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

This very detailed volume (204 pages of text, fifty-five pages of notes) focuses on the Savannah River basin from the post–Civil War period to the present. Manganiello is primarily interested in production of hydroelectric power made possible through construction of dams on the Savannah and its tributaries. The era of big-dam construction transformed not only the hydrology but also the political economy of the region. The central focus of this volume is who controlled and benefited from this transformation.

The volume is organized into seven chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue, which summarize the authors’ central argument that political and economic fortunes of the region historically have been tied to energy produced by moving water. The introductory chapter outlines the author’s central argument, that water and energy were no less central to life in the South than they were in the West, though the issues were different. In chapters 1 and 2, the author takes us through the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries when private utility companies like Duke Power and Georgia Power harnessed rivers to generate electric power. In chapter 3 we are introduced to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a powerful new competitor for control of water and power in the South. The struggle between the TVA and private utilities is a theme running through chapter 3, but we learn relatively little about the TVA itself, which the author poses as a federal alternative and therefore a threat to control of hydropower by private interests.

The TVA did not operate in the Savannah River basin, but after 1945 the US Army Corps of Engineers (“Corps”) did operate there, constructing three major dams, creating enormous lakes for flood control, power generation, and recreation (chapters 4 and 5). In the West, an anti–big dam consensus was well developed by the 1950s, but the South was still committed to impounding water and generating power. The question was whether the Corps or private utilities would be in control. Critics saw the Corps as a federal intrusion and, as the Civil Rights era unfolded, the federal government was not universally popular in the South. Neither, however, were the private utilities, which had a history of using monopoly power to their own advantage.

The final two chapters describe growing opposition to dam construction fueled by changing environmental consciousness nationally and regionally. One upshot was a concerted effort to oppose damming the Chattooga River (made famous in the 1972 movie Deliverance), the last free-flowing tributary of the Savannah River. Environmental groups worked with the US Forest Service and other agencies to have the Chattooga designated in 1974 as a Wild and Scenic River, which prevented the river’s impoundment but also reduced easy access to it by local residents for whom the river was a collective backyard, with favorite fishing and swimming spots.

Southern Water, Southern Power is a solid piece of work, extensively documented. As such this book is a useful contribution to the larger field of environmental history and will be a basic reference for future work on the Savannah River basin. However, as a reader, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the detail and starved for greater analytic contributions from the author. He mentions the concept of “political economy” frequently but never explores in a way that would have shed light systematically on institutional relationships among corporate and political actors and the wider civil society.

Additionally, the book’s title is somewhat misleading, as the focus is almost exclusively on Georgia and South Carolina, for whom the Savannah serves as a border. Broader regional and national issues are noted briefly, but the reader looking for insights into how the Mississippi, the Tennessee, or other river systems shaped the South will be disappointed. Nor is there more than passing treatment given to the contentious and decades...