TVA: Electricity for All

by Stanlee Brimberg

The controversy surrounding the Tennessee Valley Authority was profound and complicated. It raised constitutional, economic, social, philosophical and ethical issues. Once students become familiar with the facts and the issues by reading and studying the material in the collection and other material you provide, they will be in an excellent position to debate these issues.

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Overview: The controversy surrounding the Tennessee Valley Authority was profound and complicated. It raised constitutional, economic, social, philosophical and ethical issues. Once students become familiar with the facts and the issues by reading and studying the material in the collection and other material you provide, they will be in an excellent position to debate these issues.

Objectives — to help students:

1. Acquire information about TVA
2. Understand that, depending on a person’s identity and situation (social, educational, economic), he or she would have a different opinion about TVA
3. Develop understanding for all the points of view about TVA 4. Learn to make compromises to resolve disputes.

Resources: Documents from "TVA: Electricity for All" and the Image and Document Libraries of the New Deal Network (http://newdeal.feri.org)

Collection Background: Materials concerning TVA in the Image and Document Libraries of the New Deal Network include editorial cartoons, advertisements, the Tennessee Valley photographs of Lewis Hine, dramatizations, and articles from The Nation and Opportunity Magazine.
 

Exercise

Step 1 (5 min.). Meet briefly with your small group. Each individual should quickly choose an identity from the list below. (In a classroom setting, you would divide the class into seven sections and assign each section one of the characters.)

* A TVA Head Administrator. Although you have been appointed to your post by the Roosevelt Administration, you may not agree with your co-administrators.

* The head of a privately owned utility or coal company in the region.

* A poor white tenant farmer living in the Tennessee Valley who will have to move because of dam construction. He may or may not find a new home. He may or may not find work with TVA.

* A poor black farmer living in the Tennessee Valley, who may or may not find work with TVA.

* A Congressional representative who believes that government ought to stay out of people’s lives, whether they are rich or poor.

* The owner of a company that manufactures electrical appliances.

* A woman whose husband has been hired to work on the construction of the Norris Dam. Her family now has electricity and can now afford to buy several electrical appliances, including a stove, a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, several light fixtures, and a radio.

Step 2 (30 min.). Working as an individual, use the resources available in the TVA collection to find information that clarifies the point of view of your character. Look for facts, opinions, reasons, and explanations, including testimony (oral history). You might want to develop a chart listing the pros and cons to TVA from the perspective of your character.

Searching tips: Useful information can be found in three separate areas:

TVA: Electricity for All (http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/index.htm) presents an overview.
The Image Library (http://newdeal.feri.org/library/index.htm)
The Document Library (http://newdeal.feri.org/texts/index.htm)

Resources in the two libraries are often cross-referenced by subject. You may find helpful information by pursuing a subject other than "Tennessee Valley Authority."

Although the site does not have global keyword searching capabilities, remember that your Internet browser can search a given document for keywords. This may speed your search.
 

Step 3. (15 min.). Review your evidence and prepare a short (1–3 min.) statement about the TVA, from the point of view of your character. Your statement should include a concluding segment that expresses support for TVA, or opposition to it, or a combination of support and opposition.
 

Step 4. (40 min.). Meet again with your small group to share your presentations and discuss the activity. (For more detailed follow-up activities you could undertake with your class, see attached.)

a) Share your brief statements, in character. Then discuss the following:

b) Reflect on your experience researching for and participating in this activity. Were you able to find appropriate and useful information in the collection? On which character was the information most easily available? Least available? Why might this be so? What other characters might be interesting to include?

TVA Activity — Supplemental Classroom Activities

In an actual classroom, when each group reports on the points of view of their character, others in the class listen and then ask questions. Give and take in character is encouraged. Then the class returns to the present to discuss the TVA in historical perspective. To focus discussion, the students consider these questions:

Was TVA a good idea for America? Which groups of people benefited? Which groups suffered? Did more people benefit or suffer?

If a program is proposed by government today that would be bad for a few thousand Americans but good for millions, would you support it? Why or why not?

If TVA were proposed today, how could the plan be modified so that the number of people who would suffer would be minimized and the number of people who benefited would be maximized?

Should the government be responsible for providing services to Americans, like affordable electricity or health care, or should government stay out of people’s lives? If you don’t think the answer is either one or the other, what things do you think the government should provide? Not provide?

Additional follow-up exercise: In a second class session, the charts are rotated among the groups—so, for example, a group that had Roosevelt yesterday might be a coal company executive today. Each group now takes the position of that new individual. They add to the evidence the other group has compiled. At the end of an appropriate amount of time, the charts get rotated again. The process continues until all the groups have seen and have had the opportunity to amend all the charts. You might notice that as the process goes on, groups have less and less to add and you can allot less and less time before switching. Alternatively, all the charts might be posted and you might allow time for any student to come up and add evidence to any chart.

Once all the charts are complete, display them and allow time for the class to look at all of them together. Then ask and allow for discussion of some or all of these questions. Alternatively, some of these might be questions asked in a follow-up essay about TVA. In that case, it would be helpful for each student to have access to the material on all the charts and to the material in the TVA section of the New Deal Network.

The New Deal Network: The New Deal Network (NDN), a research and teaching resource on the World Wide Web devoted to the public works and arts projects of the New Deal, was developed by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and is now based at the Institute for Learning Technologies (http://www.ilt.columbia.edu) at Columbia University. NDN seeks to make the most of the interactive, communications and publication capacities of the Internet. Its designers intend to bring many different institutions and individuals into the ongoing construction of the site and to stimulate students and historians throughout the United States to discover and document the cultural and material legacy of the New Deal.

"TVA: Electricity for All" was developed by Thomas Thurston, a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Yale University and the project director for NDN. The extended on-line curriculum package, from which this exercise was developed, was created for NDN by Stanlee Brimberg, a teacher at Bank Street School for Children in New York City. NDN would like to thank The Nation and the National Urban League for granting permission for the educational, non-commercial use of materials from their publications.

Source: Stanlee Brimberg, Bank Street School