Fixing crisis,transforming landscapes: Social,spatial,ecological,and racial fixes in New Deal South Carolina

Introduction

Between 1938 and 1941, Ralph J. Bunche, a Black political scientist and Howard University professor, traveled throughout the American South documenting the state of Black life in America. During his trip, he interviewed Black residents, and wrote memos on race relations as part of the Carnegie-Myrdal Study of the Negro in America (Bunche, 1938–1941). The study was performed under the auspices of White Swedish social scientist and political advisor Gunnar Myrdal, who researched Black life in America on behalf of the Carnegie Corporation. In 1944, Myrdal published Bunche’s findings in the nearly 1500-page, two-volume book entitled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. The study sought to address what was referred to in various parts of the text as “the Negro problem,” the “problem of race,” and the “minority problem” (Myrdal, 1944). Bunche’s (1940a) memorandum, “Conceptions and Ideologies of the Negro Problem,” served as the ideological scaffolding for An American Dilemma, notably appearing in the book’s introduction. ¹

While traveling through the South, Bunche picked up a flyer entitled, “The Valley of East Tennessee[:] abundant resources for healthful living and abundant opportunity to spread the resources of healthful living” (The Valley of East Tennessee, 1938–1941). ² The flyer depicts a map of Eastern Tennessee and the southern portion of the Appalachian Mountains. In a neatly drawn sketch of the mountain landscape, the flyer illustrates several Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) hydroelectric projects, including Norris Dam, Hiawassee Dam, and Chickamvga Dam, as well as the approved, but not-yet-constructed, Watts Bar Dam. The TVA hydrology is surrounded by a series of overlapping circles depicting the resources that “concern . . . all of the people” of the region, including commerce, navigation, water and flood control, cheap power, new industries, jobs and wages, farm income, natural resources, agriculture, soil conservation, and, perhaps most significantly, the “spirit of Andrew Jackson” (The Valley of East Tennessee, 1938–1941). In other words, the flyer argued that hydroelectric power projects would fix all of the problems that plagued the Southerners for decades.

That this flyer appeared among Bunche’s collection of research materials depicting Black life in the South is no accident. New Deal infrastructure projects evinced as much about state and Federal governments’ spatial and ecological goals as they did about their racial sentiments. In the 1930s, New Dealers worked to “mak[e] the American people ‘dam-minded’” by promoting the creation of dams, the destruction of “unproductive” lands, and the dispossession of undesirable peoples as a solution to the nation’s social, economic, and ecological ills (Roosevelt, 1934). Though these proposed infrastructure and hydroelectric projects promised to revitalize America, such opportunities were only offered to a small portion of the nation. Notably, Black and other marginalized people in the South were often excluded from the benefits of hydroelectric development and, instead, Southern New Dealers opened up space for White habitation by dispossessing Indigenous and Black people in the name of American “progress” (Biles, 1994: 112–113; The Valley of East Tennessee, 1938–1941). Hydroelectric projects were regarded as a critical New Deal “fix.”

In the early years of the New Deal, before Bunche participated in the Carnegie-Myrdal Study, he produced an article entitled, “A Critique of New Deal Social Planning as it Affects Negroes,” wherein he wrote, “The New Deal Planning only serves to crystallize . . . abuses and oppressions which the exploited Negro citizenry of America have long suffered under laissez-faire capitalism, and for the same reasons as the past” (Bunche, 1936: 65). This claim was only further solidified as Bunche traveled through the South in the later New Deal, where he concluded that “the liberal promise of the country and the democracy it offered” were not, and had never been, offered to or shared with Black people (Bunche, 1940a: 55). The New Deal was not designed to alter the established racial order or ameliorate race relations in America (Cole, 1999). Rather, the New Deal was a series of programs, organizations, and policies instituted to impose a social, spatial, ecological, and racial fix across the nation at a moment of political, economic, industrial, and environmental crisis.

Structures change under conditions of power redistribution, which Gilmore (2002), Neil Smith (2010 [1984]), Stuart Hall (Hall et al., 1978; Hall and Schwartz, 1988), and others (Hooks, 1991; Negri, 1988 [1968], 1988 [1980]; Walker, 1995) define as moments of crisis. I define crisis here, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007), as “instability that can be fixed only through radical measures, which include developing new relationships and new or renovated institutions out of what already exists” (p. 26). These structural changes manifest through a series of fixes brought forth by a “creative government.” Following the Great Depression, the creative government of the New Deal manifested not only as a response to the economic crisis of the era, but also more importantly a response to the crisis of racial calamity (Gilmore, 2002: 18). Gilmore (2002) notes that during the New Deal in particular, “the US racial state renovate[d] and ma[de] critical already existing activities in times of crisis” (p. 19).

My invocation of the “fix” emerges from the scholarship of Gilmore (2002, 2007, 2022) and Clyde Woods (1998), who build upon Harvey’s (1981, 1982, 2001) notion of the spatial fix, which he and others define as “capitalism’s insatiable drive to resolve its inner crisis tendencies by geographical expansion and geographical restructuring” (p. 24). Geographers (Ekers and Prudham, 2015; Herod, 2002; Jessop, 2004; Prudham and Heynen, 2011; Smith, 2010 [1984]) have taken up this concept to understand how space is unevenly produced under capitalism. The New Deal introduced “hundreds of often conflicting federal programs in a search for a social-spatial fix—a series of alliances and agreements capable of restoring long-term profitability and social peace” (Woods, 1998: 9). I invoke “fix” here not merely to mean “improve”—though New Dealers did seek to improve the political-economic conditions of America at the time—but rather to indicate the government’s efforts to stabilize and control economic markets in an era of economic crisis. Crises are objectively neither bad nor good, but are inherently uneven, resulting in different outcomes across different social formations and geographic spheres, and occurring when social formations can no longer be reproduced on the basis of pre-existing systems of social relations (Gilmore, 2007: 54–55, 2022: 210; Hall and Schwartz, 1988: 96). Likewise, fixes are driven by contradictory tendencies of capitalism, which attempt to build a fixed space or landscape only to later destroy that space, and subsequently devalue the capital invested therein, to make way for “openings for fresh accumulation in new spaces and territories” (Harvey, 2001: 25). As Gilmore (2022) notes, “crises collide and combine,” producing the very conditions that the New Deal sought to “fix” (p. 209).

I intervene in existing literature on the spatial fix to foreground the various fixes instated in response not merely to the crisis of capitalism, but specifically to the crises of racial capitalism, a concept coined by Cedric Robinson (2000 [1983], 2019) and elucidated by others (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Gilmore, 2007, 2022; Pulido, 2016a, 2016b) that demonstrates how the material and social formation, organization, and growth of a capitalist society requires differentiation of humans along racial lines. As Laura Pulido reminds us, racial difference “creates a variegated landscape that cultures and capital can exploit to create enhanced power and profits.” She adds, “Just as the spatial fix is fundamental to capitalism, so too is human difference” (Pulido, 2016a: 7). The inclusion of an analysis of racial capitalism allows us to illuminate the inherent “socio-spatial-racial-ecological” fix that is presently underdeveloped in the scholarship on crises and fixes. Any analysis of “fixes” must therefore centrally attend to the ecological and racial dimensions that form our understanding of space and our movement therein.

Utilizing a case study of a major Southern hydroelectric project of the era, the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project in central South Carolina, I demonstrate how the New Deal radically reshaped Black geographies and ecologies in the South by funding and producing infrastructure projects designed to act as social, spatial, environmental, and racial “fixes” by dispossessing Black people and the ecologies they inhabited in the name of American progress and revitalization. In a system of racial capitalism, any attempt to alter the environmental landscapes of racialized populations also shapes the ecologies of White people as well (Pulido, 2016a: 13). In addition, while this was a state-initiated development scheme, the state project was created in response to national and regional political-economic crises, and subsequently had consequences beyond the scale of the rural Black community.

I conclude with an attention to and critique of present proposals for a Green New Deal, a policy scheme modeled after the New Deal that responds to the crises of our own time. Not only does the Green New Deal replicate federal infrastructural and political-economic schemes, but it also attempts to implement a series of fixes to solve the very climate crises that escalated in the decades following the New Deal. Therefore, I push back against fixity and instead implore individuals, organizers, and policymakers alike to look toward more capacious modes of repair in this urgent moment of environmental crisis.

The New Deal was not merely a response to the crisis of the Great Depression, but also was rather a crisis itself, one which governments sought to fix by exerting the utmost authority, agency, and order. The New Deal fixed Southern people and ecologies within infrastructures and the built environment to solve early 20th-century crises, open up space for accumulation and rural development, and further ensure the survival of capitalism into the modern era. This article serves to “rearrange the geography of New Deal history” in the South, and, further, offer guidance as we navigate the crises of the present and future (Katznelson, 2013: 9).

The Santee-Cooper Project

In the first week of February 1934, a delegation of 66 representatives from South Carolina traveled to Washington, DC to advocate for the creation of the Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project (The State, 1934). Standing before Congress, the delegation admitted that portions of their own state “lagged [so far] behind the other sections of the country in industrial development that . . . it has reached a stage where only heroic measures can save it from further economic disaster,” and argued that the state and its industry could only be saved through the “salvaging of thousands of acres of land on the lower Santee” through the Santee-Cooper Project (Hammond, 1934: 7–8). The state needed to transform the land to construct large-scale navigation and hydroelectric development, which would create a navigable channel from the capital in Columbia to the port city of Charleston to stimulate the industrial life of the cities, generate low-cost public electricity, and put thousands of men to work.

On August 11, 1938, the state of South Carolina broke ground on clearing nearly 200,000 acres of land in the center of the state to erect the US$40,300,000 Santee-Cooper Project (Edgar, 1984; Hart, 2013; O’Reilly, 1939). Signed into law on April 7, 1934, the Project was created as part of the South Carolina Public Service Authority, ³ one of the dozens of agencies known as “public authorities” created during the 20th century that were administratively, financially, and legally independent of both state and federal governments, but supported by federal and state legislation and funded primarily by revenue bonds (Radford, 2013). ⁴

Between August 1938 and January 1941, more than 12,500 Public Service Authority and Works Progress Administration laborers, under the supervision of White engineers, cleared hundreds of thousands of acres of farm- and swampland, relocated approximately 6000 graves, and erected a 42-mile-long system of dams and dikes to create Lakes Marion and Moultrie in what was the largest land-clearing project in US history at the time. To enact the project, the Public Service Authority displaced 901 families in Berkeley, Georgetown, and Horry counties, which equated to between 2500 and 3000 people, approximately 80 and 95% of whom were Black and the majority of whom lived on lands cultivated by their families for generations (Edgar, 1984; Hart, 2013: 129; O’Reilly, 1939; The News & Courier, December 1941a).

A central aim of the Santee-Cooper Project was to “push[] back the darkness” and to bring electrification to rural portions of South Carolina (Santee Cooper, 1989). The expansion of electricity throughout the state was not only to encourage rural electrification but also to promote competition among electric companies, out of which the Public Service Authority believed cheaper electric rates would emerge (Fishburne, 1934: 2). ⁵ But a secondary, less-publicized aim of the Santee Cooper Project was to fix the crisis of rural poverty, “backwardness,” and unemployment by transforming rural space and rural people in South Carolina into more generative locales and more productive laborers.

In an article entitled, “Story of Santee Resettlement is Told by Public Service Authority,” a Charleston-based newspaper presented a tale of the “comfortable” and “proud” resettlement of 901 families, thereby solving the “Human Problem” that was central to the Santee-Cooper Project (The News & Courier, December 1941a). By “human problem,” the Public Service Authority meant the “negro land-owning class” who were direct descendants of enslaved laborers who worked on early rice and indigo plantations, and whose families held land titles in the region since reconstruction. According to the newspaper, the rural Black population stayed in this region for so long because they and their ancestors “preferred remaining with their former masters to wandering forth on the uncertain path of emancipation,” and, as a result of their purported loyalty, they “earned” small acreages from their former masters on the condition that they stay there and work the same land in perpetuity (The News & Courier, 1941a). In an effort to find a “human equation”—or a fix—for the problem of the Black population, the Authority’s directors of resettlement secured new plots of land to which Black people could be removed; appointed escrow agents to hold money from the sale of the basin sites to pay for the new sites; hired engineers to tear down and rebuild the homes of Black community members elsewhere; offered dispossessed people former slave quarters or tenant houses in lieu of their former homes; and gave each dispossessed adult 100 chickens and seed loans as compensation (The News & Courier, 1941a). While at first glance, several of these opportunities might have been welcome additions to the lives of rural Black people in the region, the article mythologizes Black responses to dispossession and presents a portrait of Black rural Southerners as not only amenable to changes in their life, but also actively complicit in and eager about the destruction of their ancestral homes.

As I have argued elsewhere, the Public Service Authority did not arrive at this belief ahistorically, but rather based their perceptions of Black and Indigenous people, notably Santee Indians, upon accumulated and socially produced mythologies of landless racialized populations who lacked history (Vickers, 2022). In 1993, Oscar Pratt, then Chief of the Santee Tribe of Holly Hill noted that much of their community lost their land in the Depression because they “had to get rid of it to survive” as a tribe and as individuals amid economic crisis (South Carolina Educational Television (SCETV), 1993). ⁶ Most Santee people were never able to purchase this land back once they regained footing, though some were able to reacquire some land with bank loans and financial assistance from supportive White friends. Over 50 years after the completion of the Santee-Cooper Project, Santee Indians still did not have control over their ancestral lands, in part because hundreds of acres of tribal land sat at the bottom of the reservoir, and in part due to continued prejudice, limited state representation, and an absence of federal recognition. In 2003, 3 years before the tribe gained state recognition, the Santee Indians only owned about half an acre in common (Crediford, 2009: 70). In rural areas, regions the Public Service Authority promised it would modernize following the creation of the Santee-Cooper Project, poor, Black, and Indigenous people lived “in marginal conditions very similar to those of the 1930s Great Depression era,” even as late as 2009 (Crediford, 2009: 126). Thus, the arrival of the Public Service Authority in the 1930s marked a moment of bureaucratic intervention into the lives of formerly independent Black and Indigenous people who once had autonomy, landed connections, and relative insulation from the nation’s crises.

A social-spatial fix

Policies enacted during the New Deal were designed to fix people, resources, and capital within space to save American capitalism in crisis. While there exists no permanent solution to capitalism’s crisis tendencies, capitalism itself generates ways of delaying or diverting these crises into productive pathways (Schoenberger, 2004: 428). This was the project of the New Deal: to delay or deter future crises by productively absorbing and transforming the geography of capital. Large-scale national planning and the creation of various New Deal public agencies was a government effort to save capitalism from the private capitalists, many of whom were directly responsible for the Great Depression (Gilbert, 2015: 76; Smith, 2004: 233). National New Deal policies transformed the geography of capital in states and local municipalities, and, in turn, the local policy enactments and infrastructure projects shaped the state and national political economies.

The survival of capitalism is contingent upon the simultaneous occupation and production of space. This dual process is “achieved through bureaucratically controlled consumption, the differentiation of centers and peripheries, and the penetration of the state into everyday life” (Soja, 1980: 215). New Deal governments occupied space and transformed it by introducing policies and administrative agencies to control production and consumption, and “to stimulate employment and general prosperity,” especially in the rural South (South Carolina Public Service Authority, 1939). This involved the movement of people from urban and suburban centers to rural peripheries for work contracts and cooperative planning programs to bring rural spaces up to the progressive standards of the urban core—what Gilbert (2015) calls “progressive rural reform” (South Carolina Public Service Authority, 1939).

In defining the spatial fix, Harvey (2001) makes clear three ideas: (a) capitalism cannot survive without being geographically expansionary, (b) such expansion necessitates major innovations in transportation and communication technologies, and (c) geographical expansion depends on market expansion and the availability of labor power, natural resources (raw materials), and/or opportunities to invest in new production facilities (pp. 25–26). The Santee-Cooper Project met all three requirements. In making the Project, the Public Service Authority expanded its political and economic reach into the previously “unseen” or ungoverned regions of the state to claim territory and make the region more “productive.” Once the land was acquired in the center of the state, it was transformed into two connected reservoirs designed for hydroelectric power and intrastate navigation (Hart, 2013). The Authority not only conscripted laborers from across the state to build the hydroelectric project in the short-term, but also the creation of the reservoirs “opene[ed] up the vast timber stores for market,” whereas previously “millions of feet of valuable timber remain[ed] uncut while the sluggish Santee [River] drag[ged] through the swampland forest to the sea” (The Columbia Record, 1935). The creation of a series of hydroelectric dams and reservoirs served as a spatial fix necessary for a government seeking to create “an industrial empire in a virgin land” (The Columbia Record, 1935). The geographic expansion of capitalism and the fixing of space reduced spatial barriers to the movement of people, commodities, and information across space and time in the wake of the Project (Harvey, 2001).

A spatial fix of this order necessarily coincided with a corresponding social fix, which attends to how aspects of life often regarded as being “noncapitalist” facilitate capital accumulation by commodifying social relations, expanding markets, and socializing services and infrastructures (Ekers and Prudham, 2015: 2439). Just as a theory of a spatial fix attends to large flows of capital into the built environment, the social fix attends to the social regulation of the production of space (Ekers and Prudham, 2015: 2438). The social and spatial fixes are co-constitutive and, as such, scholars refer to the two collectively as a “socio-spatial” or a “social-spatial” fix or dialectic (Harvey, 2001; Soja, 1980; Woods, 1998: 9). In moments of crisis, the old political and social order does not disappear, but rather “every struggle is carried out within, and against, already existing institutions” (Gilmore, 2007: 28).

The New Deal was an era defined by American high modernism, which Scott (1998) describes as a government’s

self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. (p. 4)

New Deal high modernists prioritized the creation of new public authorities, like the South Carolina Public Service Authority, and the creation of many such agencies in the 1930s and 1940s demonstrated an era of technical, developmental, and social bureaucracy (Gilbert, 2015: 62; Radford, 2013). As one Santee-Cooper author argued, the name “Authority” not only implied distinction and expertise, but also placed the projects in the same class as other federal loan projects with “responsible men in charge” (Fishburne, 1934: 2). New Dealers utilized Public Authorities as they sought to quickly tackle pressing economic problems while simultaneously breaking away from the constraints of the US’ former bureaucratic apparatuses, which contributed to the crisis of the Great Depression (Radford, 2013: 12). The Authority worked to build state capacity for economic intervention, which necessarily required the ordering of social life in rural South Carolina (Radford, 2013: 11).

During the New Deal, industrial capitalism was able to transform itself through structural changes, including the increasing centralization and concentration of wealth and the state’s increase in social control (Soja, 1980: 216). The advancement of capitalism necessitated the uneven development of spatially and socially differentiated locales (Soja, 1980: 219). This was perhaps most apparent in the uneven development of environments, with poor and racialized populations being relegated to the lowlands of South Carolina while White and middle-to-upper class populations could afford land above the floodplain (Smith, 2010 [1984); The Index-Journal, 1934a, 1934b). Uneven development not only devalues materials and spaces, but also produces “surplus” peoples and ways of life, what Gilmore (2007) calls an “unfixing” (p. 179). In this process, certain classes of people, land, capital, and state power grew “idle” in the eyes of the White supremacist racial capitalist state—in this case, Black South Carolinians and the rural spaces they inhabited (Gilmore, 2007: 26–27).

Gilmore (2022) notes that crisis and surplus are “two sides of the same coin,” adding that “[w]ithin any system of production, the idling, or surplusing, of productive capacities means that the society dependent on that production cannot reproduce itself as it had in the past” (p. 210). In Lowcountry South Carolina, the “surplus” humans who remained in the region after the devaluation of the land and the destruction of communities and community structures led to a “sociological problem” that the Public Service Authority’s resettlement division believed could only be solved by moving dislocated populations to expert-designed resettlement communities furnished with modern fixtures and “humane provisions” designed to bring the Black communities up to the standards and visions of White society (The News & Courier, December 1941a). But these measures taken to purportedly improve the lives of dispossessed Lowcountry residents were, in fact, part of a “human equation” produced by Authority leaders who sought to appease the population and evacuate the land that once “teemed with enemies,” or those resistant to state intervention and control (The News & Courier, 1941a). Thus, to spatially fix Lowcountry landscapes in the making of the Santee-Cooper Project was, therefore, to stagnate rural, low-income, Lowcountry South Carolinians for the economic and social progress of White populations and economies.

Ecological–racial fix

Just as the social fix and the spatial fix are co-constitutive, so too are ecological and racial fixes. As a modality of racial capitalism, an ecological fix severed historical Black land and ecological ties through dispossessive projects and ecocide to open up space for capitalist development and revitalization—a revitalization that did not imagine Blackness and Black belonging as part of its constitution. While this eco-social fix is acutely evident in the Santee-Cooper Project, it is equally at play in other modernizing and infrastructural projects in the Americas and beyond, given the tendency to displace subaltern, racialized, and low-income communities, and destroy or transform the ecologies they inhabit, for the benefit and use of White, affluent, and other settler populations.

To offset the ecological effects of the Great Depression, the Public Service Authority turned to rational and legible environmental and agricultural planning in South Carolina (Smith, 2004: 233; Gilbert, 2015). In one 1937 newspaper article, a South Carolina reporter noted that Authority planning included “long-time programs and long-vistaed control of floods, droughts, dust storms and other revolts against the abuses of nature.” Notably, the newspaper argued that the “[e]stablishment of several regional authorities would permit integrated plans to safeguard the use of water, water power, soils, forests and other resources” (Florence Morning News, 1937). ⁷ These agencies were not invented to merely safeguard or protect the nation’s natural resources, but, rather, to appropriate resources to be utilized, processed, and transformed for the benefit of America.

The New Deal functioned as what Michael Ekers and Scott Prudham call a “socio-ecological fix.” The ecological fix builds upon Harvey’s spatial fix to examine how landscapes are produced, socio-ecological relationships are transformed, and labor is restructured to address or offset social and environmental crises of capitalism, which are produced through the productions of space and nature. Following key thinkers on the production of space and nature (Harvey, 1997; Lefebvre, 1992; Smith, 2010 [1984)), the notion of the “fix” is expanded here to highlight flows of capital into the built environment, as well as “shifts in the social regulation of productions of space and nature in response to real and perceived crises of legitimacy” (Ekers and Prudham, 2015: 2438). Ekers and Prudham (2015) posit that a socio-ecological fix as a project is designed with the survival of capitalism in mind (p. 2442). The Public Service Authority fixed capital within the built environment of South Carolina by displacing and destroying historical ecologies to erect artificial dams and reservoirs to elongate the life of capitalism.

Central within an ecological fix is the creation of expanded and improved infrastructures designed to sustain and enhance the environment to generate wealth (Schoenberger, 2004: 429). The Santee-Cooper Project necessitated the destruction of unproductive farmland and unruly swamplands, under which South Carolinians believed there existed potential wealth in the form of hydroelectric power and navigation (Hart, 2013; Vickers, 2022). To dry the swamps, the Public Service Authority created 42 miles of dams and dikes, which contained the former meandering waters within the clearly-defined boundaries of Lakes Marion and Moultrie (Hart, 2013; O’Reilly, 1939). But, before the reservoirs were filled, Public Works Administration (PWA) laborers were first required to flood the timber market with a surplus of felled trees—most of which were unprocessed due to the speed at which they needed to clear-cut the landscape—which resulted in a massive devaluation of the lumber. Because investment in infrastructure projects was not isolated to a singular moment but rather occurred over the span of years, Authority representatives were willing to tie up capital in the built environment to later provide opportunities for profit and progress in the long term (Harvey, 2001: 28). Despite the fact that the reservoirs would inundate only about 160,000 acres of land, the Authority purchased and cleared more than 193,000 acres, destroying more forest, swampland, and farmland than required to “avoid leaving the former owner[s] with a small strip of land of no economic value” (The News & Courier, November 1941b). By felling thousands of square miles of swampland forest and sending all harvested timber to market at the same time, or, in some cases, by setting thousands of acres ablaze or sinking the trees to the bottom of the swamps in instances where trees could not be transported to market, the Authority reportedly lost US$455,000, or nearly 50% of the estimated value of the nearly 300 million feet of timber at the time (Land Owners’ Association of the Santee-Cooper Basin, 1939; The Columbia Record, September 1941; The Sumter Daily Item, 1940). ⁸

The immobilization of swampland forests, the inundation of alluvial lands, and the submersion of the value therein in the short term allowed the remaining capital to be (re)invested into the future of the reservoirs and the accumulation of further capital throughout the life of the infrastructure projects (Schoenberger, 2004: 429). Thus, to “fix” the environment by locking a formerly seasonally variable hydrological space into stasis through the creation of two dams, and to simultaneously “fix” a former ecological scourge by inundating the unruly landscape, was not only to stabilize environments to prevent future ecological crises. More significantly, it was an attempt to make environments predictable and containable, to ensure the survival of capitalism and to prevent future economic harm.

Ecological fixes are tied to racial capitalist projects of eco-social manipulation. In creating the Santee-Cooper Project, the Public Service Authority combined an ecological and a racial fix to create what Milligan et al. (2022) call a hydro-racial fix, which refers to both the racial capitalist functions of water governance that encourage Americans to think of water policy as being “race-blind” or “race-neutral,” and also how water and race are inextricably tied in infrastructure projects in ways that produce racially disparate harm and risk. In the creation of the Santee-Cooper Project, infrastructural development in the form of hydroelectric dams and man-made reservoirs was framed as a universal good for rural South Carolinians, but instead supported a system of racial capitalism by simultaneously allowing the Authority to contain the landscape, generate energy to electrify rural portions of the state, while also displacing Black and Indigenous communities in the process (Vickers, 2022).

Mumm (2017) defines the racial fix as “a consensus-building process that enables White people to create and sustain a market in order to secure social and economic benefits from the historical consequences of racial disparity and racism” (p. 104). While Mumm considers a racial fix in the context of urban gentrification, I argue that a racial fix is equally apparent in rural Southern contexts throughout history, especially in the New Deal. Just as a theoretical understanding of racial capitalism necessitates an understanding of both racism and capitalism, an understanding of the racial fix necessitates an understanding that racial difference is fundamental to the continuity of capitalism. Mumm (2017) notes that the racial fix, broadly, “relies on an overarching narrative of increasing value associated with White people, white space, white symbols, and white public consumption—framed against local Others” (p. 105). Crucially, the Government of South Carolina produced mutually reinforcing relationships between race-related politics and environmental policy and initiatives that have long-standing consequences in the built environment (Carrillo, 2021: 651). This emerged in the New Deal through rural conservation movements that privileged White farmers and landowners, policies designed to combat massive gullying and soil erosion caused by the simultaneous abuses of agricultural lands and Black people for generations, and practices of Black land confiscation designed to devalue property and property rights of people of color (Connolly, 2014; Phillips, 2007; Sutter, 2015).

In the rural South of the 1930s and 1940s, Black people were too present and too visible in the eyes of White people who sought to live pure and segregated lives, whereas White people did not see or recognize the continued existence of Indigenous people. This is based on an accumulated legacy of violent dispossession, removal, and murder of racialized people in the region and the nation (Boas and David, 1940: 11). Therefore, at the moment the Public Service Authority formed the Santee-Cooper Project, Indigenous people were regarded not as a presently existing population, but were instead remarked upon only in the historical and cultural value they could bring to White people. In 1940, while clear-cutting the Santee-Cooper basin, the Authority remarked upon the extant Santee Indian mounds and burial grounds, only one of which would be saved, and the rich archeological deposits the state would reclaim for display at the University of South Carolina or the Charleston museum for White viewers to behold (The State, 1940). Compare this with the treatment of wealthy White people, many of whom inhabited the plantation homes and oversaw the cultivation of the same crops as their slave-owning ancestors. The Public Service Authority relocated or preserved nearly a dozen historic plantation homes they deemed essential to the state’s history, and meticulously documented those located in the floodpath that could not be saved (Bostick, 2008). Like Indigenous belongings, Black property and dwellings were deemed insignificant; as one historian argued, “Many of the African American cabins and shacks were not worth saving,” and as one contemporary newspaper concurred, “the structure[s] would be virtually worthless for salvage purposes” (Bostick, 2008; O’Reilly, 3 September 1939).

The state perceived Black and Indigenous people as anachronistic, and therefore in need of modernizing. During a tour of Santee-Cooper basin, one correspondent visited the all-Black Church of Reconciliation for the Reformed Episcopal Denomination that stood in the floodpath and noted that

Several hundred negroes in a wide variety of costume were assembled in front of the building. One of them was beating on a bass drum, the sound rolling out over the gathering in a primitive rhythm. The others were jumping up and down and clapping their hands in time to the drum beat. (O’Reilly, 3 September 1939)

While we might interpret this as a collective protest to the arrival of White officials and rising waters, the journalist concluded that “the [Santee-Cooper] project is utterly beyond the comprehension of many of the negroes,” adding that even if the Black community did understand what was to come, their “primitive” drumming and dancing would ultimately make them forget the problems of resettlement (O’Reilly, 1939). Therefore, the “race problem” or the “negro problem” necessitated a racialized solutions or fixes.

The New Deal was neither radical nor progressive, particularly in the South; rather, it strengthened traditional incentives and institutions, such as tenant farming or the demotion of workers to the status of seasonal laborers without benefits or guaranteed pay, to ensure that Southern conservatives would support the Federal government’s legislation (Woods, 1998: 13). In fact, Roosevelt and other New Dealers repeatedly struck down anti-lynching bills intended to protect Black people and criminalize White mobs who committed extralegal murders. This position of political and social inaction was, in large part, due to Roosevelt’s political reliance upon Southern conservatives, particularly as he was campaigning for a third term in the 1940 election (Katznelson, 2013). Likewise, despite Elanor Roosevelt privately admitting to Ralph Bunche that the nation’s race problem represented a “dangerous weakness,” and expressing eagerness “to rationalize the[] treatment of the Negro,” she ultimately conceded that the transformation of any racial situation was tertiary to the economic situation of the nation and the rising threat of the war in Europe (Bunche, May 15, 1940b: 4–9). As historian Roger Biles (1994) notes, the political powerlessness of Black people “reflected their vulnerability in all areas of life in the 1930s,” adding that “[p]eriodic violence and persecution of black[ people] unwilling to adhere to prescribed behavioral norms served as grim reminders of white supremacy,” a social and political supremacy that South Carolina politicians had no interest in reforming (p. 109). Thus, much of the “fixing” of social life in South Carolina at the time was about the maintenance of the status quo, the continuation of the previous social hierarchies, and the protection of American capital and property—including the environment.

Against the “interspecies devaluation of Blackness and nature” inherent in an eco-racial fix are Black ecological relationalities (Wright, 2018: 15). Interdisciplinary scholars (Moulton and Salo, 2022; Murphy et al., 2021; Roane, 2019, 2022; Roane and Hosbey, 2019; Vickers, 2022) largely define Black ecologies based on two historical lineages: as Black eco-social relations that manifest in response to the spatial enactments of White supremacy, anti-Black violence, and ecocide, or as the interspecies entanglements, kinship networks, and justice-oriented land praxes that span geographies of Black life. These two trajectories are not mutually exclusive, and in most Black ecologies, both livingness and threat inform lived ecological experiences. Racial capitalism frames Black and Indigenous life, but Black and Indigenous eco-social formations outside of the purview of White supremacy can offer possibilities outside of fixity. Black ecologies in South Carolina prior to the New Deal demonstrated intimate connections between “Black sociality and the geological and biological processes of the subaquatic” and open up space for Black futures outside of the destructive ecological “fixes” of racial capitalism (Roane, 2022: 236). In the antediluvian Santee-Cooper floodplain and swamps, hundreds of Black and Indigenous people lived outside of the economic, social, and political gaze and control of White society. The imposition of a racial fix worked to bring Blackness into White visibility and economic control.

The eco-racial racial fix is dialectical and requires “a constant stream of dialogue among white people” to constantly reify the public belief that rural spaces are more valuable, attractive, and clean when owned and operated by White people (Mumm, 2017: 113). The South Carolina Public Service Authority dictated, which environments and groups of people were worthy of surviving and moving forward into the modern state. It was responsible for framing rural Black populations as an anachronistic, poverty-stricken group, and allowed White South Carolinians to perpetuate this stereotype in the name of economic security and advancement for the rest of the state (Bunche, 1936: 64). As Gilmore (2022) notes, the modus operandi of the governments of the United States for solving crises is “the relentless identification, coercive control, and violent elimination of foreign and domestic enemies” (p. 209). Just as the survival of capitalism relies upon the “occupation and production of space, achieved through bureaucratically controlled consumption, the differentiation of centers and peripheries, and the penetration of the state into everyday life,” the survival of racial capitalism is contingent upon controlling the narratives and perceptions surrounding race and environments by spatializing racialized populations and producing racial-environmental policies (Soja, 1980: 215). This was key to the success of the Santee-Cooper Project.

A Green New Deal?: Interrogating a 21st-century “Fix”

On 7 February 2019, Senator Ed Markey and House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez concurrently submitted identical resolutions to the US Senate and House of Representatives, entitled “Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” Each representative was joined by dozens of other Democratic officials from both sections of the Legislative Branch who make up the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, to propose this 10-year national mobilization effort to reduce, or reverse, the effects of climate change (S. RES. 59; H. RES. 109).

The proposition for a Green New Deal harkens back to the original public works program from the 1930s and 1940s in their calls for job creation, infrastructural development, and economic intervention, arguing that it is the duty of the Federal Government to achieve net-zero greenhouse emissions, create millions of high-wage jobs, invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States, and secure access to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment that provides food and water to all citizens (S. RES. 59; H. RES. 109). Government advocates and political organizers alike argue that the Green New Deal could simultaneously help reduce inequality in the United States, mitigate the impacts of climate change, and shift the nation’s economy toward renewable resources (Van Sant, 2019).

The resolutions boast that the Federal Government’s practices and policies during the New Deal and World War II “created the greatest middle class that the United States has ever seen,” but acknowledge in passing that many vulnerable communities were excluded from the economic and social benefits of the public works program. Not only were vulnerable communities excluded from the New Deal, but, more significantly, they were deliberately denied entry and dispossessed in the name of American progress. Worse yet, in the American South, Roosevelt and other key New Dealers worked in “intimate partnership” with politicians who ran on platforms of White supremacy, “collaborat[ing] with the South’s racial hegemony as it advanced liberal democracy at home and campaigned to promote liberal democracy abroad” (Katznelson, 2013: 17–18). The architects of the New Deal did not merely tolerate discrimination and social exclusion, but, rather, its most significant achievements directly benefited from Southern racial hierarchies and discriminatory practices (Katznelson, 2013).

In an attempt to avoid the missteps of previous administrations, the authors of the Green New Deal introduced two resolutions that stray from the original public works program through one key aim:

. . . to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”). (S. RES. 59; H. RES. 109)

Notable is the desire to repair historic oppressions through the passage of this resolution, including the harms caused by the original New Deal. But, while the authors of the Green New Deal are aware of the racist exclusion of Black people and other people of color from the political, social, and economic benefits offered through the original New Deal, the legislation still mimics the various fixes inherent in the original public works project (Pettifor, 2019: 33). Following recent scholars (Patel and Goodman, 2020; Van Sant, 2019; Walker, 2022), I posit that the Green New Deal is an opportunity to learn and grow from the fixes inherent in the original policy scheme from which the Green New Deal adopts its name, while simultaneously confronting, mitigating, and repairing the urgent crises of our time.

The Green New Deal offers a promise to offset US emissions better than in the past or reduce the violences—ecological, social, political, and racial violences—at their place of origin. But offsetting is not eliminating; instead, it is a neoliberal promise that capitalism will be on its best behavior as it survives in perpetuity. Just as the authors of the New Deal could not imagine modernity without capitalism, the authors of the Green New Deal do not yet propose climate solutions outside of various capitalist fixes. At present, the Green New Deal proposes geographic expansions of capitalism through the creation of and investment in “clean” infrastructure, as well as the global exchange of technology, thereby opening up space for new markets, labor power, natural resources, and production facilities (S. RES. 59; H. RES. 109; Harvey, 2001: 25–26). The Green New Deal, as it stands, is yet another fix in response to a long line of social–spatial–ecological–racial crises in the United States.

Notably, present Green New Deal policy gives insufficient attention to rural ecologies and rural voices. As geographer Levi Van Sant (2019) argues, land reform, and specifically rural land reform, must be at the heart of the Green New Deal as agrarian reform was at the heart of the New Deal because such a framework “has the potential to summon a diverse constituency from a currently fragmented polity” (p. 69). Diverse perspectives in the policymaking process, as well as diverse recipients of Green New Deal funding and infrastructures, can help remediate past environmental, political-economic, and social harms at multiple scales, and can also bring previously occluded voices into the planning of our collective futures.

As demonstrated in the Santee-Cooper Project, the fixing of space for the benefit of White people was simultaneously the destruction of Black space, sociality, and ecologies. While Black people of the Santee-Cooper Basin once lived independently in lowland rural spaces, fishing and hunting in swamps, and sustaining themselves off of the land and the community of their choosing, the Public Service Authority relocated this population to more urban spaces designed to clean up, moralize, and incentivize Black populations to work not only for themselves and their community, but also for the larger project of American economic recovery (The News & Courier, December 1941a). The Public Service Authority attempted to fix Black life in rural South Carolina to expand White territory and economy into previously undesirable and Black and Indigenous-inhabited terrains, while simultaneously making Black people more palatable and productive laborers and citizens. A key crisis of New Deal South Carolina was thus fundamentally about a lack of White control. The enacted spatial, social, ecological, and racial fixes were the manifestation of racial capitalism’s tendencies to resolve crisis through geographical expansion, restructuring, and control of spaces formerly inhabited by marginalized and racialized people.

While Public Service Authority sought to exert White control over all aspects of Black and Indigenous life through a myriad of fixes, they were only partially able to do so. Modalities of Black and Indigenous life survived, offering us frameworks for relationalities, practices, and reparative models that can guide us toward new infrastructural possibilities, interracial solidarities, and more equitable policymaking in the proposed Green New Deal. For example, in the 1970s, the Public Service Authority discovered dozens of individuals living in Authority-owned swamplands north of Lake Marion. In spite of state-sanctioned land clearance and the seizure of their property in the 1930s and 1940s, residents refused to move, making life, building buoyant homes, and adapting to the ecologies to stay hidden and maintain their terraqueous way of life (Vickers, 2022). Black and Indigenous resistance and survival compels us to ask: What are other ways out of the crises we are currently living within? How can we avoid fixity and instead open up space for capacious pathways, toward repair? Continued critical reflections of the successes and failures of the New Deal, particularly for some of the most vulnerable populations in the country—racialized rural Southerners—might offer us answers to these pressing questions.

Local Green New Deal advocates in South Carolina are beginning to address these questions, even when their elected representatives are not endorsing Green New Deal policies at the national scale. Following decades of living under boil-water advisories due to compromised and contaminated water infrastructures, residents of Florence, a 47% Black community in the northeastern portion of the state, argued in 2021 that, “It’s very important that the voices of frontline communities . . . that our voices are heard in terms of solutions and implementation” (Bunn, 2021; Yale Climate Connections, 2021). Leo Woodberry, a Black pastor at the predominantly-Black Kingdom Living Temple in Florence is a leader of the Southern Communities for a Green New Deal (SC4GND) policy platform. Woodberry showed up for his community where the local, state, and federal governments failed them, helping to install four hydropanels at his church that produce 120 liters of water a day and promoting regional policy that will open up the “opportunity for this country to repair” (Bunn, 2021; Southeast Climate & Energy Network (SCEN), 2021). Among the demands released by the SC4GND include a commitment to Indigenous sovereignty, a rejection of the privatization of natural resources, the elimination of sacrifice zones, the inclusion of diverse voices, and the implementation of (climate-)resilient infrastructures and the replacement of failing infrastructures, among many other urgent demands (Daniels, 2021). As the SC4GND platform argues, “the South often faces underinvestment and scant attention,” therefore, it is critical for local organizations, communities, and actors, like Woodberry, to inform bring multiracial, multiregional voices into local climate action, to unite at the scale of the South and affect policy at the scale of the nation (SCEN, 2021).

The New Deal is not merely a historical project, but is instead still alive around us in our infrastructures, buildings, and governance systems. As Pulido (2016a) argues, eroding infrastructures signify “politics of abandonment . . . where past economic regimes meet the present” (p. 4). This is clearly demonstrated in the failing public water systems of Florence, South Carolina, many of which likely date back to the 1940s and 1950s (American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2021: 36). We live in landscapes shaped by fixes of other eras. Just as the Santee-Cooper Project was a fix in rural South Carolina that had economic and policy implications at the regional and national scale, local Green New Deal infrastructures and actions, particularly ones led by historically and presently vulnerable racialized populations, can inform equitable enactments across geographic scales.

Solutions to the crises of the past, present, and future should not rely on infrastructural stopgaps and temporary fixes. Rather, any contemporary project that claims to offer solutions to the climate crisis should also actively work to un-fix the spatial, social, ecological, and racial consequences of the New Deal, and should further actively work against any present or future fixes. Because, ultimately, any purported solution to our current crises that prioritizes the reification and perpetuation of racial capitalism only serves to create more “fixes” to solve our modern crises, and to perpetuate the very historical and contemporary injustices that the Green New Deal purports to solve.