THE preceding article on the TVA described the Valley, and argued that the primary function of regional planning, under the conditions which face America today, is to drive an exchange base under local communities, so that each area may have goods or services to exchange with the world beyond its borders, and thus share in the abundant output of modern technology. Failing such a base, it must lapse into the primitive self-sufficiency of the pre-machine age. The Tennessee Valley has little in the way of manufacturing and less in the way of services to offer the world beyond its hills. Its exchange base must be primarily natural resources--foodstuffs, raw materials, water-power. What is the TVA doing specifically to increase these resources?
The Constitution of the United States knows nothing of regional planning, for the conception would have been fantastic in 1787, when a specialized exchange economy was still in the womb of time. The Supreme Court knows nothing of regional planning except in the negative sense that a watershed comprising portions of seven states is suspect in the light of the commerce clause, and probably unlawful. Congress has never heard of regional planning officially, and would be seriously confused as to the patronage involved, if it had. The President first had a definite idea as to the functions and scope of the TVA. He saw the watershed as a geographic and hydrologic unit; he wanted to make the people in that watershed more comfortable, and he wanted to set up a series of yardsticks to measure power facilities, rural electrification, flood control, erosion control, progressive agriculture; yardsticks hopefully to be applied in other regions and to make people more comfortable there. Many members of Congress undoubtedly shared these desires with the President, especially Senator Norris.
But under the American system one cannot go straight to one's desire. One must adopt a crab-like course which defers to established taboos and symbols. To control the watershed of the Tennessee in the interests of the people living within that watershed is legally an outrageous procedure, as Professor Arnold of the Yale Law School ironically suggests, and not to be tolerated by right-thinking citizens. But both navigation and flood control have sidled past the taboos in times gone by, and are now admitted as right and necessary functions even by the lawyers of the American Liberty League. Federal production and sale of power, however, was on the fence until the United States Supreme Court settled it in the affirmative by eight votes to one.
The TVA act was framed with these taboos in mind. It provides for:
- A maximum development of the Tennessee River for navigation.
- A maximum amount of flood control.
- A maximum generation of electric power consistent with flood and navigation control.
- The investigation of a proper use of marginal lands.
- Studies on a proper method of reforestation.
- ecommendations for "the economic and social well-being of the people living in said river basin."
This last provision was perhaps too frank. It may yet prove the undoing of the whole experiment. It comes perilously close to stating what the act was really designed for. It is bad form and bad law to consider the social wellbeing of two million people scattered over seven states. Such frankness was not really necessary. All that needed to be stipulated in the act was navigation, and nature would do the rest, even including the welfare clause. Why? Because you cannot tinker with nine-foot channels from Paducah to Knoxville without tinkering with the whole flow of water down the basin, which involves the hydrologic cycle, which dominates and controls the ecology of the region, and thus lets in the whole program--animal, vegetable, human, and divine, if you please. Of course, you can dig a nine-foot channel at fabulous expense without considering any of the related factors, but the first spring flood will damage it, and silt rushing down from the eroded fields will complete the ruin. Various "navigable" channels have been so constructed in the past, but;: they have fallen under the general title of the Congressional pork barrel. There is no pork to be had in the TVA, as any member of Congress will sadly tell you, but instead I rather a strict interpretation of a permanent nine-foot channel.
You may or may not respect men and their taboos, but; you must respect the laws of nature. You put a nine-foot channel up to nature, and ask that it be made permanent. What does she stipulate? She first makes it very clear that what goes up must come down. Water is drawn to the clouds from the Atlantic and the Gulf and precipitated in rain and snow over the Valley, especially on the Eastern mountains. This water feeds plants and is transpired by them, runs into lakes and underground reservoirs for slow seepage seaward, and runs off on the surface through rivulets, creeks, and rivers. Ultimately it finds the sea, and the cycle repeats itself--so long as this planet endures. The water will come down. The people of Hartford, the people of Pittsburgh, the people of Johnstown have no illusions on this score.
Dependable navigation calls for flood control; flood control calls for dams and reservoirs; reservoirs must not fill with silt or their function vanishes; Hales Bar Dam in the big river is 33 per cent silted in twenty-three years. Silt can be prevented only by the control of erosion on agricultural lands and little waters. Erosion control calls for cover crops, both forest and grass, and scientific methods in tillage and crop rotation; cover crops call for cheap fertilizer, otherwise they will not take root on the exhausted soils; cheap fertilizer, especially phosphate, which is the major requirement in the Valley, can best be made with the help of electric furnaces and cheap power. So the cycle returns on itself, a house-that-Jack-built. If you really mean navigation, all these things will be added unto you. Similarly if the national taboos frowned on navigation and smiled on fertilizer, let us say, the cycle would be almost identical. Nor does it stop here. Large reservoirs demand the removal of many houses, which calls for an intelligent resettlement program. Large reservoirs demand an extensive replanning of railways, highways, schools, and recreation areas. The forest cover which is to check erosion calls for permanent management and many jobs for fire patrollers and forest workers. Large reservoirs often produce trillions of mosquitoes--probably in these latitudes mosquitoes which spread malaria; malaria calls for a medical-engineering control as rigorous as the methods of Colonel Gorges when the Panama Canal was built. Malaria is less lethal than yellow fever, but it is at least as hard to eradicate. Water control ties in with fish and wild-life preservation, with purification of streams polluted by city sewers and industrial wastes.
Such are nature's demands. In writing them down, I have automatically listed the functions of the TVA. To the list may be added certain collateral functions which appear to fit the cycle logically enough: a labor program for the very extensive engineering operations involved, primarily dams and reservoirs; the conservation of the Valley's mineral resources, especially phosphate rock; the development of the hydroelectric power resources of the Valley as one integrated, low-cost system, and the discovery of ways and means, such as rural electrification, to put the power to useful employment. There are other functions which are somewhat more indirect, such as land classification, including aerial mapping, a program for the use of marginal lands, and the development of domestic industries to supplement agriculture and provide employment.
We start with navigation and end with a pretty comprehensive program of regional planning. We could start with flood control or with power and arrive at substantially the same program. As a matter of fact--and I trust the Supreme Court is safely asleep as I whisper it--navigation is probably the least important aspect of the cycle, from the point of view of the well-being of the people of the Valley. Army engineers anticipate a very substantial traffic by 1950--some eighteen million tons in fact--but it is safe to say that they have not anticipated all the technological developments which may occur in transport within the next fifteen years.
As one drives down the Valley, its appearance is probably not very much changed from ten years ago--with a few exceptions shortly to be noted. This experiment which so agitates the nation is rather hard to find, unless one knows where to look. Ten years ago there was a great dam at Muscle Shoals, now called the Wilson Dam. It was equipped with generators for producing power and with two nitrate plants. These assets the TVA, a corporation outside any government department, took over. The generators were put to work and power was sold to various private companies and to a few towns. One of the nitrate plants was converted into a laboratory for experiments on a cheap phosphate fertilizer. Headquarters were established in Knoxville, three hundred miles from the original assets, and work begun on a dam in the Clinch River, a tributary of the Tennessee, twenty-five miles from Knoxville. To house the dam workers and part of the headquarters' staff, the town of Norris was built. The Norris Dam is now completed, generators are being installed and power will flow early in the summer. As the reservoir fills behind the dam, it will back upstream at least forty miles, and then the TVA will begin to make a very tangible impression on the landscape.
As skilled workers finish at Norris, they go down to work on the Wheeler Dam, some twenty miles above the Wilson Dam. Wheeler is almost finished, and presently its reservoir will fill. A dam at Pickwick Landing is well under way. Dams have been surveyed at Guntersville and Chickamauga. When their reservoirs are full, the Valley will have taken on a very different appearance indeed. Nor is this all. Dams are recommended for construction at Gilbertsville, Watts Bar, and Coulter Shoals on the main river, and two more tributary storage dams, like Norris, at Fontana and Fowler Bend.
Nine dams in the main river, including Hales Bar, built and leased by a private power company, and three in tributary rivers. With these twelve dams in place, the nine-foot channel running 650 miles from Knoxville to Paducah is assured and protected; no conceivable flood can seriously damage the Valley, for the plans are based on a flow of water 50 per cent greater than the historic flood of 1867. The power load will be integrated from dam to dam, so that the resources of those where the water is low will be supplemented by those where the water is high. Any power engineer can tell you what this means in dependability and low cost. Great transmission lines will link generator to generator. To take a specific instance: Wilson Dam is a run-of-the-river plant. Its reservoir does not provide much storage and in the summer and fall, when the river is normally low, its power output is at a minimum. Norris Dam, on the other hand, is designed primarily for storing flood waters, and has a huge capacity. While Wilson is well supplied by the high river in the spring, the Norris gates will be closed; flood waters will fill the great reservoir. As Wilson declines, Norris comes in. The gates are opened. Power is generated once at the Norris turbines, and as the released water goes down the river, generated again at Wilson. Norris and Wilson together can generate three or four times as much dependable power as either could produce alone.
With nine run-of-the-river dams, it is conceivable that every bucket of water released from Norris, or other tributary reservoirs, will be used ten times. Within a year from today every bucketful will be used three times, once at Norris, once at Wheeler, once at Wilson. This is the engineering ideal of balancing the load, and makes for cheap power. No private company can hope to rival such watershed control.
By the end of 1936 about $85,000,000 will have been spent on six dams--Wheeler, Norris, Pickwick Landing, Guntersville, Chickamauga, and Fowler Bend. By the end of 1940 all six will be completed--Congress permitting at a total cost of about $185,000,000. By 1944 another $144,000,000 can be expended to advantage in constructing four more dams to make the system complete--Gilbertsville, Watts Bar, Coulter Shoals, and Fontana. The total outlay is thus estimated at about a third of a billion--say the cost of half a dozen battleships. The work has been planned, furthermore, to keep the skilled labor force steadily employed for the next eight years, thus preserving the human balance as well as the hydrologic Labor costs under such a long-swing program will of course be at a minimum, as any personnel manager can tell you.
All the dams will have locks for navigation where necessary. All will be wired for power, as it were, but generators will not be installed until demand warrants it. Wilson, Wheeler, and Norris are about to produce 205,000 kilowatts of continuous power. If and when the whole group comes in, the total will be raised to 660,000 kilowatts of continuous, dependable, year-round power.
So much for dams, the bony skeleton of the TVA. Now for the flesh and blood. Looking around the Valley, if your eyes are sharp, you will find the face of nature on the farms being slowly changed. Twenty enterprising farmers in each county are allowing experiments in the control of erosion to be made on their farms. Steep slopes are going out of corn and cotton and back to grass or forest. Tilled slopes are being terraced or contour-plowed. CCC boys are helping to plug gullies with little dams and thickets of black locust. Dr. H. A. Morgan's phosphates are bringing up green new grasses, presently to be grazed by livestock. A scientific plan of crop rotation is being followed.
Neighbors come and lean over the fences--first to scoff, then to be interested, finally to consider seriously a similar plan on their own farms. Already the farmers of the whole Valley are interested. (The wise methods by which their interest has been aroused will be discussed in the next article.) Thus in encouraging methods of agriculture primarily designed to keep reservoirs from filling with silt, one-crop farming is giving way to diversified farming--a bitter need of the South; farm diet is being improved and balanced with milk and vegetables; a way is being prepared to replace King Cotton, who is toppling from his throne. Twenty experimental farms in a county are not many. But the leaven spreads.
