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A Valley to Hold Toby GEORGE C. STONEY
"Did some government expert help you work out this crop plan?" I asked the owner as we stood together on the porch of his three-room house. "Naw," Hixson mumbled, rubbing his long jaw with a gnarled work hand. "God-a-mighty give a man brains to figure out some things for hisself." WHEN TVA FIRST CAME TO THE VALLEY, EIGHT YEARS AGO, these had been sixty-three acres of badly eroded land, part of fourteen million acres in the Valley that were sending down their topsoil into the waters of the Tennessee, causing floods, filling up the reservoirs of power dams and making them grow old before their time. Almost all these fourteen million acres were owned by such farmers as Mr. Hixson. The Authority had to get the cooperation of these small farmers. Somehow a system of agriculture had to be worked out that would not only hold the topsoil in place and store the water, but also one that would at the same time support the families on the land as well as, or better than, they had been supported by the old system. The experts had certain general ideas. They knew that most of the valley land was undernourished. For too many years farmers had planted soil-depleting row crops on these slopes, literally mining the land of the natural plant foods nature had spent hundreds of years in depositing. They knew that by the planting of legumes and winter cover crops, by proper terracing and the addition of fertilizer, this land could be restored to its former richness in relatively few years. But how was the farmer and his family to live while this restoration was taking place? What choice had the farmer but to mine the soil of its last ounce of goodness when the food in his children's mouths depended upon it? Drive south on U.S. Highway 31 from Columbia, Tenn. to Athens, Ala.; turn east on 72 across north Alabama through Scottsboro and Bridgeport. Around Columbia: thick pastures, fat cows, tall even rows of corn, avenues of cedars, and beyond them the white columns of $20,000 farm homes. Around Bridgeport: bald red hills, scrubby stock, stunted crops, unpainted shacks on eroded hills. The most telling contrast of all shows in the faces of the people. Around Columbia the land sucks a continuous supply of phosphate from the limestone upon which it rests. At Bridgeport there is no such base. The difference is phosphate. Test Farms IN SETTING UP THE TVA, CONGRESS INSTRUCTED IT TO USE the old Muscle Shoals factory, originally built to develop nitrogen for war purposes, to experiment with new and improved types of phosphate fertilizers. This it has done, developing two special formulas which are now used on test farms not only throughout the Tennessee Valley, but also in twenty-two states that lie outside. The scheme for testing these combinations is the heart of TVA's large scale program for getting farmers to do something about conserving their own land. Now the Authority could have tested these fertilizers more satisfactorily from a purely scientific point of view, and no doubt more cheaply, had it bought farms in the several soil belts, hired experts, and measured results with exactitude. Scientific tests by state and federal experiment stations now tell the TVA what can be done. But farm experts have learned that to get a new method of cultivation adopted takes much longer and is much more costly than to develop it. Even then, application to each farm unit is something the farmer must figure out for himself. Why not let him help with the testing? Half a mile from Hixson's place, "within hollerin' distance," as he puts it, lives James Daulton, whose 123 acres have become the test demonstration farm for that neighborhood. In 1935, at a community meeting called by the county agent, Daulton had been nominated for this work. After his farm and farm record had been examined by the agent and the Soil Conservation Committee, made up of presidents of community associations, Daulton was finally chosen. How Hixson Did It DAULTON SIGNED UP WITH THE TVA TO RECEIVE a stated amount of the special test fertilizer each year, provided that he pay the freight on it; use it on permanent pastures, winter legumes, or other soil building and water retaining crops; not use it on row or soil-depleting crops; keep rudimentary farm records to show the effects of the fertilizer used. He was free to withdraw from the program whenever he wished. Everything else was in the hands of Daulton, his neighbors, and the county agent. Those men got together and mapped out Daulton's farm, marking all soil types, measuring slopes, condition of topsoil, and drainage. They noted Daulton's revel in tools, labor, and stock, and, finally, the needs of his family. A farm plan was drawn up with all these things in mind. Accordingly, Daulton put his land in c crops to prevent erosion during the winter. An application of test fertilizer doubled the growth and, when these covers were turned under the next spring, the corn that followed yielded nearly twice the accustomed number of bushels. More corn on fewer acres permitted Daulton to retire from row crops to pasture several acres were really too much eroded for profitable cultivation way. So it went. And Hixson watched. In the evenings he would through his own fields, note that the corn came only to his knees, then walk down the road and look over fence at Daulton's waist-high stalks. He saw Daulton grazing two cows on land reclaimed from waste and retired from corn. He had seen Daulton's farm record book for the first year (how the agents have to sweat get them to keep accounts), and knew that despite the high cost of terracing and planting of winter cover a l increased yields indicated that the investment was a profitable one. No rule of thumb could be given for adapting all these things Hixson saw happening on Daulton's farm to his own smaller place, with its own special problems of drainage, of soil depth, of family need. The fact, then, the he has successfully adapted his acres to the new agriculture, along with many thousands of other farmers in the Tennessee Valley, is signal proof of TVA's success in what they like to call "administration at the grass roots." Making the Wheel Go Around THERE ARE ABOUT FIFTEEN THOUSAND TEST FARMS SIMILAR to Daulton's in the Tennessee Valley watershed and a many more outside it, now spread over twenty-two states Eight others are organizing to join the program soon The allotment of farms in each state is not determined by TVA but by the State Agricultural Extension Service in whose hands rests the direction of this whole program Less than a score of men are employed directly by the Authority to assist. Most of the work is guided by the man in each county who knows farmers best, the county agent. And the agents are eager for it. "For twenty years," one agent told me, "I've been wanting to run some whole-farm demonstrations in this and I couldn't get them started. Oh, I had little of test crops on several farms, but somehow these have the dollars-and-cents proof the men I work ant." Now this agent has twelve whole-farm demonstrations going at once, one within four miles of every homestead in the county. It was the fertilizer program rally made the wheel go around. "Now when I want to tell the men about how to develop permanent pasture," the agent explained, "I hold a meeting with them on one. A man can stick his fingers into what I'm telling him about. And if we're talking about the effect of winter legumes on a crop of strawberries, we can walk from a field that had one turned under right over next door to one that didn't. Same soil type, same weather conditions. They can't come back at me with any of that old talk about 'it being all right what they do down at the experiment station, but now if they had the kind of land and the kind of weather we have up here . . . '" He laughed, and motioned to a graduate of the State Agricultural College, who en furnished him as a special assistant to help with test farms and to supervise conservation work in the county. "He can tell you more than I can about the farms. He spends a great deal of his time on them." This assistant is one of those supplied by TVA to 9 agents in all counties that fall within the watershed of the Tennessee River. TVA supplies the money, s. The assistant is hired through the State Extension Service, functions as their employee, and his only direct obligation to the Authority is to send it a detailed report. "This TVA fertilizer program is fine," the county agent said, and more than a dozen agents I have interviewed in as many counties in Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina. and Georgia, say the same thing. "The Extension Services are doing wonders with their test-farm program," an official in the Authority's headquarters commented as we talked. This general willingness to share credit is an indication of the success TVA is having with local officials who are participating in its 'grass roots administration." The Fertilizer Man USE OF PHOSPHATE FERTILIZER IS CERTAINLY NOTHING NEW to farmers in the South. Because they have spent close to 20 percent of their income annually for his products, the fertilizer man has been pictured often in southern journals as an awful bogey, taking a huge bite out of the farmers' meager slice of living. In some ways that bogeyman caricature of the fertilizer man was justified, and still is. The bags of phosphate fertilizer he has been selling the farmer-at the latter's request, it must be admitted-are sometimes more than half "filler" with no fertility value. Think of the thousands of dollars farmers have paid out in extra freight charges to have this "filler" shipped to them. TVA's Muscle Shoals plant has developed two concentrated phosphates, one called triple superphosphate, about three times ordinary strength, and metaphosphate, about four times as strong as the usual commercial brand. Four years use on test farms has shown that these fertilizers, when used in one third to one fourth proportions to the amount of commercial phosphate ordinarily used, give the same result. Farmers are beginning to demand these new combinations from their dealers (TVA produces none for sale), and already demand exceeds supply. Besides developing a cheaper and more efficient fertilizer (the increased phosphate content of these new combinations is one of several improvements), the TVA has its eye on the long future. Its own supply comes from the fast diminishing deposits in Tennessee. Florida has considerable deposit which will supply the Southeast's needs for a long time, but not forever. More than 92 percent of the nation's supply of phosphate is in the Far West, thousands of miles away from its largest segment of phosphate-hungry soils in the Southeast. If these western deposits are to be made commercially available to people who most need them, the cost of shipping must be reduced. TVA's new high concentrates have gone a long way toward making this possible. Are the manufacturers and marketers of commercial fertilizer suffering because of this program of what they once called "free fertilizer"? They thought they were going to suffer when the program was announced. Now they know better. Hotelkeepers in the country towns will tell you that fertilizer salesmen are now making their circuits twice instead of once a year. They come back in the fall, order book in hand, to sell fertilizers for cover crops and pastures-direct result of the test-farm program. Stepping the Hills TERRACES BELT AND STEP THE TILLED AND PASTURED SLOPES IN a large part of the Valley. Crop rows hug the hills in carefully measured contours above them and below them. Terracing is one of the most important—and expensive—jobs that must be done if soil is to stay put land, and water is to seep naturally and silt-free into the Valley streams. For many more years than they have known about TVA, Valley farmers have know terracing would do. A farmer would spend six backbreaking labor with mule and plow building ridges to hold back the water, only to see a weekend shower cut deep gashes in their lips and send half his week's work down the hillside. The few mule that were successful waterholders were either or slopes and connected with an efficient drainage system they were the work of several years of careful building. Because over half the farmers in the Valley were who moved on the average of every third year, the land had been given this treatment. Farmers found that a power terrace, thrown up by a heavy grader unit pulled by a tractor, if properly edged with grass, would last. Once built, it could be shape by a man with a single mule and light plow. The trouble was that the cheapest tractors cost from and one suitable for heavy terracing costs, with all appliances, from $1,600 to several thousand. Only the largest farmers could afford units of their own. In some places terracing units have been bought cooperatively, and farmers are able to have their la raced at a price they can afford for what they justly consider "permanent improvements." Where holdings are smaller, farmers have appealed to their county road commissioners for help. County governments have begun to realize that the health of their tax structure is no better than the condition of the land upon which it is based. Accordingly, many of them have bought tractor units for use as terracers on all farms. By gearing in the operation of this unit with work on roads, terracing can be done at a reasonable cost. While a large part of the land even within the Valley proper still stands in need of rudimentary terracing, the general transformation of the countryside is truly starting. To tell it in figures: Madison County, Alabama, had 11,550 terraced acres in 1935. In 1939 it had more than 54,000 acres. All credit for these improvements must not be given e fertilizer program. AAA's crop control has helped make it economically possible for many farmers to retire crop land to pasture. The payments for soil building practices, under the Department of Agriculture's conservation program, has supplied much of the cash necessary for legume seed and terracing. Yes, many of these acres now producing soil building s once supplied a livelihood—if a very poor one—to tenants and sharecroppers, now displaced. "To Him That Hath . . ." THE TEST-FARM PROGRAM INSTRUCTS COUNTY AGENTS AND community committeemen to select farms in their counties representing all sizes and all types of agriculture found within it. Complete application of this, however, is limited by certain inevitables of the program itself. First, each farmer selected must have education enough keep his simple farm records. Highly simplified ugh the records are, those thousands of farmers in the t11ey who cannot "read nor write nor figger," are automatically eliminated, except in a few cases where children keep the records. Sharecroppers are eliminated because their fillings do not compose an economic unit. While some few renters are acting as test farmers, the number is much smaller than their proportion of all farmers. To make a useful whole-farm test, records must be kept for at least two years. A really dependable test must continue over four or five years. In this region of one year leases, only a few landlords and tenants can come to the kind of long term agreement that will persuade a county committee that this will be a dependable unit for extended study. Test farmers must have a minimum of equipment in stock and labor to give the fields what amounts to a double cropping each year. Naturally farmers who meet all these qualifications are found, for the most part, on the larger or better holdings. Just as influential here, too, is the personal attitude of many county agents who, trained to the agricultural colleges' psychology of the bushel, look with most favor on the farmers who are best able to help them raise the total yield of the county. In some places it seems like another case of "to him that hath shall be given . . . "; and I found the small farmers complaining about it. The TVA folk know about this, too, and they ask in all honesty, what can be done? Their job is to stop erosion, no matter on whose land it might occur. They cannot attack the problems of rural overpopulation, farm tenancy, and illiteracy that choke the social progress of the Valley folk. In Alabama, for instance, there is one rural inhabitant for every six acres of tillable land. No farm program, however well geared to realities, can solve this problem. Through its program of richer lands and conserved waters the TVA can increase, and is increasing, the general prosperity of Valley life of which these poorest ones are a part. One of the basic tenets of TVA's grass roots philosophy of administration seems to be that one starts with the status quo and tries to improve the entire level of living without disturbing materially the relationship between groups within it. At least this is how it is working out. In Madison County, Alabama, the status quo is large farms, worked by sharecroppers and day laborers. One of the test farms here comprises 2,000 acres and keeps more than twenty tenant farmers occupied. The crop curtailment program left its owner many acres of cotton land that could not be planted in a cash crop. This meant less work for the tenant families. When the same condition arose on neighboring plantations, the owners simply dismissed a part of the tenants, or made it impossible for them to stay by refusing to "furnish" them food during the winter. Many landlords could hardly pay their own food bills, much less those of unproductive tenants. On the test farm no families have been dismissed. Extra work at seeding pastures and cover crops has supplied them with work during a part of the winter. Caring for the owner's new herd of beef cattle has given them additional labor. Enrichment of the fields they till has increased the tenants' as well as the landlord's "share" of the crops. Individual vegetable gardens, now fertilized and set on better land, are producing more abundantly. Permanent pastures have made it possible for those families to have an all-year-round supply of fresh milk and butter for the first time in their lives. Though these sharecroppers and laborers are no nearer owner status than they were before the fertilizer program was started, who would say that their lot had not been improved? Before Wisconsin dairymen and Florida truck farmers begin to worry about how they are going to compete with this increased local production of milk and vegetables, let them examine the extent of their sales in these parts during the past few years. They will see that such complaint would be as foolish as that of the manufacturers of beauty-rest mattresses, should they insist that competition was being given them by the projects for the home-making of mattresses now being conducted so successfully in the Southeast by the Department of Agriculture and the Extension Services. Here, I am speaking not only of the tenants and croppers below the reach of the fertilizer program, but of many farm families I have visited who are serving as test units. The development of permanent pastures on family sized farms and the enrichings of old crop fields as kitchen gardens are putting milk and greens on the menu all year round. TVA-cheapened electricity made possible community boxes. Slaughtering can be done at any time. Fresh meat is placing salt pork in many s pots. TVA's program promises to have as happy an effect on the region's diet as it has had its landscape. Land for All the People N.M. LANDESS, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR of the Agricultural Relations Division, is a kind of travel evangelist for TVA's land saving program. Basically, he pointed out, TVA's job is to save the land and the water not alone for the people who happen to live in the Valley at the present time, but for people in cities, people in other parts of the country, people not yet born, all of whose lives will be affected eventually. Nature has deposited with these Valley farmers, in trust, topsoil it spent thousands of years building. Mr. Hixson told me how, when he was a boy on his sixty-three acres, his father planted a corn crop followed by a wheat crop on the same field. "After the corn was pulled, we'd knock down the stalks and the wheat would come up as high as your chest. The last time I put this strip in corn, back in '34, it wouldn't grow nothing more' little nubbins, half as big as your fist." Nature's work o centuries all but destroyed in one generation. Modern agriculture has developed soil-enriching plant and a system of fertilizing that can hasten nature's progress of restoration. "We are trying to develop a system of farming," explained Mr. Landess, "that will produce at less cost the land; one that will produce at less cost to the farmer and one that will produce at less cost to the economy o the nation, resting ultimately on the successful control o water and land." As terraces truss the hillsides, old gullies are beginning to heal. Vegetation is creeping over those horribly erode places that once were red smears against the horizon. The doctrine that farmers are trust holders of the nation's soil is spreading like a religion among the me who are hard at work in the program. Talking with farmers in the four Valley states, I heard time and again the idea expressed by a Georgia hill farmer who told me: "I used to think if a man paid his taxes and if he le enough children in this world to make up for hisself and his wife, that was about all he was due for. But al that don't do no good, I figure, if he leaves his land in such a helluva shape his children nor nobody else can' make a living of'n it." When TVA tackled the administration of huge electric systems such as the one it purchased from Commonwealth and Southern, which served southeast Tennessee and much of north Alabama, the temptation must have en great to run things as they always had been run from the head office. Instead, the Authority has managed put its grass roots procedure to work in this field, too. Electricity at the Grass Roots TRUE, THE FARTHER AWAY ONE GETS FROM THE DECENTRALIZED individual on the farm or in the small town, the less al becomes the participation by electricity customers. The average current buyer in Chattanooga, for instance, notices no difference in things electrical now from what they were like when the Tennessee Power Company (a subsidiary of Commonwealth and Southern) directed the supplying of his current from New York, except, of course, for the very real reduction in his bill. He remembers that a group of citizens, interested in reducing at bill, started a campaign some five years ago to make possible the setting up of a municipal power system. As part of the grass roots, this citizen went to the polls and voted against the advice of most of Chattanooga's politicians: for public power. Citizens' demand carried the fight through court delays, reversals, and another election. Finally, in 1938, Commonwealth and Southern sold this division to the VA and Chattanooga's Electric Power Board was set ,. Now that the city has signed a thirty-year contract with TVA for the supplying of its power, the grass roots, though technically their own customers, have little to say. There is still plenty of "say" after connection with Authority-transmission lines is made in the small towns and among the members of rural electric cooperatives. In Cullman County, Alabama, a rural power association was started because one farmer strayed thirty miles from his home over to Guntersville to hear TVA Director David Lilienthal make a speech about how cooperatives for the distribution of TVA power might be set up to serve rural sections untouched by power companies. The next time Dr. Lilienthal spoke at Guntersville this Cullman farmer brought eighteen of his neighbors along, and a lawyer. Once back home, these men quickly organized themselves into a cooperative association and applied to the government's Rural Electrification Administration for a loan to set up their distributing system. "We had to do it quick," laughed a member who had been in on the beginning. "We begun with two strikes against us." Strike one was the Alabama Power Company, which had skimmed the cream off the trade along the highways and in the small settlements but had failed to extend its lines into the back country. Strike two was the courthouse town, where profits from a municipal power system paid a good share of the local government's expenses. While the townsmen harassed cooperative members only by refusing to handle needed supplies and by making it hard for them to get cash advances, the power company gave them real physical opposition. Power company lines were suddenly extended into territory never before serviced and where there were no contracted customers, in an attempt to get prior claims. Service poles were sunk in front yards while residents stood protesting. Lines, dead at both ends, were strung across the plotted way of the cooperative, forcing them to run irregular lengths of wire. Finally, farm wives had to give the cooperative's work gangs shelter by night in their houses, while shotgun brigades guarded the equipment. Now the Cullman cooperative has over 1,592 customers, most of whom have never before used electric lights. These consumers, through their elected representatives and by means of general meetings, have a say in determining—within limits—the prices, policies, and management methods of their systems. Collection, maintenance, and line extension policies are in their hands. A Chip That Wobbled DAYTON, TENN., MET TVA WITH A CHIP ON ITS SHOULDER. The Authority's Chickamauga Dam reservoir not only flooded some rich farm lands within the town's trading area, but pushed an arm of its infernal self up into the town limits. Scene of the famous Scopes "monkey trial" of the twenties, where Clarence Darrow's arguments in defense of evolution, and William Jennings Bryan's arguments against it, drew many thousands of visitors, Dayton has never stopped hoping that the lightning would strike again and make her a place where people who paid 10 cents for hamburgers would come. Already a shriveling rural trading center, depression and labor trouble took away almost all of Dayton's only industry, small sawmills. Now came the TVA depriving them of their last means of livelihood. But that chip on Dayton's shoulder wobbled. The first principle of TVA's grass roots philosophy of administration is to let the people make the first move. Daytonians had been struggling along for years with an outmoded municipal electric system which had its current generated in the steam plant of a local sawmill. Already the city had been forced to pay for new equipment without having any part in its management. Again in 1934 it was called on to invest money for the patching up of this decrepit private plant, which was daily threatening to close down and leave the city without power. City commissioners talked the matter over. "If the TVA is going to start giving people around here cheap electricity," they reasoned. "by gosh, Dayton is more entitled to it than anybody else." So at the request (one might almost say demand) of the commissioners, TVA worked out a system for local distribution. Though Dayton's rates had been about the lowest of any municipal system in the section, the following table shows what this transfer meant to her in dollars and cents:
Briefly, TVA cut the average Daytonian's electric bill by about two thirds. In the five years since the contract was made the number of power users in Dayton has increased from 637 to 923. and the total number of kilowatt-hours per consumer has almost doubled. Meanwhile the city of Dayton has made a net profit of $58,000, and now makes a monthly profit of almost $4,000. In contracting with TVA, Dayton's commissioners agreed to serve the farming community around them, never before touched by an electricity system. This meant the city had to become responsible for an REA government loan for the financing of these extensions. Profit from these customers, after debt retirement charges are met, must go, not to the city, but to the extension of rural service. "We don't get a cent out of it," one of the commissioners explained to me as we sat in the part of his feed and seed store where he makes those customers feel comfortable who don't like to look for spittoons. "But it's the smartest thing we ever done to take them up on it. In the first place it hasn't cost us nothing but our trouble. In the second place we've had a mighty gift to give some of these farmers that spend their money with us." Dayton is extending its rural lines as fast as REA will approve plans. Town Planning at the Grass Roots THIS FEED-MERCHANT COMMISSIONER WAS PLEASED AS ANYONE in Dayton when his electric bill was cut in half, but he was a little more peeved than his fellow townsmen at the Authority for "flooding out some of our best customers." A good part, perhaps all, of this loss, the Authority suggested, will be made up by the natural advantages this same body of water will give the village as a recreation center. Around each lake it creates, above the flood zone, TVA regularly purchases a strip of land so that it may limit the amount of pollution and may plan, to some extent at least, the use of its benefits. With an embayment protruding directly into its limits, Dayton had, if it would only develop it, the beginning for a beautiful waterfront park. Familiar with that wobbly chip on Dayton's shoulders, the Authority would not have sent in its own town planning experts even if such had been its policy. Instead, following their grass roots procedure of using local and state resources whenever available, they made an agreement with the Tennessee State Planning Commission. This agreement is similar to those made with State Extension Services. A special assistant in town planning is hired by the state commission to work in the areas affected by TVA operations. The salary is furnished TVA but the assistant is selected by, and works u the direction of, the commission. When this state employee visited Dayton to talk commissioners and citizens about what they might with this lake the TVA had pushed upon them found both doors and minds open to him. Under guidance the town has set up a planning and zoning board of its own. Plans have been worked out f municipal boat dock, to be developed as a work I project on land secured at a token rental from TVA. Directly in view from the dock site was Day shantytown, one of the most depressing small town slums in this section of the country. Not a pretty beginning for a waterfront park. TVA agreed to buy this land, vided local people would protect it against a sudden in price. This was done. The slum was demolished. Now the zoning board and the men from the State Plan' Commission are trying to clean up things in the part town where residents of the old shantytown have gone. Dayton is typical of the hundreds of little country trading posts and filling-station-villes that are strung along America's highways. Whatever success in planning is achieved here will be of tremendous value, for planning of small towns is an almost neglected field. How Far Can It Go? AND NOW, ONE MAY WELL ASK, HOW IS ALL THIS GRASS ROOTS stuff different from the procedures adopted by other government agencies? Does not the AAA have local . county committees elected by the farmers to help administer its program? Does not the U.S. Housing Author' require that local committees assist it in setting up low cost housing units? Has not the WPA regularly required local sponsorship and a large measure of local direction in the planning and execution of its projects? Yes, all these things are true. Yet there are fundamental differences between the two kinds of local participation, 1 these differences arise from the nature of the agencies themselves. TVA is a regional authority. Its policies have been made fit a section of the country that is fairly homogeneous. The other agencies named are national in scope. The local committees, as best they can, must make their local situation fit patterns prepared for the nation at large. The job of TVA—control of land and waters in a region that forms a natural unit—it can handle as a whole, little hampered by political subdivisions or artificial segmentation. The national agencies are set up according to subject matter, often with conflicting programs, and are split into county, state, and sectional administrations, geared to political rather than natural division. That the TVA's success with its new method of administration is worthy of study by other federal agencies goes almost without saying, just as its total success with regional development points the way for a more success1 handling of our interrelated problems the nation over his method of enlisting cooperation from local people has all but eliminated the usual feeling of resentment toward a federal agency. Its method of adapting its programs to those of local and state agencies has reduced to a minimum the ugliest and most constant companion of public service—the fight for credit. Keeping Out of Local Politics EVEN MORE ASTONISHING IS THE ABILITY TVA'S OFFICIALS have shown for keeping out of local politics. I talked with men in more than twenty courthouses in four states fat extend into the Valley. There were many TVA-baiters among the group, to be sure. Yet not one said he could honestly accuse the Authority of playing politics. Why should it? Remember what happened in Dayton, in Cullman, in Chattanooga? The grass roots play politics for it. When such politically diverse personalities as Republican Congressman Carroll Reese of East Tennessee, Democratic Dies-Committee-member Joe Starnes of Alabama, and liberal Senator Lister Hill from that same state fight for the Authority in the halls of Congress, its directors may rest assured that TVA's grass roots hold is deep and secure. While TVA is discovering new fields for local participation, other federal agencies in the same territory are learning of some of the limitations of local participation. In the Southeast, at least, programs of many New Deal agencies have fallen into the hands of patronage-starved politicians. Only rigid and often foolish-seeming rules enforced from Washington have kept them from making a debauch of the work. More important, while the TVA was set up to lift the level of the status quo in a single region, agencies such as the WPA, the Farm Security Administration, and the U. S. Housing Authority were created to lift the level of one particular group, those who have fared worst at the hands of local people. The extent and kind of local direction, then, must of necessity be limited. It is just this group of "bottom third" people—the landless farmers, the thousands of families living within a stone's throw of TVA transmission lines who cannot afford $1.25 a month for electric lights, the people who are as far from their city commissioners as these commissioners are from Harcourt Morgan and David Lilienthal—it is just these people who have not yet become a part of the Authority's scheme of grass roots direction. These bottom third people are profiting from the generally increased level of living within the Valley, to be sure. Many hundreds of them are finding employment in industries directly stimulated by cheapened electric power or improved navigation facilities. TVA now has the job of making them conscious and vocal grass roots directors of its policies. For the Authority is bringing again to the Tennessee Valley a democracy of little men. Beyond the Valley, wherever its fertilizer program is in practice, a new kind of citizenship is being opened up to the farmer, one in which his participation in democracy does not stop with the casting of a ballot. This farmer is becoming a maker of American earth and, as he works, he is laying the foundation for the kind of functioning democracy that has become the new American Dream.
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