteriorating strip malls. The powerful people who protected Augusta and controlled the valley’s water for industrial and commercial economies turned a handsome personal profit at the expense of others who sacrificed property, occupations, and community. Solutions to Augusta’s water insecurity benefited those who defined—and created—the problem in the first place.
Interwar environmental and economic conditions challenged the simplistic divisions between the uncoordinated private and public initiatives that managed some risks while producing magnified problems in places like Hamburg. After Savannah River valley residents gripped by the Great Depression reconsidered their drought and flood history, some looked to the federal government for help building water conservation structures that could manage complex rivers, urban-industrial energy demands, and the risks associated with what were clearly recurring and new environmental conditions.
By the time the Great Depression ended with the nation’s entrance into World War II in 1941, New Deal liberal water and energy programs bore fruit for the Corps and its critics in important ways. First, the Corps’ leadership had been slowly amassing institutional exposure to public works projects during the New Deal. For example, FDR appointed Colonel Francis Harrington to head the WPA in 1938. When former WPA head Harry Hopkins transitioned to secretary of commerce, he observed that Harrington had the political advantage of appearing as an “‘apolitical’ army engineer.” Harrington, as a former Corps officer and Panama Canal chief engineer (1924), also functioned as a foil that protected FDR and the WPA from conservative criticism.71 There is a second reason why New Deal liberalism was important for the Corps: The 308 Report forced Corps officers to engage with New South executives, and the collaboration resulted in a federal blueprint for the Savannah River’s water and energy future. Before and during the New Deal era, Corps staff learned how to organize public works projects and where these projects—including multiple-purpose dams—might rise in the Savannah River valley’s headwaters, tributaries, and main stem. Finally, the Corps’ work and experience with New Deal–era public works projects had also provided valuable lessons for critics of regional planning, civil rights, and liberalism. As Georgians, South Carolinians, and other Americans envisioned future energy and water solutions, they recognized that artificial reservoirs had the capacity to produce risk in a new social and environmental climate of postwar “rights-based liberalism.”
Southern Democrats and boosters capitalized on the Corps’ Great Depression knowledge and experience. They repackaged the New Deal big dam consensus’s water and energy program and set the stage—beginning at a place called Clarks Hill—for Sun Belt commercialism. Solving the American South’s water problems remained a predominantly private enterprise between the New South era and the beginning of the Great Depression. A handful of private companies manipulated southern waters to generate electricity primarily for urban, industrial, and commercial—not rural and agricultural—constituencies from Mississippi to Tennessee and from Georgia to Virginia. The Wall Street crash and Great Flood of 1929 were the major turning points for the Savannah River valley, and the New Deal provided a wedge for federal agencies to participate in sculpting the future of the nation’s hydraulic waterscapes. Managing old and new environmental conditions, and energy and water, would never be the same. The TVA presented an alternative program for resource management, but many Americans and Congress rejected the TVA model, leaving other federal agencies like the Corps to negotiate with multiple stakeholders over the fate of southern rivers. This experience presented all Sun Belt parties—public and private, large and small—interested in southern waterscapes with very different circumstances and new options.