TVA: A YARDSTICK FOR TOMORROW

...TVA is people...

...A thousand valleys over the globe and our valley here are in this way the same: everywhere what happens to the land, the forests, and the water determines what happens to the he good fortune of this re-veeks in the Tennessee Valley...

...For Mr...

...If it is facts that Congressmen need, they are here in this book, in practical terms of production, and money saved, and floods checked, and wasted soil salvaged...

...People working cooperatively, through existing local, state, and Federal agencies, toward an enlightened, a desirable, and an attainable goal...

...What I want to stress in this too-brief review is my belief that without the poetic passion and...

...It is broader than the reclamation of a wasted valley, or the control of floods, or the revitalizing of sterile soil...

...The goal embraces the ways of living and the very morale of the millions of people served by TVA's giant dams...

...The cold hard facts and statistics are recorded...

...Lilienthal, after 10 years of passionate devotion to his work, has been moved profoundly by its worldwide implications, and gives us pages of prose-poems such as this: "I write of the Tennessee Valley, but all this could have happened in almost any of a thousand other valleys where rivers run from the hills to the sea...

...The immediate task of fighting keeps us tense...

...Every one of his projections into the future was grounded on actual, present, down-to-earth experience...

...This is of great importance in the postwar period...

...When that time comes it will be desperately important that there be in this country and abroad many living proofs, of which TVA is one, of the creative powers of mankind and of democracy's demonstrated and practical concern for the everyday aspirations of the people...

...TVA is a fountainhead of conservation...

...Lilienthal and other TVA officials I made an airplane tour of the tremendous area which TVA serves...

...In his book, David E. Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, has given us a fascinating story of how the dream was initiated and how it is being pushed toward fulfillment by guidance and leadership, and without coercion...

...All that experience is compressed into this book...

...This enthusiasm, be it noted, was not of the pipe-dream variety...

...And TVA isn't politics...

...the philosophic convictions of "Dave" Lilienthal, that conquest would have been long delayed if not entirely prevented by the private utility corporations and the political foes who have long harassed the finest and most enduring contribution of the Roosevelt regime...

...there is no space here to list the project's tremendous achievements...

...Only a man like Lilienthal could have weathered the storms...

...You must get the book and share in the adventure of the conquest of nature—often hostile —by the brains and the skill and the patience of man...

...One regrets that the volume was not published in time to be placed earlier in the hands of every member of Congress, where only quite recently TVA was again blasted by bigots, political wheelhorses, and conservatives who have forgotten the origin of the word "conserve...

...In Missouri and in Arkansas, in Brazil and in the Argentine, in China and in India there are just such rivers, rivers flowing through mountain canyons, through canebrake and palmetto, through barren wastes—rivers that in the violence of flood menace the land and the people, then sulk in idleness and drought ¦—rivers all over the world waiting to be controlled by men—the Yangtze, the Ganges, the Ob, the Parana, the Amazon, the Nile...

...In many communities of this vast valley, once listless and lost, there is a stirring and burgeoning, the feeling of lives refashioned and people looking toward new horizons with confidence and hope...

...Once that tension is relaxed we must prepare for a letdown, a bitter loss of faith and hope...

...And only he could write so glowingly and with such deep conviction this paragraph in one of the final chapters of the book: "The TVA has come to be thought of (here and abroad) as a symbol of man's capacity to create and to build not only for war and death but for peace and life...

...But if they are more deeply stirred by poetry, aye they will find poetry in this book, too...

...For the valleys of the earth have these things in common: the waters, the air, the land, the minerals, the forests...

...And in company with Mr...

...Character, as well as soil, is subject to disintegration and erosion...

...In that brief journey I caught a little of the impact of this Federal enterprise upon the lives of people, especially in its ability —novel in our time—to make people feel secure against the hazards of the future, whether at peace or at war...

...For despair and cynicism in our own ranks will be a deadly enemy after Germany and Japan surrender...

...And TVA has wrought a miracle in the lives, the labor, and the dreams of the people as well as in the earth which they walk...

...More than that, I caught a little of the spark of "Dave" Lilienthal, his amazing capacity for detail and direction combined with a sort of apostolic enthusiasm...

...The goal is broader than the creation of kilowatts of electrical energy...