This story is 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. The book is available now from Sasquatch Books.
It was entitled Power, and it told the story of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the massive dam and irrigation project built under the auspices of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.
It had, a reviewer in the Seattle Daily Times sniffed, “the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the restraint of a groundswell,” with musical numbers that featured high-voltage couplets: “All up and down the valley, they heard the glad alarm,” one song went. “The Government means business, it’s working like a charm. Oh, see them boys a-comin’, their Government they trust. Just hear their hammers ringin’, they’ll build that dam or bust!”
To add to the fanfare of opening night, Seattle City Light lent the production company several large transformers to adorn the stage, and a favorable audience packed the seats and cheered on the dam’s construction. It’s no secret that the public had simpler demands of their entertainment in the days before Marvel Studios, but the notion of Seattleites packing a 1,600-seat theater to watch a musical about public infrastructure may seem to the modern reader to verge on parody.
However, the excitement for Power in Seattle speaks to the populist fervor many Americans were feeling during the 1930s. As this fervor pertained to electricity, New Dealers were adamant that the people would best be served if electricity was produced and distributed by government-run utilities as opposed to private power trusts—a debate not unlike today’s fight over whether medical insurance should be a service provided by public or private entities.
In 1930, 10 companies owned 75 percent of the United States’ electrical supply. Leading those companies was a who’s-who of American capitalism: John D. Rockefeller Jr., J.P. Morgan Jr., Samuel Insull. Typically, favorable state governments would grant 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 f