Let's Talk Lilienthal and Whisky
11 October 2020
I Scream for Modernization, You Scream for Modernization, We all Scream for Modernization
David Eli Lilienthal was the co-director and the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority as well as the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Lilienthal gained his Progressive chops as a member of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission under Wisconsin governor Philip La Follette. The fundamental goal of the TVA (for those who haven’t heard of it) was to produce cheap hydroelectric power for rural areas that weren’t being served by private enterprises. According to David Ekbladh, the TVA “was not simply a way to deliver technologies to the American South or any number of regions across the globe to help them modernize. It was seen as a means to achieve development democratically.”[1] By 1943, Lilienthal would claim proudly that the TVA had become “the largest producer of power for war in the Western Hemisphere.”[2] The Tennessee Valley Authority, and Lilienthal himself, as other historians have argued, would become one of the major emblems of America’s development policy during the Cold War era. Nils Gilman, in his book Mandarins of the Future has argued that the TVA’s reliance on oversight, private investment, and technical expertise revealed the agency’s instrumental role in the concurrent technocratic movement in the United States which would influence countless development programs abroad, both within and outside of the United States’ purview.[3]
“Perhaps the only way the job can be done effectively, is by observing the unity of nature, by following democratic methods, by the active daily participation of the people themselves.”[4] David Lilienthal’s mission in his book TVA: Democracy on the March was to deconstruct the success of the Tennessee Valley Authority in order to replicate it. He believed that it was not the unique or “ideal” quality of the Tennessee Valley that made TVA successful but the distinctive “methods of democratic development” that would be extremely useful to other development projects in the United States and abroad. Lilienthal had a particular interest in the Indus River Basin. He believed in sharing his faith that modern engineering and subsequent democratic development could resolve one of the major water conflicts between two newly independent countries: Pakistan and India. The source of the major rivers in the Indus Basin were rooted on the Indian side of the border after 1947, Pakistan would feel continually feel threatened over the loss of control over water that fed into Pakistani territory. Lilienthal believed he had the solution to this conflict.
In 1951, Lilienthal wrote that “India present[ed] the United States and democracy an opportunity…it is not too late in India. The same conditions of impoverishment and need [as in China]; the same potential threat if this segment of humanity goes against us, or, even worse, lines up with the Communists.”[5] In Lilienthal’s 1951 dam bursting article for Colliers, “Another Korea in the Making,” he suggested that the “whole Indus system must be developed as a unit…jointly financed with representation by the technical men of India, Pakistan and the World Bank.”[6] Though there was political and religious strife between the two countries, they were covering up the real problem of resource allocation. So the solution was not rooted in bridging the cultural or political divide, but in “scientific” and “practical” ideas. He claimed that “working together on a common project that is not political but functional, a part of life, and based on technical skill and human need” was needed to stop the “rapidly degenerating quarrel between Pakistan and India.”[7] Lilienthal’s ideas didn’t just end at a magazine article, the World Bank, then headed by Eugene Black, took notice. Black would send letters to both the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan, Jawaharlal Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan, both responded with cautious interest.
In 1960, the governments of India and Pakistan, with the assistance of the World Bank and Great Britain, signed the Indus Water Treaty. After nine years of negotiation, (I’m still working through the immense research and documents I got from the World Bank archives), the treaty itself provided for cooperation between the two countries when it came to the use of the rivers. It established the Permanent Indus Commission as well as procedures to handle disputes and issues between the two countries. This year, the IWT turns sixty years old, but there are still major issues. Pakistan and India have accused the other, consistently, of violating the treaty, while neither country can unilaterally withdraw from the treaty, recent issues with China make these disputes even more complicated. Also, unlike dear old Lilienthal had suggested in the 1950s, the IWT did nothing to resolve the Kashmir conflict, and despite Lilienthal’s and the World Bank’s efforts, the governments of India and Pakistan were unwilling to link the disputes over the Indus River Basin with the Kashmir issue. In fact, at every conflict point in the past few decades between India and Pakistan, the IWT has been treated as the one possible savior of the issue…but also the one collaboration that is easiest destroyed.[8]
What I’ve learned from Lilienthal’s life, and the life of dam development in general, is that it’s very easy to overestimate your gains. Some have argued that Lilienthal’s rhetoric places him outside of the modernization theorists milieu, because of his focus on “moral ideals” and “imagination” when it came to development in the United States and abroad.[9] However, I argue that it was precisely his ability to mix his idealism with the so-called pragmatism of other development promoters that made “modernization theory” so appealing to so many policy makers in the Cold War era. In fact, though I haven’t written all of it yet, I argue that even the end of the Cold War could not bring forth the death of modernization theory, and it is precisely because of this airy or fluffy language of thinkers like Lilienthal that made it possible for the basic tenets of modernization theory to survive the end of the Cold War and the neoliberal turn in the late 1980s and the early 1990s.
Ice Ice Baby
Obviously no one is going to a bar anymore, because of the plague. But I’m assuming many of you enjoy a dram of scotch every now and then. But wait! It’s hot outside, especially in California, where it seems like the state is on fire every other week. So you walk to the freezer, pull out an ice cube, and plop it into your glass of Highland Park 12 (or whatever you’re drinking).
Please don’t do this.
I get that it’s hot, I get that I can’t stop you. But don’t do it.
Some (wrong) people will tell you that adding ice to your scotch will give you a cleaner or smoother taste. No.
If you take a glass of whisky, specifically scotch, and you add ice, you’re going to dilute the flavors. But, if you really need to add a lil’ something, add a couple drops of water. Adding ice makes it harder for you, even if you’re a novice like me, to figure out all the fascinating flavors of your scotch.
This advice holds true for rye, bourbon, Canadian whisky, or any other whiskey drinks. I think there are many whiskeys that aren’t that special to us, and they’re more of our “daily use” whiskeys — I guess putting ice in those isn’t wrong (as even I have done!). But if you’re spending $50 or more on a bottle of whisk(e)y - drinking it with ice isn’t doing you or your palette any favors.
If you enjoyed this, you should buy me some coffee here or here.
[1] David Ekbladh, “‘Mr. TVA’: Grass-Roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for U.S. Overseas Development, 1933-1973,” Diplomatic History 26, no. 3 (July 2002): 335–74.
[2] “David E. Lilienthal is Dead at 81; Led U.S. Effort in Atomic Power,” The New York Times, January 16, 1981, sec. Obituaries.
[3] Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 38.
[4] David E. Lilienthal, TVA Democracy On The March, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953), 6-7.
[5] Niranjan Das Gulhati, Indus Waters Treaty: An Exercise in International Mediation, (Allied Publishers, 1973), 91.
[6] David E. Lilienthal, “Another ‘Korea’ in the Making?” Collier’s, (Aug 4, 1951).
[7] David E. Lilienthal, “Another ‘Korea’ in the Making?” Collier’s, (Aug 4, 1951).
[8] Saleem H. Ali, “Water Politics in South Asia: Technocratic Cooperation and Lasting Security in the Indus Basin and Beyond,” (Journal of International Affairs, March 22, 2008).
[9] Christopher T. Fisher, “‘Moral Purpose Is the Important Thing’: David Lilienthal, Iran, and the Meaning of Development in the US, 1956–63,” The International History Review 33, no. 3 (2011): 431–51.