Publication date:
January 29, 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:
Benavides, James. “Sadiron.” UTSA Institute Of Texan Cultures, September 27, 2018. https://texancultures.utsa.edu/collections-blog/object-iron/.
Caro, Robert A. The Path to Power. Years of Lyndon Johnson Series. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Elving, Ron. “The Color Of Politics: How Did Red And Blue States Come To Be?” NPR, November 13, 2014. https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363762677/the-color-of-politics-how-did-red-and-blue-states-come-to-be.
Kramer, George. “Corridors of Power: The Bonneville Power Administration Transmission Network Historic Context Statement,” 2010. https://www.bpa.gov/-/media/Aep/environmental-initiatives/cultural-resources/transmission-projects/corridors-of-power.pdf.
National Archives and Records Administration. “Tennessee Valley Authority Act (1933).” National Archives, September 21, 2021. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/tennessee-valley-authority-act.
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.” The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-nomination-the-democratic-national-convention-chicago-1.
FDR Presidential Library & Museum. “FDR Audio Recordings.” https://www.fdrlibrary.org/utterancesfdr.
Which Power Plant Does My Electricity Come From?, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH1PVVJuBtE.
Sabin, Paul. “Overview: Electricity and the Public Good: Private-Public Power Debates in the 1920s-30s.,” 2023. https://energyhistory.yale.edu/electricity-and-the-public-good-private-public-power-debates-in-the-1920s-30s/.
Sablik, Tim. “Electrifying Rural America.” Econ Focus, 2020. https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2020/q1/economic_history.
Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee. “BACKGROUND ON ELECTRICITY POLICY.” https://seuc.senate.ca.gov/background-electricity-policy.
Tennessee Valley Authority. “Annual Report of the Tennessee Valley Authority 1940/1941.” Annual Report. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015075015340?urlappend=%3Bseq=11.
Thurman, Sybil and Tennessee Valley Authority, eds. A History of the Tennessee Valley Authority. 1986 edition. Knoxville, Tenn.: Tennessee Valley Authority, Information Office, 1983.
Tobey, Ronald C. Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
United States Rural Electrification Administration. Rural Lines, USA: The Story of the Rural Electrification Administration’s First Twenty-Five Years, 1935-1960. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Electrification Administration, 1960.
US Census Urbanization Count (page 20) https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2010/cph-2/cph-2-1.pdf
Audio clip sources:
TENNESSEE VALLEY, 1936. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/11704.
POWER AND THE LAND. Accessed January 2, 2025. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1714.
Uncle Sam The Greatest Builder Circa 1937, 1937. http://archive.org/details/UncleSamTheGreatestBuilderCirca1937.
FDR Presidential Library & Museum. “FDR Audio Recordings.” https://www.fdrlibrary.org/utterancesfdr#afdr005.
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 hear a lot about Red America and Blue America. Envisioning America’s political geography as red and blue on maps only goes back a few decades. But the sense of two Americas that experience very different realities is possibly one of the most American traditions itself, going back to the Founding Fathers’ competing visions of what America should be. In the 1930s, the major divide was between rural and urban America, but it was a divide that had been undergoing rapid change in the years preceding the 1929 stock market crash.
Due to industrialization and the lure of jobs in cities, the United States had become a majority urbanized country by 1920. Today, more than 80% of the United States population lives in urban areas, but when FDR took office, it was just over 56%. Beyond the types of jobs and the environments that divided urban and rural life, one of the other major dividing factors was access to electricity. Urban electrification began in the 1880s, and over the next five decades, most cities had access to electricity. But the story was much different in rural areas.
According to economics writer Tim Sablik, by 1930, nearly 9 in 10 urban and non-farm rural homes had access to electricity, but only about 1 in 10 farms did. Why the difference? Because at that time, most utility companies were not convinced they could make a profit from building out electrical infrastructure to rural areas. Utility companies argued that the cost to build out the distribution systems for electricity to rural customers wouldn’t be worth the investment.
The lack of electricity in rural areas meant that unlike their urban counterparts, farmers and their families were not able to access electricity to carry out much of their work and household labor. Robert Caro’s biography on Lyndon Johnson illustrates this burden vividly in a chapter titled “The Sad Irons.” Caro writes,
As late as 1935, farmers had been denied electricity not only in the hill country, but throughout the United States. In that year, more than 6 million of America’s 6.8 million farms did not have electricity. Decades after electric power had become part of urban life, the wood range, the washtub, the sad iron, and the dim kerosene lamp were still the way of life for almost 90% of the 30 million Americans who lived in the countryside. For two decades and more, in states all across the country, delegations of farmers dressed in Sunday shirts washed by hand and ironed by sad iron had come, hats literally in hand, to the paneled offices of utility company executives to ask to be allowed to enter the age of electricity. They came in delegations, and they came alone. An oft-repeated scene was that of the husband whose wife had been taken seriously ill and who had been told by the doctor she could no longer do heavy work, begging the power company in vain to extend electricity to his farm.
When I read Caro’s chapter, I thought the phrase sad iron was a reference to the exhaustion of heating up irons manually in a fire, and no doubt this often led to many sad outcomes such as injuries and exhaustion. But the irons were literally called sad irons, the name coming from an old word for solid, and in an era where women would often have to manually pump water out of wells, then heat it over an oven, then use heavy hot metal irons to iron the clothing, it’s no wonder that women were often the most enthusiastic proponents of rural electrification, a topic we’ll get more into on a later episode examining electricity and women’s household labor.
Even if the utility companies had built out the infrastructure for delivery of electricity to rural customers, there was still a question of whether there would be sufficient consumption. After all, even if there was eagerness to use electricity, could anyone afford to buy new appliances during this period of economic hardship? This question of consumption is important to understand, because it’s not just about the question of whether a utility company can make sufficient profits, the question of whether there would be sufficient consumption is a question of whether a utility company can make sufficient profits, the question of consumption is also key to understanding how the electrical grid works in the first place.
By the 1930s, electricity production and distribution had taken the form that we are familiar with today. Electricity is typically generated at a central generating station through either burning fossil fuels, such as coal, or through renewable energy, such as water flowing through a dam. Electricity is then distributed through transmission lines, substations, and transformers, which step up or step down the voltage as needed. Electricity makes its final journey through distribution lines that bring it into households and businesses.
Electricity is not like water or natural gas. You can store water or natural gas in large reserves to use later, but in general, electricity is typically used as soon as it is created. This means that electric grid operators expect there will be a certain level of consumption across the region that must be matched by power generation, a process known as load balancing. In the history of American electrification, lighting for buildings was typically the first major use of electricity and industrial consumers were the first major customers.
As consumer goods became more commonplace and the electrical grid expanded, urban households of all income levels began to use more electricity. When the electrification projects of the New Deal began to roll out, it wasn’t just about delivering electricity, but these projects also focused on ensuring that new recipients of electricity would turn into consumers of electricity in order to justify the investments in large-scale government electrification. Promoting the consumption of electricity was not just critical to win over skeptics of public power projects, but FDR’s administration argued that rural adoption of electricity would contribute to a rising tide for helping the country get out of the Depression by increasing purchasing and standards of living.
Before FDR’s election, efforts to provide power cheaply and universally had already been the focus of many progressive political reformers, including Roosevelt himself when he was the governor of New York. Many of the reformers were interested in the promise of hydroelectric power due to the potential of major dams to be a source of jobs and to provide multiple benefits such as navigation control, flood control, and electricity generation. Advocates for public power characterized electricity as something of a basic human right, similar to clean air and water.
This movement for reform was happening in the context of increasing monopolization. By the end of the 1920s, 10 utilities controlled 75 percent of America’s electricity, and many felt that this monopolization had contributed to the economic crisis since several of these companies were involved with shareholder and accounting scandals. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, he worked with Congress to oversee the passage of several pieces of new legislation intended to stabilize the economy and provide immediate relief to Americans who had been devastated by the Depression.
This period came to be known as the first hundred days, and one of the first major pieces of legislation passed during that period was the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Tennessee Valley Authority, or the TVA as it quickly became known, was one of the first projects of its kind in the world. The Tennessee Valley is centered around the Tennessee River. If you don’t have a map handy, you can imagine a crooked U-shaped river that begins in eastern Tennessee at Knoxville, dips down into northern Alabama, comes back up through Tennessee, and ends its run through western Kentucky, where it joins the Ohio River at Paducah.
One of the major points of the Tennessee River is Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which for many years was the site of serious navigational challenges due to falls and rocky formations around the river. During World War I, the United States needed synthetic nitrates for munition production, and production started up in the area powered by Wilson Dam. However, almost as soon as production started up, the war ended. After World War I, the dam and facilities were put up for sale. Henry Ford, yes, that Henry Ford, tried to buy it with a comically low bid, and this really ticked off a lot of people, including Senator George Norris and former U.S. Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot. Locals wanted the jobs that they thought Henry Ford would bring, but after three years, he withdrew the bid.
By the time of the Depression, economic and social conditions were even worse in the Tennessee Valley than other places. There were serious issues of malaria, topsoil erosion from repeated flooding, and only three in 100 farms had electricity. Senator George Norris of Nebraska had proposed the Tennessee Valley Authority several times, and FDR took the idea up following his election. The TVA bill was signed on May 18th, 1933, and encompassed the watershed of the Tennessee River. The program covered most of Tennessee and parts of Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.
The TVA was remarkable given that it was one of the first massive watershed-centric regional planning projects ever supported by the U.S. government. The TVA was envisioned as a multi-pronged regional program intended to improve flood control, rehabilitate exhausted agricultural land, and provide cheap electricity to the region’s residents. It was also, as you might imagine, a controversial project from the outset, leading to charges of communism, a major Supreme Court case, and bitter political opposition to FDR that would face him throughout his career.
Despite the many challenges that TVA faced, it quickly became a major provider of electricity to municipalities and rural cooperatives, and was an important symbol of government intervention on behalf of the public when the private market had failed.
Let’s listen to this clip from a 1936 TVA film.
Meanwhile, from substations such as this, the Tennessee Valley Authority is pushing lines into rural communities. Thousands of counties in America have never enjoyed the benefits of electricity. Linemen from the Alabama division are bringing with them the medium that will lighten the drudgery of housework and permit wider use of man’s greatest natural resource, the power that lies in the might of a river. Now the cross arm swings into place, and the insulator is securely fastened. The line must be tied in firmly so that high winds and winter storms may not interrupt the delivery of cheap TVA kilowatts to farms and homes.
The power policy of the Tennessee Valley Authority states clearly that the business of generating and distributing electric energy is a public business. Private and public interests in the business of power are of different kind and quality and should not be confused. The interest of the public in the widest possible use of electricity is superior to any private interest. Where this private interest and this public interest conflict, the public interest must prevail. If this conflict can be reconciled without injury to the public interest, such reconciliation should be made. But the right of a community to own and operate its own electric plant is undeniable. This is one of the measures which the people may properly take to protect themselves against unreasonable rates.
In the authority’s 1941 annual report, Chair David Lilienthal reported that the average TVA residential customer was using more electricity for a lower price, stating that the averages worked out to 19 percent less for 49 percent more power. In May 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration was created through an executive order. A year later, Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act, which prioritized making loans to nonprofits and cooperatives. REA loans were also available for consumers to purchase appliances.
The creation of the REA incentivized the building out of the electric grid in rural areas through cooperatives that organized local farmers to join as members. These cooperatives also performed the critical work of getting easements for installing lines across farms. Every $1 invested by the REA resulted in $3-$4 of purchasing power from farm families, which created a massive market for consumer goods.
In this clip from a film titled Power and the Land, a fictional Ohio farm family named the Parkinson’s receives life-changing electricity from an REA line.
♪♪ Power for the Parkinson’s. They’re lifting the pole. Back in revolutionary days in this country, we used to plant a pole and call it a liberty tree. This pole has been a liberty tree to thousands of farm families.
In 1935, about 11% of farms were electrified. By 1942, the percentage of electrified farms was 38.3%. By 1940, the REA was responsible for getting more than 232,000 miles of electrical lines into operation and was eventually responsible for bringing over 1,000 rural electric systems online.
Thousands of miles west of the Tennessee Valley for several years, Pacific Northwest public power proponents had their sights on the possibility of harnessing the Columbia River for irrigation, flood control, and hydroelectric power generation. A 1932 report called for the construction of 10 dams on the Columbia River that began at Grand Coulee and ended at what would become the Bonneville Dam east of Portland, Oregon. Funding was appropriated for the construction of the Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams in 1933 to be operated by the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
This 1937 clip from a film titled Uncle Sam, the Greatest Builder, shows how much effort went into these massive dams.
It will be the largest hydroelectric power development possible on the continent of North America. And yet, Grand Coulee is only one of the many gigantic power and irrigation projects scattered throughout all parts of the country, which will stand guard through the centuries over the vital water resources of the nation. Under the Federal Works Program, the enormous water conservation and irrigation projects, which had their inception at the lowest ebb of the Depression, have involved the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, the purchase of countless carloads of materials, and have given widespread employment and WPA paychecks to hundreds of thousands of American citizens.
Many thought that there would eventually be a Pacific Northwest equivalent of the Tennessee Valley Authority called the Columbia Valley Authority, but this isn’t quite how things turned out. However, the Bonneville Project Act was approved in 1937, and the new BPA spurred the creation of many electric cooperatives, as well as building out a sophisticated major high-voltage distribution system that formed the backbone of the grid system in the Pacific Northwest.
The creation of the TVA, REA, and BPA demonstrates one of the fundamental characteristics of the New Deal approach to politics. The government had the power to do major projects on behalf of the public, and FDR and his allies were not afraid to use that power. The fact that so much political power was spent on the provision of electrical power reflected the New Dealers’ commitment to large-scale government infrastructure projects that resulted in material gains for Americans.
Throughout the rest of Season 1, we’ll be exploring these themes of power in terms of how they relate to the major New Deal electrification programs. We’ll look at how electrification changed rural domestic labor, how political fights over private utilities led to attempts to regulate the worst aspects of free-market capitalism, how electricity was depicted in popular culture from quilts to theater, and how the construction of major dams left an indelible mark and sometimes painful scars on ecosystems and communities.
If you listened to the first episode of this podcast, you know that I recorded that episode on Election Day. Since recording that episode, I’ve asked myself if what I’m doing here is akin to writing an obituary or if this is the equivalent of some kind of nostalgia time machine. I hope it’s neither.
As I stated in the opening, I’d like to think that the New Deal provides us a blueprint for how we might envision a better future, both in terms of building on what it got right and avoiding the mistakes in where it went wrong. Really close listeners of the first episode may have also noticed I didn’t use the name of the podcast because it didn’t exist at the time. But after thinking about it, I thought this podcast needed a distinctive name.
The title of this podcast, No Time for Fear, comes from FDR’s 1932 party nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Given the times that we’re living in, I think you might appreciate hearing it in its original context.
There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776. But it is not and never will be the theory of the Democratic Party. This is no time for fear, for reaction, or for timidity. And here and now, I invite those nominal Republicans who find that their conscience cannot be squared with the groping and the failure of their party leaders to join hands with us. Here and now, in equal measure, I warn those nominal Democrats who squint at the future with their faces turned towards the past, and who feel no response to the demands of the new time, that they are out of step with their party.
I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you like what you hear and want to support the work that goes into making this podcast, please visit notimeforfear.net. 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.
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