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By Root 982 0

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