TVA: PARTNER of the PEOPLE
SHELTON, BARRETT C.
TVA: PARTNER of the PEOPLE by BARRETT C. SHELTON In this, the 25th anniversary year of TVA, many could point to its spectacular achievements—its system of great dams and unified control of a river...
...How could this be replaced...
...Nearly 300,000 acres have been reforested...
...In 1942-43, the state provided no funds for regional library service...
...TVA moved in all these fronts...
...It has provided technical services and facts about our resources, or about the requirements of industry, that we needed to...
...By 11 o'clock in the morning, all food and soft drinks were gone, highways were blocked with parked cars...
...Lilienthal's answer took us by surprise: "I'm not going to do anything...
...For years before TVA, the progressive citizens of Decatur had tried to improve conditions, to establish a sound economy for the city and for its surrounding trade territory...
...State forestry agencies have grown and the scope of their activities has been enlarged...
...Local pluck and perseverance, plus the tools provided by integrated resource development, have paid off in the past few years for Calvert City, a town of some 300 population in west Kentucky...
...It worked with TVA and the oil company to find a suitable site on the industrial embayment for the terminal...
...TVA had no intention of "taking command...
...It paid substantial dividends to its rather surprised stockholders...
...It was followed a few years later by the Air Reduction Company, and the National Carbon calcium carbide and acetylene plant...
...Talk about country people not reading...
...The case of Guntersville was typical of the way TVA enlisted the talents, energies, and resources of state and local agencies and of citizens...
...In the late 1940's, their dreams were realized...
...Today there are six state planning bodies and 65 local agencies, all operating independently and supported by state and community funds...
...We saw we needed agriculture with a stable, year-round income, and we induced the local ice company to install packing plant facilities to provide a market for livestock, a step toward more diversified agriculture...
...Others felt the same way...
...Today TVA, which once was the only source of seedlings, produces less than half of those planted by landowners each year...
...Why this opportunity was seized is illustrated by the statement from one county, facing the loss of library service when TVA support ceased: "We have 6,000 people...
...Take the forest resources...
...Ample Trying to Use It for a Daml water was available for processing...
...The town and its trading area fell into decline after World War I, when the market for dark tobacco, the only kind that would grow well on its lands, disappeared...
...They have caught the vision of their own powers...
...Now what are you going to do...
...It began supplying seedlings for planting...
...In 1953, Bowaters had completed a $55 million plant which has since been expanded...
...State and local agencies pitched in...
...The railroad shop, our major industry, closed down, putting 2,000 men and women out of work...
...I knew I wanted no government control over me or my people...
...How well this yeast has permeated ¦ is perhaps epitomized by the comment of a mountain preacher who attended an agricultural extension meeting for farmers and ministers in a North Carolina county...
...When Bowaters became interested in a Southern location in the 1940's, TVA statistics showed that the forests and woodlands could supply a large plant in addition to the existing use...
...Resources were there: the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers, the Cumberland, and only 70 miles away the Mississippi formed a network of waterways for transportation and potential sources of power...
...You are in command...
...The best place to start a story is at the beginning and at home...
...The Draffen brothers, Luther and Art, operators of the general store, kept pushing for something to be done about it...
...Power was needed for industry to balance agriculture, but Calvert City couldn't even get electric lights until local citizens set up a generator in a flour mill...
...You're going to do it...
...What seemed like impending ruin has been transformed into a prosperous present and a promising future...
...None could miss the point of the demonstration...
...When an oil company approached TVA for use of a small level area created by the dike at the north end of the town, jutting into the lake, for a bulk storage terminal, the decision was referred to the planning commission...
...But in 1933, they were neglected, burned over, sometimes abandoned and eroded, seriously depleted...
...It saw possibilities of industrial development and trade resulting from the new navigation channel, along with the opportunity of making the town a recreation center for a wide area...
...You were not invited, but you're here...
...Harcourt Morgan, another director, brought us the same word...
...Quite the contrary...
...A deep and navigable embayment on the east side of the town was set aside for commerce and industry...
...The possibility of selling seed commercially led to establishing a modern seed-cleaning plant...
...In this county we read 4,000 books a month...
...That has been the story, all up and down the Valley, in almost infinite variety...
...Its fertilizer and agricultural development activities has been channeled through the state extension services...
...Into this almost frankly hostile atmosphere walked David Lilienthal, one of the TVA directors, one midwinter afternoon...
...Where they expended only half a million dollars in forest work in 1939, the same seven states invested nearly 15 million dollars last year in promoting forest improvement...
...Today Calvert City is struggling to keep abreast of the new industrial development, based on a chemical manufacturing complex it had sought so long, and it looks forward to a population of 10,000 by 1960...
...The answer was found in the new reservoir itself...
...Perhaps I feared the "superstate" which some people, mostly outside the Valley, had tried to call it...
...It was a trading center for surrounding farmers...
...Full use of the forest resource also depends on other developments...
...Here are the facts," has been its attitude, "and what you do with them is up to you...
...When the construction jobs closed down, and TVA's support was withdrawn, the libraries remained, supported by state and local funds...
...It helped states and counties set up effective fire prevention organization...
...The real test was yet to come, when Guntersville Dam was closed and the reservoir encircled the town...
...TVA provided funds to the Alabama State Planning Commission to finance expert assistance to the local commission, and it cooperated by providing detailed maps and other data...
...This called for detailed and careful planning in order to make the most of the waterfront...
...no telephones, no railroad, and no newspapers...
...Grain barges now ply the length of the Tennessee, to mills and elevators at Guntersville, Alabama, and Chattanooga and Knox-ville, Tennessee...
...Taking advantage of it, Nebraska Consolidated Mills Company established Alabama Flour Mills at Decatur...
...that huge .planning and engineering tasks can be undertaken and carried out without a loss of democratic values or freedoms...
...New wood-using industries are appearing...
...When we met in conference, our attitude was: "All right...
...The location of a multi-million dollar paper and pulp plant by Bowaters Southern Paper Company illustrates how the various phases of integrated development mesh together to promote industry...
...The real story of the past 25 years is a practical demonstration of the way the combined cooperative work of a forward-looking federal agency, state and local agencies, educational institutions, and private citizens— farmers, labor, business and professional men—can' make the most out of the basic resources of a region...
...Industry came hard, and it came for the wrong reasons—subsidies and low wages...
...Only the federal government, through the TVA, could have done it...
...This activity has paid off in better forest management and more forest income...
...Past our door flowed the Tennessee River, majestically broad but largely useless...
...Interest in forest management was gaining momentum...
...know...
...In 1933, there were no state and only two city planning agencies in the Valley...
...They are no longer afraid...
...It made periodic and systematic inventories of forest resources...
...Daily since 1924, has five times been president of the Decatur Chamber of Commerce...
...We looked about us, and we started to chart new courses...
...The town, after filling of the reservoir, would be on a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water...
...Huge three-deck automobile barges regularly flood the town's docks with automobiles for distribution through the southeast...
...It would, Lilienthal explained, provide the tools of opportunity—a navigation channel, protection from floods, low cost power, better fertilizers, and farm test-demonstrations to show how they cOuld be used...
...It had no powers beyond those traditional functions exercised elsewhere by the government through other agencies...
...Instead, TVA suggested the formation of a local planning commission to take a hard look at the problem and see what steps the town could take...
...Is it any...
...wonder that we are sometimes astonished to learn, from outside critics, that we are Obviously under the heel of an autocratic government agency, or at best, are the wards of a paternalistic "socialism...
...Here was a new insight into our problems and how to solve them...
...The commission set to work on a scheme to make the new reservoir an asset lather than a liability...
...Landowners are eager to plant trees, and local bankers and business men are eager to help them by buying and loaning mechanical tree planting equipment...
...It feels it is on a stable foundation, confident of its powers...
...Figures from Tennessee tell the story...
...TVA: PARTNER of the PEOPLE by BARRETT C. SHELTON In this, the 25th anniversary year of TVA, many could point to its spectacular achievements—its system of great dams and unified control of a river system, its towering steam plants, the development of the largest electric generating system in the world, its tremendous contributions of power to atomic development and the national defense...
...As the dams went up, navigation became a reality...
...More than 50,000 came...
...BARRETT C. SHELTON, publisher of the Decatur (Ala...
...B. F. Goodrich Chemical Company set up a plant to make basic vinyl chloride for its polyvinyl plastics from basic materials provided by the other plants...
...The TVA funds helped set up the agencies...
...He has lectured and written widely on TVA's impact on the people of the Tennessee Valley...
...the combined efforts of the federal government and the people have opened up new and wider opportunities, have given scope to individual talents, intelligence, and enterprise...
...About 50 miles upstream from Decatur, another small Alabama city, Guntersville, faced what at first seemed to its citizens an insurmountable problem...
...In 20 years, the county lost 5,000 population...
...The result has been a richer, more productive region,-and a richer, more productive nation...
...Electric power was available...
...Instead of setting up its own libraries at construction camps, TVA contracted with existing city libraries to provide service which was also open to nearby communities...
...My story concerns itself with people—the people of the TVA region and what they have accomplished in a quarter century of working partnership with TVA...
...The doubts of all skeptics were soon resolved...
...The assets, the resources for growth were here, but we couldn't take advantage of them...
...The plant was a success almost from the start...
...He talked of the relationship of people to the land, of the need for building the soil with phosphate, lime, and legumes, of the need for farm markets and processing plants, of making the most of our own natural resources rather than reaching out into other regions for industry...
...Far from taking the prerogatives of states, counties, cities, and citizens, the TVA has persistently urged them to take more and more responsibility to themselves...
...Another industry, brought to the city in earlier years with a considerable subsidy, went bankrupt...
...Ten years later, TVA provided no funds, the state contributed $170,000 and local sources $125,000—a total of $295,000...
...Years ago, in 1943, my paper, the Decatur Daily, editorially summed it up this way: "We can write of great dams . . . of the building of home grown industry, and of electricity coming at last to the farms of thousands of farm people in the Valley...
...Due to the multiple-purpose system of dams, a flood-free plant site could be found on the Hiwassee River arm of Chickamauga reservoir, up* stream from Chattanooga...
...No state, no city, no county, no private enterprise could have developed the Tennessee River in a unified way to capture all the multiple benefits it offered, from its sources in the mountains to its mouth...
...State forestry agencies were virtually inactive, no reforestation was going on, and protection against fire, except on federal or state owned land, was practically nil...
...Moreover, they provided the seeds for expansion...
...Other industry has found the city attractive, and today, instead of a single major industry, there is a diversity of plants producing many products...
...TVA funds amounted to $13,800 and local funds a little over $4,000...
...So it goes, all up and down the Valley region...
...Its power was untapped, its navigation chiefly a local affair of no significance, its waters often dangerous in flood...
...Wherever communities were faced with readjustments because of the building of dams and reservoirs, TVA urged the responsibility on state and local planning commissions, using the money it would otherwise have had to spend doing the job itself...
...The land, the commission decided, should be developed as a waterfront park, but it did not stop at this point...
...What you do with these tools is up to you," he said...
...Our agriculture was based on one cash crop—cotton, which drained soil of fertility and opened it to erosion...
...We scraped together the capital for a small milk plant, not hoping for a profit but simply to provide a pay check every two weeks for farm families in our section...
...Most of our banks were closed...
...Pine plantations had reached the stage of thinning for pulpwood...
...The bookmobile and the grapevine are the only means of communication...
...From the 1920's on, the Draff ens and their fellow citizens sought, through federal and state and private sources, for the kind of power they needed, and they plugged away at pointing out the advantages their area could offer industry...
...The city has doubled in population, from 12,000 to more than 24,000...
...The Pennsylvania Salt Company built a plant to be near the fluorspar deposits it had acquired in Kentucky and to take advantage of the power available from TVA...
...It was hoped that several thousand people would be attracted to the event...
...From now on," he said, "I'm going to preach less hell-fire and brimstone, and more phosphate and limestone...
...West of the peninsula, a shallower embayment was planned for recreation...
...Town officials, businessmen, bankers, and just ordinary citizens appealed to the TVA to buy the entire town, so they could take the cash and move...
...It provides a market for wood over a 300-mile radius and, to round out the circle, this promotes more intense interest in forest development on the part of the Valley people...
...instead of purchasing and flooding low-lying land on this side of the town, the TVA built a protective dike...
...Forests and woodlands cover half the Valley land area...
...Yet the significant advance has been made in the thinking of a people...
...The studies indicated that the town's income might be reduced as much as 30 per cent...
...Then came the Great Depression...
...Cotton was down to five cents a pound...
...The same with libraries...
...An elevator receives midwest grain...
...In all this development, the TVA has been a helpful adviser, never the dictator...
...More than nine-tenths of the forests now have fire protection...
...The navigation channel offered opportunities for transportation of raw materials and finished products...
...Besides bringing in midwest grain, the mills provided a market for local grain—$2,000,000 worth in 1955...
...In connection with the dedication of the dam, the town sponsored a program of motorboat races...
...Far from withering away, the town has doubled in population...
...Then came TVA . In the beginning I was against it...
...Other similar decisions on detailed, practical matters were made...
...When TVA began the construction of Guntersville Dam, 10 miles downstream, the people of Guntersville learned that the rising reservoir waters would cover much of the farmland on which their trade depended...
...For many of the 3,000 people in the town, there seemed to be only one answer to this dreary prospect...
...At the same time, pur experience over this past quarter century has shown...
...Guntersville's future as a recreation center was assured, and shortly its citizens were improving eating and housing facilities for guests and embarking on the sale of fishing tackle and boating gear...
...Library service spread out to new territories...
...Tennessee Valley Fertilizer Cooperative established a fertilizer mixing plant serving 10 counties...
...TVA has operated in the confidence that once the facts and the tools were placed in the hands of the people, they would know what to do with them...
...Today Guntersville is a busy river port and recreation center...
Vol. 22 • May 1958 • No. 5
