More Valley Authorities

kernals12

Banned
Screen Shot 2019-05-05 at 10.59.51 AM.png

The Tennessee Valley Authority is one of the more celebrated legacies of the New Deal. It is credited with bringing civilization in the form of flood control, navigation, irrigation, fertilizer, and electricity to the impoverished Tennessee Valley. And to this day, the staunchly Conservative residents of Tennessee are happy to pay their electric bills to America's only federally owned utility. In fact, in 2013, when President Obama suggesting privatizing the TVA in his budget, both of Tennessee's Republican Senators howled in protest.

Because of that success, there were a lot of proposals to make more TVAs. The photo above shows the 9 Authorities whose discussion were being discussed in congress that would cover the entire country. The TVA's own jurisdiction would expand north to cover the Cumberland River and south to cover all the rivers east of the Mississippi that flow into the Gulf. To this would be added:
-An Ohio-Great Lakes Authority covering the Ohio River and all the rivers flowing in and out of the Great Lakes
-An Atlantic Seaboard Authority covering all the rivers flowing into the Atlantic from Florida to Maine
-An Arkansas Valley Authority covering the Arkansas, Red, White, and Rio Grande Rivers and generally all rivers West of the Mississippi flowing into the Gulf
-A Missouri Valley Authority covering the Missouri River
-A Columbia Valley Authority covering the Columbia River and all rivers flowing into the Pacific north of the California border
-A Colorado Valley Authority covering the Colorado River
-A Southwestern Authority covering the Great Basin
-And a California Authority covering the rivers flowing into the Pacific south of the Oregon border
The source of the photo is from a pamphlet opposed to the idea, claiming that the 27 men who would be in charge of each authority would somehow become socialist dictators. (I apologize for the poor quality, but this was made in 1950.

It should be made clear that even though we only wound up with one TVA, that doesn't mean our other rivers were untouched, not even close, they were dredged, dammed, and channelized six ways till Sunday. The one difference I see ITTL is that now river control would be fully coordinated, which is good, because the patchwork of authorities we have now leads to mismanagement and water wars between states, most infamously with the Colorado River.
 

kernals12

Banned
I don't see the logic however of putting the entire eastern seaboard under one authority. They should at least split it at the Potomac
 
See William Leuchtenberg's article on the defeat of the FDR-Norris plan for "seven little TVAs" in 1937, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2126212?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents reprinted in his The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy https://books.google.com/books?id=0m9XuIyDiugC&pg=PA159 The idea failed not just because of the predictable opposition of business interests and congressional conservatives but also because of opposition within the administration, e.g., from Henry Wallace, who worried that the authorities would have power over areas like soil conservation and forestry which were administered by the Department of Agriculture. Secretary of War Woodring (think: Army Corps of Engineers) and Secretary of the Interior Ickes also worried about incursions on their jurisdiction. Leuchtenberg's conclusion:

"Who, then, killed the seven little TVAs? According to more than one theory of history, the answer ought to be self-evident. The executioners must have been the forces of capital, especially the private utilities, headquartered in Wall Street but with tentacles reaching out into regions in the hinterland. After all, it had been these very elements that had dragged the Tennessee Valley Authority through the courts and had done everything they could to destroy it. Granted, all of the leading players in the drama appeared to be federal officials, but they should always be understood to be merely the agents of omnipotent external interests. These assumptions, though, simply do not accord with the facts. The death of the seven little TVAs was brought about not by financial titans manipulating the strings in a Grand Guignol puppet show but by a few well-placed individuals within the government who were largely motivated by the territorial imperative. As early as 1934 when Roosevelt sought to set up an independent planning board, a cabinet official only tangentially involved in planning issues, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, circulated a remonstrance supported by Ickes, Wallace, and Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, and the President was compelled to back down. In 1937 Woodring, Wallace, and Ickes were even more determined not to let any new agency or agencies encroach on their prerogatives..." https://books.google.com/books?id=0m9XuIyDiugC&pg=PA188 https://books.google.com/books?id=0m9XuIyDiugC&pg=PA189
 

kernals12

Banned
See William Leuchtenberg's article on the defeat of the FDR-Norris plan for "seven little TVAs" in 1937, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2126212?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents reprinted in his The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy https://books.google.com/books?id=0m9XuIyDiugC&pg=PA159 The idea failed not just because of the predictable opposition of business interests and congressional conservatives but also because of opposition within the administration, e.g., from Henry Wallace, who worried that the authorities would have power over areas like soil conservation and forestry which were administered by the Department of Agriculture. Secretary of War Woodring (think: Army Corps of Engineers) and Secretary of the Interior Ickes also worried about incursions on their jurisdiction. Leuchtenberg's conclusion:

"Who, then, killed the seven little TVAs? According to more than one theory of history, the answer ought to be self-evident. The executioners must have been the forces of capital, especially the private utilities, headquartered in Wall Street but with tentacles reaching out into regions in the hinterland. After all, it had been these very elements that had dragged the Tennessee Valley Authority through the courts and had done everything they could to destroy it. Granted, all of the leading players in the drama appeared to be federal officials, but they should always be understood to be merely the agents of omnipotent external interests. These assumptions, though, simply do not accord with the facts. The death of the seven little TVAs was brought about not by financial titans manipulating the strings in a Grand Guignol puppet show but by a few well-placed individuals within the government who were largely motivated by the territorial imperative. As early as 1934 when Roosevelt sought to set up an independent planning board, a cabinet official only tangentially involved in planning issues, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, circulated a remonstrance supported by Ickes, Wallace, and Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, and the President was compelled to back down. In 1937 Woodring, Wallace, and Ickes were even more determined not to let any new agency or agencies encroach on their prerogatives..." https://books.google.com/books?id=0m9XuIyDiugC&pg=PA188 https://books.google.com/books?id=0m9XuIyDiugC&pg=PA189
A Connecticut Valley Authority? Did every little river need its own authority?
 
As Leuchtenberg writes, "It is understandable that they [Wallace and Ickes] felt concern, for whatever the proposed seven TVAs were, "little" they were not, though the press succeeded in fastening that label on them. Among them were the TVA itself with an expanded grant; an Atlantic Seaboard Authority, "for the drainage basins of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, from the east, below the Suwanee River"; a Great Lakes—Ohio Valley Authority, "for the drainage basins of the rivers flowing into any of the Great Lakes and of the Ohio River, except the drainage basins of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, and of the rivers flowing into the Mississippi River above Cairo, Ill., from the east"; a Missouri Valley Authority, "for the drainage basins of the Missouri River and the Red River of the North, and of the riven flowing into the Mississippi River above Cairo, Ill., from the west"; an Arkansas Valley Authority, "for the drainage basins of the Arkansas, Red, and Rio Grande rivers flowing into the Gulf of Mexico west of the Mississippi River"; and a Southwestern Authority, "for the drainage basins of the Colorado River and of the rivers flowing into the Pacific Ocean south of the California-Oregon line, and for the Great Basin."65 If all of these new institutions were to be action agencies, the regular departments would have little left to do in the sphere of water resources..." https://books.google.com/books?id=N3PDNiJcneoC&pg=PA192

Incidentally, legislation to establish a Columbia Valley Authority was introduced in 1935. Its problems foreshadowed the difficulties of the regional-authorities proposals of 1937:

"The experience of Senator James Pope suggested the kind of difficulty the committee was going to encounter. In 1935 he had introduced legislation to create a Columbia Valley Authority only to meet stout resistance from corporations (especially utilities), government agencies protective of their turf, and champions of states' rights resentful of any intrusion by Washington. Even in Pope's home state of Idaho, "the articulate regional reaction was overwhelmingly hostile," the political scientist Charles McKinley has noted. "A special committee of the Idaho State Chamber of Commerce, which included representatives of the leading wool-growers' association, the principal reclamation projects of the Boise Valley, the state mining association, the state bankers association, and the Master of the state grange, voiced determined opposition." In the summer of 1935 the Pacific Northwest Regional Planning Commission sought to ameliorate the controversy by conducting a study under the auspices of the National Resources Committee, an agency that the President, who wanted to "put the physical development of the country on a planned basis," had established by executive order. The Commission dealt a blow to the valley authority approach in that region by expressing dismay at the thought of combining electric energy generation and distribution with "ameliorative and philanthropic tasks" of the sort the TVA was supposed to be undertaking, though it had no hesitancy about supporting public power development. The National Resources Committee, with one conspicuous abstention, passed on the recommendation to the President with its approval. The lone holdout was the Secretary of War, who would not countenance any proposal that stripped the Corps of Engineers of the right to transmit and market power. In taking this stand, he could depend on the strong backing of businessmen in the region, who had a chummy relationship with the Corps and who were disturbed by the possibility that the report's advocacy of a new administrative agency would jeopardize the utilities and might ultimately lead to a valley authority in the Columbia basin. This alliance between the Corps and the business community had an influential agent in Washington in Charles McNary of Oregon, who permitted the lobbyist of the Portland Chamber of Commerce to set up a desk in his office in the United States Senate.

"The Secretary of War's recalcitrance aroused the ire of Ickes, who, quite apart from the fact that he was always spoiling for a fight, came in conflict with the War Department in each of his three roles—as Secretary of the Interior, as Public Works Administrator, and as chairman cif the Informal Committee on Power Policy. Ickes first learned of the bias of the Corps of Engineers when early in the First Hundred Days of 1933 the President, at the urging of Senator Norris, asked him to look into a rumor of collusion between the Corps and the Alabama Power Company, an allegation that turned out to be well-founded. That experience instilled a distrust he never got over. Nearly two decades later he was still fuming:

"'It is to be doubted whether any Federal agency in the history of this country has so wantonly wasted money on worthless projects as has the Corps of Army Engineers. It is beyond human imagination. . No more lawless or irresponsible Federal group . . . has ever attempted to operate in the United States, either outside of or within the law. ... Nothing could be worse for the country than this wilful and expensive Corps of Army Engineers closely banded together in a self-serving clique in defiance of their superior officers and in contempt of the public welfare. The United States has had enough of 'mutiny *for* the bounty.'

"All through the spring of 1937 Ickes railed at the War Department. In particular, he sought, at first with poor results, to persuade Roosevelt to vest control of generating, transmitting, and marketing power at Bonneville in Interior rather than the War Department. "I do not trust the Army engineers on power,.'he noted in his diary. Early in May Ickes had a heated set-to with Secretary of War Harry Woodring over "a most extraordinary request for funds by the Army engineers for flood-control projects, especially in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys." He found Woodring "very dogmatic and arbitrary," "very lordly," "contemptuous," and "sarcastic," in sum a "midget General MacArthur. who "struts about with inflated chest more sure of himself and more disagreeable and dictatorial than any man I have met in the Government."

"Roosevelt, recognizing how intense was the hostility of business groups and legislators such as McNary in the Pacific Northwest to anything approaching a valley authority and how potent was the sentiment for states' rights, chose to compromise on a "temporary" solution that not delay disposal of Bonneville power, but it was a compromise McKinley has written, that was "a distinct victory over the private-utility and chamber-of-commerce views on power policy" and "also a setback to the ambitions of the Corps of Engineers," as well as those of the Bureau of Reclamation. The statute, while leaving the Corps with the assignment of generating power, provided for an administrator chosen by and responsible to the Secretary of the Interior and stipulated, contrary to what the Corps wanted, that when energy was marketed, public distribution agencies and consumers should be favored. It also did not foreclose the possibility of a Columbia Valley Authority in the future. "Had it not been for the active, though delayed, intervention of the president, buttressed by the studies and recommendations of the National Resources Committee and its regional agency," McKinley has concluded, "the legislation would have lacked many features of a regional program." Still, the Columbia River saga suggested that if the committee decided to embrace "the little TVAs" solution, it would not have easy going..." https://books.google.com/books?id=0m9XuIyDiugC&pg=PA165 https://books.google.com/books?id=0m9XuIyDiugC&pg=PA166
 
Top