h the communist-sympathizing Guthrie actively loathed, once refusing to play music for the Spokane chamber of commerce—have invoked Guthrie’s music to defend the dams, no doubt recognizing that the region’s large industrial farms and heavy industry rely on the power and irrigation. “One verse of Guthrie’s song talks about the electricity generated by the dams as ‘turning our darkness to dawn,’ ” Don Brunell, president of the Association of Washington Business, wrote in an op-ed in 2012. “Some activists want to remove the dams—but consider what our lives would be like without them.” Meanwhile, some environmentalists have written off Guthrie’s music as “no-brainer” “industrial river ditties.”
But both these assessments miss the true spirit of Guthrie’s Columbia River songs—no doubt in part because the vision that Guthrie bought into when he signed on with the BPA never fully came to pass.
By acreage and cubic yards of concrete alone, Grand Coulee Dam and the irrigation project represented the New Deal at its most ambitious. But those physical feats of engineering paled in comparison to the social engineering the federal government hoped to achieve in the Columbia River Basin’s newly irrigated farmland. As originally envisioned, farms irrigated and electrified by the Grand Coulee Dam would be organized around townsites placed by federal planners and limited to 80 acres to prevent the benefits from going to large landowners.
“We will do everything in our power to encourage the building-up of the smaller communities in the United States,” Roosevelt said during a 1937 speech while visiting the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia, which was constructed almost simultaneously with the Grand Coulee. “Today many people are beginning to realize that there is inherent weakness in cities … and inherent strength in a wider geographical distribution of population.”
The journalist Richard Lowitt coined a term for Roosevelt’s Pacific Northwest: The “planned promised land,” a 20th-century synthesis of Biblical deliverance and careful civil 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 pluton