To liberals of the 1940s, David E. Lilienthal was the man who promised abundance, and the Tennessee Valley Authority was the government agency that delivered it. Under Lilienthal’s leadership, the TVA accomplished spectacular feats of engineering. Through the construction of a dozen dams, it brought electricity to the seven states that the Tennessee River watershed spans. Its projects used enough material to fill — they claimed — all the great pyramids of Egypt 12 times over; all the more impressive given that most were completed during the shortages of World War II.
Their renown was all the greater because the TVA began as an experiment with an impossibly broad mandate. The TVA was founded in 1933 as the pet project of Senator George Norris, a Republican from Nebraska. Norris took a keen interest in the Tennessee Valley, where per capita income at the time was around half the national average, and whose residents suffered from constant floods. After several attempts to pass bills that would improve their situation, Norris saw success with the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933. It was tasked with developing the watershed — everything from flood control, to electrification, to battling malaria, to reversing the land’s erosion. No small task, that. Crucially, the Act also established the TVA as a public corporation, outside of any other government department.
It started auspiciously. President Roosevelt offered critical support. In part, it fit into his dream of modernizing the South; as a staunch public power man, it also fed his vendetta against private electric utilities. FDR hand-picked the first members of the TVA’s three-man board; Lilienthal, a former utilities lawyer, was one. But things soon went downhill. The TVA’s sprawling mission led to increasingly public fights between the three directors, each of whom held a different vision for the agency. The spats resulted in a Congressional investigation of the TVA, after which Lilienthal increasingly took charge, finally becoming the chairman in 1941. Once at the helm, he focused the TVA on its ambitious program of dam construction.
