Southern Water, Southern Power: How the Politics of Cheap Energy and Water Scarcity Shaped a Region by Christopher Manganiello (review)

Manganiello’s Southern Water, Southern Power Water is a competent, workmanlike treatment of a timely topic. It provides a good overview of the importance of water (lakes, rivers, dams, reservoirs, et al.) in southern regional history. The book examines its subject in admirable detail, giving the lion’s share of its attention to matters in Georgia and then, in declining fashion, Florida, Alabama, and North Carolina— mostly as concerns their interactions with Georgia. Although readers will find the book to be a useful source of information about the role of private industries, utilities, and government agencies in water disputes, Southern Water, Southern Power ultimately falls short of achieving its more ambitious goals.

The book divides southern water history into three distinct periods— New South, New Deal, and Sunbelt. Chapters explore such issues as recent periods of drought followed by record flooding; New South boosterism; federal attempts, principally through the Tennessee Valley Administration (tva), to provide cheap power to previously unlit hinterlands; post-World War II Sunbelt developments to manipulate and manage regional water resources for economic development and, to a lesser extent, to provide cities like Atlanta with drinking water; and the strategies of environmentalists. In all of these areas, the book is thorough and well organized, although its findings usually fall short of remarkable. For instance, it comes as no surprise that boosters, corporations, and private interests manipulated water resources for their own gain, thereby creating artificial shortages and circumstances that exacerbated flooding and other periodic disasters. Readers of this journal will be disappointed that the methodological approach is traditionally narrative rather than notably innovative or interdisciplinary.

The book suffers from notable weaknesses. It says almost nothing about climate change or the demands of golf-course irrigation. Nor does it seek to make parallels with water problems on an international level. At times, Manganiello makes puzzling assertions about the South. For example, his statement, “The region has historically lacked abundant coal, natural gas, and other forms of energy” (6), is curious at best given the well-known motherlodes of coal in Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee and the oil and gas native to Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. Moreover, the book’s writing is often, ironically, dry.

The largest failure is Manganiello’s disappointing and unimaginative submission to the historiographical vogue of Sunbelt (and suburban school) studies in an explicit rejection of (without any real critical analysis) the established “myth of ‘southern exceptionalism’” (17). This tack leads him to a multitude of problems, not the least of which is a direct contradiction of his stated position by forcing him to admit that the “artificiality” and “private management” of many of “the Southeast’s major lakes” “sets the Southeast’s history of water and power . . . apart from other regions of the United States” (5). Yet, despite such self-contradictions—as well as his lack of any deep understanding of the South’s distinctive (even desperate) regional boosterism, as dictated by the destruction of its modest industrial works during the Civil War— Manganiello remains determined at all costs to join the current fashionable movement to deny the South’s exceptionalism. He even goes so far as to cast the humid South’s water problems as essentially the same as the arid West’s—an example of overreach that goes far beyond the factors that these two regions share.

Lest too much be made of this foible, the book is a useful addition to the burgeoning literature on southern environmental history. Although it does not achieve all of its goals, including its most lofty, it makes a solid contribution to an area of inquiry that will undoubtedly gain in importance as the years pass. The book’s most noteworthy strength is actually one of which the author seems unaware. At a certain level, the book is a direct, even literal, assault on—if not the “myth...