The Impact of TVA Upon the Southeast

A NY attempt to appraise the impact of the Tennessee Valley Authority upon the Southeast will of necessity be partial and not, as one would wish, highly objective. There are several reasons for this. There does not exist an over-all comprehensive socio-economic backlog study of the Valley made at the inception of TVA against which change may be measured. The lack of an equivalent of Southern Regions' for the Tennessee Valley, as of 1935, is most uhfortunate. TVA, in its eagerness to cooperate with Valley agencies, and not to duplicate their areas of work and jurisdiction, has left much record keeping and research to these agencies. This was notably true in agriculture where the responsibilities for records on unit test demonstration farms and on area demonstrations became a college responsibility. As a result the data with which one has to work frequently lack a central core of uniformity which would furnish the basis for charting changes on test demonstration farms and in demonstration areas for the Valley as a whole. TVA and the colleges recognize the problems of lack of uniformity in data and are now proceeding to correct it. For reasons inherent in social change itself, both in charting change and the assignment of causes to change, much difficulty is involved. As MacIver, in his discussion on "The Quest for a Specific Why" says, "Many dynamic factors melt, focus, clash and cooperate in the shaping of the pattern" of change.2 To this difficulty is added the fact that TVA's operations, aside from construction, power development, and flood control in the river channel, are largely cooperative with other agencies. Any attempt, therefore, in these cooperative program operations to gauge the contributions of one agency, as against those of another, is, for the most part, impossible. It is, therefore, in the light of these limitations, that we have to ask what has been the impact of TVA upon the Southeastern Region, and particularly the Seven Valley States of the region? First, TVA has been an important factor in the regional identification of the Southeast. By regional identification I mean the sense of unity, importance and confidence which the people in the Southeast have or which the 5,850,000 people (1946 estimate) in the 212 County TVA Watershed and power service area have. This is not the same as regional snobbishness. We of the Southeast have never been able to boast that we had a region with "books on the slope of Beacon Hill," when the "wolves howled" in the wilderness.' The Southeast has been on the defensive a long time and still is. It was dubbed "Economic Problem No. 1" and perhaps properly so. Its sociologists have often felt it necessary to explain "The Way of the South," not only for our own cultural understanding, but also for export. We were well on the way toward getting an inferiority complex and this was doubly so in the depression of the thirties -even Democracy had an inferiority complex, as the iron heels of Europe were on the march. Since 1933, more than 20 million people have come into the Valley to see TVA projects. In Europe we are told TVA is the most discussed American enterprise, rivaled of course by atomic energy. Thus it is that to the Southeast and to the Nation "the Tennessee Valley has come to symbolize the idea of evolutionary change,"4 a change toward the improvement and better utilization of resources, toward a better balanced economy with higher incomes from more secure sources, and a higher standard of living buttressed by better tools and knowledge for making a living. This record of substantial accomplishment by an enterprise, which is part of the South, has been a factor in bolstering the South's morale and has added a tangible element of regional identification. It constitutes a concrete demonstration that plan* Adapted from a paper read before the twelfth annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Knoxville, Tennessee, April 1, 1949. 1 Howard W. Odum, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936). 2 R. M. MacIver, Social Causation (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1942), p. 133. 3 Committee on Regional Planning, Yale University, A Case for Regional Planning with Special Reference to New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), p. 39. 4 David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), p. mi.