Chapter 2 investigates the ascent of technocrats to key roles in defining the technological foundations of the hydropower nation. The wartime crisis and the active involvement of the state in hydropower development and the training of engineers deepened the connection between hydropower and the Chinese nation. Before the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the National Resources Commission of the Nationalist government conducted studies on China’s hydropower potential. During the war it began constructing hydropower projects in the southwest to mitigate the energy shortage the war produced. By uncovering the many interactions between American and Chinese institutions and individuals, this chapter explores the importance of transnational exchange in strengthening the technological foundations of the hydropower nation. It also delves into the early social and environmental impacts of the nascent hydropower nation. Despite being limited in scale, social and environmental disturbances in the 1940s foreshadowed the significant human toll and ecological changes that would occur in later decades in a fully realized hydropower nation.

Flush with American aid and rising oil revenues, in the late 1950s the shah’s government embarked upon a new and ambitious development program, the Second Seven-Year Plan. Directed by Abolhassan Ebtehaj, the plan drew in a large number of American developmentalists. Chief among them were David E. Lilienthal and Gordon R. Clapp, former directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Lilienthal, Clapp, and Ebtehaj launched a special project to develop Khuzestan, Iran’s oil-province, into a petrochemical paradise where oil, water, and soil would be transformed together, raising living standards and burnishing the prestige of the newly re-empowered shah. The costly project revealed the extravagances of the Second Plan and eventually fell to the political whims of the shah, who turned against the Americans and the plan itself in the early 1960s, using Ebtehaj and Lilienthal as scapegoats for his government’s broader economic and political failures.

For the first twenty-five years or so of his career, Cormac McCarthy was considered a writer of “Southern literature” by most readers. This term designates a literary genre as much as it does a region of origination. Based on paradigms established by the works of earlier Southern writers such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, among many others, certain aspects of setting, plot, and character become the expected norm for writers from the region. As is the case with these other writers, understanding the cultural realities of McCarthy’s South helps readers understand his Southern works. This chapter discusses the context of McCarthy’s Knoxville, from its Civil War history through Reconstruction to the advent of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). It considers how McCarthy’s works reflect this milieu as well as that of the greater South at large, trying to place McCarthy within the context of other Southern writers, and the cultural trends and currents which influenced their writing as well as his.