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  • Enduring Pastoral: Recycling the Middle Landscape Ideal in the Tennessee Valley
  • Donald C. Jackson (bio)
Enduring Pastoral: Recycling the Middle Landscape Ideal in the Tennessee Valley. By Torben Huus Larsen. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2010. Pp. vii+208. €44.

In his 1964 book The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx brought the concepts of “pastoral” and “middle landscape” into the literary lexicon of historians interested in technology and its relationship to the American environment. In Enduring Pastoral Torben Larsen builds on Marx’s foundation (as well as on the work of other scholars) to investigate a variety of initiatives undertaken in the Tennessee River Valley that reflect a sense of pastoralism as an energizing force.

The subjects covered by Larsen are far-ranging. They include rural-life museums and recreational theme parks (such as Dollywood, an example of so-called “hyperpastoralism” that exploits singer Dolly Parton’s iconic roots in the back hollers of Appalachia), G. W. Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate built in the 1890s, conceptions of the Appalachian Trail in the 1920s, and late-twentieth-century engineering projects such as Tellico Dam and the Army Corps of Engineers’ Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. Most important, Enduring Pastoral focuses on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the famed agency spawned by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The TVA represented a major federal initiative intended to both resurrect the moribund regional economy and transform social conditions in the Tennessee Valley. Tennessee Valley was, if nothing else, a benign term for the interior South popularly known for clannish feuding (e.g., the Hatfields vs. the McCoys) and a paucity of modern technology and industry. Thus the TVA, especially in the mind of its first director, Arthur E. Morgan, had a mission to bring the fruits of modern planning and technology to a seeming cultural and environmental wilderness. In broad conception, the TVA was (as Larsen perceives it) to utilize a cadre of professional planners in creating a middle landscape and pastoralized space of enduring value.

Deeply knowledgeable in the historiography of post-Marx pastoralism/middle landscape scholarship, Larsen generally projects an impassioned yet objective perspective in his work. Nonetheless he seems to accept with little critical analysis Arthur Morgan’s self-serving rhetoric about the origins and [End Page 502] history of the early TVA. In particular, Morgan despised the Army Corps of Engineers and downplayed the Corps’ role in conceiving a river basin plan that subsequently served as a basic blueprint for TVA’s dam-building activities. And make no mistake, it was the large dams that defined the essential modernity that the TVA brought to the region. Significantly, Larsen makes no mention of the Corps’ work in planning the Tennessee River’s development from the early 1920s through 1932. And, while devoting much text to TVA’s forest restoration, soil conservation, and parkway initiatives, he pays little direct attention to the dams themselves and the power system they fostered. He avers that the Norris Dam “remains central to the history of the agency” (p. 76), but neglects to note that it was originally conceived by the Corps as the Cove Creek Dam and that the actual work of designing Norris Dam was carried out by the Bureau of Reclamation.

Larsen also makes no mention of Hungarian émigré architect Roland Wank, the man responsible for the stylish moderne architectural treatments applied to Norris and other TVA dams and powerhouses through the mid-1940s. It may be that Larsen avoids significant discussion of the agency’s early dams and Wank’s moderne styling because it proved difficult to integrate into the pastoralized space/middle landscape analysis that is the focus of the book (he does admit that his is “only one narrative of many to which the TVA lends itself” [p. 117]). Other historians looking to the TVA as an example of twentieth-century technological planning should be aware that Larsen’s treatment of the agency’s early history is selective in ways that reflect Morgan’s post-TVA writings (he left the TVA board in 1938). However, it should be noted that Larsen does offer a thoughtful critique of the early TVA’s racial policies and the ways that project benefits were...

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