New Deal Big Dam Consensus - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 53

Arkwright's company primarily envisioned Clarks Hill as a means to serve industrial con-
sumers in urban or isolated rural communities. His statement about rural customers was,
however, a critical one for southern Democrats.
With a united front, liberal and conservative New Dealers, picking up where Progressive
reformers had left off, condemned corporate energy sector monopolies for refusing to
serve rural customers. TVA energy projects and the Rural Electrification Administration
(1935)—modeled after the 1920s Giant Power concept—subsidized electrical generation,
transmission, and distribution service in rural markets where private energy companies had
refused to establish service because “the investment required to serve farms with electricity
is very great; the revenue small,” according to one of Georgia Power's founding executives,
Henry M. Atkinson (1862-1939). 47 Preston Arkwright did suggest that if Georgia Power
could purchase Clarks Hill energy and use the company's existing distribution lines, then
the federal government would not have to invest taxpayer dollars in a duplicate transmis-
sion system. Arkwright was simultaneously defending free enterprise while seeking access
to federally subsidized infrastructure that could benefit Georgia Power's monopoly in the
short term and the long run. Georgia Power executives—and all of the nation's investor-
owned utilities—wanted to maintain market share during the Great Depression and defend
themselves from New Deal liberalism.
Clearly not content with the direction in which Clarks Hill appeared to be moving, Ge-
orgia Power spokesmen launched a new discussion about plans to revive their own Clarks
Hill project and reapply for an FPC license. The Augusta Chronicle continued to report
on—and advocate for—the federal plans to build a high multiple-purpose dam for nav-
igation, flood control, reforestation, recreation, and energy. Augusta boosters who under-
stood the complexities of multiple-purpose planning and engineering were “doubtful” that
the Georgia Power Company “could duplicate the vast program planned under the federal
project since the latter involved development of the entire Savannah River valley.” 48 The
company, after all, still owned a half-completed hydroelectric dam at Furman Shoals on
the Oconee River in 1939. Moody and others certainly asked, If the company could not
complete Furman Shoals, once billed as the third-largest power project in the company's
portfolio, how could the Georgia Power Company again propose to start and finish an even
larger and more comprehensive Clarks Hill project? 49
The real conflict between those in favor of a federal power project and those in favor
of a private power project was not new and echoed the arguments surrounding the Muscle
Shoals controversy. The Savannah River's Clarks Hill project also illustrated the political
minefield FDR confronted when his New Deal administration attempted to right the ship
of an overturned economy of the 1930s. If there was one New Deal plan that politicians
initially accepted, it was the TVA. Many southerners had welcomed the idea to remake
the Tennessee River valley into a decentralized industrial heartland, to control the flood-