
However, none of these experiences compared to his brief time with the BPA, which would prove one of the most fertile months of the prolific songwriter’s career, and leave an indelible mark on our region’s music history.
He was all but forced to make music. One term of his employment was that he was required to produce a song a day—weekends not included—which his boss Kahn justified by saying it was comparable to Hollywood’s requirements that screenwriters turn three pages a day into the studio. Guthrie came away with 26 songs, many of which turned out to be among his most enduring: “Roll On, Columbia,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “The Grand Coulee Dam.”
Guthrie’s son Arlo Guthrie told documentary filmmaker Michael Madjic that the project was life-changing for his father. “He saw himself for the first time as being on the inside of a worthwhile, monumental, world-changing, nature-challenging, huge-beyond-belief thing. It was bigger than him, and frankly there weren’t many things he considered bigger than him. Most people are the center of their own universe, and it’s rare you get a chance to participate in something that you know is bigger than you and your country. He saw this as a big deal.
“He felt there was a real purpose here, an urgency,” Arlo Guthrie said. “He believed what was happening here was not only good, but needed.”
The Grand Coulee Dam was indeed a big deal, and continues to be an integral element of life in the Pacific Northwest by producing an enormous amount of electricity for the region and helping to irrigate more than 600,000 acres of farmland. However, it is also today recognized as part of a troubled legacy of stopping up America’s wild rivers, much to the detriment of the wildlife and first peoples who have coexisted with the natural streams for millennia. The effect of the Grand Coulee Dam has been particularly acute, as it cut off 1,100 miles of the river’s salmon spawning habitat. As environmentalists have pressed for the removal of dams in the Pacific Northwest, business organizations—which 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 ci