Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
within river basins between the Corps and the agriculture department's Soil Conservation
Service. The Corps retained flood control responsibilities on navigable waterways, and the
conservation service assumed responsibility for the nonnavigable streams and headwaters.
Most important, by dividing watershed responsibilities between the Corps and the conser-
vation service within a given watershed, Congress dealt regional and comprehensive plan-
infighting, but it also presented future critics of the Corps with another wedge. The TVA
had solved some of the South's water problems but remained a risky model for regional
and global modernization.
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FDR faced opposition from other quarters as he attempted to hold the New Deal coalition
together with the big dam consensus. This was particularly the case in the “Solid South”
where the Democratic Party was euphemistically unified. In reality and like many coali-
tions, the New Deal coalition was tenuous at best. Utility executives—including those from
Georgia Power—rejected the New Deal big dam consensus and liberalism because pub-
lic power projects threatened corporate profits and shareholders' returns. But white south-
ern Democrats with rural ties had little empathy for the utility monopolies that refused to
electrify farms; their primary source of antipathy to FDR and the New Deal rested some-
place else. Farmers—independent, tenant, and sharecroppers—and low-wage textile mill
workers, black and white, formed the base of the Democratic Party. While African Amer-
icans—initially devoted members of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party—found a new
home in the Democratic Party during the Great Depression, relations between FDR and
conservative white southern Democrats were increasingly strained when New Deal agri-
cultural, labor, and social programs threatened to erase the divisive color line.
FDR commissioned the 1938
Report on Economic Conditions of the South
because of
frustration over southern intransigence toward New Deal programs and because the New
Dealers saw no clear indication that the southern economy had improved. The Agricultural
Adjustment Act had injected cash into communities and reduced the total acreage in cul-
tivation, but it also adversely affected tenant farmers and sharecroppers, particularly Afric-
an Americans. If planters and landlords were able to make the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration work for them, then southern industrialists found the National Recovery
Administration untenable. They disliked the recovery administration because it elevated
wages for all laborers—African American and white—and thereby threatened the racial
like Howard W. Odum to help write the
Report on Economic Conditions of the South
. The
Report
noted that thirteen southern states—from Texas and Oklahoma to Virginia and Ken-
tucky—produced much of the nation's mineral fuels in 1938: one-fifth of the “soft coal,”
two-thirds of the natural gas, and two-thirds of the crude oil. Southern energy companies
also produced 85 percent of the region's electricity organically via “waterpower”; by com-
