Public Dams, Private Power: The Fight for Clarks Hill, 1946-1957

In the decade following the end of World War II, public and private forces collided over plans to construct a massive federal dam on the Snake River at Hells Canyon. The battle sparked national debates about nature, energy, economic development, and political power, as private interests successfully “unplugged” the New Deal in the US Northwest and ushered in an energy regime of private dams and public power. At the same time, Southerners too engaged in battles over whether the private or public sector should control their rivers. Clarks Hill dam on the Savannah River assumed a central position in regional and national questions about the fate of the New Deal. Casey Cater offers a comparative regional analysis for WSU’s Northwest audience. Despite important similarities between the Northwest and South, Cater argues that what Southerners got at Clarks Hill was the reverse of the outcome at Hells Canyon: public dams but private power. Private utilities “unplugged” the New Deal in the South, but plugged its machinery of hydropower into its increasingly coal-based network, reaffirming a Southern political economy based on state-sanctioned, federally subsidized private monopoly over nature.  

Casey Cater teaches History at Kennesaw State University near Atlanta, GA. He draws this presentation at WSU from his current research project: Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy and the Making of the Modern South.

This public lecture is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences Berry Family Faculty Excellence Fellows, the Columbia Chair in the History of the American West, the Sherman and Mabel Smith Pettyjohn Memorial Lectureship, and the Center for Environmental Research, Education, and Outreach.