Big Dam Backlash Rising in the Sun Belt - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 83

ent water and energy challenges. An interlocking group of stakeholders—local boosters,
energy executives, members of Congress, and Corps engineers—drove the process from
multiple angles. First, fast-talking local chamber of commerce agents adept at “selling the
South” and long-serving Democratic Party operatives perfected a process initiated during
the New Deal that captured federal dollars to finance the region's military bases, airports,
factories, and highways. 9 Less-well-known Sun Belt boosters also continuously used water
and energy projects to secure federal dollars and sell the region's known commodity: low-
cost, nonunionized labor. Second, energy corporations and their allies did not, however,
completely unplug the New Deal in the American South during the same time period as
they did in the Snake and Green River valleys. Corps and elected officials defended—and
corporate executives criticized—publicly funded water and energy programs in the South.
At the same time, private sector energy companies contributed to the region's hydraulic wa-
terscape by building their own hydroelectric dams or coal plants downstream from federal
dams that regulated unpredictable river flows. The private sector's opposition picked up at
Hartwell, but it could not defeat the Corps' two remaining Savannah River valley projects.
Southern Democrats had reloaded the New Deal and successfully turned the valley's en-
vironmental manipulation over to the Corps. Energy executives, citizens, and other federal
agencies challenged the Corps throughout this process, but it would take these collective
forces nearly two decades to build a serious big dam backlash to federal energy and wa-
ter operations. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Corps' victories in the Savannah River valley's
public-private power debate were very different from the celebrated outcomes that stopped
big government dams in the American West's Hells Canyon and Echo Park. But the free
enterprise, fiscal restraint, and environmental rhetoric resonated in the American South.
The backlash and resistance to federal water projects in the Savannah River valley in
the 1950s manifested in a complex moment of volatile global, social, and environmental
conditions. Southerners articulated water problems—floods, droughts, and soil erosion—in
newspapers, correspondence, and public meetings and throughout the levels of state and
federal bureaucracies. As New Deal economic liberalism came to an end, according to his-
torian Alan Brinkley, postwar “rights based liberalism” produced a limited regulatory en-
vironment while also responding to the civil rights and states' rights movements. 10 Agri-
cultural, industrial, and municipal constituencies affected by water problems expressed a
wide range of solutions to protect property rights, the local tax base, private enterprise,
and the environment. Individuals and interest groups also wanted to reevaluate water rights
in an era in which property rights and states' rights converged with civil rights to redraw
political loyalties after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education deseg-
regation case (1954). All of these issues touched as local boosters leaned on politicians to
make sure full funding was extended for new Corps projects such as Clarks Hill, Hartwell,
and nearly two dozen other major dam, reservoir, and waterway projects across the Sun