Poet, Project, Pork, Progress

The cypress and liveoak river bottoms of South Carolina's coastal fringe near Charleston are festooned with Spanish moss and legend. Here Generals Sumter, Greene and Francis Marion ("The Swamp Fox") harried Tarleton and Lord Rawdon at the Revolution's end. Here Sir Peter Parker's fleet was defeated at Sullivan's Island by General Moultrie, whose name was given to one of the forts near which the Civil War began three generations later. On forested uplands running back from the warm sea stood some of the South's finest oldtime plantations. Along the rivers and their dense delta tangles, survivors of the South's once great game supply--wild fowl, deer, turkeys--still abound, now enjoyed by rich Yankees who have bought up the old plantations.

In 1935, South Carolina's politicians decided that, as their share of PWA's millions, they would take $6,000,000 (as a starter) to divert some of the flow of the big Santee River, which empties east of Charleston, into the smaller Cooper River, which empties at Charleston. But they would first impound these waters inland, build a power dam, have a "Little TVA." Navigation from Charleston upstream to Columbia, flood control on the rampageous Santee, would be their excuses for a public hydroelectric project to serve the Southeast as far around as Raleigh, Atlanta and Jacksonville from proud but sleepy Charleston.

Mayor of Charleston then, and ambitious head of the State Public Service Authority, was Burnet Rhett Maybank, 40, first Charleston aristocrat since the Civil War with the energy and ability to win over enough low-born upstate farmers and mill hands to get himself elected Governor, which he did last year.

South Carolina's private utility companies, already equipped to generate far more power than their area could buy, fought the Santee-Cooper project in court & out. They lost. Traditionalists argued that some of South Carolina's most historic spots would go under water. They were ignored. Naturalists deplored upsetting Nature's balance by making fresh the brackish waters of the Cooper basin, teeming with life from shellfish to wild geese. For so protesting, Archibald Rutledge was censured by the State Senate, but the lower house saved him his honorary title of State Poet Laureate.

Six weeks ago the first crew of diggers appeared in a shrubby field near Pinopolis and began clearing land. But one impediment remained: South Carolina's condemnation law, behind which landowners in the to-be-flooded area took refuge, vowing to defend their holdings against the march of unnecessary Progress and political Pork. Last fortnight both houses of South Carolina's General Assembly put skids under this impediment by voting to the Public Service Authority a new right of eminent domain, subject to price verdicts by arbitrators. Last week Governor Maybank knocked out the last chock by signing this bill and the Santee-Cooper project, to cost $40,300,000 in all, was on its way.

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