FDR - Jean Edward Smith [203]
The dam at Muscle Shoals was the focus of FDR’s proposal. In January 1933 Roosevelt had taken time from Warm Springs to visit Muscle Shoals with his daughter, Anna, accompanied by Norris and an imposing delegation of power experts and congressional leaders.67 “It is at least twice as big as I ever had any conception of it being,” he told Norris. Later that evening, speaking impromptu to a large crowd from the portico of the state capitol in Montgomery, Roosevelt said he was determined to do two things: “The first is to put Muscle Shoals to work. The second is to make of Muscle Shoals a part of an even greater development that will take in all of that magnificent Tennessee River from the mountains of Virginia down to the Ohio.… We have an opportunity of setting an example of planning, tying in industry and agriculture and forestry and flood prevention, tying them all into a unified whole over a distance of a thousand miles.”68
On April 10 FDR asked Congress for authorizing legislation. The brief message, which he wrote in his own hand, forcefully restated Roosevelt’s commitment to use the power of government for the general welfare. The Tennessee Valley Authority, he said, involves “the future lives and welfare of millions. It touches and gives life to all forms of human concerns.”69
Norris called Roosevelt’s message “the most wonderful and far-reaching humanitarian document that has ever come from the White House.” In the House of Representatives, Mississippi’s John Rankin said, “The power that can be generated at Muscle Shoals now exceeds the physical strength of all the slaves freed by the Civil War.”70 Norris introduced the bill in the Senate, where it passed 63–20. Rankin led the administration forces in the House, where opposition was stiffer. Joseph Martin of Massachusetts spearheaded the Republican attack, asserting that the TVA was “patterned closely after one of the soviet dreams”—a theme embellished by New Jersey’s Charles Eaton, who charged that the scheme “is simply an attempt to graft onto our American system the Russian idea.” Even The New York Times expressed alarm: “Enactment of any such bill at this time would mark the ‘low’ of Congressional folly.”71 But the Democrats were riding high, the leadership was in firm control, and the House voted its approval, 306–91. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act the afternoon of May 18, 1933.72 At a stroke FDR had solidified his support among the two most disparate elements of his coalition: traditional southern Democrats and Republican progressives. He had also taken a massive step toward modernizing the South.73*
From Wall Street and the TVA Roosevelt turned his attention to the plight of home owners beset by mortgages and taxes they could not pay. In 1932, 273,000 home mortgages had been foreclosed—almost four times the normal rate—and in early 1933 the rate had doubled yet again. Increased foreclosures not only caused enormous personal hardship but further endangered the assets of hard-pressed banks, savings and loan associations, and insurance companies. House prices plummeted, and the entire real estate market was threatened with collapse. New-home construction shrank to 10 percent of its 1929 level. Even home owners and prospective purchasers who had money found it difficult to negotiate new mortgages or renew old ones.74 The impact on the nation’s morale was devastating. The decline in home values, combined with the threat of foreclosure, struck at the roots of the American dream.
On April 13 FDR asked Congress for legislation to protect individual home owners from foreclosure. Home ownership was a guarantee of social and economic stability, said Roosevelt, and to protect home owners from “inequitable enforced liquidation at a time of general distress is a proper concern of the Government.”75 The resulting