A Keystone Dam and Georgia’s New Ocean - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 68

Company's recently restarted Furman Shoals project on the Oconee River. The company
initiated construction at Furman Shoals (now known as Lake Sinclair and Dam) in 1929,
stopped in 1930 during the Great Depression, and restarted construction in 1949. And when
Georgia Power began operating Sinclair Dam in 1954, Milledgeville benefited from loc-
al tax payments. This was enough to justify the editor's opinion that the company was in
a better financial “position to develop” Clarks Hill. 33 Despite the crippling 1941 drought
conditions, the conversation on Georgia Power's side generally stuck to economic motiva-
tions and did not dare suggest that protecting water supply and water quantity was neces-
sary for future economic development.
The Georgia Power Company's move to relicense Clarks Hill took some boosters by sur-
prise and frustrated others. Lester Moody, the secretary of the Augusta chamber of com-
merce, rejected Georgia Power's proposal in 1946 and championed the federal project
thereafter. 34 The Augusta business community and others also rebuffed their adversaries'
attempts to link a public energy program with socialism. After the Georgia Power Company
called the federal project socialistic, Moody replied: “If working to improve the conditions
of the people living in the Savannah River Basin area is socialistic, then I am a socialist.”
The socialist label, he continued, “was just another version of the old story that is always
used when one attempts to do something to improve living conditions for a people.” 35 One
of Moody's cohorts, Augusta Herald publisher William S. Morris Jr., the father of the Mor-
ris media empire's current CEO William “Billy” Morris III, endorsed the federal project
over the private project. Like Moody, Morris likewise contested Georgia Power's assertion
that the federal project was akin to socialism: “We cannot support the power company's
argument that the development of the Savannah River constitutes Socialism, because the
rivers and streams and all other natural resources belong to the people, and should be deve-
loped in a manner which would be most beneficial to all the people.” 36 Lifelong southern
supporters of private enterprise, Moody, Morris, and others found fellow southern boosters'
and journalists' “socialism” and “socialistic” criticisms unfounded, and they recognized the
language as a rhetorical leftover from the fight against fascism in Europe and from fears of
Soviet expansion, and as a product of dropping temperatures at the onset of the Cold War.
Distrustful after years of private energy company monopoly, valley residents rejected the
legacy of private hydroelectric dams that had generated power that was, as Governor Strom
Thurmond's hometown newspaper declared, “transmitted away” from the hinterlands “for
the emolument of people elsewhere” in water- and energy-poor cores. 37 Taxes, free enter-
prise, and electricity, however, were not the only conversation topics.
Clarks Hill not only moved forward as a project to minimize flood- and drought-induced
damages or as an energy and navigation scheme, but it also became a major tool for reshap-
ing the Savannah River valley's recreation future. Recreation became an official part of
the traditional multiple-purpose project planning by way of the Flood Control Act of 1944.