Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

During the worst days of the Great Depression in the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated a series of new and innovative ideas to combat America's economic crisis. The programs, collectively known as the New Deal, offered relief and recovery to several groups and institutions that had been particularly hard-hit by the Depression, including farmers, youth, banks, industry, and workers. One of the most innovative accomplishments of the New Deal was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which became law on May 18, 1933, during the first 100 days of Roosevelt's initial term in office.

The TVA offered recovery and relief to an agriculturally devastated region in southern Appalachia, which incorporated seven southern states within the water tributaries of the Tennessee River system—an area encompassing approximately 40,000 square miles (103,600 square kilometers). This region, once identified by Roosevelt as the “nation's number one economic problem,” included the states of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia.

The Tennessee Valley had been prosperous in the past, but, according to Arthur E. Morgan, a Roosevelt intimate associated with the TVA, as quoted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., by the 1930s, “only poverty remained—poverty, with thousands on thousands of families who never saw $100 cash income a year.” Thus, the TVA sought to revitalize the South's economy but also to improve the lives of millions of families who lived in rural Appalachia. It was, Morgan suggested, “not primarily a dam-building program, a fertilizer job or powertransmission job,” but, rather, a large idea for “a designed and planned social and economic order.”

One of the primary goals of the TVA was to offer public power to a region devoid of electricity. The greatest champion of public power, Nebraska senator George W. Norris, had vigorously advocated the idea of public power during the 1920s. His defense of the government-owned dam at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, against private interests who hoped to purchase the complex led him to seek a broader federal program of dam construction along the Tennessee River. However, conservative Republican leaders in the House and Senate, as well as two Republican presidents, defeated six of his dam-building proposals before Roosevelt took office in 1933. Norris's efforts kept the dream of public power alive in the South and, in large measure, the TVA was actually his legacy.

Between 1933 and 1945, the TVA, in one of the largest construction efforts ever undertaken by the federal government, constructed 16 dams in the Tennessee River basin. According to Leuchtenburg, it was, in short, a “public corporation with the owners of government but the flexibility of a private corporation” that worked in conjunction with state and local agencies. TVA's benefits were immediately apparent. Millions of Americans found steady employment through the TVA. The dams also generated electricity to the rural South (only two out of every [Page 1716]100 farms had electricity before the TVA) and manufactured fertilizer for the region's farmers. The lakes that it created offered recreational opportunities and a profusion of government-funded parks were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and other agencies along their shores. Conservationist goals, like soil conservation, the removal of depleted agricultural lands, flood control, and forestation, were also major components of the TVA program.

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