Big Dam Backlash Rising in the Sun Belt - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 84

Belt. 11 The Clarks Hill project—completed between 1946 and 1952 because, reportedly,
“everyone was for it”—barely held together the region's long-reigning but clearly fractured
New Deal Democratic Party. The Hartwell project's postwar debates over public energy,
fiscal responsibility, and rights all contributed to dividing political parties and the states of
Georgia and South Carolina. Opinions about the Southeast's hydraulic waterscape could
be found in the heart of these debates and continued to shape liberal and conservative dis-
course in the coming decades. Conservative rights-based ideas—like those espoused in oth-
er regions over busing, taxes, and entitlements—also influenced the Sun Belt's energy and
water choices while recasting future political affinities after the 1950s drought. 12
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers technocrats had previously evaluated the Hartwell dam and
reservoir site in multiple studies—including the 308 Study (1935) and as one of eleven
projects approved in concept by Congress in the Flood Control Act (1944)—before com-
pleting the project in the early 1960s. 13 The Hartwell Dam, a 200-foot-tall and 2-mile-long
(11,000-foot) structure, is about ninety miles upstream and northwest of Augusta. Con-
gress approved and engineers designed Hartwell to provide the primary trio of benefits like
Clarks Hill and other multiple-purpose Corps projects as explicitly approved by the Flood
Control Act of 1950 for flood control, navigation improvement, and energy production.
They also envisioned a new hydroelectric dam that would impound a 56,000-acre reser-
voir (2 million acre-feet) to provide nearly endless opportunities for recreation on land and
water. 14 In the 1940s, elected officials remained generally mum about Hartwell and oth-
er possible federal dams in the river valley during Clarks Hill's planning and construction
period. Colonel Paschal N. Strong, on the other hand, did not remain so tight-lipped. Strong
believed the Savannah River valley was “a gold mine for electric power.” And in 1949,
while discussing Clarks Hill, the self-confident Strong declared, “You may be sure that the
Savannah River will be developed and the Hartwell dam will be built.” 15 Strong was not
wrong, and Hartwell got a congressional green light and first appropriation one year later. 16
With money in the pipeline to improve the Sun Belt's water and energy conditions in the
Savannah River valley, Corps engineers promptly began finalizing land surveys and con-
struction designs for the valley's second major postwar public works project.
Support for the new Hartwell scheme emerged from predictable directions. First, civic
bodies mobilized to promote the project. Georgians and South Carolinians called Hartwell
a self-liquidating “cash-register” dam that would pay for itself through electrical sales rev-
enue to rural electric and municipal cooperatives established during the New Deal. 17 The
Hartwell Steering Committee—comprised of prominent Savannah River valley movers and
shakers—believed the public infrastructure project would jump-start Sun Belt commer-
cial development. Lester Moody, Augusta's tireless chamber of commerce leader, was a
primary spokesman, and he peddled promotional materials. For example, The Hartwell
Project … Now: Presented to the Congress of the United States by the People of South