Countryside Conservatism and Conservation - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 118

from years earlier, understood that if federal water and energy projects included recreation
areas, then carefree recreation for whites would be impossible. Any public recreation areas
at Trotters Shoals built with public funds or “any thing that has Federal money in it will
have to be open to all races.” 58
The public debate over Trotters Shoals incorporated New Right rhetoric and antiliberal
arguments found in other parts of the United States in the 1960s. Clarks Hill, Hartwell,
and Trotters Shoals opponents grafted water projects into a discourse of states', civil, and
water rights in the post-1945 period. Conservative constituents from small towns and rur-
al counties used language that included throwbacks to the past while wrestling with the
Sun Belt's long-chronicled race and water conflicts. These responses from the urban and
rural Southeast trumpeted the merits of privatization and free enterprise while criticizing
public energy projects and federal intrusion into the nation's economy; they also conveni-
ently ignored the local incentives used to lure industry to the region. Finally, the conser-
vatism stirred by water and energy projects in the Savannah River valley paralleled the
thoughts and activities of grassroots activists sitting at kitchen tables who organized around
taxes, zoning, and busing in the other parts of the country. The conservative letter writers
who shared their ideas about Trotters Shoals and environmental politics identified entitle-
ments—to local self-determination, to peaceful segregated recreation, or access to the wa-
ter supply—as fundamental rights.
Trotters Shoals spanned a critical era in American environmental and Sun Belt history.
Countryside conservationists and environmentalists faced formidable challenges in the
post-1945 period. They were not alone. New South capitalists and liberal New Dealers had
promoted dams as solutions for the region's water, energy, and economic problems; they
repeatedly met opposition. Whereas countryside conservationists concerned about water
supply and quality helped put Trotters Shoals on the map, post-1970s environmentalists
threatened to erase it to save an undammed stretch of river in favor of a National Recreation
Area. When Trotters Shoals's proponents packaged the project in the 1960s, they never
could have imagined that a local, Savannah River project would become a national symbol.
Eventually, Corps engineers transformed the Savannah River's Piedmont between the
Hartwell dam and Clarks Hill reservoir. Corps project managers let the first construction
contract in 1974 as they continued to purchase land for the project area from at least sixty
families and property holders, including twenty-five farms. 59 Trotters Shoals dam was re-
named the Richard B. Russell Jr. Dam shortly after Russell died in 1971 to commemorate
the senator and to make it very difficult for the congressional Public Works Committee to
turn down future appropriations for a project named for one of the Senate's most senior
members. 60 The Corps constructed a series of earthen and concrete dams stretching 6,000
feet across the Savannah River, and when water from the 26,000-acre reservoir first flowed
through the dam's four generators in January 1985, a nearly 100-year quest to maximize