Summary
A peculiar populism pervades the story of the Washington Public Power Supply System. As we have seen (chapter 1), since early in the century public power in the Pacific Northwest had been more than an issue; it had been a cause. Its adherents considered themselves both proponents of regional development and foes of a system that subjected Northwesterners to the domination of callous utility monopolists and avaricious Wall Street financiers. Woody Guthrie's paeans to the Grand Coulee Dam and the Bonneville Power Administration composed during his brief employment with the BPA in 1941 endure as evidence of the sense of mission that infused the movement for public power. Eisenhower's emphasis on private-public “partnership” and other compromises (such as the arrangement for sharing electricity from the Hanford N-Reactor between public and investor-owned utilities) notwithstanding, the public power community retained a degree of insularity and suspicion that the special interests were still eager to thwart the people's desire for more electric power. This was a corollary of their commitment to develop dam sites and, later, thermal plants.
Ironically, the Supply System's massive undertakings were converting public power dreams into a populist nightmare. Reporter Howard Gleckman, who covered WPPSS intensively in the early 1980s, recalled that he used to hear that the projects were the public's “last stand against the … investor owned utilities who were getting fat.” Supply System boosters insisted that they wouldn't be “taken in and robbed by the Wall Street types.”
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- Nuclear ImplosionsThe Rise and Fall of the Washington Public Power Supply System, pp. 145 - 187Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008