
          The Electric Valley
          Reviewed by Whisnant, DavidDavid E. Whisnant
          Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 18-22
          
          The Electric Valley. Directed and produced by
Ross Spears, music by Kenton Coe, narration by Wilma Dykeman, research
and writing by Richard Couto, cinematography by Anthony Forma. Funding
provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the American Film
Institute. Knoxville: James Agee Film Product, 1983. 90 mins., 16mm
color, videotape available.
          TVA was "part of my life," Nashville Tennessean
publisher John Siegenthaler says as The Electric Valley
opens; it was like "oatmeal in the mornings . . . and it was good."
What the film presents, however, is not so much TVA's goodness, but
its conflicted history. When he returns to the camera at the end of
the film, Siegenthaler admits that confidence in TVA has been "badly
shaken" during its first fifty years. But there is hope, he insists:
"institutions can be renewed." Some valley citizens are not so
sure. "It was kind of like waitin' to die," says one whose land was
taken and whose home was bulldozed for the controversial Tellico
project; "I learned how temporary we are here on this earth," says
another.
          The story of TVA is not just about dams and phosphate fertilizer
and cheap electric power, but about some of the fundamental tensions
in our national life: private property vs. the common good; private
preference vs. public policy; centralized planning vs. organic drift;
individuals vs. institutions; tangible goods vs. intangible values;
tradition vs. change and "progress"; family and community vs. the
state. Few other institutions in our national life have so
consistently focused arguments on both sides of these
questions. Partly because it articulates and dramatizes these
oppositions, The Electric Valley is by far the best
film ever made about TVA--and there have been a God's plenty of
them.
          The film follows TVA's history in a simple chronological sequence
of well-marked segments: the birth of the idea through the christening
of the first dam (Norris) on the 

Clinch River; the early valley
electrification program; initial opposition from private power
companies; the conflict between directors David Lilienthal and Arthur
E. Morgan, and Morgan's departure in 1938; the World War II period
during which TVA supplied power for the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge
("We thank God that it has come to us, rather than to our enemies,"
President Truman says of the bomb); the shift to coal-fired steam
power during and after the war; opposition to TVA by political
conservatives during the 1950s, and the Dixon-Yates scandal; the
economic and environmental impact of TVA's stripmined coal purchases,
especially in connection with its steam plant at Paradise
("Mr. Peabody's coal train has done hauled it away"), Kentucky; the
agency's subsequent commitment to nuclear power, and the near disaster
at Brown's Ferry; the Tellico/snail darter controversy; and the recent
cancellation of TVA's partially completed Hartsville nuclear
installation.
          The Electric Valley gets much of its force through the skillful use
of archival film footage, interviews with early TVA officials and
partisans, and interviews with ordinary citizens who have felt the
negative effects of some TVA programs. Each has been used before in
TVA films, but they have never been blended so effectively.
          Some of the early dam-construction and rural electrification
footage is almost too familiar from TVA's own public relations films,
but other segments are fresh and unfamiliar enough to fan the coals of
the old idealism (and the old controversies) briefly into flame again:
Norris Village residents working in shop and cannery; FDR opening the
gates of Norris Dam; director Lilienthal presenting a $44 million
private power company buyout check to Commonwealth and Southern
president Wendell Willkie ("Good luck, Dave," says Willkie); opponents
Lilienthal and Morgan before Congressional committees; an
under-the-big-top TVA promotion of electrical appliances, with a
robotized refrigerator that hypes itself to the assembled crowd, and a
voice-of-God narrator who promises "a way of life that is physically
gratifying and spiritually uplifting"; Eisenhower at a press
conference, linking TVA to "creeping socialism"; Walter Cronkite on
the CBS Evening News, announcing TVA's victory over the Cherokees and
the snail darter at Tellico.
          A number of important early TVA officials are interviewed in the
film: Lilienthal, engineer Harry Wiersma, chief engineer George Palo
(who praises GE's "turnkey" nuclear plants), Eisenhower-appointed
director General Herbert Vogel ("TVA meant nothing to me, really");
director Aubrey Wagner, who presided over TVA's entry into what he
calls "the new world of the atomic age," and who blandly assures us
that the Brown's Ferry incident was "not serious"; recent director
David Freeman struggling with a forty-year legacy of policy
contradictions. Taken together, these cameo appearances telegraph
TVA's history: early idealism and achievement, persistent liberal
hopes and conservative opposition, hydro-coal-nuclear technological
drift, corporate co-optation, perennial struggles with high social
costs.
          Some of TVA's contradictions emerge most forcefully in interviews
with lower-level TVA employees, and with local citizens who felt the
agency's impact most keenly. Since part of TVA's early employment
policy was to hire locally, the two groups overlap
substantially. Norris Dam worker Curt Stiner talks of "a whole passer"
of Clinch River Stiners 

who worked on TVA's first dam; Henry Clark,
the featured test-demonstration farmer in TVA's early 1940s film
The Valley of the Tennessee, tells of his experiences
with the agriculture program. Clark and Stiner are older now, but look
prosperous and peaceful, having benefitted (we seem urged to conclude)
from the TVA experiment.
          But others have not. In one of the more moving sequences, a man who
was forcibly relocated from the Norris area tells of having bought
forty acres of ancestral land from his father, logging his own timber,
and building "a good barn, a good crib, and a good smokehouse." "I dug
me a good well and ever-thing," he says, but he got to live on the
place only a year before TVA bought him out and moved him off. A
similar sequence introduces a black Fortana worker who recalls that
racism in the area was so intense that black workers had to be guarded
at night (Lilienthal's "seamless web" still had a ravelling seam or
two), and that TVA, needing the black workers (white workers "couldn't
get no [concrete] buckets down there and back"), acquiesced to the
extent of building a Jim Crow wing on the mess hall.
          Decade after decade, such costs and contradictions
accumulate. Coal-fired steam power brings acid-laden fly ash that
filters into the clothing and beds and takes the paint off the
automobile of the Smith family who live near the Paradise steam plant
("Pardon Our Progress," says a billboard on the fence). Before finally
forcing them to leave, TVA offers free car washes. Similarly at
Tellico: the Ritchie family loses their 119 acre farm because TVA
wants three acres of it.
          One thing films can offer better than any other medium is efficient
and powerfully compressed narration. Thus one can learn more TVA
history from watching The Electric Valley than could be
learned in any other way in a comparable amount of time. Some
excellent research, writing, shooting, and editing have given us
images that linger, words that echo, issues that won't go away.
          And yet efficiency and compression come at a price. That price can
be raised by poor research and editing--as it too frequently is in
documentaries--or lowered by insight and skill, as here. But the price
is there in The Electric Valley, nevertheless, and one has to assess
it. Consider two brief examples.
          One searches TVA's own documentary films in vain for Arthur
E. Morgan. He has been banished, non-personed, by the TVA commissars;
it is as if he never was. But he is present in The Electric
Valley; the temperamental and ideological differences between
him and Lilienthal are at least sketched, and we are asked to consider
the cost of his firing by President Roosevelt in 1938. Morgan emerges
as a humane and creative public servant sacrificed to TVA
expediency. That much is to the film's credit. And yet the available
books, articles, and congressional hearings tell a more complicated
story than that: Morgan was also naive in some ways, an impractical dreamer in others, a cultural elitist in
still others. And at last his own worst enemy. So the dialectic is too
stark in the film; it lacks subtlety, and to the extent that it does,
it misleads.
          My second example is less familiar than Morgan. Test-demonstration
farmer Henry Clark appears here for perhaps a minute or two, and
sounds not very much different from the younger Henry Clark of The
Valley of the Tennessee: TVA worked for him; he signed on the dotted
line, deferred his gratifications, bought the phosphate, contoured his
fields, raised the best crop of tobacco ever seen in the county, and
tooled smilingly by his dumbstruck neighbors on his new tractor.
          And yet when I located and spent several days with Henry Clark in
1980, preparing to write an article on the earlier film, I found him a
complex and surprisingly conservative man who (like General Vogel)
never really had much use for TVA. Through five or six hours of taped
interviews (some of it done while we watched The Valley of the
Tennessee together at a local high school) I heard him
(echoing Wendell Willkie) express grave doubts about TVA-style
"socialism." He told me he had made a lot of money in Knoxville real
estate, and I came away feeling that he had "played" TVA in the same
way he played the real estate market. Ronald Reagan, he told me, was
his candidate. Did 

Clark not say those things to Ross Spears'
interviewers? Did they not talk to him long enough to ask? I don't
know. But in any case, The Electric Valley does not in
this instance carry us far beyond The Valley of the
Tennessee--with its dumb hillbilly caricatures staring in
grateful awe at the dam builders, like some primitive cargo cult--as
it might, within the limits of compression and
efficiency.
          In a sense, this is the larger problem with the film: for all its
excellence (which is substantial) it does not carry us as far as it
needs to toward new formulations of the
issues. It is still--in this darkening Reagan Age--Morgan
vs. Lilienthal; hydro vs. coal vs. nuclear; fat nuclear construction
workers' paychecks vs. massive cost-overruns, rising electric bills,
and falling demand curves. If Lilienthal and Morgan were
idealistically trying to sell a seamless web, Reagan is shamelessly
hawking a shoddy fabric of the rankest political, cultural, historical
heresy. He and his minions are seducing the public into believing that
"guvmunt" (the media mocked Wallace's and Faubus's speech in order to
question their ethics and analytical powers, why don't they mock his?)
is not us but "them," that unregulated private greed is the shortest
route to public good, that public endeavors are by nature doomed to
failure, that the most radically atomized social order is the
healthiest.
          It would have been unwise for Spears to conceive of this film as an
anti Reagan tract; God willing, TVA will still be there after Reagan
is gone. And yet the agency's history might, it seems to me, have been
better used--at least in the case of Morgan and Clark, and perhaps in
others--to raise public dialogue to a new level. Here and there we
catch a glimpse of the possibilities: Decatur, Alabama newspaperman
Barret Shelton, who appeared in the earlier TVA public-relations film
TVA Town, insists that "the federal government belongs
to us," that it is "our
federal government and our people," but the
defense rests there; narrator Dykeman tells us that plan is a "four-letter word" in the Valley (as indeed
it mostly is), but the Henry Clark contradictions are passed too
lightly over, and some of those TVA victims for whom plan is a four-letter word are then presented as
simple martyrs to simple TVA greed and bungling, and exponents of
unconditioned (Reagan-like) private ownership.
          If my own study of TVA has taught me anything, it is that the historical problems of TVA flow both from the context
of political and economic power within which it operates, and from the
conceptual limits of the public dialogue
surrounding the agency. By themselves, films can't do much about
structures of power except to reveal and dramatize them. This film
does that very well indeed: To my knowledge it is the first film on
TVA even to attempt to do so in a serious way. Had it followed its own
logic a bit further, however, it might have made an even more
substantial contribution to sharpening the terms in which future
public dialogue is to be carried on concerning one of our greatest--if
nevertheless deeply flawed--efforts to address the question of the
common good directly and courageously. 

The need is urgent as the
chilly winds of Reaganisrn continue to corrupt the very terms of
public discourse and--to borrow Siegenthaler's metaphor--cool the
oatmeal.
          
            David E. Whisnant is professor of American Studies at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of
All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an
American Region (University of North Carolina Press,
1983).
          
        