Tennessee Valley Authority Quotes

if somebody didn’t have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government, and didn’t have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying certain communities, and didn’t have a problem with the interstate highway system being built, and didn’t have a problem with the [Federal Housing Administration] subsidizing the suburbanization of America, and that all helped you build wealth and create a middle class—and then suddenly as soon as African Americans or Latinos are interested in availing themselves of the same mechanisms as ladders into the middle class, you now have a violent opposition to them—then I think you at least have to ask yourself the question of how consistent you are, and what’s different, and what’s changed.

The state, too, is in decline, though perhaps less obviously than the idea of the national community. The reason is simply that the global community of capitalists will not let the Western state reverse its post-1970s policies of retrenchment, which is the only way for it to adequately address all the crises that are currently ripping society apart. If any state—unimaginably—made truly substantive moves to restore and expand programs of social welfare, or to vastly expand and improve public education, or to initiate programs like Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration or Tennessee Valley Authority (but on a necessarily broader scale than in the 1930s), or to restore organized labor to its power in the 1960s and thereby raise effective demand, or to promulgate any other such anti-capitalist measure, investors would flee it and its sources of funds would dry up. It couldn’t carry out such policies anyway, given the massive resistance they would provoke among all sectors and levels of the business community. Fiscal austerity is, on the whole, good for profits (in the short term), since it squeezes the population and diverts money to the ruling class. In large part because of capital’s high mobility and consequent wealth and power over both states and populations, the West’s contemporary political paradigm of austerity and government retrenchment is effectively irreversible for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes just to see what was happening, my father would drive to the airport. Newark Airport was the first major airport serving the greater New York area. It was opened for traffic on October 1, 1928, on 68 acres of reclaimed marshland next to the Passaic River. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey later took it over from the Army Air Corps in 1948 and started a major improvement program. Driving by and seeing activity from the road, we drove to where Eastern Airlines had a shiny new DC-3 on display, and as luck would have it, it was open to the public. It was an exciting moment when I boarded this aircraft and discovered that it was first constructed in 1934, the same year I was born. An example of modern technology, it was the first modern airliner and the forerunner of commercial aviation. It would still be years before I would learn to fly an airplane, but for now, things could not get much better. On our way back to Jersey City, we drove over the Pulaski Skyway, one of the first elevated highways in the country. The United States was trying to crawl out of the worst depression ever and government projects, backed by stimulus money, were everywhere. The Tennessee Valley Authority was building dams to run hydroelectric generators in the South, and big projects like Boulder Dam were being built out West along the Colorado River. The nation’s electrical grid was expanding by leaps and bounds and highway construction projects with new bridges were being built. The United States was growing once again, and I was there to see it!

Soviet collectivization represented, to these American viewers, an enormous demonstration project without the political inconveniences of American institutions; “that is, the Americans viewed the giant Soviet farms as huge experiment stations on which Americans could try out their most radical ideas for increasing agricultural production, and, in particular, wheat production. Many of the things they wished to learn more about simply could not be tried in America, partly because it would cost too much, partly because no suitable large farmsite was available, and partly because many farmers and farm laborers would be alarmed at the implications of this experimentation.”30 The hope was that the Soviet experiment would be to American industrial agronomy more or less what the Tennessee Valley Authority was to be to American regional planning: a proving ground and a possible model for adoption.

I remembered those words when I heard that the Red Army had blown up the great Dnieper Dam and surrounding industries worth a quarter of a billion dollars all told. I know how the Soviet people loved that dam. I saw it three times during its building. I saw the workers competing on both sides of the river, putting up red stars at night to signal the progress of their work. That dam was the pride not only of its builders, but of the whole people. It symbolized Lenin’s great dream of electrifying the land. It was everything that the Tennessee Valley Authority meant to our Southern States – the coming of modern light, modern power, modern industry to a backward land. Millions of men and women went without meat and butter and clothes that the Dnieper Dam might be swiftly built. They said: “We tighten our belts to build our future!” But every Soviet citizen would blow it up swiftly rather than see it fall to Hitler and be used to enslave the Ukrainian people.