This Day in Labor History: October 16, 1937

On October 16, 1937, the Buchanan Dam, which dammed the Colorado River of Texas, west of the town of Burnet, was dedicated. This event might not seem to have a major role in our labor history. But in fact, it and other dams completely transformed both labor and gender roles in rural Texas and other parts of the country.

By the early 20th century, life in the United States radically differed depending on whether you lived in the cities or out in the country. If you lived in an urban environment, the radical new technologies that started in the 1870s had transformed your life. Electricity was the key, bringing in all sorts of other things, including refrigeration and, eventually, the radio. Electric washing machines may well have meant more work for mother, but having water you could just turn on in a faucet was genuinely revolutionary. Each year brought your closer to the modern conveniences of today.

If you were in rural America, your life still looked a lot like it did in 1900, or 1850 for that matter. If you were in a rural and poor area, say, the Edwards Plateau of central Texas, that was especially true. A few things reached you. The railroad had opened up modern consumer markets to rural areas, if anyone had any money to buy anything. The automobile was at least possible to access too, but the roads in areas like this were terrible. Meanwhile, work for women in a place like this was absolutely brutal. Day after day, women labored hard to keep the process of reproduction going. Think about laundry in a place like this. The Edwards Plateau was poor land, given to drought, and hot as blue blazes. Water had to be hauled. Women did that hauling. That often meant going down to the creek, which might well mean down a steep incline, fill the water tanks, drag it back up the incline (just think about how hard that would be), then boil the water using the sticks of the area. Then once you got a big blazing fire going in a place where it is frequently 100 degrees, you had to scrub those clothes. I mean, that’s some hard damn work. Then add to that everything else women had to do–gardening, churning butter, etc. It was not a life anyone really wanted. It’s no wonder that socialism had made some impact in the Great Plains and that Populism had so roiled the region in the 1880s and 1890s.

Why the inequality between the city and the country? The answer was private control of resources. It’s not that you couldn’t string electric lines out to the Edwards Plateau. It’s that it was in no one’s financial interests to do so. When private companies owned utilities, they wanted to make a profit. They could put up electric infrastructure in cities and even in poorer neighborhoods, there were enough people that the investment was worthwhile. But where was the profit to string the line out to these isolated farmers, where you might need a mile or two of line between properties for a bunch of dirt farmers who could barely stay on their land year to year.

This was one of the things the New Deal needed to address. This was part of the point of the Tennessee Valley Authority. When no one was going to bring electricity to rural America, the government needed to do it. Private power was furious and fought it tooth and nail. There’s a reason no other river power authorities were created, though attempts to create a Columbia River Authority continued until the late 1940s. But the TVA changed the entire game. The government was going to build dams and provide people electricity, even if private power had to be brought into the game.

So then you have young ambitious politicians, such as Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ was a weird guy, Lord knows. But he very much knew poverty and he hated it because he had experienced it himself. Johnson had just entered Congress a few months before the completion of the Buchanan Dam, but he knew what dams like this would mean for the women in his district. No more hauling water. No matter gigantic fires in 100 degree heat to slave away washing laundry. Not to mention the later economic impacts–men working to build and then service these dams, the jobs better roads and investment would bring once electricity was a thing. Johnson’s role in all of this that Buck Buchanan died of a heart attack in early 1937 and he won the race to replace him in Congress. Buchanan Dam was, like a lot of these projects, a combination of good idea and internal machinations of questionable legality. The government was not exactly a smooth running machine as it revved up to unprecedented levels during the New Deal. This all required local politicians and businessmen who often hated each other and had their own agendas. The Buchanan Dam required special legislation to get it through and a congressman was needed who could do that. The extremely energetic LBJ became the man for that job and the Brown & Root people who had already invested in the project saw him as the best protection for their investment.

Thus a political career was born but also a dam was created that transformed rural labor in central Texas, as dams transformed rural labor from Oregon to Tennessee. After his election, Johnson became a huge booster of a more robust Rural Electrification Administration, in part because Hill Country farmers were still weren’t being hooked up to the grid after REA loan standards meant a lot of his people couldn’t do it. It was the same old story–the REA couldn’t afford to pay for electrifying isolated farms. In the end, Johnson did what he did best–sucking up to those in power–to get to FDR to make a personal appeal to get the REA to grant a huge loan to the Pedernales Electric Co-operative to hook up almost 3,000 Hill Country farms to the grid, bringing the work of these people into the 20th century. Roosevelt did it too.

I borrowed from Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. I remember when I first started reading this, so many years ago, that I was like, why is he going into such detail about life on the Edwards Plateau before even introducing LBJ, but as I read I understood and realized it was one of the most brilliant discussions of a place I have ever read. I still believe that.

This is the 540th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.