ABSTRACT
What appeared as a universally supported water policy to build a major dam across the Delaware River in the 1950s, precipitated instead into one of the most contentious regional fights over water policy and dam building in the Eastern United States, and a failed project by the gigantic federal dam-building agency—the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Utilising mixed qualitative methodology with interviews, content analysis of multiple media sources, archival and legal research, this chapter examines how the Tocks Island Dam project arose, and how it fell apart after three decades of controversy, dissent, coalitions, propaganda wars, legal manoeuvring, multiple lawsuits, and chaos, and how conflicting narratives continually fought to reframe the project as either inevitable or inept. This one fight did more to tarnish the reputation of the previously hegemonic image of the Corps of Engineers than almost any other project, despite the Corps’ efforts to utilise media propaganda to reframe the project to suit their agenda. By 1975, what had at first seemed like an unstoppable and unquestioned federal force, the Corps of Engineers, was re-cast as the Goliath, brought to its knees by a coalition of small-town protesters fighting like David to slay the giant.
