Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy in the Modern South by Casey P. Cater (review)

Electricity or white coal promised greater industrialization, improved working conditions, and higher standards of living in America’s post-Civil War South. Although most Americans welcomed electrification, Southerners saw its benefits in the form of home lighting, indoor plumbing, and refrigerators, among other amenities. These sensible desires, however, often met roadblocks as the federal government and private power companies fought over policies for the generation, distribution, and control of electrical energy in the South. This battle involved capitalist expansion, environmental exploitation, and governmental programming. Private power companies couched federal entry into the electrical power business as blatant socialism. Advocates of public power, however, believed that governmental generation of electricity would meet the needs of farmers and urbanites rather than emphasize profits as did the private utility companies. In this regional context, the author defines Dixie as the Confederate states plus West Virginia and Kentucky.

Casey Cater has written a clearly argued, tightly organized, and solidly researched history of electric power development across the South from the 1880s to the 1970s. This is a fascinating story that begins with the rudimentary lighting of exhibit halls, city streets, and elite urban homes, followed by the powering of trolley cars that extended cities and helped create suburbs for white southerners. Before the jolt of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, private companies provided electric power from coal-fired generating plants for relatively few urban customers. When coal become too expensive and supplies dwindled for a host of reasons, the companies turned to waterpower, only to discover that drought also prevented the consistent generation of cheap electricity. In time, coal once again became available in large and comparatively cheap quantities, delivered directly from mines to power plants by dedicated railroads lines called unit trains. In the meantime, the federal government entered the region to provide electric power to the public through the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration.

Government production of electricity threatened corporate profits, which the power companies defended with cries against intruding socialism and the denial of individual liberty. In the fight to determine which entity would prevail, Cater contends that electrical power became “a core driver of social change” (p. 10). To prove his point, he traces the electrification of the region to show that it meant progress and the creation of a new, modern South that looked forward to the future and not backward to the past. His analysis of the public power battles from the 1920s through the New Deal years provides a new look at the complexity of economic and political issues and the public voice in policy decisions. Cold War America and the conservative Eisenhower years ended federal efforts to expand public power in favor of private enterprise. A coalition emerged, resulting in a federally subsidized private power industry that not only expanded the production and use of electricity but also fostered environmental degradation from the damming of rivers to air pollution. Few Southerners cared. They wanted the conveniences that electric power provided.

The generation and dissemination of electric power across the South involved greed, ideology, and public crusading. Cater traces this complex history with considerable nuance, marking the many twists and turns as corporations, governments, and interest groups maneuvered the politics of electric power. The actors are many: Populists, Georgia Power, Nebraska Senator George Norris, Georgia Railway and Power Company, Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Southern Power Administration, among others. In the end, private power companies won the battle for the generation and dissemination of electric power, and they met the public demand for affordable electricity. As long as private utility companies met that need, corporate electric power remained a sign of economic progress and the foundation of the New, Sunbelt South.

Cater does not emphasize technological or environmental change, nor racial and class relationships. Rather, this is a political and policy history about an important technological development that fostered the development of the New South. It merits the attention of...