UNITY IN A RIVER VALLEY

...These men and women whose pride of workmanship so impresses every visitor to the region and whose various specialities in resource development when pooled, constitute the world's greatest single source of know-how in this all-important field...

...Louis Post-Dispatch, which is planning to take key men in the Valley down to TVA to see how things are going there, favor a Missouri Valley Authority, under which there would be unified, integrated work on the entire valley, with flood control, power production, and improved navigation, together with research looking to the improvement of soils, etc...

...In contrast to the air of humility all too often worn by the personnel of many other Government bureaus, these Valley employes walk around with their chests out, not offensively, after the age-old manner of bureaucrats, but like persons conscious that they are doing a big and most significant job...

...Jay's theme is underscored, 150 years later, by Chairman David Lilienthal of TVA in his thrilling book, TVA—Democracy on the March, when Lilienthal writes of the two working principles for resource development which have come out of the brilliant performance in the Valley...

...Frederick C. Crawford, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, asked recently, "What is a Government job...

...Free enterprise as interpreted by the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers means free exploitation of the natural resources of the country and the people thereof for the increment of private profit and it means nothing more, however you interpret it...

...It would be interesting to have Mr...

...So significant that the work in the Valley is being considered ae a yardstick for similar resource development the world over, from the Jordan to the Missouri...

...Of course what is back of all this reactionary hoorah is the deadly fear lest a MVA would produce electric light and power as cheaply as TVA or the publicly-owned Grand Coulee-Bonneville system...

...With equal pleasure I have often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people...

...Again he says: "A new chapter in American public policy was written when Congress in May of 1933 passed the law creating the TVA...

...This friend is no "chiel takin' notes...

...This makes ironic reading when you realize how loudly these same Fat Boys have been yelling about national unity...

...One would provide for the usual thing of having Army Engineers dig out channels in the lower reaches of the Valley...

...Providence has in a peculiar manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions and watered it with innumerable streams for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants...

...For the first time since the trees fell before the settlers' axe, America set out to command nature, not by defying her as in the wasteful past, but by understanding and acting upon her first law—the oneness of men and natural resources, the unity that binds together lands, streams, forests, minerals, farming, industry, mankind...

...One thing that impressed him was the pride the men and women of TVA take in their work...

...And so, of course, they are...

...After the Revolution, in the crucial years when the entire future of the new nation depended upon the people's recognition of the unity of all our states, John Jay writing in The Federalist, proclaimed this truth as follows : "It has often given us pleasure to observe that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, wide-spreading country was the portion of our Western sons of liberty...

...Two Working Principles It is good news from the conservation front that all hands battling to save the American land from preventable wastage and spoliation are now agreed that the central TVA philosophy of the essential unity of men and resources must be adopted for the success of all such projects in the future...

...Second, that the people must participate actively in that development...

...One would hardly expect that there would be any opposition to such a sensible plan as this, but trust "the free enterprisers" to raise the customary howl about "socialism," "statism," "New Deal pork" and the rest...

...Crawford go down to the Tennessee Valley and tell that to the members of the large group of well paid, skilled workers who have been on the TVA's payroll -for the past 10 years...

...Today there are two bills before the Senate both having to do primarily with flood control in the Missouri River Valley...

...He is enthusiastic as a kid about the work the Authority is doing...

...These are: "First, that resources development must be governed by the unity of nature herself...

...Freedom To Exploit It wasn't so long ago in fact that they were all for international unity...

...Progressives and liberals in the Valley, following the lead of the St...

...He has been around America for years, going into towns and communities and coming home with stories that the local men, being too close to their own city rooms, have never dreamed could make good copy...

...When his stories appear in Collier's or the Readers' Digest there is a great gnashing of reportorial teeth and cries of, "Why didn't we write that one...

...and he answered his own question: "A Government job is a substitute for a poor farm...

...In short, the things in this watershed which should be done for the development of the whole Valley's resources, for the lasting benefit of all its people...

...So when my friend gets really lathered up about a piece he is working on, you can bet the material has to be good...

...the other endorses a huge plan of irrigation in the northwestern section of the Valley...

...You remember a book by a man called Willkie entitled One World...

...The Progressive Way This new lifting of the sights from focus upon the single purpose downstream dam, the solitary electric The Controlled And The Uncontrolled power plant, the isolated erosion control project means that if plans for unified development of the Missouri River basin, or the irrigation projects around Grand Coulee, for example, come through, a lot of boys now in training camps or overseas will come marching, sailing home to man-sized, badly-needed jobs, such jobs as those the men of the TVA are proud to work on...

...It was under our noses all this time...

...The United States Chamber of Commerce is suddenly concerned about "states' rights" and wants every state in the Valley to handle its own water resources in its own sweet way...