At Muscle Shoals, Alabama,
on the Tennessee River, a $145,000,000 hydro-electric plant and two
munitions factories had been built during the First
World War. After the war, Senator George
Norris of Nebraska and John Rankin
of Mississippi drafted a bill that would enable these facilities to
be converted for peacetime purposes. Norris, a progressive Republican,
twice persuaded Congress to pass this legislation, but both times
it was vetoed by the president, first by Calvin
Coolidge, and then by Herbert Hoover.
They both argued that as the plant would be government owned, it would
be an example of socialist planning. Something
that both men were strongly against.
Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed with
what Norris was trying to do and believing it would stimulate the
economy of one of the poorest regions in the United States, gave it
his full support. On 10th April, 1933, Roosevelt asked Congress to
set up the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The munitions factory
became a chemical plant manufacturing fertilizers and the hydro-electric
plant now generated power for parts of seven states (Virginia, North
Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi).
The development of the TVA upset many people in the United States.
They complained that a government agency should not compete with private
utility companies in the production and distribution of electric power.
Representatives of these private companies complained bitterly when
it became clear that the unit cost of TVA power was lower than the
rates they were charging.
The 34 dams under the control of the TVA on the Tennessee and Cumberland
Rivers not only produced electric power but also played a role in
flood control, irrigation and navigation. The TVA also served several
other purposes including reforestation, preservation of wildlife,
production of fertilizer and improved use of agricultural land.
Map from Peter Mantin's
The USA 1914-41
(1)
George
Norris
wrote about the Tennessee
Valley Authority in
his autobiography, Fighting Liberal (1945)
Norris Dam, provided for under the original TVA act, is about twenty
miles to the northwest of Knoxville on the Clinch River, a Tennessee
tributary. It holds back the largest amount of flood waters except
that which will be impounded by Kentucky Dam. Norris Dam has had a
very material effect upon the navigability of the Tennessee River
itself and upon the floods of the Tennessee, Ohio, and the Mississippi.
It holds back the surplus waters of a number of Tennessee tributaries
which otherwise would discharge a huge volume of water into the main
river at a time when flood conditions are aggravated.
In 1937 one of the most
damaging floods east of the Mississippi that have ever been recorded
would have been intensified had it not been for the effect of Norris
Dam upon the flow of the Ohio and the Mississippi.
The city of Cairo, located
on the Ohio River, between the mouth of the Ohio and the mouth of
the Tennessee, often has been damaged greatly by floods. There is
no doubt but the city would have been engulfed and possibly destroyed
in this particular case had it not been for Norris Dam.
It may seem impossible
that Norris Dam, roughly seven hundred miles distant from Cairo by
river, should have saved that city from destruction. Yet the waters
of the Ohio at Cairo had risen to the danger point and then above,
the levees for the city's protection were in danger of being washed
out. At the critical hour, eminent engineers, making careful computations,
reached the conclusion that the huge volume of flood waters stored
back of Norris Dam had saved Cairo and had greatly diminished the
floods along the entire Ohio and Mississippi.
(2)
Harold
L. Ickes, The Autobiography of
a Curmudgeon (1943)
I have attempted to sketch briefly PWA's direct contribution to national
defense. Because of the leeway that it had under the law to make grants
to cover the entire cost of Federal projects, PWA was able to undertake
some others that, while useful in peacetime, are just as important
for war purposes as are munitions themselves.
I particularly have in
mind hydroelectric power developments. Where would we be today with
a scarcity of power already making itself felt, and a greater lack
facing us during the next few years, if we had not gone in for the
most stupendous program of power development in history?
We claim no credit for
the conception of Boulder Dam or of the TVA. But we hurried Boulder
Dam to completion after we came in in 1933 and finished it two years
ahead of schedule. The power now being generated there is indispensable
to the war. And while the main credit for the TVA must gratefully
go to that really fine elder statesman, George W.
Norris, the records will show that it was PWA encouragement
- encouragement in the form of coin of the realm - that gave
it not only the means but the opportunity to expand into
the vitally important project that it is.
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