202 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
Franklin Roosevelt became president at a moment
of acute national crisis. Over 4,000 banks failed in
the first few months of 1933, and the unemployment
rate reached nearly 25 percent. Within days of his
inauguration in March, Roosevelt sent a series of bills
to Congress to alleviate the Great Depression and to
stimulate economic growth. The most ambitious of
these was the Tennessee Valley Authority, a massive
public works project designed to address what
Roosevelt considered the nation’s most pressing
problem: the poverty of the South.
The Tennessee Valley is almost the size of
England, stretching 44,000 square miles across
the heart of the Southeast. Its watershed reaches
north into Virginia and Kentucky, east into North
Carolina, and south into Georgia, Alabama, and
Mississippi. Much of the region is mountainous,
and large areas are subject to heavy rainfall and
recurrent flooding. By 1930, decades of intensive
cotton, tobacco, and corn farming had impoverished
the soil and left it vulnerable to erosion, while
deforestation further denuded the landscape. The
residents of the valley had little or no access to
electricity or other basic modern conveniences.
The TVA was Roosevelt’s effort to address this
poverty through flood control, electrification,
reforestation, and agricultural reform.
The project began in the lower left corner of the
full map above, at Muscle Shoals, where Wilson Dam
generated some of the first electricity for the valley.
To the north is Norris Dam, designed to control the
erratic flow of the Tennessee River in order to revive
farming throughout the valley. (As shown on page 198,
the Norris Dam even became a tourist destination
after its completion in 1936.) These twin goals of flood
control and rural electrification drove the construction
of six dams along the river and its tributaries by
1940, with dozens more planned. The map marks the
waterways to be improved by the TVA, as well as the
existing roads and proposed air routes out of Nashville
Airport (a New Deal public works project which
opened in 1937).
LET THERE BE LIGHT
Stephen Voorhies for Rand McNally,
“Raw Materials for a U.S. ‘Ruhr,’”
Fortune (October 1933)
The map conveys the ambitions of the project,
which captured widespread news coverage
throughout the 1930s. But the TVA also provoked
intense criticism. Some noted that, though
agricultural reform increased production, in the long
run small farmers still could not compete against
their larger counterparts. But far more consequential
was the political resistance to the TVA as a form of
regional planning. This criticism first appeared in the
pages of Fortune, the monthly magazine devoted to
commerce and industry founded by Henry Luce, an
ardent opponent of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Soon after
Congress authorized the TVA, Fortune published this
map by illustrator Stephen Voorhies to investigate
the program. Voorhies used a bird’s-eye view to
underscore the sheer geographical scope of the
project. The editors revealed their skepticism in
the accompanying article by labeling the TVA as
a governmental plan to remake the region into a
“social-industrial-agrarian machine,” an American
counterpart to Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley.
American history is replete with large public
works projects, such as the Panama Canal, so why
did the TVA provoke such resistance? The editors of
Fortune grudgingly acknowledged the importance
of electrification, flood control, and economic
development. But critics scoffed at the power and
utopian aims of this new federal entity, and worried
that regional planning posed a threat to state power.
Power companies feared that the TVA would compete
with their services, and unsuccessfully challenged
its constitutionality in the courts. The president of
the largest electric utility holding company in the
country, Wendell Willkie, then ran against Roosevelt
in the 1940 presidential election.
Willkie lost, but criticism of the TVA seeded
conservative opposition to Roosevelt and the
New Deal that would flourish later in the century.
These critics rejected the principle that the federal
government should undertake large-scale programs,
planning, and regulation on behalf of the people.
Resistance to the New Deal became the foundation
of the modern conservative movement, even as
many of these programs—chiefly social security—
won bipartisan support. The TVA brought electricity
to much of the rural South, provided work for
thousands, and regulated flooding within the valley.
But it also engendered an enduring resistance to
national planning in American political culture.