Dam(n) it!

Tennessee Valley Authority relocation of Bunch family of Lone Mountain, TN

This is probably a perfect encapsulation of the political complexities and divisions at the heart of US society.

As early as 1921, 94% of the electricity distributed in the USA was controlled by privately-owned holding companies.

In 1920, wealthy automobile manufacturer Henry Ford had attempted to implement a plan to dam the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals in NW Alabama for electricity generation (and monopolistic mega profits).

Senator George Norris of Nebraska introduced a bill to congress to block the plan, believing that private-owned businesses should not be trusted with vast infrastructural projects affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

Although the bill was passed, it was vetoed by the president of the day, Herbert Hoover.

It might be correct to see this as the first great stand-off between Big Business American Capitalism and those who believed that a nation’s natural resources should belong to the nation’s citizens, and should be exploited for the benefit of the many, rather than the few.

By 1934, the USA was five years into the grip of the Great Depression, and a privately-owned version of the Muscle Shoals dam project was dead in the water (no pun intended).

As part of his New Deal for lifting many Americans out of poverty, Franklin Delano Roosevelt constituted the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which would build a series of dams for hydroelectricity generation, but they would be owned by the state – not private companies with a history of gouging consumers.

Outside of Black and indigenous communities, no one was poorer, or suffering more, than the rural people of Southern Appalachia during the 1930s.

Much mountain land was exhausted due to poor farming practices.  Produce prices were at rock bottom.  Average income was about $639 per year (less than $12,000 in today’s money).  Families surviving on less than $200 a year was not uncommon.

The Roosevelt administration reasoned that in the face of such abject poverty, the public revenue generated, and the new jobs created by the TVA in nearby towns, would more than compensate poor mountain folks for the loss of their land under water.  And in many cases, the government was right.  Jobs WERE created, and better farming practices were introduced.  But there was one little fly in the ointment.  Free choice.

Using the legal principle of “eminent domain“, small farmers who had farmed, hunted, danced, and raised families in these hills for upwards of 150 years were forced to sell-up, often for prices below market value.

All of this is history in the public realm.  The one part of this story never told in history books or scholarly articles is the fact that many, many of the impoverished people of these regions were poor in the first place because they were the mixed-ethnic outcasts of colonial society.  The very reason they had sought out the most remote hills and hollers was to find a measure of freedom – freedom from bonded servitude, freedom from wage slavery, freedom from race laws and bigotry.

Just freedom.  Or the closest thing to freedom available in this world.

I’ve heard it said that Australian aborigines removed from their ancestral lands in times past would often begin to slowly “fade away”, literally dying from a loss of freedom and connection to the land.

Something similar must have surely befallen the over 125,000 Southern Appalachians who were forced to say goodbye to their farms and mountain communities between the 1930s and 1950s.

Many well-educated people today try to understand or explain why some of the American underclasses often vote “against their own interests”.

On the one hand, there is a government which had enough power to take away the only things they ever had – a home, a community, pride, and self-reliance.

Anyone who comes along blaming “Big Government” for their trans-generational troubles is likely to get a hearing.  Anyone who speaks of bootstraps and hating a hand-out is also speaking the right language.

Unfortunately for the sons and daughters of Appalachia, the people “speaking their language” today are the same b**tards who once controlled 94% of the electricity supply in America.

For some sections of America, there’s no winning.

#tennesseevalleyauthority #appalachia #bigbusiness #beforewewerewhite