TVA’s History is Electrification
Patricia Bernard Ezzell serves as the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Senior Program Manager, Tribal Relations and Corporate History. Ms. Ezzell also serves as the agency’s expert regarding the history of TVA.
She is the author of several articles as well as two books on TVA history: “TVA Photography: Thirty Years of Life in the Tennessee Valley” and “TVA Photography, 1963-2008: Challenges and Changes in the Tennessee Valley,” both published by the University Press of Mississippi.
In the 1930s, Congress approved several unprecedented programs to help bring the nation out of the Great Depression. One of the most ambitious and most successful was the Tennessee Valley Authority, TVA, among the first comprehensive development programs for an entire river basin.
The Tennessee River Watershed covers approximately forty-one thousand square miles. This area includes a hundred and twenty-five counties within much of Tennessee and parts of six other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia.
TVA also serves a larger area, the TVA Power Service Area, which covers eighty thousand square miles and includes a hundred and seventy counties in the same seven states. Two hundred and one counties comprise the Watershed and the Power Service area.
When established in 1933, TVA represented a departure from the traditional organization of the federal government. For the first time, a single agency was given responsibility for a unified approach to the development and wise use of natural resources in a specific region.
The uniqueness of TVA lies in the range of functions combined for the administration in one area, a river valley, by a single agency. Congress and the President established TVA to be separate from the existing cabinet agencies and made it accountable to the President and Congress for results.
Patricia Ezzell: Only three farms in a hundred had electricity. Unchecked fires burned ten percent of the region’s woodlands every year, and poor logging practices had nearly denuded forests that once offered endless miles of virgin timber.
The law directed that TVA's headquarters be established outside of Washington, D.C., and placed among the people with whom it was to work. TVA was told to develop and administer its program in cooperation with the various states and their departments, with the city and county governments, with organizations of citizens, with farmers and businessmen, and with other federal agencies.
It was a decentralized national administration, bringing the national government closer to the people and making it more responsive to their wishes and needs.
In 1933, the Valley needed TVA. Dr. Arthur E. Morgan, first chairman of the agency, testified that in the fall of that year there were counties in the Southern Highlands with more than fifty percent of the families on relief.
Morgan pointed out that there were many "prosperous communities" in the Valley region, but that "a considerable part of the population is on the verge of starvation." Morgan characterized the problem as "a very desperate economic situation."
Starvation was not the only problem for the people of the Tennessee Valley. Many suffered from "debilitating diseases such as malaria and hookworm." Primitive farming practices resulted in depleted soil as well as soil erosion.
It was common for half of the Valley population to be on relief; the per capita income of those in the Tennessee Valley region was half of that of the national average. While poverty was high, the region's birthrate was one-third above the national average.
Levels of literacy were low, and the labor force was largely unskilled. Only three farms in a hundred had electricity. Unchecked fires burned ten percent of the region's woodlands every year, and poor logging practices had nearly denuded forests that once offered endless miles of virgin timber.
The situation was dire, but TVA went to work. Rather than isolate problems as discrete issues, TVA used the concept of integrated resource management and approached resource problems holistically.
TVA also partnered with the region's state and local governments and, in the process, helped to transform a region. For example, an entire river system has been controlled and put to work. A stairway of nine dams and reservoirs provides a continuous nine-foot navigation channel permitting the movement of millions of tons of commercial freight traffic annually.
TVA's multiple-use reservoir system has also provided eleven million acre-feet of water storage, making serious floods a thing of the past. The development of new and better fertilizers improved Valley agricultural lands, resulting in better farm income and rural life.
Thousands of acres of eroded, neglected, and denuded land have been reforested. Recreation areas have been developed and economic growth has occurred. Vast amounts of power have been developed and channeled into homes, farms, business, industry, and national defense.
Today, TVA serves over nine million residents and has just completed its eighteenth consecutive year of 99.999 percent reliability.
This progress was not made without sacrifice. Thousands of families were relocated, many from family farms, to make room for reservoirs. In some cases, entire communities ceased to exist.
Even today, some have mixed feelings over the price paid for the greater good, but few can argue with the positive impact TVA and public power have had on the lives of those in the Tennessee Valley.
In 1933, personal income in the two hundred and one counties region averaged $168 per capita, only forty-five percent of the national level. By 2011, it was $34,442, eighty-three percent of the national level.
This is approximately two hundred and five times as much as 1933, while the national average multiplied about a hundred and ten times over the same period. In 1933, some sixty-two percent of the region's workers depended on agriculture for a living; this dropped to 0.4 percent of workers by 2011.
In 1933, only six and a half percent of the region's employment was in manufacturing, but since that time, the number of manufacturing employees has more than tripled.
Most of this industrial growth is related in some degree to the improvements in water transportation, water supply, flood control, agricultural and forest raw materials availability, or power supply made possible by resource development. And to the growing markets for industry created by the region's economic progress.
In its most recent fiscal year, TVA's continuing economic development efforts contributed to attracting or retaining seventy thousand jobs in the area and securing $8.3 billion in capital investment.
Those efforts, as well as an extensive river management, flood mitigation and recreation system, are funded entirely through wholesale electric sales. Although it remains a part of the federal government, TVA receives no taxpayer funding.
Electrification may have been an initial goal of TVA in 1933, but electricity now powers much more than homes and business. It powers the realization of hope and opportunity in the Tennessee Valley.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy remarked that the initials T.V.A. stood for progress. Fifty-five years later and nearly eighty-five years since its creation, TVA remains focused on this tradition of progress by continuing to serve the people of the Tennessee Valley by providing clean, low cost, reliable electricity, as well as environmental management and economic development.
