Environmental Engineering Reference
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an projects or create new agencies to manage unemployment and economic decline, the
postwar local leadership partnered with the federal government to pump up regional eco-
nomies through “commercial” Keynesian projects, according to one historian. These short-
term public works projects subsidized private contractors, created employment primarily
for white men, and built a foundational infrastructure for Sun Belt commercialism. 23 Lib-
eral operatives had designed large-scale New Deal public works projects like the TVA to
create jobs and inject money into all levels of the economy. Once completed, TVA's dams
did generate energy for factories and contributed to production of fertilizer for farmers. In
sum, regional planners had hoped that the TVA would create a modern industrial society
that complimented a revitalized agricultural sector. Post-1944 multiple-purpose projects,
however, would be different.
Congress, via the Flood Control Act (1944), stripped the regional planning model down
to a techno-selective river planning model. The Corps' leadership also embraced a limited
understanding of comprehensive development and how multiple dams in a single valley
could compliment one another. Most important, the Corps' Sun Belt projects did not serve
industrial and agricultural production equally, included no soil or forestry programs, and
only halfheartedly supported navigation. By and large, boosters and the Corps could pro-
mote and tailor individual postwar hydroelectric and flood control projects to meet locally
specific needs in ways the TVA never did. As such, the postwar multiple-purpose river pro-
jects like Clarks Hill resembled vehicles for pork barrel politics and constituent service. By
the end of the war, Congress positioned the Corps to serve as the main agent responsible
for placing dams and artificial reservoirs in the nation's watersheds, and the Corps began
its post-1945 mission in the Savannah River valley with the Clarks Hill dam and lake.
In the Savannah River valley alone, the Corps bundled together ideas cribbed from the
308 Report (1935) and a June 1944 study before including a recommendation for eleven
dams and artificial reservoirs throughout the Savannah River basin in the 1944 Flood Con-
trol Act. 24 Starting with the Clarks Hill project and a $35.3 million congressional appro-
priation, the Corps set a course to reshape the valley. 25 Benefits of this project specifically
included the ever-desirable year-round navigation below Augusta, flood protection for that
same city, and cheap electricity for Augusta and the lower Savannah River region. Boost-
ers hoped that the dam, like those in the Tennessee Valley and in North Carolina (Yadkin
River) erected by private institutions before 1933 and public agencies afterward, might also
attract the chemical or aluminum industry, which required access to raw water supplies and
low-cost electricity. 26 As a pork barrel project, Clarks Hill combined flood control, hydro-
electric power production, and navigational improvements, thus making the public works
project an easy sell to various constituencies throughout the valley. Not only would the
Clarks Hill dam eliminate the long history of destructive seasonal floods in the Augusta
region, according to Corps engineers, but the dam would also stabilize “low-water flows
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