Environmental Engineering Reference
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moth Corps and Bureau of Reclamation public works projects to tackle interlocking cultur-
al and natural challenges.
In the Southeast, the legacies of New South capitalism shaped New Deal liberalism as
Americans redesigned the nation's waterways and energy infrastructure during depression
and war. U.S. Army Corp of Engineers staff recommendations contributed to this process
but held the agency back from energy, water, and multiple-purpose river dam development
in the Savannah River valley. Droughts, floods, and economic crisis were not enough to
persuade the Corps to switch from river studies to actual implementation of the studies' re-
commendations. Only orders from above could, and eventually did, set in motion plans to
build upon the New South's piecemeal and fragmented waterscape.
Like many other American institutions old and new, the forces and individuals who ad-
vocated for the big dam consensus were reacting to social, economic, and environmental
conditions during the Great Depression. New Dealers responded to the free market's failure
and ensuing global Great Depression by systematizing the big dam consensus in the Ten-
nessee Valley Authority (TVA). As a grand experiment, one of the TVA's express goals
was to limit New South capitalism's monopoly power in the energy sector while simul-
taneously improving southern social and environmental conditions. Regional planners and
southern Democrats enthusiastically embraced big dams as cornerstones for an equitable
postdepression economy that would balance production and consumption in urban and rur-
al areas. As the national New Deal big dam consensus lurched forward in the coming years,
it would, however, encounter resistance from within the New Deal Democratic coalition
and the private sector.
The New Dealers' water and energy agenda began to change form nationally after 1935,
and this movement was a reflection of how significant natural resource and energy policy
had become to the administrative strategy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). 6
Southern Democrats resisted some elements of New Deal liberalism but generally accepted
multiple-purpose dams and rural electrification. By the mid-1930s, conservative Democrats
were willing to accept limited agricultural relief and improved rural equity for the greater
regional benefits that large federal infrastructure projects delivered. 7 The Savannah River
valley's residents had clearly experienced natural disasters, but these disasters were only
partly natural. Floods, like droughts, revealed “human complicity” in constructing a land-
scape subject to nature's fury and whim where the human victims were often poor and the
beneficiaries were often economically powerful. Augusta's citizens accepted flooding and
drought as temporary inconveniences, and they initiated narrowly focused projects like a
bigger Augusta Canal that produced more waterpower and a taller Augusta Levee to man-
age localized flooding. Levees, funded by either community or federal sources, represented
one form of technology for risk management and, as environmental historian Ted Steinberg
and Hamburg residents might recognize, “risk-production.” 8 As the United States entered
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