Why are the songs so great? Look through his songbooks. The songs are honest. But above all else, Woody’s songs show the genius of simplicity. Any damn fool can get complicated, but it takes a genius to attain simplicity. Some of his greatest songs are so deceptively simple that your eye will pass right over them and you will comment to yourself, ‘Well, I guess this was one of his lesser efforts.’ Years later you will find the song has grown on you and become part of your life.
oday, the twenty-six songs Woody Guthrie wrote for Bonneville remain an accomplishment in terms of songwriting, but they ultimately stand the test of time as one of Woody’s finest bodies of work—a song cycle that was unusually focused and extremely inspiring. There’s no doubt that “Pastures of Plenty,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” and “Roll On, Columbia” have outlived their usefulness in promoting the Columbia River projects, but they live on in the pantheon of American folk music.
The Columbia River songs have appreciated in time in another way as well. It is our assertion that the twenty-six songs are a direct response to Woody’s earlier, and much more celebrated, Dust Bowl ballads. In their optimism, the songs reflect the hope of a nation emerging from a decade of hard times, environmental calamity, and displacement by embracing bold public works projects and the idea of tangibly helping common people. In his Columbia River songs, he conveyed a sense that something better was coming, that the “planned promised land” in the Pacific Northwest was indeed a solution to the Dust Bowl crisis.
“We’re talking about a certain time in American history—the Depression, hard times, coming out of it a bit, but not quite solvent,” said Studs Terkel, the Chicago writer and Woody’s friend. “But at the same time there was a kinda optimistic spirit, like a light at the end of the tunnel, you felt something popping … and Woody caught that spirit!”
But hanging over the legacy of Woody Guthrie’s month of writing hopeful songs about the “planned promised land” in Oregon and Washington is a simple fact: it never truly came to be.
As planners envisioned it, and as Guthrie put to song, the Grand Coulee Dam would irrigate a wide network of small farms and provide work and sustenance to the farmers who lost their land in the Dust Bowl. However, World War II had a profound effect on these dreams. The war permanently altered America’s economy to the urban, industrial one we know today. It also delayed the construction of the irrigation project for more than a decade, as efforts went completely toward producing power for the war.
It wasn’t until 1951 that water began to be pumped from the Lake Roosevelt reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam. Though not at the scale once hoped for, today the Columbia Basin Project irrigates 670,000 acres of land and drives a $630 million agriculture industry.
However, it is not for the benefit of Dust Bowl refugees that the water flows.
After World War I, the question had been asked about returning US soldiers: “How do you expect to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?” After World War II, the question seemed all the more pertinent. So in the late 1940s, the Bureau of Reclamation mapped out forty-one thousand acres of small farms on land it had purchased to help bring farmers into the area—with preference given to war veterans. While interest in the plots was initially high, many prospective farmers quickly backed out of plans to farm the new land.
Apple Blossom Queens pouring water from all fifty states into the Grand Coulee’s main irrigation canal for the 1951 inaugural ceremony
The challenge of drawing farmers to the area became painfully clear to the Bureau of Reclamation with a publicity stunt to promote the program.
The Farm-in-a-Day demonstration project in 1952 was meant to show the kind of transformation that irrigation could bring to an area. A World War II veteran named Donald Dunn was awarded a new $50,000 farm, free of charge, in Moses Lake, Washington, and in twenty-four hours, volunteers constructed a house and tilled and irrigated the land. Dunn seemed like the perfect recipient. His farm in Kansas had been destroyed in a flood the year before, and he was considered a “top-notch farmer.” He had great success in Moses Lake, especially with potatoes, but within four years, he had sold the land to try his luck elsewhere, saying that lack of a market and restrictions put on him in Washington State were too much.
Columbia Basin farming with Grand Coulee water, circa 1960s
Most of the farmers who bought land in the newly irrigated area were from the Pacific Northwest already, meaning that no serious relocation occurred. Meanwhile, attempts by the government to create new townsites in the irrigation district were flops. One Washington town, called Burke, was outright rejected, because nearby towns feared it would divert business from their shops. Another, George, still exists today but is hardly a shining example of a twentieth-century planned community.
Over the decades, the government eased restrictions on how small farms had to be to take advantage of Columbia River projects, and larger agribusinesses moved onto the land. Today, Grant County, Washington, in the heart of the area, proudly touts itself on green highway signs as the number one potato-producing county in the country. As Oregon historian Paul Pitzer put it, the irrigation project as envisioned by New Dealers was “a nineteenth-century plan for a twentieth-century economy.”
The spread of publicly owned power kept closer to its original vision. Throughout the Northwest, PUDs and municipal power systems continue to supply millions of homes with electricity. Many towns today hang highway signs telling travelers that they are “Another Public Power Community,” and the region as a whole boasts more publicly owned utilities than any other in the nation. The area has also enjoyed over the last seventy-five years some of the cheapest power rates in the country, just as Roosevelt had all but promised it would when promoting the dam projects.
Ironically, for all the talk in the 1930s of the Columbia River projects creating a new agrarian society, the dams’ most enduring legacy may be the large urban centers of the Pacific Northwest: Seattle and Portland. Following World War II, both cities continued to flex their industrial might in peacetime, running on power from the dams. Continued damming of the river also all but eliminated flood risk in Portland—just as Kahn had said it would in The Columbia—allowing that metropolis to flourish. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the cities as they are today without the benefits of the dams.
“These great dams of the west are why we have the metropolitan areas of the West,” said historian Margaret O’Mara.
Even the cheap electricity, though, carries its own complicated coda.
For one, it played an instrumental role in the development of nuclear weapons. In 1943, unbeknownst to the public, power from the Grand Coulee Dam began to be transmitted to a secret compound in Central Washington that was enriching plutonium to be used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Today, the Hanford Site is one of the biggest and most complex environmental-cleanup projects in the country.
Meanwhile, many of those people most impacted by the Grand Coulee Dam never saw the full benefits they were promised. The tribes whose land was flooded and whose lifestyle was forever altered by the dam went uncompensated for their losses for sixty-one years, until 1994 when a federal court ordered that the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation be paid $53 million in compensation.
The first water from the Grand Coulee Dam pours into the Columbia Basin canal system, 1951
“For years, they didn’t have phone service,” Blaine Harden, author of A River Lost, said of the Colville tribes. “They didn’t get the cheap electricity that white people … got. They were really, really dispossessed of everything and were always an afterthought.”
The salmon runs on the Columbia today—which Guthrie marveled at during his time here—have been decimated, though dams do not carry sole blame for that fact. Millions of dollars are now being spent to restore salmon runs across the region through hatchery programs and habitat protection, but all species of salmon are listed as either threatened or endangered in at least one part of the Columbia Basin.
The people paid for advocating the Columbia River projects—Stephen Kahn, Ralph Bennett, and Michael Loring, who worked with Woody Guthrie at the BPA—all suggested a change in the wind when the Eisenhower administration ushered a free-market ideology into the federal government. This isn’t to suggest that the cause of their marginalization was working with Guthrie, but rather their shared belief in an activist government agency.
They weren’t the only Guthrie contemporaries to face a backlash as the Red Scare swept the country. Alan Lomax, who got Guthrie his job with the BPA, was investigated for communist ties, and decided to take a job in Europe for most of the 1950s. Pete Seeger was blacklisted due to his ties to communism and did not appear on commercial television until 1967. Guthrie himself was investigated by the FBI, but was so sick by the mid-1950s that he wasn’t considered a threat to the nation.
Given this complicated history, it’s fair to ask whether Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River songs are anything but relics of a time never come. While it’s difficult to assign value to any piece of art, the endurance of Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River songs seems to suggest that they do have worth in the twenty-first century.
Though the full designs of the Columbia River projects never came to be, as dreamed they represented a radical proposition for the nation—a vision of an engineered society in which the worker, Roosevelt’s “forgotten man,” is put first.
Seventy-five years after his Portland experience, Woody Guthrie stands secure in his embodiment of American folk identity. His songs represent the character of a great generation, the hard times they overcame, and the spirit of a social democracy.
To what extent the “planned promised land” succeeded or failed cannot diminish the idealism of Woody Guthrie’s songs and his vision for a better place in which the bounty of resources were shared by all, “cuz our pastures of plenty must always be free.”
