Publication date:
March 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:
Dorothy and Robert Etters case file, Record Group 142: Records of the Tennessee Valley, Series: Family Removal and Population Readjustment Case Files, File Unit: Wheeler Dam: Erskine – Hammond https://catalog.archives.gov/id/158969924?objectPage=9
National Archives. “The TVA and the Relocation of Mattie Randolph,” August 15, 2016. https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/tva-relocation.html.
U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). “Hydropower Explained.” Accessed March 5, 2025. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/hydropower/.
“Norris Lake.” In Wikipedia, February 15, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Norris_Lake&oldid=1275818991.
Satterfield, M. Harry. The Removal Of Families From Tennessee Valley Authority Reservoir Areas, 1937. http://archive.org/details/the-removal-of-families-from-tennessee-valley-authority-reservoir-areas-1937.
Brown, Ralph. “Family Removal in the Tennessee Valley.” Masters Theses, June 1, 1951. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/5777.
Walker, Melissa. “African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property Removal: Race in a New Deal Program.” Agricultural History 72, no. 2 (1998): 417–28.
Phillips, Sarah T. This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0616/2006020584.html.
Audio clip sources:
Lorentz, Pare. “THE RIVER.” https://catalog.archives.gov/id/13593?objectPage=3.
U.S. Information Agency. The Valley of the Tennessee – 1944. Records of the U.S. Information Agency. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/47040.
Transcript:
Case File, Robert and Dorothy Etters, Wheeler Dam.
Date of Visit, November 8, 1935.
Drive east on Triana, Whitesburg Road toward Indian River Bridge. Just before arriving at the bridge, a road turns to the right and goes south to the swamps of the Huntsville Spring Branch. Follow this road for a distance of approximately 2 miles to a slight rise in the swamps, where you will find the house of Robert Etters. This is a three-room shack in the worst repair and about to fall down. There is practically no roof on the house. The fact is, this building is not fit to keep livestock in, let alone human beings. Dorothy was interviewed. She stated that Robert was away at the mill, but from the looks of the fat hogs the worker found in the pen, they must have been fed something besides corn.
Date of Visit, December 17, 1935.
Robert is now moving to another house on the place belonging to Mrs. Tommie Young, where he will make a share crop next year. This seems to be a very satisfactory arrangement.
Date of Visit, January 15, 1936.
Robert has moved into a house on the same place that he lived on last year, one belonging to Mrs. Tommie Young. This family is much better satisfied than they were last year, as they have a better house and everything than that they had had where they lived last year. Case closed.
Case File, Maddie and Jim Randolph, Norris Dam.
Date of Visit, December 11, 1935.
This family lives in a two-room shack, one room serving as a living and bedroom. A lean-to kitchen put together with planks has evidently been added on. The house is located in a narrow ravine, or hollow, on a steep bank of the Powell River. There are no windows in the dwelling, but a plank placed over a large space between the logs serves the purpose. A stove and three double beds, about four chairs and a small table, are in the one room. A stove and two tables in the kitchen. The house is in very bad condition, cold air coming through large cracks in the walls and holes in the floor. There are many spaces in the roof where the sky can be seen.
Mrs. Randolph told the worker on the first visit, “I’ll stay here until the water comes up and float down with it when it does.” She has been accused of threatening several TVA men with a shotgun.
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.
In its first decade of operations, the Tennessee Valley Authority, also known as the TVA, constructed 16 new dams and made improvements to five existing dams. While the flood control and hydroelectric power created by these dams unquestionably benefited the people of the valley, who had long experienced major floods and lived without electricity long after their urban counterparts enjoyed indoor lighting and appliances, these major infrastructure projects were not without major costs to those who lived in their immediate vicinity.
To build the reservoirs that would bring electricity to millions of homes in the Tennessee Valley many other families lost their homes in the process. Hydroelectric dams, like the kind built by the TVA, are typically built with a reservoir behind them. A dam functions like a door or a gate built on a river, and the reservoir is an artificial lake of water that pools up behind the dam. Gates inside the dam can be opened or closed to control the water levels inside the reservoir. This is also how electricity is generated by hydropower. By controlling the flow of water from the reservoir through the dam, the flowing water spins a turbine, which powers a generator,to produce electricity. According to fact sheets on the TVA’s website, the authority has 11,000 miles of reservoir shoreline, 293,000 acres of reservoir land, and 650,000 surface acres of reservoir. water. The architects of the TVA regularly portrayed the uncontrolled Tennessee River as a wild force that had caused devastating floods to the area and that its control through the creation of dams and reservoirs was not just part of reducing flooding or creating electricity, but as a form of regional development. In Pare Lorentz’s 1937 film The River, which is about devastating floods in the Mississippi River Valley, TVA is highlighted as an example of government intervention through controlling the river.
First came the dams. Up on the clinch at the head of the river, we built Norristown, a great barrier to hold water in flood time and to release water down the river for navigation in low-water season. Next came Wheeler, then Guntersville, and Pickwick and Chickamauga, a series of great barriers that eventually will transform the old Tennessee into a link of freshwater pools. Locked and dammed, regulated and controlled, down 650 miles to Paducah.
To give you a sense of how large an individual reservoir can be, the first major dam built by TVA, the Norris Dam, has a reservoir area of 52 square miles. In order to build these reservoirs, the TVA had the authority to use eminent domain to remove the households that were in the future reservoir areas. The two major parts of this process involved the authorities’ acquisition of land and assistance provided to the impacted families.
For land acquisition, the authorities’ policy was to use standard appraisal measures for future reservoir land, and it had a policy against negotiations with individual households. Most landowners voluntarily sold their properties to the TVA based on the appraised price. For landowners who didn’t sell their properties voluntarily, the TVA condemned the properties and went through a lengthy legal process to remove the title from the owners and pay compensation to them. However, condemned properties made up only a small percentage of the TVA’s acquired lands, typically between 3 and 7 percent depending on the reservoir.
In addition to the relocation of the living, the TVA also undertook the relocation of cemeteries. In just the Norris Reservoir project, about 17,000 graves were moved in three years. For the relocation of families, the authority worked with the state extension services to send out workers to interview households and assess their income, assets, number of family members, and other aspects of the household. These family relocation case study records provide a comprehensive picture of the lives of those living in the reservoir areas. Households were evaluated for how much assistance they would require for relocation. And while the TVA did not give direct cash assistance to assist with relocation, it did use the case study information to refer households to other local, state, and federal agencies for additional help. The case study records are housed at the National Archives and they have been digitized since they contain so much valuable information for genealogists and researchers. The excerpts from those case study records are what you heard at the beginning of this episode.
The Tennessee Valley, like many other southern regions, had many very poor farmers who either owned only very small land holdings or were tenant farmers. Tenant farmers did not own their land but either paid cash rent to the owner or share of the crops they grew, which is where the term sharecropper comes from. Unsurprisingly, the landowners who were most easily able to move without additional government assistance were well-capitalized farmers who owned significant amountsof land that they could sell to TVA. But since small landowner farmers and tenant farmers had little to no land to sell to the land acquisition program, they needed more assistance in the relocation process. A 1937 article from TVA staffer M. Harry Satterfield analyzed the pre-removal status of the 4,000 families who had been relocated in the first four years of the authority’s work. Only about 15% were large landowners who required little to no assistance with relocation. The rest ranged from medium and small landowners down to tenant farmers who needed all sorts of different levels of assistance during the relocation process.
In a 1951 thesis by Ralph Brown, the total number of families removed since the TVA’s funding was over 14,000 families, and about 64% of relocated families were tenant farmers. In some reservoir areas, landowner families constituted the majority, but some reservoir areas, particularly those in Alabama, had tenancy rates of over 85%.
TVA’s relocation assistance had a mixed record. Although the authority’s policy and guidance expressed principles of fair treatment and justice for all impacted families, the realities on the ground often resulted in discrimination and segregation that reflected existing prejudices and bigotry against tenant farmers, African Americans, and disabled people. As part of the vision for TVA’s close relationships with local communities, the authority worked with agricultural extension services, local governments, churches, civic associations, and many other social agencies. Extension services often reflected the interests of white landowners with large farms, leaving out tenant farmers who were poor white and black farmers.
The 1920s had already seen a share of agricultural crises, and the problem continued into the 1930s. While all farmers were impacted by these crises, tenant farmers experienced the worst, as they did not own the land they were working on, and often not even the equipment. As the TVA reservoir relocation process began, the large landowners sometimes downsized the size of their farm after moving, meaning that tenant farmers could not necessarily move with their landlord. In other cases, sometimes small landowners or tenant farmers were able to get enough assistance or even a job with the TVA to improve their living circumstances after they relocated.
Research by Melissa Walker of the TVA’s family relocation case study files demonstrates how existing systems of racial segregation and racism in the Tennessee Valley region affected the relocation of black families. In her article titled, “African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property Removal, Race in a New Deal Program,” Walker writes,
“Black families received less help than many whites in the relocation process. Unlike prosperous white farmers who were often given leads on available land or referrals to the Agricultural Extension Service or the Resettlement Administration by TVA officials, black farmers were offered few choices.” (p. 423)
Downsizing the footprint of farms was actually in line with much of the thinking at the time within TVA. The TVA itself framed the mechanization of agriculture as part of improving regional approaches to farming. Over and over again, agricultural devastation was identified as too many people trying to scratch out a living on the land, where instead fewer farmers using the most modern methods approved by TVA were identified as the critical partners to repairing the eroded land and using it most effectively.
When you go through New Deal documentation of the time period, you sometimes see the phrase “submarginal” that appears more often in describing the devastated submarginal agricultural land that could no longer support families, but occasionally you also see it applied to the people themselves to describe the most vulnerable farming families who often suffered severe health issues. New Dealers viewed improving the state of the remaining farmlands as parallel with improvingthe lives of everyone living in the region by reducing the number of people relying on small farms and old methods to make a living.
Historian Sarah Phillips’ book titled This Land, This Nation, Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal sums up this perspective. Phillips writes,
“During the 1920s and the 1930s, the new rural conservation attempted to reconcile efficiency, equity, and sustainability. Though many agricultural analysts believe that eventually the least intelligent and the least adaptable farmers would have to find new employment, they could be just as optimistic about possibilities for widespread rural rehabilitation. The planners and policymakers examined in this study jumped to the understandable conclusion that poverty was not voluntary and they were not yet ready to surrender the agrarian ideal to the industrial ideal. In fact, they fused efficiency, equity, and sustainability in a manner that only in retrospect proved paradoxical. They hoped to preserve the family farm by modernizing it.” (p. 41)
In the 1944 film Valley of the Tennessee, we begin with a classic American motif. The young son of a farming family represents a vision of innovation and progress, while the old folks, in this case the farmers, are set in their backwards, distrustful ways.
To many of the valley people, the plan was an intrusion. Years of isolation, ignorance, and bigotry die hard. They said, “let the government men do things with machines over the mountain. None of our business.” But youth was more inquisitive and the pioneer spirit was still alive. Over the mountain was something new, big, exciting.
However, following the work of TVA’s agents going out into farming communities, the farmers in the film are eventually won over to more modern methods, thanks to TVA’s demonstration farm experiments and adoption of new technology.
He was sending substantial quantities of food to market and giving his neighbors plenty of food for thought. They came to see the new fertilizer, the new methods, and the student became a teacher.
In the Tennessee Valley that year, 30,000 other demonstration farmers became teachers too. For the next year’s harvest, Henry and his neighbors had a threshing machine, especially designed by the TVA experts for this valley. Each group of farmers had a machine. Each farmer had an equal right to its use. No longer was it one man alone against the drought and the flood. For the first time they were acting together, cooperatively, for a common purpose. And even more important, a change was beginning to come into their thinking. For the first time they were thinking in terms of each other. What they could accomplish together, by working together. With new machinery, new methods, with a definite plan to follow, a plan that embraced them all, the farmers worked and the land responded.
Of course, what is often left out of these films is the point of view of those who lived through the monumental changes associated with dam construction and agricultural modernization, and of those farmers who left farming altogether, whether by choice or by circumstance. Government films would not have included the voices that complicated the official narrative, but many of the stories of displaced families have been preserved through oral histories in the decades since. These oral histories reflect the range of reactions of those who experienced these changes from TVA firsthand, from sorrow to support, sometimes from the same person. Although the families who had to relocate due to the flooding of their homes. of their homes did so because of a major infrastructure project, their experiences are instructive for us. Because today, many families are also facing similar displacement due to flooding, but not due to the expansion of infrastructure projects, but due to climate change.
In recent years, the concept of managed retreat has become more widespread in climate policy. Managed retreat refers to policy programs in which households are incentivized to relocate due to repeated flooding events or being in vulnerable coastal areas. Managed retreat is often quite controversial, for the same reason that relocation of families from TVA reservoir areas was also controversial. It involves severing people from places they have often lived in for generations, it disrupts community ties, and it answers the old question of whether you can ever go home again with a resounding no. But how you remember the places that shaped you, your family, and your culture matters. We’ll return to that concept of memories for a place that no longer exists later in this season.
Until then, thank you for listening to this episode. If you like what you hear and want to support the work that goes into making this podcast, please visit the website notimeforfear.net. Please share this episode with a friend, and consider making a donation if you’re in a position to do so, so that I can keep making the show. A couple of our early listeners have already made donations. Thank you so much to Sean and Katy for their generosity.
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.