TVA: PILOT PLANT FOR VALLEYS
Lilienthal, David
TV A: Pilot Plant For Valleys By DAVID LILIENTHAL (EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first of a series of articies by Mr. Lilientltal on the experience of TV A as a yardstick for the proposed Missouri...
...It was something new...
...But prior to TVA, that knowledge of unity had not been deliberately reflected in the organization of our Government...
...All of its operating offices were to be not in Washington, but in the area whose people it was to serve...
...TVA was to be a kind of technical servant of a valley's farmers, businessmen, lumbermen, workers, in respect to all the interrelated natural resources upon which that valley's life depends...
...TVA was not to be run by remote controL There you have the basic differences between the TVA and the traditional Federal organization—unity of development and a regional decentralized administration...
...New opportunities for progress have been created for and by the people, who have, as an Alabama editor wrote, "caught the vision of their own powers...
...The statute creating TVA directed this public corporation to do certain things itself, and to accomplish other objectives in cooperation with existing agencies, jye were told to control the river's water so as to protect the people from the ravages of flood, at the same time to provide a channel for navigation that would nourish commerce...
...It is the greatest single asset of the people of the region, an addition to the wealth of America...
...On the other hand, those who urge the creation of a regional agency, an MVA, do so on the basis of their understanding of TVA's program and achievements...
...These things are being accomplished through a unified program of resources development in partnership by the Federal Government, represented by the TVA, and the people and institutions of the Tennessee Valley...
...There were separate plans for controlling its floods, but the floods continued, year after year, destroying factories and crops and homes and human lives, and adding to the destruction on the lower Ohio and the Mississippi...
...One bureau had one responsibility, to make a certain river navigable, for example...
...Navigation and industry and minerals and farm crops are not separate problems in actual life—surely everyone knows that...
...Guidepost For An MVA From a reading of the newspapers and the Congressional Record, it is plain that the creation of an MVA is being discussed on the basis of the TVA's record...
...TVA, set up not as a bureau but as a corporation owned by 130,000,000 stockholders—the American people—was told to develop or to aid in the development of all the natural resources of the Tennessee Valley region...
...A whole department of the Federal Government was devoted to assisting in the solution of the problems of businessmen whose enterprises are all based on the natural resources of our nation...
...Floods had been controlled...
...John J. Cochran of Missouri...
...The Tennessee today is a chain of beautiful lakes behind a series of controlling dams...
...For a century or more, rivers had been made navigable, as a Federal function...
...TVA was not intended to be merely an aid to the development of one river valley...
...It encompasses hopes and dreams that were dormant or desultory a decade aj, o. They are hopes and dreams which today are being translated into the physical facts of giant dams, green fields, and revitalized forests, of better farms and growing industry to utilize the raw materials of water, soil, and minerals...
...What was it we were told to do when TVA was created 11 years ago...
...Those who look with disfavor on an MVA do so largely because of what they understand TVA's record and its principles to be...
...That system of flood protection—the first of its kind —has been tried and tested...
...Not one resource, such as power or forests, not two or three, but all of them— the river, the land, the forests, and the minerals...
...It was no secret from any thinking person that the well-being of men and women on the farms depended upon the purchasing power of the men and women who dwell in the cities...
...James E. Murray of Montana and Rep...
...Leaders from all over the world have come to look at the Tennessee Valley in terms of their own problems in the valleys of the Jordan, the Danube, the Yangtse, the Missouri, the Columbia, and the Arkansas...
...Power had been developed and had been marketed, for many years...
...But figuratively speaking, the Valley has widened tremendously...
...All valleys differ, of course—-in the Tennessee Valley we have ample rainfall, for example, whereas parts of the Missouri Valley require irrigation...
...The second anil appear in an early issue...
...There were other plans to use the great power potentialities of the Tennessee, but they were never realized...
...That going on all over the country today, and it has been for a long, long time...
...New, Not More, Federal Action Bringing all of these responsibilities together—as they are in actual life—this unity is what was new and different about TVA...
...By no mean3 as large as the giant Missouri, of course, but large nevertheless, a major stream flowing on its way to the Ohio through seven states...
...Taming A Wild River Now in a decade all that has been changed...
...The job of the TVA, as carefully denned by Congress, is a broad one...
...Here for the first time in American history, a public body was given a unified responsibility to see that in one particular area the total job was done, to look at the opportunities of water and soil and forests and men as one problem, interrelated, indivisible, unified...
...It was clearly designed to throw the light of actual experience—not just talk or theories or promises, but actual experience—on the development of resources by a new method and a new principle...
...And while those dame have made a deep highway for modern barges, at the same time those dams today provide that valley a measure of flood protection unprecedented in this country...
...The Tennessee is a large river system...
...TVA was created to face the job of developing the resources of a single region as a whole...
...Not navigation alone, not agricultural development alone, not research in new industrial processes alone...
...That channel is being used increasingly in carrying the products of farms, forests, mines, and factories to markets...
...Through water wheels, the steady flow of the river turns the generators which produce electric energy to serve the people of the Tennessee Valley and turn out aluminum and munitions to fight the battles of all America...
...Most of the specific undertakings assigned to TVA were these long familiar activities of the Federal Government...
...A series of dams has done the job, a job that canals and levees and single-purpose power dams or low navigation dams could never do together...
...For so they are in nature...
...The basic principle of TVA, therefore—the principle which distinguishes it today from all other agencies of the Federal Government—is that its charter and its organization recognize this unity of nature...
...River Valley As A Unit The job of water control is the only part of the total job that has been done exclusively by the TVA itself...
...The waters that in other years wrecked factories and homes and destroyed life are now captive of the people...
...When protective works at a few places are added, the people of the Tennessee Valley will be safe at last against the greatest floods, and hazards to the people on the lower Ohio and the Mississippi will be lessened...
...Its shoals were never conquered...
...Soil conservation programs were nation-wide, supported by Federal funds...
...Mineral research was and is common...
...Every other aspect of this broad program—and this is too little known—has been undertaken, as the basic Act intended, in cooperation with others, and particularly with states and local community agencies all the way from local school boards and sportsmen's clubs to state' universities...
...It is a new way of making that responsibility effective...
...Grain and corn of the Middle West find their way from St...
...TVA was intended to provide a basis of facts on which the people of other regions might better determine how their river valleys and their life-sustaining resources might be best developed in their interest and that of their children and their children's children...
...Louis and Minneapolis to southern markets over this new watercourse...
...Let me report first on the results achieved in the controlling of the Tennessee River through this new tool of democracy...
...But Federal responsibility for aid in resource development is not new—it is as old as the Republic itself...
...They make a channel reliable for navigation the year round, 650 miles from Knoxville in east Tennessee to the Ohio River...
...Let us not be confused as some seek to confuse us these days, into thinking that the Tennessee Valley is the first valley in which the Federal Government has furnished technical aid to the people in the development of forests, land, minerals, and rivers...
...We were told to dispose of the electric energy that such river control would create for the benefit of the people on their farms and in their homes and factories...
...The limits of its responsibilities were fixed by the boundaries of nature, a watershed and its adjacent area...
...The figurative horizons have broadened to include other Valleys at home and abroad...
...The wild river has been gentled...
...Lilientltal on the experience of TV A as a yardstick for the proposed Missouri Valley Authority...
...It presents almost every kind of technical problem in the control of waters...
...This is no extension of Federal responsibility in eon-nection with the Tennessee Valley...
...THE horizons of the Tennessee Valley have lifted and extended in the past 11 years...
...and as quite a few people think, looking at the record, more effective...
...But a principle of development, if sound, can be adapted to any region's particular physical circumstances...
...AD other differences flow from these two...
...And only too rarely did the separate agencies and departments meet in plans or execution to discover what the effect of each one's activity might be on the other, and on the people...
...For the level of water behind more than a score of dams can now be controlled almost as precisely as liquid is measured in a vessel in a scientist's laboratory...
...Over a century ago, there were plans for making it a highway of commerce, but the river was stronger than the plans...
...so they are in the life of men...
...It has proven its worth...
...One plan was adopted...
...Day-by-day decisions were not to be made in the national capital, but by men who lived and worked in the region...
...The river was seen as one problem and one opportunity...
...Not physically, of course...
...Today the Congress and the people of the Missouri Valley are debating a concrete proposal for a similar development in the watershed of the "Big Muddy," embodied in a bill introduced by Sen...
...The peaks and slopes of the Appalachians and the Cumberlands have not moved back from the river and their majestic stature remains unchanged...
...For a hundred years men had dreamed of making it their servant, not their master...
...TVA's Basic Principle It was no secret in 1933 that land and forests and water and minerals were interrelated, that what happened to one affected the fate of the others...
...Bear in mind that the TVA was set up in the first place as an experiment, as what a businessman or scientist would call a pilot plant...
...Since the beginning of this Government, the people have from time to time placed upon the Federal Government responsibility for many kinds of resource developments...
...Nevertheless TVA was an experiment...
...There, problems were separately considered, arbitrarily divided according to the pigeonholes of historical accident and tradition...
...Like the Missouri, the Tennessee was a temperamental river, sometimes turbulent in flood, sometimes too shallow for navigation, too sluggish for recreation...
...The river races through mountainous country and flows quietly across flat alluvial plains...
...And in return come shipments of coal from Tennessee fields, billets of steel, textiles, and other products of the South...
...while a different department was concerned with the fish in the streams, or the wildlife along its shores, or the soil of the valley or the minerals, although the fate of those resources, too, was affected by the change in the river and its use by men...
Vol. 8 • December 1944 • No. 52
