Publication date:
February 26, 2025
This podcast was created and researched by me, Eira Tansey, founder and manager of the archival consulting company Memory Rising. The theme music was created by Bright Archives, an independent archival production house.
Episode listening links:
Resources mentioned in the episode:
Lilienthal E. David. Tva Democracy On The March. Pocket Books, Inc., 1944. http://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.4393.
Neuse, Steven M. David E. Lilienthal: The Journey of an American Liberal. Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press, c1996.
SAM HALL | ChattanoogaHistory.com. “The Vote for Public Power.” Accessed February 19, 2025. https://chattanoogahistory.com/publicpower.
“Wendell Lewis Willkie.” Maurer Notable Alumni, n.d. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/notablealumni/9.
TIME. “HISTORICAL NOTES: Nuff Said.” TIME, December 13, 1954. https://time.com/archive/6868484/historical-notes-nuff-said/.
Transcript:
Welcome to No Time for Fear, the New Deal History podcast where we examine how the United States’ ambitious response to the Great Depression can provide a blueprint for improving Americans’ lives nearly a century later.
Today we’re going to talk about David Lilienthal, who was one of the first directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority when it began in 1933. Lilienthal was largely responsible for TVA’s electrification programs, and the New Deal was filled with progressive reformers who demonstrated their expertise at the state level for years before FDR took office. Lilienthal was tapped for the new agency due to his experience honed as a public utilities lawyer in the Midwest. David Lilienthal exemplified many of the New Deal paradoxes—the necessity of expertise and the embrace of populism, the need for regional planning against the requirements of federal authority, and the advantages of unwavering principles combined with flexible pragmatism.
David Lilienthal was born in Indiana in 1899 to Jewish immigrants. His parents were relatively secular and worked as merchants who moved around a lot. As a young man, Lilienthal was exposed to progressive politics. In 1914, a relative took him to a Chicago labor meeting where he heard Emma Goldman speak, and later in a speaking contest, David gave a speech titled “The Predatory Rich.”
Lilienthal went on to attend DePauw University, where he met his future wife and interviewed the International Workers of the World, a.k.a. the IWW, a.k.a. the Wobblies, Big Bill Heywood. He then attended Harvard Law School, where he developed an interest in labor law. While at Harvard, he kept tabs on leftist ideas but was more interested in being a lawyer than a revolutionary.
Lilienthal published an article in The New Republic in May 1923 while still in law school, foreshadowing what would become a long track record of publishing writing in both mainstream and scholarly outlets. After law school, Lilienthal returned to the Midwest as a practicing attorney in Chicago. He initially worked in labor law and then shifted to working in public utility law.
Meanwhile, over in Wisconsin, Philip La Follette became Wisconsin governor in 1930. Philip was part of a legendary Wisconsin political family. He was the son of progressive Republican Wisconsin governor and senator Robert La Follette. Philip embarked on a progressive program, including public utilities regulation. He appointed Lilienthal to a two-year term on the Railroad Commission, which served as the basis for statewide utility reform attempts.
Remember, by this time, many progressive reformers were gaining ground across America. The stock market crash had provided an opening for reformers, especially when it came to utility rates. David Lilienthal’s biographer Stephen Neuse writes:
By the early 1930s, because of real declines in commodity and labor costs and in property values, reformers began to argue that rates should be cheaper since current value estimates were lower than in the past. The only solution was a new approach to rate-making. Failing that, the last resort was public ownership, a prospect dreaded by the private companies. Unfortunately for industry, the reform movement was not limited to academics or a few progressives such as George W. Norris. The 1930 election swept more than a dozen reformers into statehouses. (p. 45)
This podcast was created and researched by me, Eira Tansey, founder and manager of the archival consulting company Memory Rising. The theme music was created by Bright Archives, an independent archival production house. I’ll see you next month when we’re back to talk more about the history of the New Deal. I’ll see you next month, when we’re back to talk more about the history of the New Deal.
David Lilienthal got to work immediately. His reforms were introduced to the state legislature by socialist Senator Thomas Duncan. And yes, just to emphasize how much politics has changed nationally in the last 90 years and what an interesting mix of politics Wisconsin in particular had in the 1930s, David Lilienthal was appointed by a progressive Republican governor and enjoyed support from Socialist state legislators.
Lilienthal’s proposals gave the newly renamed commission, now the Public Service Commission, much greater authority to both regulate and investigate the utilities. There was a lot of initial criticism, but utilities backed off once they realized the onlyalternative to regulation was public ownership. The Wisconsin Public Service Commission sprang into action and began a truly astonishing number of hearings. For example, the commission tried to take on the Wisconsin Telephone Company through imposing a 12.5 percent rate cut and arguing that rates should decrease due to reduced consumer spending power. But the case got tied up in the court for years, which would become a recurring pattern for some of the legal challenges that Lilienthal would face throughout his career.
Outside of Wisconsin, David Lilienthal had some skepticism about total public ownership of utilities, presumably because it would threaten his job as a regulator. But he also picked a pretty colorful fight with the Professional Association of Utilities Regulators, viewing it as too cozy with industry. Philip La Follette lost the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1932, and there was a huge uptick in Democratic primary turnout that year, a harbinger of FDR’s election. The new Democratic governor, Albert Schmiedemann, was sending mixed signals about Lilienthal’s reappointment, so Lilienthal leaned on his friends to promote him amid the new FDR administration. Ohio engineer Arthur E. Morgan had already been named chair of the new TVA and interviewed Lilienthal for one of the other board director positions. Lilienthal won over Arthur, who recommended him to FDR for appointment.
Although Arthur E. Morgan and Lilienthal might have started off on a good note, the relationship would soon turn acrimonious and become one of the most infamous controversies of the Tennessee Valley Authority. But it wasn’t the only beef that David Lilienthal would engage in during his time at TVA. The Tennessee Valley Authority was the first project of its kind since it was envisioned as this integrated watershed development project. Its strength was in this unified regional planning vision, and this vision included:
- Dams to control flooding and improve navigation.
- Soil improvement to aid farms devastated by floods.
- Electricity that was to be generated by these dams.
At the same time, FDR was vague about how he thought the authority should conduct its work. And this vagueness would present recurring challenges for the agency as the director sought to establish its scope and bolster it from political and corporate attacks.
One of the things that I find really remarkable is that we often think of internal turf wars as being a hallmark of sclerotic and ineffective government, and this wasn’t the case for TVA. It had many internal and external controversies during its early years, and yet it still managed to accomplish a stunning amount of work within its first decade, including the construction of 16 new dams and improvements to five existing dams. That’s 21 dams within a decade, which is a really astonishing number.
Lilienthal was not afraid to fight very publicly with others, and there are three people he had literal years-long beefs with that exemplify both his fighting style as well as the vision he tried to create for TVA’s electrification projects. The first TVA fight Lilienthal engaged in began early on, shortly after TVA’s creation. It started internally and quickly spilled out into the public. In the initial days of the TVA, the board consisted of three directors: Chair Arthur E. Morgan, Director David Lilienthal, and a third director named Harcourt A. Morgan, who was no relation to Arthur Morgan. Arthur Morgan was an engineer from Ohio, and Harcourt Morgan was an agricultural expert who had experience with the University of Tennessee and the State Extension Service.
Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan were wary of Arthur’s approach to chairing the board. In August 1933, those two proposed the three-part system of different responsibilities for each director. Arthur Morgan later characterized this as a power grab, but at the time he voted for its approval. The division of responsibilities allocated:
- Engineering and construction oversight to Arthur Morgan.
- Fertilizer and agricultural oversight to Harcourt Morgan.
- The power system and electrificationprojects to David Lilienthal.
As he had done in Wisconsin, Lilienthal quickly got to work on dealing with utility rates. Rates were set below the private utility companies and also with the deliberate goal of increasing electrical usage or consumption in the region. Tupelo and Knoxville signed up for TVA Power in November 1933.
At the same time, disputes were growing between Arthur Morgan and David Lilienthal because the former was often on the side of private industry and believed that Lilienthal’s actions were counterproductive. Arthur Morgan even inquired to TVA’s attorneys whether the public power projects were unconstitutional as a way to remove Lilienthal’s ambition. Tensions between the two escalated when Arthur Morgan tried to prevent David Lilienthal from being reappointed and even threatened to resign over it. But David Lilienthal hit back very hard, and afterwards they were in open warfare for a couple of years, during which both of them would continue their public beefing with each other through speeches and articles in national publications.
In early 1938, the Battle Royale continued to rage between Arthur and the others, with Arthur calling for a congressional investigation and the beef reaching the New York Times. David Lilienthal offered to resign to FDR, but FDR refused. Roosevelt scheduled a fact-finding meeting with the TVA directors. Arthur initially refused to come, and by the time the meetings actually took place, Arthur kept supplying vague accusations. Roosevelt gave him another chance at a second meeting, and then after that, three days to produce evidence for his accusations. Arthur again refused, at which point FDR told him to withdraw charges or resign, for real this time. After two days without a response, FDR removed Arthur from office, and shortly after this, a congressional investigation of TVA began. It lasted from May to December of 1938, and in the end, the congressional investigation found no major scandals or malfeasance.
Another major opponent Lilienthal had to deal with was Wendell Willkie, who incidentally was also born in Indiana. Willkie was the president of the utility company Commonwealth and Southern Corporation, which had major interests in the same region as the Tennessee Valley Authority. Corporate opposition to TVA’s public power projects argued that the region was already amply supplied with electricity, a curious claim given how the overwhelming majority of rural farmers didn’t have access to electricity, and many towns also weren’t fully electrified.
Early on, David Lilienthal negotiated an agreement with Wendell Willkie regarding non-competition and cooperative measures, and this agreement was signed on January 4, 1934. However, this did not fully settle the challenges between Willkie and the TVA. Shortly after this agreement, additional lawsuits were launched by industry contesting TVA’s actions. One of them involved a Commonwealth and Southern subsidiary, the Tennessee Electric Power Company, also known as TEPCO.
By 1938, it was clear to Willkie that industry efforts to oppose TVA would have limited success, so he began negotiations with Lilienthal for the Tennessee Valley Authority to acquire TEPCO’s assets. The purchase was finally completed in 1939. A year later, Wendell Willkie actually ran against FDR and lost, while FDR won a third term.
Reflecting on the long entanglement between Wendell Willkie and David Lilienthal, Stephen Neuse writes,
“Lilienthal and Willkie had a remarkable relationship. They fought toe-to-toe for six years, with neither giving an inch most of the time. Willkie did everything he could to cripple TVA’s power program, and Lilienthal stopped at nothing to protect his charge. Yet they walked away from the bloody fight with a mutual respect that held until Willkie’s untimely death in 1944. That such respect endured was remarkable, considering Lilienthal’s personality.”
The last major Lilienthal beef we’ll look at was about TVA’s independence. In early 1939, Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes proposed bringing all federal power projects, including TVA and the Rural Electrification Administration, under his control. This was classic Harold Ickes. He had also been on a long crusade to move the U.S. Forest Servicefrom the Department of Agriculture over to Interior. David Lilienthal found out about this in September 1939. This triggered a recurring series of clashes between Ickes and Lilienthal. tried to maintain TVA’s independence, and he also sketched out an expansionist vision. At one point, Lilienthal even took a trip out West to encourage a TVA-style approach to developing the Columbia River. Ickes took this personally, as the Department of Interior had so many existing projects already out West.
By summer of 1941, the Ickes-Lilienthal turf war was resolved, if not, maybe more accurately put, neutralized. TVA was not going anywhere, but would retain its independence. In September 1941, David Lilienthal became chairman of TVA. A few months later, when the United States entered World War II, the massive electricity generation capacity of the TVA would begin powering the activities of the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge. Of the three first directors of the TVA, he lasted the longest, with more than 13 years of service, and only left when he was tapped to become the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946.
Lilienthal’s stubbornness and his appetite for fighting aren’t the only reasons he lasted so long at TVA. He was also one of the most skilled and persuasive personalities of the New Deal, unafraid to use the power of the spoken and the written word to mobilize his supporters and antagonize his enemies. Through dozens of publications he wrote for newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, and speeches he gave to government and professional organizations, he was an articulate defender of TVA specifically and the ideology of the New Deal more broadly.
In November 1939, David Lilienthal gave a speech centered on grassroots administration at a conference in Knoxville that articulated the vision of TVA as having centralized authority and locally decentralized administration. The grassroots rhetoric began to shape more of his public speeches and statements from this point forward. And at the same time, international delegations of visitors from around the world were coming to the Tennessee Valley to understand how TVA’s examples of regional planning could be adapted elsewhere.
David Lilienthal signed a book deal with Harper & Row in November 1942, and Democracy on the March came out in early 1944. Historians in recent decades have critiqued many of the shortcomings of Lilienthal’s vision of grassroots administration, given the realities of TVA’s activities on the ground. Many of the so-called grassroots partners of TVA did not always represent the most poor or marginalized community members. Many of the massive dam projects TVA built displaced entire communities, and direct democracy within TVA was rare.
Keeping these contradictions in mind, what is notable about Lilienthal’s book Democracy on the March, particularly in the period of today where public infrastructure investment has been under fire for decades, is how sweeping this book is in its vision for mobilizing large-scale government infrastructure on behalf of the public. Even 80 years after its publication, it’s an enormously readable book that is often quite poetic when Lilienthal invokes the landscape of the Tennessee Valley, or triumphant when he loathes chapters with facts and figures touting TVA’s accomplishments. His explorations of how science must respect nature feels as relevant as ever. And perhaps what feels the most refreshing is that Lilienthal pulled no punches about the strength of his views, writing in the preface,
“The reader then is warned, at the outset, that he will find no tone of Olympian neutrality in this book. For this I make no apology, for I believe the world badly needs conviction. It has had too much of a kind of impartiality that is inevitably irresponsible. In this book, there are convictions stated and conclusions pressed.”
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