Hydropower retains a mythical status in the U.S., associated above all with rural electrification and development. Much less appreciated, however, are the ways it facilitated industrial development, especially that of heavy manufacturing. As a corrective, Kodres-O'Brien and Oh call for a reappraisal of hydropower in terms of “industrial policy.” Before, during, and after the New Deal, hydropower projects in the U.S. were always paired with broader aims of regional development, and almost always industrial development. Industrial firms requiring electrical energy and other natural resources responded to government policy—whether local, state, or federal—surrounding hydropower projects in multiple regions within the U.S. in the twentieth century, from the rural South to the mountainous West. As much as economic development in the twentieth-century U.S. became dependent on the increasing use of fossil fuels, as Timothy Mitchell and many others have maintained, this was also the US’s “Big Dam Era.”
This project will uncover and link two sides to these twentieth-century hydropower development projects: the formation of political coalitions necessary for their creation and maintenance, and the myriad ways in which material and technical properties of production shaped hydropower projects and the responses of firms. The broad goal of the project is to stimulate innovative thinking about what industrial policy was, is, and could be in light of the imperative to yet again transform the way the U.S. produces and consumes energy.
