Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

by Jane Brox

  Perhaps it wasn't the things themselves that many women most desired, but the free time. "The thing [the farm woman] needs in this day and time is electricity. Then when her house is lighted, her cream separated and churned, her washing, ironing, and sweeping, her sewing machine run by the same power, and she relieved from the drudgery of washing and filling lamps, lifting and washing jars, pans, and all these other hard old things, she can have some time for a social life and the improvement of her mind," commented one farm wife. Another said, "We would like to have a chance to live as the city sisters, and not be made to live as a peasant or slave." For both men and women, above and beyond the farm work, they desired simply to be included. This was especially true of the young, who would claim that "everything had already happened before we found out about it" and that "we were back in the woods compared to the rest of the world."

  Whether in Texas, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Maine, Alabama, or Colorado, for those waiting for electricity through the twenties, thirties, and forties, there was only time, and waiting for time after. Or perhaps in the later years, the voices hardened even more, for time had passed, and as daylight waned and the last chores were done, the life that had spread across fields and woods during the day drew inside. Dark staked its boundary, large and elemental. Families gathered around the kerosene lamp on the table. What had once seemed "the kind of oil people had dreamed about for centuries" had become the symbol of obsolescence and of isolation from the future. "Kerosene light," James Agee wrote in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, "is to electric services what foot and mule travel is to travel by auto and airplane, or what plowed clay is to pavement, and ... these daily facts and gulfs have incalculably powerful and in many respects disadvantageous influences upon the mind and body."

  The tenant farmers Agee wrote about found a use for the discards of electricity long before the lines came through. In a country burial ground in Alabama, he saw graves of mounded earth marked with pine headboards that would weather away in time. The decorations on and around the graves would outlast the soft wood, however. Some were bordered with white clamshells. Others—women's graves—were decorated with plates, butter dishes, and baskets made of milk glass. And still others were marked with what the people had never had in life. "A blown-out electric bulb is screwed into the clay at the exact center [of one grave]," Agee wrote. "On another, on the slope of clay just in front of the headboard, its feet next the board, is a horseshoe; and at its center a blown bulb is stood upright. On two or three others there are insulators of blue-green glass."

  The slow and halting extension of electric lines into the countryside was not inevitable. Historian David Nye notes that "street lighting in the United States quickly developed far beyond functional necessity to include advertising and public-relations spectacles. In contrast, in Scandinavia, Germany, and Holland, spectacular lighting developed more slowly, but the electrification of every home was considered a desirable political goal, and had been 90 percent achieved before 1930." In countries where government regarded the establishment of electric power as a social and political responsibility—and took an active role—rural electrification often developed much more quickly, although government interest couldn't ensure success without the money and infrastructure to develop long-distance lines.

  When Vladimir Ilyich Lenin created a long-range plan for Soviet national and economic recovery after years of revolution and war, electrification was central to the plan. It would, Russian Marxists believed, "provide a link between town and country, [which would] make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of the land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism." But in 1920, not even the cities in Russia had much of an electric infrastructure. When electrical engineer Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii "displayed an illuminated map of a future electrified Russia to convince the 8th Congress of Soviets to approve a plan for state electrification ... Moscow's generating capacity was so low ... that lighting the bulbs on the map resulted in blacking out parts of the city." Without funding for the infrastructure across the vast country, rural electrification fell far short of Lenin's hopes, though the electric bulb came to be called the "Ilyich light" and stood as a symbol of modernization in Soviet propaganda.

  But there were many successful instances of countries developing rural electrification programs. In 1924 Harold Evans, counsel to the Rural Electric Committee of the Pennsylvania Council of Agricultural Organizations, published a survey of rural electrification throughout the world. He described the manner in which Sweden, France, Holland, New Zealand, Canada, and other countries had progressed. Sweden, for instance, had been cut off from coal and oil supplies during World War I and had immediately turned to the production of electricity for power. "Ten years ago, rural electrification was practically unknown in Sweden," Evans wrote. "Today 40 per cent of the 9½ million acres of tilled land has access to electric power.... This rapid development has come about through many different agencies, the most important of which are the state owned electric systems in central Sweden, the larger private power companies and the farmers' cooperative societies."

  Canada began harnessing the hydroelectric power of Niagara Falls in 1910. The government controlled much of the power, and by 1911 the province of Ontario decided to make the delivery of affordable electricity to the countryside a priority. Although parts of Ontario, which covers more than 400,000 square miles, like parts of the rural United States, would not see electric lines until after the Great Depression and World War II, government intention ensured that most of the rural countryside was electrified much earlier than rural areas in the United States. Evans noted that "the kw.h. production of electricity per unit of population in Ontario is more than twice as great as in the United States and is increasing much faster in Ontario than it is in this country." Although only about 3 percent of American farms were connected to central stations in 1924, he remained hopeful that half of the farms in the United States would be electrified by the early 1930s.

  In reality, when Thomas Edison died in October 1931, less than 10 percent of the farms in America were connected to central station power. As he was buried at dusk on October 21—fifty-two years to the day after the first successful experiment with an incandescent bulb at Menlo Park—his widow, the New York Times reported, could see from the cemetery in West Orange, New Jersey, "far off above Manhattan, the sky-glow from the lights his genius gave to the world." As a tribute to Edison, President Herbert Hoover requested that at 10:00 P.M. Pacific time—the hour when the sun would have set over the entire country—the nation turn off all its lights simultaneously for one minute and plunge itself into darkness. Radio stations across the nation would announce the moment. "Mr. Hoover left it to each individual citizen to participate in the minute of darkness, pointing out that if the generation of electric current were halted even for an instant, it might cause death somewhere in the country. 'This demonstration of the dependence of the country upon electrical current for its life and health,' the President declared, 'is in itself a monument to Mr. Edison's genius.'" Most farm families didn't have a radio to hear the announcement, and they would already be in the half dark anyway, gathered around their kerosene lamps.

  13. Rural Electrification

  IN 1908 PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT appointed the Country Life Commission to investigate the deteriorating quality of life in rural America. When the commission published its report, it concluded, "It is more important that small power be developed on the farms of the United States than that we harness Niagara." But not until the 1920s, when Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot undertook the Giant Power Survey, did any government agency, federal or state, look extensively at what electrification could mean for rural America. The survey suggested that rural electrification would make it possible for factories to move out of the center of cities and not only relieve overburdened, overcrowded urban areas and the people in them but also modernize rural life and "drive a wedge between women
and drudgery." And, the survey said, it could do all this cheaply and cleanly. Pinchot proposed an intensive plan, largely based on coal-fired generating plants, to electrify rural parts of his state, but the Pennsylvania legislature, under pressure from utility companies, failed to approve the plan. Only with the implementation of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s did widespread rural electrification begin to become a reality.

  Modernization of the countryside had been a concern of Roosevelt's during his tenure as governor of New York, when he'd become aware of the inequalities in electric power distribution at his rural retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. "When the first-of-the-month bill came in for electric light for my little cottage," he recalled, "I found the charge was 18 cents a kilowatt-hour, about four times as much as I paid in Hyde Park, New York. That started my long study of proper public utility charges for electric current and the whole subject of getting electricity into farm homes."

  Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933 as part of the blitz of legislation aimed at alleviating the effects of the Great Depression. The TVA oversaw development along the Tennessee River and its tributaries, which drained all of Tennessee and parts of Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. These were some of the poorest rural regions of the country, where the soils had been depleted and eroded by extensive cotton production, careless farming practices, and overlogging; where frequent floods silted the waterways; and where almost no rural communities or farms had electricity. Essential to the TVA's plan was a series of dams and reservoirs on the Tennessee and its tributaries for flood control, navigation, irrigation, recreation, and the production of hydropower for electrification. States, counties, municipalities, and farmers' cooperatives would have first access to the power produced. The utility companies of the region voiced strong opposition to the projects and initiated numerous lawsuits, charging that it was unconstitutional for the government to compete with them directly by selling electric power, but the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the constitutionality of TVA projects.

  The TVA undertook extensive regional planning, for Roosevelt believed that only an integrated approach to the conditions in the watershed could permanently improve the quality of life for the valley's residents. He saw electricity not only as something that would modernize people's lives but also as a moral force capable of improving their sense of citizenship and strengthening ties within the community. "Power is really a secondary matter," Roosevelt insisted.

  What we are doing there is taking a watershed with about three and a half million people in it, almost all of them rural, and we are trying to make a different type of citizen out of them.... Do you remember that drive over to Wheeler Dam the other day? You went through a county of Alabama where the standards of education are lower than almost any other county in the United States.... They have never had a chance. All you had to do was look at the houses in which they lived.... So T.V.A. is primarily intended to change and to improve the standards of living of the people of that valley.... If you can get cheap power to those people, you hasten the process of raising the standard of living.

  The TVA established experimental and demonstration farms and created, through university experiment stations and extension services, a means of informing farmers of good agricultural practices, such as the correct application of quality fertilizer, the terracing of hillsides to prevent erosion, and the planting of cover crops. It developed programs to inform women on the farm about nutrition, the safe handling of food, and sanitation. It also encouraged the formation of electric co-ops: farmers in a given area would join together to pay for the extension of the lines to their farms. All members of the co-op, whether they lived hard by the power station or at the far end of a rural line, would pay the same rate for service. When in June 1934 the first rural electric co-op in the TVA area—the Alcorn County Electric Power Association in Mississippi—began operation, Roosevelt said:

  Now the Alcorn County people ... did a very interesting thing. There they had Corinth, which is a good-sized town, and they found they could distribute in Corinth—these are not accurate figures—they found they could distribute household power at about two cents a kilowatt hour. But if they were to run an electric line out to a farm, they would have to charge three cents. In other words, the farmer would have to pay more.... What did the Corinth people do?...Voluntarily they agreed to take and to pay two-and-a-half-cent power which enabled the farmer to get two-and-a-half-cent power. That is an extraordinary thing. That is community planning.

  The TVA's reach was broad, and although it was accepted more readily in some places than in others, the lure of the electric life—for those who could afford it—was clearly engaging. One of the authority's directors, David Lilienthal, with all the idealism of those involved, wrote in his journal in October 1935:

  There must have been ten thousand country people in Fayetteville to attend the opening of the substation near Ardmore.... I had a chance to walk around the courthouse yard before the speaking and see them and overhear them talking. The enthusiasm about the rural electrification program that I noticed particularly while I was speaking to this crowd from the bandstand in the courthouse yard ... was really amazing.... There is somehow a magic about TVA kilowatts. We have really stirred the public imagination about electricity.

  The building of an extensive system of dams meant that many towns, settlements, and farms along the rivers would be drowned. For the first of these dams, the Norris Dam—built just below the confluence of the Clinch and Powell rivers in eastern Tennessee—the TVA purchased, often by eminent domain, roughly 240 square miles of land in five counties. The valleys were steep, the forests cutover, the fields eroded and depleted by generations of intensive farming. The young had departed years earlier, moving to the cities to find work, because even in the sparsely populated hills, there were too many people for the land to comfortably support. But as the Depression had deepened, these emigrants had trickled back home, and their return had put even more pressure on the land.

  Families had lived here for generations, residing in small, isolated communities of farmers and tenant farmers, crossroads stores and churches. Some had never traveled as far as Knoxville. The farmers, mostly self-sufficient, produced a little extra—eggs, butter, vegetables—to barter at the local store for coffee, salt, flour, and plowpoints. Such stores would be "full even without customers," Eleanor Buckles wrote,

  with boxes and bins and barrels and the home-made furniture, baskets, weaving and carving and fox skins brought in for barter, all crowded together. Boxes of shoes and sacks of feed and bolts of cloth overflowed from the shelves and cluttered the floor. In the rear stood the barber-chair circled by boxes and barrels for seating.... The gasoline lamp in the center of the ceiling shed a glaring white light and patterned the walls with the shadows of chains and harness hanging from the dusty beams.

  The people had created an irreplaceable system of interdependence among their independent selves. They helped each other care for the sick and rang the death bell for their neighbors.

  And since there wasn't no communication, people'd hear that bell, oh, for miles around. The way they rang the death bell was different from any other. They'd pull the cord—the rope—down and hold it for a few seconds and then let it go back instead of letting it ring the natural ring. Everybody'd recognize the death bell, and they knew there was somebody in the community who was dead. Of course the whole community would come in and prepare food and help and do anything that was needed to be done for the family.

  More than three thousand families were forced to leave their land in the Norris basin. The TVA offered "market value" for the properties, but no one felt it was enough—and in truth it wouldn't be: the community would be scattered; the world they moved to would be nothing but strange. Most, in the end, went only with the greatest reluctance. John Rice Irwin, who was a child when the Norris basin was flooded, remembered:

  I guess they felt that the
y were doing it for the benefit of their area.... And they especially felt this later on, I believe, when they saw what TVA had accomplished. I think it was somewhat similar to a person going into the army, in the past, you know. They didn't want to go, they dreaded to go, and it was disruptive, but at the same time they felt some obligations.... It's very difficult to describe the attachments that they had for their land, their emotional involvement, and the fact they were going to have to leave all that and come somewhere else. It wasn't just that they had spent their lives there, you know, but as far back as their grandparents could remember.

  Before the reservoir was filled, more outsiders than ever arrived—engineers, relocators, writers, photographers. Lewis Hine created enduring images of life there before the flood, of women washing clothes in the yard in their zinc tubs, of children sitting obediently in rows in the cabin schools. "And the people up there felt that they were being portrayed as if they were isolated, ignorant, mountain people," Irwin noted. "And I don't know what part TVA played, whether the pictures were from TVA, or whether it happened at the same time; but that was the one big criticism that I recall more than anything else, I think."

  Anything made of material that might float to the surface and clog the dam—wooden walls and roofs, tin—was demolished or hauled away. Chimneys and concrete and stone were left as is; the water could just rise over them. The three thousand families had five thousand dead who were exhumed and reinterred on higher ground. When the water rose, the best soil—the bottom soil—was inundated along with the dusty yards and the woodlands and creeks. Water crept along the ridges and flowed into the hollows, and the roads that led into the valley from then on led to calm water.