technology and culture Book Reviews 687 minding us that there would be no machines in the garden had not the garden been there first. Martin Reuss Dr. Reuss is a senior historian in the Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He is working on several projects dealing with the politics and technology of water-resources development and anticipates that some of these projects will actually be completed. Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building ofthe TennesseeTombigbee Waterway. ByJeffrey K. Stine. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1993. Pp. xiv + 336; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper). The story of the Tennessee-Tombigbee (“Tenn-Tom”) waterway is a distressingone. Envisioned as early as the 18th century, authorized by Congress in 1946, analyzed repeatedly in the 1950s and 1960s, funded initially in 1970, and completed in 1985, the Tenn-Tom was to be a great shortcut for barge traffic. By linking the Tennessee River Valley and western flank of the southern Appalachians with the Gulf of Mex ico at Mobile, it would obviate a long trip north to the Ohio, and then back south down the Mississippi. It was an Army Corps of Engineers project: the corps not only designed the canal and oversaw its construc tion but engineered its very feasibility by regularly generating benefits projections that were always slightly greater than projected costs. This was no mean feat: during the fifteen years of construction, costs rose from $323 million to $2 billion. It was also an achievement of classic southern politics, a measure of the power of a few long-serving Missis sippi and Alabama legislators—Stennis, Eastland, Sparkman, Whit ten—who chaired key congressional committees. Their achievement is all the more remarkable since the project was almost constantly under attack in the courts, in the press, or in Congress. Its very survival re quired a prodigious coalition-building effort each year at appropria tions time. By most measures it was a failure; it came nowhere near generating the projected barge traffic, and the economic development it was to bring to depressed counties in western Alabama turned out to be garbage—the waterway did allow cheap transport of urban trash to places too politically weak to say no. The central issue of this book is whether, as one proponent put it, the Tenn-Tom was “a creditable project with a realistic prospect of substantive benefits to the region and Nation if completed, or . . . just a boondoggle conceived by the Corps of Engineers and rail roaded through Congress by a few powerful Southern lawmakers” (p. 234). Jeffrey Stine suggests the latter: an objective observer could have foreseen failure. While it shortened the route to the Gulf, the Tenn-Tom could only accommodate tows one-fifth the size (eight 688 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE barges per towboat vs. forty) that the Mississippi could accommodate. Ultimately it was built for political reasons, he argues: this grand daddy of pork-barrel legislation was politically useful because it ap peared to contribute to regional “development” and to bring federal money into the states (much in fact went to outstate contractors). Only a few, Stine tells us, “dared speak truth to power” (p. 245). Stine tells this story as the history of a public work. A third of the book deals with the “work” end of things: the conception of the proj ect, various constraints on design, the methods and problems of con struction. Two-thirds addresses the “public” aspect of the project: the endless stratagems, both of those who would kill it—“environmen talists,” railroads that would compete with the canal, and a few budg etary watchdogs in Congress—and of its promoters: the congres sional delegations and state governments of Mississippi and Alabama, and various quasi-public local booster groups, such as the TennesseeTombigbee Waterway Development Authority. Stine’s is the kind of political history that searches for motives and “interests” underlying what the actors say in public, where invariably they justify their views in terms of public good, wise use of funds, fairness, and progress. The southern congressmen apparently see a federal project mainly as a means to reelection. In public they cham...