The Pacific Northwest: A Crafted Regionalism of Power and Modernity

Franklin Roosevelt and the progressives had ambitions to construct a new American society through national planning during the Great Depression (c. 1932–1939). A symbiosis involving technology and nature presented opportunities to integrate regional patterns and redefine traditional individualism into an innovative valley authority collectivism. Idealists sought to change social values of the past, to achieve a balance between production and consumption, restoring a sense of order and certainty to daily life. Federally sponsored regionalism would center on the use of national waterways to generate energy as a basis to implement planning ideas. Yet, a long-standing feature of life in the United States involved weighing political and economic interests, cast at various scales, that worked contrary to the success of federal regional planning, as observed in the Pacific Northwest. Rather than a TVA-style regime, Northwest residents were encouraged to envision a power landscape based on an infinite availability of hydroelectricity attracting industrial customers. This affirmed the Northwest's energy potential, but left Native Americans, biodiversity, and salmon overlooked. For all the pre-WWII regional discourse, energy crafted the modern Pacific Northwest, responsible for population expansion and settlement concentrated in the coastal metropolitan areas.