Reviews for Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll

The average rating for Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-12 00:00:00 Len Oram Though there's a substantial amount of padding, and a wealth of unnecessary or irrelevant detail, overall this book offers a nuanced and insightful look at the famous or infamous snail darter case that snarled the Tennessee Valley Authority's Tellico dam project for years. Despite some shortcomings, University Press of Kansas's Landmark Law Cases series once again proves its worth. Surprisingly, the book doesn't quote Tennessee Senator (and soon to be Majority Leader) Howard Baker's 1979 cri de coeur from the Senate floor which seems to sum up the passions engendered by the case: "Mr. President, the awful beast is back. The Tennessee snail darter, the bane of my existence, the nemesis of my golden years, the bold perverter of the Endangered Species Act is back." The subject of his ire was a three-inch minnow discovered in 1974 and soon listed as an endangered species by the Secretary of the Interior under the new Endangered Species Act. The endangerment finding caused the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court, in TVA v. Hill in 1978, to halt construction of a dam that was almost 80% finished and on which almost $90 million dollars had already been spent. The case became the symbol of either the power of new environmental laws or of the courts' overally broad interpretation of those laws against common sense. Ronald Reagan used his weekly radio show to regularly denounce the litigation, and Baker's screams were actually some of the more balanced in the political arena. The author of this book provides the background to these battles and also some very important insights that clarify the case. The first insight is that the Tellico dam was always a horrible project. Long-time TVA chairman Aubrey Wagner actually invented the project to try to create a "new mission" for the TVA after it had dammed up all of the other local rivers and built all the cost-effective power plants it could. When proposed in 1963, nothing except some very generous interpretations of economic development caused by the dam, including a Boeing-funded new town on land taken by eminent domain that was supposed to house tens of thousands (never realized), could make the benefits of the project outweigh the obvious costs. Despite this, the dream of a new industrial boom inspired by the dam caused Congress from 1965 and onwards to appropriate millions of dollars for it. The second main takeaway is that the snail darter was always a mere sop to stop the dam. It was actually discovered by University of Tennessee zoologist Dr. David Entier when he was working on a previous piece of litigation against the dam (which, using the new law requiring environmental impact statements, also caused a court injunction that stalled the dam project for a year). Entier immediately realized the darter could be used to stop the project, and worked quickly to have it listed as endangered, despite the lack of evidence of where else it might be (it was later found in other streams). Even after the TVA had agreed to transport the darters to another river, the Secretary of the Interior refused to allow the transport of the species, seemingly more bent on stopping the dam than protecting the fish. So there are few saints in this story, and most of the best of it is not about particular individuals, but about innovative procedural turns, in courts, Congress, and the bureaucracy. The book shows just how elaborate procedural games had become by the 1970s. In fact, the Supreme Court ruling in TVA v. Hill goes into shocking detail on congressional procedure, elaborating on the order of investigative hearings, levels of committee reports, appropriations versus authorizations, House rules of order, all under the rubric of deference to congressional prerogative. It's perhaps a warning against over-use of legislative history to divine vague intentions. But the spirit of the time was that appropriate knowledge of procedure would conquer all. In the end, the case caused Congress to create the "God Squad" to allow certain endangerment findings to be overruled, and when that squad refused to condemn the fish, Congress just overruled itself in a TVA appropriations act. So the dam was finished, or "closed," in 1979. From this conclusion it would seem that the litigation accomplished nothing, but this book shows that the snail darter case changed both environmental law and the debate over it forever.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-25 00:00:00 Hugh Hall Just as the story was getting good or interesting, the author would switch into some pshycobabble and I'd get bored again.