The Tennessee Valley Authority: Catchment planning for social development

March 20th, 2013

The Tennessee Valley Authority: Catchment planning for social development

Dr. Daniel Connell, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This article is part of an 11-part series titled ‘International Water Politics’. The series homepage can be accessed here.

We are now accustomed to seeing large dams as highly contentious and their costs and benefits being hotly debated. This essay attempts to create awareness of a time when they were the source of great hope. The India Prime Minister Nehru described large dams as temples of modernity, repositories of the spirit of a new age when it was possible to think that the world’s problems could all be solved by harnessing the benefits of new technology. Were those ideas simply wrong or are there things we can rescue from the past?

The Tennessee Valley Authority

The story of the Tennessee Valley Authority, established by United States President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, is one of high confidence on the part of governments that they could use planning to harness the power and resources made available by a powerful river to transform the lives of millions of people. The TVA was one of the most high profile products of Roosevelt’s New Deal program which was developed to manage the impacts of the Great Depression, one of the most devastating economic collapses of the twentieth century. The Depression affected many nations and was particularly devastating in the south of the United States. The catchment of the Tennessee River, which included parts of the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, was one of the worst affected. It had been poor for a long time before the Depression. Poverty was just one of a number of concerns for policy makers, however. Another was near monopoly private ownership of the electrical power generation and distribution system that existed at that time in the United States. Through creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority President Roosevelt and the policy team developing the New Deal package hoped to deal with both issues and transform this region of America.

The TVA built a network of major dams and management programs to achieve flood control, generate hydropower and improve navigation by linking to the Ohio-Mississippi River system which drains much of the central and southern United States. Associated with this were ambitious rural electrification, agricultural and industrial development programs that transformed the lives of millions of people in the seven states. The aim was to create a multi resource management program that would not only transform this region but also serve as a model that could be used elsewhere in the USA and, later, in the many parts of the world which similarly had powerful rivers and large populations of poor people.

The United States is usually thought of as the home of private capitalism but there are surprising exceptions that force modification of that widespread view. One of the most striking is that of electrical power generation. During the early twentieth century the use of electrical power became widespread throughout the United States, but as it became more important for the economy and in private homes many critics began to feel that the private companies that supplied most of the power were exploiting their customers and negatively affecting prospects for growth. During the 1930s support for the government ownership of generating facilities and distribution networks became increasingly powerful. Political battles about this this issue were fought in many parts of the United States and the TVA was at the centre of the fight. Sixty years later in 2013 the TVA is an independent government company that also operates a number of large coal and nuclear power stations in addition to its hydropower stations, and is the largest provider of electrical power in the United States.

Before the creation of the TVA the region was one of the poorest in the United States. One out of every three people in northern Alabama suffered from malaria. Tuberculosis and typhoid were rife and infant mortality very high. Approximately 85% of the arable land in the Tennessee Valley was eroded as a result of inefficient and destructive agricultural practices. The proportion of people living on small farms was high and there were few large towns. In the early 1930s, conditions were continuing to deteriorate under increased pressure from the Depression. Many communities were trapped in a cycle of poverty which led to low revenues for governments and consequently poor quality public services in sectors such as education and health. Despite numerous attempts since the 1820s, the river was also not navigable due to shoals, seasonal variations in flow and abrupt changes in gradient. The most serious challenge was that of flooding. Advocates of the TVA project argued that these problems could only be dealt with by large scale planning and coordination on a level that only governments could undertake. The three goals of the project are seemingly contradictory: flood control, which requires having empty dams to retain inflows; hydropower generation, which needs full storages at times when power is in demand; and navigation, which requires relatively stable river depths and a fairly steady flow rate, as well as large scale channel maintenance. Massive investment in infrastructure, detailed coordination at a regional scale and a strong focus on benefits in common rather than profits for particular sections were needed to get a reasonable balance between the competing objectives.

Key people

Many people were important in this story but two of the most significant were Gifford Pinchot, who developed and popularized ideas about multi-resource development in the early twentieth century, and Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected President in 1932 at the height of the Depression when the country was experiencing extremely high levels of unemployment and there was a widespread sense of despair. Pinchot, originally a forester and a leader of the early conservation movement, thought of a river ‘as a unit from its source to the sea’. Pinchot influenced Roosevelt’s thinking on many issues related to large scale regional planning. In his view only governments, not large private companies, were able to undertake major multi-use resource development projects such as the program to be developed by the TVA in ways that would serve the public interest. President Roosevelt, who has been described as a daring opportunist, saw the TVA as a project that he could use in his campaign to transform the public mood and create a new sense of optimism for the future.

Technological innovation

It would not have been possible to build the TVA system much earlier than the 1930s. The engineering innovations in the fields of dam construction and electricity generation and distribution upon which the TVA’s 29 large dams and hydropower plants depended were only developed on a commercial scale in the early twentieth century. Another development made possible by the new capacity to build big dams was large-scale irrigation, which now in the early twenty first century supplies nearly a third of the world’s supplies of food. These river harnessing technologies developed in parallel with other society-transforming technologies, such as powered flight, radio, the telephone and the internal combustion engine. Together they coincided with and helped fuel a great expansion in the capacity and ambition of governments in Europe and North America. This expansion coincided with the newly won right of most adults to vote in elections. In these conditions political leaders were increasingly responsive to the needs of their voters, many of whom were still very materially deprived and receptive to the opportunities that could be provided by large projects.

Irrigation based communities in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

Political leaders were very aware of the potential of the new technologies. In the first half of the twentieth century, schemes for large-scale community development based on the water harnessing technologies of hydropower and irrigation were a high priority for governments globally. An example was the irrigation development in south eastern Australia in the states of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia along the River Murray and its tributaries such as the Goulburn and the Murrumbidgee. A leading figure in the development of plans to use irrigation to build communities in this region was the young Victorian liberal, Alfred Deakin. A lawyer and journalist, he had the backing of a powerful newspaper, The Age, and strong connections with the emerging labour movement. Deakin later became a leading campaigner for federation and, after it was achieved, was three times prime minister of Australia. In the 1880s, as a Victorian government cabinet minister, irrigation was the first great cause of his career. Deakin and many other left-liberal public figures saw irrigation as a technological innovation that would make it possible to populate inland Australia with substantial towns based on irrigation along the inland rivers. The productivity of irrigated land made denser settlement possible and this in turn would promote the civilizing influences of urban living in rural regions. They also saw irrigation and laws to prevent large holdings as a way to promote small independent farming and good citizenry (in contrast to large properties with many workers which was seen as anti-democratic). Community development programs were regarded as central government business and too important to leave to random individuals or private companies motivated by profit. The result, after substantial public investment, a number of false starts and considerable cultural change in relation to the conduct of agriculture, was a long list of towns such as Mildura, Renmark Griffith and many others which are now among the most economically successful in rural Australia.

Hydropower and irrigation in the south west United States

The head of the government agency responsible for implementing the irrigation based community development program in Victoria during the period leading up to the First World War was an American engineer named Elwood Mead. Later the head of the United States Bureau of Reclamation (the federal government body responsible for water infrastructure development in the western part of the country), he was particularly interested in settlement programs. (Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam is named after him.) In its early years – but not later – the Bureau promoted small-scale irrigation-based farming across the south-west of the United States. Mead was a member of an elite group of international engineers who worked and campaigned to propagate a world-wide mission building dams and establishing settlement programs. The most outstanding achievement of the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1930s with Mead in charge was the building of the Hoover Dam to supply water for irrigation and hydro-power across the south-west states, since then one of the fastest growing regions in the United States. (Actual construction using radical new techniques was undertaken by a consortium of private companies that subsequently dominated the world dam building industry for many years.)

Achievements of the TVA

On the other side of the country Mead’s peers worked with the same confidence and similar ideas to use water infrastructure to transform the Tennessee Valley. Building proceeded at an extraordinary pace, eventually resulting in an integrated system of river management and power generation based on 29 large dams. Although the TVA employed a large work force it also promoted decentralised power delivery by encouraging the development of a network of lower level organisations and working through rural cooperatives. Electrification of rural areas, supplying ‘power too cheap to measure’ to all inhabitants of this once deprived region, was complete by the 1950s. This in turn attracted new industries. In parallel were forestry and agricultural development programs promoting conservation forestry and better farming techniques. By 1943 there were some 15,000 demonstration farms using highly effective extension techniques promoting terracing, contour farming and strip cropping. This was accompanied by a major program of educational investment in schools and libraries. (Despite its successes, however, its critics within the United States concerned about its ‘socialistic’ aspects, impacts on commercial interests and threats to local politicians, prevented it being replicated in regions such as the Columbia River Basin in the country’s north east.)

TVA as the model for foreign aid projects

Although there had been some forced displacement of people through the dam building program, the changes in the Tennessee Valley had been predominantly achieved through voluntary arrangements. The TVA’s champions, in particular one of its directors David Lilienthal, promoted its achievements as an outstanding example of democratic social and economic development. In the Cold War environment that developed in the 1950s it was widely trumpeted as the United States’ answer to the coercive development model offered by the Soviet Union and China. Coming out of the Second World War there was a high degree of optimism about the capacity of governments to achieve complex objectives through detailed planning. At the outset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s the TVA model was seen as the blue print for large scale aid programs that would reduce poverty in regions that were strategically important to the United States and cause their populations to support its goals and not those of its communist opponents. United States aid planners took the model to a number of regions with varying degrees of commitment but the most well-resourced effort was in the Mekong Basin, where in the 1950s and 1960s it was presented as the aid package that was to work in parallel with the military investment in the war in Vietnam and its neighbours Cambodia and Laos. Through the thirty or forty years following the Second World War there were many of these large comprehensive development programs in Africa, Asia and elsewhere funded either directly by aid donor governments or through organisations such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Most had very mixed or little success. Why was the success rate so poor? Why did western aid donors keep investing in the large-scale multi-faceted aid project model despite the repeated failures?

Looking from the perspective of the early twenty first century, large community development schemes are no longer in favour, either in countries like Australia and the United States or in developing countries where there is large aid investment. Trying to explain why is difficult and the opinions below are put forward more to provoke discussion and responses than as confident explanations. In early twentieth century Australia and the United States it seems that people had fewer options in terms of life choices and were more accepting of social discipline. (Applicants to join the government sponsored irrigation settlements in south-east Australia with the hope of earning an irrigation block, for example, lived under almost para-military conditions with their lives controlled by officials in ways that are almost unthinkable today.) In those times a high proportion of men had spent time in armies often as conscripts, there were more people in churches and unions, fewer divorces, more respect for employers and social superiors. Educational levels have since risen and the greater diversity of options has broken down traditional hierarchies. (Social, economic and political disparities still exist and may be greater than before but they are more diverse.) In Australia and in the United States projects such as the big irrigation schemes established in inland Australia and the TVA itself would not now be socially or politically possible.

Arguably, other factors are also at play in the so-called developing countries which are the recipients of aid. It is doubtful if those large multi-faceted development schemes ever worked very well in that context. For a start the level of investment in terms of effort, time and funds has not been remotely on the scale of that in the major schemes in Australia and the United States discussed earlier in this essay. There have also been great cultural and political differences between aid donors, with their very prescriptive projects, and the people who ‘receive’ them. In practice goals and values are shared to a very low degree, a gulf not helped by the fact that the donors are not linked to the recipients in the many ways in which elected governments are linked to their voters in Australia and the United States. Perspectives on aid projects have also changed. Now there is emphasis on more direct poverty reduction and less faith in the transformative effect of big projects. Big Dams have also come under particular scrutiny because of their displacement of people and disruptive environmental impacts.

These comments are precursors to questions such as:

What should be the connection between large infrastructure projects (such as those involved in river management) and social and economic planning?

What should be the role and expectations of external aid donors that invest in such projects in so-called developing countries?

How should such external aid donors attempt to perform those roles and meet those expectations?

Further reading:

1. Miller, B. A. and R. B. Reidinger (1998), ‘Comprehensive River Development – Tennessee Valley Authority’, World Bank Technical Paper No. 416, available at: http://water.worldbank.org/publications/comprehensive-river-basin-development-tennessee-valley-authority

2. Connell, D. (2007), Water politics in the Murray Darling Basin: Federation Press, available here: https://www.globalwaterforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Connell_Water-Politics-in-Murray-Darling-Basin.pdf

This article is part of an 11-part series titled ‘International Water Politics’. The series homepage can be accessed here.

The views expressed in this article and the associated discussion forum belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.