TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY

TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a federal corporation responsible for power generation in the Tennessee Valley, serves roughly 8.3 million people through 158 municipal and cooperative power distributors. TVA furnishes power to an 80,000-square-mile area, including the state of Tennessee and parts of Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, thus making the corporation one of America's largest electrical power producers.

Born of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's innovative solution to help stimulate the area's economy during the Great Depression, the TVA development began after World War I (1914–1918). A government-owned dam and nitrate-producing facility at Muscle Shoals, on the Tennessee River in northwestern Alabama, became the seedling of the audacious experiment. Nebraska Senator George W. Norris hoped at the time to build more dams similar to the Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, bringing public control to the Tennessee River. Almost single-handedly, Norris held the dam in government ownership until President Roosevelt's vision expanded it into a broader concept of multipurpose development and regional planning. On 18 May 1933, Congress responded to Roosevelt's prodding and enacted the Tennessee Valley Act.

TVA was to be more than a flood control and power agency. It was seen as having a wide mandate for economic development, recreation, reforestation, and the production of fertilizer. But the agency was in sad shape at its start. The best timber had already been cut, the land had been farmed too long, and crop yields were declining.

Controversy also surrounded TVA. Private utilities fought the agency's power policies, and an internal feud between Chairman Arthur Morgan and directors David Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan unsettled TVA's direction until 1938.

Nevertheless, the agency pushed forward. By 1941, it operated eleven dams with six more under construction, and it was selling low-cost electric power to 500,000 consumers throughout six states. TVA technicians developed fertilizers, and 25,000 demonstration farms taught local citizens the benefits of more scientific farming. Additionally, the agency helped replant forests, controlled forest fires, and improved habitat for wildlife. During World War II (1939–1945), 70 percent of TVA power went to defense industries, among them the Oak Ridge atomic project. At the war's end, TVA had completed a 652-mile navigation channel, becoming the largest electricity supplier in the United States.

Attacked for being too radical, TVA also found itself criticized for being too conciliatory to established interests and ideas. Director Lilienthal claimed that TVA practiced "grassroots democracy" by reaching out in a massive educational effort to involve the rural population of the valley. However, critics saw mostly manipulation in this approach.

The 1960s saw unprecedented growth in the Tennessee Valley. At the same time, TVA began building nuclear plants as a new source of power. The agency survived reproach from both conservatives and environmentalists and, by the early 1970s, claimed an impressive record. In 1972, an estimated $395 million in flood damages had been averted by TVA dams. Power revenues came to $642 million, of which TVA returned $75 million to the U.S. Treasury. Along with industrial customers, 2 million residential consumers used TVA power.

The TVA manages an integrated, technically advanced system of dams, locks, and reservoirs in the Tennessee River watershed. The balanced system facilitates navigation, controls flooding, and provides hydropower to benefit users. As of 2002, it included three nuclear generating plants, eleven coal-fired plants, twenty-nine hydraulic dams, five combustion turbine plants, a pumped-storage plant, and roughly 17,000 miles of transmission lines, making the TVA the largest public power system in the nation. TVA's generation mix consisted of 63 percent coal, 31 percent nuclear, and 6 percent hydroelectric.

The agency serves 158 local municipal and cooperative power distributors that deliver power to homes and businesses within the seven-state area. Also involving itself in technical assistance to communities and industries, TVA conducts economic research and analysis, industrial research, and conceptual site engineering and architectural services. It also provides technical and financial support to small and minority-owned businesses as well as working with regional industrial development associations to recruit new industry and develop strategies for creating jobs.

Preserving wildlife habitat, TVA oversees more than 122,000 acres of public land designated for natural-resource management. Forty percent of it is administered by other agencies, while the remainder falls under TVA management. The agency launched the Natural Heritage Project in 1976, with the help of the Nature Conservancy, to analyze and manage biodiversity on TVA lands and to improve compliance with federal environmental regulations. The project monitors threatened and endangered plant and animal species in the TVA service area. Since its beginnings, the Natural Heritage Project has supplied environmental data on TVA activities ranging from transmission-line construction to economic development.

TVA has also developed a land-use system of 10,700 acres classified as TVA Natural Areas. The specified sites are designated as Habitat Protection Areas, Small Wild Areas, Ecological Study Areas, or Wildlife Observation Areas and include limitations on activities that could endanger important natural features.

Throughout the Tennessee Valley, TVA operates roughly 100 public recreation facilities, including campgrounds, day-use areas, and boat-launching ramps.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Callahan, North. TVA: Bridge Over Troubled Waters. South Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1980.

Chandler, William U. The Myth of TVA: Conservation and Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1933–1983. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1984.

Conkin, Paul K., and Erwin C. Hargrove. TVA :Fifty Years of Grass-Roots Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Creese, Walter L. TVA's Public Planning: The Vision, The Reality. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

Tennessee Valley Authority Web Site. Home page at http://www.tva.com/.

KymO'Connell-Todd

See alsoNew Deal andvol. 9:Power .

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), independent U.S. government corporate agency, created in 1933 by act of Congress; it is responsible for the integrated development of the Tennessee River basin. The history of TVA began in the early 1920s, when Senator George William Norris sponsored a plan to have the government take over and operate Wilson Dam and other installations that had been built by the government for national defense purposes during World War I at Muscle Shoals , Alabama. However, legislation to this effect was vetoed in 1928 and in 1931 by Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. The 1933 TVA Act, redrafted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, went far beyond the earlier proposals and launched the federal government into a vast scheme of regional planning and development—an undertaking that became the model for similar river projects.

The establishment of the TVA marked the first time that an agency was directed to address the total resource development needs of a major region. TVA was instructed to take on the problems presented by devastating floods, badly eroded lands, a deficient economy, and a steady outmigration—all in one unified development effort. The act provided for the integrated development of the whole Tennessee River basin, an area of about 41,000 sq mi (106,200 sq km) that covers parts of seven states. The TVA is governed by a three-person board of directors. The fact that its main offices are located in the region, rather than in Washington, D.C., allows the TVA to maintain a close working relationship with the people of the region.

Facets and Activities of the TVA

In 1998 the TVA generated more electricity than any other U.S. utility, supplying 8 million residents. The most noteworthy feature of TVA is the system of multipurpose dams and reservoirs that have contributed greatly to the economic life of the area. There are some 50 dams in the hydroelectric system with an installed capacity in excess of 6 million kW. To meet the growing demand for power over and above the hydroelectric capacity of the system, the TVA began in 1940 to construct steam-generating facilities. By the late 1990s, 62% of the TVA's installed capacity was provided by coal-burning steam plants.

Steadily mounting power demands encouraged TVA to add nuclear power plants in the early 1970s. Design and management flaws and a 1975 accident at Browns Ferry resulted in plant closures and construction delays, but by 1996 three facilties (Watts Bar, Sequoyah, and Browns Ferry) were open and operating.

Electric power from all sources is allocated with a view to promoting the widest possible use of electricity throughout the area—with local municipalities, state and federal agencies, and farmer cooperatives receiving priority over private utility companies and industries. The availability of low-cost electricity has attracted large numbers of businesses and industries to the area, and a 630-mi (1,014-km) navigation channel extending from the mouth of the Tennessee River to Knoxville, Tenn., has been responsible for an enormous increase in river traffic, chiefly in coal, construction material, grain, petroleum, chemicals, and forest products.

Other TVA activities, carried out in cooperation with local authorities, include land conservation; environmental research; tree planting; malaria control; the development of fish, wildlife, and mineral resources; social and educational programs; and the establishment of recreational facilities along the banks of its reservoirs, including the Land Between the Lakes, in W Kentucky and W Tennessee.

Financing the TVA

Throughout much of the history of the TVA, opponents of the authority have argued that it is too costly and that government should not compete with private enterprise. In 1959, Congress authorized the TVA to issue bonds and notes to be used in financing needed additions to power system capacity. The power system became self-financing and by the early 1990s had paid back more than $2.5 billion into the U.S. Treasury. Congressional funding of the TVA's nonpower programs was phased out in the late 1990s, leaving it totally self-supporting.

The TVA Today

By the 1960s many of the regional problems of underdevelopment had been overcome, per capita income had increased dramatically, and rapid outmigration had ended. However, the TVA continues to seek ways to make the largely rural area an attractive alternative to overcrowded cities. In the late 1960s and early 70s the TVA began to place greater emphasis on environmental protection as industrialization and rising living standards resulted in greater demands on the environment. In the conflict between economic and environmental objectives the TVA sought a suitable balance, particularly in its power program. Despite the TVA's environmental protection efforts, the agency has been criticized principally by environmental groups. Controversial issues have involved construction of the Tellico Dam and Reservoir on the Little Tennessee River, the nuclear power program, and the TVA's purchase of pollution credits from Wisconsin Power and Light in 1992.

Bibliography

See P. J. Hubbard, Origins of the TVA (1961, repr. 1968); J. Moore, ed., The Economic Impact of TVA (1967); N. Callahan, TVA: Bridge over Troubled Waters (1980); W. U. Chandler, Myth of TVA: Conservation and Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1933–1983 (1984).

Tennessee Valley Authority. Established in May 1933 during the frenzied first one hundred days of the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) sought to revitalize one of America's poorest regions.At the time, the farms and small towns in the seven states that bordered the nearly impassable Tennessee River and its tributaries presented a bleak checkerboard of weather‐beaten shacks lacking electricity, crumbling churches, and one‐room schools.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not the first public official who sought to harness the Tennessee River's power and address the valley's crippling poverty, but his vision surpassed anything previously imagined. Proposing the TVA to Congress, Roosevelt declared: “It is time [for] national planning for a complete river watershed involving many States and the future lives and welfare of millions.” Under agency heads Arthur E. Morgan (1878–1976) and then the Chicago lawyer David E. Lilienthal (1899–1981), the TVA built sixteen dams to prevent spring floods and limit soil erosion, supplied the valley with cheap electricity and recreational facilities, provided farmers with inexpensive fertilizer, and established a model community of neatly placed modern homes. Like most TVA programs and, indeed, most New Deal programs, this model community was racially segregated. Indeed, the TVA's insistence on local control, or “grassroots democracy,” meant that discriminatory political and social structures often remained in place, even while the agency fought to eradicate poverty.

For supporters and critics, TVA symbolized the best and worst of the New Deal. Roosevelt's opponents saw it as a frightening instance of government excess; some even denounced it as “creeping socialism.” New Dealers, however, pointed to the project as a shining example of government action at its best. For the first time, thanks to TVA, recalled one enthusiast, “the poor and dispossessed of America could imagine a new kind of world, a life based on brotherhood and mutuality.” A particularly strong supporter was Senator George W. Norris (1861–1944) of Nebraska, a long‐time advocate of public power development. TVA's massive Norris Dam near Knoxville was named in his honor.

The TVA's legacy proved mixed. Within a decade the agency transformed an unpredictable river into a manageable waterway providing vast amounts of hydroelectric power to thousands of isolated rural homes. Malaria, once endemic in the area, was virtually eliminated. The TVA's accomplishments, moreover, eventually including nuclear power, laid the groundwork for industrial development and economic expansion in the Tennessee Valley. But that progress did not end economic inequities or racism or redistribute political power. As the twentieth century ended, the TVA survived, its spectacular dams a major tourist destination. But it survived simply as another big power company, no longer as a model of visionary government planning.
See also Electrical Industry; Electricity and Electrification; New Deal Era, The; South, The.

Bibliography

Thomas McCraw , TVA and the Power Fight, 1933–1939, 1971.
Erwin C. Hargrove and Paul K. Conkin, eds., TVA: Fifty Years of Grassroots Bureaucracy, 1983.

Bryant Simon

TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY

In 1933, U.S. President franklin delano roosevelt approved the passage of the tennessee valley authority act (16 U.S.C.A. § 831 et seq.). The act provided for a source of hydroelectric power, control of a troublesome flood situation, revitalization of forest areas, and navigation and economic benefits for the region. These goals, announced during a devastating nationwide depression, made the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) an ambitious project of the era.

The idea for the project was originally developed in 1918, when two nitrate facilities and a dam were constructed at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on the Tennessee River. Previously the area had been prone to severe floods, and water travel was impeded by sandbanks. The area had abundant natural resources, but the surrounding basin was depleted, and the region had experienced a depressed economy even before the hard times suffered throughout the nation in the Depression of the 1930s.

Politicians and developers of the project envisioned a growth of industry and water power in the Tennessee Valley, as well as the manufacture of low-priced fertilizer and public control of the valuable resources. Debates over whether the project area should be rented to private parties or be controlled by the government continued throughout the 1920s. Senator george w. norris of Nebraska was instrumental in the passage of measures by Congress advocating government control, but these bills did not receive presidential approval until 1933, when Roosevelt based his Tennessee Valley plan on the Norris proposals.

Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Act authorized the establishment of a corporation owned by the federal government and directed by Arthur E. Morgan, the chairman, and Harcourt A. Morgan, and David Lilienthal. The early years of TVA were fraught with adversity, particularly when its constitutionality was questioned. Disputes between the directors and an investigation conducted by Congress hampered its initial achievements, but the TVA continued its work despite these difficulties.

The TVA succeeded in its projected goals. Since the development of its dams and reservoirs, the region has not been subjected to serious floods. The electrical system developed by the TVA afforded the region power at a low cost, and throughout the decades, power development has been extended to include coal and nuclear systems. The TVA also benefited agrarian interests by encouraging conservation, replenishment of forests, and agricultural and fertilizer research. Although the power program of the TVA is

financially self-supporting today, other programs conducted by the authority are financed primarily by appropriations from Congress.

further readings

Colignon, Richard A. 1997. Power Plays: Critical Events in the Institutionalization of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.

Creese, Walter L. 1990. TVA's Public Planning: The Vision, the Reality. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press.

TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY ACT

The Tennessee Valley Authority Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1933 to establish the tennessee valley authority (TVA), an autonomous federal corporate agency responsible for the integrated development of the Tennessee River basin. The concept of the TVA Act (16 U.S.C.A. § 831 et seq.) initially appeared in the early 1920s, when Senator george w. norris introduced a plan to have the government assume the operation of the Wilson Dam and other installations the government had constructed at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for national security reasons during world war i. President calvin coolidge and President herbert hoover, in 1928 and 1931, respectively, vetoed the legislation. In 1933, President franklindelano roosevelt reworked the legislation, and Congress passed the TVA Act. This version significantly expanded the scope of the previous legislation in that it propelled the federal government into a comprehensive scheme of regional planning and development. This marked the first time one agency was directed to coordinate the entire resource development of a major region, and the endeavor served as the prototype for similar river projects.

The TVA was responsible for resolving the problems arising from serious floods, substantially eroded land, a lackluster economy, and continual emigration from the region. It has revitalized the economy of the Tennessee River basin, particularly by the construction of reservoirs and multipurpose dams. Other noteworthy projects of the TVA, executed in conjunction with local authorities, have included malaria control; tree planting; the development of mineral, fish, and wildlife resources; land conservation; educational and social programs; and the construction of recreational facilities adjacent to reservoir banks.

further readings

Colignon, Richard A. 1997. Power Plays: Critical Events in the Institutionalization of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.

Creese, Walter L. 1990. TVA's Public Planning: The Vision, the Reality. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press.

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) An independent federal government agency in the USA. Created by Congress (1933) as part of the NEW DEAL proposals to offset unemployment by a programme of public works, it set out to provide for the development of the whole Tennessee River basin. It took over a project (begun in 1916) for extracting nitrate at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. In addition the TVA was authorized to construct new dams and improve existing ones, to control floods and generate cheap hydro-electric power, to check erosion, and to provide afforestation across seven states.