by Jane Brox
For all the TVA's original intentions, there was no real plan to fully resettle the people. Most dispersed across the county to land that was just as marginal as what they'd been forced to leave. It was probably easier on the young than on the old, who had little chance of adapting to a new community so late in their lives.
The TVA did build a town about twenty miles from Knoxville. Norris, Tennessee, was influenced by the garden city movement of late-nineteenth-century England, which attempted to humanize the industrial city by promulgating the creation of modest, walkable, self-contained towns enfolded in protective greenery. In Norris, every fully electrified cedar-shingled house had a porch facing its neighbor and was within walking distance of stores, churches, the post office, and other services. The town was ringed with woodlands. Those who lived there, it was imagined, would have extensive opportunity to study agriculture, the arts, and trades.
But like the TVA itself, the vision of Norris was one thing, the reality another. The first buildings constructed served as dam workers' dormitories, and the homes that were built later were occupied by professionals involved in dam construction. Norris never housed the dispossessed. Almost no local families—neither former landowners nor tenant farmers—settled in Norris, and no blacks were allowed. "From all this, the Negro ... is to be absolutely excluded," wrote Cranston Clayton.
He cannot even live on the outskirts of the town in his customary hovel.... Southern towns will at least allow their out-caste population to live in dirt and shacks down by the creek or the railroad track. But the government does worse. It absolutely excludes them. This blow is all the more disheartening because it is delivered by the United States government. The Negro looks to the government as his best if not his only friend.... Federal Courts have been about the only agency by which Negroes felt they could protect themselves as American citizens.... Norris is built on government property. The project is nationally supported and therefore ought to be somewhat independent of local prejudices.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) undertook repeated investigations of the TVA, charging that it engaged in discrimination in the hiring and housing of blacks. When the NAACP published its findings, the TVA answered the charges by insisting that it could not find enough skilled black labor to fill the positions. The discrimination in Norris was never rectified. In the end, it would become a bedroom community for Knoxville.
As for electrification of the area surrounding the Norris Dam, many of the relocated were reluctant or unable to electrify their homes, and most wouldn't have electricity until after World War II. "A malaria-ridden, poverty-stricken, one-crop population farming burnt-out land can't buy electricity," wrote Buckles, "nor can it buy the products of factories."
The Rural Electrification Administration (REA), established by the Roosevelt administration in 1935, two years after the TVA was under way, didn't directly involve itself in social engineering; it had the more straightforward mission of delivering electricity to rural people across the country. "We were all feeling our way along," recalled the second administrator of the REA, John Carmody. Morris Cooke, Carmody's predecessor, envisioned that the REA would distribute low-interest government loans directly to power companies. With the money, the utilities would extend their lines to provide widespread electric power to the countryside, and in return for the favorable interest rate, they would reduce their excessively high charges to rural customers.
But the private utility companies were still unable to see the potential in farm kilowatts, especially in the precarious economic years of the early 1930s. By that time, most of the electric utilities in the United States were inextricably bound up with large holding companies—a model initiated decades earlier by Samuel Insull, who, while bringing electricity to suburban Chicago neighborhoods, also systematically bought up controlling interests in the small, outlying utility companies in the area and combined them with other assets. Holding companies were attracted to the stability of the utility companies, which they could use to guarantee other, often riskier investments, but such a practice linked the financial security of utilities with these other investments. Not only were the large holding companies more volatile than separate utilities, but their reach also extended across large geographical areas.
During the stock market crash of 1929, the enormous losses suffered by large holding companies compromised the financial health of utilities. Economically fragile utility companies were not just a liability for stockholders. Since the utilities were now less creditworthy, it cost them more to borrow money, and this cost was passed on to consumers. In 1935, in an effort to bring stability and control to the utility industry, President Roosevelt signed the Public Utility Holding Company Act (PUHCA), which strictly regulated the size and type of companies that could hold stock in utilities. Among other things, the legislation limited the amount of debt such companies could accrue, allowed the government to set electricity rates, and mandated that utilities sell power to everyone in exchange for being granted exclusive control over a given service area.
Even with such regulations in place, utility companies failed to extend electric service to rural parts of the country, so Cooke began a program that established rural cooperatives like that in Alcorn County and other TVA communities. Farmers and farm wives ran the co-ops together. Members kept the books, read their own meters, and engaged in troubleshooting when things went wrong. The REA loaned rural districts money not only for lines but also for wiring of individual houses, and the Roosevelt administration, knowing it wouldn't be feasible to extend the lines for light alone, created a federal credit agency, the Electric Home and Farm Authority, which subsidized the purchase of refrigerators, stoves, and hot water heaters, all of which would increase household electricity usage at the same time it modernized rural living. Where feasible, communities might construct small electric plants, but most of the time they purchased power wholesale from existing utility companies.
By 1938 the REA had financed about 350 projects in 45 states. "Initially ... the REA benefited a relatively small group of people—primarily those farm families in the middling ranks ... and those who lived in rural areas that had a critical population mass," notes historian Katherine Jellison. It would be decades before the most isolated and poorest communities would see power lines come through. A co-op might encompass several small towns and include stores, Grange halls, gas stations, schools, and other town buildings as well as the surrounding farms. Typically, a co-op constructed more than two hundred miles of lines, for which it borrowed about a quarter of a million dollars from the REA.
To conserve funds, the span lengths were longer, which meant there were fewer poles per mile than in urban centers. To protect the cables from strong winds and icing, they were reinforced with steel. Initially, a mile of rural line cost $2,000 to construct, but this soon dropped to about $600, in part because the work became more efficient. Lines were strung by waves of crews: one mapped out the project, another dug holes, another erected poles, another played out the line, and so on. You can see the linemen in old photos—in the back of a truck squatting among rolls of wire, harnessed to towering poles, and walking alongside horses drawing poles. And because rural people had been waiting for decades for something they felt had been denied them, they often thought of the linemen as heroic. One account notes, "Construction crews ... have dug post holes in ground frozen 3 feet down. They have set poles when the snow was waist deep." Another reports, "An Indiana woman lay dying of pneumonia in her farmhouse. The doctor said that an oxygen tent might save her, but there was no electricity in the house to operate the tent fan. Three linemen, working in a driving rainstorm, built a 500-foot extension in just two hours. The switch was turned on and the woman's life was saved." One legendary crew outside Kansas City, Missouri, was known as "the Four Horsemen of the Lines." The poles themselves—slender, usually with just one crossarm—were called "liberty poles."
The utilities quickly understood that they had u
nderestimated the needs and desires of many rural communities, and in an effort to subvert the success of the co-ops, some attempted to skim the most lucrative customers—those living nearest towns and those who were most prosperous—for themselves. Just prior to co-op lines going in, a regional power company would put up poles—even in the middle of the night—to siphon off these customers. Spite lines, they were called, or snake lines, for they almost never ran straight but crisscrossed an area. One REA cooperative specialist recalled: "In Virginia, a co-op engineered a line north through the wilderness, ending in a prosperous dairy section near Chancellorsville. When construction was about to start, the power company built a short line out of Chancellorsville to serve a handful of the large-consumption dairies on which the co-op had counted to makes its 40 miles of line feasible." Such tactics, of which there are more than two hundred recorded cases, could weaken a co-op's effectiveness and ruin its chances to prosper.
By the time electricity came to the country, light bulbs were brighter, washing machines more efficient, and irons more streamlined. Farm people who could afford it bought multiple appliances before their homes were even hooked up to power, or they got appliances secondhand from city friends, so unlike in the early years, many experienced the full gamut of electricity all at once. Their kitchens, no longer cluttered with gray zinc tubs and pails, with washboards and wood stoves, were bright with white enamel stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines. Their homes were filled with little whirs, buzzes, and hums. One woman, about two years after she was married, recalled:
I had gotten these beautiful wedding presents. An electric coffee maker, an electric toaster, and there they sat.... So the day the electric came in, I sat at my kitchen table. The electric coffee pot was plugged in, the toaster was plugged in, a bare light bulb hung above, and I sat there and waited.... And such a thrill, you have no idea. I had polished all my oil lamp globes. They were sitting in a nice neat little row. Never again would I have to polish those sooty old things. Never again would I have to fill the tank on them, never again would I have to trim the wicks. They sat there and I was glad.
Those who'd had battery-run radios before line electricity had had to mete out the listening time: "We had a large battery-powered radio in the front room that we used sparingly, and only at night, as we all sat around looking at it during 'Amos and Andy,' 'Fibber McGee and Molly,' 'Jack Benny,' or 'Little Orphan Annie,'" former president Jimmy Carter remembered. "When its power failed we would sometimes bring in the battery from the pickup truck to keep it playing for a special event." In the fully electric life, however, the sounds of other voices, music, applause, jokes, the weather, and farm reports could fill the air all the time. "The day we got our radio we put it in the kitchen window, aimed it out at the fields, and turned it on full blast," one woman recalled. "During the first week, the workers hated to be out of the sound of it." But there were also mild complaints from farm wives:
They report that their husbands are spending more time than ever in the barns experimenting with their electric milkers and coolers. A lot of men have put radios in their barns—for their own amusement, their women folks think—but the men tell me their cows give more milk to the strains of music than without it.... As a result of this modernization the wives of these farmers tell me that for the first time it is hard to get the men in to meals. They act like boys with new tool kits, always puttering around with new equipment.
For Carter's family and their neighbors, electricity changed their sense of themselves and their community. "I think the best day of my life—the one I remember most vividly with the possible exception of my wedding day—was the night they turned on the lights in our house," he recalled. "Also the bringing of the rural electric program to the farms of our Nation made it possible for us to stretch our hearts and stretch our minds to encompass public involvement in affairs that would not have been possible without the rural electric program." One Pennsylvania farmer remarked, "We felt like first-class American citizens." Another said, "Electricity changed the country way of living. That was the beginning of the change, right there. It put the country people more on a par with the city people."
Light may have been the least of it; certainly electric irons, washers, pumps, and milking machines would make a greater difference in their lives. But in the late 1930s and 1940s, when electricity finally came, it was the light they were waiting for. To see (and be seen) beyond the circumference of the kitchen table, to see into the corners of a room or into a husband's face in the evening, "was wonderful. Just like going from darkness into daylight." One farmer observed, "I'll never forget the day when they announced the electric was turned on. I waited till dark to do my chores. I had the barn all lit up like a Christmas tree. Oh, that seemed nice, especially the stable—you didn't have to look where you was goin'." The moment a house was supposed to be connected to the electric lines was known as "zero hour," and people would flip their switches on and off to make sure they didn't miss the instant of connection. The first thing some did once they were hooked up was to turn on every light and then drive down the road just to look back at their illuminated home.
For those in cities, electric light already possessed the bone-weary, jaded cast of Edward Hopper's diner in the small hours: the attendant, the couple, the lone man trapped within. How they arrived or how they will leave is a mystery. At the same time, rural men and women stood bewildered before the one bare bulb hanging from their kitchen ceilings. Some screwed corncobs into light sockets to keep "the juice" from leaking out, or they would not let go of the chain pull, believing that once they released it, the light would go out.
Sometimes people—parsimonious farm families—kept their lights on all night long: "That light in the kitchen came on, and that was the prettiest sight I ever saw. It was wonderful after all those years of oil lamps. I never expected to get it, unless I went away from here." And it was the light the linemen remembered. "Some of them wanted you to come and turn it on for them," one recalled. "They was a little afraid you know. They didn't know anything about it. So you go, there's nothin' to it, just turn the switch on and you've got it, see. And so I turned the light on, oh my gosh, look at that. We've never had it that way—you can see all around the room." Another said, "I've seen this happen—the lights come on—hundreds of places, and its an emotional situation you can't describe.... Something happens, lightning strikes them and they all at once are different. People prayed, they cried, they swore."
What of kerosene, which for a brief time had seemed the democratic perfection of light? In memory, some children will fondly recall the oil lamp in the kitchen after supper or the lantern moving across the yard as their father returned from his chores, but few wish to return to those days. When one co-op in Pennsylvania finally strung their lines, they held a mock funeral for a kerosene lamp: "Buried here May 3, 1941 by the Adams Electric Cooperative as a symbol of the drudgery and toil which its member-families bore far longer than was necessary or right but which, with the energization of their own power system, are now abolished for all time." Mock funerals were held in other communities as well. Elsewhere, farmers and their wives were content simply to smash their lanterns on the ground.
Rural people were used to being self-sufficient—repairing their own plows, saving their own seed—but electricity was a mystery, and electricity manuals for farmers reflected the old bewilderment: "What is electricity?...No one today knows the exact answer. All that is actually known is that this powerful energy is present in the world, and that it has been 'harnessed' so it can be used as a safe, tireless and efficient servant of mankind." And now, like city people, they were tied to a vast network. When a quiet winter rain fell and the temperature dropped and ice built up on the wires—and on the tree limbs hanging over the wires—they'd hear the sound of cracking, like rifle shots, and catch the scent of pine, then darkness would overcome them once again. Their electric milking machines stood useless in the pitch-black barn; the heat was gone in the chicken coops
and incubators. As one farmer observed, "All this pushbutton stuff. Well, it becomes a part of you. You can't cook a meal without it; you can't take a bath without it; you can't get a drink of water without it.... There you are, you're hooked.... [Before if] you had an Aladdin lamp you could light it and have a good light and go right on about your business, see, but you're hooked when the power goes off."
Electricity meant that the children of farmers would be different people. Not only would they do better in school once they began studying by electric light, but it would carry them into a different world: "To a farm girl who has been brought up with many electrical conveniences it is like listening to a fairy tale to be told that once rural homes did not have electricity."
Sometimes electricity did give a farm more possibilities. "I would never have believed what it has meant," said one farmer. "My boys who are just entering or about ready for high school are making their plans already about what they are going to do, in the country, when they grow up. It used to be they talked about what they were going to do when they grew up, seeming to have in mind everything else except farming." But it couldn't entirely staunch the departures: the number of farms and farm families continued to decline. Most rural children vanished into the glare of the modern world.