Crisis Behind The TVA

If inventors, engineers, and industrial managers are the main characters in the history of American technology, they are far from the sole makers of that history. They must share the job of determining whether and how their innovations are adopted with consumers, corporations, and broad social, cultural, and economic factors—including politics and ideology. Since a great public-works project involves so much technology affecting so many people, serious political and ideological conflicts are likely to play a big role both in its birth and in its later direction. A classic example of this is the great quarrel that developed in the top administration of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) through a half-dozen years, reaching a dramatic climax in 1938.

The crisis came in 1938, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was at the lowest ebb of his political fortunes since the beginning of his Presidency. He had recently lost his famous battle for legislation that would have let him pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges, and in the process he had lost considerable power in Congress. Moreover, the recovery from the Great Depression had come to a jarring halt the previous summer, succeeded by one of the swiftest economic declines in American history, and he simply could not make up his mind what to do about it. Yet he remained, as ever, seemingly devoid of doubt and continued to serve up generous portions of joie de vivre and hearty confidence when troubled subordinates came to him with their complaints and anxieties.

One such was the balding, mild-mannered David E. Lilienthal, one of the three directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Lilienthal’s troubles were grave indeed; they threatened Roosevelt’s favorite New Deal agency. The TVA was an unprecedented experiment in large-scale technological planning, and deep-rooted philosophical disagreements about its scope and purpose were now endangering its very existence.

At its inception, in 1933, the TVA had embodied two concepts. The first idea was simply to put to use the great hydroelectric Wilson Dam, which had been built by the federal government on the Tennessee River during World War I. All through the twenties and thirties the dam had stood idle, the object of bitter contention between publicpower advocates, who wanted it federally owned and operated, and private utility interests, which adamantly opposed such development.

The second idea was the larger one: to develop the whole of the Tennessee River and its watershed as a multipurpose national project. In January 1933 the President-elect visited the Wilson Dam and publicly committed himself to “national” operation of the facility and “national” development of the Tennessee basin “as a whole.” He stressed this grand purpose in his special message to Congress calling for the legislation that established the Authority.

Muscle Shoals—the site of the dam—represented but a small part of the proposed development. Other powermaking dams, as well as flood control, erosion control, soil restoration with cheap fertilizers (the original purpose of the Wilson Dam had been to provide power for manufacturing nitrates for explosives), reforestation, the establishment of small rural industries—all these were comprehended in the job to be done. “In short,” Roosevelt said, “this power development of war days leads logically to national planning for a complete river watershed involving many states and the future lives and welfare of millions. It touches and gives life to all forms of human concern.”

That last sweeping sentence reflected a searching conversation Roosevelt had had as President-elect with Arthur E. Morgan, whom he appointed chairman of the TVA. Morgan, a tall, lean, thin-faced man, fifty years old, was a civil engineer born in Cincinnati but was nonetheless the model of a high-minded Yankee schoolteacher. He had become famous as chief engineer of the Miami Conservancy District, a floodcontrol agency in Ohio, but he was no narrowly focused specialist. He was more concerned with “human engineering” than with civil engineering, and he had so well demonstrated his social and educational concerns during his conservancy-district tenure that the small butprestigiousAntioch College had asked him to become its president, an offer he promptly accepted.

Roosevelt had sought out Morgan not primarily as a flood-control engineer but as an administrator, a progressive educator, and an authority on the life of the Ohio Valley, which includes the Tennessee Valley. The two had got on famously. Each had inspired the other with a stupendous vision of the TVA as a demonstration of what multipurpose regional planning could achieve in the way of creative harmony between man and nature—a conclusive demonstration that could and must become a shining model for civilized mankind.

When he signed the TVA bill into law, in mid-May 1933, Roosevelt had already decided that Morgan would be chairman of the three-member committee that would administer the Authority. Roosevelt and Morgan both evidently expected Morgan to be top executive, overseeing the work of the other two directors, each of whom would be a specialist in a major area of the TVA’s concern. But this conception was not expressed in the language of the act that founded the TVA; it said that the three directors were to share executive authority, with equal responsibility for the agency’s overall direction. Nor—typically—did Roosevelt make clear to his other two appointees his idea of how TVA would be administered. Almost certainly the conception was far from clear in Roosevelt’s own mind.

Of the two other directors, one was Harcourt A. Morgan (no relation to Arthur), president and former dean of agriculture at the University of Tennessee. His initial understanding accorded with the language of the act: He would be primarily responsible for agricultural matters but would also have a voice equal to the chairman’s in general concerns. At sixty-six he did not lust after personal power and glory, nor had he done so when young. Remarkably sweet-tempered, kind, and considerate, he was by nature an organization man, at home with the compromising indirections of committee politics. He distrusted grandiose visions; they seemed to get in the way of one’s perception of hard facts. Certainly he was no radical social reformer; he was disinclined toward TVA programs that would provoke dangerous hostility on the part of large landowners and white racists while addressing the problems of small landowners, tenant farmers, and blacks.

The third director, David Lilienthal, had been one of Felix Frankfurter’s favorite students at Harvard Law School. “You could not … have given [Arthur E.] Morgan a better associate … than Lilienthal,” wrote Frankfurter to Roosevelt in June 1933. “That’s a team that’s bound to produce results.” Lilienthal, who at thirty-four was decades younger than either of the other two directors, was ardent in his commitment to public service. He had begun his career in Chicago as a labor lawyer and had abandoned his practice in 1931 to accept at a much smaller income the chairmanship of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. He had quickly earned a national reputation for courage, devotion to the public weal, and effectiveness. That, and Frankfurter’s hearty recommendation, led to Roosevelt’s naming him a TVA director.

But Frankfurter could not have been more mistaken in his prediction that Arthur Morgan and Lilienthal would be a team. They never were. There was a lack of understanding between the two at their very first meeting, on May 30, 1933, in Chicago. Though Lilienthal had realized he must be investigated thoroughly before being offered such a high government post, he was resentful that one of Arthur Morgan’s colleagues had been asking probing questions about him and had questioned him directly on various matters without saying why. At the Chicago meeting Morgan did not come to the point until, after three hours of “general inquiries” and “exploratory discussion,” Lilienthal forced the issue by rising to take his leave. Why the reluctance on Morgan’s part? Was he doubtful about Lilienthal?

Even before he attended his first committee meeting as a TVA director, Lilienthal had worries about the chairman’s views on the issues that would be Lilienthal’s specialty—those of power policy and relations with private utilities. He feared that Morgan, in his eagerness for harmonious relationships among all elements of the great enterprise, would yield too much to the utilities and end up being used by them. The young man’s experience had taught him to expect nothing of private utility managers save a ruthless pursuit of profit, and he was certain the TVA and the utilities would become bitter adversaries if the TVA, as required by its organic act, provided power to the public at a fair price.

Indeed, TVA proponents and utility interests had already clashed noisily. During congressional hearings on the TVA bill, Wendell Willkie, then president of Commonwealth and Southern, a Wall Street holding company in control of nearly all the operating utilities in the Tennessee Valley, had vehemently protested the bill’s provision that the TVA was to deliver electricity directly to consumers. Willkie wanted the TVA to sell its power to the utilities, to be resold at prices that would guarantee a fair profit for holders of his corporation’s inflated stock, and he had cried out that the bill would render worthless some four hundred million dollars of the corporation’s securities. Willkie hadn’t persuaded Congress—the bill was enacted as proposed—but C&S was now almost certain to take the matter into court.

Lilienthal’s unease seemed confirmed when Sen. George Norris, who had introduced the TVA bill, complained to him about Arthur Morgan just before the first TVA committee meeting, in June 1933. Morgan had just toured the Tennessee Basin and had ‘Visited with the [private] power representatives but had failed to meet with a number of people who had been carrying on the fight, in the public interest … for a number of years,” to quote Lilienthal’s journal. Norris, a champion of public power, said he had complained about this to Roosevelt; the President had replied that Chairman Morgan had a great vision overall of what the TVA could do, and his lack of public-power expertise would be compensated for by Lilienthal, if that young man could be persuaded to become the third TVA director. The appointment “would be a ten-strike,” Roosevelt said.

Lilienthal’s unease became actual alarm during the first board meeting of the three directors. Chairman Morgan read aloud a letter he had just received from Wendell Willkie asking to meet “to discuss problems common to the Authority and to his corporation,” as Lilienthal recorded in his journal. Surely Lilienthal should participate in any such conversation, but the chairman didn’t invite him to do so. Consequently there “followed a considerable discussion as to what attitude the board should take toward the private utilities, etc. … With some difference of opinion over tactics.… This will require a good deal of working out.”

Actually, Lilienthal’s disagreement with the chairman was not merely tactical; it was fundamental. Like Harcourt Morgan, Lilienthal was instinctively distrustful of intoxicating and addictive “great visions,” which could inhibit practical dealings with the particulars and individuals of the “real” world. He was inclined, in fact, to equate social-welfare planning with totalitarianism.

Not that he was opposed to planning per se. He was convinced that efficient electric-power distribution required large-scale planning and organization, and he believed that public authorities were a sound approach to the problem. But he had a profound aversion to large-scale socioeconomic planning, which he felt tended to deal with individual people as objects to be fitted into a scheme willy-nilly—for their “own good,” of course. He was committed instead to what he called grass-roots democracy—the phrase may actually have been coined by him—meaning a community initiated by and growing out of the individual people living in it, and functioning through the voluntary cooperation of its members.

To him, human freedom was the goal of any good society, and it was exclusively individual, an amalgam of purely individual right and responsibility, the enhancement of which was the proper purpose of every social organization. Thus he believed in local control of economic life to the maximum degree possible. And hence the enthusiasm with which he seized on the portion of the TVA’s organic act that instructed it to give priority to municipal power companies, rural cooperatives, and nonprofit agencies in distributing the power generated by its dams. This would strengthen local organization and free the people from bondage to giant utilities controlled from afar, which had heretofore refused rural people in the valley any electricity whatever. If this required war with Commonwealth and Southern, so belt.

These basic views were wholly at odds with Arthur Morgan’s paternalistic proposals for the Tennessee Valley. When Lilienthal learned in June 1934 that “Mrs. A. E. [Morgan] had some scheme on to [have the TVA] make mountain type furniture to be sold to our employees,” he was “riled.” Wouldn’t people resent the pressure to buy that would be exerted on them? So outraged was Lilienthal that he ridiculed the idea in a board meeting, making everyone laugh—except the chairman. Arthur Morgan, Lilienthal wrote, “got gray, clasped his hands before him, and started in on me.” The chairman said, “We don’t want to pick their furniture for them, but many of these people have never known anything except what they have had up in the hills.”

In this instance, as in many, Lilienthal would likely have been deemed right and the chairman wrong by most Americans had they known of it. Arthur Morgan seemed to want the Authority to deal with the valley as a great schoolroom in which almost compulsory educational projects resulted in local cooperatives, small-industry development, improved health and welfare services, prosperous farming, and new, better housing. An old-time teacher’s discipline would even be exercised if the chairman had his way: He favored a law that would deprive a farmer of his land if he failed to adopt erosion-control measures; moreover, he would have liked to have the TVA actively discourage tobacco chewing and whiskey drinking.

But there are two sides to every quarrel, and many people as hardheaded and committed to individual freedom as Lilienthal believed that Arthur Morgan’s general view merited at least respectful consideration. The philosophical case for the TVA chairman’s approach was based on a concept of individuality that differed radically from Lilienthal’s. The individual must be viewed not as complete and static but as a stream of being, connected with the environment in somewhat the same way a river is connected with the land through which it flows. Which means that human freedom is not the kind of exclusive independence that Lilienthal stressed but rather a certain kind of interdependence and interaction between the individual and the world around him. It is a harmonious, active relationship, involving some measure of interpénétration between self and world.

Arthur Morgan never articulated his philosophy this way; according to Francis Biddie, the chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, “he was a man with a mission, deeply apprehended, yet largely inarticulate.” But Morgan did give the highest priority to establishing harmonious relationships among the elements of Tennessee Valley life and insisted that such harmony could only be achieved through planning and control from above. Just as a symphony concert requires a conductor and a score, so the TVA’s concert of interests must be conducted. Only with a large measure of regional authority could the TVA succeed as the great social experiment of which Roosevelt had so often publicly spoken—a seamless weaving together of all the strands of the Tennessee Basin’s life, economic, educational, cultural, and governmental.

At an August 1933 board meeting- in which Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan proposed and won, over Arthur Morgan’s objections, complete autonomy for their separate parts of the TVA program—the chairman warned against “the duplication of [electricity] facilities” and consequent “hard feeling and bitterness” between the TVA and the utility corporations. Such hostility was bound to make the TVA “less representative of what economic planning can accomplish.” And it could be avoided, the chairman thought, if Lilienthal could just be less blindly antagonistic to utility executives, if he would negotiate compromises in a spirit of sweet reasonableness.

Within a few months of the TVA’s launching, the LilienthalMorgan disagreement, though not yet personal and acrimonious, made its way to the White House. And there Franklin Roosevelt, originally sharing the chairman’s broad approach to Authority policy making, clung for as long as he could to his conception of Arthur Morgan as first among equals. He initially supported the chairman’s efforts to make peace between the TVA and the private utilities, even though he distrusted and disliked utility executives as greatly as did Lilienthal.

When the chairman proposed in 1933 that the TVA and Willkie’s Commonwealth and Southern agree to a division of valley territory between them, with the TVA delivering power directly to consumers in some areas but through C&S in others, Lilienthal vehemently protested. He was sure such an arrangement would violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the TVA legislation, which required preferential service for municipalities and other nonprofit organizations; he was equally sure that the pledged word of a private utilities executive was not to be trusted in any matter of this kind. But his opposition was overruled; Roosevelt believed the proposal should be given a fair trial. Early in 1934 Lilienthal reluctantly negotiated an agreement with Willkie whereby the Authority purchased some local companies from C&S to form its own power network but also promised not to sell TVA power to consumers outside that network—consumers, that is, who were now buying from C&S—for at least three months after completion of the unfinished Norris Dam, which was still two years away.

Alas for Arthur Morgan and his great dream, the arrangement made no peace. Barely six months after the agreement was signed, the utilities pulled the rug out from under the chairman—and justified Lilienthal’s cynical view of their word—by launching a stockholders’ suit against the Alabama Power Company to prevent its carrying out the agreement. The utilities argued that the Authority had no constitutional right to sell electricity and thus had no constitutional right to enter into such an agreement. The TVA lost the case in federal court some nine months later, but it went by appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, which ultimately ruled 8 to 1 that though this particular deal was legal, the broader “question of the constitutional right of the Government to acquire or operate local or urban distribution systems” remained open.

By the time this decision was handed down, in February 1936, Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan were voting against the chairman on virtually every question that arose, and their dissension was beginning to be noised abroad and to affect the morale of TVA employees. The situation worsened as a volley of lawsuits was fired by the utilities against the Authority, each suit challenging the constitutionality of the TVA act. The utilities also began to build new transmission lines in areas where TVA lines were going up.

An increasingly desperate Arthur Morgan, blaming Lilienthal for his and the TVA’s troubles, began a campaign to prevent the young man’s presidential reappointment to the board at the end of his first term, in June 1936. Morgan brought an administrative reorganization plan to the White House in May 1936 that would give him the authority he had originally expected: there would be a general manager of TVA operations, nominated by the chairman; all policy questions must be decided by unanimous vote of the board. He also threatened to quit if Lilienthal was reappointed. Lilienthal, he said, was continually undermining him.

Roosevelt, who was then preparing to fight for réélection and hoping to establish other watershed authorities modeled on the TVA, could ill afford the chairman’s resignation and the exposure of dissension it would precipitate. He prevailed on Lilienthal to make an effort at rapprochement. This failed. Then he persuaded both Harcourt Morgan and the editor of the Chattanooga News to plead with the chairman to stay on, following this with a session of his own in which he talked to Arthur Morgan “like a Dutch uncle,” telling him “that I am going to send [Lilienthal’s] name in, and that he [Morgan] must be ready to take responsibility for delaying and perhaps disrupting not only TVA but the whole future. The issue of Government’s efforts to conserve human resources is at stake.”

The reappointment was made. Arthur Morgan did not resign.

But he now began to take his case to the public in ever more strident and unjust ways—ways that revealed grave flaws in his character, wiped out Roosevelt’s confidence in him, and, astonishingly, actually allied him with those who would destroy the TVA altogether. “To understand this complete about-face,” Francis Biddle later wrote, “it is essential to realize this strange delusion of certainty that at times attacks the vicar of God on earth.” In January 1937 Morgan had contributed an article to the New Republic in which he described Lilienthal, without naming him, as “ruled by a Napoleonic complex” and determined to destroy the utility companies rather than cooperate with them, as was his “public obligation.” Morgan now began to give speeches (to the American Economic Association, for instance) and to write magazine articles in which, while stressing the need for honesty and fairness in dealing with utilities, he effectively sided with them against his own agency’s policies—and while the Authority was involved in critical litigation with them. In an Atlantic Monthly article he cast aspersions on the personal honesty and motives of both Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan. He wrote a letter to Rep. Maury Maverick, of Texas, eventually published in The New York Times , charging that Lilienthal engaged in “evasion, intrigue, and sharp strategy” and had a “habit of avoiding direct responsibility which makes Machiavelli seem open and candid.” And on March 3, 1938, he spread across the morning newspapers of the land a charge that Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan had mishandled a claims case against the TVA in a way that typified their lack of “honesty, openness, decency, and fairness. …”

Lilienthal was in Washington that morning. He was at once summoned to the White House, where he met the President of the United States stretched out in his underwear on his bed. In his journal that night Lilienthal wrote, “He has that amazing assurance and nonchalance and complete lack of self-consciousness that made it seem appropriate to be discussing matters of high policy with a gentleman in his B.V.D.’s, and particularly a man whose legs are shrivelled up.” They talked while Roosevelt was being dressed by his valet in formal morning attire, preparatory to lunching, as he gaily put it, with the sultan of Muscat. (Lilienthal at first thought this was a joke.) FDR began by asking, with a fierce mock scowl, “What in hell are we going to do about Arthur Morgan? He’s out again.” Lilienthal replied that perhaps the only thing to do was “saw wood—keep “doing our job and producing results” —but added ”that he was prepared to resign if “my presence on the board is embarrassing you.” The President stopped tugging at his necktie to say, “Don’t be silly. The only embarrassment is the embarrassment of having a befuddled old man on our hands.”

Four days later Roosevelt was advised by Vice-Président John Nance Garner that he had “got to do something about this TVA business,” which was “getting worse all the time and will be in every congressional campaign in the country” in the autumn. But how, in view of the substantial public and congressional support that Chairman Morgan still enjoyed, could Roosevelt remove him without causing grave damage to the TVA and the administration? Roosevelt explained his solution to Lilienthal later the same day.

“Suppose I were to call all three of the directors to come here to my office,” Roosevelt said, “and say to them, ‘Now here you, Chairman Morgan, have made grave charges of dishonesty and what not against your colleagues; and you, H. A. Morgan and Lilienthal, have filed a statement with me saying that the chairman is obstructing the work of the board, etc. Now I want you to state the facts that support those charges, and 1 will ask the questions and I will be the judge.’ I will say #8230; ‘Now, I don’t want any opinions and I don’t want any speeches. I want the cold facts.’ … What do you think of that?”

Lilienthal thought it was “a grand idea.”

And so it was that on the morning of Friday, March 11, 1938, Harcourt Morgan, David Lilienthal, and A. E. Morgan were ushered into the President’s White House office to begin (in Lilienthal’s words) “six grueling hours.” They were far more grueling for Arthur Morgan than for anyone else in the room. He knew he stood on untenable ground—and knew, or sensed, that a public exposure of this fact was the real purpose of the hearing. And the death of the great dream of his life, coupled with the unadmitted realization that he himself bore some responsibility for it, was for him an unbearable agony. For the last year and more, his nights had often been sleepless. He had lost much weight. He was obviously in spiritual agony, and both Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan, despite their anger at the harm he had done, felt “terribly, terribly sorry for him” (again a quotation from Lilienthal’s journal).

The hard-crusted Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who was present at the President’s request, was not sympathetic. Ickes subsequently wrote that Roosevelt’s patience during the questioning was “more than I can understand,” since “Morgan’s attitude was really insolent. He declined to produce facts in support of his charges [Morgan asserted that he would present factual evidence only to a congressional committee] … repeatedly he made a stereotyped reply to questions propounded by the President … and when the President interposed to ask a further question, Morgan asked him not to interrupt until he had finished.” All this was recorded verbatim by a court reporter with a Stenotype perched on her knees. The record was placed in the hands of eagerly waiting newspaper reporters as soon as it had been transcribed.

Thus it became clear at once to all reasonable people, including those who shared the chairman’s view of what the TVA might become as a great experiment in regional planning, that Arthur Morgan had in fact no solid evidence in support of his libelous charges and that the President consequently had no choice but to remove him from the TVA board. This Roosevelt did, effective March 23, 1938, after two more fruitless hearings, on grounds that “Arthur E. Morgan was contumacious in refusing to give the Chief Executive the facts, if any, upon which he based his charges of malfeasance against his fellow directors, and in refusing to respond to questions of the Chief Executive.”

All this did no good, certainly, to the public image or operating efficiency of Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite New Deal agency. Nevertheless, actual measurable progress toward the Authority’s specific goals was neither prevented nor even appreciably slowed by the furor at the top. Twenty-one major TVA dams, out of an ultimate thirty-three—each a clearly defined element of an integrated valley-wide flood-controlling, navigation-developing, and power-generating plan—were under construction in 1938 or soon would be. Several of the largest were already completed. From them long and ever-longer lines of transmission towers marched across the land. In 1933 fewer than a quarter million people in the region had had electric service; by the time the Authority had brought the Tennessee and its tributaries wholly under control, harnessed to human purposes as was no other great river system in the world, more than two million people would be served with TVA electricity brought to them through 160 local distributors—110 municipal systems and 50 rural cooperatives. By then, too, electricity use per capita in the valley would be twice the national average, and the price per kilowatt-hour half the national average. The TVA would by then have taught private utility executives what they should have been able to figure out for themselves: that lowered rates could stimulate greatly increased electricity sales and thus result in increased total profits. It was a lesson that benefited utilities and their customers nationwide.

The dams served equally well the purpose of flood control in an area that was particularly vulnerable to devastating inundations. Stream-flow management would become tighter and more efficient until by the mid-1950s the TVA’s hydraulic engineers could and did handle a twenty-odd-inch rain that fell over thousands of square miles without any flooding anywhere downstream. Similarly successful were the dams, locks, and channel dredging that made the Tennessee and its major tributaries navigable by boats drawing as much as nine feet, thereby reducing shipping costs and stimulating industrial development. By the 1970s as much as 3.5 billion ton-miles of freight would move annually on the Tennessee—a river that in 1933 had carried less than one-hundredth as much. And to these strictly commercial uses of reservoirs and waterways were added recreational uses—boating, fishing, swimming—that not only made life more enjoyable for valley dwellers but also attracted profitable tourism.

Meanwhile, the TVA’s agricultural program continued apace, aided by Civilian Conservation Corps camp labor. Phosphate and nitrogen fertilizers were cheaply manufactured in TVA plants and sold to farmers at cost. Contour strip farming, terracing, grassing along waterways, the installation of farm ponds and gully-control dams, and, above all, the application of complete farm land-use plans giving every acre the use (crop or wood or pasture) for which it was naturally best fitted —these greatly reduced soil erosion while enhancing the beauty of the countryside. Extension Service demonstration projects spread knowledge of the latest improvements in farm crops, land management, and farm machinery; and the TVA’s inventive mechanical engineers even made direct contributions, including a cheap electric hay dryer, a portable thresher, and new hillside terracing machinery.

In every phase of this work, under the successive chairmanships of Harcourt Morgan (he succeeded A. E.) and Lilienthal (the dominant board member even during Harcourt Morgan’s tenure), the TVA involved the people of the valley in planning to the maximum degree possible. They participated for the most part through organizations that had been long established in the valley, an arrangement that contributed greatly to the Authority’s political support and practical effectiveness. As a result, local and state governments and widely varied institutions—library boards, school boards, wildlife-protection societies, and more—far from being superseded or weakened to the point of extinction, as the TVA’s opponents had predicted, were much strengthened. According to Lilienthal, the TVA’s “democracy at the grass roots” was an inspiring demonstration of how “man as an individual” might be preserved, even strengthened, against the “fatally impersonal” pressures of “huge factories, assembly lines, mysterious mechanisms, standardization,” and other institutional consequences of technological advance.

The TVA failed to become the lifetransforming experiment that Arthur Morgan (and Roosevelt) had originally envisaged, but it was a good deal more than “the Tennessee Valley Power Production and Flood Control Corporation,” as the Roosevelt brain truster Rexford G. Tugwell felt it should have been called after 1936. And for this, much credit is due to the TVA’s first chairman. “A good many of his unacceptable proposals … stimulated decisions endorsing similar goals but employing methods more compatible with TVA’s assignment,” wrote Marguerite Owens, a former TVA official who wrote a history of the Authority. More important was the unadmitted, perhaps unperceived influence of his implicit philosophy on the young David Lilienthal. It was in some degree a negative influence, with Lilienthal defining his views in reaction to Arthur Morgan. “Is it inescapable that such a task of resource development be carried on only by highly centralized government direction … run by a privileged elite of managers or experts or politicians?” Lilienthal asked in his book TVA— Democracy on the March. No! said the TVA, according to Lilienthal, and he obviously numbered Arthur Morgan among the elitists. But elsewhere in his book he stressed (to quote one key chapter’s title) “A Seamless Web: The Unity of Land and Water and’Man.” And he quoted Roosevelt’s line, in his 1933 TVA message to Congress, about a regional approach that “touches and gives life to all forms of human concern” —here Arthur Morgan’s evident influence is wholly positive.

In a summary statement of the first TVA chairman’s contribution to this most exciting of the New Deal’s new departures, Marguerite Owen quotes a former member of the TVA’s legal staff who incurred the chairman’s wrath and was obstructed by him during the TVA’s court battles with the utilities. “It was essential for the chairman to be removed,” this man said, with feeling. “But,” he added, “it was just as necessary for him to be appointed. The President was right both times.”