IN THE preceding article we noted the wisdom of the TVA in cooperating with local organizations in the distribution of power. There are other functions where the same wise cooperation is in evidence. Let us consider the land program. Here TVA works through the Extension Service units of the land-grant colleges, which have been functioning for years. The farmers have come to trust these people. A program of vocational education operates through local agencies set up under the Smith-Hughes law twenty years ago. Here again is no break with the past.
Public-health work is carried on through the State Health Department and through the long-established county agents. Dr. E. L. Bishop is the technician who is evolving the crucial program of malaria control at the reservoirs, but the contact work is done by local agencies. He has discovered among other things that alternately raising and lowering the reservoirs about a foot so disturbs the ecology of marine life at the brink that food for mosquito larvae is kept at a minimum, and the pests starve before hatching. He is working out a method for dusting reservoir surfaces by airplane to poison the larvae. He has saved $260,000 in the costs of clearing Wheeler reservoir by a new method which also aids the control of mosquitoes.
One of the most dramatic examples is the cooperation with local labor unions. This story has often been told, and I shall only review it briefly. Credit is due primarily to Dr. Arthur E. Morgan. The TVA principle is: allow no labor conflicts on government jobs, standardize the wage structure, eliminate the peaks and valleys of employment, look always at the worker's annual income, for this is what his family lives on, not on a high day rate. Business agents of the unions were at first suspicious. They put on their poker faces and prepared for the usual game of bluff. But the TVA granted collective bargaining at once and invited the agents to assist in preparing the whole bargaining structure. The policy, every item of which was checked by the unions, was adopted in May, 1935, including full machinery for grievances and wage adjustments. Some 85 per cent of the skilled workers are organized, 50 per cent of the unskilled, and 10 per cent of the white-collar group. There is a man named Killen who has a genius for settling jurisdictional disputes. The bluffing game has gone. Both sides lay their cards face up on the table. Men usually prefer to play square if you give them a chance. Norris Dam as a construction job will be a little below the average cost, yet its wages have run from 5 to 20 per cent above average. The WPA may be cutting prevailing wages, but the TVA is bettering them. There is no sabotage; output per man-hour is high. The accident rate is phenomenally low. Labor throughout the region has been won to the TVA and will fight for its continuance.
The Valley has been convinced, with the exceptions noted above. The strategy has been that of the "middle road." Planning is by democratic consent rather than by dictatorial blueprint. To balance resources against population, figure a possible living standard, and appoint every man to his post, is not an excessively difficult job on the drawing-board. I have done it myself on occasion. But to get men, particularly Americans, and particularly the native stock of the Tennessee mountains, to go to their posts is something else again. The connection is remote. Blueprints are necessary. They assess the potential wellbeing of any region; they furnish a goal. In the shape of land planning maps, of course, they are as vital as working drawings for dams or integrated power load. But when it comes to the practical matter of getting people to move, of changing long-established institutions, of shifting encrusted habits and folkways, it seems to me that Dr. H. A. Morgan's policy is the right one--indeed, the only one short of revolution. Of all the many problems which the TVA is tackling this seems to me the most vital: how to make Americans conscious of their resource base, and how to encourage them to act for themselves.
There has been much confusion about the whole matter of planning. Let us see if we can get the basic concepts clear. It is agreed that our objective is to raise the living standards of a given area. There are three approaches:
First: If the area is virgin territory with few people living in it and no vested rights, the planning becomes a straight engineering job. Assess the natural resources, design the plant, and invite the people in. Examples are the Panama Canal, the original city of Washington, the PWA town in Alaska, the TVA town of Norris.
Second: Granted an inhabited area, planning may be autocratic. Vested interests which object are exiled or wiped out. People are moved about like chessmen. Prevailing institutions are swept aside. The idea is: we are going to take charge of your standard of living whether you like it or not. Examples: Liberia and other large plantation areas in the tropics; parts of Russia, Italy, Germany; coal-company towns; the state of Delaware under the du Pont dynasty.
Third: Granted an inhabited area, planning may be attempted with the consent of those who live therein. Vested interests are deflected, outgeneraled, and not encountered head on except in critical cases. Prevailing institutions and folkways are reckoned with. There are no dictatorial powers, but rather persuasion, example, yardsticks, cooperative agreements, education. Examples: Sweden, Norway, Finland, many programs in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand--and the TVA.
This is not to say that the TVA is on the way to inevitable success. It may be wrecked on any of a dozen reefs. This is only to say that its goals are undeniably the right ones, that the strategy employed to reach those goals appears to be a shrewd one, that the opposition is for the moment in retreat, that visible progress is being made. The reefs are there, treacherous beneath the channel. Perhaps the power gentlemen and their courts can break not only the power yardstick but the whole experiment. I doubt this, but it is always a possibility until we break the unconscionable habits of power gentlemen. In Sweden they have been broken, but many private companies still sell power and make a good living at it. They do not, however, monkey around much with injunctions.
In the physical frame of reference the TVA makes such obvious sense that even a tory might grasp it. In the pecuniary frame the case is not so clear. As resources are built up and transformed into crops, industrial products, and energy, vested interests in scarcity outside the Valley are bound to be alarmed, even though the chances are that they will be helped more than they will be hurt by the increased prosperity of the region. Their behavior will be on all fours with the behavior of many of our best people today, who are wailing because the government spends so much, while the net effect of that spending has been to put them back on their financial feet. Plain facts are no guide in the premises, however. If enough vested interests come to believe that the TVA is destined to harm them, even though it is actually enriching them, they will gang up on it, as big business has ganged up on the New Deal, and will move heaven and hell to put it out of commission. By vested interests I mean farmers beyond the Valley as well as industrialists and power companies- indeed, all and sundry who fear for their own markets.
The TVA will certainly reach a point when the matter of developing local industries will have to be squarely met. At present this subject is in the laboratory. One hears of ceramics, canning, sorghum syrups, woodworking, and so on. I doubt if the sale of raw materials to the outside world will ever give the Valley enough in the way of exchange values to provide really adequate living standards. So the Valley will have to take some of its cheap power and produce certain strategic manufactured goods for its own consumption. Otherwise the whole experiment will hang in mid-air, like a lopsided moon. At this point every manufacturer of similar commodities outside the Valley will cry, "Ho! Help, murder and police!" Let them cry. Too much middle-road technique might end by tempering the project to so many winds that it would lose all momentum.
The TVA may be gently, even tearfully, starved to death by a Washington Administration pledged to economy, unaware that to reestablish the resource base of a large region is the soundest conceivable economy in the long run. Again, the local administration may become confused following divergent policies--dams, for instance, as against soil rebuilding--and exhaust its energies in an internal struggle, losing the united picture of an integrated watershed in which no one function takes precedence.
The future is none too clear. American institutions have changed markedly since 1929, but they must change considerably more before we can enrich our livelihood with forthright, honest regional planning. The TVA, at the present stage of what historians may some day call the Great Transition, must inevitably be a compromise--as the navigation clause which legally justifies it is a compromise--between what is and what is to be.
Finally, the world outside the Valley may sharply ask why this region should be marked off for assistance above other regions. There is a good answer to this question, but it may be disregarded. The charity is also an investment for the nation as a whole in certain. ways which are worth stating categorically. The TVA can help us all:
- By reducing our bills for electric power through the yardstick device. This is already beginning to happen.
- By helping to prevent floods or the lower Mississippi and so saving heavy losses to people outside the
- By giving a cheap phosphorus fertilizer to the nation.
- By working out a practical program to replace the one-crop cotton culture of the South. This affects the whole cotton belt.
- By working out the techniques of integrated watershed control, good for any valley.
- By working out techniques for the control of erosion, for land use, forestry, recreation, free ways (controlled motor highways); for decentralization, resettlement, town planning; for the control of malaria; for labor policies--all of which have wide general application.
- By creating a degree of local prosperity which will be infectious beyond the local boundaries. If average farm income can be raised from $100 to, say, $500, a large new market is created for imported goods. (As noted above, however, the beneficiaries may be so busy protesting against new Valley industries that the fact will escape them.)
- By developing a middle-road technique for the human and institutional aspects of regional planning, applicable throughout the Republic during this phase of the Great Transition.
The TVA can help the rest of us, particularly the boys and girls of the lost generation, by giving us hope, by furnishing tangible evidence that there is a way out.
Compromise or no, to see the Authority in operation is a spiritually refreshing experience. To look at the dean, strong walls of Norris Dam between the hills of pine; to feel the will to achievement, the deep integrity of a thousand young-minded men and women, schooled in the disciplines of science, free from the dreary business of chiseling competitors and advertising soap; to know that over this whole great watershed from the Smokies to the Ohio men's faces turn to a common purpose and a common goal--these things intoxicate the imagination. Here, struggling in embryo, is perhaps the promise of what all America may some day be.
