ABSTRACT
On February 27, 1951, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan entered into the first of a series of Point Four technical assistance agreements with the United States to carry out water development projects in the Jordan River Valley. This resulted in the “Unified Development of the Water Resources of the Jordan Valley Region” (Unified Plan), developed by Charles T. Main, Inc., which proposed a series of dams and levees along the river. It was designed upon an entirely constructed environmental imaginary for the study’s team never visited Jordan, but instead drew heavily from their experiences in Tennessee with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to devise their plan. Much like the New Deal’s Tennessee River Valley Authority (TVA) in scale and scope, the Unified Plan was an inherently socio-technological project that dismissed political boundaries and remade the Jordan Valley into an image of U.S. engineering prowess. The TVA in Jordan brought with it rural housing to settle bedouins (nomadic tribespeople), home economic programs for women, and “masculine” activities for men that superimposed New Deal U.S. beliefs unto an inherently Arab, predominantly Muslim society. This allowed the U.S. to package its New Deal arsenal of man-in-nature, woman-at-home, urban/rural divide, and scientific farming in its Cold War battles. This blanketing of natural, political, and social environments with a superimposed system, along with the myriad objects and architecture it produced, restructured social, spatial, and ideological systems. This chapter examines the ramifications of the TVA model, developed under the New Deal and exported as a one-size-fits-all model under the overseas developmental aid programs of Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower in Jordan. This chapter traces what happens after the TVA landed in the desert and the dust settled: a landscape and its people reorganized with the intent of bringing Jordan into the U.S. sphere of influence.
