What is the significance of tva

He needs the money which these cash crops bring. He can do nothing else until, as Mr. Fortunately the task of making choices of this kind available does not fall upon the T. It is a responsibility of the whole national agricultural program, with its benefit payments and rehabilitation loans. But the resources of the T, V.

It conducts research looking toward the development of agricultural industries which will use regional resources and relieve the burden on the soil by supplying new sources of income. Thus work has been done on the quick-freezing of fruits and vegetables, on the preparation of flax fiber so that it can be used on cotton mill machinery for the manufacture of linen fabrics, on the processing of sorghum.

Other research efforts have been directed to the development of farm machinery adapted to the conditions existing on Valley farms. A low-cost threshing machine has been devised, and a furrow seeder which plants grain and distributes fertilizer in the same process on hillsides.

Electric power has been adapted to income-producing uses on the farm through such devices as an electric hay drier inexpensive enough to be used by the small farmer, keeping hay crops from spoiling and increasing their feeding value. Electric methods of curing sweet potatoes have been developed.

The Authority has designed and demonstrated a community refrigerator for groups of families in the country, which can repay much of its cost and improve farm diets by the preservation of meat and other farm products. It is by aggressive, interrelated programs of this kind that the T. To the extent that its powers permit, this sort of approach has characterized all T. The Authority has sought to discharge its regional responsibility by an extensive program of co-ordinated physical and social engineering.

Land and water and forests and people have all been included in the equation to be solved. Naturally the solution has not been perfect.

There have been mistakes, and the powers of the T. But the instrument has worked. The retooling has produced results. Finally, the meaning of the T. To friend and to foe it has seemed a sign in the sky, an indication of the shape of things to come. The frenzied editor of the Chicago Tribune had this vision of the Authority:. There is no longer room to doubt that at Norris the communism of Lenin and Stalin has taken root in the United States, for no man in Norris may engage in private business, no man in Norris may work for wages except for the government, no man in Norris may worship in church or build a church to worship in according to his conscience.

Can any one doubt that in the inaccessible mountains of Tennessee is being grown the germ culture that is intended to infect America? It is obviously true that the T. It is more pertinent to consider the T.

From this point of view, a special contribution of the T. Public enterprise has been traditionally considered as handicapped by certain inescapable features of government administration. There is the alleged dilemma of operating with personnel selected either by an unimaginative civil service commission or by politicians. There is the red tape of government contracting, the restrictiveness of government auditing, the necessity of placating Congress if appropriations are to be secured, the political interference that is to be expected.

It is thus of particular importance that the T. The public corporation is a corporate entity owned wholly by the government and operated by its appointees. The form has been widely used in the administration of economic undertakings by governments, the purpose being to blend the administrative, autonomy and financial responsibility of the private business corporation with public accountability and control.

The possibilities of the public corporation have been less un-derstandingly explored in the United States than in Great Britain, where the broadcasting system, the generation and transmission of electric power, the London transportation facilities and port services, and overseas air transport have been carried on by public corporations for varying lengths of time.

Consideration is now being given to unifying the British railways on a similar basis. In the case of the T. The public corporation is, of course, only a means and a mechanism.

It can serve the totalitarian, the corporate, the communist state, as the Russian trusts, the Hermann Goer-ing Werke, and the South Manchuria Company testify.

But a country bent on making democracy work will insist that the process of socialization, and the area within which the government becomes the sole institutional capitalist, be limited. Most Americans agree on the necessity for economic activity independent of the state, and on the impossibility of maintaining democracy and freedom if economic power becomes the monopoly of an absolute state.

The virtue of the public corporation is that it can be manipulated so as to achieve public control without unduly promoting the growth of statism. It can be given substantial administrative autonomy, making it a truly public rather than merely a government activity. The policy of decentralization which the T. The long-run significance of the T. Fundamentally, its contribution has been the basis it has supplied for faith in democratic institutions. It is well to have it proved so dramatically that planning can grow out of popular consensus, and does not need to be the product of supermen, imposed by Hitlerian dictation.

It is good to have such impressive evidence that public control is compatible with efficiency. For one of the most important tasks of a democracy at war is to strengthen the administrative resources of government, to increase its sense of responsibility, to raise the level of public administration generally, so that it may be adequate to the heavy tasks of the present and future.

The power plants which the T. Perhaps in somewhat similar fashion the administrative experience of the T. Today, TVA provides power to over 9 million people in 7 states from its 29 dams, 11 coal-fired power plants and 3 nuclear facilities [7]. While it has had to adapt to new economic, political and environmental conditions, it remains popular.

It is the only public works agency entirely created by the New Deal that is still in operation, though now chartered as a public corporation. Sources: 1 Robert D. Leighinger, Jr. See also our summary of the Rural Electrification Administration. They worked with the War Department and the aluminum industry to provide munitions and aluminum for planes.

The Tennessee Valley Authority was often caught up in public and political controversy. Their displacement of families, and sometimes entire towns, caused great hardship for some communities.

Additionally, power struggles between the Chairman of the Board, Arthur E. Morgan and Board member David Lilienthal became fodder for newspapers and cartoonists.