The Tennessee Valley Authority, Franklin Delano Roosevelt`s project to completely
remake the impoverished and flood-stricken Tennessee Valley in the aftermath of the
Great Economic Depression, was without doubt a most successful social engineering
project.
TVA gave the incipient massive bureaucratic apparatus of eagle 32nd U.S. president
F.D.R. a benevolent face. It ushered in a new age for the nation`s battered economy, thus
fulfilling Roosevelt`s promise at the inaugurating speech for his first tenure in 1933,
when he first announced the project as the cornerstone of his ``New Deal`` to rebuild
America. It managed to place, with virtually no protestors, a whole state under the
jurisdiction of a specially-created-and-endowed Federal Agency which, even to date,
remains above the law. It made the depressed, suddenly ruined peoples of the Tennessee
Valley begin to wishfully look up to a big centralized government indeed as ``the new
deal``, and as the only effective solution
to cope with pressing economic and
environmental hardships. And it really helped perpetuate the political dynasty of the also
very conservationist and rurally-conscious teddy bear 26th U.S. president Theodore
Roosevelt, who had been invested as an illustrious honorary member of the Freemason
Federal Lodge, and whose niece Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Franklin had married like a
good and meek cousin before this last one was struck by poliomyelitis and became the
first American president to pearl-harbor disabilities. In fact, FDR is now touted proudly
by most current Freemason lodges as one of the most shiny and radiant examples of this
old international fraternity`s benevolent outreach into the 21st century, and according to
some he winged to the very ``maximum`` 33rd degree within the organization.
The famed science writer and historian Asimov would have wondered, indeed, if the
whole stockmarket crash that had so refulgently and fierily paved the way or, rather, the
river, for some-one like FDR to come off like the nation`s savior in the 1932 year of his
1st election had actually been the finger of god or just the claw of the devils of Wall
Street. In any event, it was certainly one hell of a heavenly stroke of fortune for anyone
eager to demonstrate to the then so excessively debonair and devil-may-care free
Americans that a little bit of friendly Teddy Bear social engineering was not out of place.
And, indeed, the whole project of the Tennessee Valley Authority was so socially
successful, that it was almost socialist; and quickly after its conception it was already run
in a manner so new dealy, communitarian, utopian, pluralistic, diversity-oriented,
affirmative-action-liberal, dissent-free, and new agey that it would make Al Gore proud.
To this date, in fact, the Gory Clinton administration continues to insist on the
``tremendous success`` that over the decades the still extant TVA has piled up, dredging
up old run-of-the-mill spinning statistics about per capita incomes in the Tennessee area.
In particular, the documentary that was recently run by the History channel on the
inception and consolidation of the TVA in 1933 is so movingly laudatory that it only
lacks Clinton`s Southern saxophone tunes as accompanying music and a last ecological
punch comment by Hollywood actor Steven Seagal dressed like a good patriot in Native
American outfit and whispering softly that he is tired of Fire Down Below and doesn`t
believe in authority. Indeed, this historical tape dramatizes brilliantly the black-and-white
contrast between the hopeless, disgruntled existence of the Tennessee farmers in the
immediate aftermath of the depression, striving up to their necks to survive in their waterless, electricity-less shacks under 6-foot spring river floods; and the sunny idyllic
community that sprung as a result of the neck-saving colossal Federal initiative which
redneck Republicans like Wendell Willkie failed to dam. There were some complaints,
the tape admits, that the Federal government had sold Tennessee down the river, but, ``on
the whole, people were smiling``. And what else were they supposed to do?
F.D.Roosevelt and his (social) engineer brainchild Arthur Morgan had rescued those poor
trodden farmers from sunk abandonment and given them jobs, good pay, horse-drawn
bookmobiles, vaccines, woodworking training, decent housing with water, furnaces,
stoves, Hope like in that town in Arkansas, and even an evening flight with a country girl.
You didn`t find all that everyday in 1933.
Granted, Morgan was rightfully accused of experimenting on people as if they were
``guinea pigs`` and of using the newly formed Norris town for TVA workers as a way to
test his model of an ideal social community, but he made his headquarters at that same
town and smilingly gathered every day at the cafeteria to chat with the rest of the
workers, like Bill Clinton more recently conversing in army uniform with our troops in
Bosnia while the CNN cameras were on. So surely this thing of the Tennessee Valley
Authority must have been no communist gulag: 15,000 families were ``encouraged`` to
move out prior to the revamping of the Tennessee river valley, homes were purchased by
the Federal Government in a manner which must have been constitutional because FDR
had said so before the Senate in 1928, and cemeteries were unearthed to quiet the spirits
of the dead.. ..; but jobs were brought in, and, this, in a disease-infected river valley
where 100,000 gallons of swampy water had to be pumped out every minute for days to
drive out all malaria insects, must have certainly been the bottom line.
Never mind that the Tennessee Valley Authority project, placing the ownership and
control of all capital, land and industry in the hands of the ``community``, met all the
requirements for the definition of socialism, as accorded by a political historian such as
James MacGregor Burns, who, labeling Roosevelt`s New Deal an attempt to ``reform
capitalism``, was not precisely noted for being a Southern redneck. Never mind that the
same river that had been the salvation for Tennessee residents in 1933 when the
pharaoh`s blueprint to remake the valley at last bore fruit and the project began ``moving
mountains``; is presently dragging (according to consulting firm Putnum, Hayes &
Bartlett) an accumulated debt of $29 billion, more mountainous than the estimated
mounting of all TVA`s current assets combined, and is now threatening to crucify the
local utility users with higher rates and/or higher taxes as a way to preserve its
``historical`` status as the main artery of an unaccounted, untouchable, unappointed,
noncompetitive, and non-competing TVA agency beyond oversight by the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission, the state public utility commissions, the Securities and
Exchange Commission, the voters, or even the market forces. Never mind that the
subsequent environmental impact of this social and technological utopia, in the years that
have elapsed since that fateful 1933 when forests were first brought down, logs were first
burned to lumber, topsoil was first blasted, and Roosevelt first hand-picked the
triumvirate of ``kings of the valley``, as the History channel tape likes to lionize them; is
of a magnitude that only Steven Seagal and the Cherokee Indians can possibly fathom,
with TVA having steadfastly lived up to its original mission of ``managing the region`s
natural resources`` and earned hard its reputation as the nation`s foremost promoter of
destructive coal strip-mining and Clean-Air-Act-fearless Nitrogen-Oxide emissions.
Never mind that Al Gore, who hails from Tennessee himself, and TVA, are more
politically connected than the very Tennessee River`s many tributaries, with $500,000 a
year of slush funds having been steadily canalized by the agency for the past years to
Jack Quinn, former White House counsel and chief of staff to the (at this moment still)
Vice President Al Gore; with Johnny Hayes the former (Clinton hand-picked) TVA
director having also been Gore`s chief fundraiser for this last one`s past campaigns as
U.S. representatives; with Peter Knight, another registered TVA lobbyist, having been
manager of the Clinton-Gore 1996 reelection campaign; and with Gore`s whole family
having been long-time bulwarks of TVA ever since that ignominious anti-communist
called Eisenhower first tried to curb its expansion. Never mind that, in all the decades
that have elapsed since its inception in 1933, the smoking and nefarious environmental
consequences of TVA may well have long outweighed its possible technological and
socialist, sorry, social, benefits; with the 3 million acres saved from soil erosion in the
period from 1933 to 1950 ranking possibly as about the only great ecological
achievement.
Never mind.
The Earth is in the balance, the ancient spirits of the Appalachian Cherokee Indians have
been disturbed from their sacred graves, Steven Seagal is frowning angry because the
Tennessee`s snail darter could become extinct, and Al Gore, like his lionized hero
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, will again be bright and honorable enough to offer us a new
deal for the new millennium and, like Arthur Morgan, will also have an almost
``Messianic`` ability to make us buy it.
Watch out.
By Conrad Salas Cano.
REFERENCES:
*Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (The First political biography of FDR), winner of the
Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, by James MacGregor Burns. Harvest Books
1956, LC number 56-7920.
*Roosevelt and Howe, by Alfred B Rollins Jr. Alfred A Knopf, New York 1962, LC
number 62-15578.
*Roosevelt in retrospect: A profile in History, by John Gunther. The non-fiction book
club, 121 Charing Cross London WC2, 1950.