August42009
Nothing New?
The reports that have been coming out over the past couple of weeks criticize TVA for dysfunctional management: its various departments can’t communicate with one another, its board isn’t in touch with what’s happening on the ground, or how its policies are being carried out.
I’ve been reading a book called Prisoners of Myth by Erwin Hargrove, that talks about the authority’s administrative history. And it seems like bad communication has always been a central feature of TVA management. Even when FDR assembled the first board, he chose three people with divergent interests who were unlikely to work out their disagreements. And FDR himself was unwilling to work out the kinks or give them a unified message. He preferred to let each board member think that their particular vision for the organization was the most important.
[The original TVA board, with David Lilienthal at right.]
Eventually, the vision of David Lilienthal won out. The youngest of the three original board members, he had been the public face of TVA for some time, and was instrumental in popularizing its program of cheap power for the people of the Tennessee Valley. It was his rhetoric that gave the TVA its public persona of a progressive organization crusading for the needs of the common man over the interests of private power companies. He was made chairman in 1941.
But as Hargrove argues, he was also a prisoner of his own myth: the myth that the TVA was essentially a grassroots organization. The problem with that narrative is that from the beginning the TVA was not in fact taking its direction from the least privileged residents of the Tennessee Valley, but rather from the region’s farm and business leaders. As one early TVA official put it, “grassroots” to the board meant “the power structure, not ten farmers.” Lilienthal’s vision for the TVA emphasized efficiency, not equity. I think that vision goes a long way in explaining how “progress” for the TVA came to mean always offering electricity at the lowest rate possible, no matter the costs; a vision that neglected the larger regional planning mission that it was originally supposed to have.
[Portrait of Lilienthal on a 1947 cover of TIME Magazine.]
Hargrove describes how the “grassroots” theme came to be the central message of TVA’s forceful public relations efforts: lecture tours by the board, movies, photographic essays, museum and world fair exhibitions, tours of TVA sites. And by arguing that no organization controlled from Washington could maintain this grassroots mission, the TVA continued to avoid federal oversight.
