ium.
That the dam went to the war effort probably didn’t bother Guthrie much. War was on the horizon even as Guthrie visited the region, and some anti-Hitler rhetoric entered a few of his Columbia River songs. He liked to say his guitar killed fascists, but he must have recognized that a B-17 Flying Fortress would get the job done just as well.
But the war ended up dooming the New Deal vision for the Columbia Basin. It drew millions of Americans to urban industrial centers for work, and following the allies’ victory, the country enjoyed a postwar economic boom unprecedented in human history. By the 1950s, the prospect of grubbing out a living on a small farm in rural America was unattractive to most Americans now enjoying a decent living in the cities. Attempts to draw farmers to the region failed, and the federal government slowly began to loosen its regulations on the size of the farms that used Columbia River irrigation. Today, the water in large part goes to massive industrial farms that bear little resemblance to what the New Dealers had in mind.
As historian Paul Pitzer put it, the so-called planned promised land was a “19th-century plan for a 20th-century economy.”
And yet Guthrie’s Columbia River songs endure to this day as some of the most popular folk tunes in the American canon. It’s easy to understand why. Regardless of their history, there is a hard-bitten optimism in Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River songs that remains inspiring. Taken together, the songs present a powerful thesis: The American worker, given the opportunity, has the power to turn deserts into orchards and rivers into a force strong enough to defeat Nazi Germany. These songs are a refutation to anyone who suggests that the government doesn’t have any business helping the common man.
And while the mass relocation of Dust Bowl farmers to the Columbia Basin never came to be, the ideals of public power that were celebrated at the Metropolitan Theatre have hardly waned.
Throughout the Northwest, public utility districts and municipal power systems like Seattle City Light continue to supply millions of homes with electricity. Many towns today hang highway signs telling travelers that they are “Another Public Power Community,” and the region as a whole boasts more publicly owned utilities than any other in the nation. The area has also enjoyed over the past 75 years some of the cheapest power rates in the country, just as Roosevelt had all but promised it would when promoting the dam projects.
That’s just as Woody would have wanted it. As he put it in one of his tunes, “’Lectric lights is mighty fine,/If you’re hooked on to the power line.”
Daniel Person is News Editor for Seattle Weekly. He can be reached at email@example.com or 206-467-4381. Follow him on Twitter at @danoperson.
This story was adapted from 26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest, by Greg Vandy and Daniel Person, available for pre-order now: