A NY attempt to appraise impact of Tennessee Valley Authority upon Southeast will of necessity be partial and not, as one would wish, highly objective. There are several reasons for this. There does not exist an over-all comprehensive socio-economic backlog study of Valley made at inception of TVA against which change may be measured. lack of an equivalent of Southern Regions' for Tennessee Valley, as of 1935, is most uhfortunate. TVA, in its eagerness to cooperate with Valley agencies, and not to duplicate their areas of work and jurisdiction, has left much record keeping and research to these agencies. This was notably true in agriculture where responsibilities for records on unit test demonstration farms and on area demonstrations became a college responsibility. As a result data with which one has to work frequently lack a central core of uniformity which would furnish basis for charting changes on test demonstration farms and in demonstration areas for Valley as a whole. TVA and colleges recognize problems of lack of uniformity in data and are now proceeding to correct it. For reasons inherent in social change itself, both in charting change and assignment of causes to change, much difficulty is involved. As MacIver, in his discussion on The Quest for a Specific Why says, Many dynamic factors melt, focus, clash and cooperate in shaping of pattern of change.2 To this difficulty is added fact that TVA's operations, aside from construction, power development, and flood control in river channel, are largely cooperative with other agencies. Any attempt, therefore, in these cooperative program operations to gauge contributions of one agency, as against those of another, is, for most part, impossible. It is, therefore, in light of these limitations, that we have to ask what has been impact of TVA upon Southeastern Region, and particularly Seven Valley States of region? First, TVA has been an important factor in regional identification of Southeast. By regional identification I mean sense of unity, importance and confidence which people in Southeast have or which 5,850,000 people (1946 estimate) in 212 County TVA Watershed and power service area have. This is not same as regional snobbishness. We of Southeast have never been able to boast that we had a region with books on slope of Beacon Hill, when wolves howled in wilderness.' Southeast has been on defensive a long time and still is. It was dubbed Economic Problem No. and perhaps properly so. Its sociologists have often felt it necessary to explain The Way of not only for our own cultural understanding, but also for export. We were well on way toward getting an inferiority complex and this was doubly so in depression of thirties -even Democracy had an inferiority complex, as iron heels of Europe were on march. Since 1933, more than 20 million people have come into Valley to see TVA projects. In Europe we are told TVA is most discussed American enterprise, rivaled of course by atomic energy. Thus it is that to Southeast and to Nation the Tennessee Valley has come to symbolize idea of evolutionary change,4 a change toward improvement and better utilization of resources, toward a better balanced economy with higher incomes from more secure sources, and a higher standard of living buttressed by better tools and knowledge for making a living. This record of substantial accomplishment by an enterprise, which is part of South, has been a factor in bolstering South's morale and has added a tangible element of regional identification. It constitutes a concrete demonstration that plan* Adapted from a paper read before twelfth annual meeting of Southern Sociological Society, Knoxville, Tennessee, April 1, 1949. 1 Howard W. Odum, Southern Regions of United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936). 2 R. M. MacIver, Social Causation (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1942), p. 133. 3 Committee on Regional Planning, Yale University, A Case for Regional Planning with Special Reference to New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), p. 39. 4 David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on March (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944), p. mi.
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Apr 23, 2012
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