A Keystone Dam and Georgia’s New Ocean - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 71

Georgia officials expressed the belief that “every citizen should be provided for.” For
white “land owners,” prime destinations apparently included coastal and mountain destin-
ations “during the warm summer months” and “especially when crop prospects” were fa-
vorable. But for “the white tenant class of the farming population,” the report observed,
“recreation among the men and boys” consisted primarily “of hunting and fishing” and
sports. Additionally, these white tenant families—perhaps white wives and girls more spe-
cifically—enjoyed “old fashioned church sociables [ sic ] … and special events” such as
barbecues. Finally, the authors assessed African Americans, who were not subcategorized
as property owners or tenants or by their sex. The authors' racial stereotypes assumed
that African Americans' recreation was “peculiar to their racial characteristics” and only
“centered around churches.” As such, African American recreation facilities only needed to
include “simple local developments, such as playfields with barbecue grounds and swim-
ming pools.” African Americans, so the thinking went, would not like the beach or moun-
tains, and these prescriptions ultimately limited African American exposure to particular
types of outdoor recreation and environments. Based on these combined demographic and
assumed social characteristics, Georgia not only needed “two area systems, one for white
people” and one for African Americans, but institutionalized facilities for “low income
groups” and men who did not have the money, time, or transportation means to travel “very
far in search of recreation.” 45 According to the Report , Georgia had little public land like
the American West and needed a recreational plan that played to the region's racial, so-
cioeconomic, and rural realities.
Sun Belt boosters and politicians stumping for the Corps' Clarks Hill project took this
recreation advice seriously. They disseminated information about plans for segregated re-
creation at the Savannah River valley's multiple-purpose dams in anticipation of a post-
war leisure boom. By the late 1940s, Augusta's chamber of commerce secretary Lester
S. Moody and South Carolina's governor J. Strom Thurmond consistently campaigned for
Clarks Hill as a public source of industrial energy and flood control. Both also openly sup-
ported the Corps' recreational plans. Moody, in particular, did not underestimate recreation
as an economic engine for his region and looked at Clarks Hill as a destination for all
overworked and “half sick” Americans seeking a sublime nature. Singling out Clarks Hill,
Moody envisioned the artificial reservoir as a “mecca” [ sic ] for “thousands of visitors” who
had the financial means to travel great distances, rent boats, sleep in lakeside cottages, and
pump thousands of recreation-related dollars into the Savannah River valley's emerging
Sun Belt service economy. 46
South Carolina's then-Democratic governor J. Strom Thurmond worked the other side
of the river and did not limit Clarks Hill recreation and nature appreciation to nonlocal
visitors with potentially deep pockets. Thurmond, of course, recognized first and foremost
that Clarks Hill would benefit one particular class: industrialists. Clarks Hill would lure in-