“It didn't keep people on the land in the way they originally envisioned would happen,” Rauchway explains. But the agency fell short of the idealized vision of its creators in other ways. The TVA brought higher incomes and greater comforts to much of the region’s population, slowed erosion of the land from the river’s flooding and improved the use of the land. Electricity from the TVA also powered Oak Ridge in the hills of Tennessee, one of the top-secret sites built to produce uranium for the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project. The region churned out everything from munitions to fertilizer for food production to aluminum for airplane machinery. Two men working on telephone lines, Tennessee, June 1942.ĭuring World War II, the TVA would play a critical role in U.S. TVA, the Court again upheld the TVA’s constitutionality. In the 1939 case, Tennessee Electric Power Company v. Tennessee Valley Authority, a case brought by the Alabama Power Company, that Congress did not exceed its constitutional powers by creating the TVA to build Wilson Dam and sell and distribute the electricity generated there. He and other power company representatives brought numerous lawsuits and injunctions in the 1930s, blocking the TVA from providing power to many cities across the South in the interim.īut in February 1936, the Supreme Court ruled in Ashwander v. Wendell Wilkie, president of a large power utility company called the Commonwealth and Southern Company, led the fight against the TVA. “That of course threatened.private monopolies, who wanted the authority to decide what was reasonable to charge for themselves.” “They would know the labor costs, they would know the production cost, they would know the distribution costs, and they could then say-well, this is a reasonable amount to charge,” Rauchway says of the publicly owned plants. Government-owned power plants, Roosevelt had argued in his 1932 presidential campaign, should serve as a “yardstick to prevent extortion” by private power companies. Wendell Willkie, president of the Commonwealth and Southern Corporation, appearing before the joint congressional committee during the investigation into affairs of the Tennessee Valley Authority, November 26, 1938. Construction of the Norris Dam in Tennessee, which began in October 1933, forced nearly 3,000 people from their homes, but the government offered compensation only for the relocation of some 5,200 graves. While it brought electricity and modern conveniences to many rural families who had never had them before, the TVA had negative impacts as well. Its efforts made a difference almost immediately: Dam construction and other agency activities created thousands of jobs, and by 1935 the cost of electric power across the Tennessee Valley had dropped to 30 percent below the national average. The TVA’s ambitious slate of objectives included improving navigation of the river, controlling flooding, reforestation, providing a reliable supply of water, modernizing farming techniques and providing affordable electricity for the people of the region. The two towers visible against the trees were part of the cableway system which, about 400 feet above the river, carried concrete out over the job and lowered it to the forms below.īut with Roosevelt now in the White House, the tide had turned toward Norris’s ideas. The Norris Dam on the Clinch River in northeastern Tennessee Valley Authority, designed to create a mountain lake 83 square miles in area. Norris tried repeatedly to introduce bills providing for federal development of the Muscle Shoals site-only to see them shot down by Republican presidential administrations. Senator George Norris, a progressive Republican, believed the government should take greater control over energy production. Throughout the 1920s, politicians debated what should be done with the site. Though the dam was originally intended to provide hydroelectric power for two factories tasked with producing nitrates for explosives, World War I ended before the facilities were completed. The site had been named for the rapids or “shoals” produced by a steep drop in elevation in the Tennessee River at that point. government to begin construction of Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, Alabama in 1916. Sponsored by the Nebraska senator, the bill provided for development of the entire Tennessee Valley, Ĭongress had authorized the U.S. May 1933: President Roosevelt presents Senator Norris of Nebraska with the pen he used in signing the Muscle Shoals Bill.
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