t these trusts exclusive access to rivers that they’d dam to generate power—crony capitalism wrapped in a free-market guise.
The Pacific Northwest, and Seattle in particular, had long been ahead of the curve when it came to busting this system. The citizens of Seattle got into the public-power business in 1890 when the city created the Department of Lighting and Water Works, the precursor to Seattle City Light. The city began construction of its first power-producing dam in 1902. In many ways, what Roosevelt had in mind would take the public-power model formed in Seattle, Tacoma, and other progressive cities to a massive scale, and plays like Power, written for the Federal Theatre Project of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, would help sell the public on it.
“People will say it’s propaganda,” WPA director Harry Hopkins told the cast following the first production of Power, according to Federal Theatre historian Hallie Flanagan. “Well, I say what of it? If it’s propaganda to educate the consumer who’s paying for power, it’s about time someone had some propaganda for him. The big power companies have spent millions on propaganda for the utilities. It’s about time that the consumer had a mouthpiece. I say more plays like Power and more power to you.”
And while the play focused on the Tennessee Valley Authority, there’s little doubt that the Seattle audience had another project in mind that dwarfed both City Light and the TVA: the Grand Coulee Dam, under construction as the chorus sang.
Four thousand feet wideat its crest and 550 feet tall at its lowest bedrock, the dam in central Washington was being billed as the largest structure ever built by man. The enormous amount of potential energy created by restraining one of the great rivers of North America would spin turbines that pumped electricity onto a grid owned and operated by a new federal agency called the Bonneville Power Administration, headquartered in Portland. The electricity would cost a fraction of what private-owned utilities sold it for, a fact touted by New Dealers as proof that the government took better care of the people than the free market did. Beyond the power, the dam would also create a reservoir large enough to irrigate 2.5 million acres of dry Central Washington scrubland, potential homesteads for the hordes of dispossessed Dust Bowl farmers then wandering the land; the reservoir itself would measure 150 miles long, stretching all the way to the Canadian border.
The Government means business, and how.
It was into this tableau—of Rockefeller wheeler-dealers vs. Roosevelt New Dealers, of wasteland imagined as farmland, of unabashed propaganda being staged to packed playhouses—that Woody Guthrie would enter, driving a busted up Pontiac. It was 1941, and the folk singer was 28. He’d already lived a hard life that that wasn’t without its charmed moments. Born and raised in Oklahoma, he experienced firsthand the ravages of the Dust Bowl and began writing songs about it. He eventually decamped from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, where he found some success on the radio. His knack for homespun folkisms was a hit at a time when the country was hungry to better understand the plight of America’s migrant masses. He left L.A. for New York around the time that John Ford’s film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath was released, and to many in Manhattan he was an irresistible species: a real-life Okie, seemingly blown right off the pages of a great American novel. The stuff of the heartland was under the fingernails of his songs: the wind, the land, the dust.
Before long, he was a known face around CBS studios, and was soon given his own national radio show. But he promptly gave the show up because of what he considered the overbearing commercialism of the enterprise. The radio show, and his abandonment of it, explained his possession of a late-model sedan, and his inability to keep up with the payments, when he eventually arrived in Portland to write songs for the Bonneville Power Administration.
Much as the musical Power made the TVA case through song, the BPA