Brilliant (23 page)

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 they 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.

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 underestimated 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: