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(This is a tremendous article on the Tennessee Valley Authority as a signature example of the New Deal as well as a call for pushing through a Green New Deal. Very long and very informative. Harper's allows you to read one and maybe more articles a month, breaking with their past. This one is a must. The opening grafs of the article appear below.)
he river “flows up the map,” they used to say, first south, then west, and then north, and through some of the most verdant and beautiful country in America. It is called the Tennessee, but it drains some forty thousand square miles of land in seven states, from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Alabama, and from Mississippi to the Ohio River, an area nearly the size of England.
Before the 1930s, it ran wild, threatening each spring to flood and wash away the humble farms and homes along its banks. Most of it was not navigable for any distance, thanks to “an obstructive fist thrust up by God or Devil”—as the writer George Fort Milton characterized it—that created a long, untamed run of rapids known as Muscle Shoals. The fist dropped the river 140 feet over the course of 30 miles, and therein lay the untapped potential of the Tennessee, the chance to make power—a lot of it—out of water.
The six million people who lived in the Tennessee Valley in 1933 had little power, though, literal or political. At a time when an estimated 70 percent of Americans could have light at the flip of a switch, only 10 percent of rural families throughout the United States had electricity—and a full one quarter of the nation still lived either on farms or in rural communities. Bringing power to the farms just wasn’t worth it, private utility companies insisted. They were too scattered and too poor—and those in the Tennessee Valley were among the poorest to be found anywhere in the country.
The region had been floundering since at least the end of the Civil War, falling further and further behind a rapidly industrializing nation. The local farmers grew cotton or corn, crops that, repeated year after year, leeched the fertility out of the land. To compensate, they bought more fertilizer on credit, falling deeper into debt, unable to afford the modern farm machinery that was transforming agrarian life elsewhere in the country.
In their desperation, the people of the Tennessee Valley had begun to cut or burn down more and more of the area’s once copious forests every year, seeking to clear more marginal land for farming, to sell the timber, or simply to heat their homes and cook their meals. Deforestation only further drained the soil, and what little land they had kept slipping away. While much of urban America was enjoying the boom years of the Roaring Twenties, the average annual income in the Valley had shrunk to just $639 a family, while many made as little as $100. Incredible as it may seem to us today, one third of the people in the Valley suffered from malaria. Malnutrition, pellagra, hookworm, and other parasites were ubiquitous.
https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/where-our-new%e2%80%a8-world-begins-green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
