The River (1938) and the New Deal

My students are watching The River this week in a documentary and society senior seminar, so I'm looking forward to reading their online responses. Here's one we published nearly a decade ago:

In Lorentz’s The River, ecology is foregrounded at the expense of race. This 1937 film provides a clear government-sponsored argument for intervention by programs like the TVA. But it also examines the reasons for wide-spread flooding before offering this solution. The River illustrates the impact of human settlement along the river and efforts to combat flooding that erosion caused by stripping the land for farming encourages, at least from the early nineteenth century. The film illustrates how impoverished the South became after the Civil War not only because of the “tragedy of war,” but because, “already the frenzied cotton cultivation of a quarter of a century had taken toll of the land.” It also demonstrates the ramifications of lumbering in the North, mining in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia and urbanization along each river shore, declaring, 

         The water comes downhill, spring and fall;

            Down from the cut-over mountains,

            Down from the plowed-off slopes,

            Down every brook and rill, rivulet and creek,

            Carrying every drop of water that flows down two-thirds the continent.

The River also shows the extent of the battle against the floods and the number of flood victims, 750,000 without “food and water and shelter and clothing,” the cost of exploiting the lands for their resources. To meet these victims’ needs, the narration explains that “We sent armies down to help the engineers fight a battle on a two thousand mile front: The Army and Navy,/ The Coast Guard and Marine Corps,/ The CCC and the WPA,/ The Red Cross and the Health Service,” programs that were part of FDR’s New Deal.

            

And The River offers numbers to support its claims about the cost of exploiting the land: “For fifty years we plowed for corn, and moved on when the land gave out./ Corn and wheat; wheat and cotton—we planted and plowed with no thought for the future—/and four hundred million tons of top soil…have been washed into the Gulf of Mexico every year.”  It also highlights not only the immediate repercussions of flood damage, but also the consequences of losing top soil—“poor land makes poor people.” According to The River, as of 1937, “forty percent of all farmers in the great Valley are tenants./ Ten percent are share croppers …. But a generation facing a life of dirt and poverty, / Disease and drudgery;/ Growing up without proper food, medical care, or schooling,…/And in the greatest river valley in the world.” 

The images that accompany the narrator’s claims about environmental, human, and economic costs, however, point out an important element missing from The River, Blacks bearing the greatest burden of flood-induced poverty and homelessness. In fact, all of the images of tenant farmers impoverished by poor soil and flooding are of Whites. Blacks are only shown in footage where slaves work the fields and load barges with bales of cotton before the Civil War. Only in the Epilogue to The River are Blacks even mentioned—because their labor contributed to the degradation of the land: “We got [B]lacks to plant the cotton and they gouged the top off the valley,” the narrator explains.

The River seeks to valorize the TVA and other New Deal projects, this time from the perspective of the federal government that commissioned the film. And The River ends with a view of a Tennessee Valley dam producing electricity to bring “a Soul”—and progress—to the South, effective when coupled with “soil conservation” and “model agricultural communit[ies]” built by the Farm Security Administration, programs highlighted even further in Power and the Land and The New Frontier, two other New Deal documentaries. The narration ends by arguing that, unlike past attempts, New Deal projects can successfully control rivers and land of the Mississippi delta, “Control enough to put the river together again before it is too late…before it has picked up the heart of a continent and shoved it into the Gulf of Mexico.” The River argues for federal intervention and public control of land and water. The River seeks to sell the TVA and other federal projects to a general (White) public in 1937, when Whites, especially the Southern Whites most affected by the projects, would resist images of Black slaves and sharecroppers carrying the greatest burden in the Southern agrarian economy.