Modern history

Chapter 43

Model TVA

Too little is understood about social momentum as a force in human affairs; I really think we have it down here.

—David E. Lilienthal

The South is tired of the dark.

—Jonathan Daniels

THE most remarkable single thing about the Tennessee Valley Authority is, in a way, the quality of its acceptance. This immense and beneficent project, the largest agency of its kind in American history, has in its time aroused some formidable opposition. It cut across zones as sensitive as states’ rights, political patronage, and the utilities industry. TVA still has powerful antagonists, like the aged and suffering Senator McKellar and, since November, 1946, it faces for the first time a non-Democratic Congress. But the fact remains that the TVA is, as it were, there. It is an accomplished fact, and it works. As Mr. Willkie once said a few years ago, “It doesn’t matter what I think any more. You can’t tear those dams down!”

Quality of acceptance? Quantity of acceptance? For the record a few items should be put down firmly. The TVA operates in seven southern and border states, and the governors of several of these are, it need not be pointed out, conservative in the extreme. All seven were asked recently what they thought of TVA; all seven responded with vivid pro-TVA views. The governor of Tennessee agreed that “the rights of this state and its citizens, far from having been restricted or violated … have been enlarged.” Ellis Arnall of Georgia said, “The only complaint I have regarding TVA is that its influence has not permeated this state further.” Chauncey M. Sparks of Alabama said, “Conducted … with vision and regard for local agencies, it has made a tremendous contribution to public welfare.” In another recent test of opinion. all newspaper editors in the region were asked to report their feelings; every reply was favorable, out of several hundred, except three. If a general plebiscite on TVA were taken in the valley, the pros would win by 95 per cent, one famous—and conservative—politician told me. Early in 1945, when the authority was under minor particularist fire in the Senate, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asked for opinions from local businessmen. The response in favor of TVA was overwhelming and unanimous; among those replying were one bank president, one Coca-Cola bottler, several contractors and lawyers, the president of the Tennessee Manufacturers Association, and no fewer than eleven presidents of chambers of commerce in the region.

Recently, while the Northwest was discussing the pros and cons of an authority like TVA for the Columbia, the Yakima (Washington) Chamber of Commerce wrote its fellow organization in Chattanooga. Reply of the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce:

There is no question but that this agency has contributed more to the economic development of the Tennessee Valley than any other single influence…. It is generally conceded that the establishment of TVA has accelerated the growth and progress of the region by as much as twenty-five years and possibly more…. This … has been accomplished with a minimum of political domination, control, or interference.

This from a chamber of commerce! Shades of socialism! But the reason is not far to seek:

The power generated by TVA is sold principally to such municipal distribution systems as the Chattanooga Electric Power Board…. In the five and one-third years of Power Board operation, Chattanooga customers have saved $14,876,000 in their power costs, or more than the $14,000,000 invested in the system.

David E. Lilienthal came up for reappointment as chairman of TVA in the spring of 1945, at the time of Roosevelt’s death; whether or not to reappoint him was Truman’s first great decision, and strong pressure against Lilienthal—including threats—was put on the new president by irreconcilables like McKellar. Reaction to this in the valley area was illuminating; practically every newspaper in the region, even in the innermost precincts, anxiously urged Lilienthal’s nomination. From beyond the valley too people came to his defense. I know few Americans in public life with such a copious variety of support. In New York for instance his work was commended heartily by the New York Times and PM alike, and by the Daily News together with the liberal weeklies and a Catholic professor in the Sun.

Eleven million visitors have seen TVA since its foundation, and a vast literature surrounds it; yet, in a peculiar way, it isn’t quite so well known as it ought to be. At the beginning, it attracted more attention abroad than at home; the Times of London was greeting it as a “great American experiment” as far back as 1935. Chinese, Russian, Indian, and European experts have inspected it by the hundred; most outsiders, no matter what their nationality, grasp at once its implications to their own local scene. At bottom, there is little difference between a farmer in Alabama and one in Bihar, a hydraulic engineer in New Zealand and one in Knoxville; a professor in Chungking will like decentralization as much as one in Muscle Shoals. The point remains that Americans, it would seem, know less about TVA than non-Americans. Courses on it are given in European universities; but the American Association of University Professors has never sent a delegation to see “the greatest development in large-scale social planning” ever undertaken. During my trip for this book I met several distinguished Americans—one a musician, for instance, one an actress—who had never so much as heard of the authority. Some of my colleagues and friends in New York, like Dorothy Thompson, William L. Shirer, and Vincent Sheean, know every corner and cranny of Sweden, Poland, and Siam, but I don’t think any of them have ever visited TVA.

Shorelines of the Future

A river has no politics.

—David E. Lilienthal

TVA has a meaning in several spheres. A simple limited definition would be that it is a decentralized federal project, cutting across seven states in an area as big as England and Scotland and containing about 4,500,000 people, for the harnessing of a river and development of its valley for the service of the people as a whole. The New Deal passed into history with the last congressional elections; the Tennessee Valley Authority will probably turn out to be its most permanent and enduring monument.

The Tennessee is, or was, an obstreperous angry river with an angry history; it was long called America’s “worst river.” It is formed by the junction of the Holston and the French Broad just above Knoxville, and the 42,000 square miles it drains include portions of Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi, as well as Tennessee itself; in the north, it almost touches Illinois; in the south, it dives deep into cotton country. The Powell, the Clinch, the Holston, the French Broad, the Hiwassee, the Little Tennessee pour into it, down the mountain slopes; eventually it reaches the Ohio at Paducah, and then the Ohio carries its waters on into the Mississippi. Its valley is fed by a soaking rainfall, 84 inches a year in some areas, and its tributaries charge downhill at a torrential pace. The drop is from roughly 6,000 feet to 933 (at Knoxville) in a hundred miles.

Congress set up the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, with intent to master this foaming Goliath. As much as any man, FDR aside, the father of the project was George Norris of Nebraska, who for almost thirty years had devoted himself to ideas for flood control on the lower Mississippi, and who sensibly thought that this should begin where the floods had their origin, i.e., in upper rivers like the Ohio and the Tennessee. Also there was a recurrent desire to make use of the nitrogen and fertilizer plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, built in World War I, which had become obsolete and was lying idle. Two bills to reconvert and utilize Muscle Shoals passed Congress; Coolidge vetoed one, Hoover vetoed the other. Finally Roosevelt gave an enveloping and energizing spark to the whole idea; the concept gradually arose that flood control, Muscle Shoals, and various other factors might be combined in a single over-all development.

So TVA came into being on May 18, 1933, when Roosevelt had been in office only a few months, and while the country was still prostrate with depression. The wasteful, dangerous giant of the Tennessee was going to be put to work. Running waters were to be “made to walk,” as a TVA pioneer expressed it. But from the beginning the conception went far beyond mere control of a river, though that was job enough. The great germinal and creative idea was regional development; TVA was the first real planning agency in the United States. The act not only gave TVA jurisdiction across state lines, under unified control, but “across existing lines of federal bureaus and departments.”1 A totally new principle was envisaged, that of a “seamless web,” in which “one strand cannot be touched without affecting every other strand for good or ill.” The act called for (a) the maximum amount of flood control; (b) the maximum development of the river for navigation purposes; (c) “the maximum generation of electric power consistent with flood control and navigation”; (d) the proper use of marginal lands, i.e., development of new agricultural techniques; (e) reforestation; and (f) “the economic and social well-being of the people living in the river basin.”

A large order!

But this is not quite all. Mr. Roosevelt, in his first directive, asked that the new authority be a corporation “clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise.” TVA was authorized to acquire real estate, to construct dams and reservoirs, to operate transmission lines, and to sell its surplus power with states, counties, and municipalities as favored buyers. Also it was to put Muscle Shoals into operation, for purposes of national defense. Perhaps we take all this for granted now; the revolutionary character of the agency, as well as its beam and bulk, is difficult to appreciate without hindsight. A British observer, writing in the New Statesman years ago, listed—as if catching his breath—the eleven basic aims the new development seemed to embody. I will quote four of them:

(1) An attempt to create a demand for electrical power in back-woods rural areas and the like, among poor farmers, to an extent … hardly dreamt of.

(2) To ensure that prices charged for electrical power by distributing agencies, public and private, are reasonable instead of excessive, by providing a yardstick, in the form of economic federal prices, with which private agencies must compete, and by which their charges may be judged.

(3) To reafforest lands not really suitable for other forms of agriculture, and to convert to pasture lands not suitable for arable farming … with the further purpose of preventing soil erosion, which is another vital problem of twentieth century America.

(4) In connection with the foregoing to re-settle poor families, white and coloured, now cultivating so called sub-marginal lands (i.e. lands which cannot now yield a reasonable return, and which ought to be returned to pasture or forest), on fresh and better tracts (such as those made available by irrigation).

The history of TVA has included brisk and lively interludes ever since passage of the act in May, 1933. A tense internal struggle led to the withdrawal of the first chairman, Dr. Arthur E. Morgan, in 1938; he was succeeded by Lilienthal, who had been a board member from the beginning. Externally, as was inevitable, the chief struggle was with the power companies; these were spearheaded by Willkie, who was then president of Commonwealth & Southern, the leading utility in the area. Lilienthal and Willkie became, as a matter of fact, good friends; they spent day after day in argument and exploration. In the end Willkie found himself in something of a cleft stick: He told Congress that he was, in effect, being expropriated, while at the same time he got an excellent bargain for his stockholders. For a time he could not “understand” Lilienthal; he thought that there must be “a nigger in the woodpile” somewhere; it was almost impossible for him to conceive (this was back in the middle 30’s) that a man like Lilienthal, who could easily have made twenty times his salary in a private job, cared for absolutely nothing but public service. Of course the issue outran personalities. It was basic—whether or not TVA was constitutional, whether or not it had the right to operate and sell power as it did. The federal courts finally supported TVA, which then took over the Tennessee properties of Commonwealth & Southern. Lilienthal handed Willkie a check for $78,600,000. Willkie’s comment, as he put the check in his pocket, became famous: “Quite a lot of money for two middle western farm boys to be handing around.”

Consider now, in purely physical terms, what TVA has done in the fourteen years since its foundation, at a total cost of about 750 million dollars. The job is incontestably the biggest in American history, from the viewpoint of sheer size. In Chapter 8 I quoted some impressive statistics about Grand Coulee. But the TVA dams as a whole used ten times the amount of material in Grand Coulee, and thirty-five times that in Boulder Dam. There are, at present, twenty-six immense dams in the TVA system, sixteen of them built by TVA.2 The amount of concrete, earth, and rock they contain would, Director James P. Pope told me, fill a hole 10 feet in diameter straight through the earth from the United States to China; the concrete alone is two and one-half times more than was used in the entire Panama Canal; another remarkable statistic is that the amount of TVA construction since 1935 equals that of the entire railway development of the United States for a hundred years.

The best way to describe TVA in detail is to quote Lilienthal. His written work is not merely that of an engineer and administrator and a passionate but cool-headed believer in twentieth century social aims, but also that of a philosopher and poet:

In heat and cold, in driving rain and under the blaze of the August sun, tens of thousands of men have hewed and blasted and hauled with their teams and tractors, clearing more than 175,000 acres of land, land that the surface of the lakes now covers …

The work of the builders has made of the river a highway that is carrying huge amounts of freight over its deep watercourses…. Huge modern towboats, powered by great Diesel engines, move up and down the channel, pushing double columns of barges, and the cargo is no longer limited to raw materials. Billets of steel and cotton goods come from Birmingham, grain from Minneapolis, millions of gallons of gasoline, oil, machinery, merchandise …

Quiet cotton towns of yesterday are now busy river ports…. Millions of dollars have been invested and thousands of jobs created as new grain elevators, flour mills, and oil terminals have been erected along the river’s banks. At Decatur in Alabama, on land where a few years ago farmers were raising corn and cotton, now newly built ocean-going vessels go down the ways into “Wheeler Lake” and thence to their North Atlantic job.

And on these same lakes are thousands of new pleasure craft of every kind—costly yachts, sailboats, homemade skiffs. Nine thousand miles of shoreline—more than the total of the seacoast line of the United States on the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico—are available for the recreation of the people….

Lilienthal was born in a small town in Illinois in 1899; he went to Harvard Law School, and then practiced law in Chicago until 1931, when he became a member of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. He was only thirty-four when, in 1933, Roosevelt put him on the original TVA triumvirate. To say that he has been heart, brain, and soul of the institution ever since would be an exaggeration, since in a curious way TVA has a special heart, soul, and brain all its own; but certainly without Lilienthal it would be less today than what it is.

That TVA helped make the atom bomb is known to everybody; the great city plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, utterly without existence in 1941 and now one of the most interesting communities in the United States, was of course dependent on TVA power, just as Hanford, Washington, was dependent on Grand Coulee.3 So it was natural for Lilienthal’s name to be considered when the future and peacetime use of atomic energy became a pressing national issue. First he became chairman of the State Department’s atomic energy committee and, as such, was largely responsible for drawing up the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, early in 1946. This document became the bedrock of American atomic policy; out of it came the Baruch recommendations to the United Nations. A few months later President Truman created the Atomic Energy Commission of the United States and made Lilienthal its chairman. There is certainly no more important position in the nation, and Mr. Truman could not have made a more appropriate choice.4 Among other things the commission is exclusively empowered to supervise and conduct atomic research, to license operations on all fissionable materials, to make atom bombs for the armed forces, to regulate use of all plutonium and uranium in the country, to distribute atomic material for medical or other use, and to control the “dissemination of secret information.”

So many Americans become spoiled or destroyed by money, by abuse of the acquisitive instinct. Lilienthal is a poor man, who had two children to educate, but he seems to have absolutely no interest in money as such. He is tall, spare, muscular, industrious, and has a manner at once direct and shy. Long before he took the atom job, he wrote that mankind had a fundamental choice: to use science either for good or evil. A person of deep liberal conviction, he believes that “men can make themselves free,” and that “democracy is a literal impossibility without faith that on balance the good in men far outweighs the evil.” Another clue to his thought is his belief that “the real revolution of our time, the dominant political fact of the generation that lies ahead,” is that people all over the world will demand for themselves the fruits of technology applied to natural resources. “No longer do men look upon poverty as inevitable, nor think that drudgery, disease, filth, famine, floods, and physical exhaustion are visitations of the devil or punishment by a deity. Here is the central fact with which statesmanship tomorrow must contend.”

Lilienthal was succeeded as chairman of TVA by Gordon R. Clapp, for some years its general manager. This was a good career appointment. For a time it was thought that Bob La Follette (who gave Lilienthal his first public job) might get the post; this would have been a good appointment too. The other board members today are former Senator Pope of Idaho, and the venerable Dr. Harcourt A. (“H.A.”) Morgan, who has been a TVA director since its inception. Morgan, Canadian born, was formerly president of the University of Tennessee; he is a specialist in the philosophy of agriculture, and he and Lilienthal formed an inseparable partnership. “I’m two years older than his father,” Dr. H.A. likes to say. “Why, from the moment we started this thing together, I tucked his shirttails in.”

The Range of Accomplishment

This is very wide, and a great many factors come into play. The first and simplest thing to say is that TVA raised the income level of the 3,225,000 people in the valley proper by something like 75 per cent in ten years, as against a national increase of 56 per cent. Compare some present figures with those of 1933. Wages went up 57 per cent as compared with 47 per cent for the rest of the nation, retail sales 63 per cent as against 47, value of manufactured products 68 as against 54, and wholesale trade 80 as against 46 per cent.

One specific element is rural electrification, and a proportionate advance in the urban use of electricity. Some 125,000 valley farms are now electrified, and Chattanooga and Knoxville are like Portland and Seattle; cheap rates have made electric current available in unprecedented quantities. Other very big items are the new 650-mile navigation channel and the network of “soil clinics” and 29,000 demonstration farms. Still others are introduction of a cheap new hay drier, a tremendous boom in fishing, the development of a tannin industry, following laboratory research on waste products from timber mills, and the planting of about 150 million trees. Or consider such a factor as malaria control. Malaria in the region, once a menace, has been virtually wiped out. This was done partly by conventional airplane spraying, partly through a wonderfully ingenious system whereby the water level is temporarily but sharply reduced along the lake rims, which leaves the mosquito eggs high and dry, and kills the larvae.

Consider too another factor—education. TVA is a kind of university; its whole staff is a research faculty. The curse of most universities is departmentalism and segmentation. But TVA, which has a central philosophy, based on the broad unifying force of a single idea, is something different; also it co-operates fully with most laboratories and institutions of learning in the region and in particular the land-grant colleges. Georgia Tech is doing research in clays (for aluminum production); the University of Tennessee on kitchen appliances (including a small portable flour mill) and on new electrical devices for farms; Tuskegee on cheap vegetable paint; others on articles as varied as laminated flooring and briquets out of sawdust.

TVA has also promoted an interesting library development. It wanted to get books out to its workers on the dams, and worked with the near-by county authorities to do so; out of this, as construction moved up and down the rivers, came mobile library units—the bookmobiles. The influence of these on isolated rural communities can scarcely be overestimated; in 1940 one area of twelve counties had no books at all; now it has 52,000. One Tennessee county, Meigs, with a population of six thousand, has no railroad, no telephone, and no newspaper. This in twentieth century America! But it does have the TVA-inspired libraries and bookmobiles. “The bookmobile and the grapevine are our only means of communication,” one Meigs citizen wrote Lilienthal. “If we lose the bookmobile, how will we know what is going on in the world? Talk about country people not reading! In Meigs county we read 4,000 books a month”—thanks to TVA.

Then look at flood control, perhaps the most dramatic of all manifestations of authority activity. Recall the 1937 floods, which made a million people homeless in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys; or think back to those of 1943, which inundated four million acres of land in Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and Indiana, and ruined 160,000 homes. Such catastrophes would be almost impossible on the Tennessee, now that TVA’s great dam-network is complete; they are a danger almost as remote as an epidemic of bubonic plague. In January, 1946, occurred one of the great floods of the river’s history, but the new dams held the flow; there was no disaster; the river had become the pliable servant of man, not its master.

Again, let Lilienthal tell the story:

In the winter of 1942 torrents came raging down this valley’s two chief tributaries, in Tennessee and Virginia. Before the river was controlled this would have meant a severe flood; the machinery of vital war industries down the river at Chattanooga would have stopped, under several feet of water, with over a million dollars of direct damage resulting.

But in 1942 it was different. Orders went out from the TVA office of central control to every tributary dam. The message came flashing to the operator in the control room at Hiwassee Dam, deep in the mountains of North Carolina: “Hold back all the water of the Hiwassee River. Keep it out of the Tennessee.” The operator pressed a button. Steel gates closed. The water of that tributary was held. To Cherokee Dam on the Holston went the message: “Keep back the flow of the Holston.” To Chickamauga Dam just above the industrial danger spot at Chattanooga: “Release water to make room for the waters from above.”

… Reports came in from hundreds of remote rain-gauge stations, telephoned in by a farmer’s wife, a crossroads store merchant, a woodsman. From well-nigh inaccessible mountain streams ingenious TVA-made devices send in their reports by short-wave radio without human intervention….

Day by day till the crisis was over the men at their control instruments at each dam in the system received their orders. The rate of water release from every tributary river was precisely controlled. The Tennessee was kept in hand.

All of this is important-—very. All of it should be stimulating and heartening. But we have not touched the heart of the story yet. The heart of TVA is not a river at all, but soil; not techniques in electric power or navigation but in agriculture.

TVA, Soil, and Life

First I went to Norris, to see the beautiful dam there, one of the earlier colossi, and then to Fontana, where the newest dam was just being completed; I flew to Muscle Shoals, and saw the chemical establishments. Everywhere I went, my guides talked mostly about agriculture and the soil and, above all, Dr. Harcourt Morgan did his best to explain these mysteries.

In this atomic age the Einstein formula, E = mc2, is well known; it means that energy equals mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light. Not so well known is another formula equally important to the valley: nCO2 + nH2O = (CH2O)n + nO2. Which means that carbon dioxide and water plus oxygen combine to produce the life of plants.

The case might easily be made that the most important single thing in the world is chlorophyll. This is the green coloring matter in plants, as every school child knows; it has never been synthesized, and it is in conjunction with chlorophyll that the foregoing formula works. A plant lives on carbon dioxide in the air together with moisture in the earth, but this process is dependent on chlorophyll, which is a kind of mysterious catalyst imprisoning the energy of the sun. It transforms solar light into agriculture, i.e., life; sunshine is captured by the green of leaves. Thus a plant grows—like grass—and becomes beef, eggs, milk, and man.

No living thing, animal or vegetable, can live without air, water, soil. Air and water are inexhaustible; but soil is not. We may think of soil as simple dirt; actually, it is one of the most highly complex of substances. In effect soil is life; certainly its character may determine the quality of life. That it behooves us to conserve soil is well known; equally well known is our reckless and prodigal waste of soil, this most basic and irreplaceable of all commodities. Soil has several enemies, of which man is one, and another water. Mother Earth is like “eternal” snow; apply water, and “she” will melt. In a thousand areas in the United States today water is slowly, silently, eating away the life blood of the people. In the Tennessee Valley the average rainfall is 52 inches; this means that six thousand tons of water per year fall on each acre of land, and the cultivatable top soil of this land only weighs about one thousand tons itself; nothing can stand up against such extreme odds, without help. The water, falling on the land, ruins the land, and the land in turn, flowing out into the rivers, ruins the rivers. What TVA stands for, in a word, is reversal of this process. What it seeks above all is to capture and utilize all the lost and wasted energy, to put the forces of nature back in harmony. Capture and make use of all that errant water! Capture and make use of chlorophyll, plants, and soil!

This is the chief essence of TVA. Its real meaning is man and nature working together to restore life to land.

Now another item: consider phosphates. Every plant lives not only on sun and water, but on rock; 2 to 5 per cent of every living thing is mineral. Thus to produce a healthy agriculture ( = life), soil must have a healthy mineral content. For reasons which we need not go into here, most types of soil lack phosphate among necessary minerals. Phosphate rock deposits are found, however, only in a few areas of the country; 80 per cent of all American soil is deficient in it. One aim of TVA (and other agencies) is to remedy these and other insufficiencies by the scientific development of a substitute in the form of a phosphate fertilizer.5

Let erosion continue at its present rate, and the United States will not be able to feed itself in fifty years. For food ( = fuel) the 140,000,000 people of this country, plus its livestock population, need the equivalent of 800,000 tons of coal per day, or something over five trillion calories.

When TVA came in there were counties in the valley more than half destroyed by erosion; some few spots were totally destroyed. The authority has so far saved something like three million acres; millions more will be saved in time. “The gullies are being healed, the scars of erosion are on the mend.” The small terraces on small hillside farms are a work of engineering exactly comparable to the monumental dams; both seek to avoid peril from water, and each puts live water to fruitful work.

Lilienthal’s own words about the general philosophy behind this are the following:

There is a grand cycle in nature. The lines of those majestic swinging arcs are nowhere more clearly seen than by following the course of electric power in the Tennessee Valley’s way of life. Water falls upon a mountain slope six thousand feet above the level of the river’s mouth. It percolates through the roots and the sub-surface channels, flows in a thousand tiny veins, until it comes together in one stream, then in another, and at last reaches a TVA lake where it is stored behind a dam. Down a huge steel tube it falls, turning a water wheel. Here the water’s energy is transformed into electricity, and then, moving onward toward the sea, it continues on its course, through ten such lakes, over ten such water wheels. Each time, electric energy is created. That electricity, carried perhaps two hundred miles in a flash of time, heats to incredible temperatures a furnace that transforms inert phosphate ore into a chemical of great possibilities. That phosphatic chemical, put upon his land by a farmer, stirs new life in the land, induces the growth of pastures that capture the inexhaustible power of the sun. Those pastures, born of the energy of phosphate and electricity, feed the energies of animals and men, hold the soil, free the streams of silt, store up water in the soil. Slowly the water returns into the great man-made reservoirs, from which more electricity is generated as more water from the restored land flows on its endless course.

Such a cycle is restorative, not exhausting. It gives life as it sustains life. The principle of unity has been obeyed, the circle has been closed. The yield is not the old sad tale of spoliation and poverty, but that of nature and science and man in the bounty of harmony.

I visited several demonstration farms, and marveled. One had been “uncovered” five years ago; its land was steadily washing away, right down to the barren clay. My guide, W. M. Landess, an eloquent man who had seen it all from the beginning, kept murmuring, “What a transformation!” The neat terraced fields, once deserted, were growing corn; the nontilled land was resting; part was “under cover” with soil-protecting and water-holding crops, like crimson clover. Before TVA came in, the farmer had simply retreated, year by year, before the marching forces of erosion; now he is attacking. The back part of his 125 acres had been abandoned; it grew only “poverty-land” crops like sassafras. Now it’s producing hogs and beef. “If only I could convey it to you!” he exclaimed.

No farmer in the area is obliged thus to improve himself. The TVA has no authority—-or desire—to coerce. A demonstration farm is strictly a volunteer proposition. What happens is that a group of farmers get together (if they so wish) and meet with the county agent; the TVA field man is at their disposal, to give technical advice and to furnish superphosphate free. The idea is, “You organize your community, pick an area for demonstration, and let us help.” Farmers were reluctant to co-operate at first. Then they saw what happened—just as Iowa farmers, suspicious of hybrid corn at first, became quickly converted when they realized what hybrid was doing for their neighbors.

Here are some comparative figures, furnished me by Director Pope, covering various items in Limestone County, Alabama:

1933

1943

Acres terraced with power equipment

0

47,500

Acres terraced, all sources

11,500

91,357

Acres of pasture improved

351

5,986

Acres small grains planted

2,297

113,677

Tons of lime used

450

49,723

Tons of 16% superphosphate used

160

13,580

Value of legume seed saved

$330

$306,570

At Fontana, F. C. Schlemmer, the project manager who built the fourth biggest dam in the world and the biggest in America east of the Rockies practically with his own two hands, took us around; he loves Fontana as Major Hutton loves Grand Coulee. Schlemmer was one of the first six men hired by TVA; this is the kind of public servant the country should be proud of. Once he left the authority briefly to take a $25,000 job with a private company; he came back because life without TVA, where his salary is a great deal less, seemed literally meaningless.

I will not describe the Fontana dam itself, because we have looked at dams in this book several times before. It weighs more than eight million tons; but it is so sensitive to various pressures that it will tilt one-quarter of an inch upstream when the sun strikes the downstream side. What interested me most was the housing situation. Here, deep in the uninhabited Smokies, in an inaccessible mountain fastness, 3,700 workers had to be housed. I remembered the slovenly huts like a line of scum around the California war industries, the unspeakable wretched hovels near Detroit, Chicago, and Atlanta. TVA does things differently. I had a foretaste when, coming up the road, two trucks each containing half a prefabricated house complete down to doors and bathrooms, drove past. Instead of a car passing a house, a house passed a car!

TVA builds several types of prefabricated house; one costs $2,200 to build, and rents at $27 per month, and I have seldom seen anything more serviceable or comfortable. The houses come in two sections (of TVA’s own design), and are demountable; they contain a living room-dining room, a bedroom, kitchen, and bath. Most of the furniture, like the bed, is built in; on delivery the house has lights in the closets, screened doors, and insulated cupboards, as well as electric hot water. The villages made by a cluster of these houses are strikingly compact and functional; the houses fit together as if the whole community were prefabricated; for instance drugstore, bank, and beauty shop are all of a piece.

The area around Muscle Shoals is as different from Fontana as can be imagined. Here is flat and torpid cotton country. When it was thought that Henry Ford would take over the old nitrogen plant after World War I, a real estate development began; property was sold at crazy prices until the, crash came, and paved sidewalks and lampposts still stretch into a deserted wilderness. So Muscle Shoals is probably the only point in the world where you can shoot quail and other game from concrete pavements.

Muscle Shoals exists not merely for the valley, but for the nation; its fertilizer is distributed everywhere. It makes phosphates, ammonium nitrate and (during the war at least) calcium carbide for synthetic rubber; it is one of the biggest industrial operations owned by the American government.

A final common denominator about TVA is the simple tablet that each of its units wears: BUILT FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.

Power Companies, Taxes, and the Opposition

Power, we should realize by now, is not the main gist of TVA, but power is the issue its enemies usually seize on, on the assumption that it is most vulnerable in this direction, hoping thus to draw a curtain over its achievements in other fields. In the public mind it is ordinarily thought of as predominantly, or even exclusively, a power project, which it is not. Nevertheless power is a very important element in the organization, since its sale pays the bills. TVA is, in fact, the biggest power-producing system in America; the only private company that runs it close is at Niagara. It sold 35 million dollars worth of power in the 1946 fiscal year, to eighty-five cities and forty-six co-operatives, with a net income around 16 million dollars. It does not, of course, sell electricity retail, like Bonneville, which was patterned on TVA and which we have already inspected, it simply transfers power to a local community, which then distributes to the public. TVA electricity covers about a quarter of Alabama, a third of Mississippi, one-tenth of Georgia, a quarter of Kentucky, virtually all of Tennessee, and small areas in North Carolina and Virginia.

The competing private systems are controlled by Commonwealth & Southern (which still operates in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, as well as Indiana and Ohio). In a sense the situation has been stabilized, and the frontiers defined. TVA has, of course, served to drive rates down, just as public power in the Northwest drove rates down; in areas where TVA and private power exist side by side, there is virtually no difference in rates; in places more remote, private rates, though much lower than they were, are still 10 per cent or more higher. It is when you compare TVA rates with those of a community totally outside the valley that you see the difference; I gave an illustration of this in Chapter 12. Another, closer home, shows what people in Memphis pay for power (under TVA) as compared to those in an Arkansas town just across the river, Marianna, which the authority doesn’t touch, and which is served by Arkansas Power & Light:

image

Also, exactly like Bonneville in the Northwest, TVA has greatly stimulated the use of power. At.0178¢ per kwh (as against a national average of.0331¢) more people can afford to buy; the private companies of course benefit from this, and make more money. For instance the two biggest utilities adjoining TVA were ordered in 1944 by their state public service commissions to make rate reductions of roughly $1,400,000, and to refund not less than $1,500,000 chiefly to domestic consumers, because of “prospective high federal income and excess profits taxes.” The Ford principle, that the cheaper you make a good commodity the greater will be your returns to a point, applies as always to most new industrial undertakings.

But opposition to TVA by the private utilities remains fierce and ineradicable; again, the story closely parallels that in the Northwest. One utility executive told me that what he objected to most was TVA’s “glamor”; he thought that a prosaic businessman shouldn’t have to compete with anything so “romantic.” This is puzzling; the serious ground for opposition is of course that TVA is akin to socialism, and extremely effective socialism at that. The power companies no longer play politics in the region quite as they used to. To go back a bit, Southwestern Gas & Electric helped finance Huey Long, and Bilbo once made the press agent of Mississippi Power & Light president of the University of Mississippi.6

But elsewhere in the United States the power lobby is as active as it ever was; consider evidence from the “Electric Hour” on the radio to propaganda agencies like that of the Hofer Company in Oregon which reaches thousands of American publications with anti-TVA handouts. Nobody can write an article in any national magazine, even one of such stature as the Atlantic or Harper’s, that even remotely touches TVA or the power issue, without getting some kind of reply, from the Edison Electric Institute up or down. For example, when I began writing this book, an amiable spokesman of an advertising agency representing a power company immediately got in touch with me. This is a very minor point. I mention it because the power lobby was the only pressure group in the country to pay any attention to what I was doing or what I hoped to do.

The most effective opposition TVA has had recently came in Kentucky. Here, after several attempts, a “ripper bill” reached the legislature which, if passed, would have prevented cities and municipalities from buying TVA power. The president of the Kentucky Utilities Company “admitted frankly that the bill had been prepared by the company” (New York Times, February 16, 1946); this is an example of a kind of direct political activity becoming rare. A great many respectable Kentucky institutions—none of which particularly wants high rates for electricity—came vigorously to TVA’s defense, and the bill was beaten.

TVA officials themselves deny that they oppose the interests of private industry in any way. The authority has worked closely with Alcoa from the beginning; it worked with dozens of business enterprises at Oak Ridge. Once again, Lilienthal phrases the issue best: “The TVA … has sought … to harmonize the private interest in earning a return from resources with the public interest in their unified and efficient development … and to make affirmative action in the public interest both feasible and appealing to private industry.” At any rate Tennessee itself, the heart of the institution, sees little dangerous or subversive in it. It was Boss Crump himself who triumphantly brought TVA into Memphis, and Tennessee advertisements in national magazines, designed to invite business into the state, use the slogan THE FIRST PUBLIC POWER STATE.

Finally, taxes. As in the case of Bonneville, the cry is raised that TVA doesn’t pay any taxes, and so has an enormous and unfair advantage over the private companies. This is not true, though it is true that TVA pays no federal taxes as such since it is owned by the federal taxpayers and its entire income is the property of the federal government. In 1945, its net income represented 45 per cent of its gross power revenues. This income went of course to the government, exactly as if it were a tax, and an additional point to make is that this percentage of return to the government is considerably greater than the average return of the private companies; for instance in 1944 the utility companies of the country paid in taxes only about 23.8 per cent of their total operating revenue. Then consider state and local taxes. TVA does pay these—most distinctly; this is almost always ignored by private utility propaganda, but it is a simple matter of recorded fact. Technically (because no federal agency is obliged to pay local taxes) these payments are described as being “in lieu of taxes”; they are taxes nevertheless and the amounts are quite substantial. For instance in 1944, TVA paid state and county governments $2,168,824, which was $790,311 more than the former ad valorem taxes on these properties; in 1945 the corresponding figures were $2,137,484 and $762,127.

Another allegation in this realm is that TVA “doesn’t pay for itself,” that its accounts are juggled to conceal “operation at a loss.” This is far from being true, and the charge can be made only by someone who willfully neglects to mention how its costs are allocated. Final note: the utility companies, before mentioning such matters, might well look into their own books. In 1943-45 inclusive they earned enough money (by charging rates high enough) to pay an average of 180 million dollars per year in excess profits taxes.

Esprit de Corps

The greatest thing about TVA is something I haven’t specifically mentioned yet but which is implicit all along—the factor of morale. Never in the United States or abroad have I encountered anything more striking than the faith its men have in their work. To explain this we may list several factors:

(1) The quality of personnel is very high. TVA picks its employees with as scrupulous care as any corporation; its standards are at least as high as those, say, of the United States Steel Corporation or, in a different field, the University of Chicago or Harvard University.7 At the beginning, its men were hired during the deepest pitch of the depression; hence, it was able to pick the cream of the national crop among engineers and the like.

(2) Autonomy. TVA makes its own decisions, and makes them promptly. It is in first and last analysis subject, of course, to control by Congress, but in the field and in day-to-day administration it is wholly its own boss. Nobody has to ask permissions from a distant bureaucracy in Washington. Nobody breathes down anybody else’s neck.

(3) Decentralization, a point that needs important emphasis. TVA is very big; also it is very small, in that every unit has its roots in the immediate local problem. Americans, in general, dislike remote control; they appreciate having things close to home; TVA is run by men actually in the field and on the spot.

(4) No interference with private business interests. TVA spreads the socializing concept, but it doesn’t threaten anybody. There is no attempt to dominate. Nobody in the valley thinks it has a foot behind the door. Man and nature work together; so do government and private property.

(5) No politics. This factor is absolute and paramount. All TVA appointments are on the exclusive basis of merit and experience; there are no political jobs of any kind; patronage does not exist, and no employee may undertake any political activity at any time.

(6) Above all, the nature of the job. People are happy because they are doing something creative, something bigger than themselves. You cannot legislate morale; you cannot impose from above the kind of loyalty TVA gets from almost every worker.

Coda: What Next for TVA ?

The phase of major construction is coming to an end, but in the larger sphere TVA’s work, after fourteen years, is just beginning. The plant is there; now should come the period of full use. Consider one detail only. When the authority came in, 3 per cent of valley farms were electrified; the figure today is 24 per cent; but this means that there is still 76 per cent to go. Similar expansion is possible, and is in fact impending, in such fields as dispersal of small industry, forest conservation, and research on almost every branch of agriculture.

The future of TVA is of course more TVA’s, in the pattern sketched in this book several times. We have talked about the Columbia and the Missouri; an even more pressing case might be made for the Arkansas. TVA is not, Lilienthal says, a “cookie cutter,” and different rivers may need different methods; but the idea is there for anybody to pick up and use. The range of the concept is indeed almost boundless; it knows no barriers except the selfishness of man, and its horizon could be illimitable. It proves that the idea of unified development works, that national resources can be developed with politics excluded and without prejudice to private enterprise.

It can be done. What more should one legitimately ask? Quite possibly the TVA idea is the greatest single American invention of this century, the biggest contribution the United States has yet made to society in the modern world.

1 Most of these quotations are from TVA-Democracy on the March by David E. Lilienthal, Harper & Brothers, 1944. This is one of the best books of its kind ever written. Time and time again the commentator on TVA, trying his utmost to describe some phase of its philosophy or operation, returns to Lilienthal to find that he has already said it better. See also an admirable survey by R. L. Duffus and Charles Krutch, The Valley and Its People, Knopf, 1944. A first-class picture paying special attention to financial points is “A Hard Look at TVA” by C. Hartley Grattan, Harper’s Magazine, September, 1945.

2 Five belong to Alcoa, and are operated by a co-operative arrangement. TVA has complete jurisdiction over matters of flood control and the like. The other five were acquired by TVA.

3 TVA personnel kept the Oak Ridge secret marvelously well. Almost everywhere else in the country where activity on the bomb was intense, a visitor would hear vague (and quite harmless) whispering; but not in the Tennessee area. The first hint to outsiders that something very big was going on came when newspaper editors in other regions noticed that the Knoxville papers seemed to be getting an abnormally large amount of newsprint.

4 Lilienthal’s appointment must of course be confirmed by the new Senate.

5 But so far as TVA is concerned the idea is not merely to get a bigger crop or put more money into the farmer’s pocket; it is to correct and remedy a fundamental soil weakness throughout a region.

6 Raymond Swing, Forerunners of American Fascism, pp. 104, 115.

7 In point of fact the first TVA personnel director was a University of Chicago professor.

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