THE TEMNESSEE VALLEY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3802, 31 August 1936, Page 7

THE TEMNESSEE VALLEY

RESEARCH SCHOOL FOR

AMERICAN NATION. (By R.L.C. in Brisbane Mail.) The judgment delivered by the United States Supreme Court in February upholding the validity of certain activities of the Tennessee Valley Authority was regarded as a signal victory by the Roosevelt Administration. For in this area there is being worked out a closely knit plan which it is hoped ultimately will apply to the improvement of the lot of every American citizen. Some phases of that plan are described in this article. Knoxville Tennessee.—The Tennessee Valley Authority has well been described as the laboratory of the New Deal. It is certainly the best obainable picture of the application of the Rooseveltian philosophy at large—a perfect immature as it were. For here are experiments in the control and prevention of floods, in the production and sale of electric power, in reafforestation, in the reform of agriculture, in town planning and housing, in road building, in the improvement of industrial relationships, in the making of a larger and happier life in general. They are not isolated experiments, despite their num- , ber. All are woven into a closely knit pattern and electricity is the medium that draws them together. It is also the element that makes the undertaking largely self liquidating. As a whole- the T.A.A. is so mammoth an experiment that it is difficult for the itinerant stranger to ?ee it in the true perspective. The authority was created in May, 1933. The legislation which brought it into being clothed it with the powers of government, yet gave it a good deal of flexibility and power of initiative that are the strength of private enterprise. It marks a break with the old ways, even in the fundamental matter of its personnel and their manner of appointment. Political patronage, that great canker of American public life, has always been a tremendous obstacle to honest and economic administration. The T.V.A., is directed to choose its men for character, experience, intelligence, and skill, not because someone has to be rewarded for political service. That has been an invaluable aid in assembling a team with social vision and splendid ideals.

THREE EXPERTS. The authority itself comprises three men, each of them a remarkable personality in his own way. The chairman is Dr Arthur Morgan, a civil engineer, expert in the control of floods, who deserted his profession for some years to put to the test, as head of a college in Ohio, his theory that the best education combines academic study with utterly irrevelant practical experience. The second member of the authority is DiHarcourt Morgan, a Canadian by birth, for many years president of the University of Tennessee. His speciality is agriculture, particularly as practised in the Tennessee Valley, which he knows from end to end after his long residence in it. He is charged with the care of the authority’s important experiments in the production of fertilisers which he regards as the key to the future of agriculture the world over.

Mr David Lilienthal, the third member of the authority, is a young lawyer, who is in charge of the electrical undertakings of the authority. To talk to these men is to be inspired by their idealism and enthusiasm, to be impressed by their unfailing patience and good temper in the face of hostility and misunderr.tanding. For them social and economic planning is no vague theorising about an ideal state of society, but a very direct process of attacking evils that are not being stemmed by private initiative and of working out solutions to serve the common good by introducing elements of order, design, and forethought.

PERFECT LABORATORY. WJiy the Tennessee Valley as the locale of this great adventure? There pre miany reasons. The first is in the watershed of the river itseif. It begins in the western end of Virginia. It sweeps south west in a wide arc across western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Northern Georgia, Northern Alabama, and a corner of North-Eastern Mississippi. Then the river swings north across Tennessee and Kentucky, wljere it finally flows into the Ohio River. The elevation of this area, which is four-fifths that of England, varies from 250 to 6000 feet above sea level. Its climatic ranges from that of the Great Lakes in the mountains to subtropical in the cotton country of the Gulf States.

Two million people inhabit its 42,000 square miles and 4,000,000 reside in the territory immediately influenced by it. They can raise anything, they say, that grows between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico. The annual rainfall ranges from 50 to SO inches.

HYDRO-ELECTRIC POWER. Tremendous hydro-electric possibilities are latent in the Tennessee

River and its tributaries which drop sharply, as the bear rains down through the valley. No other comparable area in the United States offers such diversity of climate, soil, vegetation, and resources. Nature has provided here the perfect laboratory, not with the irrational boundaries devised by man, but with her own boundaries, suggesting a regional unity larger than that of States and smaller than that of the Federation.

Man, too, has made it a fruitful field of inquiry for the social scientist. For him it is a problem area. For a large part of the population there has been no background of prosperity at any time in its history, though, in the fertile stretches highly prosperous commercial enterprises have flourished supplying industrial stimulus and leadership to the cities. But 10 years before the civil war as many as 72 per cent of»the people neither owned nor hired a single slave, yet were attempting to grow cotton, or tobacco, or maize, in competition with slave labour. It was a hopeless undertaking, with the result that these people subsisted at a standard lower even than that of the slaves. Shut off from the best farm lands, they took to thd hills, or after the civil war, they, together with the freed slaves, became tenant farmers or share croppers for the large land owners. Many thousands of families have always lived so miserably that they have never known as much as £6O a year income.

So in the Tennessee Valley every stage is present from excellent farm management to a bitter fight for a bare living. It is the job of the T.V. A., to replan the whole economy of the valley. Not that the undertaking is for the benefit of the Tennessee Valley alone; the findings will be applied to the nation at large.

How, then, are they going about it? First of all, they are developing a unified control -of the water resource's of the valley, with the dual objective of preventing floods and making water transportation practicable. There are 652 miles of river highway between Knoxville and the point at which the Tennessee joins the Ohio. Along this highway will be created a 9ft. channel, which involves the building of a series of great dams and locks, the first of which, the Norris dam, 20 miles north-west of Knoxville, with an area of 34,200 acres, has just been completed at a .cost of over £7,000,000, six months’ ahead of time. As a by-product of these dams the T.V.A. is generating electric power, to be carried to cities, towns and farms, the cities, as a reminder of their dependence on agriculture, accepting a uniform rate structure which makes electricity as cheap to the farmer as to the townsman. Less than 12 per cent, of the farmers in the area have hitherto enjoyed the benefits of electric power, but already its use is increasing rapidly. The electrical undertaking will be used as a sort of yardstick to determine whether the rates charged in other parts of the country are as low as they might be. It is over this aspect of the T.V.A.’s activities that its constitutionality was challenged ;n the Supreme Court unsuccessfully.

FIGHTING EROSION. Then there is the land problem, with two distinct but closely related phases. The farmer is to be helped to make such readjustments in his use of the land that he may preserve it against erosion, that curse of the barren south; and he is to be restored to an economic level at which he can purchase the products of industry. He is being taught that the waste of land must and can be stopped by planting more of it to grass and legumes—clover, peas, beans, and alfalfa—with roots strong enough to hold back the rain water. The growth of such crops helps also to fix nitrogen in the soil. The supply of other plant foods, which are essential to the continuous growth of good crops is not so simple. The chief source of phosphates for the American farmer is in the phohphate beds of Florida, Tennessee, and some of the Western States. The nitrate plant at Muscle Shoals, in Alabama, which was built on the Tennessee River during the war to make America independent of other countries for her supply of nitrates for munitions, is being readjusted to promote the more economical production of fertilisers by concentrating, the product of the phosphate beds and thus making practicable its cheaper transport and sale. Already fertilisers are on the market at a third of pre-war price. The immediate objective is a better method of obtaining phosphorous, but extensive researches are being conducted with nitrogen, potash, and lime also.

SYMMETRY OF PLAN. Wihat strikes one most is the wonderful symmetry of this whole great plan. The checking of erosion demands the growth of legumes and grasses, which produce the nitrogen essential to plant growth. A cheaper phosphate is needed, however, to foster the growth of the crops which produce the nitrogen; and electric power is needed to manufacture that phosphate and to promote the economic rehabilitation of the farmer and make life pleasanter for him. The production of electric power requires dams and dams, if they are to remain effective, must be protected from the deposit of silt by erosion of

the soil. Check erosion by the use of phosphate and the circle is com plete. There are many other phases of the work of the T.V.A. of which I should like to write—of the measures it has taken to sweeten industrial relationships, and of the reward it has reaped in lowered costs and contracts completed before the prescribed time; of the opportunities it is giving its employees of equipping themselves of earning their living in industries and handicrafts when the works on which they are now employed are completed; of the means by which it is teaching farmers who were so immersed in one crop that they have never even grojvn their own vegetables and fruit to form cooperatives for the growth and processing of meat and fruit and vegetables, and for the marketing of poultry and butter and cream; of the new standards it is setting in road building—wider roads with no unsightly hoardings or petrol pumps or “hot dog” stands of the campaigns of its medical officers to stamp out such diseases as tuberculosis, and the malaria carried by the mosquitoes in the swamps and to inculcate the principle of industrial hygiene and safety, so averting enormous loss and waste. But I have written enough, I hope, to suggest that this is a great plan, nobly conceived. If it fails, it will not be for want of fervour or devotion in the men to whom it has been entrusted.