Some of our adventures in the Tennessee Valley

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Photo above: “Norris damsite on Clinch River where 2000 men are at work on preliminary construction. Nowhere in America, says Mr. Morgan, has he found a superior labor force in adaptability, intelligence or workmanship.” —Survey Graphic article caption

“The first of a series of articles this, through which the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority will keep Survey Graphic readers abreast of the most arresting single project in America today. As a base, take the long stalemate at Muscle Shoals; take times flat with business breakdown and unemployment; take a region deep-seated with neglect. Turn it all right-side up as a terrain of opportunity and start long run planning in the midst of our emergency moves.

“Reservoirs built now to impound rivers will have piled with silt in the course of years—unless dam-building is paralleled with a height against soil erosion in the highlands. Power plants, rimmed with mills and factories, will suck people into congested centers that ten years from now may duplicate the idle machines and unemployment of other industrial districts—unless a new way of life can be framed in this watershed. These are only two of the exciting alternatives staked out by the TVA.

“As a small boy, it was my duty each evening to carry in the firewood and to fill the wood-box by the kitchen stove. In order to avoid monotony, I varied the task by different ways of piling the wood. Sometimes it would be in neat horizontal layers; sometimes on end; sometimes the sticks would be matched as to size and length.

“Let me do something of the sort in this series of articles through which I hope to share some of our adventures in the Tennessee Valley. They will be in the nature of an informal log of the work in process; less of a log, however, in another sense, than armfuls of situations, encounters, possibilities, plans and developments. The instalments will be written as we go along, but are less likely to stick to the calendar than to follow the bench-marks of our planning—to employ a term we use in civil engineering when we mark and record the elevation of points for future reference. I shall draw on letters, memoranda, notes of staff meetings, reports and addresses.

“In Antioch Notes, I was able to share periodically with faculty, students, graduates and friends of the college the stream of impulse and discovery that have gone into our educational experiment there, so that we had the reinforcement of their understanding and criticism. It is in much the same spirit that I shall try to put before one group of Americans outside the Valley the running story of what is going forward, and invite the interest of your readers.

“WHEN the President proposed the organization of the Tennessee Valley Authority his action was not in response to a happy thought without relation to his program as a whole. Rather, he saw it as a normal and integral part of that program. Some of the policies he proposed must of necessity be worked out on a national scale, such as the banking system and the NRA. There are others which can best be dealt with on a smaller scale before giving them national application, or which have regional variations and can best have regional solutions …”

Excerpt from
Strength in the Hills
by Arthur E. Morgan
Chairman, Tennessee Valley Authority
Survey Graphics, January 1934

Full article at: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/davis/survey/articles/government/gov_jan34_1.html

This 1944 documentary, ‘The American Scene, No. 7,’ produced by the U.S. Information Agency, explores the origins and construction of the Tennessee Valley Authority and its effect on the people of the valley.

More articles on the TVA:

It was a live burial, in a way(Opens in a new browser tab)

The New Deal – social elixir or socialist plot?(Opens in a new browser tab)

Patterned after one of the Soviet dreams(Opens in a new browser tab)