vil engineering, where farmers could relocate, work for themselves, and never again worry about the weather’s whims. For Woody Guthrie, this represented the most concrete solution yet put forth by the government to help the masses of Dust Bowl refugees still feeling the ravages of the Great Depression.
While in Southern California, Guthrie had visited and was impressed by the federal work camps set up for migrant farm workers, which were also celebrated in The Grapes of Wrath. Similarly, Guthrie in his Columbia River songs makes clear his hope that the farms watered and electrified by the Grand Coulee Dam would go to help his Oklahoma kinsmen, who were wandering the country looking for a new place to settle.
In perhaps the collection’s strongest song, “Pastures of Plenty,” Guthrie conveys the deep bitterness felt by the migrant masses toward the country they thought had abandoned them as the economy fell into tatters. “Out of your Dust Bowl and westward we rolled,” he sang. “And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold.”
The version of the song recorded for the BPA was a minor-key adaptation of the traditional standard “Pretty Polly,” which, Alan Lomax later wrote, has a “starkly brooding melody” that “endows ‘Pastures of Plenty’ with somber melancholy.” Yet the final stanzas are hopeful for the promised benefits of the Grand Coulee: “The lights for the city, for factory, and mill/Green pastures of plenty from dry barren hills.”
Arguably, no government report, study, or memo ever captured the intent of the Columbia Basin Project better than “Pastures of Plenty.”
Yet ultimately it wasn’t to be. Within a year of Guthrie’s employment with the BPA, the bombing of Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into WWII. The Grand Coulee Dam played a major role in the war effort. The electricity it produced was vital to the production of aluminum, allowing Boeing to ramp up its bomber production in Seattle. It also, secretly, began supplying electricity to Hanford Engineer Works for the manufacture of enriched plutonium.
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 s