Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Continental Divide. Georgia Power's system in the Savannah basin—like other New South
private utility companies—was a prototype for the New Deal's signature modernizing tool:
the TVA.
Preston S. Arkwright Sr. (1871-1946) recognized the power that he wielded as a broker
of water and energy. Arkwright estimated that the Tallulah-Tugaloo integrated system
directly benefited Atlanta's citizens and the region's textile employers, and he explicitly
linked consumers to the northeast Georgia project's water supply and electrical production.
Arkwright—born in Savannah, Georgia, and perhaps a distant relative of Richard Ark-
wright, who invented a water-powered spinning frame in late-eighteenth-century Eng-
land—declared that “electricity puts at the finger tips the force of the mountain torrents and
servant in the home—always ready, without rest, vacation, sick leave or sleep; eager for its
task, tireless, day and night.” Arkwright believed hydroelectricity could “banish drudgery
and bring convenience and comfort and ease and cheer and joy to human beings.” As an in-
strument for domestic consumers still dependent on human labor, hydroelectric energy was
like having servants “on tiptoe” behind a wall waiting to spring “forth at your summons,
waiting to do your bidding.” Hydroelectricity, in Arkwright's thinking in 1924, might cre-
ate a domestic and industrial labor utopia free of racial and class conflict. After the brutal
1906 Atlanta race riot left dozens of African Americans dead, and after post-World War
I cuts in textile mill production and wages led white mill workers to strike between 1919
and 1920 throughout the Southeast, Arkwright was not the only person to pin the future on
white coal. But Arkwright's assumption—and that of his contemporaries in the energy, ag-
ricultural, and industrial sectors—that water resources could benefit his company's custom-
ers and help solve the New South's manufactured race and labor problems was more dream
than reality. Transmission lines ran from dams to urban-industrial areas, skipping an inter-
mediary agriculture zone cultivated by sharecroppers and poor farmers and leaving them
without electricity for another decade or more. And textile worker strikes in Elizabethton,
Tennessee, and Gastonia and Marion, North Carolina, in 1929 proved that white coal was
no panacea for industries that continued to stretch and squeeze energy out of people. In
the near future, the company's other urban and industrial customers also learned how a de-
pendence on hydraulic systems like the Tallulah-Tugaloo's waterscape could be dangerous.
