Appalachian History

On May 18, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, creating the TVA. The aim was to provide river navigation, flood control, electric power, employment and improved living conditions in the seven states cradling the Tennessee Valley region. Much of the public welcomed the TVA as one of the most visionary of FDR’s New Deal innovations. Displaced farmers and the region’s power companies were not among them.

“They started a new deal program that would help everyone and improve everyone's life. They formed a group called the Tennessee Valley Authority. These were the biggest idiots of all. They come strolling in here thinking they're all good giving people cheap electric power, but they don't think of the farmers.

“Where do you think they got their power from? They got it from the rivers. The rivers I used to irrigate my land with. But it was all gone then. They formed dams, and stopped up the water. My poor apples were gone then. My sisters still had their business, but they too were unhappy with what the TVA was doing to the farm that my father had started.

“That was it for me. I couldn't produce any more apples with those darn TVA people doing what they wanted with the water. I was then forced to move into town to try to get a factory job. I took all the money that I had, and all my clothes, and I was off to see what this New deal was all about.

“Wendell Wilkie, president of the Commonwealth and Southern Company, led the fight against the TVA. He had many followers, but there were also men that disagreed with him and they liked the idea of having the Tennessee Valley Authority.”

Michael Smith
Orchardist
Interviewed November 11,1934
Raleigh, NC
Source: http://www.ncsu.edu/ligon/am/teddy/tva.htm

“There is just one phase of this program to which we object most seriously, and that is the Federal Government spending the taxpayers' money for the erection of power plants which, as we feel, are not needed for the very simple reason that generally, throughout the country, there is an abundance of power capacity, and particularly in the Tennessee Valley region there is already an excess of capacity. We are at a loss to understand how the power generated at Government-built plants can be disposed of except to take the place of privately owned power plants now supplying that community.”

John D. Battle
Executive Secretary of the National Coal Association
Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs
House of Representatives (74th Cong., 1st Sess., 1935)
Source: http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/coal.htm

Representative Joe Martin of Massachusetts stated that the TVA was "patterned closely after one of the Soviet dreams." As a subsidiary of the federal government, the TVA enjoyed numerous advantages that private power enterprises did not: from the onset it paid less than one fifth of the equivalent total Federal taxes paid by investor owned power companies. The authority did not pay any interest on funds appropriated to it from 1933 to 1959.

Not surprisingly, Wendell Wilkie’s Commonwealth and Southern, and various other power companies as well, filed a total of thirty four lawsuits against the TVA by 1937. Three of those challenged the very constitutionality of the act before the Supreme Court. The TVA remained intact throughout.

Between 1933 and the end of World War II, the TVA directors managed the biggest construction project on Earth, helping bring the people living in the region into the modern industrial and agricultural era. But not without a fight.


Sources: http://web.bryant.edu/~ehu/h364proj/fall_97/swain/Controversies.htm
http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/tva17.htm
www.spiritus-temporis.com/tennessee-valley-authority/
http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=T072
http://cog.kent.edu/lib/OlsonFairExchangePaper.pdf


TVA, Tennessee Valley Authority, Wendell Wilkie, appalachia, appalachian history, mountains

"The first of a series of articles this, through which the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority will keep Survey Graphic readers abreast of the most arresting single project in America today. As a base, take the long stalemate at Muscle Shoals; take times flat with business breakdown and unemployment; take a region deep-seated with neglect. Turn it all right-side up as a terrain of opportunity and start long run planning in the midst of our emergency moves.

"Reservoirs built now to impound rivers will have piled with silt in the course of years—unless dam-building is paralleled with a height against soil erosion in the highlands. Power plants, rimmed with mills and factories, will suck people into congested centers that ten years from now may duplicate the idle machines and unemployment of other industrial districts—unless a new way of life can be framed in this watershed. These are only two of the exciting alternatives staked out by the TVA.

"AS a small boy, it was my duty each evening to carry in the firewood and to fill the wood-box by the kitchen stove. In order to avoid monotony, I varied the task by different ways of piling the wood. Sometimes it would be in neat horizontal layers; sometimes on end; sometimes the sticks would be matched as to size and length.

"Let me do something of the sort in this series of articles through which I hope to share some of our adventures in the Tennessee Valley. They will be in the nature of an informal log of the work in process; less of a log, however, in another sense, than armfuls of situations, encounters, possibilities, plans and developments. The instalments will be written as we go along, but are less likely to stick to the calendar than to follow the bench-marks of our planning—to employ a term we use in civil engineering when we mark and record the elevation of points for future reference. I shall draw on letters, memoranda, notes of staff meetings, reports and addresses.

"In Antioch Notes, I was able to share periodically with faculty, students, graduates and friends of the college the stream of impulse and discovery that have gone into our educational experiment there, so that we had the reinforcement of their understanding and criticism. It is in much the same spirit that I shall try to put before one group of Americans outside the Valley the running story of what is going forward, and invite the interest of your readers.

"WHEN the President proposed the organization of the Tennessee Valley Authority his action was not in response to a happy thought without relation to his program as a whole. Rather, he saw it as a normal and integral part of that program. Some of the policies he proposed must of necessity be worked out on a national scale, such as the banking system and the NRA. There are others which can best be dealt with on a smaller scale before giving them national application, or which have regional variations and can best have regional solutions …"

Excerpt from
Strength in the Hills
by Arthur E. Morgan
Chairman, Tennessee Valley Authority
Survey Graphics, January 1934

Established in 1921 as a companion to the social work journal The Survey, Survey Graphic targeted a mainstream audience interested in social and cultural issues. In the 1930s, Survey Graphic provided a public forum for discussions about unemployment, labor unrest, race relations, healthcare, and technological change. According to the magazine's editor, Paul Kellogg, Survey Graphic relied on "social team play," bringing together writers from different fields and with different viewpoints to discuss issues that Americans were concerned about, but mainstream media publications seldom discussed.

Full article at: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/davis/survey/articles/government/gov_jan34_1.html


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