Part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal : TVA Was a Bureaucratic Blessing

Calvin Coolidge thought it was a bad idea. So did Herbert Hoover, insisting that a government agency competing with private business was “the negation of the ideals upon which our civilization has been built.”

But for Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Tennessee Valley Authority was a chance to show what the government could do to help people help themselves in hard times.

TVA, now a sprawling, controversial agency with an annual budget of more than $5 billion, was born in 1933 as part of the New Deal, Roosevelt’s remedy for the Great Depression.

Like other Roosevelt reforms, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, TVA was designed to put people back to work while improving their quality of life.

The result was a government entity unique in the United States--an independent agency charged with nurturing an entire region with flood control, navigation and cheap electrical power.

Wouldn’t Have Worked

TVA, declared Roosevelt, should be “clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of private enterprise.”

Perhaps in any other period of American history or in any other region except the destitute South of the ‘30s, TVA wouldn’t have worked.

But for people eking out an existence in the cotton fields of Mississippi or the mountains of North Carolina, it was a bureaucratic blessing that raised them from darkness into light.

In 1933, the Tennessee Valley had a per capita annual income of $168, only 45% of the national average. About 62% of the people--more than twice the national average--farmed. Only 28.6%--half the national average--worked in manufacturing, trades and services.

By 1985, the region’s per capita income was 77.6% of the national average. Just 4.4% of the population worked in agriculture, while 74.2% were in manufacturing, trades and services.

TVA got its start when Sen. George Norris of Nebraska began introducing bills in the 1920s to make an idle munitions complex in Muscle Shoals, Ala., part of a government agency to develop the Tennessee River basin.

Coolidge and Hoover vetoed the measures, but Roosevelt endorsed TVA as part of his ambitious recovery program.

The fledgling agency was given $100 million to start, and promptly found itself in a dogfight with private utilities led by Wendell Willkie, president of the giant Commonwealth & Southern Corp.

“The Tennessee River touches seven states and drains the nation,” said Willkie.

Low Prices

But TVA director David E. Lilienthal, insisting that people wanted public power, set out to create a demand by setting rates at rock-bottom prices and selling electric appliances to TVA customers.

In Tupelo, Miss., the first city to buy TVA power, consumption of electricity went up 83% in the first six months.

Willkie was unimpressed. “Every time somebody turns on a light in Tupelo, Miss., the entire country pays for it,” he said.

The battle ended in 1939 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld TVA’s constitutional right to exist and sell electricity.

In the meantime, TVA was working to fulfill the grand dreams of Roosevelt and Norris, touching virtually every aspect of life in the Tennessee Valley.

In addition to creating construction jobs, dams like Norris and Wheeler and Chickamauga improved navigation and created flood-free sites that lured businesses already attracted by the prospect of cheap power.

There are 39 dams in TVA’s water control system, and the agency claims they’ve prevented about $2.2 billion in flood damage--more than five times TVA’s investment in the system.

River Navigable

The once-treacherous Tennessee River is now navigable 650 miles from Knoxville to the Ohio River. In 1933, annual barge traffic was 940,223 tons; now it’s more than 36 million tons a year.

The munitions complex in Muscle Shoals became a leader in developing fertilizer to enrich soil depleted by decades of growing corn, cotton and tobacco.

New agricultural methods such as terracing, contour farming, strip cropping and soil surveys were introduced to regenerate the land and increase farm income.

Although the region has 40% less farmland than in 1933, the per-acre yield has more than doubled.

More than 2.1 million acres stripped bare by poor logging practices were reforested. Steps were taken to control local pockets of malaria. Libraries established for TVA construction workers were converted to regional use.

At the agency’s 30th anniversary celebration in 1963, President John F. Kennedy said: “The work of TVA will never be over.

“There will always be new frontiers for it to conquer. For in the minds of men the world over, the initials TVA stand for progress, and the people of this area are not afraid of progress.”