Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy and the Modern South 0822945649, 9780822945642

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. An Unseen Force in the New South
2. Electricity and the Mind of the New South
3. A Mighty Outpost of Progress
4. Power for the Masses and the Farm
5. A New Power Era
6. Public Dams, Private Power
7. The Heart of the New South
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Regenerating Dixie

H I S TORY OF T H E U R BA N E N V I RON M E N T

Martin V. Melosi and Joel A. Tarr, Editors

U N I V E R S I T Y OF PI T T S BU RG H PR E S S

Portions of chapter 6 include edited material and extracts from a previous publication by the author, which appeared as “Public Dams, Private Power: Electric Energy and Political Economy in the Post−Second World War US South,” in Electric Worlds/Mondes Électriques: Creations, Circulations, Tensions, Transitions, edited by Alain Beltran, Léonard Laborie, Pierre Lanthier, and Stéphanie Le Gallic (Brussels: P. I. E. Peter Lang, 2016). Permission to reuse has been granted by Peter Lang International Academic Publishers. Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2019, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4564-2 ISBN 10: 0-8229-4564-9 Cover art: W. A. White Company, Eagle & Phenix Dam, Columbus, GA, postcard, ca. 1911, Collection of the Columbus Museum, GA; Gift of Mr. Kenneth F. Murrah. G.2002.59.1 Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

For Ewa, Krzysztof, and Zofia.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1 An Unseen Force in the New South 12 2 Electricity and the Mind of the New South 33 3 A Mighty Outpost of Progress 56 4 Power for the Masses and the Farm 81 5 A New Power Era 108 6 Public Dams, Private Power 130 7 The Heart of the New South 156 Conclusion 185 Notes 191 Bibliography 235 Index 253

Acknowledgments

Lots of people have contributed to this book’s realization and I’m pleased to finally get the chance to thank them. First and foremost, thanks go to Joe Perry, who long ago urged me to consider southern electrification as a historical topic. His involvement didn’t stop there. Joe read multiple drafts, encouraged me to sharpen my thinking and writing, and made sure that I included enough cultural history. Many other members of the History Department at Georgia State University pitched in too. Chuck Steffen, Michelle Brattain, Alex Cummings, J. T. Way, Christine Skwiot, Rob Baker, Ian Fletcher, Richard Laub, John McMillian, Jared Poley, Glenn Eskew, Larry Grubbs, Ryan Prechter, Sam Negus, Lauren Moran, and Michelle Lacoss all helped me along, in ways large and small. The late Cliff Kuhn always had questions to ask and comments to make about my research and gets credit for the book’s title. Isa Blumi, wherever in the world he is at any given moment, remains a constant source of friendship and encouragement. Will Bryan has been a great sounding board. His work and advice have been invaluable. My good pals Hal Hansen and Jon Schmitt made comments on basically every part of the book’s early drafts. Jon even gave me a place to stay in Geneva and accompanied me on research trips. Clif Stratton expressed unbridled enthusiasm when I asked him to read the manuscript. No one invested as much time in poring over, and suggesting improvements for, the book as he did. I’ve been fortunate to benefit from the insights and assistance of many people outside of Georgia State, including Bart Elmore, Chris Jones, and Shane Hamilton, who offered advice and constructive critiques. Andrew Pope, Katherine Stephens, and Michaela Thompson have offered all those things and have been great friends as well. Jon Hill, Marc Landry, and Fred Meiton, who have all done fine work on electrification and have been great dinner and drinking companions at locations ranging from San Francisco to Paris (and many places in between), have constantly inspired me. Brianne “Bronka” Wesolowski was kind enough to give me a place to crash and to host study hall on a research trip to Nashville. At conferences and workshops, scholars such as David Blackbourn, Marty Melosi, ix

Chris Morris, Sarah Phillips, Mark Rose, and Emma Rothschild made helpful comments on parts of the book in stages both early and late, even if they have no recollection of having done so. Troy Vettese, Zachary Cuyler, Trish Kahle, Stephen Gross, and the other participants in the Energy and the Left workshop asked piercing questions about one of my chapters and prodded me to articulate my thoughts more clearly. Institutional support was critical to the book’s completion. Grants through the History Project (a joint venture of Harvard University, Cambridge University, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking) and the Joel Williamson Southern Studies Visiting Scholar program at the University of North Carolina provided funding for travel to and research at several repositories. An IEEE Life Members’ Fellowship in Electrical History and a Lemelson Center Fellowship (Smithsonian Institution/National Museum of American History) together afforded me plenty of time and generous funding to conduct research and to write. Untold numbers of archivists and librarians at Appalachian State University’s Belk Library Special Collections Department, the Atlanta History Center, Duke University’s Rubenstein Library, the Georgia Historical Society, Georgia Southern University’s Special Collections Department, the National Museum of American History’s Archives Center, the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History’s Archives and Library, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, and the University of North Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection provided kind assistance and crucial aid when I visited for research. My heartfelt appreciation goes out to Sandra Crooms at the University of Pittsburgh Press for encouraging me to turn my work into a book and for patiently shepherding me through the entirety of the process. Most of all, I want to thank my family. My family in Atlanta—my parents, Mike and Cheryl, and my siblings, Brent, Josh, Michelle, Steven Farrell, and Stephen Smith—and my family in Poland—my in-laws Maria, Michał, Olga, and Ryszard Urbowicz—have all been nothing but supportive and loving. Ewa provides the foundation for everything I do and has been by my side since before the idea for this book even existed. Without her, I probably would never have gotten close to finishing it. I cannot possibly settle the debt I owe her. So it is to her, and to our children, Krzysztof and Zofia, that I dedicate this book.

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Regenerating Dixie

Introduction

In an April 2011 speech at the US Chamber of Commerce’s CEO Leadership Luncheon, Thomas Fanning, chief executive of the Atlanta-­based Southern Company, lamented that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had “declared a war on coal.” The EPA’s proposed strictures on coal-­based power plant emissions, Fanning feared, would inflict massive damage on the US economy. The agency’s new guidelines, he concluded, would immediately jeopardize “35,000 jobs” in the utility industry, “but you also have coal mining, railroads and equipment vendors that will be impacted. Those jobs will go away too. And think about the tax base that would be lost to those communities.” If business leaders failed to take adequate account of their foe, the entirety of American life would take a quick and decided turn for the worse.1 Fanning’s discussion of prevailing, if not heavy-­handed, energy policy under the Obama administration spoke to several key themes facing the US South in the twenty-­first century: business–government tensions, natural resource exploitation, environmental politics, economic growth, job security, and the importance of electric power to daily life. Yet the questions Fanning raised were not limited to the 2010s. As this book demonstrates, all these matters had long weighed heavily on the South. A study of the advent and evolution of electric power in Dixie sheds light on a range of seemingly unrelated forces that have animated the southern past. Merging environmental, business, political, and cultural history together with the history of technology from the 1880s to the 1970s, 3

Regenerating Dixie argues not only that the electric utility industry occupied a central place in the post-­Reconstruction South. It also contends that a focus on the development of electric power affords a new, even revisionist, view of the region. From its emergence in the 1880s, the private electric utility industry in Dixie has been deeply involved with matters of politics, governance, the environment, economics, and culture. This book, the first full-­length study of southern electrification that moves beyond those produced by electric utilities and those that deal primarily with the Tennessee Valley Authority, demonstrates that electrification played a critical role in shaping the modern South. As the story of southern electrification is most often told—inasmuch as it has been told at all—the late nineteenth century is not the starting point. In the standard narrative, electrical modernization only came to this putatively backward place in the 1930s through federal government intervention in agencies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). Despite the existence by the early 1920s of sophisticated hydropower and coal-­fired generating networks, as well as the United States’ most expansive regional transmission system, the history of TVA and REA is, in both the popular and scholarly mind, largely the story of southern electrification.2 As such the corporate-­directed electrification of the South before the New Deal has drawn little attention.3 Southern power companies’ pre–New Deal innovations constitute only part of the story. During and after the Second World War, southern utilities enthusiastically expanded their generating facilities and, as a result, their customer bases by leaps and bounds.4 Increases in production and transmission capacity during the 1940s and after—in concert with the South’s long-­practiced policies of unfettered environmental manipulation, cheap and abundant energy, and low-­wage, nonunionized labor—coincided with a dramatic surge in both federal largess and private investment. By the late 1960s these forces had transformed Dixie into the Sunbelt South. And as the region’s electrical capabilities grew, its prominence in the nation grew as well. In fact it was this southern model of development—trumpeted for so long by southern electric company leaders and political-­business elites and sharpened in extended fights with public-­power institutions—that informed national standards for large-­scale, corporate-­driven, and publicly subsidized economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century. The southern private utility industry stood at the cutting edge of American energy development before, during, and after TVA’s heyday. Expanding the periodization of southern electrical history has importance beyond TVA. A broader chronology opens the way to a fuller understanding of electricity’s impacts on southern society. Viewing electrification across a century demonstrates that this process included more than the construction of generat4

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ing stations, establishment of transmission systems, laying of streetcar lines, and formation of utilities. A broader temporal scope allows us to trace the remarkable changes electrification wrought on everyday lifestyles in the city and the country, in the workplace and the home, for the rich and the poor, and for black and white southerners beyond the 1930s. In addition, an extended chronology enriches our understanding of energy transitions—or more precisely, fuel transitions—and environmental consequences in American life. Electrification’s first three decades coincided with the shift from coal-­based energy to hydropower in much of the United States and across the world. From the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1930s, hydropower enjoyed unquestioned supremacy in many southern states. Nevertheless, by the onset of the Second World War, water’s secure position as the region’s primary fuel source began to falter. By the early 1940s steam-­powered electricity constituted just over half of southern utilities’ generating capacity and total output; by the middle of the next decade, coal accounted for over 75 percent of southern electrical production and would continue to increase for the rest of the century. Although nuclear energy briefly represented a threat to its reign, fossil fuels (both coal and, more recently, natural gas) have maintained their place as king of southern electrical production since the late 1940s. Public debates, political fights, technological innovations, cultural matters, and ecological factors attended and influenced the shifts from one primary energy source to another. To make the case for the broader significance of southern electrification across a century, however, is not to deny the region’s peculiarities. Given the weight of southern history—including its experiences with slavery, secession, defeat, poverty, Jim Crow, and relatively slow urbanization and industrialization rates—it could hardly have been otherwise. The burdens of southern culture affected the process of southern electrification. “Different,” however, does not mean “exceptional.” The South did not stand so far apart from the rest of the United States that its past offers little instruction. It was at once peculiar and universal. These complexities also apply to the region itself. The South was never as single-­minded or as solid—politically, culturally, or otherwise—as stereotypes and southern defensiveness have long held. Dixie cannot be reduced to a monolith of any kind and there certainly were differences in patterns of electrification across the region.5 At the same time, though, enough commonalities existed that we can safely make at least some generalizations. When I use the terms “the South” or “southern,” I am referring generally to the prevailing (but not universally shared, especially among white and black southerners) historical experiences, political positions, cultural proclivities, and electrification processes in the eleven states of the failed Confederacy plus Kentucky and West Virginia. I N T RODU C T ION

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My analysis throughout the book, however, centers on the subregion of the “Southeast,” particularly Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. These states’ emerging industrial cores and leading cities—Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Columbia, and Nashville—in many ways stood at the forefront of a post-­ Reconstruction agenda called the “New South.”6 An unofficial and contested (but nonetheless powerful) idea hawked within the region and across the nation by southern boosters, the New South program, thinly adorned with a patina of tranquil race and class relations, would modernize a thoroughly defeated and desperately impoverished region through rapid urbanization and industrialization. No state more than Georgia and no city more than Atlanta embodied the New South ethos. Regenerating Dixie thus most often zooms in on developments in Atlanta and Georgia and frequently looks to their past to illuminate key aspects of regional trends in the century after Reconstruction. Falling outside my exploration of southern electrification are Texas, where the grid evolved independently of the larger South; much of Florida, especially South Florida and Miami, which saw much different and much later development compared to the rest of the South; and the Coastal South. Dixie’s old port cities, such as Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans, were as much Caribbean settlements as they were southern ones and long retained unusual mixes of eighteenth-­century social and business practices that largely precluded their full participation in the New South program.7 “Regenerating Dixie” is both an obvious riff on the New South and a term that clearly employs the present continuous tense. Many historical accounts lock the New South into the three or four decades following Reconstruction or imply that the more or less discreet goals of the program went unrealized until well after the Second World War—if ever—and focus largely on cotton mill magnates, planters, and race-­baiting politicians.8 By contrast in this study I conceive of a “long New South,” an ongoing project that persisted well past the Second World War and was in many ways driven by the electric utility industry. The rise and growth of the electric utility industry was no mere adjunct to the long New South and without an accounting of electricity’s career, we remain unable to fully understand the modern South. This book thus expands on anthropologists’ notion of “energopower,” asserting that energy development stood at the center of life in the modern South.9 Electric energy formed the material basis for the regimes of industrial and consumer capitalism that structured social hierarchies and daily life. From the beginning, those who led the electric utility industry’s expansion claimed that their business would be crucial to Dixie’s regeneration following the bloody upheavals of the 1860s and 1870s. They were not wrong to do so. In addition to the coal-­fired units, hydroelectric dams, transmission systems, distribution networks, and streetcar lines they constructed, utility 6

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executives acted as investment conduits, within a few decades building the region’s most capital-­intensive industry and helping court many other manufacturing enterprises. This process proceeded in stages based on what utility managers deemed economically viable. Following a precarious infancy in the 1880s, electricity quickly grew to become a leading energy source for urban luxury, commerce, and transportation. By the 1910s electric power had become an almost required amenity in well-­appointed homes and the prime mover behind the South’s push to take the lead in American textile manufacturing. In the middle of the twentieth century, electricity powered an expanding (if often troubled) southern industrial sector, fueled southern military production, made its way into nonelite homes, and began to illuminate farms. After the Second World War electricity played a vital role in virtually every facet of daily life and served as the foundation on which many southerners could finally stand as full and equal participants in the dream of American abundance. Yet neither the long New South nor the phenomenon of electrification was ever the unquestioned property of financial-­industrial elites. Yes, southern utility managers arranged for enormous investments and led the construction of electrical infrastructure before, during, and after the 1930s. Their stories need to be told. But Dixie’s electrification and regeneration were always contingent and contested processes—and that side of the story needs to be heard too. Though minimized by electricity’s historians, the near-­constant conflicts between private-­and public-­power forces animated the electric industry’s development from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.10 Ordinary southerners played vital roles in making both the modern South and the electric utility industry from the 1890s to the 1970s, envisioning and fighting for a version of Dixie that would best serve their interests.11 Nowhere was this struggle more evident than in the populist revolt of the 1890s, and the populist spirit carried on for decades in fights for control over electricity.12 Scholars have recently argued for the importance of “watershed democracy” and “carbon democracy.”13 For their part, many southerners in the city and, by the late 1910s, on the farm strove for the realization of what we might call “electrical democracy,” and thereby a more democratic New South. While utility executives most often realized at least some version of their stated goal to preserve electric energy’s status as a privately controlled commodity, people’s efforts to define electricity as a public service—through municipal and statewide ownership campaigns, rural electrification crusades, and environmentalist and consumer movements—made deep imprints on the process of electrification. One of the most consequential of these impacts concerned the role of government. Certainly, ordinary southerners tried to influence the state to better serve I N T RODU C T ION

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the public’s needs, but so did private utility managers. Electric utility leaders were not simply rational economic actors concerned only with profit-­and-­loss statements and the firm’s internal workings. Despite Fanning’s 2011 objections to new federal guidelines—just one example of such rhetoric in an extensive history of selectively castigating government interference—southern utilities had long participated in local and national politics and actively courted governmental involvement in their business. They did so in large part as a reaction to common people’s influence and in many cases transformed government—at the local, state, and federal levels—into a protective shield, a generous benefactor, and a channel through which private energy corporations could capture public resources. In other words, power companies used their influence to shape law and policy, extract rent, and gain control over nature. Indeed electrification was—and remains—a fundamentally environmental project. It involved not just the interactions of infrastructure and human institutions but, critically, of the forces of nature as well.14 Until recently, electricity’s historians have failed to see these connections. Southerners’ views of their relationship to the natural world conditioned the ways they worked to seize and use their environs to their advantage. The exploitation of land-­and waterscapes for the generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power was from the outset foundational to the realization of modern life in the metropolis and, ultimately, in the countryside. If historians of technology have sidelined the role of nature in American electrification, environmental historians have traditionally had little to contribute to the history of electrification—aside from the ways technological choices have resulted in devastating but nonetheless unintended consequences.15 Yet this story is more than just one of the by-­products that have resulted from a growing society’s perceived needs. The rhetoric surrounding and the “successes” in altering land and waterways did not simply reflect the appetites of swelling urban-­industrial cores. Rather, southerners often cast environmental manipulation through storage reservoirs, dams, power plants, transmission lines, distribution systems, and other technologies as a necessary precondition for Dixie’s rehabilitation in the years following Reconstruction. Certainly, such projects did result in river modification, landscape degradation, and air pollution. Yet especially among business leaders and boosters, these changes were frequently cited as evidence of progress, as a positive good for properly conserving natural resources. They thus fed back into civic booster–leaders’ and utility executives’ ethos of perpetual regional growth, prompted even more development, and led to increasing infusions of distant capital and ever more consequential environmental alterations.16 Environmental change, though, was a two-­way street. Despite boosters’ and utility executives’ treatises about modern humanity’s ability to seize natural re8

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sources for southern progress, the electric industry and the New South were often hostages to nature’s vagaries. Regional climates and land-­and waterscapes made indelible marks on the electric utility business just as much as environmental factors have influenced southern agriculture.17 Much of the Southeast, for example, contained powerful rivers flowing from the Appalachian Mountains but lacked substantial deposits of fossil fuels such as coal. The kinetic energy of falling water thus became integral to the construction of an industrial South after the 1890s—when hydroelectric and long-­distance transmission technologies became viable—and remained so for several decades. But the geography of southern power also influenced the shift away from hydroelectricity. The Southeast is a humid region but, like the American West, has long suffered from its own issues with devastating water shortages. Especially in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s— though those were by no means the only moments of rainfall famine—drought threatened to cripple private hydroelectric production.18 By the beginning of the Second World War southern utilities once again accepted a vision of the future powered by coal. Drought alone, of course, did not determine this path; no other single variable did either. A range of factors including rainfall shortages, federal hydropower competition, and skyrocketing demand combined to form a mid-­ twentieth-­century politics of energy that would nudge southern utilities away from water and toward coal. Coal would help southern power companies defeat drought, the ongoing public power insurgency, and federal incursions deemed harmful to free enterprise. Moreover, coal would provide a firm basis for the increasing levels of consumer demand that would underlie the postwar economy. Private electric utilities in the Southeast spent the next four decades steadily abandoning hydroelectricity and dotting the landscape with coal-­fired generating stations.19 The contours of southern culture shaped the electric utility industry as well. Southern culture to a large extent informed public–private-­power debates on electrification. Electric company managers and southern boosters claimed that the harnessing of rivers by privately owned, well-­regulated electric utilities for use in the city would—at least metaphorically—empower white men and women of all social standings to regain the racial dominance they had lost in the Civil War and Reconstruction.20 Thus race, an especially important element in southern history but an almost completely neglected category in energy history, played a key role in the region’s electrification. Not only did power companies try to sell their product and stay in the public’s good graces by deploying racial tropes; they combined ideas about race, federal power, and socialism to halt direct government involvement in southern electrical markets. Class likewise had significant impacts on electrification in southern cities and states. Labor strife in the urbanizing and industrializing South, constantly fraught with racial overtones, made I N T RODU C T ION

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its mark on questions surrounding municipal ownership of utilities, regulation, the streetcar system, environmental change, and rural electrification. Along with business, governmental, and environmental issues, these types of sociocultural matters play a large role in Regenerating Dixie. It goes without saying that technological innovations were also fundamental to the process of electrification. But electricity’s historians have thoroughly examined those elements—so thoroughly, in fact, that technology can seem, at least to some extent, determinative of the larger electrification project. Of course I take the history of technology seriously and explore technological shifts as they related to the South, but I do not cast the story as one centrally, and certainly not solely, of technical transformation. Instead I see southern electrification as a core driver of social change, and at the same time I view the sociocultural realm as a key influencer of electrification’s evolution. I maintain that perspective because it adds value to our understanding of energy history as a multifaceted affair that involved people’s beliefs, words, and actions. In a related vein, I also hold that position because southerners most often did not interface with or understand electric power in technical terms. They were primarily concerned with electricity’s effects on their daily lives, their pocketbooks, their jobs, their businesses, their political standing, and their natural environment. The story of southern electrification as contained in the following pages speaks to all these inextricably intertwined elements: environment, politics, governance, business, culture, and technology came together through energy development in the creation of the modern South. The first three chapters examine the initial phase of southern electrification. They lay out the beginnings of electrification as a source of public illumination and demonstrate the importance of energy resources to the creation of an urban-­industrial South while considering the environmental, technological, political, and cultural forces that led southern utilities away from coal and toward a new geography of power anchored in water. These chapters furthermore examine the impacts of electricity on daily life, the rise of popular movements for heritage preservation and publicly controlled electricity, and the roles race and class played in the electric industry’s first four decades. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 analyze the battles surrounding the extension of public-­power movements in the 1920s and 1930s as well as the federal government’s foray into the realm of hydropower, especially as it concerned the gargantuan project of electrifying southern farms. These chapters explore TVA’s influence on the southern utility industry. But they devote far more attention to ordinary people’s efforts to bring electricity to underserved areas and to the impacts on southern electrical and physical landscapes resulting from REA’s and the US Department of the Interior’s interactions with local activists and southern utilities from the 1920s to the mid-­1950s. This section of the book also consid10

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ers the interlocking elements—including racial politics, the New Deal era, the exigencies of war, Cold War politics, technological innovations, and environmental problems—that both influenced the southern transition back to coal and brought an effective end to the spread of public power and hydroelectricity in the region. The final chapter tackles a persistent, if underexplored, issue in energy and commodity-­flow history: invisibility. It asserts that energy’s seeming disappearance was no accident but occurred because of ongoing struggles between public and private power. Chapter 7 also discusses the collapse of the public-­power movement in the 1970s as well as the related and simultaneous explosion in southern electrical expansion, coal usage, economic growth, and consumerism from the mid-­1950s to the late 1970s. Finally it shows that despite the emergence of an environmentalist-­consumerist movement and the intertwined economic and energy crises of the 1970s, the modern South—and thus the Sunbelt South—has remained addicted to and overly reliant on federally subsidized, corporate-­distributed fossil fuel power in the quest for perpetual growth and Dixie’s regeneration. Electric energy was foundational to the formation of the modern South, and the history of the South’s electrification has implications for the larger American experience with energy and economic development. A study of this process adds not only to our understanding of broader national processes of economic development but offers insights into our current predicaments with energy and sustainability.

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1

An Unseen Force in the New South

In anticipation of the upcoming festivities on an October evening at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, a local reporter expressed exhilaration at the thought that “tonight the exposition grounds will be a blaze of glory.” Alongside flame-­spewing volcano-­like structures, the expo’s electric lights “dart[ed] back and forth among the buildings like fiery serpents. Everything will be weird in the peculiar glow.”1 The fair’s official guidebook likewise emphasized electric lighting at the fair, which offered as its most stunning feature an “electric fountain that glitters over beautiful Clara Meer like a rainbow of the night.”2 Even people with no direct stake in Atlanta’s reputation professed amazement. A writer for the Nation confessed that the Atlanta expo’s electrical display produced a “fine artistic effect . . . and the general effect is fairy-­like.”3 Such scenes, and glowing descriptions of their electrical glory, were commonplace in fin-­de-­siècle America. World’s fairs, especially after the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, almost as a matter of course featured awe-­inspiring electric light shows, electrically illuminated buildings and fairgrounds, and “electricity departments.” Yet more than simply standing as gaudy exhibitions of the latest innovations, electric lighting at late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­ century expositions signified white America’s racial, cultural, and technological supremacy. These demonstrations gave “Americans a feeling of participation in a national experience superior to all others, the fairs serving to establish America and Americans as special.”4 12

Figure 1.1 Fred L. Howe, Exposition at Night, 1895. Credit: Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center.

The Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition held to this pattern, calling on electricity to narrate in both symbolic and concrete terms the postbellum South’s purported success story.5 Yet it was only one of Dixie’s world’s fairs. With displays of electrical prowess in cities such as Atlanta (1881, 1887), Louisville (1883−1887), and Nashville (1897), southerners announced their membership in the elite club of advanced societies. These expos furthermore declared that the “New South,” an agenda bent on modernizing the region through rapid urbanization and industrialization, was open for business. In Atlanta’s case, according to Henry Morrell Atkinson, the expo’s electrical department chairman, “electricity . . . will do its part in demonstrating the progress of the age and the latest improvements in the comforts and necessities of life. And this is what the success of an exposition consists in.”6 Electricity’s special role at the expo went beyond conspicuous display. For Atkinson, electric power was the “unseen force” that “put the throb of life into every section of the exposition grounds”; it powered the less obvious but crucially important elements of the fair as well. Aside from decorative purposes, electricity was responsible for “the patrol and alarm systems, supplying motive A N U N SE E N F ORC E I N T H E N E W S O U T H

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power, transportation by land and water,” and a host of other functions. But demonstrations of electricity’s uses far exceeded the limited scope of the exposition. According to Atkinson, electricity had helped turn Atlanta into the glowing, bustling New South capital. This unseen force “signalized and manifested in many ways the general gains and advances in governing conditions of everyday life . . . , in social welfare, [and] in industrial progress.” These lessons in southern advancement became possible through southerners’ cooperative efforts, with a “swiftness and accuracy of purpose which are undoubtedly proofs of genius in those” who had “harmoniously” made electric power a reality.7 Atkinson’s remarks about the significance of the “unseen force” are instructive in two primary ways. First, they point out that electricity was not simply an ornamental aspect of the exposition. It proved essential to seemingly mundane but indispensable operations at the fair and made modern life in a regional capital possible. His pitch is also telling in that, while it spoke to electricity’s seemingly underappreciated part in the making of Atlanta and its exposition, it contained a fundamental deception. As one historian writes about extravagant electrical shows at world’s fairs, “the entire scene was completely artificial, a simulacrum of an ideal world.”8 Atkinson’s version of electricity at the fair, and by extension in daily life in the broader New South, likewise presented a “simulacrum of an ideal world.” The depiction of electrification’s ascent as an abstract “unseen force,” as having proceeded swiftly and amiably, as having gained acceptance as a universally awe-­inspiring, beautifying, progressive, and even magical force obscured as much as it illuminated. The realities of electrification’s initial stages—from the early 1880s through the 1890s, when arc lights and trolleys first appeared on city streets—offer a different account. Electricity’s rise, and indeed the entire history of electrification, was far messier and more problematic than Atkinson and other southern boosters allowed. This was not a story in which a mystical wonderworker magically illuminated and powered the New South. Nature’s bounty—including increasingly voluminous streams of coal and water from the Appalachians—underwrote this supposedly unseen force. Neither was it one of easily won achievements, congenial cooperation, uniform popular acceptance, and an unfettered free market. It was, rather, a story of near-­constant friction. Power company failures, conflicts between business leaders, and governmental interventions marked the electrical age’s beginnings. Big business made the birth of electrification possible, but the process was neither smooth nor coherent. Despite inauspicious, modest, and fractured beginnings, the southern electric industry, even in a supposedly laggard Dixieland, was a full participant in the late nineteenth-­century corporate consolidation craze, which saw electricity and the modern corporation emerge simultane14

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ously.9 Fierce rivalries over market control within the chaotic and highly competitive world of modern capitalism characterized the dawn of the electrical age in the South, as in the rest of the United States. In this context romantic southern notions of gentlemanly cooperation and traditional decorum and honor would not do. Cold-­blooded calculation reigned. Indeed Atkinson spoke not simply as a civic booster in 1895, but also as president of Atlanta’s near-­monopoly electric lighting company with designs on overtaking both the lighting and streetcar business in the entire city. The quest would not be easy. Electrification was a fragile process: not only were electrical systems technically frail, but social, cultural, and political realities threatened this emerging business as well.10 In the face of such precarious circumstances, the budding electric industry had to rely on the power of government to become viable and ultimately to stay in business. Exclusive contracts in the 1880s and 1890s and municipal legislation after the turn of the century proved necessary to support and then to cement the place of private-­power companies in the early twentieth-­century South. Prior to receiving public assistance, however, when limited to the nascent street lighting business, it appeared that electric power might have a difficult time even surviving its infancy. *   *   * Before electricity became the “unseen force” behind the modern city’s functions, it operated as the animating power behind the very-­well-­seen arc light. Millions of people likely saw electric lights for the first time at expositions, but the use of spectacular lighting as a lesson in civilizational advancement was not limited to world’s fairs. Electric arc lights debuted in American streets, just as in expositions, as examples of “technical monumentalism.” Scholars tend to agree that the arc lamp, which produced a brilliant “arc” of light in the open space between two carbon electrodes heated by electric current, served as a shining emblem of progress, not primarily as a tool for improving the functionality or safety of public spaces. Only with the emergence of so-­called Great White Ways in city centers across the United States did these lights come to serve the utilitarian function of stoking commercial activity.11 Atlanta’s early experience with electrification in part confirmed that position. Yet it also demonstrated that the people supporting the establishment of an electric illumination system called on this dazzling symbol for an explicitly utilitarian function. Arc lights contributed to the making of the New South. People like Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady, widely considered the New South agenda’s most important spokesman, believed Dixie’s regeneration was urgent. At least since the early nineteenth century but certainly after Reconstruction, many prominent southerners claimed that the white South’s devoA N U N SE E N F ORC E I N T H E N E W S O U T H

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tion to slavery and disdain for urbanization and industrialization left the region on the margins of American abundance. The region had no shortage of natural wealth; what it lacked, many believed, were the mechanisms to convert raw materials into locally distributed and widely shared profits. The benefits of the South’s natural bounty flowed instead to the more developed North. Dixie witnessed the results of that flawed system most acutely in the 1860s, when the Confederacy suffered devastating military losses to the industrially superior Union, and after the war when it watched its economy languish while the North’s boomed.12 Especially against a burdensome backdrop of defeat, poverty, and underdevelopment—a history not of abundance but of scarcity—southern civic boosters advocated for a “New South” of growing cities and factories. Leading entrepreneurs thus installed ornamental electric lights in streets, shops, places of entertainment, and world’s fairs to serve as both evidence of and the basis for the rapid expansion of their newly urbanizing-­industrializing society. The Atlanta City Council asserted as much in 1895. Despite a devastating situation in the 1860s, it claimed, the city could now call itself “one of the best illuminated in the Union.” As such, and in concert with street railways, a mild climate, and other advantages, Atlanta offered potential investors “everything that is favorable to successful manufacturing.”13 So alluring was the promise of this new technology that even small southern towns embraced the hope that electric lights would spark growth. “The next thing” in its development, an Alabama newspaper predicted in 1892, “will be electric lights, then will come factories, etc. Let the good things come.” Similarly, a North Carolina man joked that “electric lights, etc. are booming here; N.Y. and Boston will be mere suburbs of Chapel Hill, N.C. soon!”14 Pronouncements about the utility of electric lighting were not simply the fantasies of Dixie’s self-­aggrandizing cities or hopeful towns. The National Electric Light Association (NELA), the US electric industry’s trade organization founded in 1885, explicitly encouraged cities to embrace electricity’s role as both a spectacle and tool for growth. “A city is judged by impressions,” explained a NELA pamphlet. “It may have every natural advantage that a business man may desire. Yet, if it be unattractive, dirty and gloomy, its development will be slow.” Decorative street lighting, NELA concluded, played a fundamental role in urban-­ industrial development.15 Even if boosters and trade associations emphasized the functional purposes of electric lighting as much as its symbolic uses, the arc light’s debut in the late 1870s nevertheless inspired in southern residents, or at least in booster-­journalists, a sense of awe. Many southerners likely witnessed the arc lamp’s sublime power for the first time in autumn 1879 when W.W. Cole’s New York and New Orleans Circus, Museum, Menagerie, and Congress of Living Wonders toured cities such as Atlanta, Greenville, Montgomery, Nashville, and Pensacola.16 Although Cole’s 16

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traveling circus promised an array of expected attractions—freak shows, performing animals, exotic enticements—the Atlanta press seemed most thrilled by the news that the show would feature arc lights. Advertisements in the city’s papers peddled the show as the “first exhibition in Atlanta of the wonderful electric light,” which would make “dense night as brilliant as a southern sun.”17 The Sunny South, an Atlanta-­based literary newspaper, urged readers to attend the circus because it “opens with the wonderful Electric Light which we are all anxious to see.”18 The Atlanta Constitution billed Cole’s circus and its technological marvels as phenomena for which even Biblical wisdom could not adequately account: “The Electric Light Show: Something New under the Sun.”19 When Cole’s troop arrived in Atlanta in early November, some three thousand to four thousand people attended daytime activities to gawk at a pair of giants, a trapeze act, a clown routine, and a lion taming exhibition. As anticipated, however, the dazzling demonstration of electric lights stood out as the big hit of Cole’s stop in Atlanta. The Constitution reported that “the night performance was even better, if possible, than that of the afternoon, the wonderful electric light being seen to better advantage, and the crowd on hand larger by a thousand or two than in the afternoon.”20 A circus-­going populace, or favorable press coverage, though, did not necessarily signify a widespread desire for the creation of an electrically illuminated city. Nor did it foretell the electric lamp’s ultimate triumph. In fact electric lighting suffered through a series of false starts, as well as a lack of popular enthusiasm, in the years following Cole’s visit. It took the intervention of municipal government, which finally came to believe that lights would help bring the city more investment capital and tax revenue, to establish this business as a permanent fixture in the urban landscape. Nevertheless large southern cities were early (potential) adopters of the arc light. The South’s largest city, New Orleans, had already negotiated the installation of dozens of arc lamps by 1882 when a five-­mile stretch of riverfront glowed under electric lights.21 Atlanta’s boosters believed that if the arc lamp illuminated their streets, their town would stand out as a progressive metropolis that might soon surpass New Orleans in national prestige and regional importance.22 Atlantans started serious discussions about bringing this technology to their streets following the International Cotton Exposition of 1881, whose purpose was to announce Atlanta as the leading New South city.23 The fair’s inaugural ball boasted “blazing electric lights, whose rays, as bright as polished silver, yet as soft as the mellowest moon light, created a scene as enchanting as from fairy land.”24 The fair’s organizers wanted to extend that scene to the streets and feared that, as NELA later warned, their city might not meet its billing as the New South’s core if it failed to quickly adopt electric lamps. A N U N SE E N F ORC E I N T H E N E W S O U T H

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To accomplish this goal, Atlanta businessmen Jacob and Aaron Haas welcomed representatives of Cleveland’s Brush Electric Company, which dominated the American arc light equipment manufacturing business through the 1880s, to negotiate the establishment of an electric light company. The two parties agreed in principle to a deal in the summer of 1882, provisionally forming the Brush Electric Light and Power Company of Atlanta, with a proposed capitalization of $50,000. For the Haas brothers, the arc light’s sheer brilliance alone would bring further investment and handsome profits inevitably and quickly to Atlanta. In an interview with a reporter, Jacob Haas asserted that the “pure radiance” of electric lighting would soon shine on “every street in Atlanta” and eventually supplant the “sickly glare of gas in our shops, offices and drawing rooms.” Despite the democratic vision of illuminating every location in the city—and without an officially organized company or a contract for street lights—Haas and his brother secured lighting subscriptions solely from elite enterprises in the central business district. Chief among these were the posh Kimball House and Markham House hotels. Located near Union Railroad Station in the western portion of downtown, Kimball House and Markham House provided lavish accommodations for Atlanta’s well-­to-­do visitors and bachelors and served as a meeting place for business and political leaders.25 In the short term the arc lamp would brighten only the burgeoning New South’s most exclusive spaces. Unfortunately for the Haas brothers, the electric light’s arrival was several years away and its rival, the gas lamp, still seemed firmly entrenched in the city’s urban and political landscapes. The Atlanta Gas Light Company, which had been in business since 1856, could boast a network of nearly 450 gas lamps in the early 1880s and had plans to add some 30 more street lights each year. Because the city owned about one-­fourth of the gas company’s stock, and realized significant annual revenues from the venture, the city council proved reluctant to invest in a novelty. The Haas brothers’ venture thus ended before it truly began: Brush Company representatives withdrew from the deal when they realized that, because city fathers would not grant the company a franchise, downtown’s streets, hotels, shops, and factories would not soon feature electric lights. Atlanta, it seemed, would not only lag behind New Orleans and rival New South cities such as Chattanooga and Nashville, both of which successfully negotiated the installation of Brush lighting systems in 1882, but would be a gas-­lit city for some time to come.26 *   *   * Although the electric light appeared to founder on the shoals of local politics and general apathy, enterprising Atlanta citizens continued their work to bring the arc lamp to city streets. Over a year after the Brush-­Haas electric company failure, another group of Atlanta entrepreneurs formed the Georgia Electric 18

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Light Company of Atlanta (GELCA) to “furnish patrons from a central station . . . electric lights for stores, dwellings, machine shops, depots, inside and out, or to introduce said lights wherever desired.” By the end of 1883 GELCA installed a small isolated plant in the basement of the Atlanta Elevator Company’s building that powered forty-­five lights on the most heavily trafficked downtown roads including Peachtree, Whitehall, and Marietta Streets. The company’s first arc lamps, as the Haas brothers had planned, primarily shed light on Atlanta’s elite establishments: Kimball House, Markham House, De Give’s Opera House, and the Gate City Bank.27 From the outset the placement of electric lamps established the new technology as a marker of elite privilege and New South values. Yet the early geography of electric lighting went beyond the realm of the symbolic. The intention of such displays was to dispel the notion that “Atlanta was the poorest lighted city of her size” and thus to help realize the New South program by luring new businesses and capital investment.28 Though it showed more promise than that of the Haas brothers, GELCA’s business suffered troublesome beginnings as well. The company’s officers had difficulty raising a paltry $8,500 for the initial minimum investment. (By contrast, in 1881 a group of twenty-­five Atlanta businessmen reportedly secured $250,000 for a new cotton mill within one hour of announcing the stock’s availability.) What was more, the Lynn, Massachusetts–based Thomson-­Houston Company (a forerunner of General Electric), with which GELCA agreed to a lighting contract in 1885, experienced technical difficulties that periodically left street corners in the dark. Perhaps in response to these issues, the Atlanta City Council reduced the original franchise agreement by more than half and admitted that it contracted with GELCA only to “erect a few lights, more as an experiment to test their efficiency than anything else.”29 By December 1886 the city’s streets had only 25 electric arc lights, a meager accomplishment compared to that of New Orleans, which had over 650 by the end of 1885.30 At that point GELCA’s prospects seemed destined to replicate those of the Haas brothers. Yet fortunes changed for the electric light in Atlanta and other southern cities in 1887. In that year a small group of investors successfully chartered Columbia, South Carolina’s, first electric light company, the Congaree Gas and Electric Company, and began installing electric lamps around the city.31 In Atlanta the exposition was once again called on to sell the city on electric illumination. In early 1887 preparations began for the Piedmont Exposition, which would take place in the autumn at newly completed Piedmont Park. Much like the 1881 Atlanta Expo, the 1887 Piedmont fair was designed to entice northern capital to come south by collecting “together the evidences of the resources of the Piedmont region of the Southern States” and by exhibiting “the progress of this section.”32 The expo’s executive committee decided to open the fair at night to showcase A N U N SE E N F ORC E I N T H E N E W S O U T H

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the city’s new electric lights. One of the exposition’s directors excitedly predicted that, based on the strength of the displays, “you will see an enormous crowd here from the north. The Piedmont region,” he continued, “is the winning section, and there is going to be more capital seeking investment . . . than has ever been seen together in the south at any one time.”33 Viewing the electric light as a tool to help raise Dixie’s profile, city leaders began to show more favor to this emerging enterprise. Not only did the city council sell the city’s equity in the Atlanta Gas Light Company—in large part to help fund the 1887 Piedmont Exposition—but it opened the way for a more extensive electric lighting contract with GELCA and for franchises with other electric companies, such as the newly formed Empire State Electric Company, to install street lights.34 The adoption of electric lights around the city gained momentum after the Piedmont Exposition. By April 1888 GELCA’s contract with Thomson-­Houston had expanded to include 100 arc lights at a cost of $120 per light annually.35 A year later, the streets in the central business district contained 150 arc lights and over 400 incandescent lamps.36 Those numbers continued to rapidly expand, so that by the end of 1895 nearly 600 arc lights and 1,000 incandescent lights brightened Atlanta’s main commercial thoroughfares as well as a few residential streets.37 While the clear, angular encasement of the gas light fixture could still be seen in parts of the city, the hundreds of electric lights that now shone on Atlanta’s streets took a different form and symbolized the transformation of the urban atmosphere. The new lights on Peachtree, Marietta, and Whitehall Streets, many of which featured clusters of 2,000–candle power arc lights mounted atop tall poles, were meant to resemble the light of the moon and the stars, mimicking nature as well as testifying to humanity’s domination of it. These faux celestial bodies were meant to be romantic and brilliant in and of themselves. More importantly, though, by illuminating streets, sidewalks, shops, and office buildings, they were designed to reinforce the New South creed that capitalist development and material prosperity would beget regional and social progress.38 Whether these new lights brightened everyday life for ordinary residents is another question. Though some citizens doubtlessly agreed with boosters that electricity enhanced the city’s functionality and beauty, others griped about the electric light’s dark side. An Atlanta woman explained that on a summer evening in 1888 when she became “wild with heat” and her “eyes were burning like balls of fire” due to her gas lamps, she opened her bedroom window for relief. But the powerful electric “street lamp made spots of light on my walls that I could not keep from seeing.” Even after closing her eyes, the brilliant arc light “seemed to shine through [her eyelids] as if through glass,” and thus she had to “lay all night in torture.”39 Another Atlanta resident, identified as W. P. Patillo, complained that

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Figure 1.2 Streetcars and Arc-­Light Poles on Atlanta’s Marietta Street, ca. 1907. Author’s Collection.

any functional improvements electric lighting introduced to city life were far outweighed by the ugliness it foisted on Atlanta’s neighborhoods. “The vandalism now being committed in this city,” Patillo raged, “is almost beyond endurance.” Because of the erection of increasing numbers of electric lights—which, Patillo claimed, worked sporadically at best—the city’s elms and water oaks were being destroyed with “wanton recklessness.” What was more, Patillo challenged claims that electrical modernization would bring widespread prosperity, fore-

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shadowing the rhetoric of an early twentieth-­century movement born of popular discontent with electrification’s effects on daily life. He blamed the destruction of Atlanta’s trees on an “overpaid and unsatisfied corporation, whose large profits out of the contract for lighting the city only serve to make them more greedy of other gains and more blind to the interest of others.”40 Despite some residents’ complaints, the push for more electric light proceeded apace in the late 1880s and early 1890s but went beyond simply placing more arc lamps on the city’s main thoroughfares. Now the glow of the incandescent light illuminated some of Atlanta’s best-­known interiors. Produced in an evacuated glass bulb when electric current courses through and heats a carbon filament, incandescent light, unlike arc light, could be effectively “subdivided,” or designed to shine at varying levels of brilliance.41 What was more, unlike gas light, it consumed no oxygen and produced no objectionable odors or eye-­burning smoke. The incandescent light thus proved much more flexible and made for far more agreeable interior illumination than the arc light. It also served well as an outdoor lighting source. Arc lights, like gas lights, would not disappear from city streets for decades, but at least in the eyes of electric lighting firms, the incandescent bulb’s enlightenment of interior spaces clearly represented the future.42 The market for electric lighting inside Atlanta’s prominent places of commerce began to flourish in the late 1880s and provided GELCA and other fledgling electric companies more opportunities to bring their lighting businesses indoors. Though some Atlanta institutions, such as the Atlanta Constitution, experimented with incandescent systems as early as 1884, several years would pass before those systems became permanent.43 One of the first downtown establishments to enjoy permanent interior incandescent lighting was the M. Rich and Bros. department store, commonly referred to as “Rich’s.” Founded as a dry-­goods depot by Hungarian-­Jewish immigrant Morris Rich in 1867, by the late 1880s Rich’s had become one of the shining symbols of New South progress: in one location it displayed a blossoming consumer culture, a concentration of people, and all the fruits of industrial production. Working with GELCA, Rich installed an isolated generator and incandescent lights in late 1887 to heighten his store’s allure. Passersby, including a visiting President Grover Cleveland, could gawk at the “22 electric lights [that] bit chunks of gold out of the sky.” That same year, as the “Christmas rush” began, customers could shop for gifts late into the evening under the warm glow of electric lamps.44 Other establishments soon followed suit. In the spring of 1888 Thomson-­Houston agreed to install a coal-­fired electric generator, or “dynamo,” at the Markham House hotel in exchange for equity in GELCA.45 The electric light had caught on in the New South’s capital city. Even more significant for electric power’s fortunes was the installation by another company of a dynamo at another Atlanta hotel. In May 1888 the Edison 22

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Electric Light Company equipped Kimball House with Thomas Edison’s recently patented incandescent lighting system to typical fanfare. The Atlanta Constitution wrote in gleeful anticipation of the lights’ debut that “the Kimball house will be a blaze of beauty from top to bottom with from 2,500 to 3,000 Edison electric lamps.” Housed in the hotel’s basement, the coal-­fired generators, crowed a proud engineer, “are models of simple and beautiful machinery.” But the new dynamos would do more than just animate the hotel’s electric lamps. Acting as a central power station that mimicked gas light supply and distribution infrastructure—as Edison intended—the generating plant at Kimball House could, according to the engineer, transmit power “just as strong half a mile from the engine” to other sites, permitting the extension of this system well beyond a single location.46 The rise of incandescent lighting complexes by the end of the 1880s represented a milestone in electrification’s history. Beyond the purported beauty of dynamos and electric lights, this new development testified to the “maturation of the lighting industry.” The electric power business had become increasingly viable, profitable, and standardized.47 Yet Edison’s design also suggested an expansive way forward for the fledgling electric industry. By the late 1880s the Edison system featured a three-­wire configuration that, as the engineer at Kimball House declared, offered consistency of electric current at distances relatively far removed from the dynamo (ultimately a few miles at most). Although based on multiple direct-­current (DC) generators and therefore limited in geographic scope, it nevertheless opened the path to centrally powered, integrated electrical networks which could stretch across and distribute light and power to an entire city.48 The possibilities of integration proved alluring enough for the electric lighting industry but became even more attractive with the rise of a newly viable application: the street railway. The emergence of the streetcar as a potential consumer of large amounts of electricity—one that would require power while the lights were not burning—reinforced and enlarged the possibilities introduced by incandescent lighting systems. In requiring more electricity, more extensive networks, and more investment capital, the trolley provided the spark at the end of the 1880s for the rapid consolidation of utilities and the construction of centralized alternating-­current (AC) generating plants that could flash current across citywide webs of powerlines, ushering in the beginning of a new, more intense phase in electrification and capitalist competition. *   *   * In cities across the United States by the end of the 1880s, entrepreneurs faced trends like the one developing in Atlanta. Not only did electricity seem likely to compete with (or even eclipse) gas light, but unlike gas it could power trolleys A N U N SE E N F ORC E I N T H E N E W S O U T H

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as well. Both applications of electric power seemed ripe for expansion as cities experienced rapid growth, which to a significant extent resulted from the utility industry’s rise and maturation. In this setting electric companies began to proliferate. The budding electric power sector spawned not only multiple lighting and streetcar companies in each city but increasingly large power plants and fierce rivalries for control over rapidly centralizing power systems. The dawn of electrification prompted and “witnessed changes in the economic structure of capitalism. The transformation of free competition into corporate monopoly capitalism confirmed in economic terms what electrification had anticipated technically”: uncertainty and chaos, followed by consolidation and expansion.49 The scramble for control over power markets, which precipitated a frenzied atmosphere of corporate competition in cities across the country, took place most notably in New York and Chicago.50 The power supply market in southern cities too experienced the expansions, competitions, and combinations that led to the rise of multimillion-­dollar consolidated corporations and an increasingly electrified city. In the New South’s capital between 1887 and 1902, after a series of fierce corporate scuffles culminating in an 1899–1901 fight known as the “Second Battle of Atlanta,” Bostonian Henry Atkinson combined more than thirty electric light and streetcar companies into one electric utility. Given Atkinson’s importance to the consolidation of electrical networks in the New South’s capital, it is worth considering his biography in some detail. From his first days in the South, Atkinson displayed a shrewd business sense that, perhaps paradoxically, seems to have been sharpened not solely in New England boardrooms but also while working as a ranch hand on the rough terrain of the Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming Territories. Born to a well-­connected textile mill owner in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1862, Atkinson attended elite private schools in Boston before graduating from Harvard in 1884. After graduation, young “Harry” went west to work as a cowboy, where he reportedly made the acquaintance of Theodore Roosevelt.51 Atkinson’s flight from Boston could be characterized as a repetition of Horace Greely’s exhortation to overly refined northeastern youngsters to seek out an adventurous life in the West to find true manliness and tame the frontier. Yet Atkinson found little about which to wax romantic in his trek. “This life is severe hardship to anyone just from the East,” he wrote to his father while passing through Laramie, Wyoming, in October 1884. “Any romantic feelings the newcomer has about cowboys and galloping over the prairie with a broad brimmed hat on, and all such nonsense is soon knocked out of him.”52 More likely than just sowing wild oats, Atkinson journeyed to the American West as an emissary of “Brahmin capital” to scout land that he could purchase for mining or railroad development.53 Considering that he quit ranching and 24

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traveled to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah, it is possible that Atkinson was sent to search for grazing land to help expand and consolidate his father’s cattle interests. President of Massachusetts Cotton Mills and other enterprises in Brookline, Atkinson’s father in 1884 became one of the principal investors in the Arizona-­based Aztec Land and Cattle Company, the third largest such firm in the United States until its collapse in 1902.54 Though Atkinson apparently acquired no land in the Southwest, he gained experiences that served him well when he moved to the South. He worked with local actors who had connections to New England capital, surveyed opportunities on the frontier, and attempted to make strategic investments in properties that would enable success and eventually dominance in his chosen field. Soon after his return to New England in late 1885, the Atkinson family arranged for Henry to relocate to Atlanta to work as an apprentice for Samuel Inman in his cotton buying firm, S.M. Inman and Company. Among the largest cotton dealers in the South, Inman was friendly with the Atkinson family and had particularly close connections to Henry’s uncle, Edward Atkinson, an economist who evangelized for the New South and helped plan the 1881 Atlanta Exposition.55 Not content to remain a cotton sampler and buyer for long, Henry Atkinson quickly worked his way into the ranks of Atlanta’s business elite. In the spring of 1888 he married May Peters, daughter of Atlanta founder and railroad magnate Richard Peters, and within the next year assumed the vice presidency of the Home Loan and Banking Company. In 1891, along with Atlanta business associates and Brahmin seed capital—from the likes of the Cabot, Lodge, and Lowell families—Atkinson organized the Southern Banking and Trust Company, which he used as a pipeline to investment houses in Boston, New York, and London. He also used his connections to solidify his position as a favored member of the city’s business leadership. Following the panic of 1893, as the city faced severe financial shortfalls and a possible bankruptcy, Atkinson loaned the city of Atlanta hundreds of thousands of dollars at below-­market interest rates. By the First World War’s dawn Atkinson had made several seemingly altruistic contributions to city coffers and had funneled over $100 million into Alabama, Florida, and Georgia to establish railroad, shipping, and mining ventures.56 Atkinson’s most significant and lasting endeavor in the South, however, was in the electric utility industry. Much like his time out west, Atkinson carefully surveyed Atlanta’s electrical frontier, hoping to make key acquisitions that would enable him to take a controlling position in the future. After nearly two years of studying the bourgeoning industry, Atkinson began slowly and quietly acquiring equity in GELCA. Intrigued by the possibilities of electric lighting and street railways, the former cowboy collaborated with several prominent Atlanta businessmen to organize a rival power company, the Atlanta Electric Illuminating ComA N U N SE E N F ORC E I N T H E N E W S O U T H

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pany. Incorporated in October 1890 with Atkinson as president and William and Hugh Inman (Samuel Inman’s uncle and brother) as board members and officers, Atlanta Electric was originally capitalized at $100,000. The new utility planned to supply streets, businesses, and residences with electric lighting. Even more importantly it aimed to construct a hulking alternating-­current generating plant that would provide motive power for the city’s budding streetcar lines.57 Atkinson clearly recognized that the key to the domination of a city’s electrical market lay not in the management of isolated generators but in the creation of a fully integrated electrical network anchored in a powerful central generating plant. GELCA’s managers, who had pursued electrification in the 1880s through installing individually located DC dynamos throughout the city, foresaw the same thing. They thus aimed to enlarge their company’s share of Atlanta’s power market through the construction of their own AC plant, which would drive streetcar growth and integrate and control Atlanta’s electric power market. GELCA’s goals paired well with those of Atlanta real estate and streetcar mogul Joel Hurt. Unlike Atkinson, Hurt departed his native Alabama and arrived in Georgia nearly penniless in the early 1870s. After completing a civil engineering degree at the University of Georgia, he made his way to Atlanta in 1875 and soon after established an insurance company. By the mid-­1880s Hurt shifted his focus to other ventures, ultimately aiming to join suburban development with the emerging electric streetcar business, each pressing the other’s expansion. To realize his objective, in late 1886 Hurt chartered both the East Atlanta Land Company and the Atlanta and Edgewood Street Railway Company with backing from Baltimore-­based banks, the Inman brothers, and other Atlanta businessmen. Hurt’s planned suburb was a High Victorian enclave called Inman Park (named for Samuel Inman) located about two miles east of downtown. Atlanta and Edgewood would provide transportation between downtown and Inman Park, though at the time of the company’s incorporation—and at the beginning of track construction in 1887—no viable electric traction system existed in the United States. Ultimately, after visiting several American cities and evaluating competing systems (including Frank Sprague’s Richmond, Virginia, streetcar line, which in February 1888 became the first successful example of electric traction in the United States), Hurt engaged Thomson-­Houston to supply equipment for what would in August 1889 become the city’s first electric trolley line— though it was followed just four months later by another line, the Fulton County Street Railroad Company, also a Thomson-­Houston client. Yet while both Hurt and GELCA, which furnished power for Atlanta and Edgewood from one of its downtown DC dynamos, had reason to be proud of their accomplishment, both aimed to capture even more of the rapidly growing Atlanta market.58 To that end in February 1890 GELCA and Hurt collaborated to raise $100,000 26

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for the construction of a 3,000-­horsepower AC generating plant at a defunct rock quarry site on Davis Street slightly west of downtown. Powered by coal from East Tennessee, GELCA’s new power station would not only fuel the city’s existing street lamps and trolleys; it would also serve as the center of a web of wires stretching across the city that would enable the installation of more lights and streetcars lines—as well as elevators, printing presses, sewing machines, and, in a few private residences, other appliances—which would stretch the city’s boundaries, helping to transform it into a modern metropolis.59 Under such circumstances, all electrical generation, transmission, and distribution in Atlanta, and perhaps beyond, would fall under GELCA’s and Hurt’s control. Backed by the promise of more electric power for his operations, in 1891 Hurt combined some three-­fourths of Atlanta’s streetcar lines (several of which were “dummy” or horse-­drawn lines that were undergoing electrification) into a new, $2 million firm called the Atlanta Consolidated Street Railway Company.60 Given GELCA’s and Hurt’s apparent ascendency, Henry Atkinson made several moves in 1891 to ensure he would not be elbowed out of Atlanta’s electric power scene. Whereas he had begun quietly purchasing GELCA stock in 1888, Atkinson became more aggressive thereafter, acquiring a controlling interest in the company by the autumn of 1891. In December 1891 Atkinson surprised stockholders by announcing that he now controlled a majority stake in GELCA. He then directed the company to sell all its assets, including the Davis Street power plant, to a newly chartered corporation called the Georgia Electric Light Company (GELC), initially capitalized at $600,000.61 Shortly before taking over GELCA, Atkinson also claimed a corner of the streetcar business. Along with William Inman, Atkinson bought a substantial share of the Atlanta, West End, and McPherson Barracks Railway (the city’s first Sprague system customer) in April 1891. By the end of October the major stakeholders in that company had agreed to purchase the Grant Park Railway Company. The merger of these two streetcar companies resulted in the birth of the Atlanta Traction Company, which featured Atkinson as the new president and held an initial capital stock of $300,000.62 Not only did Atkinson now pose a threat as a potential competitor in the trolley business, but his power plant supplied most of the energy to Hurt’s Consolidated. Soon a bitter rivalry would develop between the two. Though the conflict between Atkinson and Hurt simmered below the surface for several years, in 1899 the feud boiled over into a two-­year campaign of corporate warfare—waged in the press, in boardrooms, in courthouses, and, at times, in the streets—known as the “Second Battle of Atlanta.”63 By 1898 Atkinson’s interests held near-­monopoly control over electric power generation in Atlanta. GELC enjoyed an exclusive lighting contract with the city and provided all of A N U N SE E N F ORC E I N T H E N E W S O U T H

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Atlanta Railway’s (Atlanta Traction’s name after an 1895 merger) and half of Consolidated’s power requirements. Yet Hurt had plans to usurp his rival from Boston. In November 1898, after the beginning of a franchise fight between Atlanta Railway and Consolidated, a group of Baltimore investors with connections to Hurt began secretly acquiring interest in Atkinson’s streetcar line. In spring 1899 the Baltimore syndicate had acquired enough equity to wrest control of Atlanta Railway, which it subsequently combined with Hurt’s Consolidated to form the Atlanta Railway and Power Company (ARPC). ARPC boasted a huge initial capitalization of $3 million and now faced competition from only one other streetcar line.64 Hurt had his eye on more than just a streetcar monopoly, though. As his new company’s name indicated, Hurt intended to completely overtake Atkinson by producing electricity for the entire city at a potent new generating plant. First announced in 1899, the construction of ARPC’s power station at Butler Street began in early 1900. By the standards of the time, the plant was massive. At over 12,000 square feet, the building contained five generators—three powered streetcars, two serviced lights—capable of aggregating some 6,700 kilowatts (9,000 horsepower). Atlanta Railway and Power was not simply an energy producer; just as critically it was a voracious consumer of natural resources. ARPC’s Butler Street station fed on coal shipped by rail primarily from the mountains of East Tennessee as the fuel for electric power production. In the Brushy Mountain, Jellico, Coal Creek, and Poplar Creek mines, laborers dug chunks of bituminous coal out of the earth and loaded them into railcars destined for Atlanta. On the tracks of the East Tennessee, Western and Atlantic, Georgia Pacific, and Cincinnati Southern Railroads, countless tons of Appalachian coal flowed into the city each year. The Butler Street plant stood at downtown’s southeastern edge adjacent to the tracks of the Georgia Railroad, which annually deposited some 30,000 tons of Appalachian bituminous to the plant’s five storage bins. ARPC’s power station was also quite thirsty. Each of the 1,000-­ton coal bins routed pulverized bituminous into one of the five generators, which for cooling purposes guzzled at least 12 million gallons of Blue Ridge water per day, more than the entire municipal waterworks’ daily usage.65 With the largest power plant Dixie had ever seen, Hurt’s utility could both drive the entire streetcar network and fuel all electric lights and appliances in the city. He aimed to do just that with a bid for an exclusive city lighting franchise and with plans to completely buy out GELC.66 Though now on the defensive in the battle for dominance over Atlanta, Atkinson weakened Hurt’s stranglehold over the city’s streetcar market—aided once again by city government action—by combining forces with ARPC’s sole remaining competitor, the Collins Park and Belt Railroad Company. Changing the 28

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Figure 1.3 Georgia Railway and Electric Company Streetcar Map, 1902. Credit: University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

name to the Atlanta Rapid Transit Company in the spring of 1900, Atkinson and his new partners applied for franchises to construct tracks on some fifty Atlanta streets. Though some of its planned routes were still under consideration until well into 1901, many of Rapid Transit’s proposed lines won instant approval— doubtlessly in part on the strength of Atkinson’s offer to donate $50,000 to the city to help fund a new viaduct on heavily trafficked Whitehall Street. Installation of new lines, some directly beside those of ARPC, began immediately. An incensed Hurt took Atkinson to court and filed injunctions against Rapid Transit’s construction program. In court and in the press Atkinson and Hurt hurled insults at one another; one affront from a Hurt associate reportedly provoked Atkinson into a mildly violent street scuffle.67 Despite the escalating drama, the affair ended with a handshake and a large buyout. Tiring of the destructive competition between the two camps, Samuel Inman brokered a settlement that concluded the decadelong rivalry. By September 1901 Inman prevailed upon Hurt to sell his properties to Atkinson for $1.14 million. Following several months of political wrangling between the Atkinson forces and the city council over annual tax rates, streetcar fares, and payments A N U N SE E N F ORC E I N T H E N E W S O U T H

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to the city for infrastructure improvements, a Consolidating Ordinance of 1902 formally permitted Atkinson to combine his three companies—GELC, ARPC, and the Atlanta Rapid Transit Company—into a new firm, the Georgia Railway and Electric Company (GREC).68 With the 1902 consolidation ordinance and a utility initially capitalized at $14.65 million, the former cowboy now enjoyed legally sanctioned virtual monopoly control over the New South’s largest urban power market. Both Atkinson’s business and Atlanta only continued to grow thereafter. In 1903 the city’s population approached 100,000 and the metropolitan area grew to over 125,000. That same year GREC acquired the Atlanta Steam Company and the Atlanta Gas Light Company so that, along with electric light, traction, and power, it could provide the swelling city with heat. Perhaps as importantly, GREC stretched the boundaries of the growing metropolis by extending its streetcar lines into the surrounding towns of College Park, Decatur, East Point, and Hapeville. Also in 1903, even further expanding the city’s reach into its hinterland, GREC established a 20-­mile electric interurban railway that linked Atlanta to the town of Marietta; in subsequent years, it built interurbans to the towns of Stone Mountain and Fairburn as well. With these properties combined, GREC could boast over $24 million in total assets. Although the company averaged an annual return on investment of only 5 to 7 percent, GREC’s increasingly diverse holdings and large capital investments helped it to realize over $1 million in annual profits as early as 1906.69 The Georgia Railway and Electric Company had joined the ranks of American big business. *   *   * Beginning in the late 1870s Atlantans were drawn to electricity. In subsequent years people witnessed the arc light’s brilliance in expositions and, with capital, technology, and engineering expertise flowing in from northeastern centers, business leaders attempted to leverage this new source of light as a symbol of, and an instrument that would help fashion, the New South. Although the first attempts at establishing a permanent lighting system met with little success, both the arc and incandescent lights had solidified their places in the urban landscape by the late 1880s. Electric traction soon followed, demonstrating electricity’s broader potential and the profits to be gained from it. When the expansion and consolidation of these new enterprises became possible, rivalries for control emerged. Corporate battle, both sneak attacks and frontal assaults, bloodied all parties, but concluded at the twentieth century’s outset with an apparently clear victor. The initial phase of electrification in Atlanta hewed closely to larger national patterns. Atlanta, though, was not unique in the South. New South cities’ 30

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early experiences with electricity also mirrored those in much of the rest of the United States, even if the scale of electrification in the broader South could not yet match national averages: While nearly one-­third of Americans lived in the former Confederacy in 1902, those states contained fewer than 10 percent of the nation’s central power plants and produced just one-­third as much electric energy as the midwestern states and one-­seventh as much New England and the mid-­Atlantic.70 Nevertheless, much like cities in the Northeast and upper Midwest, cities in Alabama, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, and elsewhere began adopting electric lights shortly after Edison’s 1882 Pearl Street demonstration.71 In terms of electric traction, the South acted as the tip of the spear. Although hampered by technical problems, Charles Van Depoele’s innovations allowed Montgomery to claim the place as America’s first city with an all-­electric streetcar system in 1886. Frank Sprague’s success in Richmond in 1888, followed by the speedy adoption of trolley lines in Atlanta, Asheville, and Nashville in 1889, and Charlotte and Columbia soon after, cemented the New South as the electric streetcar’s original home.72 Corporate acquisitions, mergers, and rivalries for electrical market control featured in many other southern cities as well. In Columbia from 1891 to 1911 competition gave way to consolidation as Edward Robertson’s Columbia Railway, Gas, and Electric Company absorbed several streetcar and lighting companies, becoming the de facto monopoly mass transportation provider for South Carolina’s capital.73 In turn-­of-­the-­century Charlotte tobacco and textile tycoon James B. Duke acquired the Catawba Power Company and formed the Southern Power Company (forerunner of Duke Energy) by 1904. Subsequently he took over Charlotte’s leading streetcar company, Four Cs, despite bitter opposition.74 Duke soon controlled an electrical empire that provided power for lights, streetcars, and a suite of other applications (most notably textile mills) in the Piedmont sections of both North and South Carolina. Nashville underwent much the same process. In February 1889 City Electric Railway Company, using the Thomson-­Houston system, became Nashville’s first firm to gain a municipal franchise for electric streetcar service, followed by United Electric Railway, which consolidated and electrified six dummy and mule lines using the Sprague system in 1890. The Nashville Railway acquired both City Electric and United Electric by 1894. Under local businessman J. P. W. Brown, all streetcar lines in the city were merged into the Nashville Railway in 1899. Finally, Brown brought all electric lighting and traction concerns together in the Nashville Electric Railway and Light Company in 1903.75 Neither cutting-­edge electrical developments nor competitive big business was a stranger to the New South. Yet what operated as a money-­making machine for men like James B. Duke, J. P. W. Brown, and Henry M. Atkinson and as a tool to forge a New South for A N U N SE E N F ORC E I N T H E N E W S O U T H

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boosters served other functions for electricity’s consumers. In little more than a decade a technological novelty had become a thoroughly interwoven strand in the fabric of daily life: the steam-­driven and gas-­lit city of the mid-­nineteenth century had by the dawn of the twentieth century become an electric metropolis. While residential service remained out of reach for nearly all ordinary people until after the First World War, constant interactions with electric power in public brought changes in everyday living. Electricity was more than just a question of business and was no unseen force. Despite the seeming monopolistic control of men like Atkinson, Duke, and Brown, competition—from rival power companies, antimonopoly activists, and the public sector—remained part of the electrical landscape for decades to come. It was an abundantly visible arena in which people—rich and poor, black and white—negotiated the core issues of the New South agenda.

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2

Electricity and the Mind of the New South

In his classic 1941 study, The Mind of the South, Wilbur J. Cash looked back on the history of his native Dixie and determined that there was truly only “one South.” For Cash, the region still bore the marks of “a fairly definite mental pattern, associated with a fairly definite social pattern—a complex of established relationships and habits of thought, sentiments, prejudices, standards and values” that stayed wedded to the past. The glue holding the unified southern mind together was the “Savage Ideal,” a tacitly shared commitment among white men to violently defend and preserve the region’s culture. This was a worldview in which “dissent and variety are completely suppressed and men become, in all their attitudes, professions, and actions, virtual replicas of one another.”1 Many works have complicated Cash’s view of the South, but had he studied electrification, Cash would have seen that southerners could not be classified as a like-­minded, backward-­looking people. He would have seen that this new power source helped southerners form visions of the future, though Dixie’s past did continue to play a crucial role in imagined versions, especially for whites, of what their region might become. Southerners’ ideas about what an electrified world might be were far from unified, though. Deeply divergent perspectives over the dramatic changes of electrified life point out not only that dissent and variety flourished in the South; they demonstrate that the discourses and actions surrounding electrification profoundly affected the making of the New South as well. Modern corporations brought electricity to life, but they did not do it alone. 33

Ordinary black and white southerners made significant contributions to the development of this business. Urbanites’ interactions with an increasingly electrified city changed the fabric of everyday experience, which altered urban inhabitants’ beliefs about what modern life could or should be. These expectations were tightly interwoven with issues of race—a particularly neglected element in energy history and the history of capitalism.2 In the struggles over electric power, it became clear that “race” and “racism” were not transhistorical constants that affected the provision of electricity only in the final analysis. Race, energy development, and modern capitalism were coproduced in specific historical circumstances. Virtually inseparable from race in a New South context, class was likewise a significant factor in electrification’s early decades, particularly in that working-­class whites’ hopes for what electricity might mean for them led to a racially-­tinged antimonopoly public-­ownership movement that threatened to cast privately owned utilities aside. The social and cultural realms worked as a filter through which southerners from the 1880s to the early 1900s assimilated this new technology into their daily lives. The process affected not only what electricity meant for individuals; it also influenced debates on who would have access to its benefits, who ultimately would exercise control over it, and how it contributed to the progress, and indeed wisdom, of the New South agenda. *   *   * Early electrification proceeded in a patchwork manner, affecting certain spaces and emphasizing certain values over others. In addition to streets, public places frequented by affluent southerners—posh hotels, opera houses, banks, department stores—received electric lights first, establishing this new source of artificial illumination as the province of the wealthy and as a beacon signaling the New South program’s purported success. Electric amenities at department stores exemplified this trend. Founded in the late nineteenth century as dry-­goods retailers, shops such as Birmingham’s Loveman’s and Atlanta’s Rich’s evolved into high-­tech temples of elite consumerism. By the turn of the century Loveman’s generated over $1.5 million in annual revenues and featured forty-­two departments. It also became one of the first institutions in Birmingham to adopt electric lights and one of the first American department stores with an electric escalator.3 For its part, according to the Atlanta Journal, the electric lights on display at Rich’s stood as a “monument—a great white emblem—of the unbounded faith” in urban-­industrial progress.4 Electric lighting at such southern retail outlets confirmed that electricity was more than a business. It highlighted department store customers’ elite status and helped create new spaces of consumerism and leisure in the New South. 34

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Figure 2.1 Ponce De Leon Park, Atlanta, GA, ca. 1910. The sign at bottom left reads “This park is under city police regulations which will be strictly enforced.” Another sign, not visible in this photo, reads “Ponce de Leon is a private park under city police regulations. No disorderly characters tolerated. Colored persons admitted as servants only.” Author’s collection.

In January 1907 the brightness of a new Rich’s building mimicked the electrical glory of the “Great White Way” in the city’s central business district and similarly marked the department store as an urban space of both excitement and safety, especially for women. The Atlanta Journal predicted that “Rich’s great white store [will be] truly a paradise” where “the feminine heart will flutter with real delight.” The store’s interior featured mahogany floors set against white walls, all under “electric globes” that enabled the customer to “see by night . . . as if she were standing out in the light of the midday sun.” Each of the store’s levels was accessible by electric elevators and benefited from flattering electric light. Handsome display cases, the Journal continued, revealed “the exquisite Paris models, the lime-­light revealing every light and shadow, every graceful line and curve of the gowns.”5 Updated department stores established that consumption patterns would be different in the electrified city; no longer would affluent shoppers have to haggle in muddy streets with seedy vendors hawking suspect wares. Now they could comfortably shop in a well-­appointed store at virtually any time of day under enchanting electric lamps. Other electrified public sites of leisure and consumerism seemed to cast at least certain New South spaces in a more democratic, or even subversive, light. E L E C T R IC I T Y A N D T H E M I N D OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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Amusement parks first emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century in the South, as in other parts of the United States, as sites of widely accessible mass culture. At East Lake Park in Chattanooga, Glendale Park in Nashville, Electric Park in Montgomery, or Ponce de Leon Park in Atlanta, southerners could enjoy a manufactured version of nature in grassy picnic areas, petting zoos, or man-­ made lakes as well as high-­tech enticements such as merry-­go-­rounds, Ferris wheels, and miniature railroads. Electrified amusement parks also allowed visitors to flout closely held social mores. A Nashville resident named Tom May recalled “old-­time courtin’” at Glendale Park in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Yet his stories described violations of conventional modes of strictly supervised heterosocial interactions among young people. May said that, as a young bachelor, he and a few friends regularly rode streetcars to Glendale Park on Saturday evenings to meet with young women whom they would serenade with original verses or entertain by paying “a couple Negroes who could fiddle” to play them music. May and his dates held hands while listening to love songs and danced until the park closed, which, with electric lights, could be as late as midnight. Sometimes, he confessed, he would even “steal a kiss on the rollercoaster.”6 Inside the park southerners could set aside the Victorian values of hard work, frugality, and self-­discipline in favor of play, prodigality, and pleasure.7 In many other ways, though, amusement parks confirmed the rules of the world outside. Southern amusement parks upheld Jim Crow conventions by strictly forbidding African American patrons, who could only experience the park in their capacity as laborers. In Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon and Nashville’s Glendale Parks, any ruffians or unruly guests were also unwelcome. As in the city beyond, the racial and behavioral rules of the private amusement park were enforced by the state’s police power.8 Despite socially transgressive appearances, at least for well-­behaved white customers, amusement parks aided power companies and, to some extent, disciplined the pleasure-­seeking public to the strictures of modern capitalism. Power companies often funded the development of—or even purchased—amusement parks to help fill the gaps in their business models; Atkinson’s GREC invested in Ponce De Leon Park and Brown’s Nashville Electric Railway and Light purchased and operated Glendale Park.9 Sunk costs in generating stations and streetcar infrastructure demanded the most frequent possible usage; the capital otherwise lying idle on weeknights, weekends, and holidays was thus put to use by streetcar-­riding park-­goers. What was more, the amusement park’s structure and functions bore striking similarities to the modern factory. Queued into well-­ordered lines and processed through the various rides—generating revenue for the owners in an ongoing loop—patrons learned the rhythms of industrial production while waiting to be entertained. Like de36

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partment stores, amusement parks reinforced the values of the emerging New South order, even as people made their own meanings out of leisure and consumption in a newly electrified city.10 Outside the public eye the seemingly more democratic visions of life under electricity did not hold. Ostentatious displays of electricity in elite homes, essentially the only residences to enjoy electricity until after the First World War, further bulwarked the position that electric delights belonged primarily to the wealthy. In this version of the electrical age, the affluent were empowered to benefit from a new form of domestic lighting that was sufficiently stylish and conspicuous for their level of sophisticated living.11 An 1889 party at the home of Atlanta resident W. B. Lowe serves as a case in point. Described as a “royal entertainment” and a “brilliant society event,” the gala at Lowe’s “palatial mansion” featured three hundred members of Atlanta’s upper crust and took place under an incandescent “glow of enchantment.” The residence’s dramatic entrance “was brilliantly illuminated with electric lights, and the house had electric lights shining softly through rose-­colored globes.” Electricity permitted the party to begin late in the evening, with dinner served at midnight, and shone a light on the standard of living and the attendant adornments—East Indian palms, Persian silk, exotic fruits, fine art, polished silver—that such wealth and social rank allowed Lowe to cultivate, flaunt, and model for other members of Atlanta society.12 As one historian has argued, “patronage by the wealthy and aristocratic was a key feature of electric lighting” in the 1880s and 1890s, and such support proved “essential to its success as a glamorous . . . feature of the respectable home.”13 The potential transformations in the “respectable home” made possible by electric lights and traction were not limited to aesthetic displays that helped raise social profiles. For some well-­to-­do white suburbanites, electric amenities became required additions for a better home life and, ultimately, a better society. This seemed especially true for inhabitants of elite southern enclaves like Nashville’s West End or Atlanta’s Inman Park. Made possible to a large extent by the motive power of electricity, Inman Park and West End promised improved lives for all their residents, lives that would aid in the daily regeneration of a work-­ weary business class.14 Established as a getaway for wealthy young families, West End evolved into a streetcar suburb that, like comparable Nashville neighborhoods, promised a “quiet, cozy comfortable” setting away from the city’s “narrow, hot streets.” West End grew even more exclusive after 1897 when its land was augmented and combined with the idyllic fairgrounds of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition.15 Promoters similarly cast Inman Park as an “Eden” where “all the fruits of civilization and the refinements of the city are brought into the pure air and freedom of a suburban retreat.” At least for those who were white and wealthy, nothing stood between the hustle and bustle of downtown and “this haE L E C T R IC I T Y A N D T H E M I N D OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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ven of rest,” equipped with a modern sewerage system, gas heating, and electric lights, but a “five-­cent fare” on the electric trolley line.16 Inasmuch as middle-­and upper-­class southerners looked forward to a bright electrical future in the suburbs, they shared with many other Americans anxieties about urban-­industrial life’s conditions. Indeed perceived inner-­city decay in large part prompted their flight to places like West End and Inman Park. Yet progressive-­minded reformers saw in electricity the power to eradicate squalor, especially for those who lacked the means to escape to suburban havens. Journalist J. A. Morris, reciting the research of an engineer, wrote in 1894 that even though cities “naturally domicile most of the wealth, culture and intelligence of the world’s population,” they were less healthy than the countryside. Coal smoke, animal waste, and raw sewage polluted city life. But, Morris wrote, electricity would be “the magic wand” that would dispel urban filth. “With our streets rid of the horse, the mule and the ox, superseded by the horseless wagon and carriage, our drinking water sterilized by the electric current, our sewerage rendered innocuous and odorless by electrolysis and our very atmosphere purified and sweetened by electric current,” Morris predicted, “we are certainly advancing rapidly and surely to ideal living” that would mimic the best elements of both city and country.17 In short, electricity would create a New South in which both public and private spaces would provide manifold benefits for both wealthy and working-­class whites. *   *   * If most dreams for—and lived realities of—the New South’s future applied primarily to whites, African Americans too saw in the electrified city prospects for a better life. This was especially true of the streetcar systems whisking passengers across cities in Dixie. Electric streetcars had become not only the core of the southern utility industry little more than a decade after their introduction but critical features of urban life as well. Across the region both track mileage and city boundaries quickly expanded. Ridership increased dramatically as well. In 1902 Americans took 4.8 billion streetcar rides and urban dwellers averaged from 235 to 260 yearly trips per capita. Southern rates of streetcar travel trailed the national average (about 150 annual rides per person), but the ridership rate in large southern cities came closer to national figures (210 rides per person per year).18 To be sure, readily accessible mass transit made city life more convenient for all citizens, but African Americans as much as any demographic took advantage of this new amenity, often constituting large proportions, and sometimes majorities, of ridership despite the passage of the first Jim Crow laws. After the US Supreme Court sanctioned privately administered segregation in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, laws for segregated rail travel appeared steadily but unevenly 38

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Figure 2.2 Peter Ross Calvert and Ebenezer Calvert, The Inaugural Run of Nashville’s First Electric Streetcar at 16th Avenue and Broad, 1889. West End Methodist Church can be seen in the background. Credit: Tennessee State Library and Archives.

across the South. In many instances, however, these edicts received only half-­ hearted enforcement. In Georgia’s case the law’s very language, which outsourced police power over privately administered urban mass transit to streetcar conductors, allowed trolley companies to avoid rigid adherence to Jim Crow seating, the application of which electric utilities often found overly burdensome. The Georgia statute, serving as a model for other southern states after its passage in 1891, required streetcar conductors to “separate the white and colored races as much as practicable,” which gave broad discretion to streetcar employees and often meant only that white passengers boarded through the front entrance and black passengers entered through the rear doors. Lax enforcement of the color line at times prompted white citizens and lawmakers to press for the erection of physical barriers between or separate cars for whites and blacks with varying degrees of success. Yet in most places across the South, even after Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), there was no clear delineation of who was supposed to sit where: seats on trolleys—front, back, or middle—generally went to whoever boarded first. Just like white southerners, African Americans of all classes rode to work, church, shops, and places of entertainment in the racially murky terrain inside southern streetcars.19 E L E C T R IC I T Y A N D T H E M I N D OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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African Americans’ ability to ride trolleys without strict rules for separate seating derived from two interrelated realities: the financial demands of the streetcar business and black activism. Electric lighting companies emerged in the early 1880s and oversaw the construction of infrastructure for illuminating city streets. For profit-­seeking lighting company managers, the sunk costs in electrical equipment required the most frequent usage possible, but early electric lamps generally operated only from evening to sunrise. When the electric streetcar became viable by the late 1880s, lighting companies often supplied the power: trolley passengers activated the capital otherwise lying idle for half of every day. As lighting and streetcar companies grew, so did their capital outlays. Power company owners quickly realized that increasingly large investments made economies of scale crucial. By the twentieth century’s dawn that realization not only confirmed that trolley companies must accept every fare-­paying passenger possible but that corporate consolidation would be advantageous. In cities across the South and the nation, the years after 1900 saw lighting and streetcar firms merge into city-­dominating, monopolistic utilities.20 Black activism intersected with these financial imperatives. Through various acts of resistance from the 1890s to the 1910s, black southerners demanded equal treatment on streetcars without the ignominy of screens, assigned seats, or other devices to physically divide the races. Such potential indignities provoked black southerners to speak publicly against attempts to relegate them to second-­class citizenship, testifying to the significance they placed on the symbolic and material freedom of movement across the cities where they lived and worked. Reverend Robert Jones, for example, lambasted a New Orleans ordinance that forced African American streetcar passengers to sit humiliatingly “behind screens, as if they were wild or obnoxious animals.”21 An 1896 editorial condemned an (ultimately failed) early post-­Plessy Atlanta edict that would have forced black passengers to the last two rows of streetcars as “the most disgraceful decision ever rendered.” The writer reminded readers that African Americans had “spent enough money riding on the street cars in Georgia to own a line in the state,” intimating that by withholding their fares, black southerners could force trolley line managers to compromise.22 African Americans did just that, backing their condemnations of Jim Crow with effective protests. In southern cities including Atlanta, Jacksonville, Mobile, New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah, both working-­and middle-­class African Americans participated in boycotts against trolley companies that attempted to implement Jim Crow.23 These actions posed a significant threat to electric utilities as streetcar traffic accounted for a substantial proportion of power companies’ earnings. Across the United States at the turn of the century, trolley fare receipts amounted to half of electric utilities’ revenues. For Atlanta’s GREC, which 40

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by 1902 controlled the city’s entire mass transit system, streetcar fare accounted for an outsized 70 percent of total income; one estimate claimed that a 1900 boycott in Atlanta cost trolley companies $5,000 per month.24 Street railway operators thus exhibited great sensitivity to even modest dips in streetcar revenue. In response to the fear that boycotts would jeopardize annual dividend payments, trolley companies worked to negotiate a middle ground between white calls for complete racial separation and African American demands for equal treatment. Though power companies sabotaged boycotts and ultimately sided with a social order grounded in white supremacy, seating arrangements on southern streetcars, particularly in Atlanta, remained relatively fluid for decades to come.25 Withholding fare was but one of the tactics black southerners employed to resist Jim Crow. In Richmond African Americans used numerous tactics in their quest to maintain an equal footing in the city’s trolleys. In a long chain of actions with origins in the days before electric traction, black Richmonders fought segregation with direct protests such as streetcar sit-­ins. When the state legislature passed a Jim Crow law in 1900, they called on other means. Even as African American electoral strength steadily diminished with the spread of disfranchisement schemes, they held mass meetings, organized political campaigns, and filed lawsuits. Editor John Mitchell of the Richmond Planet, one of Richmond’s African American newspapers, waged a war in the press by lobbing scathing critiques at the new segregation law and encouraging his readers to continue their protests. Even if Jim Crow’s grip over mass transit tightened in southern cities in the early 1900s and after, people like Mitchell, and his counterparts across the South, continued to fight against the disgraces of second-­class citizenship.26 Outside of reactions to discriminatory practices on streetcars, black southerners asserted themselves, in the words of the historian John Dittmer, by building “their own institutions behind the walls of segregation, preaching race pride and practicing self-­help.”27 Through organizations such as the Negro Young People’s Christian Education Congress and the National Negro Business League, African Americans created forums in which some wealth and a sense of dignity, if only for “the better element,” could be accumulated and disseminated. To the consternation of many whites who would abide no such possibilities, the overall goals of such establishments, according to Atlanta theologian Garland Penn, were to present “an object lesson of the bright side of the race to the brother in white” and plead for fairer treatment.28 On the trolley and elsewhere, the New South city for African Americans proved open for at least some level of negotiation, a site in which limited, but still important, power could be amassed and exercised. The influence that electrified urban life in the New South afforded African Americans in their pursuit of equal rights served as a source of immediate anxiety for white southerners, but it portended broader, graver changes as well. AfE L E C T R IC I T Y A N D T H E M I N D OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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rican American agency on streetcars fueled fears that white people’s ostensible historical position as a superior racial group, and moreover their place in the American democratic polity, was in jeopardy.29 According to the predominant thinking of the time, the goal of equal treatment on trolleys, and in everyday life in general, was not about equality at all. Indeed equality was impossible; one race would inevitably dominate the other. Many whites held that the equality they perceived on streetcars both symbolized and contributed to a larger, horrific inversion of the southern racial hierarchy, an inversion reminiscent of the one they purportedly witnessed in Reconstruction: blacks were becoming superior, whites were becoming subordinate.30 In the words of a Mrs. George Ball, ordinary white southerners, especially women riding alone on streetcars, had been forced “to quietly submit . . . to the domination of the negro” in the New South—a situation that would not be tenable for long.31 Nowhere did white southerners face their perceived degradation more tellingly than in day-­to-­day exchanges on the streetcars where they came into close bodily contact with African Americans. Of course, any number of sites of urban modernity threw black and white southerners together. But in most spaces of potential interracial interaction, social distance was strictly preserved: shops often permitted African Americans to enter only through the back doors and many other places, such as amusement parks, allowed African Americans only as laborers.32 For their part, railroad employees frequently removed African American travelers from first-­class cabins when white passengers complained about blacks’ presence.33 In places where physical and social distance between blacks and whites might be flattened, officials often responded to whites’ desires for a firmly maintained color line. The situation on streetcars was starkly different. As midwestern journalist Ray Stannard Baker observed while visiting Atlanta in 1907, “in almost no other relationship do the races come together, physically, on anything like a common footing.” In other circumstances white and black southerners “meet as master and servant; but in the street cars they touch as free citizens…, the white not in a place of command, the Negro without an obligation of servitude.” The color line on the trolley was completely blurred with potentially explosive consequences. “Those problems which arise from human contact on the street cars,” Baker feared, were “the most exasperating of all the provocatives.”34 Racial tensions, interracial contact, and streetcar travel were thoroughly intermixed in the New South. The racially murky terrain inside trolleys at times produced what whites interpreted as boorish, disrespectful behavior resulting from the New South’s topsy-­ turvy social order. For example, in May 1906 a white trolley passenger assaulted an African American postal worker for refusing to comply with a demand to 42

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move to another section of the car. Atlanta authorities declined to pursue charges against the white passenger who explained in defense of his actions that the supposedly impudent mail carrier failed to display “that politeness which was once proverbial with the old-­time southern negro.”35 On many other occasions, whites complained of being “crowded,” of having to stand eye-­to-­eye with members of a putatively inferior race in the tight quarters of trolley cars. “Crowding” operated as a widely legible euphemism for forced social equality experienced in the most corporeal sense. “Being ‘crowded,’” one historian writes, “meant having not just to see blacks but to feel, smell, and, hear them.”36 A scandalized Atlanta citizen, who identified herself only as “E.K.F.,” conveyed her disgust at the crowding on Atlanta’s trolleys in a 1905 letter to the Atlanta Constitution. She found it unacceptable “that the ladies and children, the mothers, wives, and children of Georgia men, should be compelled to ride in street cars crowded . . . with a motley gang of negro laborers, reeking with the most sickening of odors.”37 The offenses did not end with unsavory sensory encounters. For southern whites crowding also meant that, despite Jim Crow laws, they were often prevented from sitting in or were forced from streetcars. African Americans, E.K.F. wrote, occupied not only “the seats reserved for them, but frequently every seat in the car. White men and ladies are compelled to stand in the aisles over this mass of dirty negroes . . . who gloat over the fact that the white ladies have to . . . listen to their low, coarse language.”38 It was not only an incensed E.K.F. who objected to such treatment; other white citizens frequently complained about “deplorable situations” in which they were “crowded off of the street cars.” On a Sunday in late August 1906, for example, a “Mrs. J. F. Saunders was [reportedly] crowded off of a car by negroes [who] took possession of the car” at a busy Atlanta intersection.39 For ordinary white southerners, equality increasingly came to seem like oppression. If black passengers sometimes pushed white southerners out of trolleys, economic conditions in many other cases prevented working whites from even boarding. At the twentieth century’s beginning the standard streetcar fare in southern cities, and across the United States, was a nickel. A typical urban family of four might thus conceivably spend about $50 per year for streetcar travel, or some 10 to 20 percent of annual household income. This situation weighed even more heavily on the average white Atlanta resident. Atlanta’s cost of living reportedly exceeded that of all American cities aside from Boston, and southern wage workers generally earned one-­third to one-­half less than those in the North.40 With southern streetcar fare the same as the national rate, a typical southern worker faced prohibitively high annual transportation costs. As one frustrated white Atlantan rhetorically asked in 1906, “How can the working man pay such E L E C T R IC I T Y A N D T H E M I N D OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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fares?”41 That any African Americans could take advantage of mass transit systems while white workers often struggled to afford a ride—and, indeed, both black and white working-­class people often walked—added severe insult to the perceived social injuries whites endured daily on Atlanta’s streetcars.42 Considering the deeply held white belief in black inferiority, African Americans would not have been able through their own power to oust whites from their lofty position on the racial hierarchy—or from their seats on streetcars. The blame for this outrageous situation in the minds of working white southerners and their champions, then, lay squarely with “foreign” (i.e., from outside the South) capital outlets rapidly turning Dixie into the New South. For frustrated white Atlantans, the reason Jim Crow laws did not effectively mandate full racial separation was that corporate managers and New South proponents valued profits above all else. Despite signs of growing racial conflict on streetcars across 1905 and 1906, according to E.K.F., GREC’s executives simply had no desire to enforce segregated seating. To do so would only reduce revenues for the company and dividends for stockholders. “The ladies and children must continue to be crowded into the street cars with the negroes,” she sardonically wrote to the Atlanta Georgian in September 1906, “because the street car company is too poor to furnish separate cars, for if they did what would become of the watered stock?”43 The populist leader and white supremacist firebrand Tom Watson held the same opinion. The love of profit above all else, he penned in 1906, had seen southern interests invite northern capital to Dixie with the disastrous result that women and children had been enslaved to an urban-­industrial machine that “is grinding up their tender limbs into dividends.”44 At the same time these forces had transformed former “savages” into “black masters” who, in some outrageous cases, held “white slaves” in “bestial degradation.”45 Simply put, from E.K.F.’s and Watson’s shared viewpoint, GREC valued the bottom line more than white supremacy. For those in agreement with E.K.F. and Watson, ravenous corporations could only force white southerners into “bestial degradation” under the protection of New South–oriented Democrats who kept themselves in power thanks to a Faustian bargain. Pressing this line of thinking was the Atlanta Journal, whose publisher, Hoke Smith, echoed such sentiments while running for governor in 1906. According to Smith’s paper, New South Democrats had not only “perpetuate[d] the negro’s . . . political power” to both stay in office and ensure a steady flow of outside investments to the region, but disfranchised working whites as punishment for the Populist revolt.46 This point played on growing white resentments with the New South project. Of course by the turn of the century black voting rates across the South were reduced to negligible levels, but disfranchisement measures after 1890—including poll taxes, property requirements, and literacy 44

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tests—saw voting rates for working whites steeply decline as well. Whereas about 75 percent of adult white men regularly voted through the early 1890s South, only 15 to 30 percent did so after 1900.47 The consequences of this unholy deal, many whites seemed to agree, materialized in the New South’s daily exchanges where Atlantans shuddered under a “reign of terror” in which haughty black men frequently flaunted their status, even to the point of violent assaults, on GREC’s streetcars.48 To counter this trend, wrote an Atlanta minister, white men must act as one to demand change and lead “a great revolt against” a corporate-­political machine whose love of money had sullied Dixie with “negro domination.” If the call for white “reconquest” through reform went unanswered, the Atlanta Georgian chillingly predicted in early September 1906, the city’s white sons would rise in violent reprisals against their New South oppressors.49 It quickly became apparent, however, that legislative action could not possibly come soon enough, even if GREC president Preston Arkwright tried to defuse mounting tensions in early September by publicly stating that he and his company held the “same sentiment on the race question as all other southern people.”50 Referencing the inseparable (if largely imagined) issues of white political impotence, black political ascendancy, and ruinous corporate domination, the Georgian warned GREC and the city’s Democratic establishment that, in a twisted adaptation of Proverbs 15:1, “a soft answer turneth away wrath and considerate hearing removes opposition, but contemptuous silence and arrogant indifference will stir the stones of Atlanta to rebellion and protest.”51 By late September 1906, after a summer filled with alleged streetcar improprieties and black-­on-­white rape, Atlanta’s white men made it clear that they no longer had faith that the city’s political and corporate leaders would lend considerate hearing to calls for swift reform. At about half past 10:00 p.m. on Saturday, September 22, 1906, GREC’s 207 car arrived at the busy intersection of Peachtree and Marietta Streets, where as many as eleven thousand angry whites had gathered—following several reported black-­on-­white sexual assaults earlier that day—to bring the “reign of terror” to a decisive and bloody end. Noticing that the 207 carried both black men and white women, the mob pounced. Not simply boarding the trolley, the horde disabled the car, smashed its windows, and ripped open its doors before viciously bludgeoning at least three black men to death and severely wounding several other men, women, and children. Moments later another GREC trolley passed through the same intersection. Both the car and the passengers inside suffered the same fate as the 207. Within three days, hundreds of people had suffered injuries and at least sixty African Americans and ten whites had been killed in the Atlanta Race Riot. In addition rioters damaged more than twenty streetcars on the evening of September 22 alone.52 White rioters in turn-­of-­the-­century Atlanta E L E C T R IC I T Y A N D T H E M I N D OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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were not simply sating their racist bloodlust by murdering African Americans in the streets and on streetcars. They were also rebelling against what they believed treacherous New South leaders had foisted on them: corporate ruination of Dixie humiliatingly experienced as “negro domination” in the everyday exchanges of urban-­industrial life. *   *   * In the wake of the 1906 riot, a set of demagogic populists who claimed to speak for working-­class whites emerged to argue that the New South’s redemption from the chaos of corporate-­enabled “negro domination” would be found in public control over corporate activity. Such control, they insisted, could truly be achieved only if realized in concert with African American disfranchisement and the expansion of white male democracy—critically important issues given that, for the first two decades of its career, electricity appeared to be a fundamentally undemocratic enterprise. Because of the technical expertise, managerial sophistication, and outsized capital investment required to establish and maintain electric power businesses, ordinary people seemed to have had little say in utility operations and policies.53 By the twentieth century’s dawn, especially within the context of the push for greater white male political participation, African American exclusion, and corporate regulation, many southerners began to agree that electricity’s management should be a democratic process and acted to make it so, at least for white men. The resulting movement, a campaign not for regulation but for municipal ownership of electric utilities, drew on the abortive Populist crusade of the 1890s and made an indelible mark on electrification’s path in the New South’s capital. In the 1890s Populist Party members across the United States had pressed generally for public oversight of corporations and particularly for government ownership of railroads and the telegraph. They argued that since transportation and communication systems proved crucial to the functioning of modern society, and leaned heavily on government assistance, public institutions should acquire and control these indispensable technologies.54 Populist Party standard bearers like Tom Watson extended this thinking into the early twentieth century. Joining a nationwide crusade, southern agitators turned the earlier focus on government control over railroads toward public control of the increasingly important electric power industry, which now drew comparisons to railroads and other corporations as a tentacled beast on the verge of slithering into the South and devouring white society. For Watson and many others, the way for ordinary whites to end this “legalized Greed and Murder” was to “municipalize public utilities.”55 Even if Atlanta’s municipal ownership movement did not descend directly from Populism, it inherited Populism’s spirit through claims like Watson’s that public 46

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ownership of electric utilities would provide the path forward to a New South that served the needs of ordinary whites. Municipal ownership movements sprang from reformist political activity in cities across the United States in the late 1880s and, following Populism’s collapse, began to gather momentum by the end of the 1890s.56 In Atlanta the call for municipal ownership became a leading issue in the late 1890s. At that point the movement remained, according to the former mayor Charles Collier, the preserve of the city’s most “substantial and trustworthy” business leaders who agreed that “the city should control the electric light plant” because it would amount to enormous annual savings. Men like Collier were careful to note, however, that they did not favor city ownership of the far more lucrative streetcar system. For the business elite, municipal streetcar ownership was “out of the question” as it would soon be “put on a political basis [where] corruption would inevitably follow.”57 After the turn of the century, when ordinary whites in the city began to express—and violently act on—the fear that corporate-­political malfeasance had forced them to live, in the words of judge Emory Speer, “under the nervous terror of the criminal negro,” the rhetoric surrounding municipalization took on a radical tone.58 Leading public ownership advocates, both feeding on and fanning the flames of ordinary whites’ discontent, now argued that energy corporations’ greed threatened white democracy and as a result must immediately come under popular control. Alderman James Key lamented that Atlanta’s working whites had fallen into the “hands of grinding monopolies.” With mayoral ambitions in mind, he pledged to “support the work that is going to be done to give the people relief through municipal ownership.”59 The Atlanta Georgian, whose race-­baiting editor John Temple Graves had actively drummed up support for violent reprisals against corporate-­enabled “negro domination” in the months before the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, took up the cause as well. In a barrage of pieces in 1906 and 1907, the Georgian bombarded Atkinson’s GREC, railroads, and “foreign” corporations in general as ruinous to the South’s common people. In the paper’s view backing for public control over electric utilities was an expression of support for white democracy. If the working Atlantan truly sought to “settle and establish the supremacy of the white race in the affairs of this government and for the peace and welfare of both races,” he must join the Georgian in lending “his voice and his vote, his full intelligence and . . . his cooperation without stint to the reform measures” that would restore his power.60 Atlanta’s labor unions heeded that call and openly advocated for public ownership not just of lighting but of the streetcar system as well. The Journal of Labor, the American Federation of Labor’s Atlanta mouthpiece, published a series of editorials in late 1906 declaring that “many of the enterprises which now go to swell the individual bank accounts of private corporations would, no doubt, E L E C T R IC I T Y A N D T H E M I N D OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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save money to the citizenry of the cities if municipally owned.”61 According to the paper, because power company practices parasitically fed on working whites, the city should mandate a two-­cent trolley fare reduction so white workers could ride the streetcar alongside middle-­class African Americans. This position was not simply union leadership’s opinion. The rank and file, the paper claimed, proudly backed municipal ownership.62 Despite the Journal of Labor’s claims, it is difficult to determine the extent to which union members and white working-­class Atlantans in general favored municipal ownership, though there is evidence to suggest that the municipalization movement went beyond the vanguard’s bombast. Since the mid-­1890s, but especially from 1905 to 1907, popular support for public ownership had swelled dramatically. Across the country, citizens voted for hundreds of referendums and candidates favorable to municipal ownership of electric utilities; they also saw to it that municipal ownership became a reality. In 1896 fewer than 400 municipally owned utilities existed in the United States. By 1906 that number had ballooned to nearly 1,300, a rate of growth twice that of private utilities.63 By some measure, the South outpaced the rest of the United States in municipalization: While Dixie could claim only 11 percent of the nation’s urban population in 1900, the South at that point had 18 percent of the nation’s municipally owned generating plants.64 Nearly twenty Georgia towns created municipal utilities after the turn of the century and the movement in Atlanta likewise showed signs of popular vitality, at least as evidenced by the decisions of several mayoral candidates, including Alderman Key, to base their 1906 campaigns on municipalization.65 Another point for gauging public control’s support in Atlanta lay in a group called the Municipal Ownership League. Originally formed in 1898, the League gained new life in 1906 and boasted up to five thousand members, including Alderman Key and the Georgian’s Graves. Hoke Smith, who won the state’s Democratic nomination (and thus, essentially, the general election) for governor in August 1906 after pledging to expand the white franchise, eliminate the black vote, and rein in corporations, half-­heartedly indicated that he might join the League as well.66 According to an unofficial 1906 manifesto, the Municipal Ownership League aimed to bring a rapid end to the “oppression by an aristocracy of industrial monopoly” that sustained corrupt politicians. The masses had “suffered so much from monopoly’s extortion and indifference . . . that the time has come when the people who are the source of power and the object of all government and the supreme consideration of cities and states must awaken to the comprehension of the rights they have lost and the rights they may regain.”67 The Municipal Ownership League openly acknowledged an aggrieved sense of whiteness and suggested that the application of white democracy to the ques-

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tion of municipal ownership would open the way to wholesale reform of all the South’s problems. Regardless of the movement’s size, GREC executives saw the rise of a vigorous crusade for government ownership as a serious threat. The danger to GREC’s interests was especially palpable in Atlanta, which, according to W. E. B. Du Bois, had become the “center of the upward striving of the ‘poor whites.’” As Du Bois recognized, Atlanta had emerged as a hotbed of white working-­class activity in a city that saw whites’ numbers grow precipitously between 1880 and 1910 (a 400 percent overall increase, and a 20 percent proportional increase to two-­thirds of the city’s population). As their ranks expanded, their power grew as well. The demands of growing numbers of white workers clearly influenced Atlanta’s social and urban-­industrial landscapes—even if ordinary whites believed their status was suffering from rapid decline. White voting rates and labor union participation in Atlanta after 1900 outstripped that in the rest of the South. Large proportions of whites migrated to the city as ex-­farmers or mountaineers who had been ousted from their land and forced into demeaning factory work. Many of these people thus harbored deep resentment for the New South and the electric companies, railroads, factories, and city life that embodied it. Ordinary whites’ power commanded the respect of Atlanta’s political and business elite.68 The cresting municipal ownership movement, built on thoroughly raced questions over working whites’ status in the New South, demanded a decisive answer. GREC responded to the interwoven threats of white anger and public ownership by calling on the state to protect its business through regulation. The proposed legislation would confer on electric utilities common-­carrier status under the purview of the Railroad Commission of Georgia (RCG). Such a designation would grant utilities exclusive control over defined electric streetcar and lighting service areas—but left open the question of industrial power service—and would guarantee reasonable rates of return on investment, approximately 6 to 12 percent per annum. In exchange for monopoly status, the state’s railroad commission would exercise control over every element of the electric utility industry. State-­level regulation of electric utilities in Georgia seemed to fit neatly with larger Progressive Era goals of redefining the relationship among corporations, state, and society. It is tempting to cast utility regulation in Georgia as part of a nascent social safety net that, to quote one historian, “cushioned the impact of rapid industrial change” by restraining large corporations’ “socially destructive forms of behavior.”69 Another historian similarly writes that southern regulatory laws were among “the most visible reforms of the progressive era,” pushed by a class of politicians cynically bent on garnering more white working-­class votes.70 Perhaps this was true for railroads and insurance companies. Yet electric util-

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ity regulation in Georgia did not result from heroic reformer-­crusaders or even from a mass political campaign as a means to thwart monopoly and safeguard the public from powerful business interests. It emerged from power company boardrooms as a way to ensure private monopoly and protect the electric business from an increasingly discontented people. Electric utilities “energetically studied, worked out the principles of, propagandized, and lobbied for the establishment of state regulatory commissions.”71 Electric utility regulation in Georgia was a shield against angry whites’ calls for government ownership of the utility business. This strategy was not original to the South. While serving as president of NELA in 1897–1898, Chicago’s Samuel Insull became the first utility executive to call for regulation. Even as his remarks at an 1898 meeting scandalized many NELA members, Insull made the foundational case for his industry’s support for regulation.72 That plea became necessary because this young business already faced significant problems. Contrary to prevailing theories that free-­market competition would magically regulate the utility business, rivalries between power companies had proved ruinous to the fledgling industry and the public interest, producing duplicate wires and tracks, tattered streets, grievously overcapitalized businesses, and destructive bankruptcies. Yet the gravest danger facing the industry was the irritated customer base that fueled the public ownership crusade. According to Insull, the movement smacked of radicalism and would foist “municipal socialism” on America’s cities, destroying the private utility industry. To answer this assault, Insull insisted, utility managers must work for the passage of regulation in their home states. Business leaders’ actions in response to social pressures, he suggested, would be the “true regulative force.”73 In the years following his 1898 speech, Insull persuaded many colleagues to join him and eventually forged what one historian has called the “utility consensus,” a widely agreed upon doctrine that, as a “natural monopoly,” the utility industry needed protection from competition in exchange for regulation.74 One utility executive not in need of conversion was Henry Atkinson. GREC’s chairman believed in Insull’s prophesy from the outset, serving as one of the five original members on NELA’s Legislative Policy Committee and proselytizing for Insull’s creed in the South.75 Following the consolidation of all streetcar operations, and the apparent end of competition, in Atlanta in 1902, Atkinson continued to work with Insull and groups such as the National Civic Association (a consortium of economists, labor leaders, and utility managers) to push for state-­level regulatory laws.76 Legislation for statewide supervision of public utilities in Georgia made little progress until 1906, when mass anxieties over race-­class matters, corporate issues, and municipal ownership reached a fever pitch. But instead of launching 50

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a public campaign to garner popular, progressive support for regulatory oversight, power companies across the state worked covertly with state legislators to include regulation in another proposed measure. In the 1906–1907 legislative session, newly-­elected governor Hoke Smith honored his campaign promises by seeing that bills to expand white political participation and to disfranchise African Americans came to the floor of the General Assembly. Smith also fulfilled his pledge to rein in corporations—particularly the railroads—through a bill that would expand RCG authority. As originally introduced to the legislature by Representative Murphy Candler (nephew of GREC stockholder and Coca-­Cola president, Asa Candler), the bill included strict rate schedules, anticorruption measures, and an increase in RCG board membership from three to five; it did not contain provisions for electric utilities to fall under its purview.77 Yet as the session progressed, Candler included power companies in the bill, according to the Atlanta Georgian, after the “street railway owners themselves have asked the amendment so as to place the lines within and without municipalities strictly under the jurisdiction of the commission.”78 The Candler Bill passed both chambers of the General Assembly on the legislative session’s final day in 1907, making Georgia one of the first three states, along with New York and Wisconsin, to answer Insull’s call for statewide regulation. From a certain angle, the law appeared to be a garden-­variety Progressive accomplishment. It was not an abundantly obvious tactic to foil angry whites’ antimonopoly activism. The Candler Act empowered RCG to monitor and publicize electric companies’ financial status, approve power company securities, and set reasonable lighting rates and streetcar fares. In keeping with GREC’s financially motivated resistance to Jim Crow on streetcars the law declined to mention segregation. It did, however, include a generic provision that RCG “shall have the power and authority to order and compel the operation of sufficient passenger service when in its judgment inefficient or insufficient service is being rendered the public.”79 In other ways, though, the GREC-­supported Candler Act made clear attempts to accede to the racial requirements of the white working class whose disquiet had energized the public ownership movement. Perhaps most tellingly, the law included provisions that clearly bore the marks of, but in fact were intended to stifle, popular demands for the enlargement of white democracy. Whereas commissioners in New York and Wisconsin gained their seats through appointments, those in Georgia had to face popular election “by the qualified voters of Georgia” as representatives of the popular will.80 The company further burnished its white supremacist bona fides by recruiting the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s chair to speak on its behalf.81 Moreover GREC agreed to stricter enforcement, at least superficially, of Georgia’s 1891 Jim Crow law in accordance with a citywide E L E C T R IC I T Y A N D T H E M I N D OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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ordinance that passed after the 1906 Race Riot. The decree was intended to prevent the types of interactions that, according to white supremacists’ reading of events, led to the violence in September 1906. It forced each trolley car in the city to post signs that read “Colored seat from rear toward front, Whites seat from front toward rear.” For the moment at least—even if the new ordinance to some extent preserved the flexibility of the old seating system—E.K.F. and Atlanta’s white working citizens could feel confident that the state had finally heard their cries by reining in corporations and erecting an imaginary veil that would prevent them from being crowded in, or even off, the trolley.82 Like-­minded white citizens across the region could share those feelings over the next decade. Although Georgia’s path to electric utility regulation set the tone for the South, the rest of the region adopted statewide regulatory control over power companies in the 1910s. Even if they lacked the same level of racial tension that contributed to Georgia’s adoption of electric utility regulation in 1907, many states adopted similar legal mechanisms meant to quell white working-­class resentments against corporate malfeasance and racial confusion.83 Even the most passionate public ownership supporters in Georgia seemed to agree that state-­level oversight would accomplish those goals. The passage of regulatory legislation was apparently enough to convince them to halt their campaign. Existing records do not reveal exactly why leading municipal-­ownership advocates dropped their cause, though several factors can be counted as likely contributors to the change in attitude. For one, the new Jim Crow ordinance, in concert with the horrors of the riot, evidently reduced black ridership on the streetcars, at least temporarily. According to Ray Stannard Baker, many African Americans were incensed at renewed attempts to force them to accept inferior accommodations and thus avoided the trolley.84 According to an observer in 1914, another possibility was that regulation proved sufficiently pleasing to all parties. While governmental oversight helped power companies “escape the annoyance of local nagging,” municipal ownership advocates viewed it as a compromise measure that would restrain utilities until public sentiment swung more fully to the favor of public control.85 Most likely of all though, the rise of regulation in Georgia hushed calls for municipal ownership because it co-­opted elements of white antimonopoly populism. State-­level supervision of electric utilities appeared to hew to the broad outlines of progressive action for the general welfare—in this case, a regulatory provision that nodded to the recovery of white supremacy—and thus “short-­circuited radicalism” in early twentieth-­century Georgia by “feeding the illusions” of self-­styled popular leaders.86 Beyond simply suspending their crusade, the most vocal public ownership backers became cheerleaders for regulation. The Journal of Labor, for instance,

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took a softer tack after the Candler Act’s passage. The paper’s editor wrote in September 1907 that the war on corporations had gone on long enough and that working people had suffered too much from the fights between “demagogues and doctrinaires.” Corporations needed close oversight, he granted, but some of the demands for change had descended into radicalism. Corporations needed rigorous regulation, not crucifixion.87 The Atlanta Georgian likewise abandoned its crusade for municipal ownership, published statements in favor of electric utility regulation, and, like the Journal of Labor, urged working whites to halt their anticorporate crusade.88 Shortly after approval of the Candler Act, the Georgian’s editors admitted that “we do not wish nor do the people wish to harass or handicap these great public utility corporations, by constant hammering or incessant demands for reform.”89 The paper could finally adopt that position because of the noble work of the “great and historic legislature of 1907.” “The will of the people as expressed in the thunder” of recent years, the Georgian reported, “touched two high and signal issues—the establishment of white supremacy and the regulation” of railroads and public utilities.90 Not content to abandon public ownership and laud regulation, municipalization’s erstwhile champions now claimed that streetcar companies should be recognized as working whites’ friends. The Journal of Labor carried GREC advertisements in 1907 proclaiming that “Labor Is Well Paid in Atlanta,” affording the white working family the ability to enjoy all the conveniences that electricity could provide. GREC management thus felt “justified in asking for the support and patronage of the people who are enjoying these benefits at such reasonable rates.”91 The Georgian likewise published GREC advertisements that touted the utility’s “part in Atlanta’s upbuilding” and its contribution to “the public good.” GREC voluntarily increased its tax payments to the city, granted firefighters and police officers free streetcar travel, and lowered its electric rates “thus allowing the public to share in the company’s prosperity.”92 The Constitution, long a supporter of the New South agenda, gladly joined the chorus. Not only had GREC voluntarily reduced long-­haul streetcar fares to the standard five-­cent rate, the paper claimed, but it had reallocated $230,000 in annual expenses for the people’s benefit. “The stockholders lose that amount,” an ad asserted, so that “the public gets it.”93 At least for the Georgian’s and the Journal of Labor’s editors, a racialized version of “corporate liberalism” seemed to be a winning strategy.94 While locking in monopoly status for itself and for counterparts across the state, the now-­regulated company won favorable press as a good corporate citizen and supporter of white uplift and, at least for the moment, had halted public ownership agitation.

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*   *   * Southerners of all racial identities and class standings formed thoughts about electrification’s first phase. Their opinions, and resultant actions, mattered. In cities such as Atlanta, Birmingham, and Nashville, electricity became a conduit for defining life in the modernizing, urban South. It spoke to the onset of a society increasingly defined by consumerism and leisure, even if consumerism and leisure were, through the beginning of the twentieth century, reserved primarily for the elite or geared for energy corporations’ benefit. Electric power also promised a better home life both in the seemingly cloistered suburbs and in the city center. Where mass transportation was concerned, the new technology offered freedom of movement across urban spaces for the first time to marginalized groups across the South, especially African Americans. At the same time it furnished black southerners with a lever they could pull to exercise limited but important influence in New South cities. Working-­class whites likewise benefited from streetcar travel, but saw, especially in Atlanta, in the company that administered it and in the seeming power it granted to black southerners a threat to their ostensible position in the southern racial hierarchy. Their resentments fueled a movement for public ownership of the electric industry, which in turn influenced the rise of regulation. Electrification, in short, was as much a social-­cultural matter as it was a business concern or series of technological innovations in the New South’s capital and across the region. Looking back on that era from the 1940s, the longtime Atlanta civic booster and Chamber of Commerce president Ivan Allen Sr. proclaimed that Atlanta’s ascent in the late nineteenth century resulted from a simple but effective formula: “Altitude + Attitude.” The city’s rather lofty perch, Allen wrote, “has been Atlanta’s greatest natural asset. It is the first ingredient of the spirit which has made Atlanta” the New South’s leading city. In addition to its advantageous location at more than 1,000 feet above sea level, Atlanta also benefited from a great outlook. Following the hardships of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Atlanta’s elite and ordinary citizens stood together as one and displayed “the health . . . the energy . . . the spirit to build again!”95 As demonstrated above, the basis on which modern Atlanta, like other New South centers, was built emerged not simply from the efforts of plucky entrepreneurs and contented workers operating cooperatively in the free market. Bitter corporate rivalries, violent popular agitation, racial strife, and crucial governmental intervention proved fundamental to electrification’s early stages. In addition “natural advantages” did not foreordain a city in which well-­compensated workers could happily ride the electric streetcar to frolic under the electric lights at the amusement park. Rather it was bituminous coal, the remotely located nat54

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ural wealth stored for millennia under the surface of the Appalachian Mountains and routed to city centers by locomotives, that brightened streets, propelled streetcars, powered factories, and lit and heated shops, homes, and offices. In its first decades the New South stood on a foundation of combustible black rocks. Just as it had been established, though, that foundation began to crumble, sending power company managers to the region’s rivers in search of a new fuel for the New South.

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3 A Mighty Outpost of Progress

In a 1920s prospectus, Henry Atkinson’s Georgia Railway and Power Company (GRPC), immediate successor to the Georgia Railway and Electric Company, boasted to potential investors that, since its founding in 1911, it had become the dominant utility in half its home state by transforming the once turbulent Tallulah-­Tugaloo River system in mountainous Northeast Georgia into a “mighty outpost of progress in the heights of the Blue Ridge.” GRPC, the pamphlet explained, had “imprisoned” the Tallulah-­Tugaloo’s heretofore fugitive energy behind the “towering shoulders” of its hydropower infrastructure, forcing those rivers into hard labor.1 The shackle foisted on the Tallulah-­Tugaloo consisted not of a single facility but a series of six reservoirs and dams that together impounded a maximum of 7.5 billion cubic feet of water. With three additional dams on the Chattahoochee River, the Atlanta-­based power company in 1926 owned a hydroelectric generating capacity of almost 300,000 horsepower (compared to just 30,000 horsepower in coal-­fired plants) and wrung over 430 million kilowatt hours of electric energy out of Blue Ridge water.2 By the end of the 1920s the “mighty outpost of progress” had grown even more productive, annually generating over one billion kilowatt hours and accounting for more than 93 percent of GRPC’s total output. Atkinson’s outpost was no outlier in the Southeast. Similar outposts of southern progress in Tennessee and South Carolina also produced over one billion kilowatt hours per year by 1929. Those in Alabama and North Carolina led the 56

charge, annually churning out more than 1.8 billion and 2.5 billion kilowatt hours of hydroelectricity, respectively, by the 1920s’ end.3 Despite their locations far outside New South urban centers, the gargantuan outposts of Alabama Power, Duke Power, GRPC, and Tennessee Power were not as peripheral as they may have seemed. These mighty outposts shared direct connections with expanding metropolitan and industrial cores across the region: southern utility managers explicitly built hydroelectric complexes to drive streetcars, shops, and spindles in cities and cotton mill towns across Dixie. Perhaps Tennessee Power’s executives put it best in 1913 when they stated that their Hales Bar and Ocoee Dams were built explicitly to spark urban-­industrial growth and that “the development of water power has given the manufacturer a great opportunity” for success.4 The New South’s ever-­growing appetite for industrial progress required a power source that only the resource-­rich periphery could provide.5 Early twentieth-­ century southern energy corporations acted as primary agents of environmental change, arranging natural resource flows from distant sites of production to power consumption centers in the quest to stimulate wealth creation and economic growth.6 In doing so such firms embraced and helped establish a regime of environmental manipulation and purportedly free-­market capitalism as intertwined prerequisites for southern progress. In this model, nature served as a tool to be conserved and applied to (at least some) southerners’ aspirations for industrial modernization. Historians have devoted considerable attention to the centrality of natural resource extraction to the New South project.7 Yet, with one notable exception, scholars have almost completely sidelined the critical role of “white coal”—a globally shared euphemism for the clean, renewable, and exploitable energy of falling river water—in Dixie’s regeneration.8 Corporate-­directed environmental exploitation proved fundamental to the New South creed of economic and social improvement, and in the 1910s and 1920s the falling waters of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the broader Appalachians became the lifeblood of the New South project. The impacts of the outposts of progress, however, were not solely environmental. Dominance over rivers worked as instruments through which men like Atkinson and Duke could transform their utilities into regional energy cartels, establishing models for capitalist development in the New South. Tapping into mountainous streams of natural capital enabled power companies to transform water into the New South’s most important fuel source, helping the region gain increasing access to the financial capital required for industrial development. Again, the so-­called “Empire State of the South” was not exceptional in this regard. By the late 1920s much of the South—especially the southeastern states of Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee—had undergone both a hydroelectric and manufacturing A M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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Figure 3.1 Proportion of Hydropower Generation to Total Electrical Generation in the Southeastern States, 1902–1929. Sources: US Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census. Central Electric Light and Power Stations, 1902–1927; and Thorndike Saville. “The Power Situation in the Southern Power Province.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 153 (Jan. 1931): 94–123. 58

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revolution, pulling the center of American textile production toward Dixie and away from New England.9 The expansion of the New South’s industrial base in the 1910s and 1920s, particularly in the southeastern states, derived largely from waterpower. Developers took advantage of their waterways’ kinetic energy by installing large dams on virtually every available major river system. By the end of the 1920s the Southeast had become as thoroughly wedded to hydroelectricity as the Pacific states, widely renowned for their abundance of waterpower, and sent the majority of their output to factories. In terms of productive capacity, Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee had virtually as much hydroelectric generating capacity relative to total electric generating capacity (66 percent) as the Pacific states of California, Oregon, and Washington (68 percent). In terms of total production, the overwhelming majority of kilowatt hours generated in the Southeast by the end of the 1920s—about 91 percent—derived from hydropower.10 Energy corporations had wedded the New South to hydroelectricity. The waterpower–New South nexus was not an easy, inevitable, or one-­party affair, though. It was beset by contingencies and difficulties. Hydroelectric moguls did not impose their will on southern rivers because falling water was simply better than coal. By the mid-­1920s, despite (or perhaps because of) challenges from coal shortages, competing utilities, and scenic preservationists, hydroelectricity became the region’s dominant fuel source in large part because control over water and power became thoroughly interwoven with notions of New South progress. *   *   * Although southeastern power companies had by the mid-­1920s firmly established themselves as hydroelectric corporations, the New South had not yet fully dropped its anchor in the water at the twentieth century’s outset. It stood instead on a foundation of Appalachian bituminous coal. Among the New South’s fundamental pillars was the widely shared belief that Dixie possessed boundless natural resources that would inevitably breed industrial success and urban growth. Along with fertile land and seemingly endless supplies of cheap and nonunionized labor, Appalachian coal played a key role in creating hopeful visions of what one historian dubbed the “Opulent South.”11 Both the coal mining industry and coal consumption in southern urban-­ industrial centers expanded dramatically between the 1880s and the 1910s. Based in Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, southern coal mining saw an eightfold increase from 1880 to 1900. Between 1900 and 1910 coal production in Dixie more than doubled to about 109 million tons, accounting for nearly one-­fourth of total American coal production.12 Railroads, steel mills, factories, A M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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and gasworks remained large consumers of Appalachian bituminous through the early 1890s, but as electric lighting and streetcar systems quickly grew, electric power stations took the lead. In 1891 Atlanta’s electric companies used about 5,000 tons of coal, primarily from East Tennessee; the city’s gasworks (dependent on gasified coal), by far the largest coal user in early 1890s Atlanta, consumed some 20,000 tons. By 1899 while the yearly requirements for a waning gaslight industry steadily decreased, Atkinson’s GELC had become the city’s dominant coal user with a rate of annual consumption that exceeded 27,000 tons.13 Yet despite its significance to urbanization and industrialization in the New South’s early years, southerners began to harbor serious doubts about coal’s ability to power the future. By the end of the 1890s, even as annual coal consumption steadily rose, many southerners shuddered at the prospect of “coal famine.” The predicament far exceeded Dixie’s border. Americans in general, as well as many Europeans, felt deeply anxious about potential coal shortages.14 An 1892 article on Americans’ prodigal coal usage took on a tone of Malthusian panic, expressing the fear that at present rates of increase, coal consumption would expand geometrically and bring the catastrophic end of “modern civilization.” With this coming disaster, not only would industrial production collapse, but “the atmosphere will be so laden with this poisonous product [carbonic-­acid gas] that only such unwieldy animals as characterized the Mesozoic period can flourish in it.”15 Quite apart from abstract notions of a dystopian future, southerners had reason to believe that a coal famine might befall them at any moment. For that frightening prospect they blamed the railroads. For decades following Reconstruction railroads drew criticism, especially from reform-­leaning southerners as “foreign” monopolistic corporations that imposed economic hardships on Dixie’s residents. Now the railroads created the possibility of artificial fuel scarcity by manipulating coal supplies and freight rates in order to swindle consumers and thicken profit margins.16 Atlantans in particular grew angry at the railroads’ 1891 coal-­delivery price hikes, which would fall “hardest on the gas works, waterworks and electric light works, which so closely concern public comfort.” The city’s industrial leaders concluded that the situation “appears [to be] purely arbitrary extortion.”17 The railroads, though, did not shoulder the blame exclusively. Just as often southerners believed the mines serving their cities faced imminent depletion. According to a January 1893 editorial, urban dwelling southerners feared “not coal famine as to the price of coal, but as to a real scarcity of it.”18 Those concerns continued throughout the decade. In 1899 Atlantans worried that they stood “on the verge of a coal famine” that would imperil both domestic comfort and industrial production because the city’s dealers held little on hand and expected no forthcoming deliveries.19 In Anniston, Alabama, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, 60

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observers grew anxious over “an existing scarcity of coal in all the mines” that supplied their utilities, factories, and homes.20 Labor strife added to coal’s perceived unreliability. A rash of railroad and mining strikes across the United States in the 1890s contributed to the widely held concern that continued reliance on coal presented severe challenges.21 Yet circumstances specific to Atlanta’s coal supply made the situation there appear more precarious. In 1891 the state of Tennessee leased convict laborers to the Coal Creek mines. Mine workers in the area, and eventually in five other nearby communities, engaged in a multiyear, at times violent struggle to ensure that they would not have to compete with unpaid prisoners. Intermittent work stoppages threatened coal’s flow into several southern cities for years thereafter, but by 1895 Tennessee’s legislature capitulated and agreed to end the practice of leasing convicts to privately owned mines outside of Knoxville.22 In the following year, though, the state opened a mine near a new prison named Brushy Mountain and forced inmates to harvest coal. Atkinson’s electric company reaped the benefits of Tennessee’s southern convict lease: by 1902 Brushy Mountain had become one of Atlanta’s principal coal suppliers. Still, East Tennessee miners’ continued rejection of convict labor expressed in strikes and other acts of resistance leveled a constant threat to the amount of coal available to the electric generating stations and other power producing machinery in Atlanta and other New South centers.23 Alongside the problems of fuel supply and costs, Atlanta’s coal-­fired power plants suffered from significant inefficiencies. Although cutting-­edge electrical generation technologies made possible the production of 1 kilowatt with about 4.5 pounds of coal, the equipment at GREC’s Davis Street and Butler Street plants by 1902 still required some 6 pounds of coal per kilowatt. These plants, moreover, proved unable to handle peak loads consistently. Frequent blackouts and trolley system failures forced GREC to supplement its generating capacity with an expensive battery system as well as with a 6,000-­horsepower gasoline engine.24 The costs and risks of a coal-­based power system ran too high for a growing New South. Coal’s sharply declining reputation helped give birth to Dixie’s hydroelectric age. Especially for business leaders, falling river water would be the sustainable natural resource on which the “Opulent South” was built. Yet even as coal had been coded as an unreliable natural resource, water was not without its own problems. It was not simply, transcendently the best or most important fuel source for the New South. Many southerners agreed that before hydroelectricity could power the engines of industry, rivers first had to be conquered and harnessed. In adopting this thinking, southerners joined a transnational exchange of ideas about humanity’s relationship to nature. Across the Western world in A M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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the late nineteenth century, societies embarked on “Promethean” projects to free themselves from the natural world’s strictures, in the process further instrumentalizing their nonhuman environments, a rationalism that sustained a perspective on humanity as ontologically separate from the nonhuman natural world.25 In parts of Europe, this orientation led actors to conceive of nature as an enemy, and states launched conservationist crusades against waterways. Terms like “conquer,” “subjugate,” and “war” peppered treatises on strategies for attacking rivers. In Spain, a nation reeling from the loss of its last colonial holdings in 1898, reformers, state actors, and capitalists sought to regenerate their nation by waging “internal war” against the Ebro, Tajo, and Duero Rivers. Kaiser Wilhelm praised engineers for their victorious dam-­building campaigns on the “great battlefields” of Germany’s Rur and Urft Rivers.26 The people converting Dixie’s waterscape into a power-­production machine for regional progress hewed to this same general thinking but put a distinctly New South spin on it, forging their own justifications for conquering rivers. In evaluating the South’s destruction in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the first generation of New South boosters determined in the 1880s that the Old South suffered fatal flaws rooted in the slave system’s disdain for industrialism and urbanism, and in its reverence—at least among the mythical planter class—for leisurely agrarianism. New South leaders carefully distanced their program from the Old South, even if they professed nothing but reverence for the lost world of moonlight and magnolias and the Confederacy’s failed crusade to protect it. They transformed the cold, violent capitalism of slavery into a warm, familial schoolhouse of civilization that had been foisted on Dixie by Europeans and northerners. To build a region of bustling cities and humming factories, then, New South leaders argued that a new work ethic must replace romantic notions of the “genteel loafer” and the dawdling slave.27 They insisted that in the past, southern rivers, like Old South society, were unproductive and lazy, squandering their inherent wealth-­and energy-­producing potential. In the words of Alabama Power’s Tom Martin, untapped rivers were “loafing at the public expense,” hampering “continued progress.”28 Especially given coal’s apparent downfall, the continued construction of the New South required ending such lethargy. The solution to southern rivers’ indolence was to impose on them a “gospel of work” that differed from the old ways.29 While one might expect southerners to have turned immediately to slave-­system metaphors for putting rivers to work, the Old South’s waning status led them to adopt another set of symbols. Turn-­of-­the-­century southern hydropower boosters instead most often classified waterways as wild beasts, particularly horses, which needed to be tamed. The notion of putting horses to work, of tapping into fluid “horsepower,” proved a

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handy symbol for a still heavily agricultural society, many of whose members harbored doubts about electricity’s usefulness. The Scottish inventor James Watt fashioned the horsepower metaphor in the late eighteenth century to equate a horse’s strength to that of his steam engine for London brewers reluctant to forsake muscular energy.30 There was a critical difference, though, between the way Watt and southern hydropower champions used the expression. Whereas Watt linked horsepower to machines, southerners applied the idea directly to rivers. To justify their mastery of the region’s waterways, electricity’s developers would transform a natural resource into a beast of burden for southern betterment. A waterpower developer in the Carolinas cast the Chestatee-­Wateree system as a draft animal “completely harnessed for the service of mankind.”31 Similarly an 1897 announcement for a dam on the Chattahoochee near Atlanta promised that the river would soon be “bridled to furnish electric power for the entire city.”32 With a new dam in place, the New South’s capital would be poised to make great progress by taking advantage of the recently channeled “horse power that was flowing untamed past the gates of the city.”33 Many southerners cheered the push to yoke their rivers, but transmission technologies limited hydraulic energy’s effective range essentially to the water’s edge. By the early 1890s, however, German and Italian engineers demonstrated the viability of the long-­distance transmission of alternating current. This innovation proved critical to the practical application, and ultimate feasibility, of hydroelectricity. Because the best sites for dams were almost invariably far removed from centers of electrical consumption, hydroelectricity would have proven useless to urban-­industrial prosperity without a proficient means of power transportation.34 By 1895 many dams, especially in California and Oregon, shipped electricity over long distances (usually not more than twenty miles) to cities and industrial sites hungry for energy. But the hydroelectric facility that would set the standard for humanity’s awe-­inspiring ability to harness and transport hydraulic energy, the Adams power plant at Niagara Falls, began sending its current over high-­voltage transmission lines some twenty miles away to Buffalo, inspiring other American capitalists to attempt the same.35 Southerners tapped into these national and transnational flows of technological innovation and by the end of the 1890s began to create a “geography of power” anchored in remotely located falling water.36 Soon after exhibitions of long-­distance transmission’s viability in Germany, Italy, California, and New York, the interlocking efforts of local, regional, and international businessmen, engineers, and capitalists resulted in the materialization of hydroelectric outposts that radically altered southern land-­ and waterscapes and generated energy far removed from where power would be consumed.37

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*   *   * As coal’s reputation took a nosedive and water’s fortunes improved in the 1890s, some of the earliest attempts to force rivers into hard labor for Dixie’s regeneration took place in the Carolinas. Those who charted this path primarily eyed the electrification of the textile industry. One of the prominent figures was the Charleston-­born, Cornell-­educated engineer W. B. Smith Whaley, who returned to South Carolina in 1892. Following on the success of the Columbia Cotton Mill in 1894, the South’s first fully hydro-­electrified factory, Whaley designed several more cotton mills near Columbia, most notably the Olympia Cotton Mills, which contained over 2,400 looms and 100,000 spindles—over four times more than the average mill at the time. By the time Whaley once again departed South Carolina, the state led the southern textile industry with over 2.5 million spindles. Despite South Carolina’s ultimate successes, Whaley and his counterparts shared a basic set of problems. Especially in Columbia, which relied on water from the Congaree and Broad Rivers channeled into the Columbia Canal, water levels were notoriously variable; as in the Olympia Mills, hydroelectricity had to be supplemented with coal-­fired dynamos. Given the limitations of transmission technologies in the early 1890s, hydro-­powered textile mills had to be located essentially on the river’s banks. Expansion of the industry, and of southern prosperity, then had to await more reliable streams and better transmission technology.38 They would not have to wait long. By 1897 another South Carolina engineer, William Church Whitner, had linked Anderson, South Carolina, to two dams in the Savannah River Valley, over twenty miles apart, via newly available long-­ distance transmission capabilities. After the turn of the century, J. B. Duke and his business partners expanded on Whitner’s work. Following the establishment of the Southern Power Company in 1904, Duke’s enterprise began the process of harnessing the Catawba River with a series of three dams. By 1910 Southern Power had constructed over 700 miles of high-­tension transmission lines that linked cities such as Charlotte and Columbia and over one hundred cotton mills to seemingly remote outposts of progress in the Piedmont Carolinas.39 Atkinson ultimately aimed to emulate Duke’s model in Georgia, but the developers who first attempted to harness Blue Ridge waters for Atlanta’s betterment were not directly associated with Atkinson’s GREC. They were potential competitors, aspiring southern hydropower magnates who had engineering experience across the United States and Canada, access to national and global investment networks, and ambitions to build water-­based electrical generating capacities that would far outstrip, and perhaps overtake, Atkinson’s coal-­based business. Because of the highly leveraged capital required to meet hydropower 64

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facilities’ enormous construction costs, prospective energy companies sought footholds in the largest possible markets to generate enough revenue to service debt obligations and satisfy stockholders. Thus, the fragmentation-­ to-­ consolidation trajectory that marked the electrical age’s infancy was revived in hydropower’s dawning, but on a far larger scale. Here competing hydroelectric firms faced a significant problem. For a fledgling waterpower company, securing enough power supply contracts in a sizable city to meet minimum income requirements proved exceedingly difficult. An infrastructural buildup followed by an attempted entry into an already well-­served territory with insufficient revenue streams would leave a new company vulnerable to financial ruin. The course that southern hydropower developers followed engendered a logic of intensification with enormous consequences for southern rivers. To gain a share of—if not a dominant position in—urban power markets, new hydropower companies first cultivated consumers in small industrial centers surrounding the New South’s cores. But to satisfy the hinterland’s needs while also crafting plans to overtake larger cities, hydropower firms began a self-­perpetuating cycle of development and environmental exploitation with clear impacts: more and larger dams that drastically altered river basins saw nearly all power generation, transmission, and distribution consolidated in large energy corporations like J. B. Duke’s Southern Power Company and Henry Atkinson’s Georgia Railway and Power Company. This cycle in Georgia began not in the Blue Ridge but on another river that Atlantans found much more accessible. Because of the still relatively limited reach of high-­voltage transmission systems in the 1890s, the river that first attracted developers’ attention was the Chattahoochee. Like the Tallulah and Tugaloo Rivers, the Chattahoochee originates in the Blue Ridge. Yet where the Tallulah-­Tugaloo charts a southeastern course to help form the Savannah River, the Chattahoochee flows southwest toward Atlanta, at points coming within ten miles of downtown. Beginning in 1895 and inspired by hydropower generation and long-­distance transmission demonstrations at Niagara Falls and other sites, speculators announced plans for the Chattahoochee that plainly articulated the perceived links between river alterations and the New South agenda. First among potential developers was former Edison assistant and nationally experienced engineer Jonathan Vail. With support from a consortium of Atlanta and New York financiers, Vail pledged, in appropriate New South–style parlance, that by the end of 1895 “the Chattahoochee river will have been bridled and the reins will be placed in the hands of the manufacturers of the city.” The facility he would build at a site called Bull Sluice, he bragged in a clear challenge to Atkinson, would be second only to Niagara Falls and would provide power “sufficient to operate every factory, shop, mill, or other establishments . . . at a wonderful A M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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reduction of cost from the present rates” of coal-­fired electricity.40 Even more importantly for southern prosperity and hydropower’s future, it would dramatically expand electrical service with factories and homes covering the expanse between the dam and the capital.41 Vail’s grandiose scheme faltered by 1897 but, alongside examples in the Carolinas, demonstrated that the South was already integrated into national and global networks of large-­scale hydroelectric and long-­distance transmission development. Despite Vail’s failure, the determination to shackle the river continued and other local and national actors soon began making claims on the Chattahoochee. Eager to enter the budding southern hydroelectric business, S. Morgan Smith, a water turbine inventor and manufacturer from southeastern Pennsylvania who had installed hydroelectric equipment in the northeastern United States and Canada, sent his son in late 1898 to survey land near Bull Sluice. By February 1902—after a series of legal troubles—Smith had established the Atlanta Water and Electric Power Company and soon after began construction at Bull Sluice. Smith’s project presented a problem, though: his firm lacked a market for its dam’s power and potentially threatened Atkinson’s business. Perhaps in exchange for Atkinson’s help with his legal issues, Smith agreed to sell all his dam’s power to Atkinson’s GREC. At least in the near term, Smith posed no competitive challenge to the virtual monopoly electric utility in Atlanta.42 Boosters pitched Bull Sluice as a key element of the New South’s hydropower destiny, a facility that would both lure industry and dispatch coal.43 Named Morgan Falls Dam when Morgan Smith died shortly before the dam’s completion, the machinery at Bull Sluice began delivering power to GREC in October 1904, seemingly fulfilling its mission for the New South. According to the Atlanta Constitution, a paper long favorable to modernization efforts, Bull Sluice turned the “powers of the river into channels of commerce.”44 With seven turbines of 1,500 kilowatts each and a 22,000-­volt transmission line into the city, Atlanta Water and Electric’s powerhouse could, when operating at maximum capacity, generate enough energy to furnish the entire load for GREC.45 Finalized under the management of Morgan Smith’s son, Elmer Smith, Morgan Falls afforded Atlanta Water and Electric the potential to emerge as a major force in the Atlanta power market. Despite the deal with GREC, it also prepared Smith’s firm, eventually, to challenge Atkinson’s dominance not just in the city but in its hinterland as well. Yet before Smith could contemplate any such plans, other actors, most notably railroad and mining mogul A. J. Warner, stood in to play the role of interloper. A former Union general and congressman from Ohio, Warner ventured south in the late 1890s to begin a prospecting operation in the Northeast Georgia town of Dahlonega.46 Although seven decades of gold harvesting at Dahlonega had not completely foreclosed the possibility of 66

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Figure 3.2 Morgan Falls Dam at Bull Sluice, ca. 1909. Author’s collection.

continued surface mining, Warner saw a more lucrative future in underground mines. To expedite his short-­term plans for surface mining, the success of which would hasten the start of his deep-­mining enterprise, Warner sought a new energy source that would improve upon the relatively slow progress pickaxes and muscles could make. Electricity, he found, would be that new energy source.47 Warner’s experience with electric power at Dahlonega’s mines inspired him to diversify his interests. To that end he ordered the construction of a small dam and a 1,200-­horsepower generating station, called New Bridge, on the Chestatee River, a Chattahoochee tributary. Warner originally intended for New Bridge to ship power fifteen miles to a streetcar company in Gainesville (a textile production center nearly sixty miles north of Atlanta) and to a thirty-­mile interurban line between Gainesville and Dahlonega. These transit projects, however, required only about half of New Bridge’s output. Warner used the remaining energy from New Bridge to light streets, hotels, and shops in Gainesville. In addition the Chestatee’s energy reportedly enticed $500,000 of new capital to the “Queen City of the Mountains” in 1902 alone for the establishment of cotton mills and poultry processing plants.48 Waterpower opened a range of opportunities for New South–style development in Gainesville and, for an ambitious Warner, far beyond as well. New Bridge marked a promising start for Warner’s hydroelectric ambitions, though he realized that an incursion into a larger, more lucrative market would necessitate far more waterpower. Warner raised money through connections A M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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in Ohio and Pennsylvania and worked to build a series of outposts in Atlanta’s mountainous hinterland, a hydropower arsenal that might enable him to invade Atlanta as well as other New South cities. From 1902 to 1906 he chartered three complementary utilities, the North Georgia Electric Company, the Southern Light and Power Company, and the Etowah Power Company; completed a dam and 2,500-­horsepower generating station on the upper Chattahoochee River at a place called Dunlap Shoals; and purchased properties at nine possible hydroelectric sites across North Georgia, including land at Tallulah Falls on the Tallulah River, which aggregated a potential total of well over 100,000 horsepower.49 A radical increase in hydroelectric capacity would allow Warner in the short term to furnish power to the small towns and textile production centers across the region. To generate enough revenue to fulfill his long-­term obligations to his investors, however, he also had to bring that energy to the capital city. Warner was by no means shy about his ambitions. His fleet of dams and powerhouses across three North Georgia watersheds and a 66,000-­volt transmission system, he announced in 1905, would propel his company to the realization of its “ultimate purpose.” Warner sought “to furnish a cheap and reliable power and light service to a territory with Atlanta as a central point, and extending one hundred miles in every direction.”50 With the power that his holdings would produce, Warner declared, there was no reason Atlanta would not become the United States’ manufacturing center.51 Despite GREC’s protests, in 1905 the Atlanta City Council granted an electric power franchise to Warner’s companies, which had already acquired office space in and had begun construction of a transmission line to Atlanta. According to the terms of the arrangement, Warner’s interests could make bids for street lighting deals and could contract with shops and factories for lighting and motive power.52 The city council’s actions exposed gaps in GREC’s assumed monopoly status: While the 1902 Consolidating Ordinance permitted Atkinson to combine all the city’s streetcar and lighting companies into one virtual cartel, it did not explicitly forbid competition. In fact the city still exercised considerable power in deciding whether to extend franchise offers to competing utilities. Nevertheless Atkinson’s total control over the streetcar system, the most profitable element of the electric utility business, left Warner little room to work. Unable to secure adequate lighting or power deals—likely due to Atkinson’s influence—Warner found virtually no market for his highly leveraged product in the New South’s capital. In 1907 Warner’s companies defaulted on several bonds, forcing the former general to forfeit his Atlanta franchise.53 The fragmented landscape and corporate competition born of hydropower development began to give way to unity in the wake of Warner’s collapse. Yet it was Morgan Falls owner Elmer Smith, not Henry Atkinson, who seized the 68

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opportunity to consolidate North Georgia’s fractured hydroelectric scene. From 1908 to 1910 Elmer Smith worked to cement his place in the North Georgia hydropower business and to overtake the Atlanta market. With capital from a New York utility manager named Eugene Ashley, with whom the Smith family had collaborated to build the Spier Falls Dam on the Hudson River in 1903, Smith bought all of Warner’s utilities and undeveloped hydropower sites in Georgia, including all lands surrounding Tallulah Falls.54 Smith, like Warner before him, then created three utilities—the Atlanta Power Company, the Blue Ridge Electric Company, and the Georgia Power Company—and completed Warner’s transmission system, which now encircled Atlanta and delivered power to industrial and lighting customers in the small towns surrounding the city. The only step left for Smith was to extend his operations to Atlanta, which looked certain when the City Council granted his Georgia Power Company a franchise in July 1910.55 As with Warner’s short-­lived franchise, prevailing law and the sovereignty of Atlanta’s municipal government left open the possibility of competition, especially in the realm of industrial power, which was Smith’s target market. Success in that arena might represent the thin end of a wedge that would open the path for dominance over all North Georgia. To solidify control over the entire hydropower landscape in the northern half of the state, Georgia Power’s managers, prior to their incursion into Atlanta, wanted to develop the crown jewel of North Georgia’s potential waterpower sites, Tallulah Falls. Renowned as a holiday destination for its stunning beauty, Tallulah Falls alone promised to generate almost 75,000 kilowatts of electricity. To put that latent energy to work, Smith’s company issued stocks and bonds totaling $20 million (funded mostly by financiers in Detroit and London via Toronto), marshaled some 61,000 barrels of concrete, 2 million pounds of copper wire, and hundreds of laborers to build the dam at Tallulah Falls. Although the falls sat ninety miles from the capital, rapid advances in transmission technologies would enable Smith’s company to deliver Tallulah Falls’ considerable power to Atlanta quite efficiently. Georgia Power planned to use 110,000-­volt power lines—enabling the delivery of twenty-­five times more power than the lines from Bull Sluice—to link the Tallulah River directly to consumers in Atlanta.56 Georgia Power broke ground at Tallulah Falls in early 1911, but Smith had made a grave miscalculation. Not only did construction at the site quickly begin to exceed original cost estimates; like Warner, Smith encountered trouble generating adequate demand for the output of his hydropower portfolio, a problem that plagued prospective hydroelectric companies across the nation. In 1910 most electrified factories produced their own power with on-­site coal-­fired dynamos. Those electrified factories in the aggregate produced some three-­fifths of the nation’s electricity and were reluctant to sacrifice their independence by switching A M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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Figure 3.3 Currier and Ives, Tallulah Falls—Georgia, ca. 1856–ca. 1907. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-­DIG-­pga-­09934.

to central-­station electricity.57 Despite this reality Atkinson’s company had long drawn the blame in Atlanta for the limited industrial power market. One Atlanta man bitterly complained, for example, that anyone who cared to look could “see the corpses of [competing] enterprises which bear the death stab of the deadly dagger of the Georgia Railway and Electric Company.”58 That killer instinct, Smith once again realized, also made Atkinson a valuable ally. In need of a bailout, Smith approached Atkinson in September 1911 to discuss a partnership for Tallulah Falls that would replicate the deal for Bull Sluice. Now, though, the situation for Atkinson was different. Available records do not indicate why Atkinson sat on the sidelines of hydroelectric development for so long. But given waterpower’s increasing efficiency and potency and the constant parade of potential competitors—from Warner and Smith as well as from similar companies in Georgia and the Carolinas—Atkinson likely decided that his interests could no longer risk being tossed aside by the rising wave of hydraulic energy.59 Soon after their initial meeting concerning Tallulah Falls, Atkinson and Smith announced that they would join forces and form a new utility, financed by investors from London and by the Philadelphia-­based electric utilities holding company, United Gas Improvement Company. The new company, with Atkin70

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son as chairman and Smith as director, merged all the properties, as well as the names, of the original firms into a new corporation called the Georgia Railway and Power Company.60 The struggle for corporate supremacy over rivers and power in the northern half of Georgia thus concluded when Atkinson consolidated at least five electric utilities, five hydropower facilities, and ten prospective dam sites into his new firm, originally capitalized at $27 million.61 Outside of Georgia and the Carolinas, similar stories of hydropower competition and consolidation unfolded across Dixie. Canadian engineer James Mitchell teamed with Alabama attorney Tom Martin in 1911 to cultivate and transmit hydroelectricity across Alabama and neighboring states. The centerpiece of their collaboration was Lock 12, a dam on the Coosa River between Birmingham and Montgomery, completed in 1914 under the auspices of the Alabama Power Company. Developers had already constructed several dams in the state before Lock 12, but Mitchell’s ambitions led to the creation of Alabama, Traction, Light & Power, a Canadian company that acquired almost twenty Alabama utilities in 1912.62 In Tennessee the path to hydroelectric consolidation began near Chattanooga at a site called Hales Bar on the Tennessee River. Hales Bar was originally evaluated by the US Army Corps of Engineers around 1900 for potential navigation improvements. But the Chattanoogans C. E. James and J. C. Guild, with financing from New York investors, won approval to develop the site in 1905 after the Corps declined to proceed. Riddled with engineering challenges, Hales Bar finally went online in 1913 but in the meantime opened the floodgates to waterpower development in Tennessee. New utilities emerged across the state after Hales Bar’s approval, only to be combined into a mammoth new corporation, Tennessee Railway, Light, and Power Company in 1912 (succeeded by the even larger Tennessee Electric Power Company in 1922). Established in Maine and funded by banks from Philadelphia and New York, Tennessee Power absorbed at least a dozen rival companies upon its founding, and more throughout the 1910s, as it and its direct successors dominated much of its state through the late 1930s.63 These region-­controlling utilities pitched their value to southern publics in the typical rhetoric of New South boosterism. Mitchell claimed that Alabama Power’s hydroelectric portfolio “saves mankind from toil . . . , reduces the labor and drudgery of women, [and] provides leisure for education and culture.”64 Guild’s Tennessee Power boasted that “the prosperity of our industries today is due to the continued efforts of the people in developing and producing economies by utilizing to the utmost all of our natural resources” at Hales Bar and other dams.65 Elmer Smith wrote in 1912 that GRPC and the “power generated from its works throughout the northern part of Georgia” would unquestionably “contribute to the development, growth and prosperity of this state and her citizens.”66 A M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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Despite their bombastic tenor, these statements to some extent seem genuine. Many utilities in the early 1910s followed what would become known as the “grow-­and-­build” strategy: the construction of new and more efficient generating capacity ahead of demand, which would stoke greater usage and perhaps more production, jobs, and comforts, justifying the construction of newer, more powerful generating stations, and so on.67 Especially in a regulated environment, this method made financial sense, as utilities could pass capital expenditures on to consumers in the form of state-­sanctioned rate increases. Yet these activities suggested to people skeptical of the New South agenda that growing and building for the general welfare was not the foremost consideration. This was especially true in Georgia’s case. With the RCG’s blessing, Atkinson had created a hulking corporation and would radically alter the Tallulah River to preserve control over and stave off competition in Atlanta and its hinterland. When the Tallulah Falls power plant began generating electricity in September 1913, the GRPC had already reached overcapacity and had no use for its energy. The utility instead shipped every kilowatt of the Tallulah’s output to Duke’s Southern Power Company, which was busily supplying electricity to the rapidly expanding textile and lumber industries in the Carolina Piedmont. Anti–New South preservationists in Georgia saw these developments as clear evidence of crass financial calculation and corporate gamesmanship that molested Tallulah Falls and defrauded working people. This thinking inspired a backlash among Georgians who abhorred monopolistic capitalism and valued Tallulah Falls as a symbol of traditional southern culture far more than for the electric energy and industrial prosperity it could supposedly generate. *   *   * Shortly after Elmer Smith’s Georgia Power Company began construction of Tallulah Falls dam in 1911, a Northeast Georgia native named Helen Dortch Longstreet began a crusade to stop the development at a site she cast as both the state’s most treasured landscape and a relic of the Old South. The “Niagara of the South,” she believed, stood as “one of the greatest scenic wonders of the world— an heirloom which has come down to us from immemorial ages.”68 The men who would ruin the falls earned Longstreet’s bitter denunciation as the “henchmen and hirelings of ‘Big Business,’” and as “pirates and vandals” who would violate the falls purely for pecuniary gain.69 They were, in short, monopolists who would swap southern distinctiveness for a few pieces of silver. For Longstreet, if GRPC destroyed the falls for its narrow purposes, an emblem of Dixie’s heritage would face destruction as well.70 Though waged with an at-­times overwrought sense of poetry and pomposity against an influential and wealthy utility, Longstreet’s crusade illustrates that 72

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the New South program faced serious obstacles. Her fight for Tallulah Falls also points to the emergence in the South of competing narratives of development and preservationism, revealing the critical place of natural beauty and resources in Dixie’s regeneration not just for utility leaders, but for ordinary southerners as well. In fact activists across the South fought against the New South doctrine of seemingly unfettered development in such actions as the scenic beautification movement in upcountry South Carolina and waterfront preservation efforts in Florida’s Panhandle.71 The version of a New South Longstreet and like-­minded southerners envisioned differed markedly from the one hydropower and textile moguls endeavored to create. Whereas power company executives, at least from her perspective, sought to modernize Dixie at any cost, Longstreet believed the modern South must resist monopolistic capitalism and continue to honor the traditions—and the traditional landscapes—of the Old South. From her earliest days, Helen Dortch was tutored in the southern school of dogged resistance to imposed limitations, an education that served her well in her time as a Tallulah Falls crusader. Born in 1863 to a well-­to-­do couple in Carnesville, Georgia (about twenty-­five miles south of Tallulah Falls), young Helen proved to be an inquisitive child and avid reader. Against nearly all expectations for a young southern woman in the late nineteenth century, she graduated from Gainesville’s Brenau College and soon after became her hometown newspaper’s editor, earning a reputation as a “fearless writer.” Her intrepid spirit led her in 1894 not only to become the first woman to hold statewide office in Georgia—assistant state librarian—but in 1896 to force through the all-­male Georgia General Assembly a bill that would permit a woman to become the state’s chief librarian.72 Seemingly contradictory for an independent woman, Helen was deeply devoted to the myth of the Lost Cause as well.73 In fact her love for the Old South and the Confederacy overwhelmed her professional ambitions, at least for a time. In 1897 she married a man for whom she had long pined, the seventy-­six-­ year-­old ex–Confederate General, James Longstreet. He was “ever the hero of my young dreams,” she later wrote. For Helen her venerable husband embodied the “ideals of chivalry and courage” that in her mind the Old South and Confederacy still represented. After General Longstreet’s death in 1904, Helen worked to rescue the memory of her late husband—who became a pariah in the postwar South for his presumed foot dragging at the Battle of Gettysburg and for his association with the Republican Party—and to perpetuate the romantic myths of the Old South, a mission she continued in her time working for Tallulah Falls’ salvation.74 To protect Tallulah Falls, Longstreet helped found the Tallulah Falls Conservation Association (TFCA) in 1911 and served as its president. The organization vowed “to work together for civic health and civic righteousness; to preserve our A M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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heritage, the forests, and the natural beauties of the land,” and to “save from the destroying hand of commercialism the matchless grandeur of ‘The Niagara of the South.’”75 Through TFCA Longstreet rallied allies to her cause, waging a war of words against an enemy that she believed put New South–style industrial development before both heritage and the aesthetic wealth of pristine nature. To challenge GRPC’s presumptive dominance over nature in North Georgia, Longstreet appealed to the antimonopoly forces that had confronted Atkinson’s utility in 1906–1907. In December 1911 the Atlantian, an Atlanta-­based labor monthly, reprinted Longstreet’s statement “To the People of Georgia,” which decried GRPC’s stock and bond issues (potentially totaling $57 million), “as iniquitous a scheme as has ever been proposed in any American state.” It was simply a stock-­watering ploy that would far overvalue the company, rob the people through exorbitant rates, and install “a monopoly which would control our rates for power, control our trolley lines, both urban and interurban, control our electric lighting system, control our gas plants and eventually control our waterworks.” To allow an artificially bloated GRPC to enjoy total sway over the state’s rivers would be tantamount to both giving away the people’s birthright and creating a monster. “Why,” she asked, “should we consent to create a Frankenstein to devour us?”76 If at times she warned of the monopolistic fiend that would savage Georgia’s natural resources, Longstreet most often emphasized Tallulah’s singular beauty. “Neither the Yosemite nor the Yellowstone can vie in weird loveliness with this picturesque gorge. . . . The Grand Canyon of northern Arizona may be wider and deeper. But not a blade of grass, not a twig of green” could be found there. The Grand Canyon, she wrote, was a bleak “scene of desolation” reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, “but in gazing on Tallulah [one] dreams of Milton’s paradise.”77 The cataracts in Northeast Georgia awed the eye, to be sure, but according to Longstreet, the falls’ power and beauty overwhelmed all the senses. The entirety of the body felt the shock of “organ thunders . . . [that] swell in endless anthems” of “Tallulah’s God-­given song.”78 For those like Longstreet who believed the New South’s gilded enticements threatened to ravage a treasured southern landmark, there was a palpable fear that with its destruction, the South’s distinctiveness would be sacrificed at the altar of mammon. This concern was typical among those devoted to the Lost Cause and critical of the New South.79 “The great problem of our future,” remarked ex– Confederate general John Brown Gordon, “is not how to secure material prosperity . . . but how to hold to the characteristics of our old civilization.”80 Those characteristics, many believed, were fundamentally tied to the South’s environmental features.81 Mildred Rutherford, the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s historian general, declared in 1912 that “nature has really seemed partial to 74

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the South,” not only because of the region’s rich endowment of raw materials but because of unique natural wonders such as Stone Mountain and Tallulah Falls. For Rutherford as well as for Longstreet, these ancient landmarks, if properly stewarded, would help shield Old South values from the New South’s “desecrating touch” and devotion to “filthy lucre.”82 That “desecrating touch” at times took an all too familiar and revolting form. The struggle at Tallulah drew comparisons to Reconstruction’s putative horrors and the supposed “reign of terror” that in part inspired the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. As discussed in Chapter 2, New South opponents, such as Tom Watson, linked corporate power and Democratic political machines to the specter of “negro domination,” which white southerners believed resulted in heinous offenses, most notably the fantastical epidemic of black-­on-­white rape. Adherents to Longstreet’s cause made similar connections. Alice Baldy of Griffin, Georgia, likened GRPC’s managers to vile carpetbaggers and railed against their plans for Tallulah Falls with thinly veiled references to Reconstruction and corporate-­ enabled rape that any southerner would have recognized. “The ruin of Tallulah,” she wrote in 1912, was the worst “outrage that can be conceived of. That a foreign company composed of the worst class of Northern men—the class that did the most mischief when the Federal army tried to ruin the South, rapacious, greedy, money-­worshipers—should come in conjunction with Canadians and forcibly seize the loveliest jewel the State possesses . . . is the most astonishing, most insulting act that could have been offered the state.”83 Invoking such terms as “outrage,” “Northern men,” and the forcible seizure of the “loveliest jewel,” this tactic allowed Tallulah’s champions to seamlessly weave Reconstruction, race, and the corporate-­permitted assault of southern womanhood into their argument, an approach meant stir Georgia’s most gallant men, alongside the chivalrous ghosts of the glorious Confederate past, to redemptive action. In fact, Longstreet aimed not simply to influence public opinion but to summon the state’s power—appealing to the governor, lawmakers, and judges—to halt the construction of what would ultimately become the centerpiece of GRPC’s “mighty outpost of progress.” In petitioning her state’s politicians, Longstreet used much the same appeal as the one she employed to cultivate donors. But in bonding Tallulah Falls to the Lost Cause, she also emphasized the state’s responsibility to defend what should be a public monument to Georgia’s heritage. She felt confident that “the fighting blood which coursed through the veins of the heroes who followed the greatest captain of the English-­speaking races [General Robert E. Lee] over the battlefields of the Civil war still pulses in the hearts of Georgians, and is a guarantee that our people have the manhood to protect our property at Tallulah.”84 The protest over Tallulah Falls thus served in large part as a test case for state power as it related to business and private citizens: Would the A M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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state allow monopolistic entities to safeguard the public good or would it place that responsibility on its own shoulders? At her legal battle’s outset, TFCA’s leader had reason to believe that Georgia’s solons might opt for the latter. Her first move was to convince Georgia governor Hoke Smith and his successor John Slaton to order new surveys of the land surrounding Tallulah Falls because, she claimed, the original 1820 survey at Tallulah Falls was incorrect.85 For Longstreet the property directly surrounding the falls, and more precisely the river itself, actually belonged to the state of Georgia and as such should become part of a state or national park.86 Governor Smith agreed to review the case. While his survey proved inconclusive, Governor Slaton’s found significant problems with the 1820 assessment. Shortly after Slaton’s findings were published, however, new governor Joseph Mackey Brown (elected in the fall of 1912) declined to pursue the case. Longstreet then took her fight to the General Assembly where she worked with state legislators to pass a resolution directing Governor Brown to file a lawsuit that would enable the courts to determine who truly owned Tallulah Falls.87 Longstreet expressed faith in the state’s legislators but, to encourage them to vote her way, prodded them with remarks about manly fealty to old values over new ones. She trusted that each honorable man in the legislature would “lay down his life before he would betray Georgia for the color of Canadian gold,” and that “there is not one man on the Rules Committee whose patriotism the yellow taint of Mammon can besmirch or whose lofty ideals the Klondykes or Golcondas can buy.”88 Apparently her gendered goading worked. After receiving the resolution from the Senate, the House overwhelmingly agreed to the measure by a vote of 112 to 19 and ordered the state to file suit. The trial began in late May 1913 in the Superior Court of Rabun County (the county in which Tallulah Falls is located). Disappointingly for Longstreet, though, it lasted only two days. Persuaded by GRPC’s counsel, the eminent Atlanta attorney Luther Rosser, that riparian ownership extended to the riverbed, the jury found in GRPC’s favor.89 Later that same year, the State Supreme Court affirmed the Rabun County jury’s decision, finding the company’s chain of title unmarred and the original surveys valid.90 Longstreet denounced the decision. What was more, she doubted whether the state and particularly Attorney General Thomas Felder had ever intended to pursue the case with adequate vigor. “I do not know,” she wrote to Felder, “that you are yet honestly convinced that the waterpower people are just ordinary thieves; and that if I should do on a small scale (or any other citizen) what they have done in Rabun County, the laws of this state would put us in stripes.”91 In the end, she dismissed Felder as simply “an office boy to the Georgia Railway and Power Company.”92 Despite Longstreet’s best efforts, GRPC completed the Tallulah Falls dam and 76

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installed the first generator by September 1913, followed by four more by April 1914. Together, the five units totaled 60,000 kilowatts of generating capacity, all of which the company sent to Duke’s Southern Power Company until the beginning of US involvement in the Great War. At the time of its completion, the Tallulah Falls facility was reportedly the South’s largest dam and the nation’s third largest. The dam stood over 100 feet high and stretched more than 400 feet across the opening of Tallulah gorge, impounding water in a deep reservoir that covered 63 acres of land. At Indian Arrow, a point just above the falls, the dam diverted the Tallulah’s water into an underground 6,666-­foot tunnel that had been cut through solid granite. From there the water fell more than 600 feet through five penstocks and finally into one of five turbines that churned out hydroelectric power. Tallulah Falls had become an “organic machine” and confirmed GRPC’s position as the dominant utility in North Georgia.93 The violence done to Tallulah Falls seemed to form the core of the debate over modern development versus environmental heritage preservation. GRPC wanted to radically alter the falls to benefit the South’s industrial future, and TFCA sought to preserve a site that shone as a transcendent symbol of southern identity. Those seemingly hard and fast lines quickly blurred, though. Somewhat ironically, GRPC claimed that its destruction at Tallulah Falls would be aesthetically creative: the company’s work there would maintain the area’s natural beauty.94 Following a GRPC sponsored trip to Tallulah Falls in 1914, a corps of journalists agreed but felt that the company’s sentiment had not gone far enough: the area was even lovelier now. They reported that “far from being robbed of its scenic beauty, by reason of the great power development, this delightful country is now more attractive than ever, and, in addition to its natural charms, it is enjoying many more comforts and an industrial prosperity, impossible under old conditions.”95 Longstreet’s yearning for the preservation of older ideals also contained a fundamental paradox. The Tallulah for which she waxed so romantic was not, in fact, a place that southerners had cherished since time immemorial. Tallulah Falls only became a symbol of Old South values following New South modernization. Southerners first learned of Tallulah Falls in 1819 when it was part of Cherokee territory; the Cherokee regarded it as a place of death and took pains to avoid it.96 Though it gained some acclaim in the antebellum years, through the late 1870s Tallulah Falls hosted relatively few visitors and could claim only one hotel. Its inhabitants included not much more than a few hermits and eccentrics, and the small bands of elite sojourners who braved an excursion there did so only at significant bodily risk.97 A more widely accessible tourist industry, which Longstreet wanted to protect and extend, began in earnest only after the Tallulah Falls Railroad arrived in A M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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1882. Though originally brought to the area for logging interests, the fifty-­seven-­ mile line gladly transported passengers to and from Tallulah, earning for the area its self-­declared nickname, “the Niagara of the South.” Two decades later the area could boast nearly twenty hotels with modern conveniences, including fine cuisine, indoor plumbing, and, somewhat ironically, the brilliant illumination of romance-­inducing electric lights.98 Despite its awe-­inspiring beauty and seeming timelessness, Tallulah Falls was not a transcendent emblem of southern distinctiveness. It was a creation of the New South. Tallulah Falls’ dependence upon a rapidly modernizing world for its economic health proved, at least in some measure, to be the source of its downfall. Rabun County’s population quickly doubled after the arrival of the railroad and tourist industry but began to shrink after 1900. The promise of a good wage or cash for butter and eggs at a posh hotel inspired hope in locals for a brighter economic future. But it soon proved to be a siren song. Mountaineers struggling to make ends meet quickly soured on the seasonal limitations of a stagnating tourist industry. This position seems to have been borne out by the Rabun County jury’s decision to side with GRPC, and by the lack of a formidable, locally-­led movement to save the falls.99 Locals remained almost universally silent on the issue and apparently sold their land to the power company quite eagerly; area residents who spoke out on the falls’ fate usually supported the dam’s completion.100 What seems to have prevailed at Tallulah Falls was the argument that choking off the river for electric power would bring the area more intimately into the New South sphere of growth and progress. GRPC likely raised such expectations when it pledged to electrify not only places such as Tallulah Falls, but all North Georgia where “the amazing development in the use of electrical power in the industrial world . . . , in the household, and on the farm” would “aid in revolutionizing conditions.” Factory workers, farmers, and housewives would directly benefit from the company’s “control of the water powers of the South” which they “expected to hasten amazingly the onward march of this section.”101 Many Georgians, and particularly those at Tallulah, seemed to agree that private capital and hydropower should lead them in the onward march toward a New South. *   *   * Despite Longstreet’s protests and the problems of war (see Chapter 4), GRPC finalized the construction of its “mighty outpost of progress” in the 1910s and 1920s. Shortly after completing the Tallulah Falls project in 1914, GRPC constructed a storage reservoir and diversion dam upstream from the falls. The new structure, called Mathis Dam, impounded water in an 834-­acre area, forming Lake Rabun, a reservoir that would hold 1.4 billion cubic feet of water.102 In 1918 GRPC proposed to add a sixth unit to Tallulah Falls, to build a new power dam 78

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on the Tugaloo River, and to construct a colossal reservoir about seventeen miles upstream from Tallulah Falls. The new storage facility, named Lake Burton, would flood almost 2,800 acres and at capacity would hold 5.28 billion cubic feet of water (more than triple Atlanta’s yearly water consumption as of 1920). By 1919’s conclusion Atkinson’s utility installed the sixth unit at Tallulah Falls and completed Lake Burton. In addition to the three facilities already in operation, the company drafted plans to install three more reservoirs and dams on the Tallulah-­Tugaloo watershed. When completed in 1926, the six reservoirs and dams stored a total of nearly 7.5 billion cubic feet of water and covered nearly 5,000 acres of Blue Ridge land. The powerhouses aggregated 181,000 kilowatts and, assuming all reservoirs were full, could generate hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours per year, which GRPC could instantly ship to locations across the region via the Southern Super Power system (see Chapter 4).103 Now, the utility bragged in an investment prospectus, every raindrop that fell on the Georgia Blue Ridge, would to be converted “into kilowatt hours for industrial use” and Georgia’s betterment.104 *   *   * Southern hydropower development experienced a great spasm of expansion from the turn of the century to the mid-­1920s with revolutionary results. Appalachian bituminous coal, the New South’s fuel source through the beginning of the twentieth century, proved unreliable. The region’s developers instead looked to its rivers for power. Many southerners saw their waterways as potential beasts of burden, encouraging nature’s instrumentalization and subjugation. Eager businessmen went to Dixie seeking to harness the latent “horsepower” in southern streams and engaged in frenzied competition to take the reins of the best possible sites for dam installation. The fragmented hydroelectric landscape that resulted went through a period of consolidation that replicated but dramatically expanded upon that of the electrical age’s early years. The corporations that won the cutthroat contest for hydroelectric supremacy, including Alabama Power, GRPC, Southern Power, and Tennessee Power, emerged as heavily capitalized enterprises that enjoyed monopoly control not only over large urban and industrial markets but over entire waterscapes. In the New South’s center, GRPC rearranged nature by channeling hydraulic resources from the Blue Ridge to consumption sites. Through radical river alterations, companies like GRPC stimulated industrial expansion, forging a lasting connection between environmental manipulation and economic growth. That linkage faced a challenge from Helen Longstreet’s preservationist movement, raising piercing questions about the security of the New South’s energyscape. Even as her movement failed, growing critiques of a monopoly sysA M IG H T Y O U T P O ST OF P RO G R E S S

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tem that harmed landscapes and fell short of its rhetoric inspired vigorous local and national movements—at first in cities and later in the country—to compete with or even attempt to overtake private energy corporations. These conditions, however, did not prompt hydroelectric companies such as GRPC to abandon the water and seek shelter in Appalachian coal mines. Private southern utilities held their ground, working to preserve their monopoly over rivers and their proclaimed place as custodians of social and economic progress in the era of the First World War and the 1920s.

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4

Power for the Masses and the Farm

In his contribution to a 1924 national forum on the state of electric power, the Atlanta-­based attorney Marion Jackson lamented that “power equal to the labor of 75,000,000 men—over five times the Negro population of the United States— is idle in the streams of the South, because undeveloped.” At the same time he held out hope that a new system of bondage would rouse the “millions upon millions [of] idle slaves in the South” to a new level of industriousness. Enforcing riverine laziness, the writer argued, were corporate cartels that both manufactured and benefited from energy scarcity, a situation that would continue to reap a “golden harvest” for power companies while nearly all farmers and many city dwellers struggled through medieval conditions. For Jackson the solution to the problems of monopoly and poverty was simple: “These idle slaves should be put to work” by state power for the “people of the South.”1 Predictably, such clarion calls drew sharp resistance in the southern utility industry. In a series of early 1920s speeches, Preston Arkwright, president of Henry Atkinson’s utilities since 1902, exemplified private power’s argument. “Do you know,” Arkwright rhetorically asked in 1921, that “the electrical industry in Georgia is menaced? It is proposed to socialize it; to turn it over to State and municipal ownership.”2 To halt socialism and continue developing hydropower, Arkwright claimed a year later, southerners must embrace free enterprise, which would be the surest means to realize the hydroelectric slavery that poor white southerners, industrial workers and farmers alike, so desperately needed.3 Yet in Arkwright’s 81

estimation free-­market hydroelectric servitude would be far superior to the slave regime of the Old South. This new gang of faithful souls would work for very little recompense: “The slave and the convict . . . cost many times as much. Even the Chinese coolie draws a princely salary in comparison.” Furthermore they would honor their masters with unceasing toil and devotion: “They require no taskmaster, overseer, or boss . . . and don’t know the meaning of disloyalty.”4 The 1920s witnessed strident debates over who should manage the provision of hydroelectricity and, perhaps more critically, who would control the rhetoric and direction of the New South. Jackson’s and Arkwright’s positions reveal several key themes in the conflict. The most enduringly prominent issue in these discussions was rural modernization, a question, as both men implied, inextricably intertwined with clashes over nature. Starting in the late 1910s many southerners saw rivers as commonly held properties that, if publicly managed, would offer ordinary folks opportunities for a more modern and more democratic existence. This was a new potent development. Whereas earlier public power crusades fought to take control over electricity for the benefit of discreet urban populations with little regard for environmental factors, public-­power activists in the late 1910s and 1920s envisioned a system that went well beyond any individual city. They increasingly turned their attention to the social benefits of broad-­based rural electrification rooted in public ownership of energy-­producing waterways. This movement did not result solely from vanguard-­driven action. From the First World War’s waning years many southerners expressed doubts about the ideology of progress that narrated private power’s first wave of dam building. They sought alternatives to private monopoly by connecting with an array of activists and ideas—local, state, national, and global—to demand broader access and rural modernization through public ownership of hydroelectric networks. In many ways the federal interventions, long lauded as the force that brought electricity to the benighted South (discussed in Chapter 5), sprang from these labors. It comes as no surprise that the early New South era’s racialized discourses also played a role in this effort. Southern public-­power proponents, particularly in and around Atlanta, had long woven race into their attempts to wrest control of electricity from monopolistic hands and to articulate a New South idea that better addressed the needs of working whites. Jackson’s 1924 manifesto thus struck a familiar chord. It dredged up enduringly raw memories of Reconstruction, memories which held that federally backed Yankee capitalists invaded a war-­torn Dixie, relegated common whites to virtual peasantry, and set “idle Negroes” free to do sinister deeds.5 A racially charged public-­power movement posed a significant threat to private-­power cartels. Widely shared concerns over the perception that white 82

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southerners’ putatively traditional position in the southern racial hierarchy faced continued degradation at the hands of corporate monopolies could advance public power’s appeal and imperil private power’s monopolistic hold over rivers. In response private utilities largely co-­opted public power’s populist messages about race and broad-­based social improvement. Southern utility spokesmen like Arkwright claimed that only free enterprise could regenerate Dixie and combined this message with increasingly influential warnings about the creeping socialist menace in the years following the first Red Scare. In the 1910s and 1920s the quest for a public alternative to deliver power to the masses became inextricably bound to both electrical modernization and the conquest of rivers not only at the state and local levels. Drawing on global discourses and practices, these debates operated at the national level, and the results would have far-­reaching consequences for public and private power, waterscapes, and electrical markets not just in the 1910s and 1920s South, but across the nation for decades to follow. *   *   * The push for empowering the masses began in a drought-­addled and power-­ scarce World War I moment. From summer 1917 to fall 1918, much of the Southeast suffered through a relentless drought. For Georgia and the western Carolinas, it stood as the worst rainfall famine since 1893.6 Drought conditions imperiled crop yields and potable water supplies, but because the United States was at war with the Central Powers, drought endangered the southern war effort as well.7 Essentially from the First World War’s beginning, American manufacturers had produced goods for the Allies, but after the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, industrial activity saw a dramatic expansion, which depended, more than anything else, on electric power.8 Increased demand strained electrical systems across the United States, but drought in a hydropower-­dependent region threatened to become a national emergency. Utilities sounded the proverbial alarm. The monopoly electric companies in both Atlanta and Macon (about eighty miles south of Atlanta) encouraged consumers to conserve energy and cringed at the prospect that “every big manufacturing plant . . . will be forced to close down” if the rain did not soon return.9 Alabama Power reacted by scurrying to secure 15,000 new acres of coalfields in 1918 to produce supplementary steam power when hydroelectric supply ran dangerously low.10 According to the industrial booster J. A. Holloman, though, the solution to drought and energy famine could not lie in a return to coal; most southern utilities lacked adequate coal-­fired capacity, and in any case coal was in short supply and too expensive. For Holloman the answer was more river manipulation: power companies should cooperate with state and federal governments P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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to construct new “hydro-­electric plants that are of almost limitless value” to continued New South progress.11 As these reactions show, southern prosperity had by the late 1910s become wedded to hydroelectricity. Wartime conditions made that relationship ever more intimate, drastically enlarging the electric utility business and helping it to become the most heavily capitalized industry in the United States.12 The war’s exigencies intensified the corporate-­directed quest to run rampant over Dixie’s rivers—aided by an increasingly active federal government—expanding preexisting regional power sharing arrangements and helping cement private hydropower corporations’ place as state-­sanctioned custodians of the general welfare. This designation cleared the way for the completion of outposts of progress across the region but exposed the vulnerabilities of a water-­dependent energy system in a place that periodically experienced severe drought, piquing the ire of an anxious populace. As soon as Congress declared war on Germany, southerners jumped at the chance to benefit from national mobilization. Southern congressional delegations proved quite adept at ensuring that federal largess—particularly in the form of shipbuilding complexes, cantonments, and training installations—made its way to Dixie.13 Buoyed by a general attitude in favor of preparedness, southern power companies welcomed military camps, such as Georgia’s Fort Gordon and South Carolina’s Camp Wadsworth, and the resultant growth in revenues due to these highly electrified installations. Federal spending boosted southern industrial fortunes as well. Shipbuilding, lumber cultivation, and munitions production enterprises in the South benefited from the tens of millions of tax dollars invested in their businesses. Perhaps most importantly, textile manufacturing realized enormous gains. Cotton mills in Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas often reported 100 percent revenue growth in the war years. Electric utilities profited from all these developments. A year after Congress’s declaration of war, the number of factories GRPC supplied with hydroelectricity had expanded by nearly 50 percent to 160. Included in the new roster of hydro-­electrified plants were 8 power-­hungry cotton mills, many of which produced textiles and cotton linters (useful in the production of explosives) on government contracts.14 Wartime conditions helped southern utilities achieve their goals of becoming industrial power suppliers, but those same circumstances facilitated the 1917– 1918 energy crisis as well. At the First World War’s outset, most electrified factories used on-­site coal-­fired generators—and over 40 percent of electrical capacity in the Southeast resided in individual factory dynamos—but war changed that arrangement.15 The US War Industries Board’s demands for coal precipitated a shortage. Not only had coal become scarce, it had become prohibitively expensive, doubling from 1915 to 1918 and increasing even more thereafter. To con84

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tinue producing lucrative military goods with electricity, factories often had little choice but to adopt central station hydropower. Half of GRPC’s new wartime contracts in North Georgia were agreements with factories that previously relied on isolated coal-­fired dynamos. Now their energy needs could be satisfied only through hydroelectricity.16 This abrupt shift proved a boon to GRPC but produced another set of issues. By 1917’s end GRPC worked Bull Sluice at full capacity and drew large of amounts of electricity from Tallulah Falls to power its increasingly busy operations in and around Atlanta. But more than half of Tallulah’s output, nearly three-­tenths of GRPC’s total production, still flowed to Duke’s Southern Power Company, which like other utilities in the South suffered from its own power supply problems. New industrial contracts and wartime demand increased GRPC’s yield by nearly 10 percent in 1917 alone and over twofold relative to 1913, an amount that pushed the company over capacity.17 When drought descended on an already strained, hydropower-­dependent Southeast in mid-­1917, electric utilities and the US government panicked. Arkwright explained the situation’s gravity in no uncertain terms. Due to the “war crisis,” he reported, “there is an enormous existing shortage of [kilowatt] hours for industrial purposes.”18 To address the challenges that drought and energy famine presented, the War Industries Board and the US Army Corps of Engineers summoned southern power company executives to Washington, DC, in February 1918. Federal government personnel told the utility men in attendance at the meeting what they already knew very well. The nation had an “urgent need . . . for large amounts of power,” but even though the federal government had purchased a hydropower site at Muscle Shoals, Alabama (which would remain incomplete well past 1918), the war effort still suffered from a “serious shortage of power.”19 Federal representatives urged major utilities in five southeastern states to devise a plan for supplying sufficient energy—a stunning 800,000 kilowatts of generating capacity—to enterprises manufacturing war matériel.20 After a subsequent meeting in Atlanta in March 1918, southern utility managers reported that the only way to meet federal requirements was to combine their companies into a fully integrated region-­wide power-­sharing unit.21 Engineers in other regions had studied and proposed the same possibilities; though never implemented as planned, William Murray’s “Super Power” program for the Northeast was the best known among them.22 For southern utilities interstate powerline linkages were nothing new. In addition to its agreement with the Southern Power Company in 1913, GRPC coupled its transmission lines with those of Tennessee Power near Chattanooga, Columbus Power in Southwest Georgia, and Central Georgia Power in Macon, so that each utility could use its hydropower facilities as efficiently as possible. In the Carolinas, Southern Power P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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had long-­standing transmission links with the Yadkin River Power Company and the Carolina Light and Power Company. Powerline connections that would tie Alabama Power to utilities in Georgia and Tennessee were in the planning stages.23 The necessary scale and comprehensiveness of interconnections required now were far greater and more urgent than what southern utilities had achieved before the war. Armistice Day arrived before southern power companies could commence any real work on their shared transmission system. Yet electrical demand continued to increase across the South through 1919 and 1920. Thus in May 1920 GRPC and Alabama Power began work on a shared 110,000-­volt line that they completed in early 1921. Soon thereafter, while power companies across the United States dithered and mulled over their plans, utilities across the Southeast completed a comprehensive interconnection. By 1921’s end seven electric companies across five states formed what came to be called the Southern Super Power Zone. The system’s trunk line, which originally stretched more than 900 miles from Gadsden, Alabama, to Raleigh, North Carolina, could instantly flash power from any watershed to any point on an extensive web of transmission lines. By the mid-­1920s the network shared over 3,000 miles of powerlines, covered an area of more than 120,000 square miles, and included plans to bring other states, such as Kentucky and Mississippi, into the fold. Observers predictably gushed over this accomplishment. The managing editor of the industry trade journal Electrical World praised the Southern Super Power Zone as “the most extensive interconnection in the world,” and another spectator noted that this system, without the addition of any new dams, could effectively produce over 11 percent more electricity while using 25 percent less coal every year.24 Of course, spurred on by wartime emergency and the “grow-­and-­build” model, utilities in Dixie did seek to add considerable hydropower capacity to their portfolios. Across the wartime South, however, utilities claimed that they lacked the ability to fund these projects. War had slowed global capital flows, dramatically increased materials costs, and thus, reportedly, bloated expenses beyond what revenues could cover.25 For companies such as Alabama Power and GRPC, global problems threatened to halt their construction programs. In Georgia’s case, to complete the outpost of progress, the cash-­strapped GRPC had to seek RCG approval for significant increases in streetcar fare and in power and light rates. Because many Atlantans saw this development as war profiteering and an attempt to monopolize the state’s natural wealth and electrical markets, GRPC’s petition ignited a municipal firestorm that would grow into a statewide public-­ power movement. A “Citizens’ Committee” joined union members together with other Atlantans to protest GRPC’s proposed rate increases. The Committee con86

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Figure 4.1 Southern Super Power Zone. Charles G. Adsit, “Power Development in the Southeast,” 1922.

demned the utility’s request as a dastardly ploy to levy a $1.8 million annual tax on the public to fund an already wealthy company’s ability to “take hold of all the water powers” in North Georgia.26 In short according to the protestors, rate increases would amount to state-­sanctioned extortion of public resources and aid GRPC in robbing the people.27 The Citizens’ Committee had a point: RCG’s authority remained an open question in 1918. Despite the Candler Act’s passage in 1907, Atlanta’s government maintained the power to grant franchises to competing power and streetcar companies within city limits. The 1918 rate case, however, removed any lingering doubts about RCG’s and GRPC’s supremacy. Following the case, RCG’s authority blanketed the state and each city in it. With its newfound influence, Georgia’s regulatory body confirmed GRPC not only as North Georgia’s primary agent for manipulating rivers and cultivating electric energy, but as the corporate steward of the general welfare as well. In August 1918, after four months of testimony, RCG granted GRPC’s rate increase request based on 1908 and 1913 judicial decisions which held that hydroelectric corporations must have the authority to provide for the public welfare. RCG chairman Murphy Candler, who as a legislator had sponsored the 1907 act subjecting electric companies to regulation, similarly argued that GRPC was a proxy of state power and guardian of public prosperity. Alongside its vital war effort, GRPC supplied energy to “practically all of north Georgia, including forty-­ six towns, besides a large number of mills, manufacturing plants and industries.” Therefore, it “should receive . . . fair and unprejudiced treatment” and continue to P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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extract energy from North Georgia’s rivers. The state had a fiduciary duty to protect GRPC’s ability to produce electricity by allowing higher rates that increased its solvency. Wartime coal shortages, Candler concluded, underscored the need for more hydroelectric power to serve the public.28 RCG plainly supported the New South ideal of state-­sanctioned monopoly capitalism and expropriation of rivers’ energy as the best means to achieve widespread prosperity. Faith in that model went well beyond Murphy Candler and his RCG colleagues. The state’s larger legal machinery backed that stance when an appellate court asserted that “it was the duty of the Railroad Commission” to set rates in Atlanta and beyond and, through private corporations, oversee public well-­being.29 Not limited to Georgia, state authorities extended similar privileges to Alabama Power in the First World War years. While building the Cherokee Bluffs dam on the Tallapoosa River, Alabama Power faced a lawsuit from a downstream, traditional waterwheel-­driven factory. After several appellate courts affirmed Alabama Power’s right to construct its facilities, the case went to the US Supreme Court in 1916. Delivering the majority opinion that upheld lower court findings, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, in prose matching New South rhetoric, that Alabama Power had the duty “to gather the streams from waste and to draw from them energy” that would secure “the very foundation of all our achievements and all our welfare.”30 Governmental power proved crucial to the materiality of hydroelectricity and to the protection of corporations’ standing as the sole agents for structuring flows of the hinterland’s natural resources into sites of energy consumption. With the path cleared of any further legal or financial snags, southern utilities could finalize their mighty outposts of progress, which, according to prevailing booster sentiment, served as “industry’s right-­hand bower” and played a key role in “industrial, educational, and social life.”31 Yet just when private capital gained the authority to deliver economic growth and social advancement to Dixie, drought struck again and cast serious doubt on that promise. Despite critical relief provided by the Southern Super Power system, hydroelectric companies in Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee feared that the lack of rainfall in mid-­1921 would dry up their operations.32 From Atkinson’s perspective, “the whole section has been on the verge of catastrophe growing out of a continued drought,” and J. B. Duke announced that his company would make any necessary arrangements to confront the latest dry spell.33 Regional interconnection came to the rescue. Coal-­fired power generated in Alabama and Tennessee, testifying to the Super Power Zone’s indispensability, helped utilities in Georgia and the Carolinas survive the rainfall and power shortages. But the persistence and increasing severity of drought—another that 88

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was far worse would strike in 1925—highlighted the South’s precarious reliance on hydropower.34 The construction of the outposts of progress and the Southern Super Power Zone bred region-­wide dependence on and exposed the weaknesses of state-­protected monopolies that consistently failed to live up to their stated goals. Especially as electricity penetrated the realm of everyday life both in the city and on the farm after the war, such failings prompted large numbers of farmers, urban activists, and even federal actors to seriously question the mightiness of privately owned outposts of progress. *   *   * The incident that sparked the public ownership movement’s rebirth in Georgia was RCG’s consideration of GRPC’s rate increase request in midst of the First World War—an explicit appeal for state-­ordered funding for more hydroelectric facilities on the Tallulah-­Tugaloo River system. The broadly shared ire over the issue reached such heated levels that the RCG’s rate case—and its relationship to hydropower ownership—became a central question in the city’s 1918 mayoral election. Several candidates made GRPC’s rate-­increase petition significant planks in their platforms, city councilman James Key chief among them. A longtime advocate of citywide control over electricity, Key pledged that as mayor he would call for immediate public control over Atlanta’s hydropower supply and electrical distribution systems.35 After winning the race Key reiterated that his administration’s top priority—alongside creating jobs and building transportation infrastructure for increased commercial and industrial activity after the war—would be public ownership of the city’s electrical facilities and the state’s hydraulic resources. “Atlanta,” he stated in his inaugural address, sat in an area “full of streams and latent water power” whose cultivation by “some public instrumentality” will electrify the whole state “at cost.” Mayor Key concluded that “since the public must in any event pay for [hydroelectric] properties . . . , the public should own them.”36 Key’s efforts were mirrored by activists in Alabama who, claiming that “the [Alabama] Power Company is taking all this property for its own personal gain,” had likewise grown tired of private capital’s ineffective monopoly over water. Evidently, this sentiment gained enough traction that a First World War–era senatorial candidate could base his platform on the claim that he “was for the people owning the water powers of the State of Alabama.”37 Back in Georgia’s capital, Key went beyond campaign-­trail bluster. Shortly after his inauguration, he proposed legislation that would give Atlanta the authority to acquire waterpower sites throughout the state for the capital city’s benefit.38 Yet the possibility that Atlanta might assume responsibility for hydropower development for the entire state was one that even the apparent abundance of P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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popular backing could not overcome. Characterized by legislators as a “wild, visionary, and ridiculous” attempt to socialize the state’s electric business, and by Atkinson as a ploy to seize “all the water powers in the state, which belong to the whole people of Georgia,” Key’s proposed legislation foundered largely on two seemingly contradictory trends. On the one hand, the “Key Bill” flew in the face of New South elites’ commitment to “business progressivism,” or state support for industrial capitalism, as the surest path to widespread prosperity and social improvement.39 On the other, Key’s legislation clashed with an increasingly rigid political scene that pitted cities—as imposing symbols of New South ascendancy and agents of Yankee predations in Dixie—against the “provincial” interests of a still predominantly rural region.40 The chorus of criticism was best captured by a legislator who raged that “when Atlanta [gets] the power she [needs] for her own public utilities, she would not develop anymore and the rest of the state might go to hang. It has been charged,” he continued, “that this proposition is Bolshevism. I say it is Bullshevism with Atlanta constituted the only bull in the state.”41 The bill never made it out of committee. Public dominion over rivers had become central to the crusade for public ownership of electricity and the potential implications of this movement were not lost on electric company managers or rural bosses. In fact, the attempt to seize waterpower for the capital’s benefit brought these unlikely forces together in a powerful, if temporary, coalition. But the way GRPC managers and countryside legislators articulated their shared position against Key’s bill opened the way for another, more consequential path to public ownership. Opponents of the Key Bill unwittingly suggested—and proponents undoubtedly heard loud and clear—that if supervision over the state’s rivers became the responsibility of all the state’s people, and not just urbanites, public control over water and power stood a greater chance of finding success. The organization that took the cue and led the charge for public custody over Georgia’s waterways was the Municipal League of Georgia, a group founded in 1918 that represented an array of interests. The explicit purpose behind the newly chartered organization, which featured both James Key and Marion Jackson as officers, was to challenge RCG-­imposed electrical rate hikes within the state’s municipalities.42 Yet the League’s leaders quickly realized that its narrow mission of focusing on cities and towns did not go nearly far enough in garnering necessary levels of support.43 Not only would the League’s work now include efforts to keep electric bills and streetcar fares affordable for urban dwellers; it would also address electricity’s absence in rural areas across the state. Municipal League members identified the farm as an arena ripe for electrical modernization and farmers as a potentially foundational constituency. They did not stand alone. After the turn of the century a number of Americans, including 90

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farmers and urban reformers as well as local and national actors, viewed the farm as a site of persistent premodernity and believed that the widespread adoption of an array of new technologies—telephones, radios, automobiles—would rescue the countryside from its backwardness.44 During and after the First World War, the modernization of American farms increasingly meant access to electricity.45 Since, according to the Municipal League, private utilities had electrified just 1 percent of Georgia farms by 1920 (compared to a 2 percent national average)— and had no serious plans to improve on that figure—only a movement for a statewide, publicly owned hydroelectric complex could satisfy this urgent need.46 By mid-­1919 the organization’s leaders decisively shifted their focus. The League now positioned rural electrification based on publicly controlled hydroelectricity at the center of its platform, insisting that the farm’s renewal could only become a reality if the public held the reins of power, and by the same token, that public power would come to life only if it enjoyed rural support. For many Georgia farmers as well as for industrial workers, “the only hope” for a modern existence resided in a collective effort to deny “big corporations” the continued ability to monopolize water and power “at the expense of the public.”47 For the League, the goal of complete rural electrification rooted in hydroelectricity could be realized only through an independent commission authorized to oversee dam construction, energy generation, and power distribution for the entire state. The model on which the League based its newly proposed agency was the Hydro-­Electric Commission of Ontario. Established in 1906 and affectionately called “the Hydro,” the Ontario Commission began operating dams on the Niagara and St. Lawrence Rivers in 1910 and transmitted at-­cost power to locally owned utilities, both urban and rural. To help small towns and farming districts take advantage of cheap electricity, the Hydro offered low-­interest loans for appliance purchases and local distribution system construction.48 By 1920 nearly 30 percent of Ontario’s farms had electricity, and average consumers used more kilowatt hours at lower rates than their American counterparts.49 “Georgia has the power,” read a March 1920 Municipal League advertisement, to replicate Ontario’s success. Yet as of mid-­1919 “only 230,000 horsepower had been developed leaving 1,870,000 horsepower going to waste.” “Why this difference?” the ad asked. Because the public controlled hydroelectricity in Ontario while Georgia languished in private monopoly’s clutches.50 The Georgia Hydroelectric Commission would follow the Hydro’s lead, imploring the state to act by harnessing as much as possible of the nearly 2 million horsepower still idling in Georgia’s rivers. The League’s adherents believed that Georgia’s version of the Hydro would immediately reap benefits for farm families. One farmer opined that a public hydropower system would mean a less arduous existence, especially for the farm’s P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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mistress—the “drudge horse”—who daily “washes the clothes, scrubs the floors, cleans the lamps, cuts the wood, churns, draws water out of a forty-­foot well, and does various other chores, all with her hands.” To realize a better life for the “drudge horse,” the correspondent continued, farmers must have “hydro-­electric power in such plenty and so cheap that poor folks as well as rich corporations can have it for all their needs.”51 Everyday improvements for individual consumers constituted only one of the Hydro’s potential benefits. Municipal League members pitched Georgia’s Hydro as a mechanism that would mean “power for the masses,” and would include a range of progressive social benefits. It would transfer the purported advantages of urban-­industrial life to the countryside. “What water power means to industry,” stated a Municipal Leaguer in December 1919, “can be made to mean equally as much to the improvement of rural conditions and the welfare and happiness of the masses.” Publicly owned hydropower would revolutionize the New South, spreading its purportedly manifold benefits to a struggling rural population.52 Notwithstanding individual Municipal Leaguers’ invocation of “the masses,” the official pitch avoided references to collectivism and to characterizations of Georgia’s Hydro as a foreign import. Instead, the League cast its program as a way to recover “Home Rule,” a bald attempt to equate postwar circumstances with those of Reconstruction and to encourage ordinary southerners to “redeem” their homeland by kicking electrical carpetbaggers out of Dixie.53 With this strategy, the League resuscitated the spirits of Helen Longstreet’s and Tom Watson’s efforts against GRPC, and fleshed out its argument in a 1920–1921 public relations campaign. The “State Should Act,” as the campaign was known, transmitted the message in small-­town newspapers across Georgia that the modernized farm could spring only from a movement for the recovery of ordinary southerners’ control over water and power. The folly of entrusting hydroelectricity to forces alien to the South, stated a 1920 Municipal League advertisement, had left “farms, villages, and the homes of the many cold, dreary, powerless and in gloom.”54 The only requirement for redemption was that the people seize their rivers’ energy with the “vote to put your state on an equal footing with the corporations” that sent their profits to financial centers far from Georgia’s farms.55 To bring Georgia’s Hydro to life, the League drafted two amendments for the state’s constitution, which, if passed by the General Assembly, would face Georgia voters. The first proposed amendment would enable all Georgia towns and counties to incur bonded debt so they could finance the construction of local transmission and distribution lines, or even purchase existing facilities. The second, and perhaps more consequential, amendment would instruct the legislature to create an independent hydroelectric commission empowered to issue bonds 92

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and exercise complete control over all waterpower developments—including previously completed dams and reservoirs—across the state.56 These amendments’ potential impacts went far beyond electricity. The measures called for wide-­ranging transformations in a scheme that foreshadowed the 1920s “regional planning” craze. Instead of building single-­purpose dams and reservoirs meant only to provide power, the League’s proposed legislation called for building multiple-­purpose facilities that would result in “First: Cheap hydro-­power for use in city, town and country; Second: The reclamation of the flooded lands of Georgia; Third: The elimination of the mosquito and malaria in this state; and Fourth: The extension of navigation.”57 The Hydro would “light the home and cook the food of every family.” It would “pump the water, run the dairy, thresh the grain, and gin the cotton” of every farm, and “drive the wheels of every machine and factory.” It would, in short, equitably distribute the benefits of nature’s bounty to all, boost all Georgians’ living standards, and thus enable the state to leap forward into the future based not on cartel capitalism but on democratic control over water and power.58 The League’s statewide, regional development strategy seemed as if it might bear fruit. In July 1920 the Georgia House Committee on Constitutional Amendments recommended the League’s amendments to the full House by a ten-­to-­ seven vote. Those favoring the amendments argued that their far-­reaching changes would end corporate enforced scarcity and would bring cheap hydropower and a host of other social benefits to countless rural Georgians for the first time.59 Yet the League’s detractors—both in the legislature and power company boardrooms—worried that they would invite socialism, ending capital flows to and harming future industrial growth in Georgia. Buried in other House committees, the League’s amendments never made it to the floor in 1920.60 As legislators’ opposition to public power grew more determined, the League’s efforts consistently failed throughout much of the 1920s, and the organization faded into obscurity by the end of the decade.61 The Hydro’s failure in Georgia did not deter like-­minded actors in other southern states. The seeds of a public rural electrification authority in North Carolina seemed to find fertile ground in March 1917 when the governor signed a modest funding bill authorizing the Highway Commission to study hydroelectric development and transmission line extension into underserved areas. The First World War delayed the project, but by late 1919 a small group of reformers, led by sociologist Eugene C. Branson, began circulating information about rural modernization and Ontario Hydro. For Branson this was a moral question: Would southern wealth be widely distributed, or would it be concentrated in the hands of a few? Though Branson’s efforts drew opposition from Southern Power and other utilities in the state, which convinced the legislature to discontinue the P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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Highway Commission appropriation in 1921, farmers began to act on their own. In Cleveland County by the end of 1921 nearly five hundred farm families, having each invested $100 in rural powerlines served by a municipally owned plant, boasted well-­lit homes and improved lives. Their boot-­strapping became the model on which public-­power proponents attempted to make their case across the state, even if they achieved little during the 1920s.62 An analogous campaign took place in South Carolina. Bewildered over the dearth of electrified farms in a state with abundant hydropower potential, retired state legislator Richard Meares began investigating the matter in the 1920s and criticized private utilities for failing to meet their stated obligations to the public. Like his counterparts in Georgia and North Carolina, Meares worked to persuade South Carolinians of the need for a state-­owned public-­power program based on Ontario Hydro. Also like the situation in neighboring states, Meares’s crusade made little headway, other than being subsumed within South Carolina’s regulatory apparatus, until 1933 when the tide of publicly controlled rural electrification began to shift.63 While battles for statewide rural electrification commissions based in water conservation appeared to be nonstarters in the South, the movement was far from dead. Early post–First World War attempts to establish hydroelectric commissions in Georgia and the Carolinas presaged a broader national movement, which focused on the equitable distribution of natural resources, the end of corporate monopoly, and the importance of rural electrification. The intellectual foundations of the national drive for public power emanated from a loose-­knit group of lawyers, engineers, scholars, and policy makers who believed that regional development rooted in water conservation and abundant hydroelectricity would modernize rural districts. Also referred to as the “New Conservation”—“new” because it emphasized not only the Progressives’ principles of efficiency and expertise but also because it insisted on equity—this mode of thinking held that the equitable allocation of nature’s bounty would transform American society. In the words of leading New Conservationist Lewis Mumford, “regional planning” would revive “whole regions so that the products of culture and civilization, instead of being confined to a prosperous minority in the congested centers, shall be available to everyone at every point in a region.”64 The best-­known attempt at rural rehabilitation and large-­scale regional development in the 1920s—though it followed proposals in Georgia and North Carolina by several years—came in Pennsylvania under the auspices of a program dubbed “Giant Power.” Conceived in 1923 by the longtime conservation champion Gifford Pinchot and the public-­power advocate Morris Llewellyn Cooke, Giant Power aimed at improving rural life through a scattered network of coal-­mine-­based (or “mine-­mouth”) generating stations and a high-­voltage 94

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transmission web that could flash affordable electric power to the state’s remotest corners.65 Outside of food, shelter, and clothing, Pinchot told the Pennsylvania legislature in 1925, the issue of cheap electricity “is the greatest of the economic questions.”66 And on Giant Power’s advent, Pinchot wrote, Pennsylvania would see heightened living standards, the end of drudgery, and the eradication of poverty. These benefits would apply to all consumers, Pinchot insisted, but “our first concern will be with the small user—particularly with the farmer.”67 Although Pinchot, Cooke, and the Giant Power Board recognized that the bituminous coal fields in the western half of their state would underpin Giant Power and the rural renaissance, their ambitions were not limited to Pennsylvania or coal. Pinchot and Cooke saw Giant Power as a blueprint for a series of state-­level projects based in publicly controlled waterpower. These Progressives, like those in the South, drew inspiration for their plan from Ontario Hydro, believing that an improved United States would emerge from comprehensive regional planning and rural electrification.68 Like those of their southern counterparts, though, the Pennsylvanians’ vision failed to materialize. Members of the Pennsylvania legislature seemed convinced by arguments—some of which were made by utility industry supported engineers—that Giant Power represented a “most dangerous plan” leading to state socialism, nationalization, or even full-­ fledged dictatorial communism. What was more, the president of the Pennsylvania Rural Electrification Association argued, no truly popular call for programs such as Giant Power existed because “rural electrification is making real progress at the present time.”69 While potential state-­level hydroelectric development agencies were emerging and—with very little legislative success—challenging hydroelectric monopolies in the early 1920s, a truly region-­transforming possibility materialized on the southern reaches of the Tennessee River, intriguing public-­and private-­power forces alike. When it appeared that the United States might be pulled into the war, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Defense Act of 1916 and called for the establishment of nitrate production factories near Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Munitions manufacturing required large amounts of nitrates, which required large amounts of electricity; thus Wilson’s directive included orders for the construction of a large dam at Muscle Shoals. Hostilities ended before contractors could complete the nitrate facilities—and the dam, eventually named Wilson Dam, was not completed until 1925—rendering the war-­specific plans for Muscle Shoals obsolete. The federal government now owned a southern hydropower site that it seemed unsure how to use.70 In the half decade immediately following the Armistice, several parties—including congressional factions, private utility executives, public-­power advocates, and individual entrepreneurs—competed in a frenzied contest to secure P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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Figure 4.2 O.T. Ericson, Wilson Dam and Power House, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, April 11, 1926. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

and develop the site at Muscle Shoals.71 A headline-­grabbing offer for the site came in June 1921 from automobile manufacturing mogul Henry Ford. In the Tennessee Valley, Ford saw a place where the “opportunities are almost limitless” not just for new assembly plants but for the comprehensive development of the entire region.72 Many ordinary southerners, in Alabama as well as in Tennessee and Georgia, heartily endorsed Ford’s proposal as a plan that would mean “infinite labor . . . and infinite benefit to the American people.”73 Other camps expressed far less enthusiasm. The unlikely coalition that resisted Ford’s bid—southern factory owners, southern power company managers, national public-­power liberals, Southern Democrats, and Progressive Republicans—shared a common concern. They all feared that Ford’s enterprise would exercise unregulated control over one of the nation’s most coveted hydropower sites and thereafter would come to dominate the region. The interests opposing Ford might have worked only to obstruct his efforts in the Tennessee River Valley, restoring the southern power situation to its default setting. Instead their shared resistance tilted the issue to public power’s favor.74 Seemingly against type, electric utilities in the South argued that Ford’s plan would violate the regulatory intentions of the 1920 Water Power Act, which held that private-­power companies were public service entities with the obligation to furnish their territories with affordable electricity under public oversight. They furthermore claimed that, because the Tennessee was a navigable river and thus subject to the authority of the Federal Power Commission (created by the 1920 Water Power Act), any power produced at Muscle Shoals must be equitably distributed across the entire Tennessee Valley. These positions were all that Nebraska senator George Norris, a public-­power champion and New Conservationist, needed to steer the Muscle Shoals debate to 96

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his favor. Leading the charge in Congress against Ford, who withdrew his offer in 1924, Norris then extended private power’s argument to its logical conclusions: If the hydroelectric business were truly a public service, then should the public not exercise control over the provision of waterpower? And if equitable distribution of the river’s energy to the entire Tennessee Valley were an essential part of serving the greater good, then should the federal government not control that process? Wouldn’t the federal government’s direct involvement in the hydroelectric business be the best possible means not only of furnishing farmers and other powerless southerners with waterpower’s benefits but also regulating the private-­power business? Joined in the US Senate by fellow Progressive Republicans and by Southern Democrats, Norris answered these questions by submitting bills to Congress throughout the 1920s stipulating that the US government own Muscle Shoals, generate and distribute its energy, and serve as a “yardstick” against which to measure the private utility industry’s effectiveness and fairness. Norris’s vision, though, stretched far beyond Alabama. Like the reformers in Georgia, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania, Norris drew inspiration from Ontario Hydro. He foresaw a high-­voltage transmission system that would extend more than 300 miles from Muscle Shoals in all directions. These powerlines would fuel regional development, illuminate countless farms, and enter urban markets—including Atlanta, Birmingham, and Chattanooga—at cost.75 “If we should properly develop this project,” Norris declared in 1926, “we would . . . turn countless wheels of toil all through the South and bring happiness and comfort to thousands of humble homes.”76 With the Muscle Shoals debate, the seemingly isolated state-­level fights for water and power had become truly nationwide in scope. This development was worrisome for utilities across the nation, but especially for those in Alabama, P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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Mississippi, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia, as the focus of a newly national power struggle now centered squarely on the Deep South. The masses and the farmers who wanted cheap hydropower could now look past monopoly capitalism as the sole agent for Dixie’s regeneration and could see in federal government action and the region’s rivers a viable alternative for a brighter future. *   *   * Throughout the 1920s state-­and national-­level crusades for public hydroelectricity faced an onslaught from private-­power forces bent on wresting away the momentum on rural modernization. At NELA’s 1927 annual meeting, the organization’s eloquent vice president, Preston Arkwright, delivered an address that reverberated throughout the electric utility industry. Arkwright told the convention that his firm, like all American electric utilities, was not a corporate plunderer. Rather the Georgia Power Company, which succeeded GRPC and gained control over more than two-­thirds of its home state after several acquisitions and mergers in 1926, was “a citizen wherever we serve.” The effects of Georgia Power’s citizenship, Arkwright claimed, far exceeded electrical comforts and conveniences. His company’s alterations of Georgia’s rivers brought regional development and broadly shared prosperity, affording ordinary southerners a wide range of advantages. Hydropower, he asserted, “is increasing production, raising wages, and elevating standards of living. It is enabling men to substitute brains for brawn.”77 Other speakers focused on farm modernization, noting that rural electrification rates had witnessed dramatic increases due to private utility programs. According to NELA’s Rural Electric Service Committee chair, power companies had electrified nearly 230,000 American farms in 1926 alone and had doubled the total number of electrified farms in the preceding three years.78 Despite their professed confidence in corporate-­led social advancement, NELA’s leaders feared that private enterprise faced serious peril. They worried that “demagoguery and political selfishness” had fueled “a formidable effort” in favor of public power—a point afforded greater purchase in a time still haunted by lingering memories of the first Red Scare. No proletarian revolt, however, would be required for the realization of American socialism. In the United States this menace would arrive “not by revolution, as in Russia, but through the insidious invasion of the Government in business.”79 In a speaking tour of the Northeast following his NELA address, Arkwright too confessed to the fear that public-­ power advocates favored socialism. Capitulation in this fight would be fatal, he warned, because the electric energy driving recent American prosperity resulted not from government action but from “business enterprise.” Only by ensuring that the private realm continued to lead in developing this vital energy source, Arkwright concluded, would progress march steadily forward.80 98

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From a certain perspective NELA’s members seemed to be tilting at windmills. After all, 1920s America roared with industrial production, consumer plenty, and laissez-­faire economics. The postwar South embraced an “Atlanta Spirit” that promised widespread prosperity based on ever-­increasing business opportunities. As much as any other sector, the electric industry had reason to celebrate. Over the course of the decade, American utilities expanded their properties by almost 60 percent and southern utilities grew at nearly three times the national average.81 And while the private utility industry continued to increase in size and strength, public power shrank. The wave of municipal electric utility success that washed over the nation at the turn of the century had significantly receded by the beginning of the 1920s and continued to wane across the rest of the decade. At the outset of the 1930s only 5 percent of American electric power originated in publicly owned plants, less than half of 1912 figures.82 Arkwright’s and his NELA cohorts’ words and actions, however, suggested that the postwar public-­power surge posed a real threat to private power’s hegemony. Industry leaders knew quite well they were not jousting with an imaginary opponent. The scale of private power’s achievements—made possible largely through state backing and access to the vast pools of capital that funded construction of large hydropower networks and the consolidation of utilities into massive holding companies—pointed out just how much the industry stood to lose if public power triumphed.83 To protect its hydroelectric foothold, then, the southern utility industry vigorously countered its foe on multiple fronts and in arenas both local and national. It did so by highlighting the advantages of corporate citizenship for ensuring Americans’ welfare and for delivering power to the rural masses, by co-­opting ideas about race, and by heightening anxieties about socialism. Whereas public-­power activists identified rural electrification as a crucial part of their agenda, private power had long seen the American farm, in financial terms, as a losing investment and, in political terms, as a source of trouble. But because calls for rural modernity rang out louder and more frequently after the turn of the century, NELA began to investigate possibilities for rural electrification in the early 1910s, at least in part, in response to President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1909 Country Life Commission report. In addition to discussing the promises of farm modernization, the report warned of the formation of waterpower monopolies and encouraged farmers to form cooperatives to protect their interests.84 Even if the foundations of a cooperative-­based, hydro-­powered rural electrification program had been laid in the years before the First World War, neither NELA nor public-­power advocates took any meaningful action on farm modernization until after the Armistice. Yet as increasing numbers of farmers formed P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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co-­ops and demanded electrical service after the war, and more and more public-­ power reformers worked to deliver it, utility industry leaders revisited the matter. In a moment rife with public-­power activism, electric company executives realized that if they refused to supply farmers with electricity, farmers would find a way, in the words of a North Carolina man, “to get their own systems.”85 To meet this challenge NELA commissioned a group called the Committee on the Relation of Electricity to Agriculture (CREA) in 1923. Working with the US Department of Agriculture, universities, state farm bureaus, and local utilities, CREA had two explicit tasks: to conduct rural electrification experiments and to electrify one million American farms by 1935. A third goal, more implicit and urgent than the first two, was to curtail public power’s assault on private power’s dominance.86 In keeping with its stated mission, CREA operated rural electrification “laboratories” in more than twenty states and conducted several high-­profile experiments in the mid-­1920s. The best-­known test case took place in a dairy and poultry farming area near Red Wing, Minnesota.87 Although utility leaders loudly proclaimed Red Wing a success, burnishing claims about their support for rural electricity, they knew local circumstances heavily favored CREA. Not only could Red Wing’s farmers rely on relatively steady cash flows from their operations, but conditions in general proved ideal for the experiment because dairy and poultry production adapted quite readily to electrical mechanization. In addition local power companies and electric equipment manufacturers funded the entire project. To gain more credibility CREA needed to conduct its experiment in less favorable surroundings.88 CREA found more challenging environs in the South. In 1924, in cooperation with Alabama Power, Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University), and the Alabama Farm Bureau, CREA began a three-­year experiment in eastern Alabama that concentrated primarily on desolate, monocrop farms. In terms of farm output, CREA’s research met only with disappointment. Cotton and grain cultivation, not to mention a rigid adherence to traditional modes and relations of production that shunned mechanization, proved unable to adjust easily to electrical modernization.89 Moreover Alabama’s “dirt farmers,” growing steadily poorer after the First World War, rarely had access to cash and simply could not afford Alabama Power’s rates.90 Most continued to live in premodern conditions well into the 1930s. CREA suffered even worse results in the Carolinas. Finding that only about 1 percent of North Carolina farms and 2 percent of South Carolina farms enjoyed electricity, CREA did little more than furnish rural people with information about electric lights’ transformative potential.91 Nevertheless, throughout the 1920s southern utilities cast free enterprise as the only mechanism through which widespread rural electrification and its at100

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Figure 4.3 Interior of an Alabama farm house before rural electrification. Walker Evans, Kitchen Corner in Alabama Tenant Farmer’s House, 1936. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-­USF342-­T01– 008234-­A.

tendant social benefits would arrive in Dixie. To that end—even as CREA operated no laboratories in Georgia—Georgia Power initiated a CREA-­style farm modernization project in the mid-­1920s and created a Rural Lines Division.92 For Atkinson this program augured what free enterprise would soon grant all farmers. Rural communities would realize the benefits of free-­market electrification, which would send a jolt through the countryside by providing “markets for the products of the farm, increased opportunity for employment, opportunity for more diversified farming, [and] increased profits for the farm itself.”93 Many farmers (but by no means all) exposed to private power’s experimentation in the South agreed that, even if electric power made little difference to farm production, electricity and electric appliances dramatically improved everyday life.94 A Chattanooga area farmer looking back on the days before rural electrification plainly made the case that modernization would mean more than “convenience.” Even though electricity could offer little direct help with cotton production, it eased strain on the eyes, pumped water, washed clothes, and prepared and preserved food.95 Many southern farm women concurred. They seemed overjoyed that electric power eradicated some of their most arduous daily chores, such as pumping, carrying, and heating water, and eased the monumental weekly P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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task of tending to the laundry. Electric refrigeration likewise improved farm life, preserving food longer than traditional methods, thus promoting better nutrition and health. Electricity upgraded home life in less tangible, but nonetheless important, ways too. Families with electricity reportedly spent more evening hours on leisure activities, often reading by the warm glow of incandescent lights or listening to radio programs.96 Despite some promising results and grandiose prophesies about improvements in farm life, electricity’s potential benefits lay far in the future for most southern farmers, as CREA’s work in Alabama and the Carolinas showed. Atkinson’s farm power division in Georgia clearly drew on CREA’s findings in Red Wing and eastern Alabama, focusing on farming areas that could realize a return on investment by avoiding cotton growing areas and targeting only farms that had shifted to “dairying, stock raising and diversified crop production.”97 By any standard Georgia Power’s rural electrification program produced meager results. Although by 1935 the company had built nearly 1,000 miles of rural lines, less than 3 percent of Georgia’s farms enjoyed electricity.98 Georgia’s outcomes conformed to those of the broader South where state rural electrification rates before 1935 almost universally failed to exceed 3 percent; some southern states, such as Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi fell below 2 percent. The clear exceptions to this trend were Florida and Virginia, both of which could brag of a still skimpy 8 percent farm electrification rate in 1935. In those states, crop diversity—fruit cultivation in Florida, and cattle, poultry, and grain farming in Virginia—likely contributed to higher rural electrification results compared to the parts of Dixie with greater commitments to mono-­crop (especially cotton) agriculture.99 Even if, as a recent article argues, CREA made earnest attempts to empower the countryside, many rural people in the 1920s South did not see it that way.100 In their estimation and in the results they saw, CREA clearly had no serious plans for pursuing countryside electrification. Instead, according to critics, CREA’s top priority was to demonstrate that the free-­enterprise system could develop self-­liquidating farm modernization programs, and that farmers would eventually benefit from the corporate version of rural electrification. Put another way, CREA aimed to thwart an increasingly credible movement that sought to create a competing, publicly owned power system that would generate hydroelectricity and deliver it to rural districts.101 As it turned out the North Carolinian was right all along: if farmers wanted electricity, they would have to provide it for themselves. *   *   * Yet self-­help for rural electrification was not an effort private power would abide. Farmers’ work to provide electricity for themselves drew the private utility 102

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industry’s scorn. In Georgia those who aligned with Georgia Power’s position agreed that the Municipal League’s success would invite state overreach but took the point even further. In its denunciation of the Municipal League’s activities, a Southwest Georgia newspaper fretted that if the League succeeded, “socialism or Bolshevism” would soon reign. The argument did not cease there. The paper highlighted not just “socialism and Bolshevism” but those ideologies’ alien origins and suspected that the League’s ideas emanated from Chicago, a “hotbed of socialism.”102 A west Georgia newspaper likewise fretted that Municipal Leaguers fell under the influence of a source foreign to Dixie. Certainly the realization that public power drew inspiration from Canada served for many Georgians as reason enough to take a dim view of the League’s designs. But that its activities might lead to “disastrous ventures” with state funds held deeper, more troubling meaning: Public power reeked of a “tragic era” when northern aggressors occupied the South, empowered ex-­slaves, and disfranchised legions of poor whites. According to the paper, the League’s proposal would be a scam far more menacing than anything “carpet-­baggers” and “negro legislatures” put over on the “[white] property owner, the wage earner and farmer . . . in Reconstruction Days.”103 The invocation of socialism and Reconstruction—both of which resonated across the white South as outsiders’ power-­grabbing ploys that would force African Americans into equal standing with, if not dominance over, whites—yet again insinuated race and class into public debates on electric energy.104 Whereas antimonopolists in Dixie had deployed race for their cause through the early 1920s, now private utilities and their cohorts seized race as a way to burnish claims about unfettered capitalism’s superiority. At times utility spokesmen appealed to the most objectionable racist sentiments in denouncing public power and its purported complicity in the debasement of white southerners. Preston Arkwright, for instance, fumed in 1924 over Mayor Key’s attempt to use his authority to potentially condemn GRPC and establish public ownership over rivers and utilities. “The only people ostracized politically in this section of the country,” he spat, “are niggers. Being in the public service business may make us servants of the public, but it ought not to make us slaves.”105 Yet rather than recruiting racial animosity solely to cast public power as a foreign invasion that would essentially reduce whites to slavery, Arkwright and his cohorts presented an alternative to this bleak vision. Co-­opting a part of public power’s repertoire for its purposes, private power suggested that ordinary whites rally around free enterprise as the mechanism that would revive slavery. The Tallulah-­Tugaloo facilities’ primary purpose, Arkwright claimed, was to capture “the rain drops falling on the mountains” and to hold rivers “prisoner behind the great dam at Burton” so that “their energy may be . . . controlled.”106 Just as P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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the enslaved had for the slave owners, Arkwright intimated, these hydroelectric properties would relieve southerners of the many burdens of work, “lifting the yoke” from whites’ shoulders, placing “at their fingertips the force of the mountain torrents.”107 The peculiar institution’s reanimation would not simply resurrect the mythical, hierarchical Old South. Instead private enterprise’s hydroelectric complex would be a radical leveling force. It would create a neo-­antebellum utopia that would improve on the fragile “herrenvolk” democracy that elite whites allegedly nurtured throughout the mid-­nineteenth century.108 In a 1925 radio address Arkwright told listeners that his company’s hydroelectric system did not labor solely for financiers, cotton mill owners, and power company executives. The Tallulah-­ Tugaloo toiled for even the humblest, most work-­weary white southerners as well. These chattels, Arkwright claimed, cheerfully took on their “shoulders the burden of labor. . . . They are converting laborers into directors of labor [and] work for the rich and poor with the same willingness . . . without reference to financial, social or political position.”109 Hydroelectricity, in short, would make all white southerners—from plantation owner to factory drudge—slave masters. Arkwright’s allusions to a technology that could reawaken at least some version of slavery may on the surface seem to be little more than boilerplate industrial-­age ballyhoo with a southern twang. To be sure, the concept of the “energy slave,” which made its debut in the Western world as early as the 1880s, flowed freely throughout both the United States and Europe.110 Even General Electric saw fit to trade on this metaphor in national promotions. In a 1920s advertisement simply titled “Slaves,” General Electric, borrowing from Oscar Wilde’s 1891 meditation on the necessity of “mechanical slavery [to] the future of the world,” displayed a hard-­at-­work black man. Now, the ad claimed, “electric light, heat and transportation . . . are America’s slaves.”111 Notwithstanding the national, even global, resonance of the “energy slave” metaphor, the promise of slavery’s return held special meaning in the 1920s South. Especially given the rapidity of change, many southern whites seemed more than ever to yearn for the days of moonlight and magnolias.112 It was a time, in other words, of “laudation of the antebellum order” when “everyone in the white South somehow retroactively acquired slaves and plantations.”113 GRPC clearly plugged into this trend, though not necessarily to subordinate black southerners and certainly not to elevate white southerners. To the contrary, references to race-­class matters in the 1920s functioned as an implicit recognition that white southerners were far from united under the banner of cartel capitalism. Antebellum-­tinged visions of a white democratic future based on a highly electrified life were part of private utilities’ attempts to control the masses of whites who openly rebelled against corporate monopoly and the New South order. 104

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Private utilities’ efforts to tamp down discontent among ordinary southerners went beyond the large-­scale matters of race-­class hierarchies. Southern energy firms extended their appeal down to the home, casting hydroelectric servitude as a force that would afford the masses cleaner, more comfortable, more convenient daily lives. “It is as if,” Arkwright proposed, “there stand behind the wall servants on tiptoe to spring forth at your summons.” Hydroelectricity, he continued, worked as “a silent and unobtrusive servant in the home . . . eager [to] banish drudgery and bring convenience and comfort and ease and cheer and joy to human beings.” It would be easy to attribute such idealized sentiments to naked salesmanship meant to fill middle-­class homes with electric appliances. Yet Arkwright took things beyond appliance sales, explicitly linking hydroelectric servitude and improved daily living conditions to his utility’s struggles with public power. Ordinary southerners, he added in his closing remarks, could ensure that their electrical workforce would “not [be] restricted or impeded by unjust laws or unfair public sentiment” if they would only resist the “deadening hand of government ownership.”114 Arkwright certainly did not act alone in attempting to anthropomorphize and enslave electricity; his rhetoric was representative of a larger trend. Indeed the reincarnation of the slave/servant as a racialized consumer item appeared across the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such techniques “merged the service of the product with the service of the black figure promoting it. . . . African Americans, whether symbolically or materially, worked for the white folks.” The use of such icons proved crucial to a coherent sense of whiteness, as “being white, being a consumer, being a modern American, meant having some kind of black help.”115 Among the many southern utilities that cast electric energy as an embodied, human form eager to please the master and ease the burdens of home life was the Appalachian Power Company. Appalachian Power used the “Sambo” and “pickaninny” stereotypes in its 1920s advertisements with a character called “Elec,” a faithful soul dressed as a bellhop, keen “to serve you” and to protect the home from the perils of darkness.116 Alabama Power was the southern utility that most effectively put this imagery to use with its enduringly popular figure, Reddy Kilowatt. Though he ultimately appeared as a cute and almost cuddly cartoon with clownishly large feet, a body made of lightning bolts, and a lightbulb nose, the earliest drafts of Reddy Kilowatt retained many of the attributes that characterized electric power as a racialized servant. According to Reddy Kilowatt creator Ashton Collins, Alabama Power’s marketing manager from 1925 to 1932, Reddy—a homophonic play on the idea that electricity was always ready to serve—was born in 1926 while “I was racking my brain for a way to sell more electricity to household users. I decided to play up the angle of electricity being the world’s cheapest servant.” Among the P OW E R F OR T H E M A S SE S A N D T H E FA R M

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ideas Collins spent time “toying around with” were, rather tellingly, electricity as a “Negro bellhop” or a “colored servant.”117 In the end, though, he decided that for a national audience he would have to avoid any such explicit references to black servitude because they were “too racial or too sectional, not universal like electricity.”118 In any case Reddy’s role was to be “the help,” a drudge who would make domestic labor, especially for housewives, almost pleasurable.119 Beyond making housework a breeze, Reddy had another job. In a discussion of his character’s growing national popularity in the 1920s, Collins granted that Reddy Kilowatt’s most visible work was electricity sales. Yet, according to Collins, Reddy gained such acclaim in utilities’ advertising departments because he functioned as a stealthy evangelist for private enterprise and spoke to an issue weighing heavily on southern utility managers’ minds. Collins claimed that his character’s widening usage derived from its ability to help consumers “escape to fantasy,” from his penchant, that is, to distract from “economic and political upheavals.” Most important in the political atmosphere of the 1920s, Collins concluded, was that utilities “have found a way to dramatize and humanize their relations with the controller of their destinies, the Public.”120 Like their rural electrification programs and invocations of race and socialism, southern electric companies’ public relations techniques in the 1920s operated as tools to aid private power in its quest to dominate nature and energy markets and fend off the rising threat of public power. *   *   * A crusade to empower the southern masses and southern farmers emerged in the late 1910s and persisted throughout the 1920s. The movement’s goal was to turn the developments in the New South–hydropower connection—a nexus drawn ever closer together in the First World War—to more democratic, socially beneficial purposes. Although private power had gained state sanction as a trusted guardian of the general welfare, most notably in Alabama and Georgia, most working-­class and rural southerners fell outside the (purportedly) free market’s version of progress and lacked access to electricity. Based on global trends and alongside national-­level counterparts, southern activists rejected this arrangement and worked to place rivers and energy production facilities under apparently more democratic, public administration. While these efforts bore little fruit in the 1920s, the private utility industry resisted public power’s measures through cooptation, cries of socialism, and use of the still raw wounds of the southern past. What is most striking about these events is that they predated— and indeed laid groundwork for—the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration, federal agencies often credited with finally bringing electricity to the South beginning in the 1930s. The public–private power 106

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struggles of the 1910s and 1920s South demonstrate that ordinary southerners tried to claim water and power for the public good on their own terms and that private utilities would fiercely resist any attempts to pry hydropower monopolies from their grasp. These fights had only begun in the 1910s and 1920s but would continue and expand in the 1930s.

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5 A New Power Era

Jubilation struck Tupelo on a Saturday in early November 1933. A small, impoverished town in Northeast Mississippi’s Lee County, Tupelo’s bunting-­ adorned streets overflowed with thousands of parade watchers. Led by police officers and Boy Scouts, the processional included distinguished Mississippi politicians, most notably Congressman John Rankin, as well as a Harvard educated lawyer named David Lilienthal and an engineer and former college president named Arthur Morgan. The crowd had gathered to celebrate the Tennessee Valley Authority’s arrival: Tupelo was the new federal corporation’s first wholesale hydroelectric customer. Rankin, a hearty TVA supporter in Congress, declared at the festivities’ conclusion that Tupelo’s deal with TVA was a watershed moment, a “new power era” when the lengthy “war of the people against the private power interests” finally ended. When it was his turn to speak, Arthur Morgan, one of TVA’s three original directors along with Lilienthal and entomologist Harcourt Morgan, said that his agency would help southerners realize a long-­held dream by bringing “complete electrification to every farm in Lee County.”1 But TVA would not stop there. It would continue to work so that affordable hydroelectricity would reach far beyond Lee County. For private utility managers not just in Mississippi, but in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, the news in Tupelo was grim enough. The prospect of taking the experiment in federally controlled hydropower beyond

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Lee County made things far worse. In fact the metastasis had already begun: multiple counties in Mississippi and Alabama had held referendums, with more forthcoming, demonstrating that legions of rural southerners approved of TVA; Tennessee in its entirety looked to be in TVA’s sights. To make matters worse, from private power’s perspective, TVA managers sought to capture urban markets. That movement had already commenced as well. Shortly after the celebration in Tupelo, voters made Knoxville the first sizable southern city to sign up for wholesale TVA power, and Lilienthal intimated that major urban centers, such as Atlanta or Birmingham, might be next.2 Private power, though, would not go quietly. At every turn its proponents resisted what they saw as TVA’s—and soon thereafter the Rural Electrification Administration’s (REA)—invasions of Dixie. To do so they called on the well-­worn tactics of the post–First World War years, including co-­opting public power’s rhetoric, decrying socialism and federal incursions, and appealing to racism. But utility managers developed a new, ultimately more consequential, strategy: if private-­power company executives could not prevent the creation of a federal hydropower complex in the South, they might be able turn it to their purposes. Regardless of private power’s objections, federal authorities had, seemingly suddenly, contributed to Dixie’s regeneration by constructing a publicly owned hydropower complex that promised electric energy to even the most downtrodden of southerners, at least white ones. Yet despite both supporters’ and detractors’ justified focus on federal action, much of the energy driving change in the 1930s South stemmed not from Washington technocrats, but from local actors who had toiled for public power since the late 1910s. In many ways TVA’s and REA’s successes in rural electrification sprang from their work; they were not simply impositions by a distant, paternalistic governing force that foisted sweeping changes on a beleaguered southern landscape and population. As Lilienthal in 1934 told a Decatur, Alabama, resident skeptical about TVA’s designs for his hometown, “We’re not going to do anything for Decatur. We’re just going to give you a chance to do something for yourselves.”3 This is not to suggest that the New Deal proved insignificant to a severely depressed South. It hardly needs to be stated that federal interventions helped bring a new power era to the South. Rather than representing a clean break with the past, though, the New Deal’s achievements in the public-­power arena drew on strong continuities nurtured by the determination of ordinary southerners. Based on those struggles, southern water increasingly became coded as public power’s domain, forcing private power to reconsider the business model—heavy investment in and full identification with hydroelectricity—to which it had clung since the 1890s. *   *   * A N E W P OW E R E R A

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Rooted in a series of agricultural crises beginning in the mid-­1920s—in part brought on by floods in Arkansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina and drought across the region—widespread depression struck the US South well before the infamous stock market crash of October 1929. After reaching more than $0.20 per pound in 1927, cotton two years later traded for over 17 percent less. Tobacco, sugar, and other crops took similar hits. As prices fell so did profit and homeownership rates; banks collapsed too. Dixie’s depression grew steadily worse after Black Thursday. By mid-­1932 cotton prices had descended to depths (4.6 cents per pound) not seen since the 1890s. While overall income across the South by 1932 slumped to slightly less than 60 percent of 1929 levels, farm income plummeted to just 39 percent of 1929 figures. The urban-­industrial South suffered as well. Retail sales in everything from department stores to car dealerships dropped by at least half from 1929 to 1933 and the entirety of the southern textile manufacturing sector recorded net losses every year between 1929 and 1932.4 Needless to say, many southerners faced precarious times. Enjoying far more stability in the already depressed late 1920s South was the private utility industry. In the decade following the First World War American utilities experienced stunning growth. Between 1920 and 1929 power companies’ kilowatt-­hour sales expanded over twofold while the United States’ population grew by slightly more than 10 percent. This explosion in power production was due largely to consolidations into gargantuan holding companies, organizations loaded with the seemingly unlimited financial resources to make constant expansion possible. Atkinson and Arkwright’s Atlanta-­based utility not only fit this model, but far exceeded it. Whereas the company generated some 294 million kilowatt hours in 1920, it produced over 1 billion kilowatt hours in 1929.5 Much of the capital required for their utility’s growth derived from its association with the Southeastern Power and Light holding company (which controlled utilities in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and South Carolina), a move that in turn precipitated the creation of the consolidated, truly state-­dominating Georgia Power Company in 1926. Even more funding arrived for southern utilities when Commonwealth and Southern (C&S), which already held the Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and several companies in the upper Midwest, acquired Southeastern Power and Light in 1929.6 As one historian rightly points out, “this decade was indeed the ‘roaring twenties’ for the electrical industry.”7 By 1929’s end, however, increasing numbers of Americans saw these developments in less glowing terms. Any lingering sympathies for the private realm’s ability to foster social and economic progress were largely crushed by the economic crisis—and by revelations that private power’s financial practices played a large role in causing the 1929 crash. While power companies grew wealthier, failed to provide wide110

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spread access to electricity, frequently asked regulatory bodies for higher rates, and contributed to the Depression, many struggling southerners grew angrier and continued in the quest for public-­power alternatives. In late 1920s Georgia a coalition of citizens from around the state, including white union members and African American activists, besieged the Public Service Commission (PSC, successor to the Railroad Commission of Georgia) to castigate Georgia Power’s recent requests for increases in streetcar fares and power rates. They also voiced the displeasure that while “the power company owned the city, [it] now seeks to own the state of Georgia.”8 Attempting to capitalize on this most recent groundswell of popular discontent, James Key returned to politics after spending most of the 1920s in private legal practice. In 1930 he ran for another term as Atlanta’s mayor on a platform founded once again on public ownership of electric properties. Following his election Key revived his postwar efforts by sending a bill to the General Assembly that would grant Atlanta both independent borough status and the “authority to condemn gas and electric properties throughout the state in an effort to establish municipal ownership.”9 Though his newest proposal gained some support in the legislature, Key and his supporters had to live with disappointment once more. Like its predecessors the newest Key Bill died in committee, but that represented only the opening salvo. If Key again focused on the city (with at least some implications for rural areas), activists in other parts of the South more explicitly brought their early 1920s hydro-­powered rural electrification ambitions into the new decade. Statewide elections in South Carolina in 1930 largely centered on the issue. Several newspapers took up the effort, disseminating information about successful public-­ power projects in Los Angeles and Ontario. Richard Meares renewed his work on public power’s behalf by pressuring gubernatorial candidates and lobbying state legislators. These efforts seemed to pay off when the South Carolina General Assembly created the Power Rate Investigating Committee in 1931. Although the committee stopped short of creating a public works program for hydropower cultivation and farm modernization, its work spurred the new governor, Ibra Blackwood, to action—if only because he believed the initiative would please constituents by creating jobs. Blackwood signed legislation in February 1932 that promoted statewide rural electrification, unleashing a wave of requests for the new service. By year’s end over one hundred rural South Carolina communities had submitted petitions for the new service and began pushing the state to develop the Santee-­Cooper River system for cheap hydroelectricity. Encouraging as it might have been, the program had limitations. As originally conceived, only farms near state roads would receive electricity, restricting power recipients to about eleven thousand customers.10 North Carolina farmers in concert with the State Grange forced rural elecA N E W P OW E R E R A

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trification to the top of state political priorities in 1931. Led by W. Kerr Scott, the Grange insisted that farmers immediately needed electricity and, like counterparts in South Carolina, that the program would create desperately needed jobs. Pressure from rural people and their allies, notably Clarence Poe of the influential magazine Progressive Farmer, led the state government to commission surveys evaluating farm life and electricity markets. Even as the reports confirmed that rural life was decidedly premodern—almost universally lacking indoor plumbing, running water, and refrigeration—and would see vast improvements with electrification, the legislature declined to act.11 Publicly administered modernization projects were slow to appear in the South (as was the case for much of the rest of the nation), but demand for hydroelectricity and rural electrification showed that southerners would not wait for modernity to be given to them. The perceived need for public power in the late 1920s and early 1930s extended well past state-­level solutions in the South. National figures cried foul over what they believed were egregious power industry abuses. In public speaking engagements and a range of publications, activists denounced hydropower’s concentration, and thus rural electrification’s scarcity, in the hands of an increasingly few holding companies. As the labor activist H. S. Raushenbusch pointed out in 1929, just seventeen holding companies controlled nearly 86 percent of American power generation.12 This situation, he wrote in the previous year, had “brought a very real threat of new dynastic control over us through the economic and political mastery exercised by the feudalism of superpower.” “A rather complete system of public control” over the power business at the federal level, Raushenbusch argued, had now become necessary.13 Though few openly agreed with Raushenbusch’s call for complete government ownership, many actors nevertheless pushed for more federal involvement. Still chief among them was Senator George Norris. Norris revived his Muscle Shoals fight in the Senate in 1928, only to meet with President Herbert Hoover’s obstruction. Perhaps even more significantly, Norris and his colleagues prodded the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the utility industry for its public relations practices, a probe that exposed widespread propaganda efforts and forced the power issue to the forefront of state and national elections in 1928, 1930, and 1932.14 What FTC uncovered after a multiyear inquiry, in the words of New York governor Franklin Roosevelt during his 1932 campaign for the presidency, was “a systematic, subtle, deliberate, and unprincipled campaign of misinformation” to propagandize the public as to the virtues of supposedly unfettered capitalism.15 Making matters worse for the utility industry, many people laid blame for the 1929 stock market crash, to say nothing of the Depression, at the feet of the byzantine, interlocking utility holding company network. Several of the largest such firms lost as much as 98 percent of their severely bloated equities 112

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values, a catastrophe, according to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, which stood as one of the crash’s five primary causes.16 For candidate Roosevelt in 1932, words, investigations, and blame had proven insufficient to correct the electric industry’s misdeeds. There must be action. The public’s right, he said, to own their rivers and manage their power systems must amount to more than Senator Norris’s “yardstick.” Roosevelt said in a 1932 campaign speech that public power should be “a ‘birch rod’ in the cupboard to be taken out and used only when the ‘child’ gets beyond the point where a mere scolding does no good.” Those who would realize the most benefit from the spanking Roosevelt meant to deal to hydropower cartels were the masses, both rural and urban; and the people would be vital to maintaining a new disciplinary regime, one that would not end with corporal punishment. Roosevelt promised voters that once he assumed office, their vigilance would ensure “that this ‘lusty younger child’ of the United States [would] be kept very closely under the watchful eye of its parent, the people.” Such a tightly controlled environment had become necessary, he stated, because “electricity is no longer a luxury. It is a definite necessity. It lights our homes, our places of work and our streets. It turns the wheels of most of our transportation and our factories. . . . It can relieve the drudgery of the housewife and lift the great burden off the shoulders of the hardworking farmer.” For many people this image was more aspiration then reality, he admitted. It was for reasons such as these that he frequently spoke of a “New Deal,” one that could “be applied very definitely to the relationship between the electric utilities on the one side, and the consumer and investor on the other.” It was a deal that would ensure that “water power [would] belong to all the people.”17 Though he delivered this speech to an audience in the Pacific Northwest, Roosevelt had more immediate aims for hydropower cultivation in another region. If the 1920s had been a roaring time for electric utilities and their holding companies, the 1930s promised very different outcomes. Despite the glitzy image of labor-­saving consumer goods, the help of Reddy Kilowatt, and even the promise of a neo-­antebellum utopia, southerners would no longer be distracted in their quest for power and, presumably, would have an ally in the White House. Soon after his inauguration in 1933, the new president and his Republican ally Senator Norris aimed to realize a long-­held dream: They would begin to transform the South by creating the Tennessee Valley Authority—signed into law in May 1933—based at Muscle Shoals, Alabama.18 *   *   * Public power saw a dramatic upswing with the Depression, and the New Dealers’ electoral success confirmed that public solutions enjoyed widespread A N E W P OW E R E R A

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sympathy. Roosevelt’s pledge to put water under the people’s authority seemed to satisfy the demands of the southern masses who had long tried to put power-­ producing rivers and electrical networks in public hands. With the implementation of TVA and other New Deal programs in the South, massive changes in the region were soon to follow. In addition to answering regional planners’ calls for water conservation, soil restoration, reforestation, flood control, and industrial diversification, TVA set important precedents for broad-­based electrification by partnering with co-­ops.19 Yet for the area outside the Tennessee River Valley— essentially all of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, as well as the majority of Alabama and Mississippi—the TVA offered only a potential model for electrifying the masses. Many rural southerners, and many farmers across the nation, would have to continue to work, in an adaptation of a compelling phrase, to make their own new deal.20 Rural southerners were not grateful supplicants who would wait patiently for saviors from Washington to offer them enviro-­technological salvation. Rather, like their counterparts in and around the Rocky Mountains, southerners “eagerly called the federal government’s attention to their areas, voluntarily applied for federal loans for rural electrification, and counteracted local opposition to the New Deal.”21 Devastated by the Depression, southern farmers had to persist in their fight to build rural electrification networks and to rearrange the flow of hydraulic resources in order to bring power to the masses and regenerate Dixie in ways that served their needs. Nevertheless, the TVA model gave many southerners reason to anticipate the arrival of an extensive rural electrification program. TVA’s architects explicitly included farm modernization in the agency’s structure. In fact the TVA Act of 1933 not only reinforced the “preference” principle—a standard dating to the 1906 Reclamation Act, which held that public establishments had priority in the disposal of government generated hydroelectricity—it went a step further by including in the list of preferred institutions “cooperative organizations of citizens or farmers [organized] for the purpose of supplying electricity to its own citizens or members.” Beyond allowing cooperatives the first right of refusal for federal waterpower, the TVA Act explicitly sought “to promote and encourage the fullest possible use of electric light and power on farms within reasonable distance of any of [TVA’s] transmission lines” and granted the new agency the “power to construct transmission lines to farms and small villages that are not otherwise supplied with electricity at reasonable rates.”22 Soon after the celebration in Tupelo, the people of Corinth, in Alcorn County, Mississippi, became the first to jump at TVA’s rural electrification possibilities. Prior to 1933 only about 100 homes and shops in the town of 6,200 drew electric power from a small coal-­fired generating plant owned and operated by the Mis114

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Figure 5.1 Tennessee Valley Authority, Tennessee Valley Area: Pictorial Map, 1939. Credit: Library of Congress Geography and Maps Division.

sissippi Power Company, a subsidiary of C&S. Fewer than one in 100 farms in all Alcorn County, and indeed all of Mississippi, had electricity in 1933. Corinthians were eager for a change. In January 1934 a local furniture store owner welcomed county leaders and David Lilienthal into his shop where the great “Corinth Experiment” began. Flush with a $154,000 TVA loan, locals led the way in forming the Alcorn County Electric Cooperative. By June 1934 Alcorn County Electric had bought out Mississippi Power (with the strategic blessing of C&S’s CEO, Wendell Willkie), electrified several farms, and began drawing hydroelectricity from TVA transmission lines. The Corinth Experiment was an unmitigated success. Even in a severely depressed section of the severely depressed South, Mississippi’s first federally sponsored rural cooperative earned enough gross revenue in its first six months to estimate that it could fully repay TVA in only one-­third of the original loan’s projected length.23 Alcorn served as a blueprint for rural people in the rest of the Tennessee Valley. In South-­Central Tennessee, farmers from four counties formed the Duck River Electric Membership Corporation with plans to build almost 400 miles of transmission lines that would serve 1,687 customers. In East Tennessee local peoA N E W P OW E R E R A

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ple, led by former University of Tennessee football star Fred Moses, formed the Norris Rural Electric Membership Corporation to help over 700 farm families make “progress in their fight to secure the benefits that cheap power can bring.”24 By 1937 TVA worked with local people to establish eighteen other cooperatives in its territory and electrified farms at a rate twice the national average.25 Inspiring as it doubtlessly was for many rural southerners, the Corinth Experiment was not easily transportable beyond the Tennessee Valley’s confines. Locked into a limited territory, TVA could only go so far in helping farmers and other rural residents across Dixie gain access to the power flowing through its rivers. But the obstacles to a region-­wide, publicly administered rural electrification program did not result strictly from geographical limitations or technological shortcomings; TVA’s designers estimated that powerlines could stretch more than 200 miles from Muscle Shoals. Rather, TVA’s limitations sprang largely from corporate and political opposition. Much of the resistance to the expansion of government power networks was, as it had long been, discursive. Not surprisingly New Deal detractors in Congress savaged TVA as a scheme “patterned clearly after one of the Soviet dreams” and as “an attempt to graft onto the American system the Russian idea.”26 For their part southern utility officials denounced TVA as a malignant arm of a now overly aggressive, anticapitalist federal government, combining the red menace with white southerners’ deepest fears. According to TEPCO executives, TVA used “propaganda of every nature” in its effort to “create . . . a spirit of dissatisfaction for private enterprise.”27 In response to a North Georgia cooperative’s attempt to purchase TVA power, a Georgia Power representative claimed that “the Tennessee Valley Authority invaded this State” to destroy private enterprise.28 Here was yet another opportunity to drag race—and along with it socialism—into the public-­power issue by likening the New Deal’s incursion into the Tennessee Valley (and possibly beyond) to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Perhaps as much as any previous period, it seemed an opportune time to do so. Substantial minorities of southerners—business leaders not least among them—worried from its beginning that the New Deal would upend the region’s racial order and, along with it, its “racialized capitalism.” A prominent spokesman was the “Wild Man from Sugar Creek,” Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, who through much of the 1930s crusaded against “Negroes, the New Deal, . . . and Karl Marx” with campaign coffers that businessmen had discretely stuffed. Talmadge raged that this topsy-­turvy racial situation, which would invite the dreaded thought of “social equality” to Dixie, would emanate directly from the White House. Not only did the president welcome African Americans as advisers and friends, but the first lady, Talmadge reported, at least once went to “some nigger meeting, with two escorts, niggers, on each arm.” South Carolina 116

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Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith and his proxies filed their agreement with Talmadge’s viewpoint when they accused New Dealers of being members of the “Roosevelt-­ Nigger Democratic Party” and warned that federal programs would soon lead to the day when “negroes will be allowed to propose wedlock to white girls.”29 Georgia Power’s Preston Arkwright concurred by suggesting that TVA would be a replay of past horrors. He warned the white South that TVA would replicate the ravages visited on Dixie in the 1860s and 1870s. In one speaking engagement he played on raw memories of the Civil War when he told his fellow Georgians that TVA had forced Americans to contemplate yet another “irrepressible conflict” as “we are [now] half individualist and half collectivist.”30 In a 1937 speech in Augusta, Georgia, Arkwright drew even more explicit comparisons. Just as General Sherman began his infamous “March to the Sea” near Chattanooga in the Tennessee River Valley, Arkwright claimed, so would TVA eventually cut through the heart of Georgia. Following this new federal invasion, Reconstruction’s supposed horrors would once more plague the South with racial equality. After TVA had overtaken Georgia, Arkwright predicted, it would dole out patronage jobs to African American men and create a situation in which “Negro meter-­readers will visit the homes of farmers who have to leave their wives and children while they go to plow.”31 With his invocation of TVA as a federal “menace” that would implicitly invite black men to sexually assault white women, Arkwright tapped into the broader anti–New Deal narrative in the South, helping to forge a lasting connection between “race-­baiting populists and right-­wing industrialists.”32 That coalition remained relatively weak—at least until the modern civil rights era—and clear majorities of southern voters continued to support Roosevelt and his New Deal throughout the 1930s in spite of appeals to racism. In any case, TVA’s early days provided evidence for whites that the agency would uphold, if not extend, discriminatory racial practices—as powerful southern congressional delegations intended. According to a Tennessee minister in 1934, TVA dam construction sites in Tennessee and Alabama employed far too few black men, and those who did secure jobs worked mostly as unskilled labor in clearing sites for future reservoirs. Worse still, TVA’s promised model towns, equipped with a range of modern amenities, would be completely closed off to African Americans, as would education and job training programs.33 In addition to maintaining Jim Crow, TVA land acquisition and clearing projects were far more likely to evict, or underpay for relocation, black families than white.34 Even if they could not persuade the southern masses that federal power programs would disturb Dixie’s dearly held racial hierarchy and free enterprise system, private utilities tried other means to foil TVA’s expansion. At times such confrontations took ugly, nearly violent turns. In a 1936 legal battle involving A N E W P OW E R E R A

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TVA, TEPCO, and Georgia Power, both local witnesses and TVA officials testified that the “Georgia Power Company deliberately sabotaged [the] effort” to connect co-­ops to TVA through new transmission lines. Initially, Georgia Power representatives reportedly “swarmed through the region making false and misleading statements about the nature of the cooperative undertaking and tried to frighten the farmers from joining” co-­ops. Later, just as cooperatives began stringing wires across the countryside, Georgia Power crews quickly installed “spite lines” in areas locals had targeted for their first publicly owned transmission facilities. In TEPCO’s territory too, according to an East Tennessee farmer, the company allegedly “zig-­zagged their poles along both sides of the road . . . compelling us in many instances to run our lines through fields. That meant getting easements, and it slowed us down.”35 Because state laws and TVA policy prohibited the construction of duplicate powerlines, spite lines prevented the co-­ ops, at least temporarily, from completing their work. Presumably many rural southerners strongly opposed such treachery and filed complaints through the proper legal channels. At least one woman decided to take matters into her own hands. Upon seeing a Georgia Power crew preparing to build a spite line on her property, Mrs. A. M. Tate loaded her rifle. After approaching the workers and issuing a stern warning, “she waved her gun and a lineman scurried down the trunk” of the tree in which he had been working. “Another who had been standing at the foot of the big hickory hopped over a fence [and dashed] out of the yard.” People in Tennessee reported similar confrontations.36 Eventually, people in North Georgia and East Tennessee formed co-­ops, becoming (and remaining) TVA customers, but the message was clear: determined as rural people were to benefit from public power, rural electrification via the TVA would not come easily. Accusations of socialism and underhanded tactics failed to shoo rural southerners away from the promises inherent in the New Deal’s crowning public-­ power accomplishment. Negotiations over TVA’s physical extent, though, proved rather effective at keeping southern farmers in the dark, at least in the short term. Less than one month after Roosevelt signed the TVA bill into law, C&S’s chief executive Wendell Willkie arranged to meet with Arthur Morgan, FDR’s first appointee to TVA’s three-­person directorate. As a devoted regional planner and educator, Morgan was most interested in holistically reconstructing the Tennessee Valley; he considered power production a decidedly secondary by-­product of water conservation. As such Willkie had a counterpart with whom he could bargain. The two quickly agreed that competing power networks were wasteful and that TVA’s hydropower should be limited to a single area whose farms and towns would most directly benefit from electricity. For his part David Lilienthal insisted that TVA’s operating area should face no 118

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such restrictions. For Lilienthal not only should Northeast Mississippi, Northwest Alabama, North Georgia, and East Tennessee fall within TVA’s bounds; essentially all of Tennessee as well as at least one major city should become part of TVA’s territory.37 Lilienthal’s metropolitan designs were far from fanciful entries on a public-­power wish list. Atlanta Mayor James Key and the Atlanta City Council jointly approved an ultimately toothless measure that would link Norris Dam (originally Cove Creek, named for Senator George Norris) directly to their city so that “consumers could obtain electric service at a much lower figure than under the present system of private distribution.”38 Dozens of southern towns and cities of varying size made similar applications. If such proposals became reality, a network of TVA powerlines would extend from federal dams, creating a competing public system of electrical generation, transmission, and distribution across much of the South. Fortunately for private power Willkie held a high card in this game. As of 1934 C&S’s subsidiaries purchased and distributed essentially all TVA hydroelectric energy and were thus its only significant customers. Absent the quickly realized revenues needed to recover the enormous capital sums the federal government had invested in its new regional planning agency, TVA might perish in its infancy. Willkie and Lilienthal thus inked a new contract by February 1934. C&S would sell its admittedly paltry northeastern Mississippi, northwestern Alabama, and northeastern Tennessee holdings to TVA. For its part TVA would continue to sell large blocks of wholesale power to C&S and would attempt no territorial expansions before the completion of Norris Dam in 1936. Aside from TVA’s purchase of all TEPCO properties for nearly $80 million in 1939, TVA never significantly breached the borders agreed to in the February 1934 pact.39 At least in terms of territory, TVA’s ability to bring rural electrification to the broader South faced serious limitations. Southerners would have to seek out other solutions. *   *   * President Roosevelt originally showed little interest in a rural electrification program outside of TVA’s limited domain. Despite private power’s fears of an inexorable federal invasion, and public power’s hopes for more extensive government power networks, it seemed the New Deal would not quickly modernize Dixie’s vast rural areas. It took the efforts of a broad coalition of Americans to form an agency dedicated to that task. As much as any other individual, Pennsylvania’s Morris Cooke proved central to the process. Since his days on the Giant Power board, Cooke believed that widespread rural electrification was a vital part of country life’s recovery. With the TVA’s establishment, he claimed, a rural electrification program would not be far behind. Cooke met with and sent letters and reports to everyone of consequence in Washington from 1933 to 1935 in A N E W P OW E R E R A

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his attempt to establish an independent rural electrification bureau, but experienced only frustration. Snubbed at every turn for more than a year, Cooke finally grabbed Roosevelt’s attention with a report encased in a red-­and-­black striped cover. Cooke’s “zebra report” caught the president’s eye because—in addition to its flashy binding—it made the case for the revolutionary changes that a publicly administered rural electrification program would bring to farmers’ lives. Of course, Cooke did not work alone. Members of the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Grange had resolved at their annual meetings in 1934 to press for federal action on rural electrification, and the Farm Bureau’s president personally appealed to FDR. Finally, convinced by Cooke’s persistence and pressured by “the growing militance of the rural population for assistance in their efforts to modernize home life,” Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7037 in May 1935, establishing the Rural Electrification Administration with a $100 million budget.40 Joyous as many people undoubtedly were, REA’s status as a temporary agency did not settle the question of rural electrification. Few farms benefited from the program in REA’s first year. This poor showing only prompted more questions: How would the agency organize its operations? How would REA go about actually delivering power to rural districts? For Cooke, REA’s first administrator and no radical in the Raushenbusch mold, the obvious first answer was to cooperate with and offer loans to private-­power companies, which already had the wherewithal to build transmission lines and distribution systems in rural districts. But only three months after REA’s establishment, Congress passed the Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA) of 1935. Also known as the Wheeler-­Rayburn Act, the PUHCA ordered holding companies to demonstrate compelling economic and geographical reasoning behind their ownership structures or face being broken up.41 C&S’s Willkie emerged as perhaps the most forceful opponent of the PUHCA—and gained national acclaim as an ardent defender of free enterprise—arguing that the law amounted to a backdoor method for New Dealers to realize “government ownership,” a veritable death sentence for private utilities.42 Any hopes for an easy agreement on implementing REA’s mission quickly evaporated. Compromise no longer seemed possible. Cooke realized that the only means to achieve broad-­based rural electrification was the cooperative association. Like many other technocrats, Cooke initially placed little faith in the inexperienced and impoverished farmers who would establish and operate the nation’s REA co-­ops, but the Corinthian Experiment’s triumph, along with encouragement from individual farmers and the American Farm Bureau, persuaded him that the cooperative idea could work. Cooke’s newfound confidence in co-­ops only increased when Senator Norris advised him that REA would succeed if it became a permanent agency with a steady 120

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budget as well as a staff of engineers, county agents, and other personnel to support local people.43 REA finally became a permanent agency in July 1936, but the problems associated with its establishment were woven into REA’s very fabric. There would be no overarching organizations rolling through the countryside granting people a modern, electrified life. Rural people would have to do that on their own. In the words of an REA official working in the South in 1936, “as for the government’s part . . . it serves merely as a medium and is willing to lend money to the cooperative group to do the work.”44 Undeterred by the requirement to do the work of rural electrification for themselves, southerners outside the Tennessee Valley quickly began forming electric cooperatives after REA’s establishment. Their stories speak both to obstacles and to rural people’s eagerness for publicly controlled electrification projects. Residents of Cullman County, Alabama, who had lost patience with Alabama Power’s apparent unwillingness to electrify their area were among the first to act. In April 1936 fourteen farmers formed the Cullman County Electric Cooperative. By 1942 Alabama had twenty-­two cooperatives.45 In Arkansas too local people began forming cooperatives shortly after REA’s foundation, ultimately creating eighteen across the state. Arkansans had a somewhat more difficult time than Alabamans. Not only did the dominant utility, Arkansas Power & Light, resist rural electrification; it ran interference through spite lines, public relations campaigns, and lobbying efforts in the state legislature. In both Alabama’s and Arkansas’s cases, co-­op leaders worked to further their interests by combining individual co-­ops into statewide associations, the Alabama Rural Electric Association and the Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation, that represented rural people in legislatures and courts.46 Individual accounts add depth to stories of difficulties and determination. In North Carolina, according to a farmer named Alvin Morrison from Iredell County, several problems stood in the way of rural electrification, despite the foundation of REA. Aside from widespread poverty, poor farmers who favored public electricity faced opposition from their wealthier counterparts who preferred to work with the Duke Power Company (formerly Southern Power). When Duke Power informed residents of Iredell and Davie Counties that its rural electrification program would serve only part of their area, Morrison and more than a dozen other farmers formed the Davie Electric Membership Corporation and quickly began wiring rural homes. For Morrison the decision to work with REA was easy. “I signed right up,” he recalled.47 Farmers in Georgia faced and overcame complications as well. “We had been in a state of starvation, oh from about 19 and 30 [1930] until 1935,” said Valene Bennett, a resident of the South Georgia town of Alma. “So, we figured getting electricity on the farm would sure help us recover from the Depression.” After A N E W P OW E R E R A

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Figure 5.2 Marion Post Wolcott, REA (Rural Electrification Administration) Line Going to a Home in Caswell County, North Carolina, 1940. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-­USF34–055951-­D.

REA’s creation Bennett drove to countless farms in nine Southeast Georgia counties to lobby for the creation of what would become the Satilla Electric Membership Corporation. “Our job of signing up farmers wasn’t easy,” according to Bennett. The trouble sprang not from a lack of interest, but that few South Georgians could spare the required registration payment. When approached about registering for service, people would often “shuffle around and all [in embarrassment]—you know, some of them didn’t have $5 to their name.” Yet many quickly accepted Bennett’s offer to lend them the enrollment fee. “I loaned a lot of fellas” the cash, he laughed. Regardless of the financial obstacles, it became clear that people across rural Georgia believed that living an electrified life would be worth the struggle.48 By 1939’s end rural Georgians like Bennett had scraped together thirty-­five electric membership corporations and chartered seven more by 1948. Among Georgia’s most consequential co-­ops was the Planters Electric Membership Corporation, led by Walter Harrison. Originally called the New Deal Power Association when it was incorporated in August 1936, Planters established its headquarters in Millen, Georgia (about fifty miles south of Augusta), and conducted operations in seven counties located in the Savannah River basin.49 Alongside 122

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Figure 5.3 Electrified leisure time in the rural southern home. Jack Delano, Mr. and Mrs. L. Smith and Their Younger Children in Their Home on Their Farm, Carroll County, GA, 1941. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-­USF34–043862-­D.

many other rural Georgians, people like Bennett and Harrison helped bring co-­ ops together with the foundation of the Georgia Electric Membership Corporation (GEMC) in 1937. Like the Alabama Rural Electric Association, the Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation, and similar organizations in the Carolinas, GEMC was a statewide organization that represented the interests of Georgia’s electric cooperatives and aimed overall to ensure a steady supply of “electric energy to persons in rural areas.”50 The efforts of GEMC and similar organizations across the region involved more than just bringing electricity to the farm—though many relished the improved lifestyle it provided. Many rural people in the South were concerned that even if their homes received electricity thanks to REA loans, the (fuel, production, and transmission of) power would still rest in private utilities’ hands. The quest to seek energy sources of their own would push them into a series of conflicts over who—the public or the private realm—would furnish farms with electricity and exercise control over the South’s rivers. These fights generally remained localized affairs, but one skirmish over hydropower rights would have far-­reaching national implications. A N E W P OW E R E R A

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*   *   * Well into the 1930s, despite REA’s foundation and private utilities’ pledges to deliver wholesale power to the countryside, many rural people experienced difficulties in drawing adequate amounts of electricity, regardless of who controlled the supply. Unlike cooperatives in Tennessee and northern Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, which could rely on TVA power, co-­ops outside the Tennessee River Valley believed that if their projects were to survive, they needed to provide electric energy for themselves. They believed that goal could be accomplished only if they worked to wholly separate themselves from the private-­power system. Senator Norris encouraged that hope when he argued that REA, through co-­ops and new multipurpose dam projects, should evolve to become a series of little TVAs across the United States.51 Norris specified no particular sources for the nation’s rural electrical supply, but developments in 1930s Georgia and South Carolina gave co-­ops cause for optimism. Little TVAs of their own—rural modernization projects rooted in public ownership of power producing rivers— seemed to be within reach. One of those sources of hope involved the Santee and Cooper Rivers in the South Carolina low country. Rice planters had manipulated the Santee-­Cooper system since the late 1700s through swamp drainage and canal construction— both accomplished largely with slave labor—for improved commerce and inland navigation. By the twentieth century water had reclaimed much of the territory in Old St. John’s Parrish (parts of Berkeley, Clarendon, and Orangeburg Counties since the late nineteenth century), but the area still served as productive land for agriculture, timber cultivation, and hunting. New South–style thinking in the 1920s, however, cast Old St. John’s as a place ripe for modernization. A consortium of local business people and New York engineers thus proposed a plan in 1926 that would divert the Santee River into the Cooper, creating two reservoirs covering some 200,000 acres and a 100-­mile shipping lane linking Columbia and Charleston. Aside from improvements in navigation, industrial development, swamp drainage, and flood control, Santee-­Cooper would produce an abundance of hydroelectricity.52 The Great Depression killed the original designs for Santee-­Cooper but local desires for rural modernization attempted to bring it back to life. In 1934 a small group of farmers and politicians from across the state went to Washington and petitioned the Public Works Administration (PWA), led by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, for money to build the Santee-­Cooper complex. They sold it as a little TVA: Santee-­Cooper would control flooding, improve navigation, eliminate malaria, rehabilitate farmland, lure industry, and of course generate hydropower. It was not an easy sell, though. Ickes at first proved reluctant to release funds 124

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and the project faced resistance from wildlife conservationists and local preservationists who, like Helen Dortch Longstreet at Tallulah Falls, valued Old St. John’s as a relic of Old South virtue. Private-­power companies in South Carolina encumbered Santee-­Cooper in court for three years, arguing that, because the plan included condemnation of several local distribution systems, it represented property confiscation by an overweening state.53 Despite these obstacles South Carolina’s co-­ops realized their own little TVA in late 1935 when Harry Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration, which would fund the land-­clearing labor, partnered with PWA, which would fund reservoir and dam construction, to greenlight the project. Upon Santee-­Cooper’s completion REA cooperatives immediately benefited. The Horry County co-­op, for example, served over 3,300 customers and turned a profit of $35,000 in the system’s first full year of operation. Yet even though it was built with federal funds, the low country’s little valley authority faced limitations. Administered by the South Carolina Public Works Authority, Santee-­Cooper remained a state-­level institution.54 The 1930s South saw other, similarly limited state-­level proposals, such as the ultimately failed Arkansas Valley Authority, which aimed to cultivate the Arkansas, Ouachita, Red, St. Francis, and White Rivers for broad-­based social improvement.55 Although the examples in both Arkansas and South Carolina represented significant strides toward water-­based independence for rural co-­ ops, they had few of the broader regional and national implications that Norris had imagined. It was the potential development of a site on the Savannah River, however, that pushed the struggle for hydropower control into a much more consequential arena. In 1935 Congress published a US Army Corps of Engineers report on the Savannah, which forms the Georgia–South Carolina border. Though the report insisted that the installation of multiple-­purpose dams and reservoirs at eighteen different sites on the Savannah would bring improvements to the area, it recommended no immediate action and no hydroelectric developments. Local actors in Georgia and South Carolina, led by Augusta Chamber of Commerce secretary Lester Moody, saw things differently. Rural people from both states, Moody claimed, urgently needed the Savannah’s power. In particular, the construction of a federal reservoir and dam at a site called Clarks Hill (about twenty miles north of Augusta) “would bring to the people of Eastern Georgia and Western Carolina enormous benefits.”56 Following a new, more favorable study of the possibilities for Clarks Hill in 1936, groups of Georgians and South Carolinians, including senators, congressmen, business leaders, and co-­op members, pressured Congress and the White House to act. In addition to being a site, in Moody’s estimation, that could “generate more power than any other hydro-­electric development east of the Mississippi River except Niagara Falls,” Clarks Hill would A N E W P OW E R E R A

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afford a large area all the benefits that TVA had granted to the Tennessee Valley.57 Percy Thomas, southeastern regional director for the Federal Power Commission (FPC), agreed, saying Clarks Hill was “a sound multiple-­purpose project (navigation, flood control, power development, sanitation, and recreation)” that would extend well beyond the Savannah River basin to much of Georgia, the Carolinas, and even Alabama.58 Southerners hungry for a power source they could call their own saw in Clarks Hill not only the possibility for public control over the water, but a project that could span, and link public power across, large swaths of the Southeast. Surprisingly, Georgia Power and its subsidiary Savannah River Electric— which until 1932 held a federal license to develop Clarks Hill and still owned thousands of acres at the site—offered no overt resistance to public-­power plans for the Savannah River. In fact Moody reported that Arkwright personally offered “his co-­operation and added that his company would be interested in purchasing [any excess] power” from Clarks Hill.59 And from Arkwright’s viewpoint, why not cede the river’s development to the federal government? The Great Depression had prevented Georgia Power from constructing any new dams, Clarks Hill included, since 1929. Moreover, no comprehensive federal transmission system program (and thus no TVA-­style federal invasion) seemed to be in the works for the broader South. With continued control over powerlines, power remained firmly in private utilities’ hands.60 In any case in the near term it mattered little: congressional reluctance to create any new valley authorities, followed shortly by the onset of another world war, prevented the beginning of any federal reservoir and dam construction on the Savannah River until the late 1940s.61 Yet while Arkwright professed a willingness to partner with public power on the Savannah, Georgia Power’s actions suggested that his utility desired to steer matters in another direction. Co-­optation of federal resources, rather than cooperation with Georgia’s farmers, seemed to be the goal. From REA’s first days of existence, Arkwright readily agreed to deal with rural co-­ops.62 Here was a new market—always welcomed, especially in a decade of economic disaster—his company could capture with essentially no investment; all financial risk would fall to cooperatives and REA. This proved to be a theme across the South. An editorial in Mississippi’s Jackson Daily News encouraged co-­ops to “go ahead with REA” because the farms it helped wire would be a new—and containable—market ripe for service by private power’s generating plants, not socialistic enterprises like TVA.63 TEPCO likewise claimed to favor REA’s work because it would mean not just lights but “the complete electrification of the farm and home as rapidly as is possible.” In addition to production equipment the farmer’s home would be filled with an array of appliances, including an iron, a waffle iron, a refrigerator, a dishwasher, a fan, a radio, a space heater, a sewing machine, a 126

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washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, and even an air conditioner—all driven by the power of “private enterprise.”64 For its part Georgia Power readily exploited the opportunity afforded by the REA. By 1938’s end the utility provided about 93 percent of wholesale electricity to Georgia’s co-­ops.65 A steadily expanding customer base drawing energy from private-­power sources, along with an Army Corps of Engineers facility at Clarks Hill feeding a private transmission system, would amount to a federal subsidy that promised to become only more generous in the future. Private power had shifted its strategy from appropriation of public power’s message to one that clearly included appropriation of public resources. Certainly co-­optation and subsidies would help thicken the bottom line. But this move concerned matters far more significant than increased profits. Georgia Power’s motivation, shared with private utilities in the region and across the nation, was, at least in large part, to prevent REA and its co-­ops from becoming an independent, competing public-­power complex, a network that through federal authority would finally make real the long-­pursued dream of farm modernization based in hydroelectricity. That trend was already under way in parts of the South. By the mid-­1930s local people in Arkansas, North Carolina, and South Carolina pursued aggressive rural electrification plans based on publicly controlled waterpower.66 Through state power, public ownership activists across Dixie seemed to be gaining ground in the war for control over rivers. A holding company executive admitted as much when he warned his fellow utility executives that they must not permit “government ‘yardsticks’ to be established in every section of the country.”67 If Georgia Power could stop the creation of a potential TVA-­style yardstick in its own backyard, if it could compartmentalize Clarks Hill and other potential Corps projects by interposing itself between public dams and public-­power co-­ops, it could drain New Deal infrastructure of any real public component and maintain the private realm’s nearly exclusive right to deliver power to the southern masses and southern farmers. *   *   * Wendell Willkie resigned in July 1940. Instead of continuing as C&S’s CEO, he would be the Republican candidate for president and challenge Roosevelt for the nation’s highest office. The presidential election of 1940 would bring the public–private power debate to the forefront of American politics, serving as a fitting conclusion to the previous two decades of struggles for control over water, power, and rural modernization in the South. Hints had already begun to swirl as early as January 1938 that Willkie, who had garnered a national reputation as a silver-­tongued orator and sharp-­witted debater, could successfully unseat FDR. In the summer of 1940 Republican Party A N E W P OW E R E R A

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hierarchs chose the CEO of an electric utilities holding company—not a traditional party standard bearer—to do so. In his hometown of Elwood, Indiana, in August 1940, Willkie delivered his informal acceptance speech for the GOP’s nomination and outlined the political philosophy that he—a self-­described former “liberal Democrat”—would preach throughout his campaign. That viewpoint, he informed the crowd, was rooted in the belief that he must work for the “preservation of American democracy” and resist the threats posed by the “tyrannies” and “totalitarian powers” devastating Europe and East Asia. Much of Willkie’s talk focused on Nazi aggressions, but he linked Hitler’s war to issues back home. The reason the Germans had “crushed France like an eggshell” was that, despite abundant natural resources and battle-­tested courage, French leaders had forsaken freedom and democracy in favor of “unfruitful political adventures and flimsy economic theories.” The same fate, Willkie averred, would befall the United States if the New Deal continued: “This course will lead us to economic disintegration and dictatorship.” For his part, Willkie chose to “stand for the restoration of . . . private enterprise in America.”68 Of course the election was not simply a referendum on programs like TVA or REA. Yet in late 1940, at least according to the former CEO, America stood at a crossroad and faced a crucial, if simple, choice. Would the government continue to power the nation’s quest for prosperity and freedom or would free enterprise reign once again? Willkie’s proposition obscured the complex history that underlay the long-­running public–private dispute. TVA and REA were not simply “political adventures and flimsy economic theories,” or even “high modernist” triumphs shoved down a benighted populace’s throat.69 Ordinary southerners and their more prominent allies had worked for two decades for control over rivers, rural electrification, and a New South that served their needs. They ushered in a new power era in the face of dogged resistance from the private utility industry—an industry that clawed to preserve its state-­backed monopoly status and worked to covert the emerging public-­power edifice into a federal subsidy pipeline. Regardless, Willkie enjoyed slightly more electoral success than his Republican predecessors in 1932 and 1936 but lost the 1940 election to FDR in an unmitigated landslide. Yet neither the clear election results nor the United States’ entry into the Second World War brought the public–private fight over southern rivers and power to conclusion. Although southern utility managers had initiated plans as early as 1938 to transition away from a waterscape increasingly controlled by the federal government—and back toward coal—the mounting strength and ambitions of a hydro-­based public-­power coalition during and after the war years prompted reconsideration. The ongoing rift between those who favored public

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dams and those who supported private power stretched well into the 1950s with critical implications for how—and what kind of—electric energy reached the masses, rural or otherwise.

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6

Public Dams, Private Power

In a June 1953 letter to the US Department of the Interior (DOI), John Chambless, a GEMC representative, condemned Georgia Power’s plans for the US Army Corps of Engineers’ recently completed Clarks Hill dam on the Savannah River. According to Chambless, Georgia Power had proposed a plutocratic scheme for seizing every kilowatt generated at the dam. Chambless feared that if DOI sided with Georgia Power, the utility’s executives, “in their selfishness and greed, would . . . monopolize the Great Hydro Projects developed and built with public funds.” For GEMC’s rural electric cooperatives, Clarks Hill’s hydropower must “belong to the people” and remain part of the New Deal’s management of southern waterscapes in the service of equitably distributing natural wealth and cheap electric power to all.1 Georgia Power executives, who sought ownership of the dam’s output ostensibly to diversify their electrical portfolio, fretted over Clarks Hill as well. While the company’s flamboyant president, Harllee Branch, could reject Chambless’s exclusive claims to Clarks Hill as spurious at best, he also worried that GEMC’s plans portended much graver consequences for the postwar South. In an early iteration of what would gain broad Cold War–era purchase as the “domino theory,” Branch charged that GEMC’s designs contributed to an insidious “socialistic endeavor” that went well “beyond anything the New Dealers and Fair Dealers ever conjured up.”2 If GEMC prevailed at Clarks Hill, Branch feared the result would be not only “the creation of a federal power empire,” 130

but a long step toward the ultimate destruction of American free enterprise as well.3 Both Chambless and Branch, and the institutions they represented, saw the Clarks Hill contest as an extraordinarily high-­stakes affair, signifying much more than a skirmish over a single dam. Their disagreement rehashed core elements of long-­standing New South debates about public versus private control over natural resources and electric power. Yet in the Cold War era these New South–style questions gained even broader import. For GEMC and Georgia Power, as well as for their counterparts across the region and the nation, the postwar United States’ future hung in the balance at Clarks Hill. The brawl at Clarks Hill became a test case for the continuation and potential expansion of water-­based public power across the South. Like the better-­ known struggle for a federal dam on the Idaho-­Oregon-­Washington border at Hells Canyon—a clash that “transcend[ed] hydroelectric history” and offered larger lessons “about the meaning of citizenship in a democracy and the place of nature in our national culture”—the fight over a relatively obscure place on the Savannah River assumed a central position in regional and national questions of nature, energy, the New Deal’s legacy, and the type of society Americans desired for the postwar era.4 There were critical differences, however, between the results at Hells Canyon and at Clarks Hill: Hells Canyon never progressed past the planning stage. Apparently, people in the Northwest favored private dams over public power and “unplugged New Deal hydropower.”5 Southerners, by contrast, saw a markedly different outcome: public dams but private power. That privately controlled power, though, would not originate at dams for long. The fallout at Clarks Hill accelerated a critical energy transition in Dixie. The story of that shift began with a confluence of forces—drought, power shortage, and war—that pushed southern utilities away from hydropower and back toward coal throughout the Second World War. But the return to coal-­fired electricity looked to be temporary. For several years after the war’s conclusion electrical famine driven by coal scarcity reemerged. Accompanied by a suite of other issues, this latest bout of energy shortages threatened the Great Depression’s possible return. The prospects of continued electrical shortfalls, renewed economic disaster, and federal hydropower expansion inspired southern power companies to reconsider waterpower. Yet after a failed attempt in the mid-­1940s to add Clarks Hill to its portfolio, Georgia Power once again changed course and acquiesced to the Army Corps of Engineers’ ownership of and plans for the site. Private power’s goal at Clarks Hill by the early 1950s, despite stated positions to the contrary, was not primarily to gain direct access to a new hydropower source in the interest of maintaining a balanced energy portfolio. Instead, as Chambless worried, southern utilities, armed with a network of potent coal-­fired generatP U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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ing stations and private transmission lines, aimed to absorb the output of public dams into the private-­power system. During the Clarks Hill fight Georgia Power seized the opportunities of the early postwar years and led the South in finally forsaking waterpower, brandishing coal and its transmission-­ network monopoly—along with a heavy dose of Cold War rhetoric—as political weapons to halt the extension of what it perceived as a pernicious ideology. Southern utilities thus “unplugged New Deal hydropower,” but not permanently; they reconnected the New Deal’s hydroelectric machinery to private power’s coal-­based network. Far more than a question of fuel, this move marked the beginning of the end for public power, which, despite the existence of government-­owned coal-­fired generating stations, was firmly anchored in water. The absorption of public waterpower into the private utility network would transform the output of public dams into private power, diluting a New Deal–inspired vision of a socially leveling public-­ hydropower complex. It dramatically boosted New South energy corporations’ long-­standing quest to seize public resources for private profit. It reaffirmed a southern political economy based in state-­ sanctioned, federally-­ subsidized, private monopoly control of nature and power and, moreover, guardianship over the general welfare. The crucible of Clarks Hill helped forge the Sunbelt South. *   *   * Although the 1920s droughts and the rise of a water-­based federal power network had not compelled private southern utilities to abandon rivers by the late 1930s, the return of drought and the onset of the Second World War initiated the process. Conditions in the early 1940s radically altered circumstances for hydropower-­dependent southeastern utilities, threatening to halt electrical generation and industrial production for the war effort. The wartime transition to coal represented a major shift for a region built largely on hydroelectricity. It appeared during the Second World War years that the New South’s promise would once again rest on a foundation of Appalachian coal. Doing their part to contribute to the “Arsenal of Democracy,” southern utilities produced record amounts of electricity—and spearheaded efforts to lure defense factories to Dixie—to stoke industrial production for the war in Europe in 1940 and 1941.6 That demand alone strained their systems. A dearth of precipitation beginning in late 1939 and continuing through late 1941—a drought even worse than the record-­setting 1925 dry spell—nearly crippled their productive capacities. Rainfall by May 1941 in the Southeast had reached only half of average levels, bringing on a “grave emergency.” Without a power-­pooling arrangement that would ship electricity into the South from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Penn132

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sylvania, according to FPC chairman Leland Olds, severe electrical shortages would imperil the war production effort.7 Power company managers expressed serious doubts about their hydropower complex’s ability to continue furnishing energy for the Allied war effort or even for everyday life. Beginning in May 1941 both private southern utilities and TVA appealed to the public’s sense of “patriotic necessity” to voluntarily reduce electrical consumption.8 Months later reservoirs still held far too little water. Fall 1941 headlines warned of a coming “BLACKOUT” and grave language informed readers that “Power Shortage in Southeast [Is] Critical.” Calls for voluntary conservation measures had clearly proven inadequate. Thus in October 1941 the US Office of Production Management (OPM) issued mandatory curtailment orders that prohibited all non–defense related industrial and commercial electrical consumption (private homes were exempt) and required all factories and commercial establishments using more than ten thousand kilowatt-­hours per month to reduce their power usage by 30 percent. A November 1941 Georgia Power public announcement put the matter plainly when it claimed that “unless the withdrawal of water from the reservoirs is stopped, the whole power supply of this area will be endangered. . . . The situation is worse than it was at any time” in history.9 Heavy showers finally fell on the Southeast in the last two months of 1941, restoring reservoirs to adequate storage levels and ending OPM conservation mandates.10 But the damage to hydroelectricity had been done. Even with a sophisticated regional system of interconnected transmission lines that could ship energy to Dixie’s most parched corners, southern utilities could no longer rely on water as the Southeast’s primary fuel source, at least through the remainder of the war. Coal came to the rescue. Whereas hydropower accounted for strong majorities of southeastern kilowatt-­hour production and power plant capacity in 1939, the balance of power abruptly shifted to coal’s favor by 1941. In Georgia and Alabama the hasty construction of several new thermal generating units (at Plants Atkinson and Arkwright in Georgia, Plant Chickasaw in Alabama) made the wartime transition to coal possible. Water’s unreliability formed the basis of the companies’ justification for rushing these power stations into service and for adding five more units by mid-­1943. Preston Arkwright claimed that his utility had to construct coal-­fired generating units “because it is essential that . . . such a plant be able to run day and night every day. A fuel-­plant can do that, whereas a hydro-­electric plant is dependent on rainfall.”11A sympathetic editorial agreed: coal “can always be mined . . . but the genius of man or the power of a government has never broken a drouth.” Absent the new coal-­fired plants, “the recent shortage of power in the southeast, due to low water behind the dams, could have reached a critical stage—a disastrous stage.” Thus because P U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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America enjoyed “inexhaustible deposits of coal,” the United States would realize victory in the war and uninterrupted prosperity afterward.12 Abundance was only one of coal’s purported virtues. Many voices proclaimed that coal-­fired power generation now cost less than hydroelectricity. According to New York Times’ utilities reporter John Callahan, several factors—including construction and financing costs and tax burdens—made hydropower twice as expensive as thermal power.13 A 1941 study by the Twentieth Century Fund likewise found that coal-­fired electrical generation held considerable financial advantages over waterpower, concluding, somewhat more moderately than Callahan, that hydroelectric generation ultimately cost over 50 percent more than steam-­power production.14 Aside from coal plants’ relatively lower capital expenses, proponents argued, technological advances had made coal an increasingly effective fuel.15 Even as hydroelectric facilities still dominated their generating capacities, southern utilities clearly agreed. Whereas in 1939 falling river water accounted for the clear majority of southeastern electrical production, coal-­fired generation had taken the lead by the end of 1941. Coal-­fired generation increased by nearly 185 percent to over 53 percent of Georgia Power’s total output. Alabama Power experienced similar wartime shifts. Coal’s share of Alabama Power’s production in 1941 leapt to nearly half its output, a 129 percent increase over 1939 levels. Changes in the Carolinas were even more dramatic. From 1939 to 1941 the percentage of coal-­fired electricity for Carolina Light and Power increased fifteenfold, and proportions in Duke’s system swung from 48 percent to over 63 percent.16 Although drought subsided by the beginning of 1942, coal’s importance only grew throughout the war years, especially in Georgia and Alabama. From 1939 to 1944 the amount of coal-­fired generation for Georgia Power increased by a stunning 460 percent to account for more than three-­fifths of overall kilowatt-­ hour production. Less intense but striking nevertheless, Alabama Power’s coal-­ based generation increased by 199 percent between 1939 and 1944, representing some half of that utility’s output.17 Environmental conditions and war had combined to transform southern utilities from fundamentally hydroelectric enterprises into entities that more and more translated lumps of black rock into kilowatt hours for wartime industrial production and everyday life. Or so it seemed. *   *   * While drought and wartime demand pushed southeastern utilities to stray from their longtime marriage to hydroelectricity, their affair with coal suffered from its own uncertainties. Much like hydroelectricity in 1941, coal’s ability to help defeat global fascism, much less to secure lasting American prosperity in the postwar years, was far from assured. Energy shortages during and immediately 134

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after the war proved significant in shaping the post–Second World War electric industry, spurring both private-­and public-­power forces to once again look to the water, at places such as Clarks Hill, for a fuel source that would not only sustain the war effort but ensure prosperity afterward. Annual increases in electrical demand for wartime production through mid-­ 1945 gave utilities in Dixie and across the nation reason to think they might lack adequate power for the war effort and the postwar years. By mid-­1943 American electrical consumption began to outstrip coal production, which threatened potential fuel shortages. In response the US War Production Board (WPB) imposed nationwide “brownouts” to protect America’s energy supply. WPB imposed no limitations on domestic or industrial consumption but urged people instead to “express their patriotism” by using as little energy as possible. While WPB lifted some restrictions in January 1944, it encouraged voluntary conservation measures for the rest of the year.18 Early in 1945, though, a combination of unusually frigid temperatures and heightened demand for electric power brought another “coal shortage crisis.” A projected shortfall of 22 million tons of coal for the year forced the return of nationwide brownouts.19 Apparently the curtailments worked, but wartime energy problems struck fuel sources other than coal and southerners not yet dependent on electricity.20 North Carolina farmers pleaded with Senator Josiah Bailey to help alleviate the crisis. Correspondents in Angier and Goldsboro worried that, because of wood, kerosene, and labor shortages, their farming operations—and “our success in this great conflict”—risked failure.21 Energy famine imperiled the southern economy and the war effort. But it was not to last. By spring 1945, when it became clear that the war in Europe would soon end, the electrical shortages that had tormented the American war effort seemed gone for good. Because defense production had created such a demand bubble through 1945, economists and utility industry forecasters predicted that the end of hostilities would almost certainly deflate electrical consumption to prewar levels for at least two years, allowing the nation’s utilities to relax while they added generating capacity. As if on cue industrial demand plummeted as the Allies overwhelmed the Axis powers. By the end of 1946 national electrical sales to factories sank more than 6 billion kilowatt hours relative to the 1944 wartime peak. In Georgia 1946 sales to industrial customers fell by more than 217 million kilowatt hours (12 percent) relative to 1944 figures.22 Yet despite the drop in industrial energy requirements that lasted throughout much of 1946, overall consumption only rose after the war’s end, with national kilowatt-­hour sales reaching all-­time highs in 1946 and again in 1947.23 By 1948 utilities saw even greater growth, with demand swelling by a national average of 15 percent over 1945 levels.24 Increases in early postwar southern electrical deP U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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mand surged well beyond the national mean. An Arkansas utility reported that its demand in the summer of 1947 soared 50 percent above its wartime peak.25 Alabama Power sold 25 percent more electric current in 1948 than in 1945, Georgia Power’s total sales in that time frame increased by 35 percent, and Duke’s expanded by 48 percent.26 Commercial activity spurred much of the expanded usage in the early postwar years, but the lion’s share of these gains came in the “final consumption horizon”: the private home.27 Increases in electrical consumption for domestic life might have been cause for celebration. After all, aside from abstract notions of freedom as the war’s core purpose, one of the central, more concrete assurances was that Americans would enjoy material prosperity following victory. More than anything else, that meant a suburban home stocked with an array of appliances. As V-­E Day approached, utilities and electric equipment manufacturers pledged to make good on the war’s promise.28 In a May 1945 Georgia Power advertisement, a GI and his fiancée snuggled in a meadow as they gazed into the distance, longing for a postwar “dream-­home” filled with “frozen food cabinets and automatic washers and electric blankets and air conditioning and lots more electric conveniences.” The young couple’s vision would become reality because “the electric service that keeps [electrical conveniences] running will continue to be both cheap and friendly. That’s one way we can help make dreams come true!”29 For homeowners in Georgia, this high-­powered dream indeed seemed to have come true. Although domestic electrical consumption increased steadily throughout the war years for reasons peculiar to the wartime economy, electric power consumption in Georgia homes jumped to unprecedented levels in the years after 1945.30 The average electrified home in Georgia Power’s territory in 1948 used about 2,300 kilowatt hours annually, 28 percent higher than 1945 levels. Moreover the residential proportion of Georgia Power’s kilowatt-­hour sales amounted to almost 25 percent more in 1948 than in 1945.31 Postwar hopes for a consumers’ paradise relied on enormous—and quickly increasing—amounts of electric energy. The unexpected spike in electrical consumption in the early postwar dream home, though, did little to inspire confidence in America’s future. On the contrary, rapidly growing energy usage endangered economic growth and the realization of Americans’ consumerist fantasies: it threatened to cause another power shortage, a palpable threat to postwar progress. Several factors contributed to the impending collapse. A lack of generating capacity was one. Because of the government’s wartime claims over both raw materials and industrial production, utilities lacked the ability to adequately expand their generating capacities. At times in the early postwar years overall electrical generation soared to about 95 percent of capacity—shaky ground considering utility managers generally believed they should maintain a reserve capacity of 15 to 20 percent.32 Based on 136

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FPC chair Leland Olds’s estimate, in 1946 and 1947 the nation’s ability to produce electricity fell some 43 percent short of adequate capacity and reserves.33 Load increases and capacity shortages were not solely responsible for shutting down the grid. Fuel supply also contributed to postwar power shortfalls. In parts of the United States drought caused postwar electrical shortages. A wartime population boom combined with surging electrical usage in cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Diego might have been enough to halt production after the Axis’s defeat. But combined with a rainfall deficiency, those factors resulted in sudden blackouts and strict limitations on electrical usage in the Southwest.34 Inadequate coal supplies, due in part to striking electrical workers and coal miners, threatened to cause power shortages. Reports from the South shortly after the war’s end claimed that electrical generation was in jeopardy because “coal supplies have reached the point of exhaustion.” According to one observer, “if this condition exists much longer, the situation will become chaotic.”35 Labor strife and coal shortages also caused both brownouts and blackouts in places such as New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. Striking electrical workers and coal miners brought the city of Pittsburgh to its knees in the fall of 1946. Factories, hospitals, department stores, streetcars, and streetlights stopped operating or faced severe service cutbacks for more than two weeks until bosses and workers agreed to a solution. The lack of ample electrical supply, one observer noted, hurled the city back into the premodernity of “some darker century.”36 The looming chaos went well beyond the inconvenience of dark city streets and dim storefronts. While New Dealers and utility executives did not agree on much, they did agree that plentiful electric power would be fundamental to postwar economic recovery, security, and growth, and thus that energy scarcity posed a grave danger to the nation’s future economic health.37 Many Americans worried that not only would obstacles to economic progress and full employment delay the realization of the long-­promised postwar consumer cornucopia, but that such problems might also invite the Great Depression’s return.38 Without sufficient electricity these fears seemed to be coming true. Auto manufacturers in Detroit laid-­off over forty thousand workers in 1946 because of power shortages. Between 1946 and 1949, power reductions in parts of the South resulted in manufacturing shortfalls and tens of thousands of layoffs.39 A plant in Arkansas, for instance, forfeited an estimated 72 million pounds of aluminum in 1948 because it had to operate on about half its wartime level of electricity.40 Reddy Kilowatt approached the situation in a light-­hearted manner, lamenting that the interrelated problems of “coal shortage, . . . factory shutdowns, [and] material shortages” had him singing “those Reconversion Blues.”41 Fortune magazine reported in a far soberer tone that much of America was “depression conscious [and] worried sick about post-­war joblessness.”42 P U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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The Deep South did not directly experience long-­lasting, crippling postwar power shortages, but the shockwaves of energy famine elsewhere rattled southern electric companies and their consumers. This proved especially true among the electrical customers who believed they were most vulnerable to power outages: farmers. REA’s chief, Claude Wickard, claimed in 1947 that because existing generating capacity was insufficient to satisfy rapidly growing demand, farmers faced an “extremely grave power situation.” More than a year later those concerns had not been allayed. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), a St. Louis–based advocacy and lobbying organization, echoed Wickard’s position, claiming that “there is not a state in the Union in which a cooperative’s power situation does not reflect an acute power shortage.”43 Cooperatives in South Georgia likewise complained about “critical power shortages” in 1947 and 1948, and worried that, without the speedy completion of federal hydroelectric generation stations at places such as Clarks Hill, rising demand in coming years would only make matters worse.44 Sensitive to widespread worries about possible energy shortfalls and postwar economic calamity, southern power companies took pains to convince their customers, including REA cooperatives, that they had no reason to fret. Georgia Power told its clients in 1946 that “your electric service is one thing you don’t have to worry about. . . . No worry about a shortage. There’s more reserve today than ever.”45 Other southern utilities tried to parry consumers’ worries about energy scarcity by shifting blame to a government-­induced materials shortage that lingered into the early postwar years. Mississippi Power and Light informed the public that “the many factory shut-­downs, shortages, and delays that you’ve been reading about lately in your newspaper” are “due, of course,” to “an acute shortage of materials” over which the War Department still claimed priority.46 Even if power shortages had not directly stricken the South, utility managers and public-­power officials alike believed they had to act because they might soon face energy famine. Indeed, electricity shortfalls, actual or anticipated, played a major if underappreciated role in postwar public–private power fights at places such as Clarks Hill, where questions of American abundance—and of whether the public or private realm would distribute the nation’s natural resources—took center stage.47 For private utilities, public power’s frantic warnings about power shortages functioned as a type of boogeyman, a scare tactic of the “prophets of doom” meant to dupe an anxious voting public. Such deceit, energy firms argued in a repetition of the domino theory, was part of a ruse to open the way for more government hydropower immediately and for a government takeover of the grid—and all of American life—eventually.48 To do its part to answer the challenges of impending postwar power shortages and to fend off potential economic depression—as well as to preempt public power in doing so—Georgia 138

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Power and its allies, which clearly could not rely solely on coal, looked once again to consolidate control over the water and expand their hydroelectric portfolios. Most notably, Georgia Power looked to Clarks Hill, an area on the Savannah River that the federal government, public-­power advocates, and rural co-­ops also wanted to develop to meet the postwar era’s pressing challenges. *   *   * Hydropower developers, both private and public, had long coveted Clarks Hill. The Canadian-­born engineer James Mitchell visited the site in 1911 with plans to use his connections to British capital to build a hydroelectric production facility. He discovered a better opportunity near Birmingham, though, where he helped found Alabama Power in 1912.49 In 1928 the Savannah River Electric Company, a Georgia Power affiliate, purchased large tracts of land and secured an FPC permit to develop Clarks Hill. The company surrendered its license in 1932 (but never sold its land) when it became clear that the Great Depression would continue to clog global capital pipelines and significantly delay or even prevent the project’s completion. At that point the federal government drew up plans for Clarks Hill. After the US Army Corps of Engineers announced its intentions for the site in 1935, Savannah River Electric and Georgia Power pledged their support and reiterated their backing for the Corps’ Clarks Hill development during the Second World War.50 After the war, when fears of power shortage and recession coursed through the South and the nation, circumstances changed. Georgia Power–Savannah River Electric managers claimed they immediately needed all the power that Clarks Hill could provide so they could stave off energy famine, assure lasting progress, and secure free enterprise in the South. An aging but still eloquent Preston Arkwright—now serving as Georgia Power’s chairman and Savannah River Electric’s president—appeared at an October 1946 FPC hearing in Atlanta to make his case for a new license to develop Clarks Hill. He assured the commissioners that since the war had concluded and capital had once again begun to flow, the company could reclaim its status as a hydropower utility. In fact, according to Arkwright, Georgia Power and its neighboring utilities had never wanted to turn quite so decisively to coal. The company and its counterparts had temporarily transitioned to steam power only because wartime exigencies, rising domestic consumption, and drought demanded that “we had to have [increased coal-­fired capacity] in a hurry.” To some extent statistics seem to bear these points out: utilities in Alabama and the Carolinas produced much higher proportions of hydropower in the late 1940s than in 1945.51 But now both Georgia and South Carolina urgently needed the Savannah River’s energy because, according to Arkwright, “there is a greater demand for electric power at the present time than there has P U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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ever been, and from our studies of the question demand is going to keep up.”52 Yet, Arkwright insisted, even though the Army Corps of Engineers should play an advisory role in Clarks Hill’s construction and management, private enterprise must build the reservoir, dam, and powerhouse. Government ownership would result in lower tax revenues and crippling inefficiencies, which would worsen fragile postwar energy circumstances. It would also signal the revival New Deal−style confiscation of private property, ultimately resulting in “the destruction of this Company’s business.”53 Harllee Branch, serving at the time as Georgia Power’s general counsel (becoming vice president in 1949 and president in 1951), made much the same point in trying to convince Congressman James Davis of Georgia to use his influence in the FPC case. “Georgia and South Carolina need the power now,” Branch fumed, and the federal government’s usurpation of his client’s right to develop its “own lands” at Clarks Hill would “bar the largest single investment of private funds ever sought to be made in the states of Georgia and South Carolina.” In short government ownership at Clarks Hill would be “absurd and un-­American.”54 For Arkwright and Branch, if free enterprise were to survive and if depression were to be avoided in the postwar South, the private realm must exercise control over the Savannah River. Even as the war’s end had changed the circumstances for private utilities, supporters of the New Deal’s ongoing mission to improve the South through watershed manipulation—which included virtually all of Georgia’s and South Carolina’s state and federal representatives—stood fast. Several prominent southern politicians spoke on behalf of the government’s plans at Clarks Hill. Democratic US senator Richard Russell, long a proponent of federal public-­works initiatives, pledged his backing for Washington’s role at Clarks Hill and swore to “fight the electric company’s proposal ‘to the limit.’”55 Perhaps most notably, J. Strom Thurmond, South Carolina’s incoming governor, offered testimony before the FPC tribunal in Atlanta that best articulated public-­power advocates’ position on Clarks Hill. Thurmond waved away notions that government plans for Clarks Hill reeked of “socialism” and claimed that the Corps of Engineers should develop the site for the same reasons that Arkwright and Branch stated: both Georgia and South Carolina, like the rest of the United States, faced potential power shortages and economic depression and needed the power immediately. Federal agencies, he argued, boasted an unmatched track record of swiftly completing dams. Only government action could speedily provide much needed electricity and help avoid a severe economic downturn. He also averred that the federal government must construct the facilities because its “first consideration . . . will be the public good,” which consisted of more than just electric power. It included navigation and flood control mechanisms, antimalaria measures, wildlife protection, soil conservation, reforestation programs, and ra140

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cially segregated recreation opportunities.56 Otherwise an outspoken proponent of free enterprise—and thus a representative of selective southern outrage at the federal government—Thurmond’s vision for Clarks Hill sounded quite a lot like the populist critique of New South–style cartel capitalism. It furthermore seemed to call for the extension of TVA-­style regional development into Georgia and South Carolina, a consequential position in the escalating rivalry for Clarks Hill.57 FPC sided with Thurmond (after whom the dam and reservoir at Clarks Hill were renamed in the 1980s) and Russell in January 1947. Perhaps the point was moot in any case: Congress had already identified Clarks Hill, along with proposed improvements for river basins across the country, as a fundamental part of the postwar economic growth agenda and had approved over $35 million for its construction.58 Although Georgia Power protested FPC’s decision, company managers soon regrouped and adopted a strategy that reflected the reality they now faced. Instead of clamoring for exclusive possession of the land and water at Clarks Hill, they now worked to claim ownership of only the Savannah River’s energy. In the spring of 1947 George Dondero, a rabidly anti–New Deal Republican Congressman from Michigan now working closely with Georgia Power and Savannah River Electric, submitted a bill to the US House of Representatives that called for dividing the water’s functions at Clarks Hill. In this scheme the Corps would build and maintain the reservoir and dam and would thereafter oversee the facilities’ flood control and navigation tasks. The federal government, though, would have no link to the production or transmission of Clarks Hill’s energy. The Dondero Bill characterized electricity as an “incidental” by-­product and thus directed FPC to grant Savannah River Electric a new license that would entitle the company to complete and own all the electric machinery at Clarks Hill. In addition, the Corps—not DOI—would have sole authority to oversee powerline construction from the hydropower station, a responsibility it would outsource to Savannah River Electric.59 Dondero’s legislation did not represent a wholly new departure; it revived a maneuver Arkwright proposed in response to TVA in the early 1930s. At a congressional committee hearing in 1933, Arkwright claimed that his business as well as his customers were “menaced by the suggestion of the Government building transmission lines.” TVA’s direct connection to preference customers would breed chaos in the South’s electrical markets. To protect private interests and best serve the region’s consumers, Arkwright argued, TVA facilities at Muscle Shoals should interconnect with and sell its output to Georgia Power, Alabama Power, and other private companies in the Tennessee Valley.60 Along with Wendell Willkie, Arkwright brought this proposal to President Roosevelt in 1936, offering to include TVA in the Southern Super Power Zone.61 In both P U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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cases, although the utility executives made their pitch in the language of broad social benefits and sound business practices, TVA would act only as a wholesale operation and essentially be emptied of any public-­power elements. Dondero’s 1947 effort to replicate this strategy, like Willkie’s and Arkwright’s in the 1930s, bore no fruit. After Public Works Committee hearings in 1948, Congress once again confirmed that not only would the Corps build the reservoir and dam; it would construct the powerhouse and oversee electrical generation at Clarks Hill. Dondero’s failure strongly suggested to southern power companies that they had at best an uncertain future in hydroelectricity and at worst that private capital’s controlling hand in the South’s political economy might soon fall victim to the New Deal’s supposed totalitarian designs. That possibility prompted Dondero to ask of the Clarks Hill affair: “Are we going to have Government ownership and State socialism, or are we going to preserve private ownership?”62 The grim implications of his rhetorical question did not emerge solely in response to FPC’s decision or his bill’s failure. Nor did those implications pertain only to Clarks Hill. Georgia Power–Savannah River Electric’s efforts to regain control over the Savannah River took place as a wave of public power rose across the United States in the late 1940s. *   *   * As the sense of urgency in 1946–1947 suggested, private utilities were not alone in crafting plans to meet postwar economic challenges by quickly developing reservoirs and dams on the South’s waterways. In response to widespread fears of power shortages and the Great Depression’s return, public-­power liberals pressed for an aggressive expansion of federal river conservation and socially redeeming hydroelectric projects across the United States. Spurred on by President Truman’s exhortation to “apply the lessons of our Tennessee Valley experience to our other great river basins,” public power lobbied for new valley authorities based on the TVA model.63 Even more ominously for private utilities, DOI, stocked with ambitious public-­power advocates, worked to expand its role in building an integrated, potentially nationwide, electrical network anchored in the nation’s rivers. Many valley authority proposals failed in Congress in the late 1930s and during the war years, but the early postwar moment’s potentially dire economic situation compelled public-­power advocates to press for more regional planning corporations similar to TVA.64 In fact in the early postwar years Congress had as many as ten TVA-­style proposals in its hands at any given time, the most ambitious of which were the controversial Missouri Valley Authority and Columbia Valley Administration.65 The Southeast was not exempt from this trend. Utilities in Georgia and South Carolina had to confront a potential valley authority head 142

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on. Immediately following the war congressional delegations from those states proposed a TVA-­style agency in the Savannah River basin based at Clarks Hill. According to the bill, which enjoyed enthusiastic support as a bold attempt to bring comprehensive conservation measures and broad social improvement to postwar Georgia and South Carolina—much like Thurmond’s vision for Clarks Hill—the Savannah Valley Authority (SVA) would include eleven dams and would be an exercise in regional planning in a 10,000-­square-­mile area in the Savannah River valley. It would be a “little TVA” for Georgia and South Carolina.66 But like the proposed valley authorities in the Missouri and Columbia River basins, the Savannah River’s own “little TVA” failed in a TVA-­weary Congress. Yet the push for new river valley authorities throughout the late 1940s indicated to private utilities in the South that reports of the TVA idea’s death had been greatly exaggerated. Although no independent TVA-­style agencies emerged in the postwar era, belief in the regional development model did not perish. In fact DOI proved to be an even greater danger to private power in the South than the somewhat limited valley authority scheme. Under the leadership of Harold Ickes, Interior secretary from 1933 to 1946, DOI dramatically increased in size and significance as a hydropower producer, especially with its Bureau of Reclamation dams in the US West.67 More troubling for private utilities in the South (which lay far outside Reclamation’s territory), DOI lengthened its reach through the establishment of electrical transmission agencies such as the Bonneville Power Administration in the Northwest in 1937 and the Southwestern Power Administration (SPA) in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas in 1943. Originally both Bonneville and SPA transmitted power from a very few, specifically identified public dams, but the scope of those agencies grew far greater during the war because of drastic increases in demand.68 By 1945 Bonneville was responsible for arranging the transport of all federal electricity in the Northwest, and SPA assumed transmission duties from all public dams in its original states plus Louisiana, Kansas, and Missouri.69 By decade’s end DOI had designs to extend its power shipping operations to the Southeast as well. The legal mechanism behind the DOI’s rapid growth was the Flood Control Act of 1944. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this legislation not just for Bonneville’s and SPA’s growth, but for postwar public power in a larger sense. Because Section 5 explicitly granted DOI exclusive authority to transmit electricity from federal dams to rural co-­ops and other public bodies (a provision that Dondero’s 1947 bill sought to undermine), the 1944 Flood Control Act had the potential to stitch together the patchwork, regional nature of public power into a coherent nationwide web. The law could firmly link the functions of the various DOI agencies to those of the primary postwar dam-­building institution, the P U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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Army Corps of Engineers, as well as to federally-­funded co-­ops. All this activity could extend well outside the boundaries of single river valleys.70 According to the historian Christopher Manganiello, the 1944 Flood Control Act, particularly for Congress and the Corps, functioned to water down TVA-­ style regional planning for the postwar era. Instead, he writes, the law created a “techno-­selective river planning model” that encouraged piecemeal “pork-­barrel projects” but included few New Deal–style ambitions for broad social improvement.71 Yet DOI’s postwar blueprints, which leveled scathing criticisms at the limited valley authority model, went well beyond constituent-­pleasing dams. DOI operated with an “expansionist fervor” and mimicked the private utility industry’s grow-­and-­build model, all with the objective of implementing the New Deal’s goals of improving Americans’ lives through equitable resource distribution and access to cheap and abundant electricity.72 Ickes articulated this position with an official “power-­policy memorandum” in 1946 meant to guide DOI’s nationwide growth as an electric power producer and shipper during the process of reconversion.73 Even before hostilities ended he announced that DOI would construct a “new empire” in the West and “Second Empire” in the South based on the “absolutely essential” conservation of water. Though his empires would center on a massive buildup of federal hydropower capacity, Ickes envisioned soil conservation, swamp drainage, reforestation, irrigation, and navigation improvements as critical elements of his plan. DOI-­led regional development efforts would furthermore enable social and economic progress for millions through the establishment of productive farms, prolific factories, and modern homes electrified by public power.74 Just prior to the Nazis’ defeat, the secretary of the Interior pushed his imperial appeal even further, revealing plans for an “ocean-­to-­ocean power project” that would far surpass what any isolated regional development agency could accomplish. It would take “regional development at its boldest”—which only DOI, not TVA-­style agencies, could manage—to cultivate whole river basins as well as to link them together through the long-­distance transmission of electricity for widespread social improvement across the continent.75 In the early postwar moment, even as Congress had soured on the TVA idea, Interior’s plans resembled but radically extended the scope of comprehensive development schemes. DOI cast itself as both a potential nationwide planning authority and a would-­be federal electric utility. As such it would compensate for the inadequacies of an overly coal-­dependent private utility industry, whose looming power shortages, according to Assistant Interior Secretary C. Girard Davidson, would “throw more workers out of jobs,” beginning a “spiral path leading to depression.” The federal government, Davidson continued, must secure adequate supplies of electric power for homes, farms, and factories by 144

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Figure 6.1 Southeastern Power Administration Marketing Map, 2016. Credit: Southeastern Power Administration/US Department of Energy, 2016.

building new multipurpose dams across the nation. Only then would the electric industry’s heretofore empty “slogans of ‘better living, less drudgery,’ ‘more jobs, more production’” become real and ensure that “all competitors in free enterprise will have an equal opportunity to move forward.”76 This was not just talk. DOI worked to implement its ideals in all sections of the postwar United States, including the South. As early as 1947 DOI contemP U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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plated plans—with no success—to extend the Bureau of Reclamation’s territory and power-­marketing authority to Dixie.77 But the idea that carried the day was to establish in the region a public power–marketing agency modeled on Bonneville and SPA. DOI formally established its newest agency, named the Southeastern Power Administration (SEPA), in 1950 and, as if to stick a thumb in private power’s eye, placed its headquarters just northwest of Clarks Hill in Elberton, Georgia. SEPA’s explicit mission was to ensure that rural electric cooperatives and other preference customers in the ten-­state area south of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi Rivers would receive the low-­cost energy generated at Corps dams, potentially through federally funded “backbone” transmission lines that would connect public dams directly to public customers.78 A glimpse of what SEPA might mean already appeared in central and low-­country South Carolina. Over the protests of South Carolina Electric and Gas, the Central Electric Power Cooperative, a conglomeration of fourteen state co-­ops, had successfully arranged by 1950 for a $7.8 million REA loan to bypass privately owned transmission systems and construct 800 miles of new powerlines that directly connected them to Santee-­Cooper.79 SEPA might go far beyond that model and as such represented the possible realization of public power’s dreams in the Southeast: a wholly integrated production, transmission, and distribution system that would furnish reliable energy, economic stability, and social progress for underserved communities in postwar Dixie. For private utilities in the Southeast, the expansion of DOI’s power transmission responsibilities was a nightmare, one whose consequences they believed they had already witnessed in SPA. A 1947 Arkansas Power and Light advertisement warned consumers that they “had better watch out” for SPA. Through that agency DOI had foisted a “far-­flung competing power system” on the South’s western reaches. SPA would ultimately act as a “Regional Authority” and would initiate the dreaded domino effect, knocking over private utilities in the region much as TVA had in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. But, the ad emphasized, SPA would be even more malignant than TVA: it would control a territory “3½ times the size . . . of the TVA,” link to TVA, and be ripe for ever more metastasis.80 As the Corps toiled away at Clarks Hill, SEPA wasted no time in taking steps to make public power’s dreams, and private power’s nightmares, come true. SEPA’s first administrator, a grizzled public-­power veteran named Ben Creim, thought that if his new organization were to follow in the footsteps of its sister power administrations, Bonneville and SPA, then it must begin constructing powerlines immediately.81 With SEPA’s creation and imminent growth, the abstract “far-­flung competing power system” crept ever closer to reality. Not only 146

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had a centralized authority seized much of the fuel over which private southern energy corporations had long held monopoly control; the mechanism for constructing a rival, government-­owned power network—one that countenanced no single river-­basin limitations—was poised to rise not just over Dixie but over much of the United States as well. *   *   * Private utilities across the region nervously anticipated SEPA’s growth and interpreted it as an act of unbridled federal aggression. A power company manager from West Virginia lamented that with SEPA, which would control the largest area in the nation outside that of the Bureau of Reclamation, “the Federal Government is welding the final link in a public-­power chain that threatens to choke off more than twenty major private utility companies throughout . . . the South.” That chain would stretch well beyond the Southeast. According to the West Virginia executive, SEPA would interconnect with TVA, which in turn would join SEPA together with TVA, SPA, and, perhaps even Reclamation and Bonneville, putting public powerlines in almost thirty states.82 Clarks Hill was no provincial matter. Under “the present Interior Department attitude” of unchecked expansion, another southern utility executive griped, all “privately owned power and light companies would eventually be nationalized.” In this light TVA, which private utilities still abhorred, had clearly become the “lesser of two evils.”83 The escalating Cold War afforded utilities, lobbying organizations, and public relations firms around the nation the opportunity to bind these sorts of New Deal power programs to the Soviet-­led worldwide communist conspiracy. A few electric industry leaders in the early 1950s explicitly sported the “paranoid style” in making these associations, claiming for instance that those who agitated for federal power initiatives “are of course the Communists, who are guided from Moscow” with designs to transform the United States into a “modified Marxist state.”84 Yet despite the occasional attempt to stoke fears of a direct Soviet-­style takeover, private power’s campaign was no McCarthyesque free-­for-­all. Rather, the utility industry homed in on American liberty’s true enemy—the “creeping revolution” of “Fabian socialism” that revealed itself piecemeal and slowly destroyed American free-­market capitalism—the New Deal.85 By repeating ungainly terms such as “socialism-­communism” and arguing that federal electricity was an “un-­ American” ploy hawked by devious “planners” and “crackpots,” private electric companies might convince consumers to shudder at the New Deal’s ostensibly inevitable trajectory toward tyranny.86 American electric industry leaders did not allow the idea of public-­power-­ as-­socialism to float freely as an abstraction. Rather they calculated their efforts P U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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Figure 6.2 Federal Power Marketing Administration Territories and Facilities, 2013. Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory/US Department of Energy.

to make a coherent, if emotional, argument about a free-­enterprise system in serious jeopardy. Warnings about capitalism’s imminent demise and the continuing stain of New Deal socialism would appeal to Americans based on what they stood to lose in their everyday lives. In particular the utility industry focused on how public power’s toxicities, step by step, poisoned the US tax system as well as Americans’ places of work and business—familiar arenas of daily life to which private-­power companies could effectively “link socialism and what it means into something every person understands.”87 The notion of a long first step, of castigating public power as a gateway to complete socialism—or once again the domino theory—was another common tactic for the postwar utility industry. This idea gained a national audience in 1950 when Ashton Collins’s Reddy Kilowatt Corporation, in partnership with the American Medical Association and other industry associations, published an advertisement titled “The Story of Ten Little Free Workers.” Placed in countless publications throughout the 1950s, the ad began with a description of the calamitous downfall of the first little free worker, Reddy Kilowatt: “Ten little free workers—Reddy was doing fine / Until the socialists got him—then there were nine.” Following Reddy’s demise, “federal medicine” took out the independent “doc.” Then the railroads, oil companies, steel producers, and legal profession all became victims of the government takeover. Next to fall were the farmers, who, 148

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in a telling linkage to Soviet communism, “have been collectivized.” The apocalyptic vision ended with a cautionary tale. Grocers, clerks, and even reporters all plodded off sadly to federal jobs that they could work only “when and where ordered, and at a fixed rate” because citizens had failed to “keep government out of business.”88 Southern utility executives took the same tack. In 1950 S. C. McMeekin, president of South Carolina Electric, raged in both New York Times and Washington Post full-­page ads that the “misuse of federal funds” for South Carolina co-­ops’ Santee-­Cooper powerlines represented a “matter of national importance.” “The destruction of this individual company is an attack on the system we all want to preserve.”89 Applying his thinking directly to Clarks Hill, Savannah River Electric vice president Charles Collier similarly claimed that “Government ownership” of Clarks Hill would mean the “socialization of American industry” and the end of “private power.”90 At least some consumers tended to concur. Possibly influenced by Reddy Kilowatt’s “Ten Little Free Workers” advertisement, one Georgian foresaw the dominos falling. She believed that “public power at Clark’s Hill” would cause nothing short of a nationwide totalitarian catastrophe. Not only would the project have negative tax implications, she wrote to her congressman, but its completion would further encourage “the Socialistic element in our country which is trying to Communize the United States by taking over, first the public utility business, then ultimately the railroads, coal, oil, lumber, and finally land.”91 Yet after SEPA’s creation in early 1950 utility leaders reined in their rhetoric— at least temporarily. It should be noted that southern utilities continued to support anti–New Deal rhetoric and lobbying activity through their contributions to staunchly anticommunist, anti–civil rights, and antilabor industry associations such as the Southern States Industrial Council.92 But there were compelling reasons for this newfound restraint. The operating utilities in the Southern Company (a new holding company, formed in 1946 after C&S’s forced dissolution, that controlled the Alabama, Georgia, Gulf, and Mississippi Power Companies) had to appear to be good energy shipping partners for both DOI and REA cooperatives. Continuing to bash public power as a socialistic monster would curry the company no favor with co-­ops or with consumers in general, especially given that opinion research found in 1949 that nearly seven in ten Americans still approved of public power.93 Southern Company also had to maintain good relations with Interior, given the 1950 appointment of C. B. McManus, Southern Company’s president, as chief of a federal body created to coordinate electric power supply for defense production at the Korean War’s outset. Now Southern Company spokesmen focused their tamped down critique on SEPA’s potential powerlines. In this way, unlike with other public–private battles over hydroelectricity in the early postwar years, southern utilities would not permanently disconnect the P U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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New Deal. They would instead plug New Deal infrastructure into their private, increasingly coal-­based network. This approach, cast as a partnership with the federal government, would enable southern power companies to realize a federal subsidy while essentially ending government competition in the region. It would allow them to funnel the output of public dams into its coal-­dominated system and convert that output into private power. McManus clearly articulated this strategy in a 1950 appearance before President Truman’s Water Resources Policy Commission, headed by longtime public-­ power champion Morris Cooke. In his statement to the commission McManus surprisingly reversed earlier positions on Clarks Hill and flatly admitted that utilities in his region “do not oppose these river developments.” To resist such projects, when private utilities lacked the financial wherewithal to build new dams, would be to “take a ‘dog in the manger’ attitude.” Because the Corps’ dams contributed to southern modernization through flood control, navigation, recreation, and even power generation, McManus continued, they were “legitimate governmental enterprises.” The legitimacy of government enterprise stopped there though.94 Aiming to keep DOI out of Dixie, McManus insisted that private utilities retain the right to purchase all energy generated at Corps hydroelectric plants, energy they would then deliver to preference customers in accordance with the 1944 Flood Control Act. According to McManus, such an arrangement would enable private companies, which outside of TVA owned all powerlines in the South, to handle transmission more cost-­effectively and more efficiently than SEPA. It would also prevent SEPA from engaging in “destructive competition” with private enterprise.95 McManus did not conjure his power purchasing offer out of thin air. He based his 1950 proposal on an agreement Georgia Power and DOI signed in 1948 regarding the disposal of the energy generated at the Corps’ Allatoona dam on the Etowah River about forty miles northwest of Atlanta. Congress first authorized Allatoona in the 1941 Flood Control Act, which allocated $3 million to the Corps for the initial work and reauthorized the dam in the 1944 Flood Control Act with a budget of $14.4 million. Construction at the site began only after Second World War ended and was completed in January 1950.96 The 1948 accord, first drafted in 1945, stipulated that the Corps would build and thereafter manage the reservoir, dam, and powerhouse, and that Georgia Power would purchase all Allatoona’s output from DOI, provided it supplied rural electric cooperatives with low-­cost electricity. The deal inspired laudatory comments as a national model of public–private “co-­operative action” for energy generation, flood control, recreation, and postwar prosperity.97 It was thus in this cooperative spirit that DOI agreed to the 1948 “tri-­contract” 150

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(DOI, Georgia Power, and GEMC co-­ops). In the years before SEPA’s establishment, the Allatoona covenant served as the presumptive template for public-­ power disposal not just in Georgia but in the entire Southeast. This arrangement received tacit confirmation when the Federal Inter-­Agency River Basin Committee’s southern regional subcommittee, established in 1945 under President Roosevelt to study the possibility of forming a public-­power marketing agency in the region, disbanded in 1948 without making recommendations after the Allatoona agreement.98 For McManus, the Allatoona pact’s continuation at Clarks Hill would be most pleasing for all parties. It would allow private companies to maintain their powerlines and gain new customers. It would also ultimately enable cooperatives to abandon hydropower and enjoy the reliability and abundance of coal-­fired electricity. Because water had disappointed the South so many times, McManus claimed, it could now be counted on only as reserve power. Even massive Corps installations such as Allatoona and Clarks Hill, McManus warned the commission, could not contend with the region’s periodic droughts. If co-­ops hitched their networks directly to a fickle southern waterscape, they would continue to trail other southerners in enjoying prosperity. But given coal’s new birth, rivers would no longer have to support southern progress. McManus thus proposed that, since water had proven so unreliable, the shaky federal waterpower system could “be mingled with the power from our generating sources.” Southern coal-­ fired “plants can be operated to ‘firm up’ government hydroelectric power and, in effect, convert it into power useable at all times.”99 The growing roster of increasingly potent coal-­fired generating stations in the Southern Company system by 1950, particularly in Alabama and Georgia, generated plentiful energy for use at any time. Since FPC’s Clarks Hill decision in early 1947, Southern Company’s steam plants had nudged past hydroelectricity, accounting for about 53 percent of capacity; they would race beyond waterpower soon thereafter. In 1950 in both Alabama and Georgia, coal-­fired units accounted for some 70 percent of total generating capacity following the addition several new power stations. Even as Alabama Power and Georgia Power brought long-­ planned dams online—which, like government dams, would now provide only supplementary power—coal continued to far outpace water in both capacity and production across the 1950s. Overall, Southern Company’s utilities added more than 2 million kilowatts of generating capacity and nearly tripled its kilowatt-­ hour output—the vast majority of both in coal-­based facilities—by 1957.100 McManus’s plan for intermingling public water with private coal would not only prevent the need for SEPA to construct powerlines; it would also dilute public hydroelectricity, rendering it indistinguishable from the energy generated in private networks. It might even spell the effective end of public power in the South. P U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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*   *   * Rural electric cooperatives clearly divined what McManus’s pitch would mean for the future. A private-­power victory at Clarks Hill would not only fatally injure public power in the Southeast but would also mean public subsidies for private utilities. Faced with these possible outcomes, public power fought back—and realized ostensibly positive results—in an attempt to shape the emerging Sunbelt South in public power’s favor. As a counteroffer to McManus’s proposal, SEPA’s Ben Creim offered Georgia Power the opportunity to “wheel” electricity (that is, to act only as a courier, not as a buying/selling agent) over its powerlines from Clarks Hill to REA cooperatives’ distribution networks. Wheeling arrangements had become commonplace in the United States by 1950, but because of the precedent-­setting Allatoona deal, McManus and his successor, Harllee Branch, refused to accept any such contracts. The company insisted that it would settle for nothing less than purchasing and reselling all energy generated at all public dams in Georgia and, by extension, the rest of the Southeast. All sides now stood locked in a stalemate over who would own the power flowing from public dams.101 Given Southern Company’s intransigence, SEPA grew more aggressive. In late 1952 SEPA convinced Congress to authorize over $1 million for a forty-­one-­ mile “backbone” transmission line from Clarks Hill to the Greenwood County Electric Power Commission, a publicly owned electric utility in western South Carolina. In addition SEPA requested over $6 million for hundreds of miles of powerlines to integrate public dams and preference customers across the agency’s service area.102 For local REA leaders the successful construction of federally owned powerlines at Clarks Hill would ensure the purity of public electricity, and the continuation of public power, for the entire region. In the words of NRECA executive manager Clyde Ellis, “this is, powerwise, a situation of ‘as Georgia goes, so goes the southeast.’”103 According to GEMC’s John Chambless, Georgia had to go the way of public power. If Clarks Hill’s electric current flowed into Georgia Power’s coal-­based system—a vast web of generating stations, powerlines, and distribution networks in which electricity had become completely fungible—it would “lose its identity” as public electricity.104 In that scenario, Chambless maintained, government power networks, a “God given right that made the blessings of electricity available for the first time to the rural people,” would effectively cease to exist.105 Not only would GEMC “lose any real control over Clark Hill” but Georgia Power would enjoy a nearly $1.5 million annual subsidy.106 For southern cooperatives the need to preserve their power’s identity became paramount after November 1952 when Republican Dwight Eisenhower won the 152

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presidency and Republicans gained slim majorities in both houses of Congress. Unlike in Bonneville’s and SPA’s territories, no federal powerlines existed in the Southeast, and under the Eisenhower administration it became clear that none would rise over the South. While campaigning for office Eisenhower made it clear that he would act as a friend to private power, denouncing public electricity as “creeping socialism” and swearing to chip away at the New Deal’s “malignant bureaucracy.”107 This position won him the praise of many in the private-­power business. Ashton Collins professed in October 1952 that, despite being a lifelong southern Democrat, he planned to vote for the Republican Eisenhower “because he is an avowed Free Enterpriser—not a socialist under Democratic cloak.”108 Southern utilities must also have taken comfort in the knowledge that Eisenhower’s well-­known golfing companion, the native Atlantan and legendary Bobby Jones, sat on the Southern Company board.109 At least in the short term, “Ike” did not disappoint utility leaders. Within weeks of his landslide victory, Eisenhower began to make good on his campaign promises by implementing a scheme that would reconfigure the federal government’s role in the nation’s economy. The plan called for removing, as much as possible, Washington’s involvement in sectors of the economy that private capital could handle. For the electric industry this meant ending the “federal monopoly over power” in parts of the Northwest and the South. Instead the federal government and private utilities, echoing McManus’s plans for Clarks Hill, would form a “partnership” to ensure that rural consumers enjoyed plenty of cheap electricity.110 The public–private partnership had immediate impacts. The appropriations SEPA requested in late 1952 were denied or underfunded by the new Congress. Even the Greenwood backbone line—on which about half the construction had been completed by mid-­1953—was forcibly sold to a private utility under President Eisenhower’s orders.111 Indeed the stated policy of the Eisenhower administration was to oppose any new federal transmission systems unless private companies refused to serve preference customers. In a drastic about-­face of the early post–Second World War trend, DOI now seemed to be on private power’s side. Eisenhower’s Department of the Interior secretary, Douglas McKay, refused to sell Clarks Hill power—which had begun to flow in 1952—directly to cooperatives, opting instead to pen a string of one-­year Allatoona-­style contracts.112 Prospects for government powerlines, and indeed for public power, looked bleak. GEMC persisted though and pursued its case in court in 1953 and 1954 with former Georgia governor Ellis Arnall serving as its lead council. Both GEMC and Southern Company held fast to their positions until Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, issued a surprise ruling in July 1955. Although officials in McKay’s DOI reportedly tried to suppress the ruling, which was not publicized P U B L IC DA M S , P R I VAT E P OW E R

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until October 1955, Brownell argued that McKay’s position on Clarks Hill “flouts the Congressional” purpose as articulated in the 1944 Flood Control Act and that “by restricting the construction of transmission of facilities, it would . . . permit the private utilities in the vicinity of each dam to monopolize, on its own terms, the power produced at the Federal project.” He therefore concluded that “Section 5 of the Flood Control act of 1944 does not authorize the Secretary of the Interior . . . to enter into the proposed contract with the Georgia Power Company” and that DOI must contract directly with preference customers even if they lacked the means to transmit their own power from government dams.113 Already persona non grata in the South for his opinion in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, Brownell took things even further when he intimated that DOI might aid cooperatives in acquiring or building powerlines that would bind together a coherent, southern public-­power network.114 That suggestion seemed closer to reality when both chambers of Congress, once again controlled by Democratic majorities following the 1954 midterm elections, produced reports warning that if cooperatives did not soon receive power delivery contracts that adhered to Brownell’s decision, appropriations would be earmarked for the construction of SEPA transmission facilities.115 With these interventions co-­ops seemed to have finally won at Clarks Hill. Smelling blood in the water, GEMC’s chief executive, Walter Harrison, issued a proposal to SEPA in March 1956 for the construction of powerlines that would tie Clarks Hill to a new Army Corps of Engineers’ dam on the lower Chattahoochee River and thus link rural cooperatives in Georgia to those in South Carolina and Alabama.116 Faced once again with the creation of a rival electric system—which Branch, gloves now off, castigated as “tyranny” and “a device for socializing our economy”—Georgia Power agreed to reconsider negotiations for a wheeling arrangement.117 Within two months of Harrison’s proposal, Georgia Power–Southern Company, GEMC, and SEPA came to a wheeling agreement for Clarks Hill.118 The deal was expanded in 1957 when SEPA agreed with private utilities to wheel electricity from all Corps dams in Georgia to rural cooperatives.119 Even as preference customers had seemingly preserved their power’s identity, private power retained control over southern transmission systems in Georgia and across the Southeast. Although this settlement represented a compromise compared to the company’s demands for Clarks Hill in 1946, it prevented DOI from building a competing electric system in the South. To this day in fact SEPA owns no powerlines. The federally-­funded energy flowing from public dams, as McManus proposed, had been seamlessly subsumed within privately controlled, coal-­dominated networks in Dixie. Private utilities had successfully converted the output of public dams across the region into private power. The potential

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growth of a public-­power network in the South had been halted and the seeds of the Sunbelt had been planted. *   *   * To some extent the fight for Clarks Hill “unplugged the New Deal” in the South by entrusting to the private realm reliable flows of electric power for continuous economic growth and social progress in underserved communities. Yet if the spirit of the New Deal was unplugged by the mid-­1950s, many features of the system remained connected. The New Deal state was under attack, but the New Deal’s infrastructure remained intact (and continued to grow) and served in large part as the foundation for a new type of political economy. The Clarks Hill debate points to a crucial moment in the mid-­twentieth-­century South when this emerging mode of social provision—one based on federal largess, private enterprise, and perpetual growth—began to coalesce. It reveals that questions of political economy in the postwar South revolved in no small measure around public and private claims on nature, energy, electrical democracy, and monopoly capitalism. But the settlement at Clarks Hill also demonstrates that coal—not water—would power the New South after Second World War. It is certainly the case that this shift took place in part because the South ultimately lacked sufficient hydropower to meet demand in the postwar world. But to suggest that reservoir volumes or generating equipment alone caused the transition is to succumb to enviro-­technical determinism. There was a clear fuel-­source politics at play in the postwar South. The Clarks Hill drama points out how people’s desires for control over nature and power influenced energy history. By the late 1950s rural southerners still resisted the politics of coal and private power and continued their struggle in subsequent decades. Their fervent pursuit of increasingly large amounts of electricity, though, revealed that they had clearly bought into an energy-­driven politics of prosperity. The lure of the American dream would see them capitulate to private power by the mid-­1970s, ultimately helping private power forge a model for Dixie’s regeneration based in a nexus of coal, consumerism, and corporate monopoly capitalism.

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7 The Heart of the New South

Georgia Power declared 1965 a year for celebration. In the century since the Confederacy’s defeat, mono-­crop agriculture, dawdling country life, and rigid tradition had lost their hegemonic grip on Dixie. Now a New South, “a pulsing industrial giant [with] high-­rise offices piercing the skies [and] factories throbbing and humming tunes” of prosperity, had finally emerged. After one hundred years of uninterrupted progress, according to Georgia Power, the state of Georgia and its capital city sparkled as the grand symbols of the South’s transformation. They represented a fully regenerated Dixie. More than mere symbols, though, they were the beating “Heart of the New South.”1 The year was notable for another, far less conspicuous reason as well. In June 1965, with virtually no fanfare, Georgia Power completed construction of the most potent coal-­fired generating station Dixie had ever seen, Plant Harllee Branch, whose first generating unit boasted a region-­leading capacity of 250,000 kilowatts.2 Work had already begun on three incrementally larger units which, when completed, would make Plant Branch the first southern generating site of more than 1.5 million kilowatts, over half the utility’s entire 1965 capacity. Linked to a new regionwide 230-­kilovolt transmission system—and soon after connected to a 500-­kilovolt network—Plant Branch’s plentiful electric current could be flashed in an instant to a number of booming New South metropolises.3 Plant Branch was remarkable for more than its productive prowess. In the same year the plant opened, Georgia Power and Pittsburgh-­based Consolidation 156

Coal executed a contract for a continuous supply of bituminous coal to flow to Plant Branch from Tackett’s Creek coal mine in Claiborne County, Tennessee. The means through which 1.5 million tons of Appalachian coal would be annually shuttled to Plant Branch was the “unit train.” Coal mine operators, electric utilities, and railroads in the eastern United States implemented the unit-­train idea in the early 1960s to ship entire trainloads of fuel much faster and more cost effectively than the old individual car–load method. Stocked only with coal from a specific mine, a unit train chugged directly to a specific power plant, dropped the entirety of its cargo in a coal pit, and headed directly back to the mine. Plant Branch was among the nation’s first generating stations to adopt this delivery service and was one of the country’s largest unit-­train customers. Whereas most unit trains consisted of about seventy 100-­ton cars and weekly deliveries, the one-­ hundred-­car train that transported coal from Northeast Tennessee unloaded its freight in Middle Georgia three times per week.4 Though it stood above the crowd, Plant Branch did not stand alone. Georgia Power’s counterparts in the Southern Company system, as well as Duke Power, Virginia Electric, and others, came to rely on unit trains and expanded their coal-­based holdings at similar rates. Thanks to the apparently unending streams of coal as well as seemingly unlimited increases in electrical consumption—intertwined elements of the “grow-­and-­build” strategy and the formula for private power’s ultimate victory—southern utilities produced a veritable explosion of generating capacity after the Second World War, far outpacing national averages; Southern Company’s four-­state construction program in 1971 alone outstripped that of General Electric’s, Ford’s, and IT&T’s global construction programs combined.5 In Alabama generating capacity from the early postwar years to the mid-­ 1970s expanded by over 600 percent. Georgia’s grew by more than 800 percent. Annual kilowatt-­hour totals across the same time frame saw even more stunning rates of increase: Alabama Power’s production expanded by over 650 percent and both Georgia Power’s and Duke Power’s yields both rose by some 930 percent.6 The basis for the vast majority of this power surge was coal. Such energy transitions were not unique to private power; TVA now produced far more coal-­ fired power than hydroelectricity as well.7 Although apparently unnoticed by the consumers using increasingly large amounts of electricity and little touted by private-­power cartels, the lifeblood coursing through the New South’s pulsing heart and urban-­industrial arteries was electric power derived from Appalachian bituminous coal.8 The fuels and facilities driving the New South had not always been so obscure. Private-­and public-­power forces frequently and loudly clashed in fights for control over rivers and dams across much of the twentieth century, and these conflicts ensured that many ordinary southerners knew about the infrastructure T H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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and natural resources that made modern life possible. Jubilant revelries often accompanied a new dam’s opening and utilities warmly invited tourists to gaze upon humanity’s ability to harness and improve nature. Southern utility executives, especially Georgia Power’s Henry Atkinson and Alabama Power’s Tom Martin, insisted that dams constituted the core of their corporations’ identities. Shortly before he died in 1939, Atkinson asked that eternity honor his legacy as a hydropower pioneer. He requested that his tombstone should read, “He put to work for Georgia the mountain rivers that had for centuries been running to waste.”9 Yet although hydroelectricity receded from view and importance in the 1940s and 1950s, coal plants, coal mines, and coal trains did not replace dams and rivers in the public’s eye. Even as it provided more power than hydroelectricity ever did, coal-­fired electricity drew little notice in the 1960s. Environmental and energy historians have offered explanations as to why, but very little as to how, such energy systems faded from consumers’ vision.10 We are left to assume that physical distance and everyday banality unintentionally rubbed coal and power plants off people’s consciousness, leaving between them a conceptual void—a phenomenon we might call “historical friction.” Granted, the wear and tear of passing time helped ease the built environment into daily life’s unnoticed normality but the seemingly empty, invisible space between energy production and energy consumption has a history too. Far more than historical friction was at work in removing the true, jet-­black heart of the postwar New South from plain view. A deliberate and productive process increasingly—but never totally—shrouded coal in a cloak of invisibility that enabled consumers to forget about the origins of the energy required for modern life. Scholars of social memory have demonstrated that interrogating forgotten events is as important as analyzing what societies have chosen to remember. Remembering and forgetting are tightly interwoven properties and neither happens as the unintended consequences of historical accident.11 Much the same could be said about the process of obscuring energy production. Efforts to help consumers “forget” about the place of power plants and Appalachian bituminous emerged in reaction to public power’s persistence. Following Clarks Hill and another nationally consequential public-­power controversy known as “Dixon-­Yates” in the mid-1950s, utilities invested increasingly large amounts of resources in keeping the uneasy peace. Advertising and public relations campaigns—highlighting the ways free enterprise could provide a clean, comfortable, and convenient life for the individual consumer, especially in the region’s booming suburban settlements—became private power’s weapon in the ongoing war against public power. In stark contrast to earlier practices, such 1960s pieces rarely mentioned the energy sources underwriting all the ben158

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Owned Utilities in the United States, 1979.

Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1939–1976; US Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration. Statistics of Privately

Figure 7.1 Levels of Coal-­fired, Hydro, and Nuclear Electrical Generation for Major Private Utilities in the Southeastern States, 1939–1979. Sources: Federal Power

efits of postwar American abundance. By deemphasizing the place of coal, power plants, and powerlines in making such a life possible, southern utilities furthered corporate capitalism’s “quest for social and moral legitimacy” and removed from the equation an awareness of the natural resources and infrastructures that had served as the basis of public power’s consternation for much of the twentieth century.12 While this strategy seemed to pay dividends, the twin threats of economic and energy crisis in the 1970s broke the silence, prompting many people to once again ask serious questions about monopoly capitalism and energy production in the New South. To quell the rising storm of popular protest and avert potential financial disaster in the 1970s, private power yet again sought relief and stability in the state’s arms by pursuing a federal bailout, in an astoundingly ironic turn, with the aid of REA cooperatives which bought into the private-­power system and welcomed coal and nuclear energy as power sources for the rural South’s future. The public–private partnership confirmed but accelerated a long-­standing, if not fully recognized, trend: southern free-­market capitalism and state action had long been thoroughly interwoven. This pact had lasting implications for southern regional development and energy policy, weaving together coal, consumption, and corporate monopoly capitalism as the basis on which Dixie might finally achieve full regeneration. *   *   * Before coal and power plants temporarily faded from view in the 1960s, their centrality to electrical provision in the South grabbed national attention. The ten-­year scuffle over Clarks Hill went far toward settling the rather cacophonous public–private power disputes that, at least since the 1910s, had kept southern power sources in plain view. Yet other fronts in the ongoing public–private rivalry opened in the early 1950s. The most momentous of these battles, referred to as “Dixon-­Yates,” renewed fights over TVA’s territorial limitations but took matters in a new direction. Dixon-­Yates became a proving ground for coal’s place in the continued struggle for dominance over both the discourses and materiality of southern modernization. While Dwight Eisenhower campaigned for the presidency in 1952 as an ardent anti–New Dealer who promised both to restore free enterprise and root out socialism, he governed in moderate tones. He would arrange a “partnership” between federal power programs and private enterprise to provide for the nation’s electrical needs in a time of rapid growth.13 In practical terms, and in keeping with larger Cold War–era thinking, the partnership plan worked essentially as a form of homeland containment. Much like its pledge to limit global communism to the places where it already reigned, the Eisenhower administration would not 160

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work to roll back public power. It would, however, prevent TVA from spreading into private enterprise’s territory.14 The administration’s policy held that any power needs in the Tennessee Valley beyond TVA’s current capacity—needs almost certain to arise in a swiftly growing region—would have to be satisfied by privately owned utilities.15 This version of containment ruled with little incident until 1954 when a major disagreement centering on control over the southern geography of power, and the threat of another electrical famine, rattled an already uneasy peace. Due to the outsize demand that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), national defense manufacturers, and domestic consumers placed on their generating and transmission capacity amid the Korean War, TVA managers realized that “prompt action was imperatively needed to avoid a grave power shortage.”16 In a potential immediate postwar replay, TVA leadership feared their agency would prove unable to furnish major urban markets like Memphis with adequate power. To satisfy projected energy requirements, TVA sought congressional appropriations to expand its generating capacity with the construction of a new coal-­fired power plant thirty miles north of Memphis in Fulton, Tennessee.17 This was not the first time TVA looked to coal to serve its customers’ needs in a moment of looming power shortage. Until the Second World War, TVA had produced essentially all its output in hydroelectric facilities. But waterpower proved insufficient during and after the war. Coal became the short-­term antidote. To political conservatives’ and private utility managers’ horror, coal apparently became the long-­term answer as well when TVA in 1948 proposed to build a coal-­burning station called New Johnsonville. Though opponents denounced the move as plainly unconstitutional, the Truman White House ensured that New Johnsonville received full funding and speedy completion. Created as a water conservation and hydropower agency, TVA was now in the business of generating, transmitting, and selling coal-­fired electricity.18 For private power any new TVA generating station stung badly enough, but TVA’s foray into the coal-­fired power business implied more worrisome changes. Across the United States federal power had nearly always been associated with hydroelectricity.19 Increased coal-­based capacity would decouple TVA from the Tennessee River, allowing it to impinge upon private power’s turf. Private southern utilities and their congressional allies thus saw this development as the thin end of a wedge that would cut into their territory and assail free enterprise. Though the president justified New Johnsonville as an emergency measure, southern utilities nonetheless found the new trend troubling. While TVA’s increased demand would likely be temporary, the infrastructure would most definitely be permanent. Even when fears of power shortage eventually subsided, TVA could not simply scale back its coal-­plant production. Sunk costs would deT H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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mand that TVA managers seek new revenue from new customers. “From bitter experience,” a Southern Company executive glumly quipped, “we knew where that market would be found.”20 TVA’s proposed Fulton plant, languishing in a Republican-­controlled Congress and facing private-­power pushback, did not enjoy the same level of backing as New Johnsonville. But in 1954—after Congress had delayed the Fulton plant’s funding for as long as possible—Eisenhower announced an alternative. Private utilities would partner with TVA to supply AEC and Memphis with new electric power sources: Middle South Utilities, a holding company headed by Edgar Dixon, and the Southern Company, led by Eugene Yates, would build a jointly owned coal-­fired power station in West Memphis, Arkansas—outside TVA territory. In a convoluted arrangement, AEC’s Kentucky facilities would purchase electricity from the Dixon-­Yates generating station, but that power would not flow directly to AEC. Instead the West Memphis plant’s electricity would cross the Mississippi River and enter TVA’s Memphis market as “replacement power.” TVA would in turn ship electricity to AEC, albeit now with energy supplied by the privately owned Dixon-­Yates entity in West Memphis.21 This plan would not only contain TVA but, by essentially converting Memphis into a private-­power customer, would signal the beginning of private power’s infiltration into public power’s territory. For public power’s supporters, containment had ended and rollback had begun. AEC managers professed their unhappiness with the proposal, claiming their agency would be forced to pay the higher rates.22 TVA’s leadership and its congressional supporters likewise expressed their displeasure. Both Democratic US senators from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore, joined TVA chairman Gordon Clapp in denouncing Dixon-­Yates as the backdoor ploy of a Republican Party–private power cabal to begin the process of dismantling the New Deal’s signature modernization accomplishment.23 Perhaps the only group pleased with the plan was the Southern Company–Middle South combination, which would initially have to invest only about 5 percent (or about $5.5 million) of total estimated construction costs for a project that would inaugurate private power’s penetration into TVA’s market.24 What ensued between Eisenhower’s 1954 announcement and the contract’s cancellation in 1955 was a front-­page worthy, densely tangled political drama that left few unscathed. Senator Kefauver openly accused the president of colluding with his legendary golfing chum and Southern Company board member, Bobby Jones, as well as with FPC and Securities and Exchange Commission officials, to ensure the deal’s approval.25 The scandal even reached into the vice president’s office. “Nixon, Dixon, and Yates,” charged Tennessee Governor Frank Clement, were all guilty of the “lowering of the American standard of public morals.”26 162

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Dixon-­Yates’s chief financier was exposed as a double agent: not only did he secure private funding, but he also secretly worked in the President’s Bureau of the Budget. A former employee of Mississippi Power and Light (a Middle South subsidiary) blew the whistle on purported Wall Street chicanery and holding company improprieties, denouncing the whole affair as a fraud.27 Democratic Party hopefuls tried to use the force built up in the hullabaloo to their advantage in the buildup to the 1956 election, but by then the affair had run out of steam.28 The controversy concluded rather anticlimactically in 1955 when Memphis officials announced they would build their own generating plant. Though it produced little in the way of criminal investigations or electoral results, a significant development nevertheless resulted from the altercation. Dixon-­Yates had sufficiently frightened enough politicians to the point that Congress refused to issue any new appropriations for even modest TVA building programs. Yet the agency supplied energy to a region of the United States that in the postwar years experienced steady growth in both population and energy needs. To meet TVA’s requirements for current and future growth—without resorting to potentially scandalous solutions—a TVA self-­financing bill made its way into Congress in 1957. The legislation called for as much as $750 million in TVA bond issues and, according to southern electric industry leaders, a potential increase of its territory of up to 25,000 square miles.29 Predictably, the plan drew condemnations as a socialist plot. Because the electric power industry was “the first target of government ownership advocates,” New Hampshire senator Styles Bridges claimed in 1958, “the implications of [TVA self-­finance and expansion] spell trouble for our whole free enterprise system.” The root cause of such a worry was the type of energy such expansions implied: more coal-­fired plants. If TVA remained tied to the water, it could be contained. If it continued to invest in coal-­fired generation and high-­tension transmission networks, Bridges feared, such a program would initiate the domino effect, establishing “a precedent for similar organizations in the Pacific Northwest, the Missouri River basin, and who knows where eventually.”30 Southern Company president Harllee Branch (appointed to that position in 1957) echoed Bridges’s sentiment at a congressional committee hearing in 1958. Pleading for “fair play”—by which he essentially meant public power’s end as a government sponsored competitor—Branch argued that a coal-­powered TVA would breach its current boundaries and launch a new incursion into Southern Company’s operating territory.31 To protect free enterprise and his operating utilities’ turf, Branch concluded, TVA must be contained by a “fence.” With the help of congressional allies and power company executives from across the South, Branch’s proposal passed. In 1959 the TVA Revenue Bond Act severed TVA from dependence on congressional appropriations, ordered the agency to pay $1 bilT H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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lion to the US Treasury over a half century, and most importantly, limited any future territorial expansions to just five miles beyond 1957 borders.32 By 1957 private power had won several crucial victories in the South. After the Dixon-­Yates fiasco, Harllee Branch and Congress had built their “fence” around TVA, and the larger southern public-­power system had been effectively incorporated within the private utility industry following Clarks Hill. Another victory for private power and southern boosters came in the realm of public sentiment on federal involvement in their region. Southern congressional delegations and their constituents were, of course, perfectly happy to receive federal welfare in the form of interstate highway construction, military bases, nuclear weapons programs, and NASA. (By 1960, while only 12 percent of federal tax revenues came from Dixie, 25 percent of all federal spending went to the southern states.)33 In other arenas, though, selective outrage cast federal involvement as a foreign invasion. As Washington hacked away at Jim Crow in the 1940s and 1950s, southerners began to reject parts of the New Deal. A popular, but not universal, backlash against further developments on the Savannah River in the 1950s and 1960s, seen in much the same light as civil rights legislation, emerged in both Georgia and South Carolina.34 Nevertheless with a weakened public-­power structure and fewer public-­power sympathizers, it seemed private utilities could finally build a coal-­based New South without further worries over public power’s threat. Yet despite 1950s triumphs public power still weighed heavily on private power’s mind. Co-­ops continued to agitate for preference rights to federal electricity soon to be available at new Army Corps of Engineers dams on watersheds across the South. Though private power generally did not oppose new government facilities after Clarks Hill, tensions continued well into the 1960s.35 In addition, the Bureau of Reclamation pursued an ambitious plan in the 1950s and early 1960s to construct a federal transmission system in the US Southwest (realized as the Western Area Power Administration in 1977) that drew private power’s scorn as the clear progeny of Karl Marx and the obvious precursor to a socialist takeover.36 Though federal developments in the Southwest posed no immediate threats to the South, the domino theory held that they soon might. But instead of continuing down the path of vociferous opposition to public power as the 1960s approached, private power chose another direction. Rather than castigating public power’s quest for more dams, coal-­fired plants, and powerlines as components in a Fabian socialist stratagem—although that tactic never fully disappeared—private power began to remove these structures from view. Through aggressive public relations and sales campaigns, private utilities emphasized the ways the free market could provide consumers with the best possible lives in a postwar New South—a life that seemingly contained no coal, power plants, or powerlines.

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*   *   * “COMFORTABLE!” “CLEAN!” “CONVENIENT!” exclaimed an April 1965 Georgia Power advertisement. With fully electrified homes, southerners would realize these benefits, but not just for a season. “Now you can have springtime in your home the whole year ’round [with] flameless electric heating and cooling.” Regardless of seasonal swings, the ad explained, consumers could always enjoy a perfect indoor climate. “During the bitter winter months, electric home heating keeps your family warm and snug with never a disturbing draft. And in summer, electric air conditioning does away for good with sweltering days and sleepless nights.” Invisible, flameless energy would dramatically improve people’s lives.37 By the mid-­1960s—even as southern generating stations burned millions of tons of Appalachian bituminous coal per year—the comfort, cleanliness, and convenience of flamelessness had become one of the US electric utility industry’s most recognizable mottos. Utilities’ promotional efforts in the late 1950s and 1960s focused more and more on the results from which electrical consumers would benefit and obscured the networks of nature and technology that made better living possible. Certainly part of the motivation for pursuing a “flameless” public relations agenda sprang from business realities. On the one hand, electric utilities competed with natural gas companies for greater shares of the increasingly important domestic market. The emphasis on electricity’s modernity and invisibility clearly linked the gas flame with the primitive. On the other hand, the rise of the air conditioner, though in only about 12 percent of American homes by 1960, had significantly tilted peak electrical usage times to the summer months. To fight off the natural gas industry and to balance their “load”—that is, to ensure that their generating equipment operated at optimal levels all year long—utility managers vigorously promoted “flameless” electricity.38 Far more than sales strategies were at play in the 1965 “Springtime” advertisement—a promotional piece in which coal, power plants, and powerlines were wholly absent. Historical friction alone, though, did not rub away coal-­fired electricity’s place as the heart of the New South. Electrical infrastructure’s newfound invisibility required a productive discursive process. The utility industry generated this seeming obscurity largely to disaggregate cause (coal, power plants, and powerlines) from effect (electrical comfort, cleanliness, and convenience) and thereby to thwart any further electrical successes of the New Deal state. If people were content with the highly electrified lives that private enterprise afforded them, they would presumably feel no need to investigate electrical infrastructure or fuel sources or to pressure the state for more New Deal–style solutions. An examination of this process requires a broader scope and a step back in time. The private utility industry’s efforts in the 1960s to cast electricity as an T H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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unseen force that would grant consumers perpetual “springtime” had roots in the early post–Second World War years when both private and public power, concerned about power shortages and each other’s expansion, were rather prolix about the sources of energy production. Although power companies constantly encouraged consumers to acquire new electric appliances, sales were not the utility industry’s sole concern in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Private power took pains to emphasize the dangers that public power’s expansion represented. To that end, the Electric Companies Advertising Program (ECAP, founded in 1941) formulated a public relations campaign in 1949 that directly challenged public power. The potent, straightforward tagline it devised charged that “GOVERNMENT IN ANY BUSINESS IS SOCIALISM.”39 ECAP spread its message by placing advertisements in a wide array of publications. To tug at heartstrings and highlight the dystopia that future generations would face, ads often featured children and asked readers such questions as “Who’d want to leave a socialistic U.S.A. to his kids?”40 If the federal government took over the electric industry, another ad asserted, Americans would no longer be able to bequeath liberty to their offspring because “when government, moving step by step, controls enough things, you have a socialist government, whether you want it or not. You’ll be controlled, too. Then what freedoms will you be able to pass on to your children?”41 In league with ECAP, Ashton Collins, who had positioned himself as a public relations guru for the utility industry, drafted Reddy Kilowatt into the war as well. In 1950 Reddy became a soldier in the battle against public power and led the charge in a public relations campaign titled “Grass Roots Impact Plan” (GRIP), which encouraged “action in the crusade against creeping socialism.”42 One such advertisement from 1950 spoke directly to consumers about their bottom line. “His game will cost you MONEY,” Reddy warned, referring to a bureaucratic “crackpot.” More than just pocketbook issues were at risk though; the government would use taxpayers’ dollars to build a public-­power network. Reddy claimed to have no knowledge of why the government wanted to build “extra power plants you don’t need.”43 But GRIP’s authors made the point explicit: public power aimed to use nature and infrastructure to initiate a totalitarian takeover. In response GRIP sought to stoke “the fear that the government socialist planners for public power will scream ‘Power Shortage’ at the slightest opportunity” and use that pretense to build even more federal generating stations.44 Critical of public power as he was, Collins believed that denigration alone was insufficient. He thus advised power company executives that, beyond denouncing incessant increases in New Deal–inspired public power, they must stress the ways the free enterprise system had responded to power shortages in the early postwar years. For the starkly antisocialist Collins, this part of private power’s 166

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strategy was critically important given prevailing political circumstances. The Truman administration, along with its public-­power cohorts, Collins charged in a 1952 speech, had revealed itself as “an avowed enemy of electric companies” with plans for “regimenting [power companies] as slaves of a government bureaucracy.” Public-­power fanatics, according to Collins, would achieve their objective of building more federal dams by fomenting class warfare and highlighting capitalism’s supposed failure to meet postwar energy needs, thereby convincing Americans to acquiesce to totalitarianism. Just as the United States had invested billions in postwar Europe and China to rebuild the foundations of free enterprise and stamp out any communist seedlings, private utilities pursued and vigorously promoted aggressive power plant construction programs—a sort of privately administered, internal Marshall Plan.45 By no means were power companies alone in promoting growth. Indeed in the postwar South “economic progress became a regional obsession.” But southern power companies heard Collins’s message and—often with state-­level encouragement and subsidies—stood at the forefront of efforts to promote the South as a land of unlimited economic development.46 Private power’s central theme in the early postwar years was growth—and growth, as Collins suggested, meant power plants. “The year 1952 was one of continued growth and expansion,” Georgia Power proudly claimed in its 1952 annual report. “New construction and peak demand . . . reached the highest figures in the Company’s history.”47 This was no idle boast. From 1947 to 1950 Georgia Power added 350,000 kilowatts of capacity (all in coal-­fired stations) to its portfolio, bringing its total capacity to over 981,500 kilowatts. The trend continued into the middle of the decade: by 1955 the utility had added nearly 500,000 more kilowatts to its system.48 Like its counterparts in the South, Georgia Power did not reserve these statistics for stockholders. To the contrary, southern utilities openly boasted of their astonishing postwar growth spurt and based their 1950s advertising campaigns—waged in publications across the nation—on the theme of power plant expansion.49 The use of production facilities as promotional symbols had deep roots in the American past. Since the 1880s companies had placed their factories at the center of their public relations programs, informing consumers that “they were dealing with a stable, competent firm.” The sheer size of a power plant spoke to the success of a given electric company, particularly its “large capacity, well-­ developed expertise, ample capitalization, and modern production techniques.”50 Innumerable southern utility promotional materials from the 1950s illustrate the point. A 1957 Duke Power ad featured a coal-­powered plant under construction, boasting that it would have an “ultimate capacity [of] 1,000,000 kw” and would ensure “industrial profit.”51 Even more on the nose, a 1954 advertisement claimed that a new Alabama Power coal-­fired station shone as the “Symbol of Growth” T H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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for the modern South.52 In a similar vein Georgia Power pitched its powerlines in 1952 as “Highways of Progress” that delivered “the benefits of modern living to homes and farms.”53 The list could continue endlessly, but if we take the continued production of advertisements as at least some measure of popular reception, it becomes clear that many southerners seemed to have been amenable to the promise of economic prosperity embodied in free enterprise, power plants, and fossil fuels. Yet by the early 1960s, as the tide seemed to turn in southern utilities’ favor, private power began to alter its message. Rather than crow about the fuel and power stations on which free enterprise had built postwar economic progress, utilities now deemphasized corporate growth and worked to obscure the natural resources and sites that made electrical generation possible. A national sales effort, called “Live Better Electrically,” helped forge this new path. Beginning in mid-­1950s General Electric (GE) launched a series of promotional campaigns designed to boost appliance and kilowatt-­hour sales. But the firm needed an image makeover as well. From the late 1940s to the mid-­1950s GE drew fire as a heartless, antiunion corporation from many of its almost 200,000 employees. To recast its reputation GE hired the actor Ronald Reagan in 1954 to both soften its image and halt New Deal liberalism’s advance.54 To accomplish his task Reagan hosted a weekly television program called GE Theater and embarked on a nationwide speaking tour that highlighted the free market’s contribution to postwar progress.55 In fact GE adopted “progress” as one of its 1950s key words: “Progress Is Our Most Important Product” became its corporate slogan. Americans experienced GE’s free-­market progress through “People’s Capitalism,” a widely deployed Eisenhower-­era assertion that laissez-­faire economics had enabled Americans to beat the Soviets at their own game of broadly distributing national wealth.56 “In a competitive People’s Capitalism,” a 1957 GE ad declared, “everyone gains . . . because part of the profits are plowed back into business to spur growth that leads to new products, new jobs and new services.”57 The benefits of corporate-­directed progress, another GE piece professed, was “not only to improve the jobs of all [Americans], but to also offer more of the personal satisfactions that mean a better life.”58 GE consolidated the ideas of its mid-­1950s sales drive in the Live Better Electrically program, first introduced in 1956. In combination with GE’s Medallion Home Program, which debuted in 1957, Live Better Electrically was a mass-­ marketing campaign that urged people—especially women—to stuff their homes with as many appliances as possible. GE informed consumers that the level of electrical saturation in their homes bore a direct relationship to the cleanliness, comfort, and convenience they would experience daily. In following this advice, according to a 1957 jingle, “you can make your family’s life much brighter / you 168

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will find your work much lighter / it’s as easy as can be / when you live better electrically,” and “you can have more time for fun and pleasure / family moments you will treasure / it’s an opportunity / to live better electrically.”59 In short, Living Better Electrically meant a better, freer, less arduous life.60 Individual testimonials purportedly confirmed GE’s claims. A woman from Illinois praised her all-­electric home for its comfort and convenience: “I just love our Medallion Home—especially the kitchen. All these appliances . . . sure make my job easier.”61 Homemaker Mildred White of Indianapolis added liberation to the mix. Both she and her mother agreed, she stated, that “without those machines we’d all be full time washer women.” Alongside freedom White valued the socially leveling aspects of living better electrically. “Now we know,” she stated, that “total-­electric living is not just for rich people.”62 Implicit in White’s statement about the democracy of living better electrically was a clear pre–Second World War holdover as well as a repetition of Eisenhower-­era discourses about “people’s capitalism.” Public perception held that electrical modernization, at least until after the Second World War, was just for the well-­to-­do and, especially in the South, almost exclusively for white people.63 The postwar economic boom had changed circumstances. As a sales pitch, GE’s injunction to seek cleanliness, comfort, and convenience seemed to have produced results, helping millions to live better through free enterprise. The trade association journal Electrical World reported that refrigerators, washing machines, and television sets each exceeded the 90-­percent saturation threshold in American homes by the end of the 1950s.64 Whether Americans had fully bought into GE’s version of free-­market politics is up for debate. But people had certainly bought the goods—if not quite at the levels Electrical World claimed—driving the larger politics of prosperity that insisted social leveling would arrive through consumer capitalism, not the state’s heavy-­handed policies of forced redistribution.65 Much like GE’s 1950s public relations campaigns in general, Live Better Electrically was clearly more than just a call to buy new appliances. As one historian writes, “what might at first appear to be an appeal to mass consumption veiled an important public relations move.” In other words, the electric industry specifically engineered such slogans to bolster corporations’ standing. “Better living” first became a corporate watchword in the 1930s and came to “narrate” the rise of consumer capitalism in the postwar years.66 GE continued that narration with its Live Better Electrically campaign, seeking to erase its image as a union-­busting corporate villain and to confirm the free market as the mechanism through which even blue-­collar Americans could lead lives of clean, comfortable, and convenient abundance. Live Better Electrically marked an important moment for the American T H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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utility industry. It underscored the ways individuals could both partake in and stimulate postwar economic progress by using steadily increasing amounts of electricity in the home. It furthermore closely associated high-­intensity electrical living with core American values at a time when international communism and internal socialism seemed to pose unceasing threats. Perhaps just as significantly, a central feature of Live Better Electrically was its failure to mention the fuels and infrastructures that made improved domestic life possible: the energy behind better living seemed to appear out of thin air. Yet as late as 1959 southern utilities continued to emphasize growth and power plant construction. Now though, utility industry insiders saw the continued focus on coal and generating stations as a critical misstep and argued that only by taking Live Better Electrically a step further—by deliberately removing fuel and infrastructure from their advertisements—could utilities polish their corporate image, boost American free enterprise, and finally defeat public power. Once again Ashton Collins assumed the role of chief exhorter, but now he urged southern utilities to change course. At a 1959 utility conference in New Orleans, Collins promised to be “coldly analytical” in discussing “our industry shortcomings” in public relations. Southern power companies—based in no small measure on his advice in 1952—had become overly proud of their generating stations. This tack, he said, no longer addressed the challenges facing their industry, particularly the issues of public power and customer dissatisfaction. “Does any man in this audience have a Power Plant for sale?” he rhetorically asked. “No!” he exclaimed. “Then why do we need emphasis on power plants per se in Company promotions?” The scolding continued: “You are not selling power plants, you are selling the product of those plants [which] has to go into the hands of the customer through two little holes in the wall, silently.” From that point forward, he insisted, utilities should deemphasize generating stations because such gimmicks did too little to “solve such important problems as . . . government ownership and [consumer discontent with] rates.”67 Southern electric companies immediately heeded Collins’s advice. They did not completely dispose of advertisements that cast their region as solid ground for continued economic expansion but, as the 1960s began, emphasized the direct relationship between private corporations and individual benefits. A series of advertisements in 1960 extended “people’s capitalism” to Dixie and identified ordinary southerners such as third-­grade teacher Marjorie Neal and cattle farmer Alex Dunaway as “power company owner[s].” As stockholder-­customers, they, like “almost everyone in the nation, [have] at least an indirect financial interest in electric company operation.”68 Widespread financial investment would embody the American way of free-­market capitalism and thwart public power. As Live Better Electrically suggested, everyday people would realize the return 170

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on their investment through the increased cleanliness, comfort, and convenience of all-­electric living—values private power explicitly stressed by the mid-­1960s.69 Perhaps the greatest advantage consumers would experience through all-­electric living was the erasure of the messiness and vagaries of nature. A suite of southern electric industry advertisements in the 1960s promised to bless consumers with year-­round comfort by way of “an ideal indoor climate.”70 Utilities vigorously promoted the comforts of electric heating in the 1950s and 1960s, but no single appliance signaled greater control over Dixie’s sweltering environs than the air conditioner. As a machine to improve people’s comfort, the AC debuted in movie theaters, department stores, and other places of public consumption in the 1920s. By the 1950s in-­home AC was in reach of increasing numbers of consumers, aided in part by federal expenditures in the region. Non-­ southern military officers often bought window units upon arriving at southern bases, sometimes overloading local power distribution systems.71 Of course private utilities pitched the AC as a tool to make long southern summers more tolerable and to make Dixie a good place to live and do business. According to promotional materials, air conditioning would not only help southerners beat the heat, but it would jettison many other ill effects of harsh conditions, including laziness and high mortality and morbidity rates. Apparently air conditioning would also dispatch the southern penchant for immorality as an electrically cooled sanctuary would lure more lost souls into church.72AC adoption did not happen quickly or evenly, although white southerners adopted AC at rates faster than the rest of the nation in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1960, 18.2 percent of all southern homes had air conditioning (compared to 12.4 percent nationally), while only 3.9 percent of African American homes in the South did. By 1970 just over half of all southern homes had air conditioning, while only 20 percent of black southerners’ homes and 35.8 percent of all American homes could enjoy cool comfort.73 None of the foregoing sales efforts mentioned the energy sources behind the people’s capitalism or all-­electric living, but neither did any of them explicitly work to remove coal and power plants from consumers’ view. That labor would be performed by the “flameless” public relations campaign of the 1960s. The American electric industry began using the term in 1961 after the Live Better Electrically program adopted “flameless” as its “key word” and urged utilities to “use the word ‘flameless’ in all its advertisements.” As noted above, the electric industry’s stated motivation for “the elimination of the flame” sprang from competition with the natural gas industry.74 But in the context of ongoing struggles against public power, and in combination with Collins’s 1959 advice, the private utility industry’s “flameless” campaign operated on a deeper level, scrubbing the once-­vaunted generating station from the public’s consciousness. T H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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Flameless living, as Georgia Power intimated in its 1965 “Springtime” advertisement, would replace the coal-­fired power plant as the apotheosis of humanity’s triumph over the natural world’s cruel realities, eliminating nature’s filth. A series of Florida Power and Light advertisements illustrated this point. Asking the reader, “Wouldn’t you rather switch” to flameless electricity?, each of the ads featured a hard-­working woman shrouded in darkness with a kerchief on her head. A 1970 ad advised a woman lugging a load of laundry to an outdoor clothesline that if she owned a flameless electric dryer, she would be set free from toil.75 Another ad displayed a woman hunching into and attempting to clean a dark and caked-­over oven. If she went flameless, however, she would be liberated not simply from the grime of a conventional oven but from the “drudgery of the past.”76 By the end of the 1960s flamelessness promised not only to relieve women of drudgery and dirt but also helped confirm an image of a fully modernized land of consumer plenty even as it obscured the place of coal-­burning generating stations as the heart of the New South. Such a process, though, was never even or complete. Even as southern generating plants annually pumped out tens of billions of seemingly invisible coal-­derived kilowatt hours, there were rumblings among activists suggesting that many ordinary people still had southern power sources in sight and were displeased with the way corporate cartels generated and distributed the energy that had become so interwoven with life in the modern South. *   *   * The struggles for control over electric energy in the South appeared to have settled into a peaceful moment in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In addition southern utilities worked to produce discourses that would remove contentious sources of fuel and power from consumers’ view beginning in the early 1960s. Especially after Clarks Hill and Dixon-­Yates, the war for southern power seemed to have ended. Yet southern utility executives knew that threats to their monopoly status still existed and continued to alert consumers to lurking dangers. In a 1962 pamphlet Alabama Power president Walter Bouldin issued the warning that radical cabals still pushed for redistributionist ploys that would imperil regional prosperity. Their aims were so hazardous not just because they would lead to domestic socialism and economic crisis, but, Bouldin hinted, because they would assist the Soviet Union in its quest for global dominance. Bouldin named DOI and REA as the primary culprits working to cripple southern progress. REA-­funded cooperatives “conscript the taxpayers’ money” and offer no “service which the investor-­ owned utility is not ready, willing, and able to supply.” Georgia Power chairman 172

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Jack McDonough heartily recommended Bouldin’s missive to “every thoughtful American” as a work that “shows how government competition adversely affects these companies and their customers.”77 Bouldin’s and McDonough’s warnings proved rather prescient. In the 1960s and 1970s southern public-­power supporters once again confronted private utilities, demonstrating that private power’s generating facilities were anything but invisible. What neither Bouldin nor McDonough seemed to have anticipated, though, was that southern utilities would face not just traditional public-­power foes; they would also confront global financial disaster as well as homegrown environmentalist–consumers’ rights movements. Co-­op members and environmentalists, holding opposition to private-­power cartels in common, might have made for an ideal coalition. But critical differences over energy consumption’s significance to Dixie’s continued regeneration—especially in a time of economic uncertainty—saw the two sides part company. To preserve at least a modicum of the New Deal–inspired dream of an independent southern public-­power network, cooperatives compromised and bought into—thus becoming a federal subsidy pipeline for—private power, bearing witness to and helping realize the triumph of the coal–consumerism–corporate capitalism nexus. At a site called Middleton Shoals in the Savannah River basin, the Carolinas saw one of the earliest power struggle outbreaks in the 1960s South, another flare-­up in the ongoing battle between those who favored public hydroelectricity and those who backed private coal-­fired electricity. Duke Power had long controlled markets in the western Carolinas but had no notable generating stations in upstate South Carolina. Given the Army Corps of Engineers’ continued Savannah River developments—in this case, a new dam called Trotters Shoals— and private utilities’ long-­held objection to what they saw as a federal invasion, Duke’s managers made plans for their own hulking coal-­powered facility on Duke-­owned land in the area. Blueprints for the new plant called for an initial generating capacity of 700 megawatts and 2,000 megawatts by 1965—larger even than Georgia’s Plant Branch—with cooling water diverted from the Savannah. But because Middleton Shoals conflicted with co-­ops’ desires for more federal development and threatened to scrap the Trotters Shoals project, Duke’s new scheme stirred up trouble.78 Both camps in the ensuing affair brandished familiar weapons. Co-­op representatives, politicians, and others favorable to Trotter Shoals cast the new site as an energy producer for preference customers, a guardian of vital public resources, and a place of recreation. Statements in support of Duke’s plans, they argued, were merely “propaganda.”79 For his part Duke’s CEO countered that Trotters Shoals was another example of “bureaucratic empire building” that would hamper free enterprise. Other Duke backers agreed but, somewhat more T H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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moderately, claimed that private cultivation would provide a windfall in tax receipts (despite quiet promises for several years of tax exemptions) and secure future economic progress by paving the way for local jobs.80 A South Carolina high schooler brought before Congress in 1963 to testify on the matter claimed that he and his peers “bitterly oppose Trotters Shoals because we’ll have to look other places for work since there would be none at home if Trotters Shoals is built.”81 Foreshadowing a trend to come, animosity gave way to compromise. South Carolina congressman William Jennings Bryan Dorn brokered a deal in 1966 that seemed to sate all parties. Dorn convinced South Carolina co-­ops and Duke Power that their projects could coexist, forming in the upper Savannah valley a public–private power complex “second to none in the world.”82 Co-­ops would get their dam (ultimately named for Senator Richard Russell of Georgia) and Duke would get Middleton Shoals. The joint project, Dorn told the House Appropriations Committee in 1967, would “greatly aid the REA in its efforts to make power available to our rural people” and would lure job-­creating companies like the Mead Corporation.83 What Dorn obscured, however, was that Trotters Shoals was mostly symbolic. It would not in fact power rural people’s lives, at least not constantly. Russell Dam only provided peak (supplementary) power in high-­ demand moments; Duke’s private coal-­fired system continued to provide rural co-­ops in the Carolinas with most of their energy. Tensions between public and private forces also resurfaced in 1960s Georgia. As with Middleton Shoals, accommodation was a key theme. Georgia law offered co-­ops’ market territory no protection; thus the first point of contention was one of turf. GEMC’s leadership, staunch backers of projects like Trotters Shoals because of the independence they would theoretically safeguard for co-­ops, saw in Georgia Power’s rapidly expanding coal-­fired network a possible channel for invasion of cooperatives’ market territory. “On a long-­range basis,” GEMC reported in December 1969, the potential damage could not “be adequately measured in dollars—even in millions. It could well be survival versus total abolition.”84 Following four years of backroom politicking, Georgia Power and GEMC agreed to a negotiated settlement, which Governor Jimmy Carter signed into law as the Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act (GTESA) in March 1973. GTESA segmented the state into thirty-­eight GEMC-­controlled distribution zones but left the most lucrative urban markets (outside those with municipally owned systems) and new industrial customers to Georgia Power.85 GEMC’s general manager, Walter Harrison, cast the law as a public-­power victory, ensuring co-­ops’ autonomy.86 It might have been more appropriate, however, to cast GTESA as the beginning of a partnership that funneled federal subsidies to an energy corporation in desperate need of cash. The new law effectively functioned as a government subvention that put the expensive job of wiring the swiftly 174

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expanding suburbs and exurbs exclusively in public power’s hands and on its ledger.87 Even as GEMC and Georgia Power settled their territorial dispute, the power supply issue remained a vexing problem. Due to alarming inflationary trends, borrowing and fuel costs had risen precipitously since the late 1960s—a serious problem for the ongoing coal-­fired construction program for utilities across the South. As a result, in May 1970 the Georgia utility asked, as did Virginia Electric in its home state, FPC for a 33 percent increase in wholesale rates to REA cooperatives—the first such request in REA’s history.88 Unsurprisingly GEMC cried foul. Harrison criticized the petition as an “unreasonable” measure that might mean disaster for REA cooperatives who believed that remaining the helpless customers of a utility that controlled all electrical generation and transmission was no longer tenable.89 In a striking reversal of its long-­cherished status as a federal hydropower customer—even though by 1970 Georgia Power’s coal-­fired plants supplied more than 80 percent of co-­ops’ electricity—GEMC requested $545 million from REA to build its own coal-­fired generating stations and transmission lines.90 Larger developments only worsened southern power supply problems. Global events in the early 1970s, including continued inflation and hostilities in the Middle East, sent both borrowing and fuel costs to new highs.91 By mid-­1974, as the national financial situation continued to falter, Southern Company and Duke Power equities both shed over 40 percent of their January 1974 value. Aside from having trouble making payroll, paying taxes, and showing enough earnings to satisfy stockholders, financial difficulties meant southern utilities might be unable to pay interest on outstanding bonds. The inability to service debt threatened construction programs, which, in a moment when electrical consumption levels steadily increased, reportedly threatened the return, yet again, of power shortages and further financial calamity. In response to these problems Duke, for example, not only delayed plant construction in 1974 but shuttered training facilities and laid off over 1,500 employees. A Georgia Power official candidly admitted that “we were broke” and had few good ideas about where to look for answers.92 In a jarring twist, it was rural electric cooperatives that provided the answer. GEMC’s co-­ops rescued Georgia Power in mid-­1974, agreeing to use low-­interest, tax-­free REA funds to help build coal-­fired and nuclear plants. The historical record is unclear about which side first approached the other.93 Regardless of who began the negotiations both parties came to the table with strengths and weaknesses. GEMC had federal money but no generating or transmission system. Georgia Power had a well-­established power network but essentially no funding. To solidify its standing as an equal partner with Georgia Power, GEMC chartered T H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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Oglethorpe Electric Membership Corporation, a new consumer-­owned company dedicated to the electrical generation and transmission business. Equality proved fleeting, however. Georgia Power and Oglethorpe signed a contract stipulating that the co-­ops would receive a minority stake (30 percent) in the new coal-­fired and nuclear plants and that REA would provide cheap financing. Convinced of the plan’s soundness, REA administrator David Hamil approved an initial loan of $206.5 million in November 1974, and a subsequent loan of almost $400 million more, to fund new construction.94 Georgia Power’s managers seemed quite relieved at the knowledge that tax payers would invest some $600 million in their business. “The only way we could build” the first units at Plant Hatch, a Georgia Power officer recalled, “was to get somebody else to pay for them.”95 The Middleton Shoals and GEMC cases were part of a larger trend demonstrating that questions of public versus private power in the South, even after Clarks Hill and Dixon-­Yates, remained open in the 1960s and 1970s. They also showed that shared commitments to ongoing electrification could produce unexpected collaborations that would even further turn New Deal–inspired institutions and infrastructure to private power’s purposes. Indeed, public–private partnerships were not limited to Georgia and South Carolina. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia, co-­ops agreed to provide cheap, federally backed loans to power companies totaling approximately $5 billion. The paradoxical nature of this turn of events did not escape southern utility managers. A Duke Power executive admitted that, although in previous decades companies like his spent millions denouncing public power, private power and co-­ops had now become “strange bedfellows.”96 Although public and private power in the South had continued to butt heads until the early 1970s, the irony of the new conciliatory posture was somewhat mitigated by the larger history of public power. From the late 1910s public-­power activists had located constant increases in electric energy provision and consumption at the core of their agendas for improved living standards. When federally backed public waterpower became a reality in the 1930s, New Deal programs only deepened the connections among electrical expansion, electrical consumption, and social uplift. Not only was this the case with TVA and REA—which included courses on how to use electricity in daily life—but with related programs such as the National Housing Act and the Electric Home and Farm Authority, which subsidized home wiring and appliance purchases.97 Rural power networks also helped create the jobs that put spendable dollars in southerners’ pockets: by 1965, at least half of new industrial jobs in the South were in rural counties.98 As rural electrification expanded in the early postwar years, farmers and their champions celebrated electric power as a transformative force. TVA chairman Gordon Clapp lauded rural electrification as “one of the tools [rural people] use 176

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in building a standard of living we are willing to call American.”99 Planters EMC linked electricity directly to consumer plenty, proudly reporting that “those now enjoying electric service are reaping untold benefits obtained only through electricity: Lights for Home and Farm, Appliances for Better Living.”100 The recognition of consumerism as a fundamental American value gained a significant boost in the 1960s and early 1970s when Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as countless other officials, affirmed that the greater national good required ever more consumer activity and the protection of consumers’ rights.101 Certainly from the co-­ops’ perspective, not to mention that of millions of other southerners, the consumption levels required for modern life would not have been possible without steadily expanding and reasonably priced electricity—the provision of which, after the developments of the early 1970s, would ultimately be guaranteed by private power. This is not to argue that co-­ops would inevitably partner with private power. Rather, mid-­twentieth-­century historical forces nurturing corporate capitalism’s version of energy-­intensive, coal-­powered consumerism proved enticing to even the most committed public-­power enthusiasts as New Deal liberalism wound down. But this was just the beginning. Budding private–public partnerships in the early 1970s South would only grow stronger as economic and energy troubles continued and a new crop of private-­power detractors emerged. *   *   * Not all southerners agreed that private power’s monopoly status and policy of unending growth was good for Dixie’s future. Across the region varied coalitions voiced displeasure at what they saw as the manifold drawbacks of the southern power situation in the 1970s. To level their environmentalist-­consumers’ rights critique, these groups combined labor activism and protest models forged in the 1950s and 1960s—including those of the civil rights, antiwar, and New Left movements—to offer an alternative to the ascendant Sunbelt structure of federally backed, private-­monopoly capitalism. In the early 1970s southern student activists, in league with Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group, often led the charge against what they perceived as needless private-­utility construction programs and extortionate rate-­increase requests. Duke University and University of North Carolina students protested Duke Power’s petitions for higher electrical charges. Enrolling with student protestors in both the Carolinas, and thus broadening the movement, were consumer groups, such as Carolina Action and Palmetto Action, and labor unions like the United Mine Workers, which had been engaged in a long struggle against the utility over a new labor contract. By 1974 almost twenty groups collaborated in the Carolinas to nationally publicize what they saw as harmful utility industry T H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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practices and to resist rate increases. Both tactics were meant to decrease Duke’s financial power—and evidently Duke felt that its equities value suffered due to the protests—so that further construction would have to be halted.102 Localized student-­led pushback against new power plants and rate increases arose in early 1970s Mississippi as well. But while the Mississippi movement, like that in the Carolinas, evolved into a much more broad-­based affair, it more clearly articulated an environmentalist critique. By mid-­decade local activism evolved into a statewide coalition of antinuclear activists called the Mississippi Catfish Alliance. Incensed over the ecological dangers of nuclear power and testing—including unacceptable tritium levels in drinking water and deformed wildlife—Mississippi Catfish organized rallies across the state to offer their objections to nuclear proliferation. Not only did Mississippi Catfish borrow from civil rights protest techniques, they aligned with civil rights organizations such as the NAACP. In addition to speaking about the threats of nuclear power to public health, African American Catfish members lambasted Mississippi Power and Light for its long “racist and reactionary political” record.103 Pulling together the strands of southern environmentalist and consumers’ rights protest was the Atlanta-­based Georgia Power Project (GPP), founded in 1972. In league with the Textile Manufacturers’ Union, Save America’s Vital Environment, and other citizens’ associations, GPP cast its fight as a “battle between the people and the Georgia Power Company,” seemingly dragging traditional public power–private power issues into the 1970s. Yet GPP had no New Deal– style goals in mind. Like many 1970s protest organizations, it was a child of 1960s radicalism and its leaders cut their teeth as activists in Students for a Democratic Society and the anti–Vietnam War movement.104 GPP’s philosophy, in the words of spokesman Bob Hall, held “that the long-­term solution to the problems posed by the Georgia Power Co. is for the people . . . to assume direct control of its operations. We are socialists, working toward a time when the company will be run and managed by its workers and consumers.”105 If GPP more explicitly aimed to fundamentally change the southern electrical landscape in the long term, its short-­term objectives closely aligned with those of its counterparts in the Carolinas and Mississippi. Because of the financial difficulties it faced, Georgia Power, like Duke Power, had requested that consumers pay higher rates each year from 1969 to 1972. Company president Edwin Hatch told PSC in June 1971 that his utility had “reached the end of our rope” and would soon be dead without a $45 million (8 percent) rate increase.106 In 1972 Georgia Power requested almost $48 million more from ratepayers. GPP’s protests against the proposed increases reportedly brought some seventy-­five citizens— including homemakers, white collar workers, union members, students, and civil rights activists—to PSC’s September 1972 meeting to offer testimony against the 178

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higher prices that one elderly woman said would be “impossible for the old and poor to pay.”107 PSC granted only a fraction of Georgia Power’s request ($17.9 million), leading the company once again to request large rate hikes in both 1973 and 1974.108 When PSC gathered in January 1975 to hold public hearings on an emergency rate increase, hundreds of irate citizens overwhelmed the meeting. Following two weeks of closed-­door deliberations, PSC granted Georgia Power only half of its emergency request (about $25 million). Predicting fatal financial shortfalls for the rest of the year, Georgia Power soon thereafter filed yet another petition— this time for a whopping $305 million in permanent rate hikes, or a 28 percent rise in consumers’ monthly bills.109 GPP and its allies were more incensed than ever. Protestors gathered outside the capitol in late February 1975 and charged that Georgia Power’s claims of financial troubles were a ruse designed to coax PSC into forcing ordinary consumers to foot the bill for the utility’s lavish construction program. Street-­level demonstrations followed on the actions of angry consumers, some of whom proposed “rate strikes,” in which consumers revived the moral economy spirit of eighteenth-­century English bread riots and pay only what they thought was fair. Others suggested full-­on “electricity strikes,” wherein domestic power users would restrict their electrical consumption to a “barebones-­minimum.” GPP also took its case to both the Georgia Supreme Court and the US District Court, charging that Georgia Power had colluded with PSC members and thus violated a rash of state and federal legislation as well as the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.110 Though unsuccessful in the courts, GPP’s maneuvers seem to have borne some fruit. In April 1975 PSC granted Georgia Power a rate increase of only $116 million. Realizing that his company would have considerable difficulty meeting even short-­term financial obligations, Georgia Power’s new president, Robert Scherer, announced that he would eliminate $1.4 billion from the 1975–1977 construction budget, meaning that eighteen planned generating units would not, at least in the foreseeable future, be built.111 The prospect of fewer generating units in Georgia Power’s system was no disappointment to GPP. The cancellation of new units, especially in nuclear generating stations, was one of GPP’s underlying goals. In addition to its advocacy on behalf of consumers, GPP was an environmentalist organization that sought not just to lower rates but to halt nuclear programs that “bring disease, death, and malformation” to all of society.112 Environmentalist objections to electric utility practices had roots in the mid-­1960s when activists fought against unsightly power plants and transmission lines. In short, they concentrated, like much of the incipient environmentalist movement, on aesthetic qualities.113 As the 1960s T H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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wore on, however, environmentalists focused more of their attention on the human and ecological health concerns associated with nuclear power—a turn not at odds with the aims of consumer activists. Consumers’ rights and environmental protection coevolved in the decades following the Second World War and their goals, centering on quality-­of-­life issues, remained similar in the 1970s.114 Indeed by the early 1970s many activists seemed to believe that, in Nader’s words, “a coalition of these two movements is essential if either is to succeed.”115 GPP’s activism plainly fit with Nader’s model that encouraged people to adopt “the strategy of cutting off the flow of money to utilities for nuclear expansion— by entering rate fights and [filing law] suits.”116 From GPP’s perspective this tactic would both help consumers keep more of their money and improve environmental conditions. According to Bob Hall, “if the company pursued conservation policies instead of seeking such a high rate of growth . . . , then we could decrease that growth rate considerably and not need so many new plants and so many increases on our light bills.”117 GPP’s mission at its core was to join a new regime of consumption with environmental protection, a direct critique of the apparently successful, but now faltering, strategy that drove postwar economic expansion. The organization seemed to have had good reason to believe its version of a slow-­growth, more environmental and consumer-­friendly New South would come to life when PSC consistently denied Georgia Power the full amount of its requested rate increases across the 1970s. Southern utilities had anticipated the rise of a consumerist-­environmentalist critique but given that critique’s success in concert with the energy-­economic crisis, they had to face their new foe head-­on. Already by 1970 power companies began to greenwash their images. But as groups like GPP and Mississippi Catfish called power plants and fuel sources back into prominence, private power had to adjust. Coordinated by Reddy Kilowatt Inc., southern utilities attempted to counter the public relations problems associated with consumers’ rights and environmentalism.118 A confidential report, titled Public Acceptance of Nuclear Power, focused on minimizing the damage protest groups could heap on nuclear proliferation programs. “Growing, active interest in ‘big issues,’” Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., wrote, “constitutes a major shift . . . from when people were satisfied with electricity per se and rarely questioned how it was produced. Today . . . people are concerned with the social, environmental, and economic effects of its production and consumption” and were taking action.119 While the pamphlet argued that local power companies could essentially ignore small protest groups as a typical “minority of the population [that] will oppose any issue, ” Alabama Power, Duke Power, Georgia Power, South Carolina Electric, and Virginia Electric, all key contributors to the Reddy Kilowatt report, could not wave protesters away. Activists in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Mississippi had cast serious doubt 180

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on whether the nexus of power plants, consumerism, and corporate hegemony would continue to hold. That vision for a regenerated Dixie found new life when co-­ops once again bailed out their old foes in the late 1970s. Armed with a new round of REA loans, southern cooperatives negotiated purchases of generating units across Dixie. Co-­ops in Virginia bought into Virginia Electric’s Surrey Plant and those in the Carolinas purchased shares in several Duke Power plants, notably Units 1 and 2 at the Catawba Nuclear Plant.120 Oglethorpe secured a 30 percent stake in all four units at Georgia Power’s coal-­fired Plant Scherer, as well as in two additional units at Plant Hatch and several other units around the state. Additionally, Oglethorpe agreed to buy into Georgia Power’s transmission network with a plan called the “Integrated Transmission System.” All told by the end of 1976 the Oglethorpe-­REA investment in Georgia Power’s generation and transmission system—a structure in which Oglethorpe had agreed to become a junior partner—totaled a stunning $1.962 billion, by far REA’s largest capital outlay for a single state to that point.121 When Plant Hatch opened in May 1976—three years behind schedule and more than two times over budget—Georgia Power’s Robert Scherer enthusiastically thanked REA for the timely cash infusions that made nuclear power and a stronger economy possible.122 REA administrator David Hamil delivered an address at the dedication as well. Hamil framed Plant Hatch’s cheap and reliable power as the culmination of the farmer’s long quest for full participation in postwar America’s regime of consumerism. Electricity had enabled “the resurgence of vigor in rural life” and was “the key to a revitalized rural America.” But Plant Hatch was only the beginning of the public–private power partnership, Hamil concluded, as “there is no way to escape the fact that energy demand will continue to increase.”123 *   *   * In 1982, after four years of returned stability following the Oglethorpe-­REA bailout, Georgia Power opened Plant Robert W. Scherer in Juliette, Georgia, with one 880,000-­kilowatt unit. Over the next seven years three more units joined the first, giving Plant Scherer a total capacity of 3.52 million kilowatts, making it the largest coal-­fired power plant in the Western Hemisphere. Since the mid-­1980s Plant Scherer has delivered electric power to millions of southerners, enabling them to enjoy the dreamy American standard of living seemingly promised to all.124 As Hamil predicted, energy demand in the South only continued to increase; by the beginning of the new millennium Dixie was the most energy intensive section of the nation, in overall terms and in electrical consumption. In 2012 the T H E H E A RT OF T H E N E W S O U T H

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US South contained about 33 percent of the nation’s population but consumed some 42 percent of the nation’s electric power. A substantial proportion of that consumption took place in the private home, primarily in the region’s expansive suburbs. As of 2012 the typical household in Georgia consumed about 1,280 kilowatts hours per month (or about 15,335 kilowatt hours annually), twice 1970 figures and an amount equivalent to the average American home’s yearly electrical consumption in 1946.125 Despite the completion of units three and four at Plant Hatch and two additional nuclear generators at Plant Vogtle, coal and coal-­fired power plants remained the heart of the New South past the first decade of the twenty-­first century, accounting for nearly 70 percent of electrical generation in the Southern Company system as late as 2011. Every day the four units at Plant Scherer combine to burn some 30,000 to 40,000 tons of coal (about 1,288 tons per hour, or about 11 million tons per year) brought in from the Black Thunder Coal Mine in Wyoming on thirty-­three unit-­trains that, like those destined for Plant Branch in 1965, never stop running on an 1,800-­mile loop. Each unit train measures about one-­and-­half miles long and carries over 10,000 tons of sub-­bituminous coal. With all the coal that it burns, Plant Scherer is not only the largest coal-­fired electrical station in the Western Hemisphere but is also, not surprisingly, the largest producer of CO2 emissions in the United States at some 25 million tons annually. (The third largest producer of CO2 emissions in the United States, Plant Bowen, at nearly 21 million tons per year, also calls Georgia home.) Due to its coal burning process, the power station in Juliette also sends nearly two tons of mercury into the atmosphere every year. Untold amounts of other heavy metals—arsenic, chromium, lead, nickel, selenium, and thallium—have reportedly been found in Scherer’s 750-­acre ash pond.126 Plant Scherer, like the other coal-­fired power plants across Dixie funded by both private investments and federal dollars, stands as an imposing archive housing loads of obscure but critical information about the newest New South. It speaks to the powerful appeal of the highly electrified life and to the superiority of coal, though natural gas, another fossil fuel, has recently taken a large share of coal’s place in southern electrical generation. But Plant Scherer also bears witness to the success of corporate capitalism’s links to coal and consumerism, a nexus forged in the 1950s and 1960s and, despite a searing critique by consumer-­environmental activists, consolidated in the 1970s. This intense and powerful entanglement—signifying in many ways the rise of the Sunbelt and the triumph of neo-­liberalism that continues into the twenty-­first century—became the dominant formula not just for regenerating Dixie but for bringing energy security and economic prosperity to the entire United States. In the mid-­1970s

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www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/.

ties in the United States, 1963–1970; US Energy Information Administration, “State Historical Tables for 2016,” EIA: Independent Statistics and Analysis, https://

Power Stations, 1902–1937; Federal Power Commission. Electric Power Statistics (1961); Federal Power Commission, Performance Profiles: Private Electric Utili-

Figure 7.2 US Electrical Production by Region, 1902–2016. Sources: US Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Central Electric Light and

journalist Kirkpatrick Sale described the Sunbelt’s rise as a “power shift” in which the United States saw the center of influence swing away from the Northeast and toward the “southern rim.” For Sale this transition turned on the ideal of perpetual growth led by federally backed investment in private enterprise. The issues raised in the foregoing pages can help us think more about the basis on which such a shift in power was based.127

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Conclusion

A bizarre alliance formed in August 2013. Members of the Atlanta Tea Party and the Georgia chapter of the Sierra Club joined forces, calling themselves the Green Tea Coalition. The group’s general mission was to challenge the Georgia Power Company’s monopolistic grip on the state and its electrical consumers. According to Tea Party activist and Green Tea president Debbie Dooley, who also founded an organization called Conservatives for Energy Freedom, Georgia Power had created and benefited from a rigged system that imprisoned southerners. “A monopoly is slavery, it’s servitude, it is not freedom and that’s something we need to understand,” she said at a September 2013 rally. More particularly, the Green Tea Coalition sought to dispute the monthly fees “captive ratepayers” faced to cover the significant cost overruns for units three and four at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle—the first nuclear units authorized in the United States since the 1970s. “We regard that as an atomic tax that we are forced to pay” by the Georgia Public Service Commission, Dooley railed. “We want a free market system and we want to phase out all subsidies. And here’s an idea, let the market and consumers decide which energy they want to use. Not the government or a monopoly.”1 Resistance to the “atomic tax” was not the Green Tea Coalition’s sole purpose and its activities did not stay limited to Georgia. Joining with like-­minded organizations such as Tennesseans for Solar Choice, Floridians for Solar Choice, and antinuclear activists in Florida, the group has also advocated for individ185

uals’ liberty to produce renewable energy by installing solar-­power panels on their homes and to sell any excess electricity back to power companies or even to neighbors. For Green Tea and its allies, this was not primarily an environmental matter. Of central concern for Dooley were consumers’ rights, free-­market capitalism, and even national security. As she told the New Yorker in 2015, “the regulated monopoly in Georgia had far too much power [and] had begun to look out for the best interests of their stockholders instead of their utility customers.” What was more, “rooftop solar makes it harder for terrorists to render a devastating blow to our power grid.”2 But still, in agreement with her Sierra Club cohorts, she insisted that “I care about the future of my kids and grandkids. I want them to have a clean environment. You can be conservative and still care about the environment.”3 For Dooley the problems with state-­sanctioned, federally-­ subsidized energy monopoly clearly went well beyond dollars and cents. Despite initially rejecting solar-­panel installation and electrical sales as a strike against its long-­cherished status as the state-­regulated monopoly energy provider in the state, Georgia Power finally capitulated in 2015. It agreed to support a measure that would allow homeowners to install 10-­kilowatt generators atop their residences, enough capacity to power about one average home but not enough in the aggregate to mount a significant challenge to the company’s dominance.4 The utility has been far less flexible regarding its nuclear proliferation program. In April 2016 Georgia Power filed a petition with the Public Service Commission that would add a 6–10 percent surcharge to its customers’ monthly bills in order to recover some of the $9 billion already invested in the two new units at Plant Vogtle. Though the project at that point was already more than three years behind schedule and nearly 60 percent over budget, Georgia Power executives maintained that they “are committed to managing this important project well, and every dollar we have invested has been necessary to complete the new units safely and correctly to best serve our customers.”5 In late 2017 the Public Service Commission voted unanimously to allow construction to continue.6 Apart from the Public Service Commission, sustaining Georgia Power’s efforts to complete Plant Vogtle were the Oglethorpe Power Corporation (formerly Oglethorpe EMC), a coalition of municipal systems, and, not surprisingly, the federal government. According to former US Department of Energy secretary Ernest Moniz, “the construction of new nuclear power facilities like this one [Vogtle]—which will provide carbon-­free electricity to well over a million American energy consumers—is not only a major milestone in the [Obama] Administration’s commitment to jumpstart the US nuclear power industry, it is also an important part of our all-­of-­the-­above approach to American energy as we move toward a low-­carbon energy future.” That commitment was far more than a political talking point. Based on the promises of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which 186

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guarantees subsidies for corporations implementing new technologies that reduce greenhouse emissions, it came with low-­cost federal loan guarantees totaling $8.3 billion; the current administration has pledged at least $3.7 billion more.7 As the strange bedfellows in the Green Tea Coalition would certainly claim, the model of state-­and federal-­level protection of powerful monopoly corporations following the “grow-­and-­build” maxim still reigns in the South, largely crowding out democratic governance over energy choices as well as the possibility of a cleaner, more sustainable energy future. Though emanating from erstwhile political enemies who cast their movement as a new departure, the Green Tea Coalition’s critique was not altogether novel. It revived a tradition of protest that seemed to have finally collapsed in the 1970s and rehashed many of the issues raised in this study. From the turn of the twentieth century ordinary electrical consumers in the South often voiced their displeasure at (and sometimes approval of) the fuel sources and corporate organizations behind the energy that powered everyday life. It has been a central goal of this study to consider both the production side and myriad sociocultural effects of electric power in an examination of the electric utility industry’s rise in the long New South. Few of the scholars who have studied electrification have joined production together with use, and fewer still have offered an analysis of southern electrification.8 We gain a fuller understanding of the electric business not only when we consider the interactions between corporate elites and average consumers, but when we think through the ways that relationship has operated within and affected the broader contexts of political, environmental, and cultural change. Perhaps more prominent than any other concept, a key theme in this study is that ordinary people mattered to southern energy history. The point is not to idealize “The People” as a pure and unified force fighting the good fight. Southerners frequently disagreed with and acted violently against one another. White southerners often characterized their antimonopoly crusades as means, at least in part, to protect or recover a chimerical sense of racial supremacy and their movements and interests rarely included African Americans. Moreover, average people in the South almost universally shared with corporate leaders the arrogant belief that humans enjoy the unlimited right to manipulate and conquer nature for society’s improvement. This is not to cast corporations or the people who support them as “evil,” although it is clear that self-­interest, and perhaps hubris, played a large role in justifying seemingly any technological innovations and environmental manipulations deemed necessary for Dixie’s regeneration. Corporate leaders and the citizens’ groups with whom they did battle, to paraphrase Karl Marx, operated within and tried to alter historical contexts not wholly of their own making. C ON C LU SION

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In highlighting the place and influence, the agency, of the people in the creation of what became an indispensable industry, the point is to show that the first century of the utility business’s career was marked by a long chain of struggles— on the one hand, to defend the concept of electricity as a commodity that should be produced, shipped, and distributed by private entities, and on the other hand, to define electric power as a public service. Though the ordinary southerners and their more prominent allies who resisted monopoly control over electricity rarely achieved their stated ends, all these groups argued, as do the members of the Green Tea Coalition now, that the public should exercise at least some measure of control over the provision of electric energy and nearly all of them believed that electric power should be a social benefit available to all citizens. Because of everyday people’s activities, southern power companies, no less than their counterparts across the nation, consistently sought shelter under the increasingly large and protective umbrella of governmental power—whether local, state, or federal—even as they strenuously protested state interference in their affairs. As noted throughout much of this study, both ordinary southerners and corporate leaders were keenly interested in the natural resources that underwrote electric power. Their thoughts and actions thus open questions as to the environmental matters associated with southern electrification. Of course, this work cannot pretend to speak to all these issues. The specific impacts of hydroelectric dams, coal-­fired plants, nuclear generation, and transmission and distribution systems on southern ecologies, air and water quality, and human health are left for further research to explore. Regenerating Dixie does, however, address one of the key elements of what historian Donald Worster calls “doing environmental history.” It investigates the ways competing interests in the South imagined their relationships to nature as well as how those perceptions inspired action on, or against, the material world.9 It furthermore joins a burgeoning historical literature that insists on the primacy of corporations in rearranging flows of natural resources. With capital sources and technical expertise from across the globe, and at times with critical government aid, southern utilities built production infrastructures far from sites of consumption and constructed energy transportation networks that made the abundance of the hinterland available to populations in dense urban cores and eventually suburban settlements.10 In short, energy corporations acted as primary agents of southern environmental change from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Electrification, which was fundamentally a project that included the inputs of ordinary folks and brought remarkable environmental changes, also made dramatic impacts on southern living. What first appeared in the late 1870s as a mystical force behind awe-­inspiring lighting spectacles on city streets, in circus acts, and at regional expositions became the driving force behind public trans188

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portation in the early 1890s. Electric streetcars helped rearrange city life, making suburban living available to a relative few wealthy southerners. And though it appeared in few homes and a negligible number of farms by the early 1910s, many southerners saw electricity as a key requirement for industrial production and a modern domestic life in both urban and rural areas by the First World War’s end. Although everyday people fought to gain access to affordable electrical abundance across the twentieth century, notions of electrical consumption as the basis of full membership in a prosperous United States had won out by the late 1950s and 1960s. In many ways the triumph of consumerism reflected utilities’ efforts to launch full-­on assaults on the public’s consciousness through advertisements, sales campaigns, and public relations. Yet average people consistently displayed a desire for electricity’s benefits—often on their own terms—and since the 1970s, not only have central air conditioning and a range of other electric appliances in the home become de rigueur, but the domestic realm has overtaken the industrial sector as the most voracious consumer of electric power in the South. Significant as electricity was to altering the practices of everyday life, it must be acknowledged at the same time that southern culture had deep impacts on electrification’s path. The rise of electricity affected race-­class matters (often assumed to be stable categories in environmental and energy history) not only in the final analysis; these social-­cultural matters worked as front-­end inputs that in many ways guided both producers’ and consumers’ thoughts as to electricity’s possibilities and helped (re)make race and class. Early twentieth-­century municipal ownership activists’ rhetoric and violence on the intertwined issues of race and class played a key role in the rise of state-­level regulation and informed the post–First World War public-­power movement as well. Power companies too plugged their attempts to build dams into ideas of race, class, and the southern past to provide palatable justifications for their massive alterations of waterscapes and growing corporate monopolies. Southern utility leaders furthermore called on the twin fears of race and socialism to resist federal incursions into the South in the New Deal years and in large measure extended those discourses into the post–Second World War years, helping to forge the ultimately victorious model that rested on coal, consumerism, and corporate monopoly capitalism. The social, political, environmental, technological, and cultural aspects of electrification provide a productive way not only to examine the rise of the electric utility industry but to rethink the long New South. Certainly things changed dramatically from the 1870s to the 1970s, but many of the central questions of Henry Grady’s and Henry Atkinson’s era remained core issues in Jimmy Carter’s and Robert Scherer’s heyday—and perhaps even in Debbie Dooley’s time. How would elites bent on creating a modern, urban-­industrial South relate and react to ordinary southerners who often had strikingly different ideas about DixC ON C LU SION

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ie’s future? How would the circulation of global and national-­level capital and social trends operate in the South? What role would corporations and governments—as well as common people—play in attempting to make a New South? How would southerners go about extracting and distributing the region’s wealth of natural resources? How would African Americans fit into a rapidly changing South? What would be the relationship of urban-­industrial modernization to the benighted farm? The foregoing discussion of the electric industry’s intimate involvement in the ongoing efforts to regenerate Dixie offers useful lessons in our attempts to address these questions.

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Notes Introduction 1. “Southern Chairman Fanning Talks Energy Policy at US Chamber,” Atlanta Business Chronicle, Apr. 13, 2011, http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2011/04/13/fanning -talks-energy-policy-at-us.html?s=print (accessed Aug. 27, 2015). 2. This is not to diminish the impacts TVA or REA have made on southern, US, and even world history. The volume of work dedicated to explaining and understanding these agencies testifies to their importance. See, for just a few examples, Preston J. Hubbard, Origins of TVA: The Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920–1932 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1961); Thomas K. McCraw, TVA and the Power Fight, 1933–1939 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971); North Callahan, TVA: Bridge over Troubled Waters (South Brunswick, NJ: AS Barnes, 1980); Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study of Politics and Organization (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); Michael McDonald and John Muldowny, TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of Population in the Norris Dam Area (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections of Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). REA has received far less scholarly attention. See D. Clayton Brown, Electricity for Rural America: The Fight for REA (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). 3. Its primary focus is water, the one shining exception being Christopher J. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power: How the Politics of Cheap Energy and Water Scarcity Shaped a Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 4. In the utility industry this was known as the “grow-and-build” model. See Richard F. Hirsh, Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 19–21. 5. For a thoughtful meditation on these issues, see Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf, eds., All over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 62–82. 191

6. The literature on the New South is vast. Some of the more prominent works on the subject include: C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951); George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967); Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1938–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Edward L. Ayers, Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). 7. See Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, xi–xvi. 8. See especially Ayers, Promise of the New South; Woodward, Origins of the New South, Tindall, Emergence of the New South; Bartley, The New South. 9. Dominic Boyer, “Energopower: An Introduction,” Anthropological Quarterly 86 (Winter 2014): 1–37. 10. See Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1888–1940 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); Paul W. Hirt, The Wired Northwest: The History of Electric Power, 1870s to 1970s (Lawrence: University Press of Kanas, 2012); Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power. 11. For a consideration of social impacts on the rise and ultimate dominance of steamdriven energy technologies—especially in nineteenth-century England—see Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016). 12. See Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 13. See Donald Worster, “Watershed Democracy: Rediscovering the Lost Vision of John Wesley Powell,” in Marie Leybourne and Andrea Gaynor, eds., Water: Histories, Cultures, Ecologies (Crawley, Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2006); and Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011). 14. I have formed this perspective based on the work of several historians, including Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996); James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1997); Paul N. Edwards. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems,” in Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, eds., Modernity and Technology (Cambridge: 192

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MIT Press, 2003); Needham, Power Lines; Jones, Routes of Power; and Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power. 15. See for example Karl Boyd Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); and Hirt, Wired Northwest. Examples of other historians whose works have considered the environmentally unfortunate by-products of electrification include Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Eugene Levy, “The Aesthetics of Power: HighVoltage Transmission Systems and the American Landscape,” Technology and Culture 38 (July 1997): 575–607. 16. See William D. Bryan, The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018); and Needham, Power Lines. 17. See Hirt, Wired Northwest, 2–5; also see Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California, where much the same point is made. Although in recent years southern environmental history has emerged as a coherent field, agriculture and land-management issues dominate historians’ thinking. See for example Mart Stewart, What Nature Suffers to Groe: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1910 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Paul S. Sutter, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); James C. Giesen, Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Albert G. Way, Conserving Southern Longleaf: Herbert Stoddard and the Rise of Ecological Land Management (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); and William Thomas Okie, The Georgia Peach Culture Agriculture, and the Environment in the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 18. See Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power. 19. While federal agencies constructed many large dams across the United States and in the South from the 1930s to the 1960s (a time dubbed the “Big Dam Era”), those dams’ contribution to electrical generation in the South steadily diminished while that of coal rapidly grew. See David P. Billington and Donald C. Jackson, Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006). 20. For an example of this position, see Marion Jackson, “Idle Slaves in the South,” Survey Graphic, Mar. 1, 1924, 613.

Chapter 1: An Unseen Force in the New South 1. “Today at the Fair,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 11, 1895. 2. Quoted in Bartow J. Elmore, “Hydrology and Residential Segregation in the Postwar South: An Environmental History of Atlanta, 1865–1895,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 94 (Spring 2010): 60. N OT E S TO PAG E S 8 –1 2

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3. William A. Coffin, “The Atlanta Exhibition,” The Nation, Nov. 7, 1895, 325. 4. John Jakle, City Lights: Illuminating the American Night (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 143. Also see David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 35–36. 5. See Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); and Nathan Cardon, “The South’s ‘New Negroes’ and African American Visions of Progress at the Atlanta and Nashville International Expositions, 1895–1897,” Journal of Southern History 80 (May 2014): 288–326. 6. H. M. Atkinson, “The Unseen Force,” Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 29, 1895. 7. Atkinson, “The Unseen Force.” 8. Nye, Electrifying America, 41. 9. Hirt, Wired Northwest, 21. 10. See Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 214–51; and Peter Soppelsa, “The Fragility of Modernity: Infrastructure and Everyday Life in Paris, 1870–1914” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2009). 11. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 127; also see Nye, Electrifying America, 28; and Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 12. Gaston, New South Creed, 45–51; Bryan, Price of Permanence, 3–14; and Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 136–58. 13. Atlanta City Council, A Few Points about Atlanta, 4, 15; also see Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, Atlanta: A Twentieth-Century City (Atlanta: Atlanta City Council, 1904). 14. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 72–73. 15. National Electric Light Association, Ornamental Street-Lighting: A Municipal Investment and Its Return (New York: National Electric Light Association, 1912), 7, 37. 16. “The Electric Light: A New Atlanta Project,” Atlanta Constitution, July 18, 1878. 17. W. W. Cole’s advertisement, “A Dazzling Orion among the Satellites,” Sunny South, Oct. 25, 1879. Also see W. W. Cole’s advertisement, “First Exhibition in Atlanta of the Wonderful Electric Light,” Weekly Constitution, Oct. 28, 1879. 18. “A Truly Wonderful Show,” Sunny South, Oct. 25, 1879, emphasis in original. 19. “The Electric Light Show: Something New under the Sun,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 9, 1879. Also see “The Electric Light Show,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 2, 1879. 20. “The Circus,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 5, 1879. 21. Jakle, City Lights, 47. 22. Wade H. Wright, History of the Georgia Power Company, 1855–1956 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1957), 15. 23. Thomas H. Martin, Atlanta and Its Builders: A Comprehensive History of the Gate City of the South (Atlanta: Century Memorial Publishing Company, 1902), 2:462. 194

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24. “It’s Brilliant Opening Last Night,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 19, 1881. 25. “The Brilliant Blaze,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 23, 1882; Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 36. 26. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 14–15; Hank McQuade, Light Up Our Land: Georgia Electric Membership Corporation: The First Fifty Years (Atlanta: Georgia Electrical Membership Corporation, 1990), 11–12; and Arthur Crouch, “The Tennessee Electric Power Company,” 1968, 7–8, box 1, folder 2, Crouch, Arthur W., Tennessee Electric Power Company Collection, 1860–1939, MSS# 69.158, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee (hereafter Crouch Collection). 27. “Let Us Have Light,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 29, 1883. 28. “Electric Light Tonight,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 14, 1883. 29. “No Electric Lights during the Week,” Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 23, 1885; Wright, History of Georgia Power, 22. 30. “Atlanta’s Electric Lights,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 14, 1884; McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 12–13; and Jakle, City Lights, 47. 31. Nell C. Pogue, South Carolina Electric and Gas Company, 1846–1964 (Columbia: State Printing Company, 1964), 50. 32. Martin, Atlanta and Its Builders, 462. 33. “The Piedmont Fair,” Atlanta Constitution, May 29, 1887. 34. McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 13. 35. Fred H. Whipple, Municipal Lighting (Detroit: Free Press, 1888), 39. 36. “Those Street Lights,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 9, 1889. 37. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 39. 38. See National Electric Light Association, Ornamental Street-Lighting, 9–15; and David E. Nye, “The Transformation of American Urban Space: Early Electric Lighting, 1875–1915,” in Josiane Meier, Ute Hasenöhrl, Katharina Krause, and Merle Pottharst, eds., Urban Lighting, Light Pollution, and Society (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 31–32. Also see Gaston, New South Creed, 45–79. 39. “Walks and Talks,” Atlanta Constitution, July 10, 1888. 40. “Letters from the People: A Strong Plea for Shade Trees,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 5, 1890. 41. Jakle, City Lights, 59. 42. See Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty, and Gender, 1880–1914 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 155–62. 43. “The Electric Light,” Atlanta Constitution, May 4. 44. Henry Givens Baker, Rich’s of Atlanta: The Story of a Store since 1867 (Atlanta: Foote & Davis, Inc., 1953), 49, 251; Jeff Clemmons, Rich’s: A Southern Institution (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012), 15–16. Also see William R. Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925,” Journal of American History 71 (Sept. 1984): 323–25. N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 7–2 2

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45. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 24; “Through the City,” Atlanta Constitution, May 25, 1888. 46. “A Blaze of Beauty,” Atlanta Constitution, May 27, 1888; also see Nye, “Transformation of American Urban Space,” 33. 47. Jakle, City Lights, 59–76. 48. See Daniel French, When They Hid the Fire: A History of Electricity and Invisible Energy in America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 96–98. 49. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 74. 50. See Hirt, Wired Northwest, 31–32. For a discussion of utility consolidation in Chicago, see Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 201–12. 51. Lucian Lamar Knight, A Standard History of Georgia and Georgians (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1917), 6:2819–20. 52. Margaret Calhoon, J. D. Huddleston III, and Lynn Speno, eds., The Cowboy Letters of Henry M. Atkinson, Founder of the Georgia Power Company (Atlanta: Georgia Power Heritage Preservation Club, 2007), 47. 53. See Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 54. Calhoon, Huddleston, and Speno, Cowboy Letters of Henry M. Atkinson, 7. 55. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 152–53. 56. Knight, Standard History of Georgia and Georgians, 2819–21. 57. “Light and Power,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 3, 1890. 58. O. E. Carson, The Trolley Titans: A Mobile History of Atlanta (Glendale, CA: Interurban Press, 1981), 12; Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 195–96; “For Inman Park,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 21, 1889. 59. “A New Electric Plant,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 9, 1890. 60. “Growth of Atlanta’s Transportation, 1866–1974,” box 32, folder 3, Mule to Marta Papers, MSS# 619, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA; also see Julian C. Chambliss, “A Question of Progress and Welfare: The Jitney Bus Phenomenon in Atlanta, 1915–1925,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 92 (Winter 2008): 489–91. 61. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 25, 31. 62. “In New Hands,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 31, 1891. 63. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 45–75; and Jean Martin, Mule to MARTA (Atlanta: Atlanta Historical Society, 1975), 1:74–108. 64. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 41, 45; “New Company Been Formed?” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 23, 1898; “Will Make Last Payment Today,” Atlanta Constitution, May 5, 1899. 65. “Working on New Light Plant; New Railway Underway,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 18, 1900; “Higher Freight Rates on Coal,” Atlanta Constitution, June 26, 1891; “Famine in

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Steam Coal Threatens the City,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 28, 1899; Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 5, 36–37. 66. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 45–46; “Light Contract Is Given Georgia Co.,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 14, 1899. 67. Wright, History of Georgia Power. 68. “Georgia Ry. & Power Co. v. Railroad Commission of Georgia et al (no. 1174),” The Southeastern Reporter, Vol. 98 (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company, 1919), 696–700; Frederic Nicholas, American Street Railway Investments: The Electric Railway Red Book (New York: McGraw Publishing Company, 1910), 44–45. 69. Georgia Railway and Electric Company, 1907 Annual Report (Atlanta: Georgia Railway and Electric Company, 1908), 3–4, box 11, folder 4, Atlanta Gas Light Company Records, MS 1881, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, Georgia; Nicholas, American Street Railway Investments, 44–45; Wright, History of Georgia Power, 84–87. 70. US Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Central Electric Light and Power Stations, 1902 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905), 8, 106. 71. Thomas Wesley Martin, The Story of Electricity in Alabama since the Turn of the Century, 1900–1952 (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Publishing Company, 1953), 12; Ayers, Promise of the New South, 72–74. 72. George W. Hilton and John F. Due, The Electric Interurban Railways in America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), 5–7; Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 191; and Richard D. Starnes, “‘A Conspicuous Example of What Is Termed the New South’: Tourism and Urban Development in Asheville, North Carolina, 1880–1925,” North Carolina Historical Review 80 (January 2003): 65. 73. Pogue, South Carolina Electric, 51–54. 74. Robert F. Durden, “Electrifying the Piedmont Carolinas: The Beginning of the Duke Power Company, 1904–1925, Part I,” North Carolina Historical Review 76 (October 1999): 426–28. 75. Crouch, “Tennessee Electric Power Company,” 1968, 7–8, box 1, folder 2; and Crouch, “Glendale Park, Nashville, Tennessee,” 1969, 7, box 3, folder 1, both in Crouch Collection.

Chapter 2: Electricity and the Mind of the New South 1. Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; New York: Vintage Books, 1991), quotes from xlviii, l–li, and 90–91. 2. In a recent survey of the literature on the history of American capitalism, historian Sven Beckert, in only a brief mention of race and racism, notes that “Racism . . . was a persistent feature throughout American history.” See Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., American History Now (Philadelphia:

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Temple University Press, 2011), 320. Also see Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zeilzer, “Introduction: What’s Good for Business,” in Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zeilzer, eds., What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–15. 3. Bobby M. Wilson, “Race in Commodity Exchange and Consumption: Separate but Equal,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 (Sept. 2005): 588. 4. Atlanta Journal, quoted in Baker, Rich’s of Atlanta, 109. 5. Atlanta Journal, quoted in Baker, Rich’s of Atlanta, 108–11. 6. Virginia Bivin, “Old-Time ‘Courtin’ in Glendale Park with Tom May, who Rode Dummy Line,” Nashville Banner, Feb. 20, 1956, in Crouch, “Glendale Park, Nashville, Tennessee,” 1969, 8–9, box 3, folder 1, Crouch Collection. 7. Nye, Electrifying America, 122–32; Sarah Toton, “Vale of Amusements: Modernity, Technology, and Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon Park, 1870–1920,” Southern Spaces (January 2008), https://southernspaces.org/2008/vale-amusements-modernity-technology-and -atlantas-ponce-de-leon-park-1870–1920 (accessed Aug. 13, 2018). 8. Toton, “Vale of Amusements”; Craig Allen Kaplowitz, “A Breath of Fresh Air: Segregation, Parks, and Progressivism in Nashville, Tennessee, 1900–1920,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 57 (Fall 1998): 142–43. 9. Crouch, “Glendale Park, Nashville, Tennessee,” 1969, 2, box 3, folder 1, Crouch Collection. 10. Nye, Electrifying America, 129–32; Toton, “Vale of Amusements.” 11. Nye, Electrifying America, 242–43. 12. “In Society’s Domain,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 10, 1899. 13. Gooday, Domesticating Electricity, 165. 14. According to historian Jackson Lears, in the years between Reconstruction and the First World War, Americans shared “a widespread yearning for regeneration—for rebirth that was variously spiritual, moral, and physical. . . . As daily life became more subject to the demands of the modern corporation, the quest for revitalization became a search for release from the predictable rhythms of the everyday.” Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 1. 15. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 202–8. 16. “A Beautiful Place,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 23, 1890; “To Sell the All,” Atlanta Constitution, Apr. 12, 1891. 17. Francis B. Crocker, “Coalless Cities,” Cassier’s Magazine 9 (Apr. 1896): 231–39; J. A. Morris, “Scientific and Industrial: The Ideal City,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 9, 1896. Also see Nye, Electrifying America, 287. 18. Nye, Consuming Power, 166; Ayers, Promise of the New South, 72–73; Wright, History of Georgia Power, 96. 19. Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship

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in the Age of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 33–34, 88–91; Gregory Mixon, The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 38–43, 129–30; Railroad Commission of Georgia, The Report of the Railroad Commission of Georgia (Atlanta: Franklin-Turner Company, 1908), 98, emphasis added. 20. Hirt, Wired Northwest, 34−35. 21. Jones quoted in Kelley, Right to Ride, 104. 22. Untitled editorial, Southwestern Christian Advocate, Aug. 20, 1896; also see August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, Along the Color Line: Explorations in the Black Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 270–71. 23. Meier and Rudwick, Along the Color Line, 268–69. 24. Jones, Routes of Power, 167; Wright, History of Georgia Power, 84; Martin, Mule to MARTA, 1:17. 25. Kelley, Right to Ride, 2–6, 185–87; Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 188; Mixon, Atlanta Riot, 35–36. 26. Kelley, Right to Ride, 139–63. 27. John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900−1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 50. 28. Garland Penn, quoted in Gregory Mixon, “‘Good Negro—Bad Negro’: The Dynamics of Race and Class in Atlanta during the Era of the 1906 Riot,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 81 (Fall 1997): 595−96; also see Godshalk, Veiled Visions, 83, 120. 29. See Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xv–xvii. 30. David Fort Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 25–32; Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 259–61. 31. Mrs. Geo. C. Ball, “The Race Problem from a Domestic Point of View,” Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 8, 1906. 32. Postel, Populist Vision, 177−78; Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 168−97. 33. Kelley, Right to Ride, 37−40; Nye, Electrifying America, 122−32. 34. Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1908), 25, 30. 35. “Negroes Show No Politeness,” Atlanta Constitution, May 23, 1906. 36. Smith, How Race Is Made, 54. 37. “Letters from the People: Separate Cars for Negroes,” Atlanta Constitution, July 19, 1905.

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38. “Letters from the People.” 39. “City Council Urged to Take Stand against Street Car Company,” Atlanta Georgian, Aug. 31, 1906. 40. Steve Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 5. 41. W. S. McIntyre letter to the editor, “The People’s Fight,” Atlanta Georgia and News, Sept. 8, 1906. 42. See Ayers, Promise of the New South, 136–40; also see Nye, Electrifying America, 96–97. 43. “Trail Cars for the Negroes,” Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 8, 1906. 44. Tom Watson, “Down in Georgia,” editorial, Tom Watson’s Magazine 4 (March 1906): 1. 45. Tom Watson, “The Ungrateful Negro,” editorial, Tom Watson’s Magazine 4 (April 1906): 168, 171. 46. “The Nigger in the Woodpile,” Atlanta Journal, Nov. 10, 1905. 47. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 309. 48. “Letters from Georgian Readers, with Especial Reference to the Race Question: The Inevitable Remedy,” Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 11, 1906; Mixon, Atlanta Riot, 73–81. 49. Rev. Sam Jones quoted in Mixon, Atlanta Riot, 67. 50. Jean Martin, Mule to MARTA (Atlanta: Atlanta History Center, 1977), 2:22. 51. “The Spirit of Our Corporations,” Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 10, 1906. 52. “Attack by Mob on Street Cars,” Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 23, 1906; Godshalk, Veiled Visions, 91–93, 107–8; Mixon, Atlanta Riot; and Williamson, Crucible of Race, 209– 23. 53. See Hirt, Wired Northwest, 21. 54. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 146–50, 177–78. 55. Tom Watson, “Socialism and One of Its Great Books,” editorial, Tom Watson’s Magazine 4 (May 1906): 321, 329. 56. See Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley, Power Struggle: The Hundred-Year War over Electricity (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 22–56. 57. “Citizens Favor City Ownership,” Atlanta Constitution, July 30, 1899; and Wright, History of Georgia Power, 42–43. 58. Speer quoted in Mixon, Atlanta Riot, 75. 59. “Let City Own Her Utilities, Say the People,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 23, 1906. Also see “Key Gives Reasons for Need of League,” Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 21, 1906. 60. “Municipal Ownership for Atlanta” and “The Governor’s Responsibilities,” Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 4, 1906. Also see “Some Municipal Ownership Examples,” Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 13, 1906; “Let the Rich Remember Who Made Them So,” Atlanta Georgian and News, Mar. 26, 1907; “The Only Brave and Permanent Policy,” Atlanta Georgian and News, Mar. 30, 1907. 200

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61. “The Initiatory of Municipal Ownership,” Journal of Labor, Sept. 14, 1906. 62. “Organized Labor and Municipal Ownership,” Journal of Labor, Oct. 5, 1906; also see Mixon, Atlanta Riot, 37. 63. Forrest McDonald, “Samuel Insull and the Movement for State Utility Regulatory Commissions,” Business History Review 32 (Autumn 1958): 247–49. 64. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 73. 65. See Bureau of the Census, Central Electric Light and Power Stations, 1902, 13; Bureau of the Census, Central Electric Light and Power Stations, 1907, 142; and Thomas Goodwin, political advertisement, Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 22, 1906. 66. “Municipal Ownership League Being Formed,” Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 21, 1906. 67. “Let Us Have Municipal Ownership League,” Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 22, 1906. 68. Clifford M. Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order: The 1914–1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 33–34, 40–42; Du Bois quoted on 34. Also see Godshalk, Veiled Visions, 21–23. 69. Thomas K. McGraw, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 302. 70. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 413–14. 71. McDonald, “Samuel Insull,” 248. 72. Samuel Insull, Public Control and Private Operation of Public Service Industries (Chicago: Other Side Publishing, 1899), 12–15. 73. Insull, Public Control and Private Operation, 5–11 (quotes from 5, 8). Also see Gregg A. Jarrell, “The Demand for State Regulation of the Electric Utility Industry,” Journal of Law and Economics 21 (Oct. 1978): 269–95; and William J. Hausman and John L. Neufeld, “The Market for Capital and the Origins of State Regulation of Electric Utilities in the United States,” Journal of Economic History 62 (Dec. 2002), 1050–73. 74. Richard F. Hirsh, Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility System (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 2–24. For industries that required high initial investments and included fixed costs in equipment and/or infrastructure, such as the railroad or electric utility industry, many economists believed the most sensible method for avoiding destructive competition and ensuring economic and social security was to designate one common carrier to operate as a monopoly in each service area. In other words, electric companies, phone companies, gas companies, and railroads were (or should be) “natural monopolies.” 75. McDonald, “Samuel Insull,” 242; “St. Railway Franchises Intended as a Whip,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 16, 1899. 76. See National Electric Light Association, Proceedings, vol. 1 (Boston: National Electric Light Association, 1904); National Civic Association, Committee on Private Operation and Ownership, Municipal and Private Operation of Public Utilities, vol. 1 (New York: National Civic Association, 1907). N OT E S TO PAG E S 4 8–50

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77. “Larger Powers for Commission,” Atlanta Constitution, June 29, 1907; “Candler Bill Recommended by Committee,” Atlanta Constitution, July 30, 1907; 78. “Street Railways under Commission,” Atlanta Georgian, July 20, 1907; “Senate Considers Increased Power for Commission,” Atlanta Georgian, July 24, 1907. 79. Railroad Commission of Georgia, Report of the Railroad Commission of Georgia, 100−106, quote from 102. 80. Railroad Commission of Georgia, Report of the Railroad Commission of Georgia, 102. 81. “Separate Cars Will Be Asked,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 27, 1908. 82. Kuhn, Joyce, and West, Living Atlanta, 77; Bayor, Race and the Shaping of TwentiethCentury Atlanta, 188. 83. Woodward, Origins, 388. 84. Baker, Following the Color Line, 33−34. 85. Delos Wilcox, “Effects of State Regulation upon the Municipal Ownership Movement,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 53 (May 1914): 72−74. 86. Quotes from Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900−1916 (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 285. A similar conclusion is reached in Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 150−51. 87. “Control—Don’t Crucify—Railroads,” Journal of Labor, Sept. 20, 1907. 88. See “America Is Unripe for Municipal Ownership, Says Civic League Experts,” Atlanta Georgian and News, Aug. 14, 1907. 89. “Regulating the Trolley Lines, the Power Plants, and the Telephones,” Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 7, 1907. 90. “The Great and Historic Legislature of 1907,” Atlanta Georgian, Aug. 19, 1907. 91. Georgia Railway and Electric Company advertisement, “Labor Is Well Paid in Atlanta,” Journal of Labor, July 19, 1907; Georgia Railway and Electric Company advertisement, “Some Suggestions for Modern Conveniences,” Journal of Labor, Aug. 23, 1907. 92. Georgia Railway and Electric Company advertisement, “Our Corporation’s Part in Atlanta’s Upbuilding,” Atlanta Georgian and News, Dec. 17, 1907. 93. Georgia Railway and Electric Company advertisement, “How One Corporation Is Winning Success,” Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 1, 1907; also see “The Five-Cent River Fare,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 17, 1907. 94. For a discussion of “corporate liberalism,” see James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900−1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). 95. Ivan E. Allen, The Atlanta Spirit: Altitude + Attitude (Atlanta: Allen-Marshall Co., 1948), 4, 11.

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Chapter 3: A Mighty Outpost of Progress 1. Georgia Railway and Power Company, Georgia Railway and Power Company (Atlanta: Georgia Railway and Power Company, 1926), 4, 9. 2. Thorndike Saville, “The Power Situation in the Southern Appalachian States: Development of Power Systems of the Southern Power Province,” Manufacturers Record, Apr. 21, 1927, 69. 3. Saville, “The Power Situation in the Southern Power Province,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 153 (Jan. 1931): graphs between pages 94 and 95. Also see Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1928 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1929), 10. 4. Arthur Crouch, “The Tennessee Electric Power Company” (unpublished paper, 1968), 9, box 1, folder 2, Crouch Papers; and Tennessee Power Company, The Power of Water (Columbus, OH: The Lawrence Press Co., 1913), 5, box 2, folder 2, Crouch Papers. 5. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 6. See Bartow J. Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). 7. Gaston, New South Creed, 45–79; Ronald D. Eller, Miner, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 39–160; Ayers, Promise of the New South, 104–31; James C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877–1984 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 5–50, 121–35; and Bryan, Price of Permanence. 8. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 45–68. 9. Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945, 74–78. 10. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 45–51; Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 71–74; US Bureau of the Census, Census of Electrical Industries, 1927: Central Electric Light and Power Stations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), 42; also see Saville, “The Power Situation in the Southern Power Province,” graphs between pages 94 and 95. 11. Gaston, New South Creed, 68–75. 12. Manufacturers’ Record, Manufacturers’ Record’s Annual Blue Book of Southern Progress, 1911 (Baltimore: Manufacturers’ Record, 1911), 32. 13. “Higher Freight Rates on Coal,” Atlanta Constitution, June 26, 1891; “Famine in Steam Coal Threatens the City,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 28, 1899. 14. See William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (London: Macmillian, 1865); N OT E S TO PAG E S 56–60

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T. Foster Brown, “The Coal Question,” Economic Journal 1 (December 1891): 663–74; and David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 217. 15. “Coal Waste in Pennsylvania,” The Nation, Aug. 11, 1892, 101. 16. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 379–84. 17. “The Advance in Coal Rates,” Atlanta Constitution, June 26, 1891. 18. “The Coal Famine,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 14, 1893. 19. “A Coal Famine Threatened,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 16, 1899; “Famine in Steam Coal Threatens City; Some Plants May Shut Down,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 28, 1899. 20. “Coal Famine in Chattanooga,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 18, 1899; “Coal Car Famine Is Grave Matter,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 23, 1899. 21. Christopher J. Manganiello, “Dam Crazy with Wild Consequences: Artificial Lakes and Natural Rivers in the American South, 1845–1990” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2010), 76–77. 22. See Karin A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle against Convict Labor in Tennessee Coalfields, 1871–1896 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2008). 23. “Their New Plan,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 21, 1896; “Coal Famine Is Unabated,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 10, 1902; Shapiro, New South Rebellion, 243–47. 24. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 73, 83–84. 25. See Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City (London: Routledge, 2005), 3–12; and James C. Williams, “Understanding the Place of Humans in Nature,” in Martin Reuss and Stephen Cutcliffe, eds., The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 9–25. 26. Erik Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890–1930,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (Sept. 1999): 451; and Blackbourn, Conquest of Nature, 189–228, quote from 191. 27. Gaston, New South Creed, 54–63, 107–8. 28. Tom Martin, quoted in Harvey H. Jackson, Putting “Loafing Streams” to Work: The Building of Lay, Mitchell, Martin, and Jordan Dams, 1910–1929 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 152. 29. Gaston, New South Creed, 107–8. 30. See Nye, Consuming Power, 22; and Alfred W. Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 75–76. 31. Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 72. 32. “River’s Power for City’s Use,” Atlanta Constitution, July 21, 1897. 33. “Bull Sluice Dam Has Bridled the Chattahoochee,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 6, 1904. 204

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34. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 262–84, quote on 262; also see Jones, Routes of Power, 161–94. 35. James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1997), 174–75; Nye, Electrifying America, 60–62. 36. Todd Andrew Needham, “Power Lines: Urban Space, Energy Development, and the Making of the Modern Southwest” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2006), 158–62. 37. Manganiello, “Dam Crazy,” 72–74. 38. J. Tracy Power, “W.B. Smith Whaley and the Rise of the South Carolina Textile Industry, 1893–1903,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 93 (Apr. 1992): 126–38; Pogue, South Carolina Electric, 51–64; and Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 39–40. 39. Robert F. Durden, “Electrifying the Piedmont Carolinas: The Beginning of the Duke Power Company, 1904–1925, Part I,” North Carolina Historical Review 76 (October 1999): 412–31; Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 40–44, 47–49. 40. “The Plans Ready,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 7, 1895; J. H. Vail, “The Central Station Superintendent,” Electrical Review 39 (July–Dec. 1901): 32. 41. “From the River,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 1, 1895. 42. “Plan to Harness River Results in the Arrest of Two Promoters,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 19, 1899; “Cooke Acquitted by Bloodworth,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 21, 1899; “Municipal Ownership Has Aroused People to Active Interest,” Atlanta Georgian, Oct. 3, 1906; Wright, History of Georgia Power, 107–9. 43. R. H. Timmons, “Chattahoochee Bows before Science and Skill,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 16, 1902. 44. “Bull Sluice Dam Has Bridled Chattahoochee,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 6, 1904. 45. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 109; “Big Dam Will Be Built as Rapidly as Possible,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 19, 1902; “Power Company Officers Named,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 23, 1902. 46. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 110. 47. Pascal J. Moran, “Getting Lots of Gold from the Heart of the Mountains of North Georgia,” Atlanta Constitution, May 6, 1901. 48. A. S. Hardy, “Chattahoochee River, under Electric Harness, Will Supply Light and Power to North Georgia,” Sunny South, Oct. 17, 1903; also see Wright, History of Georgia Power, 110–11. 49. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 111; “Power Company Purchases Site,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 12, 1905. 50. “Southern Light and Power Company Is Knocking Loudly at the Gates of Atlanta with Immense Electric Power,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 3, 1905. 51. “Power Company Purchases Site,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 12, 1905. 52. “Mayor Approves New Franchises,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 27, 1905. 53. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 111–12. N OT E S TO PAG E S 63–68

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54. George E. Howe, “The Spier Falls Dam and Power Plant of the Hudson River Water Power Company,” Engineering Record 47 (Jan.–June 1903): 688–92. 55. “Georgia Power Co. Given Franchise,” Atlanta Constitution, July 7, 1910; Wright, History of Georgia Power, 112–16. 56. Eric A. Lof, “The Hydro-Electric Development of the Georgia Railway and Power Company at Tallulah Falls, Georgia,” General Electric Review (June–July 1914): 3–5, Georgia Railway and Power Company: Georgia Railway and Power Company Notebook, W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection, Belk Library Special Collections, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina (hereafter Eury Collection); also see Wright, History of Georgia Power, 117–18; and Needham, Power Lines, 127. 57. Jones, Routes of Power, 187. 58. “Franchise Given Piedmont Power Co.,” Atlanta Constitution, Apr. 6, 1909. 59. “Atlanta May Get New Power Company,” Atlanta Constitution, June 29, 1909; “Dam for South’s Greatest Power Plant Is Completed across Ocmulgee River,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 4, 1910. 60. “Hydro-electric Development Projects to Be Consolidated in New Giant Georgia Company,” Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 24, 1911; Wright, History of Georgia Power, 127–28. 61. Moody’s, Moody’s Manual of Railroads and Corporation Securities, vol. 2, pt. 2 (New York: Moody Manual Company, 1914), 2223. 62. Dub Taft and Sam Heys, Big Bets: Decisions and Leaders that Shaped Southern Company (Atlanta: Southern Company, 2011), 3–15; Jackson, Putting “Loafing Streams” to Work, 14–36. 63. Jacobs and Davies, Inc. “Description of Hales Bar Dam: History of the Project,” (ca. 1915), 1–2, in Hales Bar Dam Collection, MSS# 1051, box 1, folder 1, Archives Center, National Museum of American History (hereafter Hales Bar Collection); William A. Doran, “Early Hydroelectric Power in Tennessee,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 27 (Spring 1968): 72–75. 64. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 11. 65. Tennessee Power Company, Power of Water, 5, box 2, folder 2, Crouch Papers. Doran, “Early Hydroelectric Power in Tennessee,” 76. 66. C. Elmer Smith, “The Georgia Power Company, and the Tallulah Falls Development,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 1, 1912. 67. Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 21. 68. Helen Dortch Longstreet, “Shall Tallulah Falls, Dixie’s Wonderland, Be Sacrificed at the Alter of Big Business?” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 4, 1912. 69. Longstreet, “To the American People,” n.d., Helen Dortch Longstreet papers, MS 1341, box 14, folder 208, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, Georgia (hereafter HDL Papers). 70. Longstreet, “Tallulah Falls: Switzerland of America,” May 14, 1912.box 14, folder 208, HDL Papers. 206

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71. Bryan, Price of Permanence, 154–63. 72. Andrew Beecher McCallister, “‘A Source of Pleasure, Profit, and Pride’: Tourism, Industrialization, and Conservation at Tallulah Falls, Georgia, 1820–1915” (MA thesis, Univ. of Georgia, 2002), 59–61, quote from 59. 73. Historian James Cobb defines the “Lost Cause” as an “ethos [that] not only defended secession and glorified the society that white southerners had gone to war to preserve, but actually transformed their military defeat into a tremendous moral triumph.” James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 62. 74. McCallister, “‘A Source of Pleasure, Profit, and Pride,’” 61. Also see Helen Dortch Longstreet, Lee and Longstreet at High Tide: Gettysburg in the Light of Official Records (Gainesville, GA: self-published, 1904); and Sarah E. Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 132–40, 220–23. 75. Longstreet to Mrs. Turner, June 12, 1912, box 1, folder 6, HDL Papers. 76. Bernard Suttler, “The Water Power Trust,” Atlantian, Dec. 1911, 6–7. 77. Longstreet, “Unmatched Tallulah, the Pride and Glory of a Free People Appeals for Protection to the War-Torn Heroes of the Sixties,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 3, 1912. 78. Longstreet, “Unmatched Tallulah.” 79. See Gaston, New South Creed, 153–86. 80. John Brown Gordon, quoted in Numan V. Bartley, The Creation of Modern Georgia, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 106–7. 81. The best-known proponent of this position was historian Ulrich B. Phillips. See Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (New York: Little, Brown and Co, 1929), 3–13. 82. Mildred L. Rutherford, “Thirteen Periods of United States History,” Nov. 21, 1912, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/addressdelivered00ruth/address delivered00ruth_djvu.txt (accessed July 14, 2015); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 61– 62, 85–86; Longstreet, “Peerless Tallulah—Immortalized in Song and Story Appeals to the Courage and Loyalty of Georgians,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 25, 1912; and Longstreet, “Tallulah Falls: Switzerland of America,” May 14, 1912, box 14, folder 208, HDL Papers. 83. Alice Baldy, quoted in Coulter, “Tallulah Falls,” 267, emphasis in original. 84. “Georgians to Protect Old Tallulah Falls,” Atlanta Georgian and News, Dec. 22, 1911. 85. “Tallulah Falls Case Put to Governor,” Atlanta Georgian and News, Aug. 15, 1911; “Tallulah Falls Fight Reaches Governor,” Atlanta Georgian and News, Sept. 29, 1911. 86. Coulter, “Tallulah Falls,” 256–58; also see “Make National Park at Tallulah Falls,” Atlanta Georgian and News, July 28, 1910. 87. McCallister, “‘A Source of Pleasure, Profit, and Pride,’” 68–80. 88. Longstreet, “Members of Rules Committee Will not Betray Georgia,” Atlanta Constitution, July 29, 1912. N OT E S TO PAG E S 7 3–7 6

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89. Coulter, “Tallulah Falls,” 268–69. 90. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 130–31. 91. Helen Dortch Longstreet, quoted in Coulter, “Tallulah Falls,” 271. 92. Helen Dortch Longstreet, quoted in McCallister, “‘A Source of Pleasure, Profit, and Pride,’” 81. 93. Manganiello, “Dam Crazy,” 105–7; “Gigantic Power Plant at Tallulah Falls to Develop about 100,000 Horse Power,” Atlanta Constitution, Apr. 23, 1911; Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). 94. “Falls not Hurt by Power Plant,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 5, 1911. 95. Quotes in Coulter, “Tallulah Falls,” 262. 96. McCallister, “‘A Source of Pleasure, Profit, and Pride,’” 8–17. 97. Coulter, “Tallulah Falls, Georgia’s Natural Wonder: From Creation to Destruction, Part I, Creation,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 47 (June 1963): 123–49, quotes on 149. 98. McCallister, “‘A Source of Pleasure, Profit, and Pride,’” 8–29. 99. McCallister, “‘A Source of Pleasure, Profit, and Pride,’” 19–29. 100. C. Elmer Smith, “The Georgia Power Company and the Tallulah Falls Development,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 1, 1912; Andrew Jackson Ritchie, Sketches of Rabun County History, 1819–1948 (Atlanta: Foote and Davis, Inc., 1948), 342; “Develop Water Powers of Georgia,” Clayton (GA) Tribune, Mar. 19, 1915. 101. “Hydro-electric Development Project to Be Consolidated in New Giant Georgia Company,” Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 21, 1911. 102. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 134–35. 103. Georgia Railway and Power Company, Georgia Railway and Power Company, 38; Georgia Railway and Power Company, Water Power Developments in North Georgia (Atlanta: Georgia Railway and Power Company, 1924), 14–15, Eury Collection. 104. Georgia Railway and Power Company, Industrial Georgia, 81.

Chapter 4: Power for the Masses and the Farm 1. Marion M. Jackson, “Idle Slaves in the South,” Survey Graphic, Mar. 21, 1924, 613–14, 656, 658. 2. Preston S. Arkwright, “Holy Rivers,” May 9, 1921, in Preston S. Arkwright, Addresses (Atlanta: Georgia Railway and Power Company, 1926), 166, 169–70. 3. “Municipal League Rapped by Arkwright,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 17, 1922. 4. Preston S. Arkwright, “Sons of Light,” Oct. 25, 1925, in Arkwright, Addresses, 348–49. 5. The paradoxical notion of problems associated with the “idle Negro” (vagrancy, drunkenness, criminality, rapaciousness) both during and after Reconstruction was a common trope in the early twentieth-century South. For a critique of this idea—which points out that, even as many southern whites complained of “idle Negroes,” they were 208

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largely dependent on African American labor—see Ray Stannard Baker, “Following the Color Line,” American Magazine 46 (May–Oct. 1907): 144–45. 6. Georgia Railway and Power Company, Annual Report, 1918 (Atlanta: Georgia Railway and Power Company, 1919), 3, Eury Collection. 7. “Cotton Crop Hurt by Weather in South,” New York Times, Aug. 2, 1917; “Drought Plays Havoc with Cotton Crop,” New York Times, Aug. 2, 1918. 8. Hirt, Wired Northwest, 170–71. 9. “Macon Is in Same Fix over Electric Power Supply as Atlanta,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 18, 1917. 10. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 21. 11. J. A. Holloman, “Development of Georgia’s Wasting Water Resources Is One of the Crying Necessities of the Times,” Atlanta Constitution, June 16, 1918. 12. See Hughes, Networks of Power, 285–323; Hirt, Wired Northwest, 166–85; and Jones, Routes of Power, 195–210. 13. Craig Britt, “Military Metropolis of Amazing Magnitude Built at Camp Gordon as by Magic Overnight,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 19, 1917; Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1917, 3, Eury Collection. 14. Henry M. Atkinson, “Georgia Streams Are Turning Wheels of Commerce,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 18, 1917; “Why It’s Your Problem,” Atlanta Constitution, May 12, 1918; Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 38–60. 15. “Minutes of the Meeting of Representatives of Power Companies in the States of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee Held at the Office of the Georgia Railway and Power Company, March 4, 1918,” 2, in Memorandum of Co-Operative Efforts of Southern Utilities to Meet Requirements of War Industries Board, 1918, Charles E. Waddell Papers, 1914–1934, MS# 78–2372, box 1, folder 2, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (hereafter Waddell Papers). 16. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 172. Also see White, Organic Machine, 50–51. 17. Georgia Railway and Power Company, Annual Report, 1917, 3, Eury Collection; Wright, History of Georgia Power, 136. 18. “Increased Rates Hearing Adjourns,” Atlanta Constitution, July 14, 1918. 19. “Minutes of the Meeting of Representatives of Power Companies,” 1. 20. “Report of the Power Companies in the States of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama,” Mar. 13, 1918, 5–7, in Memorandum of Co-Operative Efforts of Southern Utilities to Meet Requirements of War Industries Board, 1918, box 1, folder 2, Waddell Papers. 21. “Report of the Power Companies,” 5–7. 22. See Hughes, Networks of Power, 296–97; and Jones, Routes of Power, 202–8. 23. See “Report of the Power Companies,” 5–7; Wright, History of Georgia Power, 143– 45. 24. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 59–60; quote from Wright, History N OT E S TO PAG E S 83–86

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of Georgia Power, 177; William Patrick Lay, The Southern Super Power Zone (Gadsden, AL, 1922), 11–13. 25. Jackson, Putting “Loafing Streams” to Work, 43; See Carole E. Scott and Richard D. Guynn, “The Atlanta Streetcar Strikes,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 84 (Fall 2000): 439; Kuhn, Joyce, and West, Living Atlanta, 14–29; Julian C. Chambless, “A Question of Progress and Welfare: The Jitney Bus Phenomenon in Atlanta, 1915–1925,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 92 (Winter 2008): 486–506. 26. “Claims Power Co. Is Far from Ruin,” Atlanta Constitution, May 21, 1918. 27. “Increased Rates Hearing Adjourns,” Atlanta Constitution, July 14, 1918 28. “Gas and Light Increases Awarded,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 17, 1918; also see Georgia Railway and Power Company, Annual Report, 1918, 5, Eury Collection. 29. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 166–70, quote on 170. 30. Jackson, Putting “Loafing Streams” to Work, 57–59, Holmes quoted on 59. 31. “Georgia’s Big Hydroelectric Developments Play Prominent Part in Progress of the State,” Atlanta Constitution, May 1, 1927. 32. Charles G. Adsit, “Power Development in the Southeast,” Electrical World, May 11, 1922, 344–45. 33. “Power Company Is Planning to Borrow over $13,000,000 to Complete Enlargement Plan,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 25, 1921; Robert F. Durden, “Electrifying the Piedmont Carolinas: The Beginning of the Duke Power Company, 1904–1925, Part II,” North Carolina Historical Review 77 (Jan. 2000): 87. 34. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 64; Manganiello, “Dam Crazy,” 119– 22; Wright, History of Georgia Power, 211–12. 35. “James L. Key Now in Mayor’s Race,” Atlanta Constitution, May 19, 1918. 36. “Key Urges Advisability of Municipal Ownership of Street Car System,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 7, 1919; also see, “New City Leaders in Charge Today,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 6, 1919. 37. Jackson, Putting “Loafing Stream” to Work, 44. 38. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 202. 39. George Brown Tindall, “Business Progressivism: Southern Politics in the Twenties,” South Atlantic Quarterly 62 (Winter 1963): 92–106. 40. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 202; “Municipal Ownership for Atlanta Defeated in House Committee,” Atlanta Constitution, July 24, 1919. Also see Steven Wayne Wrigley, “The Triumph of Provincialism: Public Life in Georgia, 1898–1917” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1986). 41. “Municipal Ownership for Atlanta Defeated in House Committee,” Atlanta Constitution, July 24, 1919. 42. “Cities Will Fight Increases in Rates,” Atlanta Constitution, July 18, 1918; also see Wright, History of Georgia Power, 201–2. 43. “Public Utilities Bill Is Defeated,” Atlanta Constitution, July 30, 1919. 210

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44. See Report of the Country Life Commission. 45. Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 131. 46. Kline, Consumers in the Country, 87, 99–102; McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 23. With isolated generating plants included, American farm electrification in 1920 reached as high as 7.5 percent. See Phillip J. Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy: The New Deal and the Electric Utility Industry, 1933–1941 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 124. 47. “The Only Hope,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 7, 1920. 48. Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 30, 33–34. 49. Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 17. 50. Municipal League of Georgia, “We Should Get Together,” Thomasville (GA) Daily Times-Enterprise, Mar. 25, 1920. 51. John W. Greer, “Waterpower Development Would Open the Way to Lifting of Drudgery from Farm Life,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 27, 1919. 52. “Power for the Masses,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 27, 1919. 53. Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman, 53–54. 54. Municipal League of Georgia, “Did God Forget?” Americus (GA) Times-Recorder, Jul. 16, 1920. 55. Municipal League of Georgia, “Macon, Savannah, Rome, Augusta, Atlanta, Columbus,” Americus (GA) Times-Recorder, July 23, 1920. 56. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 202–3. 57. “Water Waste,” Atlanta Constitution, Apr. 3, 1920. For a discussion of regional planning thought in the 1920s, see Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 21–36. 58. Municipal League of Georgia, “We Should Get Together,” Thomasville (GA) Daily Times-Enterprise, Mar. 25, 1920. 59. “Municipal League Bills Win Favor by a 10 to 7 Vote,” Atlanta Constitution, July 22, 1920. 60. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 203–4; H. M. Atkinson, “Public Ownership Measures Would Wreck State’s Credit, Declares H.M. Atkinson,” Atlanta Constitution, July 27, 1920. 61. “Foes in Senate of Water Power Bill Win Fight,” Atlanta Constitution, July 21, 1922; “Water Power Bills Lose in Committee,” Atlanta Constitution, July 25, 1924. 62. D. Clayton Brown, “North Carolina Rural Electrification: Precedent of the REA,” North Carolina Historical Review 59 (Apr. 1982): 109–14; E. C. Branson, “Wealth and Common Wealth,” Bulletin of the North Carolina State Board of Charities and Public Welfare 3 (Apr. −June 1920): 22, in E. C. Branson Papers, 1895–1933, MS # 2610, folder 457, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. N OT E S TO PAG E S 9 1 –94

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63. D. Clayton Brown, “Modernizing Rural Life: South Carolina’s Push for Rural Electrification,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 99 (Jan. 1998): 70–73. 64. Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 21–36, Mumford quote from 31. 65. Hughes, Networks of Power, 296–313. 66. Giant Power Survey Board, Report of the Giant Power Survey Board to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg: Telegraph Printing Co., 1925), xiii. 67. Gifford Pinchot, “Giant Power,” Survey Graphic, Mar. 1, 1924, 561. 68. Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 27–30. 69. Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 29–30, quotes from 30; also see Hughes, Networks of Power, 302–8. 70. See Preston J. Hubbard, “The Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920–1932,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 18 (Sept. 1959): 195–96; and Matthew L. Downs, Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 14–17. 71. Downs, Transforming the South, 23–24. 72. “Ford to Take Edison to See Muscle Shoals,” New York Times, Nov. 24, 1921; Hughes, Networks of Power, 293–95. 73. “Henry Ford and Muscle Shoals,” The Atlantian, Apr. 1922; Downs, Transforming the South, 26–29. 74. Hubbard, “Muscle Shoals,” 198–200. 75. Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 17–18; Hubbard, “Muscle Shoals,” 199–211; Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 33–35. 76. George Norris quoted in Downs, Transforming the South, 49. 77. Preston Arkwright quoted in Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 63–64. 78. “Finds Big Business No Longer Feared,” New York Times, June 9, 1927. 79. “Finds Big Business.” 80. “Arkwright Hits US Ownership,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 10, 1927. 81. Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 74, 99–100. 82. Nye, Electrifying America, 179–80. 83. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 55. 84. Report of the Country Life Commission, 4–5, 33. 85. Brown, “North Carolina Rural Electrification,” 114. 86. Hirt, Wired Northwest, 251. 87. E. A. Stewart, J. M. Larson, and J. Romness, The Red Wing Project on Utilization of Electricity in Agriculture (n.p.: University of Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station, 1927), 1, in Louisan E. Mamer Rural Electrification Administration Papers, 1927–2002, MSS# 862, box 17, folder 2, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. 88. Audra J. Wolfe, “‘How Not to Electrocute the Farmer’: Assessing Attitudes towards Electrification on American Farms, 1920–1940,” Agricultural History 74 (Spring 2000): 212

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518–20; Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 3–7; “Electric Farming on the Increase,” Literary Digest, Jan. 30, 1926, 19. 89. Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 9–10. 90. Matthew L. Downs, Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2014), 17–21. 91. Brown, “North Carolina Rural Electrification,” 115–17; Brown, “Modernizing Rural Life,” 70–72. 92. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1928 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1929), 14. 93. “Progressive Program Adopted by Georgia Association,” Atlanta Constitution, May 17, 1928. 94. Significant numbers of farmers regarded electricity with indifference, fear, and/or disdain. See Wolfe, “‘How Not to Electrocute the Farmer,’” 515–29; and Kline, Consumers in the County, 99–112. 95. “Rural Power Far More than a Convenience,” Chattanooga News, Mar. 31, 1937, in box 125, folder 2, Guild, Jo Conn, Collection of Tennessee Electric Power Company Records, 1933–1939, MSS# 1987.03, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, TN (hereafter Guild Collection). 96. Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 7–12. 97. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 297. 98. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1936 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1937), 5. 99. See Morris Llewellyn Cooke, “Electricity Goes to the Country,” Survey Graphic, Sept. 1936; US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Agriculture, 1935 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1936), 1:397, 535. 100. See Richard Hirsh, “Shedding New Light on Rural Electrification: The Neglected Stories of Successful Efforts to Power Up Farms in the 1920s and 1930s,” Agricultural History 92 (Summer 2018): 296–372. 101. Kline, Consumers in the County, 136–37; Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 5; 102. “Is Socialism or Bolshevism Seeking to Graft Itself onto the Democratic People of Georgia?” Bainbridge (GA) Post-Search Light, Oct. 2, 1919. 103. “State Treasury Raid to Aid City People,” Carroll (GA) Free Press, Dec. 23, 1920. 104. See Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 30–32; and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 81–83. 105. Preston S. Arkwright, “Public Activities of Public Utility Men,” Apr. 23, 1924, in Arkwright, Addresses, 31. 106. Preston S. Arkwright, “The Great Workman,” May 16, 1920, in Arkwright, Addresses, 142. N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 00–1 03

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107. Preston S. Arkwright, “Lifting the Yoke,” June 20, 1924, in Arkwright, Addresses, 279–80. 108. See Kenneth P. Vickery, “‘Herrenvolk’ Democracy and Egalitarianism in South Africa and the US South,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (June 1974): 309– 28; and Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman, 1–5. 109. Preston S. Arkwright, “Sons of Light,” Oct. 25, 1925, in Arkwright, Addresses, 348–49. 110. Jones, Routes of Power, 86; and Andrew Nikifarouk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Vancouver, BC: Greystone Books, 2012). 111. General Electric Company, “Slaves,” Survey Graphic, Dec. 1, 1926, 256; Oscar Wilde quote, adapted from the General Electric advertisement, originally in Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose (1891; New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 141. 112. See Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977). 113. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 480–81. 114. Preston Arkwright, “Some of the Marvels of Electricity,” Manufacturers Record, Dec. 4, 1924, 88. 115. Grace Elizabeth Hale, “‘For Colored’ and ‘For White’: Segregating Consumption in the South,” in Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, eds., Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 166–69, quote from 168–69. Also see M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). 116. Appalachian Power Company, “An Alert Policeman,” in Public Utilities Advertising Association, Five Hundred Representative Public Utility Advertisements, 1928 Edition (n.p.: Public Utilities Advertising Association, 1928), 34. 117. Carter Henderson, “Reddy Kilowatt Leaps into Various New Jobs for Private Utilities,” Wall Street Journal, June 15, 1956, box 1, folder 11, Reddy Kilowatt Records, 1929– 1999, AC0913, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC (hereafter RkW Records); and untitled document, ca. 1936, 2, box 1, folder 10, RkW Records. 118. “Reddy Is Ready,” Investor’s Reader, Sept. 17, 1947, box 1, folder 11, RkW Records. 119. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 89–99; and Mark H. Rose, Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), esp. 171–88; “Reddy Kilowatt, Your Electric Servant,” ca. 1926, 1, 4, box 1, folder 3, RkW Records. 120. “Reddy Kilowatt—Goodwill Ambassador-at-Large for 156 Electric Companies,” Edison Electric Institute Bulletin, Nov. 1940, 506, box 1, folder 10, RkW records.

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Chapter 5: A New Power Era 1. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 105–6; “Tupelo Celebrates TVA Power Grant,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 12, 1933. 2. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 106–7; “Knoxville Votes Municipal Power,” New York Times, Nov. 26, 1933; “Co-Operative Plan to Put Electricity within Reach of All, Says TVA Head,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 11, 1933. 3. Charles W. Crawford, “Oral History of the Tennessee Valley Authority: Interview with Charles Krutch,” Nov. 10, 1969, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/oral historyoften00krut/oralhistoryoften00krut (accessed Aug. 23, 2018). 4. Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 354–59. 5. Georgia Railway and Power Company, Annual Report, 1920 (Atlanta: Georgia Railway and Power Company, 1921), 6; Georgia Railway and Power Company: Georgia Railway and Power Company Notebook, Eury Collection; Georgia Railway and Power Company, Annual Report, 1930 (Atlanta: Georgia Railway and Power Company, 1931), 6. 6. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 213–16. 7. Hirt, Wired Northwest, 186–87. 8. “Hearing of Car Fare Testimony Will End Today,” Atlanta Constitution, July 19, 1927. 9. “Charter Changes Ask Sweeping Power for City,” Atlanta Constitution, July 7, 1931. 10. Brown, “Modernizing Rural Life,” 73–85. 11. Brown, “North Carolina Rural Electrification,” 117–19. 12. H. S. Raushenbusch, “The Centralization of Power Control,” The Nation, Sept. 18, 1929, 297. 13. H. S. Raushenbusch and Harry W. Laidler, Power Control (New York: The New Republic, 1928), 287. 14. Hubbard, “Muscle Shoals,” 205–6. Also see Carl Dean Thompson, Confessions of Power Trust: A Summary of the Testimony Given in the Hearings of the Federal Trade Commission on Utility Corporations Pursuant to Resolution no.83 of the United States Senate Approved February 15, 1928 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1932). 15. Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoted in Hirt, Wired Northwest, 227. 16. One of the largest holding companies, the Electric Bond and Share Company, which owned significant shares of Southeastern Power and Light, experienced one of the most extreme, though not wholly unrepresentative, cases of bubble-bursting during and after the 1929 crash. From the summer of 1928 to the fall of 1929, Electric Bond and Share stock prices rose from $90 to $187 per share. By the nadir of the Depression in July 1932, Electric Bond and Share’s stock traded for $3 per share. Hirt, Wired Northwest, 216–17. 17. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Campaign Address in Portland, Oregon on Public Utilities and Development of Hydro-Power,” Sept. 21, 1932, in Gerhardt Peters and John T. Wolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=88390 (accessed Apr. 9, 2016). N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 08–1 13

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18. See Preston J. Hubbard, Origins of the TVA: The Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920– 1932 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1961); Thomas K. McCraw, TVA and the Power Fight, 1933–1939 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971); North Callahan, TVA: Bridge over Troubled Waters (South Brunswick, NJ: AS Barnes, 1980); and Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study of Politics and Organization (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). 19. For a thorough discussion of the TVA’s comprehensive regional development mission, see Tennessee Valley Authority, The Unified Development of the Tennessee River System (Knoxville: Tennessee Valley Authority, 1936). 20. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 21. Brian Q. Cannon, “Power Relations: Western Rural Cooperatives and the New Deal,” Western Historical Quarterly 31 (Summer 2000): 135. 22. Tennessee Valley Authority Act, 73rd Cong., 1st Sess., HR 5081, May 18, 1933. For a discussion of the development of the preference principle, see US General Accounting Office, Federal Power: The Evolution of Preference in Marketing Federal Power (Washington, DC: US General Accounting Office, 2000), 5–7, http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/653502.pdf (accessed Apr. 10, 2016). 23. Alcorn County Electric Power Association, “History,” http://www.ace-power.com /about/history/ (accessed Apr. 9, 2016). 24. See “Duck River Corporation Gets First REA Funds,” Bedford County Times (TN), Dec. 31, 1937; “Franklin County Court Convenes,” Truth and Herald (TN), July 9, 1936; quote from “TVA Marches On,” Knoxville News-Sentinel, Feb. 7, 1938, in box 101, folder 2, Guild Collection. 25. Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 100. 26. Quotes from Representative Joe Martin (R-MA) and Representative Charles Eaton (R-NJ), originally in Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley, Power Struggle: The Hundred-Year War over Electricity (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 72. 27. Tennessee Electric Power Company, Annual Report, 1936 (Chattanooga: Tennessee Electric Power Company, 1937), 5, box 1, folder 4, Crouch Papers. 28. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1936 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1937), 6–7; also see “Invasion of State by TVA Attacked,” Atlanta Constitution, May 26, 1936. 29. Ward, Defending White Democracy, 7–20, quotes from 13–14, 18. Also see T. Robert Hart, “The Lowcountry Landscape: Politics, Preservation, and the Santee-Cooper Project,” Environmental History 18 (January 2013): 127–56. 30. Preston S. Arkwright, quoted in Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 132. 31. “Arkwright Uses Race Issue,” Atlanta Daily World, June 3, 1937. 32. “Arkwright Uses Race Issue,” Atlanta Daily World, June 3, 1937; Ward, Defending White Democracy, 19. 216

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33. Clayton Cranston, “The TVA and the Race Problem,” Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life 12 (April 1934): 111–12. 34. Melissa Walker, “African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property Removal: Race in a New Deal Program,” Agricultural History 72 (Spring 1998): 417–28. 35. John T. Moutoux, “Dreams Come True for Farmers When Power Comes to Homes over TVA Lines,” Knoxville News-Sentinel, Mar. 9, 1937, box 102, folder 2, Guild Collection. 36. “Willkie and the TVA” New Republic, Sept. 2, 1940, 323. 37. See Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 108–30; and Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 98. 38. “Council Moves to Get TVA Power for City,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 7, 1934. 39. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 119–30. 40. McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 25–31; Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 35–46, quote from 46. 41. Hirt, Wired Northwest, 245–47. 42. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 138–41. 43. Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 57. 44. “Georgia Areas Push Rural Power Lines,” Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 26, 1936. 45. Kay Cagle and Greg Richter, Legendary Locals of Cullman County Alabama (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2014), 14. 46. Sherry Laymon, “Arkansas’s Dark Ages: The Struggle to Electrify the State,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 71 (Autumn 2012): 283–300. 47. Oral History Interview with Alvin Morrison by Robert M. Rhodes, Oct. 23, 1984, (D-0029), in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 48. McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 43. 49. “The Story of Rural Electrification in Our Area,” [1955?], box 57, folder “Planters EMC, History,” The Papers of Walter Wade Harrison, 1900–1985, Special Collections, Zach S. Henderson Library, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA (hereafter Harrison Papers). 50. Originally GEMC was chartered as the Georgia Rural Power Reserve EMC, which, though formed in 1937, was not granted incorporation until 1940. In 1944 the organization changed its name to GEMC. For simplicity’s sake, in the text I refer to the organization only as GEMC. See McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 65–69, 91. 51. George Norris, quoted in Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 57. 52. Hart, “Lowcountry Landscape,” 131–35, 141–50. 53. Hart, “Lowcountry Landscape,” 136–41; Bryan, Price of Progress, 140–41; and John A. Zeigler, “Another Giant Stride: The South Carolina Public Service (Santee-Cooper) Authority—A $47,000,000 Project Gets under Way,” Public Ownership of Public Utilities 24 (Nov.–Dec. 1942): 65–66. 54. Hart, “Lowcountry Landscape,” 136–41; Zeigler, “Another Giant Stride,” 65–66. 55. Laymon, “Arkansas’s Dark Ages,” 290. N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 17 –1 2 5

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56. L. S. Moody, “Statement of L.S. Moody, Secretary, Chamber of Commerce, Augusta Georgia before Civil Functions Appropriations Sub Committee, House of Representatives of the United States,” June 11, 1947, 4, box 61, folder “Clarks Hill Dam Documents, 1935– 1978,” Harrison Papers. 57. “Almost $3,000,000 Will Be Requested for Power Project,” Atlanta Constitution, July 4, 1937. 58. “Clarks Hill Dam Is Held Feasible,” Atlanta Constitution, May 25, 1937. 59. Lester Moody, “Statement before Civil Functions Appropriations Sub Committee,” 4, box 61, folder “Clarks Hill Dam Documents, 1935–1978,” Harrison Papers. 60. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 80–81. 61. For a discussion of Clarks Hill in the late 1930s, see Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 77–84. 62. Wright, History of Georgia Power, 294–95; Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 117–19. 63. “The TVA and the REA,” Jackson Daily News (MS), July 27, 1937, box 125, folder 2, Guild Collection. 64. Tennessee Electric Power Company, Electric Service for Your Farm (n.p., ca. 1937), 2–16, box 2, folder 7, Crouch Collection. 65. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1938 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1939), 6. 66. Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 45, 99–100. 67. Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 49. 68. “‘We’ll Stop Hitler the American Way,’ Says Willkie Text,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 18, 1940; Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 146–48. 69. See James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–8.

Chapter 6: Public Dams, Private Power 1. J. R. Chambless, “Statement Concerning Disposition of Clark Hill Power,” June 18, 1953, 1, emphasis in original, box 76, folder “Georgia Electric Membership Corp.,” James C. Davis Papers, MSS# 507, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA (hereafter JCD Papers). Also see Chambless, “Objections of the Georgia Co-Operatives to the Interior Department’s Tri-contract,” n.d., box 204, folder “Clark Hill Dam,” JCD Papers. Though some sources refer to the site under discussion here as “Clark Hill” or “Clark’s Hill,” the site’s original name, and the name preferred by the US Army Corps of Engineers, was Clarks Hill, drawn from the nearby South Carolina town of the same name. Through federal legislation passed in 1988, the dam and reservoir were renamed the J. Strom Thurmond Dam and Lake at Clarks Hill to commemorate South Carolina Senator Thurmond’s work on behalf of the project, though the state of Georgia still officially refers to the site as Clarks Hill. In this text, I refer to the site as Clarks Hill. 218

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2. Harllee Branch to Oscar Chapman, Jan. 10, 1953, box 76, folder “Georgia Power Company 1953,” JCD Papers; “Branch Charges ‘Pure Hokum’ in GEMC Row,” Atlanta Journal, Dec. 16, 1954; Gene Smith, “‘Socialism’ Trend in Power Scorned,” New York Times, Mar. 13, 1956. 3. “‘Power Empire’ Charged in Clark Hill Case,” Atlanta Journal, Jan. 7, 1953. 4. Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams, 20–21. 5. Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams, 5. 6. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1941 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1942), 1, 4; “Georgia Group for Mobilizing Industry Ready,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 28, 1940. 7. “Southeast to Pool Power for Defense,” New York Times, May 26, 1941. 8. Georgia Power Company, “An Appeal to All Users of Electric Light, Heat and Power,” Atlanta Daily World, May 28, 1941. 9. Georgia Power Company, “US Government Orders Immediate BLACKOUT,” Atlanta Daily World, Nov. 6, 1941. 10. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1941, 8. 11. “Giant Addition Is Planned for Plant Atkinson,” Atlanta Constitution, June 1, 1940; Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 405–6. 12. “Water Power vs. Coal,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 21, 1941. 13. Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams, 126–67. 14. The Twentieth Century Fund, The Power Industry and the Public Interest: A Summary of the Results of a Survey of the Relations between the Government and the Electric Power Industry (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1944), 5–6. 15. See Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 44–46; Needham, “Power Lines,” 197. 16. Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1939 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940), 601, 607, 643; Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1940 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941), 601, 608; Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1941 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942), 601, 608, 643. 17. Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1942 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 601, 608; Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1944 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1945), 601, 607; also see Georgia Power Company, Annual Reports, 1939–1944. 18. Harold Ickes, “Go Ahead and Cuss Me . . . ,” Atlanta Constitution, July 25, 1943; “Promotional Lighting from Dusk to 10 p.m.” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 3, 1944. Also see David E. Nye, The Night the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 56–59. 19. Jay Walz, “Cold Impedes Struggle against Fuel Shortage,” New York Times, Jan. N OT E S TO PAG E S 13 0–135

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21, 1945; “Army Tosses Coal Shortage Crisis of 20 Million Tons to Civilians,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 9, 1945. 20. “Huge Brownout Saving of Coal Is Indicated,” New York Times, Mar. 4, 1945. 21. T. E. Barnes to Sen. Josiah Bailey, Feb. 19, 1945, and Raymond Bell to Sen. Josiah Bailey, Feb. 23, 1945, box 452, folder “1945, February,” Josiah William Bailey Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University (hereafter JWB Papers). 22. Needham, “Power Lines,” 184–85; Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1944, 12; Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1946, 24. 23. Franklin P. Huddle, “The Outlook Is Dim,” New Republic, May 12, 1947, 26. 24. Needham, “Power Lines,” 185–86; Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 48. 25. Ark-Mo Power Company advertisement, “Ol’ Sol on the Loose,” in Reddy News, Aug. 25, 1947, 220, box 76: “Reddy News 1946–1947,” RkW Records. 26. Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities, 1945, 601, 605, 629; Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities, 1949, 601, 627; Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1948, 25. 27. Ronald C. Tobey, Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 166. 28. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 73–75. 29. Georgia Power Company, “We’ll Build a House on a Hilltop,” Kilowatt News 3 (May 1945): 3. 30. Although federal government demands on American industrial production during the war prevented most Americans from acquiring new electric wiring and appliances, the mass immigration to and concentration of populations in already well-electrified urbanindustrial areas for wartime production jobs caused domestic electrical consumption levels to steadily increase from 1942 to 1945. See Tobey, Technology as Freedom, 166–67. 31. Georgia Power Company, Annual Reports, 1945–1948. 32. Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 48. 33. Franklin P. Huddle, “The Outlook Is Dim,” New Republic, May 12, 1947, 25. 34. Needham, “Power Lines,” 184–88; also see C. Girard Davidson, “The Need for More Electric Power: Shortages Delay Production” (Apr. 11, 1949), Vital Speeches of the Day 15 (May 1, 1949): 446. 35. “Dixie Coal Shortage Acute; Cotton Mills Face Shutdown,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 17, 1945. 36. Nye, The Night the Lights Went Out, 60–62, quote from 60. 37. Needham, “Power Lines,” 191–92. 38. See Needham, “Power Lines,” 184–89; for more general discussions of fears about a return to the Depression in the postwar, see Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 114–19; and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008) 76, 157. 220

N OT E S TO PAG E S 135–13 7

39. John P. Callahan, “Consumers Fear Power Shortage,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 1947. 40. Davidson, “Need for More Electric Power,” 445. 41. Puget Sound Power & Light Company advertisement, “Reddy’s Got the Reconversion Blues,” in Reddy News, July 8, 1946, 163, box 76: “Reddy News 1946–1947,” RkW Records. 42. Fortune, quoted in May, Homeward Bound, 76. 43. “Power Shortage Called Emergency,” New York Times, Feb. 2, 1949. 44. Hank McQuade, Light Up Our Land: Georgia Electric Membership Corporation: The First 50 Years (Atlanta: Georgia Electric Membership Corporation, 1990), 121. 45. Georgia Power Company, “Worry-Free,” Kilowatt News 4 (Sept. 1946): 3, emphasis in original. 46. Mississippi Power and Light Company advertisement, “Shut-Downs! Shortages! Delays!” in Reddy News, July 8, 1946, 163, box 76: “Reddy News 1946–47,” RkW Records. Many other privately owned utilities made the same claim. See Reddy News, 1946–1948, RkW Records. 47. Historians have almost universally ignored the significance of power shortages to US postwar political economy. The exception here is Needham, “Power Lines,” 184–89, 191–200. 48. John Callahan, “No Shortage Seen in Electric Power,” New York Times, Oct. 12, 1947. 49. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 2. 50. Carl Vinson, “Honorable Carl Vinson Analyzes the Dondero Bill,” (1947), 3–7, box 61, folder “Hon. Carl Vinson statement opposing control by Georgia Power Company of Clarks Hill Power, 1947,” The Papers of Walter Wade Harrison, 1900–1985, Special Collections, Zach S. Henderson Library, Georgia Southern University (hereafter Harrison Papers); also see Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 73–85. 51. Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities, 1945, 601, 605, 629; Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities, 1949, 601, 606, 627. 52. “Excerpt from Statement of Preston S. Arkwright at Hearing before Federal Power Commission for a License to Construct and Operate Clark Hill Hydro Plant,” October 1946, 2–3, box 183, folder “Clark Hill Dam,” JCD Papers. 53. “Excerpt from Statement of Preston S. Arkwright,” 1. 54. Harllee Branch to James C. Davis, Jan. 18, 1947, emphasis in original, box 183, folder “Clark Hill Dam,” JCD Papers. 55. “Project in Georgia Stirs Opposition,” New York Times, Aug. 24, 1946. 56. J. Strom Thurmond, [Statement to the FPC], October 31, 1946, 1–5, quote on 4, box 61, folder “Clarks Hill Dam Documents, 1935–1978,” Harrison Papers. 57. Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2012), 49–50. 58. “FDR Signs Billion Flood Control Bill,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 24, 1944. N OT E S TO PAG E S 13 7–1 4 1

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59. US Congress, House, 80th Cong., 1st sess., HR 3826 (June 13, 1947), 1–2, box 183, folder “Clark Hill Dam,” JCD Papers. 60. US House Committee on Military Affairs, Muscle Shoals: Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs, 73rd Cong., 1st sess., 1933, 134–35; 146–51, quote on 151. 61. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 120–23. 62. US House Committee on Public Works, Clark Hill Power Project, Georgia and South Carolina: Hearings before the Committee on Public Works, 80th Cong., 2nd sess., 1948, 13. 63. Harry S. Truman, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” Jan. 5, 1949, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index .php?pid=13293 (accessed Apr. 11, 2015); Phyllis Komarek De Luna, Public versus Private Power during the Truman Administration: A Study of Fair Deal Liberalism (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 16–21. 64. “Bill Asks 7 Boards to Control Floods,” New York Times, Feb. 11, 1937; Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California, 262–66; Louis Broomfield, “Flood Control,” Atlanta Constitution, Apr. 4, 1945. 65. Wesley C. Clark, “Proposed ‘Valley Authority’ Legislation,” American Political Science Review 40 (Feb. 1946): 62. Also see De Luna, Public versus Private Power, 41–52; Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams, 124–31. 66. Manganiello, “Dam Crazy,” 189–90; “Arnall Backs ‘Little TVA’ Plan for Savannah River Development,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 16, 1945; quote from Gladstone Williams, “Georgia Congressman Is Credited with Clark’s Hill Development,” Atlanta Constitution, July 18, 1948. 67. Clayton R. Koppes, “Environmental Policy and American Liberalism: The Department of the Interior, 1933–1953,” Environmental Review 7 (Spring 1983): 21. 68. Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government [Hoover Commission], Task Force on Water Resources and Power, Report on Water Resources and Power (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1955), 2:447–75 and 520–39. 69. US House of Representatives, Flood Control Act of 1944, Public Law 534, 78th Cong., 2nd sess., chap. 665, HR 4485 (Dec. 22, 1944), Sec. 5, 3–4, www.fws.gov/habitat conservation/Omnibus/FCA1944.pdf (last accessed Apr. 25, 2015). 70. Flood Control Act of 1944, Sec. 5, 4. 71. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 98–99. 72. Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams, 44–46, 119–20. 73. Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams, 44–47. 74. Harold Ickes, “Veterans . . . Here’s Your Empire,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 5, 1943. 75. “Ickes Making Bid to Supervise Ocean-to-Ocean Power Project,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 18, 1945. 76. Davidson, “Need for More Electric Power,” 445, 447. 222

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77. Hoover Commission, Water Resources and Power, 540–54; De Luna, Public versus Private Power, 95. 78. For a history of SEPA, see Gus Norwood, Gift of the Rivers: Power for the People of the Southeast: A History of the Southeastern Power Administration (Washington, DC: US Department of Energy, 1990). 79. Pogue, South Carolina Electric, 121–23. 80. Arkansas Power & Light Company advertisement, “WATCH OUT!” in Reddy News, July 14, 1947, 211, box 76, folder “Reddy News 1946–1947,” RkW Records. 81. Norwood, Gift of the Rivers, 35–38. 82. Callahan, “20 Utilities Seen in Peril in South,” New York Times, Mar. 19, 1950. 83. John P. Callahan, “Utilities Watch New House Bill,” New York Times, June 1, 1947. 84. Quotes in Lee Metcalf and Vic Reinemer, Overcharge (New York: David McKay Co., 1967), 98, 102. In an influential 1964 essay inspired by rhetoric surrounding Arizona senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency, historian Richard Hofstadter defined “the paranoid style” as “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” about one’s political enemies. See Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s, Nov. 1964, 77–86, quote from 77. 85. See John Flynn, The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution (New York: DevinAdair Company, 1949), 9, 136; and “Soft Socialism—The Handwriting on These Walls . . . ,” Time, Mar. 14, 1949, 108–9. Also see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), ix–x, 60; and Kevin Kruse, One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), xiv. 86. Reddy Kilowatt Service, Target ’52–’53: Grass Roots Impact Plan, Chapter VII (New York: Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., 1951), 24, box 25, folder 7, RkW Records. 87. Reddy Kilowatt Service, The Crusade against Creeping Socialism: Grass Roots Impact Plan, Chapter IV (New York: Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., 1950), 3, box 25, folder 6, RkW Records. For further examples, also see America’s Local Business Managed, Tax-Paying Electric Light and Power Companies advertisement, “Who ASKED You?” Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 18, 1951, 74; America’s Business Managed, Tax-Paying Electric Light and Power Companies advertisement, “Pay This Bill for Me, Will You?” Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 16, 1949, 106; and Andrew Needham, “The End of Public Power: The Politics of Place and the Postwar Electric Utility Industry,” in Phillips-Fein and Zeilzer, eds., What’s Good for Business, 157–76. 88. Reddy Kilowatt Service, “The Story of Ten Little Free Workers,” 1950, box 25, folder 5, RkW Records; Metcalf and Reinemer, Overcharge, 99. 89. S. C. McMeekin, quoted in Pogue, South Carolina Electric, 123, emphasis in original. 90. “U.S. Bid at Clark’s Hill ‘Socialism,’ Collier Says,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 2, 1948. 91. Leona Westbrook to James C. Davis, Mar. 17, 1948, box 183, folder “Clark Hill N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 4 6–1 4 9

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Dam,” JCD Papers; also see Clarence Haynie to Walter George, Mar. 22, 1948, box 183, folder “Clark Hill Dam,” JCD Papers. 92. Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Mississippi Power and other utilities in the South and across the nation regularly contributed dues to the Southern States Industrial Council (SSIC), and Georgia Power’s executive vice president, J. J. McDonough, served as the SSIC’s chairman. See Metcalf and Reinemer, Overcharge, 206, 221. Also see Katherine Rye Jewell, Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century (London: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 93. Richard Munson, The Power Makers: The Inside Story of America’s Biggest Business . . . and Its Struggle to Control Tomorrow’s Electricity (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1985), 107; Aaron Wildavsky, Dixon-Yates: A Study in Power Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 8–9. 94. Georgia Power Company, Georgia and the Georgia Power Company (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1951), 32. 95. C. B. McManus, “Statement of Mr. C.B. McManus, President of the Southern Company, before the President’s Water Resources Policy Commission,” July 31, 1950, 6, box 62, folder “Statement of C.B. McManus, President of Southern Company & Georgia Power Company, before President’s Water Resources Policy Commission, July 1950,” Harrison Papers. 96. The President’s Water Resources Policy Commission [Cooke Commission], Ten Rivers in America’s Future: The Report of the President’s Water Resources Policy Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1950), 2:523–73. 97. John Popham, “Big Dam in Georgia Nears Completion,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 1949; quote from J. R. Hornady, “Great Possibilities Seen in Inland Waterways,” Atlanta Constitution, May 11, 1945. 98. Hoover Commission, Report on Water Resources and Power, 2:540–41. Also see De Luna, Public versus Private Power, 95. 99. Georgia Power Company, Georgia and the Georgia Power Company, 32, 34. 100. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 170. 101. Norwood, Gift of the Rivers, 37–38, 43–45. Also see Wyatt Wells, “Public Power in the Eisenhower Administration,” Public Policy History 20, no. 2 (2008): 238–39. 102. Norwood, Gift of the Rivers, 45; De Luna, Public versus Private Power, 99–104; Hoover Commission, Report on Water Resources and Power, 2:545–47. Also see: “SEPA Official Hits Back at Georgia Power Co.,” Atlanta Journal, Feb. 13, 1952. 103. Clyde T. Ellis, “Our Problems of Survival, Function and Growth,” Sept. 24−25, 1953, 18, box 50, folder “NRECA Region II Meetings: Greenville, SC, Sept. 1953,” Harrison Papers. 104. Chambless, “Statement Concerning Disposition of Clark Hill Power,” June 18, 1953, 1–2, box 76, folder “Georgia Electric Membership Corp,” JCD Papers.

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105. Chambless, “Report [on the Clarks Hill Project],” n.d. [1953?], 3, box 76, folder “Georgia Electric Membership Corp,” JCD Papers. 106. Georgia Electric Membership Corporation, “FACTS about Georgia Power Company Proposal for the Distribution of Clark Hill Power: G. P. Co. Facts vs G.E.M.C. Facts,” 1–2 (n.d.), box 61, folder “GEMC Statements on Clarks Hill Dam, 1946–1956,” Harrison Papers. 107. Martin V. Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 204–5. Eisenhower quoted in “Ike Never Paid a Power Bill,” New Republic, Nov. 29, 1954, 8. 108. Ashton B. Collins, “Iowa Utilities Association” speech, Oct. 6, 1952, 2, box 3, folder 10, RkW Records. 109. Both Eisenhower and Jones vehemently denied any collusion in business matters based on their friendship. See Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 181–84. 110. Brooks, Public Power, Private Dams, 176–85. 111. Hoover Commission, Water Resources and Power, 550–54. 112. “Decision Nears on Clark Hill Power Dispute,” Atlanta Journal, Dec. 9, 1954. 113. Clyde Ellis, “Memorandum to All Rural Electric Systems, NRECA Board of Directors, Statewide Presidents, Managers and Editors,” Oct. 13, 1955, 1, 15, 18, box 61, folder “Clarks Hill Dam Documents, 1935–1978,” Harrison Papers. 114. Norwood, Gift of the Rivers, 48–50. 115. Norwood, Gift of the Rivers, 48–50. 116. “Branch Doubts Congress Ok on Dam Linkup,” Atlanta Journal, Mar. 28, 1956. 117. “Danger Foreseen to Private Power,” New York Times, June 6, 1957. 118. Joe Hamilton, “Pact Nearing in the Clark Hill Row?” Atlanta Journal, May 16, 1956. 119. Georgia Power Company, “Summary of Contract between Georgia Power Company and Southeastern Power Administration,” Oct. 11, 1957, box 205, folder “Buford Dam 1957,” JCD Papers; Norwood, Gift of the Rivers, 50.

Chapter 7: The Heart of the New South 1. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1965 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1966), 24–25. 2. The Atlanta Constitution ran only one article on Plant Branch—which in three short paragraphs discussed technical and financial matters—in 1965. See Jim Montgomery, “Georgia Power Plant to Add $40 Million Generating Unit,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 25, 1965. 3. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1965, 16. Georgia Power retired all four units at Plant Branch by April 2015. 4. “Coal-Mine Project Set for Tennessee,” New York Times, Dec. 26, 1965; Joseph

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Carter, “Unit Coal Trains Cut Freight Costs,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 1964; “$15 Million Deep Mine to Open in Claiborne Co.” Middlesboro (KY) Daily News, Jan. 29, 1965, box 5, folder 36, Southern Railway Historical Association Records LMS 2003.009, Central of Georgia Railway Industrial Development, 1943–1975, Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History Archives and Library; also see Richard L. Gordon, U.S. Coal and the Electric Power Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 73–75. 5. See Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 21; “Southern Power Companies: A Special Supplement,” Southern Exposure 1 (Summer 1973): 53; and US Energy Information Administration, “Table 8.11a Electric Net Summer Capacity: Total (All Sectors), 1949– 2011,” http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.cfm?t=ptb0811a (accessed July 10, 2013). 6. Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities, 1949, 601, 605, 627; Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities, 1972, 701, 704; Federal Power Commission, Statistics of Electric Utilities, 1975, 493, 501, 537. 7. Martin V. Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 203–4. 8. Historian Christopher Manganiello rightly points out that water remained crucial to southern power generation even in an era dominated by fossil fuel–driven power. The distinction I draw is that water was no longer the dominant fuel source for electricity’s generation; rather, primarily as a cooling agent, water was relegated to a means through which coal-fired power could be produced efficiently. See Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 6–7. 9. “H.M. Atkinson, 76, Power Company Chairman, Dies,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 22, 1939. Also see Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 184–87. 10. See Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis. Also see Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity,” 188–91; Soppelsa, “The Fragility of Modernity,” 18; Nye, The Night the Lights Went Out; Hirt, Wired Northwest, 1–2; Jones, Routes of Power, 12; Needham, Power Lines, 5, 18, 251; Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 68; and Daniel French, When They Hid the Fire: A History of Electricity and Invisible Energy in America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). 11. See for example W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Introduction: No Deed but Memory,” in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 12. Quote from Andrew M. Shanken, “Better Living: Toward a Cultural History of a Business Slogan,” Enterprise & Society 7 (Sept. 2006): 486. 13. “Statement Relative to Power Policy of the Department of the Interior,” n.d. [Aug. 1953?], 1–2, box 52, folder “Statement of US President Eisenhower and Secretary Douglas McKay on Power Policy, Denver, CO, Aug. 1953,” Harrison Papers. 14. Dwight D. Eisenhower, quoted in Michael Straight, “Ike Never Paid a Power Bill,” New Republic, Nov. 29, 1954, 8. 226

N OT E S TO PAG E S 15 7–161

15. Wildavsky, Dixon-Yates, 17; Melosi, Coping with Abundance, 204–6. 16. American Enterprise Association, “Analysis of the Dixon-Yates Contract and Its Development,” ca. 1955, 6, box 184, folder “Dixon Yates,” JCD Papers. 17. Wildavsky, Dixon-Yates, 43–49. 18. New Johnsonville was not the first coal-fired plant in TVA’s system. TVA inherited coal-fired plants in Alabama when the agency was created in 1933. As the first coal-fired plant constructed by TVA, New Johnsonville marked a new departure for the agency. 19. Needham, Power Lines, 159–60. 20. Southern Company vice president, James Crist, quoted in Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 179. 21. See Melosi, Coping with Abundance, 206; and David Howard Davis, Energy Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 130–32. Both Middle South Utilities and Southern Company, as holding companies and not operating utilities, were unable to directly construct and operate generation and transmission facilities. To fulfill the Dixon-Yates contract, they jointly formed a new utility, the Mississippi Valley Generating Company, which would oversee construction in West Memphis, operate the plant, and build and maintain the transmission lines that would interconnect with TVA lines. 22. Wildavsky, Dixon-Yates, 140–42. 23. William Kerwin, “Ike’s Views Not Changed on TVA,” Atlanta Daily World, July 10, 1955. 24. American Enterprise Association, “Analysis of the Dixon-Yates Contract and Its Development,” 1, box 184, folder “Dixon Yates,” JCD Papers; also see Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 179. 25. Eisenhower, Jones, and others vehemently denied these charges, though Senator Kefauver continued through 1956—unsuccessfully—to press for an investigation to determine whether a criminal conspiracy took place in the Dixon-Yates affair. See Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 181–84. 26. William M. Blair, “Nixon, Dixon, Yates Accused of Harming Nation’s Morals,” New York Times, Dec. 11, 1954. 27. Michael Straight, “New Light on Dixon-Yates,” New Republic, Oct. 11, 1954, 8–9. 28. Michael Straight, “New Light on Dixon-Yates,” New Republic, Oct. 11, 1954, 8–9; also see Rudolph and Ridley, Power Struggle, 106–8. 29. Wildavsky, Dixon-Yates, 323–25; Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 193–14. 30. Senator Styles Bridges, quoted in “What Others Think: EEI Holds Twenty-Sixth Annual Convention,” Public Utilities Fortnightly, July 3, 1958, 51. 31. See for example, Harllee Branch, “Fair Play and the Pocketbook,” Public Utilities Fortnightly, June 7, 1956, 793–99; also see Lee Metcalf and Vic Reinemer, Overcharge (New York: David McKay Co., 1967), 96. 32. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 193–96.

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33. James C. Cobb, The South and America since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 63. 34. See Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 116–64. 35. See McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 155–82; and Lori Coleman, “Our Whole Future Is Bound Up in This Project: The Making of Buford Dam” (MA thesis, Georgia State University, 2008), 75–80. 36. Needham, Power Lines, 160–62. 37. Georgia Power Company advertisement, “Now You Can Have Springtime in Your Home the Whole Year ’Round,” Atlanta Constitution, Apr. 26, 1965. 38. See “Electric House Heating—1955,” Electrical World, Nov. 14, 1955, 129–44; Gordon W. Evans, “Summer Peaks: What to Do?” Electrical World, Jan. 21, 1957, 76; and “Appliances: Appliance Sales Shot Up 15% to $8.5 Billion in ’59,” Electrical World, Feb. 29, 1960; also see Hirsh, Technology and Transformation, 50. 39. Metcalf and Reinemer, Overcharge, 95–98. 40. “Who’d Want to Leave a Socialistic U.S.A. to His Kids?” advertisement referenced in Munson, Power Makers, 107; America’s business-managed, tax-paying Electric Light and Power Companies advertisement, “How Can You Explain These Times to a Boy?” in Time, Apr. 16, 1951, 54. Though the bylines of these and many other advertisements read “America’s business-managed, tax-paying Electric Light and Power Companies,” they were produced by ECAP and Bozell & Jacobs. See Metcalf and Reinemer, Overcharge, 99–100. 41. America’s business-managed, tax-paying Electric Light and Power Companies advertisement, “Will You Leave These to Your Children?” Life, Apr. 3, 1950, 134, emphasis in original. 42. Reddy Kilowatt Service, The Grass Roots Impact Plan, Chapter I (New York: Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., 1950), 1, box 25, folder 6, RkW Records. 43. Reddy Kilowatt advertisement, “His Game Will Cost You MONEY!” 1950, emphasis in original, box 25, folder 5, RkW Records. 44. Reddy Kilowatt Service, Reddy for Anything! The Grass Roots Impact Plan, Chapter VI (New York: Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., 1950), 4, box 25, folder 7, RkW Records. 45. Ashton B. Collins, “Iowa Utilities Association” speech, Oct. 6, 1952, 1–2, box 3, folder 10, RkW Records. 46. Cobb, Selling of the South, 1, 70–79; also see Bartley, The New South, 105–46. 47. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1952 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1953), 1. 48. Georgia Power Company, Annual Reports, 1947–1955. Stunning growth in this era marked not only Georgia Power but American utilities in general. See US Energy Information Administration, “Table 8.11a Electric Net Summer Capacity: Total (All Sectors), 1949–2011,” http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.cfm ?t=ptb0811a (accessed July 10, 2013). 228

N OT E S TO PAG E S 164 –167

49. See for example Southern Company advertisement, “Southern Fibers Clothe the Nation,” Newsweek, Sept. 29, 1952; Middle South advertisement, “GROWTH Opportunities for You,” Time, June 10, 1957; Southern Company advertisement, “Cash Registers Are Ringing with the South’s Success Story,” Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 9, 1957; and Southern Company advertisement, “Cash Registers Are Ringing with the South’s Success Story,” New York Times, Nov. 26, 1957. 50. Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 31. 51. Duke Power Company advertisement, “We Thought You’d Be Coming,” New York Times, Nov. 17, 1957. 52. Southern Company advertisement, “Symbol of Growth,” New York Times, Apr. 14, 1954. 53. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1952 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1953), 1. 54. Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the 1950s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 74–75. 55. Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 93–114. 56. Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 124–26. 57. General Electric advertisement, “People’s Capitalism,” Time, May 17, 1957, 13. 58. General Electric advertisement, “How 280,000 People at General Electric Benefit from Its Progress,” Time, June 17, 1957, 2. 59. General Electric television advertisement, “Live Better Electrically,” YouTube, 1957, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=kEMxYRoW1b0 (accessed Mar. 3, 2012). 60. General Electric advertisement, “You Get Wonderful Features Like These in . . .,” House and Home, July 1958, 166–67. 61. General Electric advertisement, “You Get Wonderful Features Like These in . . .,” House and Home, July 1958, 166. 62. General Electric advertisement, “Now We Know Total-Electric Living Is Not Just for Rich People,” House and Garden, Apr. 1960, 30–31. 63. See Tobey, Technology as Freedom, 10–39. 64. “Appliances: Appliance Sales Shot Up 15% to $8.5 Billion in ’59,” Electrical World, Feb. 29, 1960. 65. Historian Ronald Tobey writes that refrigerator saturation in the United States in 1960 was 93.5 percent, but that washing machine saturation was only at 73 percent. See Tobey, Technology as Freedom, 7. 66. See Shanken, “Better Living,” 485–514, quote from 514. 67. Ashton B. Collins, “Our Power Plants Are Not for Sale!” Nov. 16, 1959, 1–9, box 3, folder 12, RkW Records. 68. Georgia Power Company advertisement, “Marjorie Neal: Third Grade Teacher and N OT E S TO PAG E S 167 –1 7 0

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Power Company Owner,” Atlanta Daily World, Oct. 18, 1960; and Georgia Power Company advertisement, “Alex Dunaway: Cattleman, Contractor, and Power Company Owner,” Atlanta Constitution, Apr. 18, 1960. 69. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1963 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1964), 40; Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1964 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1965), 50; and Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1965 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1966), 50; 70. Georgia Power Company advertisement, “Have You Noticed?” Atlanta Daily World, Mar. 25, 1964. 71. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 172–73. 72. Raymond Arsenault, “The Cooling of the South,” Wilson Quarterly 8 (Summer 1984): 156–57; Robert S. Thompson, “‘The Air-Conditioning Capital of the World’: Houston and Climate Control,” in Martin V. Melosi and Joseph A. Pratt, eds., Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 91–92. For a national-level examination of the air conditioner as a climatecontrol device, see Gail Cooper, Air Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900–1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 73. Raymond Arsenault, “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture,” Journal of Southern History 50 (Nov. 1948): 610–11. 74. “LBE Program Gets New Approach,” Electrical World, Mar. 7, 1960, 83. 75. Florida Power and Light Company advertisement, “Wouldn’t You Rather Switch?” Miami Times, Feb. 6, 1970. 76. Florida Power and Light Company advertisement, “Wouldn’t You Rather Switch?” Miami Times, Mar. 7, 1970. 77. Edwin Vennard and Walter Bouldin, Why Hobble the Leader? (New York: Edison Electric Institute, [1962?]), 20–23, quotes from 20, 22; signed note from Jack McDonough attached to pamphlet, emphasis in original, box 63, folder “REA Pamphlets and Brochures VII: Southern—Tisinger,” Harrison Papers. 78. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 145–47. 79. “Gov. Russell Ends Hearing over Dam,” Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 23, 1963; US Army Corps of Engineers, Final Environmental Impact Statement: Richard B. Russell Dam and Lake (Formerly Trotters Shoals Lake), Savannah River, Georgia and South Carolina, Savannah District (May 1974). 80. Robert Durden, Electrifying the Piedmont Carolinas: The Duke Power Company, 1904–1997 (Durham, NC: The Academic Press, 2001), 132–37, quote from 137. 81. “Udall, Carolina Boy Disagree over Dam,” Atlanta Constitution, Apr. 25, 1963. 82. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power, 147–51, Dorn quoted on 151. 83. US House of Representatives, Committee on Appropriations, Public Works Appropriations for 1968: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations,

230

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90th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968), 1370–74, quote from 1374. 84. McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 172–73. 85. “Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act,” n.d., 1–2, box 55, folder “Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act, Oct.-Nov. 1972,” Harrison Papers; Beau Cutts, “Power Areas Bill Held Up for Study,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 27, 1972. 86. Walter Harrison form letter to Dear. . . . , Nov. 7, 1972, box 55, folder “Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act, Oct.-Nov. 1972,” Harrison Papers; McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 174–81. 87. See Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 256–58. 88. Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1970 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1971), 3. Georgia Power claimed the rate increase would be “slightly in excess of 30 percent.” GEMC’s leaders insisted that the rate increase would amount to 38 percent. See McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 184, 186; also see Jim Overton, “Challenge to Public Power,” Southern Exposure 7 (Winter 1979): 117. 89. Fred Heller, “Co-ops Pledge to Fight GPC’s Proposed Boost,” Atlanta Constitution, May 26, 1970. 90. McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 186–87; “Rural Georgia Electric Cooperatives Seeking Release of Appropriated REA Funds,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 28, 1971. 91. Rudolph and Ridley, Power Struggle, 142–143. 92. See Durden, Electrifying the Piedmont Carolinas, 187–88; and Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 254–58, quote from 263. 93. For competing accounts of events, see Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 259–61; and McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 187–89. Following Georgia Power’s and Virginia Electric’s 1970 rate-increase requests, southern co-ops initiated antitrust proceedings with the Atomic Energy Commission, arguing that in order to gain some measure of independence, they should be allowed to become part owners of the generating stations that supplied them with the majority of their electricity. Until the time of the 1973 energy crisis, private utilities opposed and the Nixon Administration denied funding for such maneuvers. See Overton, “Challenge to Public Power,” 117–18. 94. Tom Henderson, OEMC Plans to Invest in Georgia Power Plants,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 8, 1974; also see Oglethorpe Electric Membership Corporation, “Background Material on Oglethorpe Electric Membership Corporation,” n.d. [1976?], 2, box 58, folder “Oglethorpe EMC, 1974–1976,” Harrison Papers; and McQuade, Light Up Our Land, 193–94. 95. Quotes from Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 260. 96. Overton, “Challenge to Public Power,” 118. 97. Jones, Routes of Power, 222; Tobey, Technology as Freedom, 115–18; Gregory B. Field, “‘Electricity for All’: The Electric Home and Farm Authority and the Politics of

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Mass Consumption, 1932–1935,” Business History Review 64 (Spring 1990): 32–60; and Michelle Mock, “The Electric Home and Farm Authority, ‘Model T Appliances,’ and the Modernization of the Home Kitchen in the South,” Journal of Southern History 80 (Feb. 2014): 73–108. 98. Cobb, South and American since World War II, 64. 99. Gordon R. Clapp, “Electricity Goes to Work in the Development of a Region,” Dec. 9, 1947, 1, box 55, folder “Georgia EMC General Documents, 1942–1948,” Harrison Papers. 100. Planters Electric Membership Corporation, 1951: Presenting 15 Years of Progress (Millen, GA: Planters Electric Membership Corporation, 1951), 6, box 58, folder “Planters EMC, 1951, Presenting 15 Years of Progress,” Harrison Papers. 101. Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 345–46. 102. Durden, Electrifying the Piedmont Carolinas, 164−68. 103. Ken Lawrence, “Cracks in the Tower: Mississippians Organize against Nuclear Power,” Southern Exposure 7 (Winter 1979): 107–8. 104. The Georgia Power Project, “The Georgia Power Project,” The Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta, GA), Sept. 11, 1972; Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 359. 105. Sam Hopkins, “Georgia Power Timing Attacked,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 23, 1973. 106. Charles Lambeth, “At ‘End of Rope,’ Georgia Power Says,” Atlanta Constitution, June 30, 1971. 107. The Georgia Power Project, “The Georgia Power Project,” The Great Speckled Bird, Sept. 11, 1972. 108. Sam Hopkins, “Georgia Power Timing Attacked,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 23, 1973. 109. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 262–63. 110. Sharon Bailey, “Georgia Power Sued by Group,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 8, 1975. See E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (Feb. 1971): 76–136. 111. Taft and Heys, Big Bets, 264–66; Sam Hopkins, “Ga. Power: Less Would Do,” Atlanta Constitution, Apr. 8, 1975. 112. R. Cronk, “New! Improved! POLLUTION!” The Great Speckled Bird, Sept. 11, 1972. 113. Eugene Levy, “The Aesthetics of Power: High-Voltage Transmission Systems and the American Landscape,” Technology and Culture 38 (July 1997): 575–607; also see Rome, Bulldozer in the Countryside, 119–52. 114. See Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1987), 1–12. 115. Ralph Nader, quoted in Rudolph and Ridley, Power Struggle, 147. 116. Ralph Nader, quoted in Rudolph and Ridley, Power Struggle, 147. 232

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117. Sam Hopkins, “Georgia Power Timing Attacked,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 23, 1973. 118. See Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., “Environment: A Reddy Kilowatt Program,” n.d. [1970s?], box 24, folder 2, RkW Records. 119. Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., Public Acceptance of Nuclear Power: Analysis and Approaches (New York: Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., 1973), 3–6, 25–26, 40–42, quote from 3, emphasis in original, box 25, folder 3, RkW Records. 120. Overton, “Challenge to Public Power,” 118–19; Durden, Electrifying the Piedmont Carolinas, 188–90. 121. Oglethorpe Electric Membership Corporation, “Background Material on Oglethorpe Electric Membership Corporation,” n.d. [1976?], 2–3, box 58, folder “Oglethorpe EMC, 1974–1976,” Harrison Papers. 122. Robert W. Scherer, untitled address, n.d. (May 1976?), 2, box 58, folder “Oglethorpe EMC, 1974–1976,” Harrison Papers. 123. David A. Hamil, “Rural Electrification Steps into Tomorrow,” May 28, 1976, 3–5, box 58, folder “Oglethorpe EMC, Dedication Ceremony, Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Plant, Baxley, GA, May 1976,” Harrison Papers. 124. Georgia Power Company, “Plant Robert W. Scherer,” http://www.georgiapower .com/about/pdf /Plant% 20Sherer%20Brochure.pdf (accessed May 11, 2016). 125. “Electricity Consumption by State, 2012,” Institute for Policy and Social Research, http://www.ipsr.ku.edu/ksdata/ksah/energy/18ener7.pdf (accessed Jan. 17, 2013); US Bureau of the Census, “Quick Facts: Georgia,” https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table /PST045215/13 (accessed May 16, 2016); Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1946 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1947), 6; Georgia Power Company, Annual Report, 1970 (Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1971), 5. 126. John McPhee, “Coal Train—II: Going into Thunder.” New Yorker, Oct. 10, 2005, 70–71; Georgia Power Company, “Plant Robert W. Scherer”; Heather Duncan, “Report Slams Plant Scherer for Ash Ponds,” Macon Telegraph, Jan. 8, 2009, http://www.macon. com/2009/01/08/579650/report-slams-plant-scherer-for.html (accessed Feb. 3, 2010). 127. Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (New York: Random House, 1976).

Conclusion 1. Jonathan Shapiro, “Green Tea Coalition Rallies for More Solar, Vogtle Cost Controls,” 90.1 WABE (Atlanta, GA), Sept. 17, 2013, http://news.wabe.org/post/green-tea-coalitionrallies-more-solar-vogtle-cost-controls (accessed May 17, 2016); “About,” Conservatives for Energy Freedom, http://energyfreedomusa.org/about/ (accessed Aug. 31, 2018). 2. Carolyn Kormann, “Greening the Tea Party,” New Yorker, Feb. 17, 2015, http://www .newyorker.com /tech/elements/green-tea-party-solar (accessed May 17, 2016). 3. Jonathan Shapiro, “Green Tea Coalition Aims to Bridge Partisan Divide,” 90.1 WABE N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 8 0–1 86

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(Atlanta, GA), Aug. 7, 2013, http://news.wabe.org/post/green-tea-coalition-aims-bridge -partisan-divide (accessed May 17, 2016). 4. Georgia General Assembly, HB  57, Solar Power Free-Market Financing Act of 2015, July 1, 2015, http://www.legis.ga.gov/Legislation/en-US/display/20152016/HB/57 (accessed May 17, 2016). 5. Walter C. Jones, “Who Will Pay for Vogtle Construction Costs?” Augusta Chronicle, May 1, 2016. 6. Anastaciah Ondieki, “Georgia PSC Votes to Continue Construction at Plant Vogtle,” Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Dec. 21, 2017, https://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt —politics/georgia-psc-votes-continue-construction-plant-vogtle/Tu0ja76KWtR3YG lhaFLTeM/ (accessed Aug. 31, 2018). 7. US Department of Energy, “Sec. Moniz to Georgia, Energy Department Scheduled to Close on Loan Guarantees to Construct New Nuclear Power Plant Reactors,” Feb. 19, 2014, http://energy.gov/articles/sec-moniz-georgia-energy-department-scheduled-closeloan-guarantees-construct-new-nuclear (accessed May 17, 2016); also see US Department of Energy, “Vogtle,” Loan Programs Office, n.d., http://energy.gov/lpo/vogtle (accessed May 17, 2016); Gloria Tatum, “Health, Environmental Harms Ignored at Plant Vogtle VCM 18 Hearings,” Atlanta Progressive News, May 17, 2018, http://atlantaprogressivenews .com/2018/05/17/health-environmental-harms-ignored-at-plant-vogtle-vcm-18-hearings/ (accessed Aug. 31, 2018); and US Department of Energy, “Secretary Perry Announces Conditional Commitment to Support Continued Construction of Vogtle Advanced Nuclear Energy Project,” Sept. 29, 2017, https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-perry -announces-conditional-commitment-support-continued-construction-vogtle (accessed Aug. 31, 2018). 8. See Hughes, Networks of Power; and Nye, Electrifying America. Recent historical works have begun to consider both the corporations that generated and the consumers who used electric power. See Hirt, Wired Northwest; Jones, Routes of Power; and Needham, Power Lines. The one study of which I am aware that attempts to link corporate-directed electrical production and use in the South is Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power. 9. Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 289–308. 10. See Elmore, Citizen Coke. Also see Jones, Routes of Power; and Needham, Power Lines.

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Bibliography Manuscript and Archival Collections Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, DC Hales Bar Collection Louisan Mamer Rural Electrification Administration Records Reddy Kilowatt Records S. Morgan Smith Company Records Warshaw Collection of Business Americana Belk Library Special Collections, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC W. L. Eury Appalachian Collection Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, GA Atlanta Gas Light Company Records Helen Dortch Longstreet Papers Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA Georgia Power Company Collection Mule to MARTA Collection Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA James C. Davis Papers Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC E. C. Branson Papers Southern Oral History Program Collection Charles Waddell Papers Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History Archives and Library, Kennesaw, GA Central of Georgia Railway Industrial Development Collection Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, TN Crouch, Arthur W., Tennessee Electric Power Company Collection, 1860-1939 Guild, Jo Conn, Collection of Tennessee Electric Power Company Records, 1933-1939 235

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Tindall, George B. “Business Progressivism: Southern Politics in the Twenties.” South Atlantic Quarterly 62 (Winter 1963): 92–106. Tindall, George B. The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Tobey, Ronald C. Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. 1930; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Twentieth Century Fund. The Power Industry and the Public Interest: A Summary of the Results of a Survey of the Relations between the Government and the Electric Power Industry. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1944. US Army Corps of Engineers. Final Environmental Impact Statement: Richard B. Russell Dam and Lake (Formerly Trotters Shoals Lake), Savannah River, Georgia and South Carolina, Savannah District. May 1974. US Country Life Commission. Report of the Country Life Commission. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1909. US Department of Agriculture. Bureau of Statistics. Wages of Farm Labor. Bulletin 99. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912. US Department of Commerce. Bureau of the Census. United States Census of Agriculture, 1935. Vol. 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1936. US Department of Commerce and Labor. Bureau of the Census. Central Electric Light and Power Stations, 1902. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905. US Department of Commerce and Labor. Bureau of the Census. Street and Electric Railways, 1902. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905. US Department of Commerce and Labor. Bureau of the Census. Central Electric Light and Power Stations, 1907. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910. US Department of Commerce and Labor. Bureau of the Census. Central Electric Light and Power Stations, 1917. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920. US Department of Commerce and Labor. Bureau of the Census. Central Electric Light and Power Stations, 1922. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1925. US Department of Commerce and Labor. Bureau of the Census. Census of Electrical Industries, 1927: Central Electric Light and Power Stations. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930. US Department of Commerce and Labor. Bureau of the Census. Central Electric Light and Power Stations, 1932. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935. US Department of Commerce and Labor. Bureau of the Census. Central Electric Light and Power Stations, 1937. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940. US Department of Energy. Energy Information Administration. Statistics of Privately Owned Utilities in the United States, 1979. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980. 248

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US Federal Power Commission. Electric Power Statistics. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1939. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1940. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1941. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1942. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1943. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1944. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1944. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1945. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1945. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1949. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1950. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1953. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1954. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1957. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1958. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1960. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1965. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1970. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971. US Federal Power Commission. Performance Profiles: Private Electric Utilities in the United States, 1963–1970. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1972. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973. US Federal Power Commission. Statistics of Electric Utilities in the United States, 1975. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976. US General Accounting Office. Federal Power: The Evolution of Preference in Marketing Federal Power. Washington, DC: US General Accounting Office, 2000. US House of Representatives. Tennessee Valley Authority Act, 73rd Cong., 1st Sess., HR 5081, May 18, 1933. US House of Representatives. Flood Control Act of 1944, Public Law 534. 78th Cong., 2nd sess., chap. 665, HR 4485, Dec. 22, 1944. B I B L IO G R A P H Y

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US House of Representatives. Committee on Appropriations. Public Works Appropriations for 1968: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations. 90th Cong., 1st sess., 1968. US House of Representatives. Committee on Military Affairs. Muscle Shoals: Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs. 73rd Cong., 1st sess., 1933. US House of Representatives. Committee on Public Works. Clark Hill Power Project, Georgia and South Carolina: Hearings before the Committee on Public Works. 80th Cong., 2nd sess., 1948. Vickery, Kenneth P. “‘Herrenvolk’ Democracy and Egalitarianism in South Africa and the US South.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (June 1974): 309–28. Walker, Melissa. “African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property Removal: Race in a New Deal Program.” Agricultural History 72 (Spring 1998): 417–28. Ward, Jason Morgan. Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Weinstein, James. The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900−1918. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Wells, Wyatt. “Public Power in the Eisenhower Administration.” Public Policy History 20, no. 2 (2008): 227–62. White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Whites, LeeAnn. “Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Wife’s Farm: The Class and Racial Politics of Gender Reform.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 76 (Summer 1992): 354–72. Wilcox, Delox. “Effects of State Regulation upon the Municipal Ownership Movement.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 53 (May 1914): 71−84. Wildavsky, Aaron. Dixon-­Yates: A Study in Power Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962. Wilde, Oscar. The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose. 1891; New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Williams, James C. Energy and the Making of Modern California. Akron: University of Akron Press, 1997. Williams, James C. “Understanding the Place of Humans in Nature.” In Martin Reuss and Stephen Cutcliffe, eds. The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Williamson, Joel. The Crucible of Race: Black-­White Relations in the American South since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertisements. London: Boyars, 1978. Wilson, Bobby M. “Race in Commodity Exchange and Consumption: Separate but Equal.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 (Sept. 2005): 587–606. 250

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Wolfe, Audra J. “‘How Not to Electrocute the Farmer’: Assessing Attitudes towards Electrification on American Farms, 1920–1940.” Agricultural History 74 (Spring 2000): 515–29. Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951. Wright, Wade H. History of the Georgia Power Company, 1855–1956. Atlanta: Georgia Power Company, 1957. Wrigley, Steven Wayne. “The Triumph of Provincialism: Public Life in Georgia, 1898– 1917.” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1986.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. aesthetics, 179–80 African Americans, 38; disenfranchisement of, 41, 44–46, 51; streetcars and, 38–39, 40–42, 52, 54; whites’ fear of domination by, 42–43, 46–47, 75, 103. See also race agriculture, 62–63, 100, 102, 110. See also farmers; farms air conditioning, electricity for, 171 air pollution, 8, 182, 186–87 Alabama, 25, 89, 121, 126; hydropower in, 56–57, 71, 88; Muscle Shoals site in, 95–96; rural electrification in, 100, 114 Alabama, Traction, Light & Power, 71 Alabama Power Company, 86, 88, 89, 100, 134; dams as core of corporate identity, 151, 158; hydroelectric generation and transmission by, 57, 71; increased production by, 136, 157; racism in ads of, 105–6 Allatoona dam, 150–53 Allen, Ivan, Sr., 54 alternating-­current, 23, 63 American Farm Bureau Federation, 120 amusement parks, 36 antimalaria, 140 Appalachia, 57, 59, 157 Appalachian Power Company, 105 appliances, residential, 27, 91; increased electricity use by, 101, 105; private utilities urging purchases, 166, 168–69 arc lights, 15–17, 19–20, 21, 22 Arkansas, 121 Arkansas Power & Light, 121 Arkansas Valley Authority, 125 Arkwright, Preston, 45, 85, 126, 133; arguing for private power companies, 81–82, 98, 141–42; condemning public-­ownership movement, 103–4, 117, 141–42; as Georgia Power chairman, 110, 139; on increased electrical demand, 139–40

Army Corps of Engineers, 173; Allatoona dam of, 150–51; dams of, 146, 150, 154, 164; in development of Clarks Hill, 130–31, 139–42; in federal network of public power, 143–44 Arnall, Ellis, 153 Ashley, Eugene, 69 Atkinson, Edward, 25 Atkinson, Henry Morrell, 13–15, 50, 101; background of, 24–26; consolidating companies, 24, 29–30; expansion of corporation of, 72, 110; funneling money into Atlanta, 25, 29; Hurt vs., 27–30; hydropower and, 64–66, 88, 158; monopoly criticized, 70, 74; regional energy cartel of, 57; Smith’s partnership with, 70–71; streetcars and, 27, 68; utility companies and, 25–27. See also Georgia Railway and Power Company Atkinson, May Peters, 25 Atlanta, 27; arc lights in, 15, 17, 19–20, 21; Atkinson funneling money into, 25, 29; Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in, 12–14; coal power in, 28, 60; economy of, 16, 25, 43; electricity in, 12–14, 19, 83, 86–87; electric lights in, 16, 18–19, 22, 34–35; generating plants in, 25–28, 60; hydropower for, 64–65, 68–69, 85, 89–90; image of, 6, 19, 54; Piedmont Exposition in, 19–20; politics in, 89, 111; public ownership of utilities and, 46–47, 89, 111; racial tensions in, 41–43, 45–46, 54; streetcars in, 25, 26–30, 29, 41; street lights in, 19, 21 Atlanta, West End, and McPherson Barracks Railway, 27 Atlanta City Council, 28, 68, 69, 87, 119 Atlanta Consolidated Street Railway Company, 27–28 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, 12–14 Atlanta Electric Illuminating Company, 25–26 Atlanta Gas Light Company, 18, 20, 30 Atlanta Georgian, 45, 53

253

Atlanta Race Riot, 45–47, 51–52 Atlanta Railway, 28 Atlanta Railway and Power Company (ARPC), 28–29 Atlanta Rapid Transit Company, 29 Atlanta Steam Company, 30 Atlanta Tea Party, in Green Tea Coalition, 185 Atlanta Traction, renamed Atlanta Railway, 28 Atlanta Traction Company, 27 Atlanta Water and Electric Power Company, 66 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 161, 162 Bailey, Josiah, 135 Baker, Ray Stannard, 42, 52 Bennett, Valene, 121–23 Birmingham, Alabama, 6, 34, 54, 71, 97, 109, 139 blackouts, 61 Blackwood, Ibra, 111 Blue Ridge Mountains, 28, 57, 65, 79 Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), 143, 146, 148 Bouldin, Walter, 172–73 boycotts, of streetcars, 41–42 Branch, Harllee, 130–31, 140, 152, 163–64 Branson, Eugene C., 93–94 Bridges, Styles, 163 Brown, J. P. W., 31 Brown, Joseph Mackey, 76 Brownell, Herbert, 153–54 Brush Electric Company, 18 Brush Electric Light and Power Company, 18 Bull Sluice, 65–66, 67, 85 Bureau of Reclamation, 143, 145–46, 164 businesses, 99, 136; electric lights for, 18, 22; government and, 75–76, 166 Callahan, John, 134 Candler, Murphy, 51, 87 Candler Act, 51, 53, 87 capital, 25, 86, 175; for hydropower development, 64–65, 99; for power companies, 30, 40; for South, 19, 44 capitalism, 24, 57, 112, 147, 186; consumer, 169, 177; corporate, 160, 182; monopoly, 88, 160; opposition to, 72–73 “carbon democracy,” 7 carbonic-­acid gas, from coal burning, 60 Carolina Light and Power Company, 85–86, 134 Carolinas, 83, 178, 181. See also North Carolina; South Carolina Carter, Jimmy, 174 Cash, Wilbur J., 33 Catawba Power Company, 31 Catawba River, 64 Central Electric Power Cooperative, 146 Central Georgia Power Company, 85 Chambless, John, 130–31, 152 Charlotte, North Carolina, 6, 31, 64 Chattahoochee River, as hydropower source, 56, 63, 65–66, 154

254

Chattanooga, Tennessee, 18 Cherokee Bluffs dam, 88 Chestatee-­Wateree system, 63, 67 cities, 46, 57, 90; effects of electrification on, 38, 92, 189. See also municipal ownership movement citizens’ groups, vs. corporations, 187 citizens/public, 75–76, 187; anger at private utility companies, 48, 104–5, 111, 118, 177–78; fighting for control of rivers, 82, 113, 128; little notice by of coal-­generating plants, 158–60; power in energy history, 119, 187–88; private utility companies and, 46, 51, 94, 170–71; on public power, 46–47, 155, 164; resistance to rate increases, 86–87, 178–79; on rural electrification, 54, 120, 121 civil rights movement, 178 Civil War, 16, 116–17 Clapp, Gordon, 162, 176–77 Clarks Hill project, 139, 143, 146, 150; Army Corps of Engineers in development of, 125–27; control of electricity from, 130–31, 140–42, 153–54; Georgia Power and, 140, 153–54; goals of, 140–41; larger importance of, 142, 147, 149, 151–52, 155, 160; private-­public fight over, 149, 151–52; transmission lines from, 152, 154 class, social, 38, 103; effects of electricity on, 169, 189; influence on electrification, 9–10, 34 Clement, Frank, 162 climate, 9 coal, 27–28, 86; consumption of, 60, 155, 165, 182; deliveries of, 156–57; hydropower vs., 83, 151, 157, 161; importance in electrification, 54–55, 59; little public notice of, 158–60; private utilities use of, 131–32, 139, 150, 171; shortages of, 60–61, 83–85, 88, 135, 137; supply of, 79, 131, 134; used during world wars, 83, 88, 131–34 coal-­fired generators, 27, 181; air pollution from, 8, 182, 186–87; in businesses, 22–23; coal consumption by, 60; construction of, 133, 173–75; factories having own, 69–70, 84–85; Georgia Power’s, 156, 167; hydroelectric generation vs., 56, 64; hydropower vs., 5, 134, 151; little public notice of, 158–60; “mine-­mouth” generating, 94–95; owned by Mississippi Power Company, 114–15; production of, 9, 61; supplementing hydropower, 64, 88, 151; TVA’s, 161–63 coal mining, 59–61, 137 Cold War, 147 Cole, W. W., 16–17 Collier, Charles, 47, 149 Collins, Ashton, 105–6, 148, 153, 166–67, 170 Collins Park and Belt Railroad Company, 28–29 Columbia, South Carolina, 6, 19, 31, 64, 124 Columbia Railway, Gas, and Electric Company, 31 Columbus Power Company, 85 Committee on the Relation of Electricity to Agriculture (CREA), 100, 102 common-­carriers, electric utilities treated like, 49

R E G E N E R AT I N G DI X I E

Commonwealth and Southern (C&S), 110, 114–15, 118–19, 120, 149 Congaree Gas and Electric Company, 19 Congress, US, 152–53, 163–64 Conservatives for Energy Freedom, 185 Consolidated Coal, supplying Plant Branch, 156–57 consumerism, 54, 169, 177, 182, 189; electricity promoting, 34–35, 137, 181 consumer rights movement, 173, 177, 180, 186 consumers. See citizens/public Cooke, Morris Llewellyn, 94–95, 119–20, 150 cooperatives, 160, 181; farmers’, 99–100, 115–16; financing for, 115, 143–44, 172, 175; Georgia Power and, 118, 126, 150, 152, 174; as new market for private utilities, 126–27, 152; private utilities and, 124, 173, 176; private utilities interposing between public dams and, 127, 153–54; public power and, 143–44, 154, 164, 173; on public vs. private electricity, 152–53; regional organizations of, 123, 146, 154; in rural electrification, 120–21; sources of electricity for, 114, 125, 143, 146, 150, 173–75; supply of electricity for, 124, 177; TVA and, 115–16, 118 Coosa River, 71 Corinth, Mississippi, 114–16 corporate capitalism, 160, 177 corporate liberalism, 53 corporations, 44; consolidation of, 14–15, 24, 40, 79, 110, 112; criticism of “foreign,” 47, 60, 75, 92; criticism of monopolies by, 79–80, 91, 94, 104; government and, 49, 84, 187; opposition to, 46, 72, 187; race and, 46–47, 75, 82–83; regulation of, 51–53; trying to bolster standing, 169–70. See also private utility companies Country Life Commission (1909), 99 Creim, Ben, 146, 152 culture, influence on electrification, 9, 189 Dahlonega, Georgia, 67 dams, 68; of Army Corps of Engineers, 146, 150; Bureau of Reclamation’s, 143; competition over electricity from, 131–32, 141, 152, 157–58; in federal network of public power, 143–44; increasing number of, 63, 158; increasing numbers of, 59, 65; private utilities’, 56, 151; public, 127, 131–32, 145, 152; sites for prospective, 69, 71, 125 Davidson, C. Girard, 144 Davis, James, 140 DC dynamos, 26 De Give’s Opera House, arc light in, 19 democracy, 104, 128; white, 47–49, 51 Democrats, 44, 75 Department of the Interior (DOI), 153, 172; expansion drive by, 142–44, 147; as nationwide planning authority and electric utility, 143–45; public-­private cooperation and, 130, 150–51, 154 Depression, 113; effects of, 110, 114, 124, 126; fear

I N DE X

of return of, 137, 142; private-­power companies blamed for, 110–11; rural electrification in recovery from, 119–21 development, South’s, 4, 15–16. See also economic growth direct-­current dynamos, 23, 26 disenfranchisement, of blacks, 41, 44–45 Dittmer, John, 41 Dixon, Edgar, 162 Dixon-­Yates fight, 160, 162–64 Dondero, George, 141–42 Dooley, Debbie, 185–86 Dorn, William Jennings Bryan, 174 droughts, 110; effects on hydropower, 9, 84–85, 88–89, 132, 137, 151 Duke, James B., 31, 57, 64 Duke Energy Company, 31 Duke Power Company, 121, 134, 157, 175, 181; hydroelectric generation by, 57, 88; proposed construction by, 173–74, 177–78. See also Southern Power Company economic growth, 4, 79; boosters’ belief in, 8, 167; electricity promoted for, 16–17, 137, 141 economy, 153, 172, 175; crises in, 25, 110, 160, 175; private utilities and crash, 110, 112–13; South’s, 16, 110 Edison, Thomas, 23 Edison Electric Light Company, 22–23 Eisenhower, Dwight, 152–53, 160–62 electrical current, AC/DC, 23, 26, 63 electrical generation, 27–28, 79, 112, 181, 183; capacity of, 61, 136–37, 151, 156, 167, 174; coal-­generated vs. hydropower, 58, 66; construction of power plants, 170, 175–76, 179; DC dynamos, 26; focus on power plants, 167–68, 170–73, 180; increasing, 157, 176; production of, 86, 136–37. See also coal-­ fired generators; hydropower electrical networks, 23, 26 electrical workers, strikes by, 137 Electrical World, 86, 169 Electric Companies Advertising Program, 166 electric industry, 9, 15, 34, 165, 187; competition in, 24, 27; consolidation of, 14–15, 23–24, 31; expansion of, 6, 23, 72; trade organization of, 16. See also municipal ownership; private utility companies; public power electricity: dependence on, 7, 89, 113; equitable distribution of, 144; on farms, 101, 112, 123; farms’ lack of, 91, 100, 101, 106, 115; introduction of, 12–14; invisibility of infrastructure and fuels for, 165, 170; lack of, 90–91, 106; ownership of, 7, 131, 151–52, 163; perceptions of, 46, 113; shortages: private power companies blamed for scarcity, 112; wheeling of, 152, 154 electricity, consumption of, 23, 133, 189; increasing, 30, 136, 170, 175–76; South’s high, 181–82

255

electricity, cost of, 153, 162; coal-­generated vs. hydropower, 66, 134; hydropower as cheap, 68, 95, 98, 111; perceptions of, 32, 100, 177; in public-­ ownership proposals, 89, 91, 97; rate increases and, 86–87, 175; request for increase, 111; resistance to rate increases and, 90, 177–78, 180 electricity, demand for, 112, 155; increasing, 9, 86, 135–36, 149, 161, 181; increasing after WWII, 135–36, 139–40 electricity, effects of, 23, 37–38, 100, 123, 169; benefits in utilities’ public relations campaigns, 165, 168–69, 171–72; expected benefits, 135, 144; modernization and, 54, 91; on standard of living, 37, 54, 101–2, 176–77; touted benefits, 53, 71, 78, 100, 181 electricity, production of. See electrical generation electricity, residential, 7, 32, 37, 136, 165, 189 electricity, shortages of, 134, 175; causes of, 131, 137; effects of, 132–33, 137, 144–45; efforts to prevent, 135, 140, 144–45; fear of, 138, 142, 161; private utilities’ response to, 166–67 electricity, sources of, 132–33, 159–61 electricity, supply of, 83, 137, 155, 177 electricity, uses of, 27; air conditioning, 171; for amusement parks, 36; at Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, 13–14; in defense factories, 7, 95, 132, 135, 161; heat, 171; for military installations, 84; in textile manufacturing, 7, 31, 64, 72 electric lighting, 31; ARPC power station supplying, 28; in Atlanta, 16–20, 30; effects of, 19, 34–36; for elite, 34, 37; hoped-­for effects of, 16–17, 19–20, 35; public response to, 16–17, 20–22; rates of, 86–87; streetcars and, 40, 68 electric transmission agencies, of DOI, 143 electrification, 78, 105; coal’s importance in, 54–55, 59; components of, 4–5; culture’s influence on, 5, 9, 189; effects of, 5, 21–22, 24, 33, 188–89; environment and, 8, 21–22, 188; government’s role in, 7–8, 114; influences on, 10, 14, 34; public response to, 33, 54; South vs. US, 30–31. See also rural electrification elite, 37, 90, 104 Ellis, Clyde, 152 “energopower,” 5 energy corporations. See private utilities energy crisis, 1970s, 160 Energy Policy Act (2005), 186–87 environment, 5; effects of electrification on, 21–22, 188; manipulations of, 57, 79, 124 environmental movement: effects of, 180–81; opposition to nuclear energy, 185–86; opposition to private power companies, 173, 177–80 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 3 Etowah River, 150

256

factories, 16, 36, 49, 96, 114; defense, 7, 95, 132, 135, 161; power demands by, 83, 95, 135; production of power for, 59, 69–70, 84–85 Fanning, Thomas, 3 farm modernization project, Georgia Power’s, 101–2 farms/farmers, 112, 121–22, 181; cooperatives of, 99–100, 115–16; effects of electricity on, 100–102, 120, 123; electrification for, 91–93, 99–100, 108, 114, 123, 176–77; fear of energy shortages, 135, 138; fighting for electrification, 102–3, 114; lack of electricity, 100, 101, 115; modernization of, 90–91, 98, 114. See also rural electrification Federal Inter-­Agency River Basin Committee, 151 Federal Power Commission (FPC), 96, 126, 139–41, 162, 175 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 112 Felder, Thomas, 76 flood control, 114, 140–41, 150 Flood Control Act (1944), 143, 150, 154 floods, 110 Florida, 6, 25, 73, 102, 176, 185 Florida Power and Light Company, 172 Ford, Henry, 96–97 fossil fuels, 5, 9. See also coal; natural gas free enterprise, 128; benefiting from consumerism, 126–27; handling electricity shortages, 166–67; power companies promoting, 105–6, 168–69; public power as threat to, 130–31, 140, 147–48, 173–74; saving South from socialism, 83, 140; TVA as threat to, 116, 161–62 free-­market electrification, 101 fuels, 5, 175; consumers’ awareness of, 172, 180, 187 Fulton, Tennessee, 160, 162 Fulton County Street Railroad Company, 26 Gainesville, Georgia, 67 gas lighting, 18, 22–23, 60 gasworks, coal consumption by, 59–60 Gate City Bank, 19 General Electric (GE), 168–69 generating networks, hydro-­and coal-­fired, 9 generating networks, hydropower and coal-­fired, 4 generating plants, 23–24, 26, 31; in Atlanta, 25, 27–28; requiring frequent/constant usage, 36, 40. See also coal-­fired generators; hydropower Georgia, 25, 48; electrification of, 78, 114; hydropower generating plants in, 68, 74–75; hydropower in, 68–69, 71, 89–90, 92–93, 125–26; image of, 6, 156; power supply in, 83, 140; private utilities in, 88, 154; rural electrification in, 91–92, 122–23; state regulation of electric utilities, 49, 51 Georgia Electric Light Company (GELC), 27–28, 60 Georgia Electric Light Company of Atlanta (GELCA), 19–20, 22, 25–27 Georgia Electric Membership Corporation (GEMC), 123, 152–53; Clarks Hill electricity and, 130–31,

R E G E N E R AT I N G DI X I E

154; in DOI “tri-­contract,” 150–51, 175–76; Georgia Power and, 130–31, 174, 175–76 Georgia Hydroelectric Commission, 91–93 Georgia Power Company, 98, 110, 118; buying power from Allatoona dam, 150–51; Clarks Hill project and, 126–27, 130–31, 140, 153–54; coal-­based generators of, 134, 156, 181; construction by, 126, 151, 179; cooperatives and, 126, 174–76, 181; dams as core of corporate identity, 158; expansion of, 69, 136, 157, 167–68, 181; farm modernization project, 101–2; fungible electricity in system of, 152; hydropower and, 133–34, 138–39, 141, 142; limiting home solar power production, 186; monopoly of, 132, 185–86; opposing farmers’ self-­ help in electrification, 102–3; partnerships with public power, 150–52; public relations campaigns of, 164–65; rate increase requests by, 111, 175, 178–80, 186; transmission system of, 132, 181; wanting to buy and resell all power from public dams, 130–31, 152–54; wheeling electricity and, 152, 154 Georgia Power Project (GPP), 178–80 Georgia Railway and Electric Company (GREC), 29, 30, 36, 47, 49, 53, 61; hydroelectricity and, 64, 66, 68; race and, 44–45, 51–53 Georgia Railway and Power Company (GRPC), 24, 56–57, 65, 70–71, 84; capacity of, 72, 77; deemed guardian of public welfare, 87–88; expansion of, 86–87; hydropower and, 79, 85; opposition to, 74, 76, 89, 92; rate increase attempts, 86–87, 89; Tallulah Falls projects by, 76, 78 Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act (GTESA), 174–75 “Giant Power,” 94–95 Glendale Park, Nashville, 36 Gordon, John Brown, 74 Gore, Albert, 162 government, federal, 142; call for involvement in hydropower by, 97, 112; Clarks Hill project and, 125–27, 140–41; criticisms of, 116, 138, 148–49, 164, 166; involvement in electrification, 7–9, 15, 114, 119, 120; involvement in hydropower, 84, 95, 108–9, 125–28, 140–41, 145; power marketing territories, 148; private utilities and, 9, 85, 163, 186–88; spending by, 84, 164; subsidies for private utilities, 127, 150, 152, 160, 173–74, 184–85, 187; transmission systems and, 126, 141, 143, 152–53. See also Army Corps of Engineers; public power Grady, Henry, 15 Grant Park Railway Company, 27 Graves, John Temple, 47–48 Green Tea Coalition, 185–88 Guild, J. C., 71 Haas, Aaron, 18 Haas, Jacob, 18

I N DE X

Hales Bar, Tennessee, 71 Hall, Bob, 178, 180 Hamil, David, 176, 181 Harrison, Walter, 122–23, 154, 174–75 Hatch, Edwin, 178 health, 178–80, 188 heat, 30, 171 heavy metals, from coal-­fired generators, 182 Hells Canyon, proposed dam at, 131 holding companies, 112 Holloman, J. A., 83–84 “Home Rule” movement, 92 Hoover, Herbert, 112 Hurt, Joel, 26–30 Hydro-­Electric Commission of Ontario, as model, 91, 93–95, 97 hydropower, 61, 159; benefits of, 98, 105, 132; capital needed for development of, 64–65, 69, 99, 119; demand for, 83–85, 88; federal involvement in, 9, 85, 97, 112, 128, 142–43 (See also Tennessee Valley Authority); federal ownership of, 95–96; fight over control of, 81–82; importance of, 9, 84; private utilities turning away from, 9, 128, 131–32, 138–39; public ownership of, 95, 97, 131; in total electrical generation, 58; transmission system for, 63–64; uses of, 59, 85, 91, 99–100 hydropower, supply of, 125–26, 133, 155, 161 hydropower companies, 65, 71, 86–87; consolidation of, 68–69, 79; monopolies of, 91–95 hydropower generation: capacity of, 85–86, 139; coal-­ fired generation vs., 5, 56, 64, 79, 134, 151, 155, 157, 161, 173; drought as danger of dependence on, 9, 84–85, 88–89, 133, 151; droughts’ effects on, 88, 132, 137; by private utilities, 56, 67, 71, 86–87 hydropower sites, 9, 69, 76–77, 97, 124 Ickes, Harold, 124–25, 143–44 incandescent lights, 20, 22–23 industrialists, right-­wing, 117 industrialization, 189; labor strife in, 9–10; of New South, 6, 13, 74; South’s disdain for, 15–16, 62 industries. See factories Inman, Hugh, 26 Inman, Samuel M., 25, 29–30 Inman, William, 26 Insull, Samuel, 50–51 International Cotton Exposition (1881), 17 interurban railways, 30 investment conduits, private utility industry as, 7 irrigation, 144 Jackson, Marion, 81–82, 90 James, C. E., 71 Jim Crow laws, 36, 117, 164; resistance to, 40–42, 51; segregation of streetcars, 38–42, 44, 51–53 jobs, 112, 117, 144–45, 174, 176

257

Johnson, Lyndon, 177 Jones, Robert “Bobby,” 153, 162 Journal of Labor, 47–48, 52–53 Kefauver, Estes, 162 Kennedy, John F., 177 Kentucky, 5, 59, 86, 162, 176 Key, James, 47–48, 89–90, 103, 111, 119 Key Bill, 90, 111 Kimball House, 18–19, 22–23 Knoxville, Tennessee, 109 Korean War, 149, 161 labor activism, 9–10, 177 labor strikes, 61, 137 labor unions, 47–48, 177 Lake Burton, as reservoir, 79 Lake Rabun, as reservoir, 78 landscapes, 8–9 leisure, 37, 54; effects of electricity on, 34–36, 102, 123 lighting subscriptions, 18 Lilienthal, David, 108–9, 115, 118–19 Live Better Electrically campaign, 168–71 Longstreet, Helen Dortch, 72–76 Longstreet, James, 73 Lost Cause myth, 73, 75 Loveman’s department store, 34 lumber industry, 72 M. Rich and Bros. department store (“Rich’s”), 22 Macon, Georgia, 83, 85 Manganiello, Christopher, 144 Marietta, Georgia, 30 Markham House, 18–19, 22 Martin, Tom, 62, 81, 158 Mathis Dam, 78 McDonough, Jack, 172–73 McKay, Douglas, 153–54 McManus, C. B., 149–52 McMeekin, S. C., 149 Meares, Richard, 94, 111 Memphis, Tennessee, 161–63 Middle East, effects of hostilities in, 175 Middleton Shoals plant, 173–74 Middle South Utilities, 162–63 The Mind of the South (Cash), 33 mining: coal, 59–61, 137; electricity in, 67 Mississippi, 86, 114–15, 178 Mississippi Catfish Alliance, 178, 180 Mississippi Power and Light, 138, 163, 178 Mississippi Power Company, 114–15 Mitchell, James, 81, 139 Mitchell, John, 41 modernization, 6, 57, 150; complaints about, 21–22; electricity in, 13, 54, 165; of farms, 90–91, 101, 112, 114; fight over, 73, 83; public ownership of

258

rivers, 124; race and class differences in, 169; rural, 82, 98 Moniz, Ernest, 186 monopoly capitalism, 88, 90, 160, 187 Montgomery, Alabama, 31 Moody, Lester, 125–26 Morgan, Arthur, 108, 118 Morgan, Harcourt, 108 Morgan Falls Dam. See Bull Sluice Morrison, Alvin, 121 Moses, Fred, 115–16 Municipal League of Georgia, 90–93, 103 Municipal Ownership League, 48 municipal ownership movement, 46–49, 89, 92–93, 189; resistance to, 50, 81 Murray, William, 85 Muscle Shoals project, 85, 95–97, 96–97, 113, 141 Nader, Ralph, 177, 180 Nashville, Tennessee, 6, 13, 17, 18, 31, 36, 37, 39, 54 Nashville Electric Railway and Light Company, 31, 36 National Civic Association, 50 National Defense Act (1916), 95 National Electric Light Association (NELA), 16–17, 50, 98–100, 102 National Grange, 120 national security, 186 natural gas, 165, 171, 182 natural resources, 8–9, 188; equitable distribution of, 94–95, 144; in New South development, 57, 59; public vs. private ownership of, 131, 138 nature, 9, 20, 188; humanity’s relationship to, 61–62, 74–75, 79 navigation, 140–41, 144, 150 New Bridge plant, 67 “New Conservation,” 94 New Deal, 109, 113, 119; Eisenhower’s criticism of, 153, 160; goals of, 116–17, 132; infrastructure of, 149–50, 155, 162; linked to Reconstruction, 116–17; management of southern waterscapes in, 130, 140; opposition to, 114, 116, 128, 142, 147, 149, 162; southerners’ response to, 117, 164 New Johnsonville coal-­burning station, 161–62 New Orleans, Louisiana, 6, 17–19, 40, 170 New South, 37, 82, 131; Atlanta as leading city of, 6, 17–18, 54; coal-­fired generation predominating in, 155, 182; development of, 44, 57, 74, 83–84; electricity in, 59, 83–84, 92, 187; long, 6–7, 187; monopoly capitalism in, 88, 90; Old South vs., 62, 156; opposition to, 72–75, 104; promotion of, 16, 44, 71, 128; Tallulah Falls as creation of, 77–78; whites’ resentment of, 44–46, 49 New York and New Orleans Circus, Museum, Menagerie, and Congress of Living Wonders, 16–17 Niagara Falls, hydropower from, 63 Nixon, Richard, 177 Norris, George, 96–97, 112, 124–25

R E G E N E R AT I N G DI X I E

Norris Dam, 119 North, 16; capital from, 19, 44, 82 North Carolina, 114, 126; hydroelectric generation in, 56–57; rural electrification in, 93–94, 111–12, 121 Northeast, as center of influence, 184 nuclear energy, 160, 179, 182, 187; financing for, 181, 186; opposition to, 178, 180, 185–86 Office of Production Management (OPM), 133 Oglethorpe Electric Membership Corporation, 176, 181, 186 Olds, Leland, 132–33 Old South, 125; New South vs., 62, 156; rhetoric of, 103–4; traditions of, 73–75; values of, 15–16, 62, 75–76 Old St. John’s Parrish, 124–25 Olympia Mills, 64 Pacific states, hydropower in, 59, 63 Penn, Garland, 41 Pennsylvania, 94–95 Peters, Richard, 25 Piedmont Exposition, 19–20 Pinchot, Gifford, 94–95 Plant Bowen, 182 Plant Branch, 182 Planters Electric Membership Corporation, 122–23, 177 Plant Harllee Branch, 156–57 Plant Hatch, 176, 181–82 Plant Robert W. Scherer, 181, 182 Plant Vogtle, 182, 185–86 Poe, Clarence, 112 police, 39 politics, 8, 89; Dixon-­Yates partnership in, 162–63; public-­private power in, 48, 111, 127–28 Ponce De Leon Park, Atlanta, 35, 36 population, increasing, 137 populism, 7, 46, 52, 83, 117 Populist Party, 46 poverty, 81 power companies. See private utility companies private property, confiscation of, 140 private utility companies, 4, 8, 25, 57; call for public control over, 46, 113; city governments and, 15, 46; coal-­based generation by, 128, 131–32, 134, 139, 150, 170; competing with natural gas companies, 171; competition among, 30, 50, 68; consolidation of, 23, 71; cooperatives and, 124, 126–27, 176–77, 181; criticisms of, 46–47, 92, 110, 112, 177–78, 187; deemphasizing power plants and coal, 170–72; on economic growth, 166–67; exclusive contracts for, 15, 27–28; failure to meet obligations, 89, 94; federal government and, 9, 85, 120, 149–50, 152–53, 188; federal subsidies for, 127, 150, 152, 160, 173–74, 184–85; finances of, 7, 36, 40–42, 65, 86–87, 112–13, 176; growth of,

I N DE X

99, 110, 167, 170; hydropower generation by, 9, 86, 128, 134; maintaining control of electricity, 123, 127–28, 150, 154; monopolies of, 79–80, 172, 175, 177, 188; power from public dams and, 131–32, 150; power plants of, 167–68, 173, 175; power shortages and, 85, 112, 138, 155; public-­ownership movement and, 81, 83, 93–94, 138–39; public ownership vs., 119, 147, 158, 162–64, 170; public power and, 109, 117–18, 146–47, 150, 164; public relations campaigns by, 158, 164–74, 180; as public service entities, 96–97, 98, 99, 106, 110–11; race and, 9, 47, 105–6, 189; rhetoric against public power, 147–49, 189; rhetoric of, 9, 83, 103–4; rural electrification and, 98–99, 102–3; state governments and, 50–51, 81, 88; state regulation of, 49–52, 54; struggles over ownership centered in South, 97–98; threatened by public power, 125, 127, 141, 146–47, 161–62, 166–67; wanting control over rivers, 88, 140. See also public-­private competition; public-­private partnership progress, as corporations’ catchphrase, 168–69 Progressive Era, 49, 51 Progressive Republicans, 97 Public Interest Research Group, 177 public ownership, electricity as first target for, 163 public-­ownership movement, 34, 46, 142; benefits of, 91–94; on Clarks Hill project, 140–41; control of hydropower in, 82–83, 95; goals of, 146; opposition to, 100, 103, 106–7, 116; private utilities vs., 93–94, 98–99, 138–39; state regulation of electric utilities mollifying, 52, 54; victories of, 127, 152 public power, 111, 120, 151; effects of, 99, 172; from hydropower, 109, 131; images of, 98, 147–48, 153, 163; marketing territories, 148; network of, 143, 154–55, 164; private companies’ rhetoric against, 147–49, 164; private utilities vs., 7, 109, 119, 147, 158, 162, 164, 170; production by, 99, 113, 152, 176; support for, 112–14, 155, 164, 167; TVA as model for, 142–43 public-­private competition, 173, 176; for control over rivers and dams, 157–58; Dixon-­Yates fight as, 160, 162–64; over Clarks Hill project, 151–52 public-­private cooperation, 155, 181; Eisenhower promoting, 153, 160, 162; GEMC and Georgia Power’s, 175–76; Georgia Power and DOI deal as, 150–51; Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act as, 174–75 public relations campaigns, by private utility companies, 158, 164–72, 180 Public Service Commission (PSC), 111, 178–80, 186 Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA), 120 Public Works Administration (PWA), 124–25 race: benefits of electricity and, 169, 171, 189; in fight over control of electricity, 82–83, 103; hierarchy of, 42–45, 187; influence on public-­ownership movement, 34, 105; in labor strife, 9–10;

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race (cont.): New Deal thought to upend racial order, 116–17 racial tension, 9, 42–43, 45–46, 82 racism, 117, 178 Railroad Commission of Georgia (RCG), 49, 51, 72, 87–90 railroads, 59, 61; coal shipped on, 28, 157, 182; criticisms of, 47, 60; regulation of, 46, 49, 51 Rankin, John, 108 rape, 45, 75, 117 Raushenbusch, H. S., 112 Reagan, Ronald, 168 Reclamation Act (1906), 114 Reconstruction, 75, 82, 92, 103, 116–17 recreation, 140–41, 150 Reddy Kilowatt Corporation, 105–6, 113, 137, 148–49, 166, 180 reforestation, 140, 144 regional development, 98, 144, 160; as public-­ ownership movement goal, 94–95; TVA in, 114–16, 142–43 Republicans, 127–28, 152–53, 162 reservoirs, 56, 77–78, 124–25, 133, 141 Rich, Morris, 22 Richmond, Virginia, 26, 31, 40, 41 Rich’s department store, 34–35 rivers, 9, 142; effects of dams on, 8, 65, 79; fight over control of, 82–83, 90, 109, 123, 127, 157–58; harnessed for hydropower, 61–63; public control of, 87–88, 113–14, 124, 128; untapped, as loafers, 62, 81 Robertson, Edward, 31 Roosevelt, Franklin, 116–17, 127–28; promoting public ownership, 112–14; rural electrification and, 119–20 Rosser, Luther, 76 rural areas, 124, 152–53, 174 rural electrification, 91, 122, 128; benefits of, 82, 95, 112, 126–27; cooperatives’ importance in, 99–100, 120–21; effects of, 102, 120; expansion of, 176–77; farmers and, 99–100, 102–3, 114, 122, 176–77; for farms, 99, 108; Municipal League of Georgia focusing on, 91–93; in North Carolina, 93–94, 111–12; obstacles to, 117–18, 121; in Pennsylvania, 94–95; private utilities and, 98, 112, 176; thought vital to recovery from Depression, 119–21. See also farms/farmers; Rural Electrification Administration (REA) Rural Electrification Administration (REA), 124–25, 172; cooperatives and, 120, 160, 175–76, 181; loans by, 122–23, 181; private companies’ fear about, 109, 127; working with private utilities, 120, 126–27, 175–76 Russell, Richard, 140–41, 174 Russell Dam, 174 Rutherford, Mildred, 74–75

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Sale, Kirkpatrick, 184 Santee-­Cooper project, 111, 124–25, 146, 149 “Savage Ideal,” 33 Savannah River, 125–27, 140, 164; Georgia Power’s plans for, 130, 141–42; Middleton Shoals plant on, 173–74. See also Clarks Hill project Savannah River Electric Company, 126–27, 139, 141, 149 Savannah Valley Authority (SVA), 143 Scherer, Robert, 179, 181 Scott, W. Kerr, 112 “Second Battle of Atlanta,” 27–28 Securities and Exchange Commission, 162 Sierra Club, in Green Tea Coalition, 185–86 Slaton, John, 76 slavery, 15–16, 103–5 S.M. Inman and Company, 25 Smith, “Cotton Ed,” 116–17 Smith, Elmer, 66, 68–71 Smith, Hoke, 44, 48, 51, 76 Smith, S. Morgan, 66 socialism, 95, 147, 164, 166; fear of, 93, 98–99, 103, 189; public ownership of utilities called, 81, 83, 109, 130, 153, 172; TVA accused of, 118, 163 soil conservation/restoration, 114, 140 solar power, 185–86 South, 5; competition in electric industry in, 14–15; development of, 15–16, 19, 167; development vs. preservation in, 73, 77; economy of, 59, 110, 164; effects of air conditioning in, 171; electricity at world’s fairs in, 13; electricity consumption in, 5, 181–82; federal government and, 114, 164; importing power from neighboring states, 132–33; modernization of, 54, 99; natural resources of, 59–60; public-­private cooperation throughout, 176; struggles over power company ownership centered in, 97–98, 106–7; Tallulah Falls as symbol of, 72, 77; using Hydro-­Electric Commission of Ontario as model, 93–94; US vs., 30–31; values of, 33, 74–75; world war industry in, 83–84 South Carolina, 111, 112, 140; electrification in, 94, 114; hydroelectric generation in, 56, 124–26, 173–74 Southeast, 9, 83, 85–86, 153. See also South; specific states Southeastern Power Administration (SEPA), 152, 154; private utilities threatened by, 146–47, 150–51; territory of, 145, 148 Southeastern Power and Light holding company, 110 Southern Banking and Trust Company, 25 Southern Company, 149, 175; control of power from public dams and, 153–54, 162–63; expansion of, 151, 157; power from coal, 151, 157 Southern Power Company, 24, 31, 65; GRPC sending power to, 72, 77, 85; hydropower of, 64, 88; opposition to public-­ownership movement, 93–94. See also Duke Power Company Southern Super Power system, 79, 85–86, 87, 88

R E G E N E R AT I N G DI X I E

Southern Super Power Zone, 141–42 Southwestern Power Administration (SPA), 143, 146 Soviet Union, 172 Speer, Emory, 47 Sprague, Frank, 26 State Grange, supporting rural electrification, 111–12 states, 75, 112, 125; business and, 75–76, 187; proposals to take over hydropower, 91–93, 95; regulation of electric utilities, 49–52, 51, 54; utility companies and, 81, 88 steel mills, coal consumption by, 59 streetcars, 47; in Atlanta, 25–27, 29, 30, 45–46, 68; benefits of, 40–42, 54; black ridership on, 40–42, 52; cost of, 43–44, 48, 53, 86–87, 111; electricity for, 25, 28, 61; electric lighting companies merging with, 40, 68; expansion of systems, 30, 38; infrastructure requiring frequent usage, 36, 40; in Nashville, 39, 39; power companies and, 27–30, 40; segregation on, 38–44, 51–53; South’s adoption of, 30–31 street lights, 68; in Atlanta, 19–20, 21; electric, 15, 19–20; gas, 18, 20 suburbs, 182; in Atlanta, 26, 37; effects of electrification on, 37, 189; for whites, 37–38 Sunbelt, rise of, 184 swamp drainage, 144

textile industry, 59, 84, 110; electrification of, 7, 31, 64, 72 Thomson-­Houston Company, 19–20, 22, 26 Thurmond, J. Strom, 140–41 tourism, around Tallulah Falls, 77–78 transmission system, 4, 68, 114; citywide, 23, 27; combining in Super Power program, 85–86; cooperatives and, 154, 175, 181; federal “backbone” lines, 146, 152; funding for construction of, 175–76; Georgia Power’s, 23, 132; government ownership of, 92–93, 126, 143, 153, 164; high-­voltage, 23, 94–95, 97; for hydropower, 63–64, 69, 92–93, 97, 141; opposition to government ownership of, 149, 153, 163; private utilities trying to maintain control over, 121, 150, 151, 154; spite lines and, 118, 121; 110,000-­volt lines, 69, 86. See also Southern Super Power system trees, 21–22, 140, 144 trolleys. See streetcars Trotters Shoals project, 173 Truman, Harry, 142, 150, 161, 167 Tugaloo River, 56, 65, 79. See also Tallulah-­Tugaloo watershed Tupelo, Mississippi, 108 TVA Act of 1933, 114 TVA Revenue Bond Act (1959), 163–64

Tallapoosa River, 88 Tallulah Falls, 70, 70; beauty of, 69, 74; as creation of New South, 77–78; hydropower generation at, 72, 78; myth around, 75, 77; tourism around, 77–78 Tallulah Falls Conservation Association (TFCA), 73–76 Tallulah Falls dam, 72–77 Tallulah River, 56, 65, 68–69, 72 Tallulah-­Tugaloo watershed, 79, 103–4 Talmadge, Eugene, 116–17 Tennessee, 61; coal from, 27, 28, 60, 157; cooperatives formed in, 115–16; hydropower in, 56, 71, 88 Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO), 110, 116, 118–19, 126 Tennessee Power, 24, 57, 85 Tennessee Railway, Light, and Power Company, 71 Tennessee River, 71, 95–96 Tennessee Valley, 96–97, 118 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 108, 113, 115; coal-­ fired generation by, 157, 163; cooperatives and, 115–16, 146; efforts to contain, 126, 160–63; goals of, 114, 118; limitations of, 116, 160; as model for public power projects, 124, 142–43; opposition to, 116, 118; private utilities and, 117–19, 147; proposal to control power sales from, 141; in public-­ private partnerships, 141–42, 162; self-­financing bill for, 163–64; similarity of other projects to, 124, 126; territory of, 118–19, 160, 163–64; trying to capture urban as well as rural market, 109, 118

United Electric Railway, 31 United States, coal consumption in, 60 urbanization, 6, 13, 15–16, 62

I N DE X

Vail, Jonathan, 65 valley authorities, modeled on TVA, 142–44 Van Depoele, Charles, 31 Virginia, 26, 31, 102, 176, 181 Virginia Electric, 157, 175, 180, 181 Warner, A. J., 67–68 war on coal, EPA accused of, 3 War Production Board (WPB), 135 water, for cooling, 28 water conservation, 94, 114, 118, 144 Water Power Act (1920), 96 Water Resources Policy Commission, 150 waterscapes, 9, 130, 140 Watson, Tom, 44, 46, 75 Whaley, W. B. Smith, 64 wheeling electricity, 152, 154 “white coal.” See hydroelectric generation whites, 33, 52; benefits of electricity for, 103–4; continuing resentment of Reconstruction, 82, 103; democracy for, 45, 47–49, 51; feeling threatened, 42, 44–45, 47, 54, 82; public ownership of utilities and, 46–47, 50–51; resentment of New South, 44–46, 49; streetcars and, 42–44, 54; suburbs for, 37–38. See also race

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white supremacy, 47; efforts to protect, 42, 187; GREC supporting, 45, 51 Whitner, William Church, 64 wildlife protection, 140 Willkie, Wendell, 115, 118–20, 127–28, 141–42 Wilson Dam, 95–96, 96 working class, 49, 52, 82–83, 106 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 125 world’s fairs, introduction of electricity at, 12–14, 13, 17 World War I, 83, 89; electricity demand and, 86, 88, 95; farm modernization and, 91, 99; power shortages in, 85, 88

262

World War II, 4, 161; Clarks Hill project and, 126, 139; coal use and, 9, 131–34, 139, 155; electrical demand and, 135–36; public power movement in, 142–44 Worster, Donald, 188 Wyoming, coal from, 182 Yadkin River Power Company, 85–86 Yates, Eugene, 162

R E G E N E R AT I N G DI X I E