Critical Historiography of the Tennessee Valley Authority
By Savannah Grandey
HIST 6103 – Readings in Modern America
March 29, 2013
2
If the amount of literature on a historical topic is reflective of the topic’s impact and
perpetual significance within a broader narrative, the Tennessee Valley Authority approaches the
extremes of both. Established in 1933 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the
TVA was an experiment in resource development, social planning, and government intervention.
These ideas, while controversial were not new; however, the scale on which they would
materialize and function was unprecedented. President Roosevelt and Senator George Norris,
among other New Conservationists, saw in the Tennessee River the potential to uplift the
residents of the valley who were conspicuously behind the curve of progress, undermining the
stability of the entire nation.1 The development of the Tennessee River would afford flood
control, navigation, and rural electrification (through public ownership of utilities), induce
economic development, and raise the standard of living of Tennessee Valley residents, a
population of 4.5 million.2
The intellectual origin of the TVA as a “national experiment”3 is imperative. The
organization was exempt from certain bureaucratic processes and conflicted with certain societal
norms. It was literally and figuratively exceptional. Perhaps such leeway was allowed because of
the desperate circumstances and TVA’s uplift infused ideology. To approve and accept the TVA,
with all its exceptionality, was to ratify the execution of democracy, to extend to economically
marginalized Americans the pursuit of better life. However, the TVA soon lost its luster; it was
1
Sarah Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 78-80.
2
3
David Lilienthal, Democracy on the March (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 10.
Ibid., 161. “Franklin D. Roosevelt in New York State and George W. Norris in Nebraska saw the importance and
value of regional planning of resources. They urged the setting up of a national experiment, in a southern region,
which would be available for appraisal by every region.”
3
not exceptional in its results. Its unprecedented nature would serve as a handicap when TVA
officials and the President were unwilling to stand beside TVA’s initial vision. Its programs
often preserved the status quo, and even exacerbated class and race relations, which, in the
Tennessee Valley, was anything but democratic. The TVA contaminated its own exceptionalism.
The historiography of the TVA reveals a consistent pattern of attack. Much like the
United States’, the TVA’s exceptionalism has been revoked by several authors who have
revealed the discrepancy between the organization’s rhetoric and its actions. This trend of
criticism specific to the TVA fits into the larger historiographical trend of New Deal criticism
which accuses New Deal programs, such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, of
contributing to the detriment of the lowest rungs of society.
This historiographical study will begin with David Lilienthal’s Democracy on the March,
a work that reflects upon the first decade of the TVA’s existence, lauding its good deeds,
reiterating its mission, and, most usefully, implying its consciousness in regards to its
exceptional nature. Philip Selznick’s sociological study of the TVA’s organizational behavior in
its execution of agricultural programs, TVA and the Grass Roots, looks beyond Lilienthal’s
rhetoric and depicts the way in which goals were sacrificed to means, producing diluted results
which contrasted greatly with TVA rhetoric. Michael J. McDonald and John Muldowny find the
same discrepancy with TVA’s resettlement program in their socioeconomic study of the families
removed from the Norris Dam’s reservoir area in TVA and the Dispossessed. Nancy L. Grant’s
TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo looks at the indifferent attitude of the
TVA toward African Americans as employees and residents of the Tennessee Valley. Finally,
4
Walter L. Creese’s TVA’s Public Planning traces the evolution of the TVA’s mission, its
exploitation by the government, and diluted planning agenda.
Written for the general reader and admittedly subjective, David Lilienthal’s Democracy
on the March can hardly be considered a scholarly work. Composed during his tenure as
chairman of the TVA Board in 1944, it could suffice as a primary resource from which to grasp
the candid ideological faith that drove the creation of the organization. Lilienthal seeks to “cut
through the fog of uncertainty and confusion about tomorrow that envelopes us.”4 The
uncertainty he wishes to dispel is surely that brought on by the Second World War. Within this
atmosphere of anxiety, he opportunistically situates the TVA as a guiding light, a trial and
success, a model for domestic and international observers by which there can be built a “better
world and way of life after the war.”5 Lilienthal, understanding the unprecedented nature of the
organization, repeatedly cites the necessity of active participation of Tennessee Valley residents
in the improvement of their world. Such decentralization was allowed by Congress and executed
through grass roots administration, or “grass roots democracy.”6 This ideology, which implied
equal inclusivity, meant working with and through established programs with which residents
were already familiar. However, as critics and scholars later assert, grass roots administration
functioned only to preserve the status quo regarding race and class relations in the South.
Class and race are almost completely absent besides the mention of a recreational park
built for African Americans, undermining his rhetoric of inclusive democracy but upholding his
4
Ibid., xi.
5
Ibid., 4.
6
Ibid., 78.
5
statement that the TVA has operated “under typical and traditional American traditions.”7
Lilienthal gingerly acknowledges the communities whose relationship with the TVA left
something to be desired, noting that the amount or quality of benefits provided by the TVA was
“not uniform in every community of course, but the general result is always the same.”8 He
addresses the displacement of families for which TVA became notorious, but even concerning
this his tone is optimistically utilitarian, quickly moving on to cite the good to many afforded by
the removal of few.
Throughout the book Lilienthal also seeks to disprove the naysayers who opposed the
creation of the organization. To cries of sectionalism, he retorts regional development that
benefits the nation. He makes light of the coal industry’s anxiety over increased generation of
electricity by citing the rising demand for coal. By illustrating the marriage of technology,
planning, and action under the auspices of one organization, Lilienthal imparts his conviction of
the TVA’s value as a model, internationally and domestically unprecedented, that should be
repeated. Lilienthal implies that the TVA’s exceptionalism regarding exemption from both
federal oversight and distinctly American notions of government invisibility has resulted in
exceptional results. The book is a “rhetorical masterpiece”9 and an example of the doctrine that
sociologist Philip Selznick sought to look beyond.
Influenced heavily by Robert Michel’s book Political Parties: A Study of Oligarchical
Tendencies in Modern Democracy, Philip Selznick’s TVA and the Grass Roots: Study in the
7
Ibid., 7.
8
Ibid., 21.
9
Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 93.
6
Sociology of a Formal Organization is an “anti-utopian criticism”10 of the TVA, especially of its
execution of agricultural programs through grass roots administration. An exercise in social
science, Selznick’s work is one of the first scholarly criticisms of the TVA. First published in
1949, the book’s second edition, published in 1966, is prefaced by a defense of Selznick’s
alleged “pathos of pessimism” regarding the TVA.11 In the book, Selznick explains the
organizational behavior by which the TVA failed democracy, behavior that was never checked
because of the organization’s exemption from oversight. Because of the TVA’s autonomy from
the Civil Service Commission and the General Accounting Office, it could control the pool from
which it chose personnel and avoid turning in receipts to the Treasury. The exceptionalism that
Lilienthal implies, defends, and exhorts, Selznick clarifies. The TVA had the authority of
government and the flexibility of a private corporation.12
Selznick portrays the grass roots administration that Lilienthal touted as a unique
strength, instead as a paralyzing weakness. Borrowing upon Michels’ theory of the “tyranny of
means and the impotence of ends,”13 Selznick ascertains in the TVA “the early foundations for
weakness…that would affect the agency for a long time.”14 To Selznick, TVA working through
established outreach infrastructure, including the land grant colleges, experiment stations, and
extension offices, to execute agricultural objectives was a kind of defense mechanism an
10
Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (New York: Harper &
Row, 1966), xii.
11
Ibid., x.
12
Ibid., 29.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., xiii.
7
organization uses when its reception is not guaranteed to be congenial.15 Lilienthal and Selznick
both comment on the organization’s self-serving cooperation with local establishments, but
Selznick’s interpretation of this practice and its consequences is in direct opposition to
Lilienthal’s. For example, Lilienthal hardly addresses the relocation of families from reservoir
sites, but what he does point out is the assistance with which the transition is eased through local
experts. Lilienthal fails to mention TVA’s dependence on the Extension Service in this process, a
point which Selznick seizes upon in his assertion of TVA’s near indifference to tenant farmers.
Given discretion in deciding those “most deserving” of assistance in relocation, the Extension
Service essentially allowed landlords “to weed out their poorer tenants and replace them with
better ones…adding to the problem of the most depressed layers of the rural population.”16
Similar events, such as the exclusion of Farm Security Administration projects from the
distribution of fertilizer and the indifference of TVA programs to the predicaments of African
Americans justifies Selznick’s insistence upon looking beyond even the most captivating rhetoric
of democracy and utilitarian intentions to measure results.17
Drawing upon doctrinal speeches given and articles written by TVA officials, gossip,
personal interviews with TVA personnel, congressional hearings, statements from Valley
residents, and secondary sources on both the TVA and organizational behavior, Selznick uses the
TVA to demonstrate the ways in which an organization’s objectives are subordinated to methods
and how virtue is not enough repel the things which “bind the hands of good men.”18 He
15
Ibid., 13.
16
Ibid., 139.
17
Ibid., 112, 135.
18
Ibid., 266.
8
provides historians with a scientifically structured cause to their assessment of TVA’s effects and
leads the published attack on the organization’s exceptionalism. The “co-optation” practiced by
the TVA, a strategy of accommodation to ensure survival that Selznick cites, proved TVA’s
failure at exceptionalism.
Continuing the scholarship attentive to the disparity between TVA’s vision and its impact
are Michael J. McDonald and John Muldowny in TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of
Population in the Norris Dam Area, published in 1982. A socioeconomic study, McDonald and
Muldowny look at the TVA’s “first laboratory in regional planning,” the five county area in East
Tennessee of 153,000 acres bought and over 3,000 families displaced by the organization for the
Norris Dam and reservoir.19 This study of a displaced population portrays the TVA as an “agent
of modernization” which had the capacity to and even intention of improving the lives of those
they moved, a group the authors categorize as transitional between a premodern and modern
society. The dependence of too many people on too little resources, lack of capital, and
topographical isolation served as the “push” to out-migration, complementary to industrial
centers’ “pull” of factory work, cash, and access to technology. Out-migrants embarked on the
paths of economic and social mobility until the Great Depression forced them back into their
overpopulated, rural birthplaces.
McDonald and Muldowny’s assessment of the impact of the TVA on the area between
1933 and 1940 begins with a reconstruction of the area pre-TVA. Demographics, quantitative
analysis, and information from interviews tell of a society struggling with the opposing desires
19
Michael J. McDonald and John Muldowny, TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of Population in the
Norris Dam Area (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 4.
9
for cultural preservation and modernity. The authors’ use of oral sources differs from Selznick’s.
McDonald and Muldowny interviewed those who were displaced decades ago, forcing them to
recall from memory their experiences. Selznick’s oral sources, it will be recalled, include gossip
and those working in the organization at the time. McDonald and Muldowny are drawing upon
people’s long term memory, a construction in and of itself. Even though Selznick’s work can be
categorized as “bottom up” history considering his assessment of the general consequences of
the TVA’s grass roots administration, McDonald and Muldowny’s concern with Norris Basin
residents’ memories and opinions of the organization that displaced them, enable this work to
better exemplify inquiry and interpretation “from the bottom up.”
The second part of the book assesses the procedures upon which this book centers:
buying the land, relocating families, and reburying the dead. McDonald and Muldowny reveal
that as a planning agency, TVA hardly planned for the displaced at all. Aside from the success of
the reburial program, TVA’s regional planning and social experimentation were failures. The
TVA did not help displaced families plan their next move, as the final part of the book
demonstrates. The Norris community, envisaged by chairman Arthur Morgan as a way to
simultaneously modernize the displaced and meet local needs, contained workers’ dormitories
before it did housing, diluting its objective from the beginning and resulting in a “TVA suburb”
whose composition was conspicuously white collar, and in 1948 sold at auction to private
interests.20 The authors ascertain a fundamental weakness of regional planning that Selnick also
asserts. Unlike power production, flood control, and navigation, planning to increase quality of
20
Ibid., 221, 233, 235.
10
life was elusive and “more ideological in nature.”21 Such ideas, Selznick argues “might be useful
as utopian calls to action, but they do not serve well as guides to policy.”22
Instead of improving the lives of the displaced, the TVA, McDonald and Muldowny
argue, actually worsened the plight of most of them. The lack of TVA monetary and logistic
assistance encouraged families to cling “to the region where they had been raised,” resulting in
sixty-two percent of the families relocating in surrounding counties, exacerbating the rural
overpopulation of the area.23 In addition to the inability of ideology to inform policy, the authors
also cite the lack of a unified vision among TVA officials, the agriculturalist right wing that
formed inside the TVA, and the legal battles that threatened the existence of the organization as
components that contributed to the discrepancy between TVA’s vision and its impact. A case
study that, if summarized, could amend a third publication of TVA and the Grass Roots, TVA and
the Dispossessed evidences Selznick’s borrowed theory of ends’ subordination to means, reveals
the planning agency’s inability to do so, and thrusts TVA historiography into on-the-ground
synthesis of the organization’s economic and social impact, if only for the Norris Basin.
A work whose subtitle aptly summarizes the premise of this historiographical study,
historian Nancy L. Grant’s TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo, like
McDonald and Muldowny’s work, studies the effects of the TVA on a particular population.
Unlike the preceding book, however, Grant considers the plight African Americans inside the
organization as well from 1933 to 1945. Paralleling Selznick’s assertion of TVA’s
21
Ibid., 9.
22
Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots, ix.
23
McDonald and Muldowny, TVA and the Dispossessed, 247.
11
accommodation to local institutions, Grant, like McDonald and Muldowny, argues that the TVA
had the opportunity to transform existing conditions but instead subordinated promises of
nondiscrimination to local institutionalized discrimination.
Despite President’s Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rhetoric of uplift and nondiscrimination in
the process, Grant refers to him as a “politically astute president” who needed to “avoid conflict
with powerful southern Democrats who wished to maintain segregation and discrimination in
their region.”24 How could this new social planning and resource development agency fulfill its
promises and meet its vision when the President, who championed the project and embraced its
uplifting potential, bowed down to the perpetrators of existing conditions? It could not. Instead
of addressing the social and economic problems of African Americans and nurturing the notion
of equality, the TVA implemented plans that perpetuated a “subordinate, segregated position for
blacks…for the foreseeable future.”25
One of these plans was the quota system which was implemented and upheld within the
TVA regarding African American employees. The quota system was based on the premise of
employing the same percentage of African Americans as were represented in the population of
the area. The population of the Tennessee Valley was eleven percent African American,
therefore the TVA sought to maintain a workforce of the same composition. The TVA
maintained this ratio with moderate consistence, but by relegating African Americans to the most
menial jobs. And white men, who may have been working construction alongside of African
24
Nancy L. Grant, TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1990), xxi.
25
Ibid., xxix.
12
Americans doing the exact same job, would be paid a higher wage because of a different job
classification on paper. The only skilled African Americans hired were usually soon fired or
replaced with whites after work on infrastructure set aside for African Americans was finished.26
Grant addresses the treatment of African Americans as unaffiliated residents of the
Tennessee Valley as well. Threatened by criticism of it overstepping its social and regional
planning role, the TVA’s legal division advised the organization to “restrict its redevelopment
activities,” a retreat which was backed by four sections of the TVA Act which allowed
“whatever supportive activity [that] was necessary to implement its program of flood control,
power production, and fertilizer manufacture.”27 In other words, in order to be able to meet the
primary objectives of the TVA, certain programs or procedures that endangered the
organization’s ability to function in the region, such as social planning objectives, could be
legally subordinated to a larger cause. For example, the relocated African Americans displaced
from reservoir areas received little in the process because, “Several regional planners with
considerable power to approve or reject requests held racial views that did not allow for equal
treatment of blacks.”28 The fact that TVA hired people for such positions from a local pool
increased the likelihood that supervisors would hold racial views similar with those of the area
that their employment at TVA neither reshaped nor reprimanded; instead it preserved the status
quo. This hiring practice is an example of the co-optation Selznick cites. The TVA was able to
26
Ibid., 48-50.
27
Ibid., 73.
28
Ibid., 83.
13
avert threats to its existence by incorporating local elements, which could included people and
racial views, into its “leadership or policy-determining structure.”29
There were those who opposed the treatment of African Americans by the TVA. “These
attacks took several forms, including critical newspaper reports, investigations by civil rights
organizations and the Fair Employment Practices Committee, threats of legal action, protests
from valley civic committees, and even complaints by black TVA employees.”30 Grant asserts
that those employed by the TVA “experienced a particularly difficult dilemma.” Angered from
the organization’s racial practices, but desiring to keep their jobs, some African American
employees kept mum at the workplace to obtain a decent paycheck.31
Grant, like McDonald and Muldowny, has further substantiated the need to look beyond
rhetoric, using a study of impact on a certain population to illustrate some of the social failures of
the TVA. Drawing largely upon correspondence between TVA employees and articles from the
period, she weaves her argument with evidence from within the TVA and without. Contributing
to the scholarly criticism of the TVA and the scholarship on African Americans’ experiences
during the New Deal, Grant’s book also contributes to the tradition of contrasting the
organization’s visions and realities, where goals were subordinated to means, resulting in diluted
ends. It gives a glimpse of the outside forces that affected the organization’s internal behavior
and debased its exceptionalism by accommodating local establishments that would nurse it
through survival on its way to meet goals deemed more important.
29
Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots, 13.
30
Nancy L. Grant, TVA and Black Americans, 109.
31
Ibid.
14
Published in 1990, the same year as TVA and Black Americans, architectural historian
Walter L. Creese’s TVA’s Public Planning: The Vision, The Reality, contrasts the original vision
TVA had for the valley’s transformation with the reality of the valley in the 1970’s. Creese
rejects the exceptionalism of the organization and portrays the TVA less as a “radical
experiment” and more as the “culmination of the Progressive and Conservation movements of
the 1880’s and 1890’s,” in addition to a reaction against “overripe urbanism” exhibited by New
York City and Chicago.32 The coming together of these two notions created an opportunity for
architecture, engineering, and land planning to refashion “the surface of a continent in some
positive way, to accommodate an entire people better.”33 Simultaneously modernizing and
uplifting a region, while preserving what made it different from the city necessitated planning.
While still contributing to the trend of contrasting ideological visions and outcomes,
Creese uses pictures to drive the point rather than relying solely on statistics and experiences of
valley residents. This approach necessitates that he analyze the New Deal landscape and its
evolution. Creese discusses the transformation underwent by the TVA during and after World
War II, “The TVA was big, but World War II was even bigger.”34 For example, by the 1950’s,
“No longer could demands for energy be satisfied by hydroelectric power alone,” which was
largely due to government demands for energy.35 This resulted in a renewed interest in coal as a
power source which ultimately resulted in TVA’s consumption of coal rising from none during
32
Walter L. Creese, TVA’s Public Planning: The Vision, The Reality (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990),
xiv.
33
Ibid., xv.
34
Ibid., xvi.
35
Ibid., 119.
15
the early years of the organization to 1.2 million tons in 1951. This astronomical surge in coal
consumption resulted in TVA strip mining, an activity in conflict with the TVA’s original
promotion of “clean power,” its conservation objectives, and its uplift of valley residents. Not
only does the coal predicament illustrate the disparity between vision and reality, Creese’s
citation of TVA spokespeople measuring achievement by quantitative results, such as the amount
of coal being gleaned by faster, better equipment, exemplifies “the haste and efficiency [that] had
been advancing in the valley since World War II.”36 Like the previously discussed authors,
Creese demonstrates the, by now tired gap between the TVA’s vision and reality. However,
instead of taking an organizational approach such as Selznick, or using human experience as
evidence like McDonald, Muldowny, and Grant, he uses the landscape to substantiate his
assertion of the subordination of original TVA visions of planning to higher national priorities.
Creese’s treatment of President Franklin Roosevelt seems more congenial than the other
authors previously discussed, aside from Lilienthal who set aside a page expressing his gratitude.
Perhaps this is because Creese’s book stretches into the 1970’s. He argues that with each
generation of TVA officials and supporters, the organization’s original mission became obsolete,
placing President Roosevelt at the ideological hearth of regional planning and uplift. The other
authors explicitly or implicitly assert the President’s unwillingness to go to bat for the TVA
when its principles were being compromised.
Instead of depicting the TVA as the villain, as did other authors, Creese argues that the
organization was the victim of wartime expansion and government exploitation. Much like
Grant, McDonald, and Muldowny, he recognizes the ability the TVA had to implement its
36
Ibid., 123.
16
vision. However, instead of being undermined by lower, grass roots administration, the TVA’s
vision was crushed by the federal government, who subordinated the TVA mission of regional
planning to wartime mobilization and nuclear warfare. The planned transformation of the region
prophesied by early TVA supporters, whether it ever had much shape or not, never materialized.
The region transformed, but it did so in a haphazard manner. The vision of creating of a better,
nurturing landscape was not only subordinated to other, in this case, wartime goals, it was wholly
lost, the effects of which, Creese proves, can be seen on the landscape.
The transformation underwent by the Tennessee Valley at the hands of the TVA is
indisputable. And in no way were all of its programs or effects negative or malicious in intent.
To the contrary, Lilienthal demonstrated, and each author subsequently discussed, acknowledged
the sincere aspirations of good men who supported the TVA, as well as the organization’s ability
to meet those goals, or at least make substantial gains toward them. However, this
historiographical study of TVA scholarship focuses on those authors who pursued the causes and
effects of the TVA’s many unmet social goals and visions. The exceptionalism of the Authority
was apparent. The norm did not apply because the organization was going to produce great
things in the midst of desperation. To achieve goals unprecedented, the organization would,
logically, have to function differently than existing organizations, but accommodation to extant
social infrastructure instead made them extensions of the ordinary discriminatory institutions that
repelled democratic endeavors. Selznick, McDonald, Muldowny, and Grant would label this cooptation, a survival tactic that ensured the existence of the TVA, but also controlled its activity.
When the TVA compromised, it sacrificed its exceptionalism. As Creese would argue, the TVA
became a pawn of the federal government. Forgetting its initial vision of planned transformation
for the Valley, it fed wartime mobilization which preceded a seemingly infinitive arms race. The
17
TVA, created for the uplift and planned transformation of the region, became a weapon of war
mobilization. Contributing to New Deal criticism, these works depict the TVA as agents of
change whose diluted results can be gleaned from the people and the landscape.
18
Bibliography
Creese, Walter L. TVA’s Public Planning: The Vision, the Reality. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1990.
Grant, Nancy L. TVA and Black Americans: Planning for the Status Quo. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1990.
Lilienthal, David. Democracy on the March. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944.
McDonald, Michael J. and John Muldowny. TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of
Population in the Norris Dam Area. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
Selznick, Philip. TVA and the Grass Roots: Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949.