New Deal Big Dam Consensus - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 54

ing, improve navigation, and to produce fertilizer to reclaim degraded farmland. The TVA
initially looked like a set of programs targeting regional poverty and unemployment while
also healing a sick land. 50 But New South free enterprise advocates were not interested in
more TVAs. After 1935, their opposition had increasingly tarred the organization as social-
istic and anticapitalist and as an institution insulated from competition and protected by
government subsidies. 51
As Georgia Power and Corps staff negotiated Clarks Hill's fate, Commonwealth and
Southern's president and future U.S. presidential hopeful Wendell Willkie engaged the
TVA's directors on multiple fronts to limit the New Deal's liberal regional planning expan-
sion into the territories of Commonwealth and Southern's subsidiaries. Alabama Power—a
subsidiary like Georgia Power—had acquired significant land and ideal waterpower sites
along the Tennessee River in the Muscle Shoals area before the Great War, begrudgingly
donated the Wilson Dam property to the federal government in 1918, and then entered
short-term contracts to purchase federally generated hydroelectric power from the site after
1925. Soon after Congress and the president created the TVA in 1933, Willkie negoti-
ated additional short-term contracts and agreed to sell specific utility properties including
Alabama Power's Wheeler Dam site to the TVA for $2.9 million. This agreement set off
the Alabama Power shareholder-led lawsuit Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority in
1936. Given these complicated relationships between private utilities, their shareholders,
and emerging public energy utilities like the TVA, Georgia Power and other energy com-
panies, not to mention Corps engineers, across the country watched Willkie and the TVA
board of directors engage in a private-power versus public-power battle that had implica-
tions for New Deal liberalism, the nation's rivers, and the Savannah River valley's Clarks
Hill site. 52 By the mid-1930s, the TVA looked increasingly like a onetime experiment, but
the legal route critics pursued in hopes of testing the constitutionality of and dismantling
the TVA failed in 1939. And lobbyists on all sides continued to fight over energy and water,
over who would protect private needs and public goods, and over how to manage environ-
mental conditions like droughts and flooding. Clarks Hill was bound up in the TVA fight.
Critics within and outside FDR's administration—particularly within the Department of
the Interior and the Corps of Engineers—also expressed concern over TVA expansion bey-
ond electric generation and river planning into forestry and soil conservation. As FDR's
programs failed to deliver significant relief or threatened local political structures, agricul-
tural and antiliberal critics derailed the New Deal's water program by lobbying Congress to
approve the Flood Control Act of 1936. 53 This legislation called into question the viability
of future TVAs and regional planning by dividing comprehensive watershed management
between the Corps and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Congress ultimately designed
the 1936 act to limit the expansion of additional valley authorities. The act, however, was
an example of legislation born out of bureaucratic conflict because it divided flood control