A Keystone Dam and Georgia’s New Ocean - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 63

and commercial model of economic development to sustain postwar industry and promote
leisure. Something else changed: The New South capitalists and the New Deal regional
planners were no longer the primary dam builders. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers'
participation in transforming the Cotton Belt into the Sun Belt after 1945 should not be
underestimated. The Corps had experience with wartime military-industrial development
and altering river valleys at the behest of local navigational or flood control lobbies. But
the Corps was not necessarily prepared to build hydraulic waterscapes that specifically be-
nefited cities, industries, and leisure-seekers at the expense of old agricultural landscapes. 10
The milewide Clarks Hill dam and massive lake on the Savannah River about twenty miles
upstream from Augusta was among the Corps' first attempts to remake the New Deal big
dam consensus and deliver economic building blocks to the Sun Belt's boosters without
disrupting social relations. 11
Southern Democrats in Congress, state capitols, and chambers of commerce enthralled
by the New Deal big dam consensus continued to solicit and plow federal dollars into big-
ticket Corps water and energy developments to bust droughts, tame flooding, and boost
Sun Belt commercialism. From the beginning, the Clarks Hill scheme appeared to have
wide support, but it was a project that took many people into uncharted territory. The Corps
was challenged to manage seemingly tangential new objectives and the social engineering
required for something like Clarks Hill on the eve of the modern civil rights movement.
This new nature—artificial lakes with attendant recreational possibilities and public health
responsibilities—needled the fracture lines within a political party that was less and less
solid. 12 Crafting blue lakes from a land of red clay to avoid future droughts and floods in
mild Sun Belt climes proved more difficult than anyone anticipated.
Droughts, perceived as natural disasters, like flooding, provided an impetus for southern
river valley residents to support dam and reservoir construction across the region after
1945. Drought in 1941 had again demonstrated that environmental conditions, like the oft-
cited and manufactured labor and race problems, were among the most important barri-
ers to regional economic growth. The White House, Congress, and the Corps responded
by reengaging a modified New Deal land, soil, and water conservation program. Since the
1930s, engineers planned for Clarks Hill to provide electricity, flood control, navigation,
and “other beneficial effects,” including the opportunity to “eliminate entirely” power “out-
ages” along the Augusta Canal “due to low water.” 13 While the Corps may have down-
played its own 308 Report in 1935 (the New Deal-era survey that identified eighteen po-
tential multiple-purpose dams and reservoirs in the Savannah River valley), local boosters
won support at various levels of the federal government to achieve real commitments. 14
The Corps completed another round of surveys throughout the valley in the early 1940s
and published the results in June 1944 while Allied forces prepared for the massive D-Day