THE PEOPLE'S STAKE IN PLANNING

...The change is told, too, in the land...

...Being decentralized, close to the y>roblems, facing its responsibilities at close range, forced to face the consequences of our mistakes and shortcomings, the TVA has been able to enlist the active participation of hundreds of local and state institutions and agencies in this job of planning and carrying out plans...

...No power in TVA to compel joint action binds this coalition together...

...Some discerning industrialists urge widespread postwar "planning" as a way of assuring the future of "free enterprise" or "democratic capitalism"—phrases that also have come by loose handling to be as foggy in their meaning as "planning" itself...

...It concerns everyone interested in planning that the Valley's people fought a determined and successful battle to persuade Congress to permit the TVA to keep on the course which Congress itself had charted 11 years before...

...Perhaps of greater significance, certainly to those interested in planning, are the methods that have been developed for accomplishing the physical development...

...For Congress directed that that Valley's resources were to be developed not separately, as in the past, but in a unified way...

...Planning in this unified way for the development of resources required a new kind of instrument of planning...

...The same story of change extends to the forests of a Valley that is more than half wooded...

...Responsible For Results The TVA idea of planning sees action and planning not as things separate and apart, but as one single and continuous process...

...For the term "planning" has come to be used in so many different senses that the nomenclature has almost lost usefulness, has even come to be a source of some confusion...

...The Peril Of Coercion This lack of power to enforce plans has disturbed-a good many observers and students of the enterprise, and mystifies some of them...

...Plans had to be made, of course, many of them...

...The People's Stake In Planning By DAVID LIL1ENTHAL THE TEST of democratic planning- is whether the people will fight for it—not simply whether they will accept it, or approve it, or join in it—but whether they will fight for it...

...TVA is responsible not alone for plans but for results...

...It showed the place the program has in the esteem and confidence of the people of the region...

...The TVA has responsibility to see that things happen—but no powers of compulsion, save only a limited authority to condemn land—a power that even private utilities possess for private purposes...

...It is important that they were defeated, when the House of Representatives refused to concur with the Senate...

...Will the people help to make it effective...

...In my opinion the idea of planning is still struggling for popular support in America largely because the most spectacular plans have been drawn by men who did not have the responsibility for carrying them out...

...Their land produces from 30 to 60 per cent more than before of better quality crops, while preserving the top soil for the years and the generations to cpme...

...Our critics, admitting that not a little progress has been made by voluntary methods, point to the many farmers who still persist in plowing higher and higher on their hills, planting more corn and cotton, destroying more and more land, to the substantial timber interests which continue to spurn the advice of forest technicians that would sustain the yield of lumber, to the manufacturers who still pollute thte streams with waste...

...The gullies and erosion that had damaged 7 million of the 8 million cultivated acres of the Valley are healing...

...Waters once wasted have been put to work, night and day, producing electricity, 10 billion kilowatt hours a year to lighten the burden of drudgery, to turn the wheels and heat the furnaces in scores of new enterprises representing hundreds of millions of dollars of private investment...

...These instrumentalities of local and state government and private associations and business, acting in concert with TVA, have made the physical accomplishments possible...

...The Tennessee Valley—a region larger than England —has been referred to quite generally as the most extensive example anywhere in the world of what democratic planning can accomplish...

...TVA is a planning agency, the first of its kind in the United States...

...it is imperative that the people must be in on the planning ; their existing institutions must be made part of it...

...What is important is the light the TVA's experience throws on the modern task of making nature work for man, of changing man's environment so that it will provide him with a better opportunity for individual development and spiritual strength...

...But eroded rural farm lands and blighted urban districts are symptoms of the same unwise utilization of resources...

...The way land is farmed determines the flow of waters both on the land and in the rivers...

...To get a job done in this way was a unique assignment, one that required the invention of new devices and new methods...

...The people of the Tennessee Valley have just won a fight to protect and maintain the integrity of the TVA regional program of planning and action...

...But the analogy is a mistaken one...

...In the President's message on TVA in 1933, this fact was stressed...

...Fields that had grown old and barren with misuse now are vigorous with new fertility...

...That voluntary coalition, with each group doing the job most appropriate to it and yet the whole woven together into a firm fabric, would have been impossible but for one essential provision written into the TVA law by the Congress: the fact that the TVA is decentralized...

...So it is important to citizens the country over who are preparing postwar plans that, when its program was threatened, the Tennessee Valley was, to quote one of its leaders, "on fire...

...Nor was the river, under the TVA plan of comprehensive development, to be seen separately from the land, as in the past...

...TVA's purpose was not the making of plans, but that a valley be developed...

...The development of minerals is still another part of the change...

...So frequently have men sought an escape from the long task of education, the often prosaic day-by-day steps to "do something about it," by pressing for a plan— usually in the form of a law—without considering whether the people understand the reason for the law's plan, or how they are to benefit by it...

...What of the enforcement of economic and social plans in this valley ? I would not say dogmatically that there is never any justification whatever for regulatory measures...

...The TVA, he said, "should be charged with the broadest duty of planning for the proper use, conservation, and development of the natural resources" of the region, but should also be responsible for getting results...

...Getting that participation was to be almost wholly on a voluntary basis...

...Step by step they will be transformed into reality...

...Most of the groups lay out their own money, run their own affairs...

...For it is those methods, those ways of planning and carrying plans to fruition that have put in the hands of the people, at every turn, more and more of the job of building the strength of their region...

...The physical changes that have taken place tell only part of the story...

...An unwillingness to start from where you are ranks as a fallacy of historic proportions...

...A Story Of Change The story of the Tennessee Valley in the past decade is the story of a great change...

...TVA was directed to design the dams so that all assets —navigation, flood control, and power—were to be made available to the people from each dam...

...But most significant was the fact that this crisis tested the strength of the regional planning program of the Valley...

...If this conception of planning is sound, then it.is plain that in a democracy we always must rest.our plans upon "here and now," upon "things as they are...

...But the direction and trend have been unmistakably upward...

...The job having been defined and the broad policies laid down, Congress fixed upon one agency the responsibility, for results in resource development in a region...

...Not one plan, once and for all, but the conscious selection by the people of successive plans...

...This aspect of TVA's experience may throw some light on a vital question that has concerned planners from the beginning: "Would planning bodies be more effective if given 'teeth...

...The planning problems and methods of the Tennessee Valley may seem a far cry from those of the bustling cities...

...The label for what has happened in the Tennessee Valley is not of particular importance—whether it is called planning or resource development, or any other name...

...Plans that people will fight for are living, dynamic...

...It is here that much controversy has arisen in the field of planning...

...The Unified Approach So much for the physical changes of the past ten years in the Tennessee Valley...

...And that has been a national benefit, for it has opened one of the best possible markets for the expanded production of other regions, such as the East and Middle West...

...An awakening in the whole people of a sense of a common purpose is the very life principle of democratic planning...

...On 3 million acres dirt farmers, pioneers in new scientific methods, sponsored and aided by the TVA, have shown what the whole Valley will soon be able to do...

...This has a profound and salutary effect on the experts themselves...

...But I feel strongly that in resource development the admitted limitations of voluntary methods, distressing and tragic as their consequences sometimes are, do not invalidate the wisdom of a minimum of coercion in carrying out such plans...

...Not one goal, but a direction...

...it has no arbitrary point of beginning and goes on and on with no point of completion...

...And all the series of structures were to be dealt with as interdependent, interrelated—in short, a unity...

...Almost all the index figures tell the same story...

...Such a popular uprising to fight for a government activity comes under the head of "man bites dog"—it is news...

...The decisions are made in the Tennessee Valley...

...they used every avenue to let their sentiments be known...

...By 1940, and before the effect of war expansion, the per capita income had increased in the seven Valley states 73 per cent over the level of 1933...

...But I prefer to use the terminology of plans and planning sparingly, within the TVA and outside...

...And each dam was to be made to yield all of its potential value—not only a navigation channel, or flood control alone, or power or recreation...

...Other parts of the job are being done by tens of thousands of farmers working on their own land, by scores of local power boards distributing electricity to cities and farms, by local planning boards readjusting their communities to take advantage of newly created deep water frontage, scores of soil improvement societies, county health boards, city or regional libraries, chambers of commerce...

...It is an agency rooted in the Tennessee Valley, where the resources and the people and their problems occur...

...This Is News It isn't news, especially these days, when citizens complain to their Congressman about a Government activity or write indignant letters to the editor cussing out a public agency...

...TVA has no power—and wants no power—to order farmers, owners of forest land, businessmen—citizens generally—-to do anything...

...The lesson of the past seems to me clear on this score...

...The TVA did not face the stupifying complexities of clearing each step of its work with perhaps a dozen agencies in Washington...

...We are all bound together by a common purpose and a common plan of action : the unified development of resources for the strengthening of the region and its people...

...while for the same period the increase in the country as a whole was 56 per cent...

...The detail of those amendments—just how they would have hamstrung and crippled the TVA in its war job or its function as a planning agency—is unimportant...

...This was different...

...The Valley's achievement depends upon TVA's ability to enlist the voluntary cooperation and consent and participation of the people, their private enterprises and their local and state public institutions...

...Those results depend chiefly upon the people's participation...

...That principle of joining planning and action was enacted into the TVA law...

...It is contended constantly that the course of education and voluntary action is too slow, that only the force of law will meet the crisis of depletion...

...It is not part of a bureau or a department in Washington...

...In whatever guise it comes, once coercion becomes the accepted chief reliance for making planning effective, more and more coercion is needed...

...Without this confidence, planning in a democracy is sterile, short-lived, ineffectual...

...Others have gone to the other extreme...

...That method embodies the voluntary and the ardent and enthusiastic participation of the people and of the people's institutions in the basic task of developing the natural resources upon which all human plans and aspirations rest...

...More than once industries have been located at points where it seemed clear to,TVA that sound planning should discourage industrial location...

...They did not have the wholesome discipline imposed upon the experts of the Tennessee Valley, who have had to ask themselves: "Is this a plan that I can take responsibility for seeing carried out...

...That program, as the people had come to know it and participate in it for almost 11 years, was threatened by amendments to an appropriation bill which would have changed the basic TVA law...

...I am deeply persuaded that high as the price of voluntary methods maybe in delays and errors, in the end the price of arbitrary-enforcement of planning is nothing less than our freedom...

...Why do the people of the Tennessee Valley feel the way they do...

...Will the people understand it...

...The change is also told in the figures of a rising level of income of the people and their enterprises...

...The river was to be seen as a comprehensive whole, not as a series of unrelated sites for dams...

...they approve or violently condemn "planning" because to them it means a complete reconstitution of our social system, comprehensive state socialism, and the like...

...present-day planning, anywhere in the world for that matter, will fall into the same pit if it makes the same gigantic error...

...But in the Tennessee Valley the expert cannot escape from the consequences of his planning, as he can and often does where it is divorced from execution...

...Chambers of commerce, labor unions, farmers' organizations, stores and factories, and civic organizations joined together to buy full-page advertisements to tell how they felt...

...But plans and action are part of one responsibility...

...How many are.the bloody casualties of liberal efforts to improve the lot of man, how bitter the lost ground and disillusionment because of failure to understand so simple and yet so vital an issue of human strategy...

...What seems the plainest sense to a manager, i.e., fixing responsibility in one place for an entire undertaking of many parts, all interrelated and interwoven—land, water, minerals, forests—was virtually a revolution in government administration...

...In terms of planning, the significance of TVA lies in the method of carrying forward the Valley's enterprise, a concept that underlies the entire undertaking...

...In the current postwar planning discussion, for example, some people have pared down the word "planning" to mean merely ordinary foresight...

...The region is still a region of low income, far below the average for the country...

...Planning that people won't fight for winds up on a shelf in the reports of experts...

...Will they make the plan their own...

...Too often the resources of both city and country have been exploited or mistakenly developed for temporary special benefits, without the guidance of a common purpose...

...There is another kind of change—new public library service, state parks established where none had been before, more hospitals, county health units almost doubled, less tuberculosis and malaria and other "low-income disease," the creation of planning commissions,-state, county, and city, and the growth of city and town planning as a definite part of the life of many communities...

...The idea that planning and responsibility for action may and should be divorced—the maker of plans having little or nothing to do with their execution—follows the analogy of the planning of a house, an office building, any fixed structure...

...the way a plan is developed and carried out is at least as important as the physical project itself...

...The building of the 16 new dams has transformed a wandering, inconstant, and dangerous river into a chain of broad and lovely lakes carrying a heavy movement of barges of commerce—250 million ton-miles of traffic a year, and steadily growing...

...If TVA had been a "planning agency" in the sense that its responsibility had been limited to the making of plans—the usual meaning of the term—those plans would probably have met the fate of so many other plans: brochures decorating bookshelves, adornments' of the bibliography of a sterile, learning...

...Rooted In The Valley Part of the job—the dams, for example—TVA did directly...

...The Valley press united in an almost unanimous chorus of protest day after day and was joined in vigorous editorial disapproval of the amendments by newspapers all over the country and by editors of widely varying political faiths...

...For the development of a region or a community is a course of action...

...In the Tennessee Valley the method of developing1 resources in the past decade represents a departure in national policy...

...Similarly, the other natural resources of forests and of minerals and the elements in the air all were to be seen and' planned and dealt with riot separately, as in the past, in order to fit the arbitrary pigeon holes of government departments and bureaus, but as they are .in nature, "a seamless web" in which each strand affects every other strand...