Following on last week's news that the Tennessee Valley Authority's small modular reactor demonstration will receive some Federal moolah, "Nuclear Firms Will Get Cash From Trump Administration. Here’s Who Benefits." (BWXT; GEV), a look back at some of the TVA's history.
From Asterisk Magazine, Issue 12:
David Lilienthal’s account of his years running the Tennessee Valley Authority can read like the Abundance of 1944. We still have a lot to learn from what the book says — and from what it leaves out.
To liberals of the 1940s, David E. Lilienthal was the man who promised abundance, and the Tennessee Valley Authority was the government agency that delivered it. Under Lilienthal’s leadership, the TVA accomplished spectacular feats of engineering. Through the construction of a dozen dams, it brought electricity to the seven states that the Tennessee River watershed spans. Its projects used enough material to fill — they claimed — all the great pyramids of Egypt 12 times over; all the more impressive given that most were completed during the shortages of World War II.
Their renown was all the greater because the TVA began as an experiment with an impossibly broad mandate. The TVA was founded in 1933 as the pet project of Senator George Norris, a Republican from Nebraska. Norris took a keen interest in the Tennessee Valley, where per capita income at the time was around half the national average, and whose residents suffered from constant floods. After several attempts to pass bills that would improve their situation, Norris saw success with the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933. It was tasked with developing the watershed — everything from flood control, to electrification, to battling malaria, to reversing the land’s erosion. No small task, that. Crucially, the Act also established the TVA as a public corporation, outside of any other government department.
It started auspiciously. President Roosevelt offered critical support. In part, it fit into his dream of modernizing the South; as a staunch public power man, it also fed his vendetta against private electric utilities. FDR hand-picked the first members of the TVA’s three-man board; Lilienthal, a former utilities lawyer, was one. But things soon went downhill. The TVA’s sprawling mission led to increasingly public fights between the three directors, each of whom held a different vision for the agency. The spats resulted in a Congressional investigation of the TVA, after which Lilienthal increasingly took charge, finally becoming the chairman in 1941. Once at the helm, he focused the TVA on its ambitious program of dam construction
The program bore fruit as the first few dams began to control floods and bring electricity to the region. Much of the early bickering was forgotten when the TVA delivered the enormous Douglas Dam in just over a year, with a low accident rate, all in the wartime conditions of 1943. The dam powered factories essential to the war effort, including the then secret Clinton Laboratories (now Oak Ridge National Laboratory), which enriched uranium used in the Manhattan Project.
The TVA won widespread public acclaim, and the American people were eager to hear the story of its success. Lilienthal published Democracy on the March in 1944, dedicated to the people of the Tennessee Valley region. As he pondered moving on from his role, he told, in an almost evangelical tone, his narrative of what the TVA meant, and why development mattered.
It is difficult today to imagine the hold Lilienthal once had on the liberal imagination. It is tempting to call him the Ezra Klein of the 1940s, but the comparison is not wholly accurate — unlike Klein, Lilienthal is exciting. A generation of liberals dreamed of living in the world that the TVA was building, and of being the men that Lilienthal challenged them to be.
The author John Gunther spoke for postwar liberals when he called the TVA arguably “the greatest single American invention of this century, the biggest contribution the United States has yet made to society in the modern world.” Although hyperbolic, Gunther’s judgment carried weight; he had just toured the entire United States while writing his masterpiece of Americana, the travelogue Inside U.S.A.
Having surveyed everything the United States had to offer, from the commanding heights of industry to the nascent welfare state, Gunther judged the TVA the fullest embodiment of America’s promise. Liberals like him trusted Lilienthal for two reasons: the soaring rhetoric that cast Abundance as a moral project, and the record of achievement that proved it possible.On both counts, today’s Abundance movement has something to learn from the Tennessee Valley Authority. They could learn it from Democracy on the March – though they should read it with caution....
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