Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
will complete the Panama Canal will the Government in due time undertake this work.”
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The prescient Switzer envisioned not private enterprises but instead extensive government
valley and headwaters projects throughout the nation, starting with the Tennessee Valley.
As the lead federal institution in the Tennessee River valley at the time, the Corps
of Engineers approached multiple-purpose dams and projects with trepidation. While the
Corps today manages hundreds of multiple-purpose dams and reservoirs, it amassed this
responsibility very slowly, beginning in 1918 at a place downstream of Hales Bar called
Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Throughout the nineteenth century, individuals and investment
groups had presented the federal government with plans to improve navigation and harness
Muscle Shoals's immense waterpower potential. Before and after World War I, successive
administrations were mired in conflict over how to acquire, develop, manage, and then dis-
pose of federal property at Muscle Shoals. To clear the environmental, financial, and tech-
nical hurdles evident at Hales Bar, some Muscle Shoals promoters had suggested public-
private partnerships in which the federal government would pay for navigational improve-
ments and a large dam, while energy corporations would finance generation and transmis-
sion facilities. Hales Bar's environmental and staggering financial challenges, however,
menced in 1914 and the nation's participation was imminent, Congress eventually acquired
two dam sites from the Alabama Power Company and approved construction of two ni-
trate production facilities at Muscle Shoals and a dam to generate electricity for wartime
industry. As construction proceeded, intense national debate ensued over the federal gov-
ernment's entrance into the fertilizer and energy production business, and this well-doc-
umented New South battle at Muscle Shoals between big business (namely the Alabama
Power Company) and Progressive reformers (led by Nebraska senator George W. Norris)
influenced the ultimate shape of the liberal New Dealers' TVA.
The debate over the fate of Muscle Shoals was an important national exercise involving
many public and private participants who contributed to the TVA concept, but the creation
of the TVA all too often overshadows other aspects of this earlier dispute. Understanding
the pre-TVA role of private hydroelectric power illustrates what private energy corpora-
tions stood to lose during this famous dispute over Muscle Shoals, as well as why private
interests continued to vilify federal hydroelectric energy projects as symbols of New Deal
liberalism in the following quarter-century. As Preston J. Hubbard has concluded in his de-
tailed analysis of the debate, Muscle Shoals occupied “an important place” in U.S. history
because the conflict was essentially about who should control energy markets and conser-
of Engineers built Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, the agency was not devoted to multiple-
purpose dam building or energy production. According to David P. Billington and Don-
ald C. Jackson, the national leadership of the Corps considered multiple-purpose projects
