Encyclopedia of American Studies

Tennessee Valley Authority

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is the principal survivor of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first "hundred days" of the New Deal (March 9�June 16, 1933). Enacted by Congress and signed into law by Roosevelt on May 18, 1933, the TVA Act capped 35 years of intense legislative and political struggle to preserve for the public the government-owned munitions plant and Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on the Tennessee River.

Roosevelt built on the repeated but unsuccessful efforts of Nebraska Senator George D. Norris, a Midwestern progressive Republican, to create a public corporation to keep these World War I facilities out of private hands and establish a public "yardstick" for measuring the performance of private utilities. Roosevelt, in his congressional message of April 10, 1933, enlarged Norris's vision. Adopting the philosophy of conservationist Gifford Pinchot that natural resources and related activities were united in a "seamless web," Roosevelt's proposal encompassed the entire Tennessee River and charged the TVA with the responsibility for planning "the proper use, conservation, and development of the natural resources of the Tennessee River drainage basin and its adjoining territory." The TVA was to be "a corporation clothed with the power of Government but possessed with the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise." The TVA also was to bring electricity, economic progress, and hope to Appalachia, one of America's most economically depressed and backward regions.

Roosevelt's version of the TVA included Tennessee and portions of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Today this area encompasses 80 thousand square miles (207 thousand sq km) and approximately 8 million people.

The TVA quickly began to fulfill its broad mandate. Construction began immediately on what eventually became a network of twenty-nine dams on the Tennessee River and its tributaries to control devastating floods, to provide a 650-mile (1,046-km) navigation channel from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Paducah, Kentucky, to create "the Great Lakes of the South" for recreation, and to generate electricity.

The TVA's three-person board of directors, appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, did not stop there. The World War I munitions plant became a laboratory for developing experimental phosphate fertilizers. Demonstration farms for testing new farming techniques were established throughout the valley, in collaboration with regional land-grant colleges. A forestry program largely restored the valley's forests, which had been destroyed by clear-cutting and fire. Malaria, a serious health risk in the 1930s, was attacked and eliminated. TVA agents helped small communities and counties plan for economic growth.

By the 1960s the initial emphasis on the "nonpower" regional development activities had diminished; production of low-cost and reliable electricity became the TVA's dominant goal. The urgent need for electric power in World War II accelerated the TVA's dam-building program. In the war's aftermath, and as the river's hydrogenerating capacity was reached, the TVA in the late 1940s began construction of eleven large coal-fired steam generating plants and, in the 1970s and 1980s, struggled with an ambitious but controversial program of nuclear generating facilities. By 2000 the TVA became the nation's largest electricity producer, generating more than 155 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.

For all its achievements, the TVA has been controversial from the beginning. In 1936 the Supreme Court upheld the TVA's constitutionality in the historic case of Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority. Nonetheless, congressional and other critics have relentlessly hammered away at the TVA. Even though the TVA brought thousands of jobs to a depressed region, some valley residents, reflecting their heritage of independence and self-sufficiency, deeply resented the presence of a large federal bureaucracy in their midst. Land acquisition for reservoirs drove many valley residents from their ancestral homes. Coal-fired electricity generation led to excesses of strip mining and severe air pollution. Electricity prices shot upward in the 1980s owing to the high cost of the TVA's nuclear program. In the late twentieth century the TVA attempted to correct its environmental shortcomings, getting its nuclear program back on track and adapting its management to the new challenges of a deregulated electricity market.

John G. Stewart

Bibliography

Clapp, Gordon, The TVA: An Approach to the Development of a Region (1955; Russell & Russell 1971).

Ezzell, Patricia Bernard, TVA Photography: Thirty Years of Life in the Tennessee Valley (Univ. Press of Miss. 2003).

Gray, Aelred, and David A. Johnson, The TVA Regional Planning and Development Program: The Transformation of an Institution and Its Mission (Ashgate 2005).

Hargrove, Erwin C., Prisoners of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933�1990 (Princeton Univ. Press 1994).

Hubbard, Preston J., Origins of the TVA: The Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920�1932, new ed. (Univ. of Ala. Press 2006).

Lilienthal, David E., The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. 1, The TVA Years, 1939�1945 (Harper 1964).

Macy, Christine, et al., The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion (Princeton Architectural Press 2007).

Murchison, Kenneth M., The Snail Darter Case: TVA Versus the Endangered Species Act (University Press of Kansas 2007).

Phillips, Sarah T., Poor People, Poor Land, in This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge 2011), 75�148.

Pritchett, C. Herman, The Tennessee Valley Authority: A Study in Public Administration (Univ. of N.C. Press 1943).

Selznick, Philip, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (Harper 1966).