It was down in the valley that's called Tennessee
Uncle Sam started something in the year thirty-three
We dreamed a great dream then, that's now here to stay
Saw democracy's future when we built TVA
Now rivers that once ran unchecked to the sea
Use the force that was wasted for electricity
And, rains that washed topsoil away in the night
Helped the great turbines turn dark into lightPete Seeger, "The TVA Song"
On December 22, 2008, a coal ash pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant near Kingston, Tennessee, burst, letting loose more than a billion gallons of a black, sticky slurry that collapsed houses and flooded nearby properties. Owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Kingston was the largest coal power plant in the world when it was finished in 1955. Firing at peak capacity, it could burn 14,000 tons of coal every single day. What was left behind after it burned was dumped into wet ponds, covered with grass and earth, and allowed to sit while the water evaporated. From a distance, it was just another hill, even if it wobbled or shook at times.
Miraculously, nobody died in the flood that day. In the subsequent cleanup, however, hundreds of workers were exposed to dangerous levels of coal ash toxins. Coal ash is the substance that is left behind once coal has been through a furnace. It's a fine dust that's grayish-black when it's dry. Most of it consists of silica, the fine dust that has poisoned coal miners' lungs for generations, but coal ash also contains arsenic, cadmium, radium, and other heavy metals that poison the human body. More than 60 of the people who worked on the cleanup have died, while more than 200 are sick with lung diseases and cancer today.
The TVA understood that coal ash was dangerous, but the coal power plant and its subcontractor, Jacobs Engineering, downplayed the threat that coal ash posed. Tom Bock, the safety officer on site, insisted that you could eat a pound of ash every day and be fine. Workers tasked with cleaning the site were actively discouraged from wearing safety equipment; showing up in a dust mask was seen as a way to be let go.
Coal ash isn't recognized as a hazardous material by the EPA, thanks to lobbying by the coal industry. Even when new rules for coal ash disposal were drafted in 2015, they exempted "legacy" sites, of which there are approximately 700 in the United States. In any event, the new rules haven't been enforced at all since they were drafted, and under the second Trump Administration, it's almost a certainty that they won't be enforced for the foreseeable future.
Cleanup for the 2008 Kingston TVA coal ash spill took more than six years, and the toxic coal ash was trucked to the Arrowhead landfill in Uniontown, Alabama, a majority-Black town. Residents say they can smell it on the wind.
What happened to the TVA?
The TVA began with high, contradictory hopes for a region that the whole country saw as troubled. The Tennessee Valley was one of the poorest regions in the United States by the time of the Great Depression. Only three percent of farms in the region had access to electricity, and most farmers worked as cotton sharecroppers. The Tennessee River was difficult to navigate, and when it flooded, it devastated communities. Malaria affected close to 30 percent of the population. Millions of acres of farmland were badly eroded from years of cotton overproduction, and the median income in the region was close to one-third the national average.
For years, progressives in both parties had taken aim at democratizing private utilities. Senator Gerald Norris of Nebraska made the issue into his own crusade. At Muscle Shoals in Alabama, the federal government had started a dam during World War I that was finished in 1924, but it only generated a fraction of its full power. Norris's attempt to use the dam to provide cheap public power was stymied by Herbert Hoover, who vetoed a bill in 1931 that would have adopted the project. Norris felt that the issue was blocked by private companies, who "want no yardstick which would expose their extortionate rates…" But Norris's vision won out a few years later when Franklin Roosevelt was elected. Roosevelt liked the idea of expanding on what had been done at Muscle Shoals, and in April of 1933, he asked Congress to "create a Tennessee Valley Authority, a corporation clothed with the power of government, but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise." With that, the Muscle Shoals dam was adopted into the TVA system.
While the TVA began as a Great Depression relief program, it was far more ambitious than programs like the Works Progress Administration or the Civilian Conservation Corps. The TVA's mandate was broader than any peacetime government program established before it. It would be responsible for flood control, erosion control, disease eradication, fertilizer manufacturing, dam construction, and electricity generation. The TVA also sold electric power to communities rather than offering it to private companies, a move that lowered the cost of energy and, as a result, improved people's lives by giving them access to modern amenities and attracting manufacturing jobs to the region.
One of the TVA's most important mandates was to make the Tennessee River navigable, as river management was a prerogative of Congress. Vagueness was part of the mission. When asked by George Norris about what the TVA would do, Roosevelt responded that "it's neither fish nor fowl, but whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley."
While the TVA embarked on a multitude of programs, such as trying to convince farmers to engage in crop rotation, its most famous projects were its dams. The TVA's first dam project, Norris Dam, began in 1933. The pace of dam construction was aggressive: more than 20 were built in 20 years, transforming the landscape of the Tennessee Valley. In addition to the dams, the TVA created demonstration farms to show farmers how to do crop rotation, use new electric appliances, tools, and fertilizers. The Tennessee River's floods were finally brought under control.
Despite the progress made by the TVA's programs, more than 125,000 people were displaced to build its dams. Some people were willing to take buyouts, but others resisted. One farmer on the Big Barren Creek warned that "I'll take my hog rifle, and the first one of them TVA fellers come onto my land, I'll shoot him before he can show his hind quarters." Even flood control had political ends, as it benefitted Chattanooga and stopped its periodic inundations—at the cost of putting 243,000 acres elsewhere permanently underwater.
Most New Deal programs were structured to primarily benefit white Americans, and the TVA was no exception to this. The TVA's first chairman, Arthur E. Morgan, was a vehement racist and eugenicist. Morgan oversaw the construction of the planned community of Norris, which was segregated, leading the NAACP to describe the TVA as "Lily-White Reconstruction."
The more ambitious regional planning work done by the TVA accelerated after World War II. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, following wartime stagnancy, both administrators and politicians questioned whether the TVA would continue at all. The experiments in utopian living, such as those of Norris, were abandoned, especially after Arthur E. Morgan was forced out (though the town remained segregated). Other programs, such as malaria abatement, succeeded; once malaria was effectively eradicated or contained, those programs could be wound down or turned over to state public health departments. Likewise, the erosion that had once threatened to leave the Tennessee Valley's soil permanently infertile was largely brought under control by the 1950s.
The TVA Turns to Coal Power
It was not a given that the TVA would primarily become a power company. David Lilienthal and Arthur E. Morgan developed an acrimonious feud over the mission of the TVA: Morgan wanted it to be an ambitious planning agency, whereas Lilienthal saw it primarily as a vehicle for power generation. As late as 1948, an internal memo held that the TVA was responsible for generating power, but the primary mission was flood control. But generating electricity was an attractive mission. During the war years, the TVA used the allure of cheap energy to draw arms and munitions manufacturers to the Tennessee Valley. Places like Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which enriched uranium for the first atomic bomb (and continues to do so today) chose Tennessee because of the TVA's power. And to David Lilienthal, one of the TVA's directors, the best mission was power generation. He believed that if there was a surplus of electricity, the best thing to do was to encourage more consumption. In a 1944 talk, Lilienthal said, "There is no such thing as too much electrical energy. For electricity is a creator, a builder." Usage grew rapidly; between 1945 and 1947, demand for energy rose 60 percent.
This fed demands for the TVA to both become an energy supplier primarily, and to ensure that it always had more energy to provide. But hydroelectricity is a finite resource. A river can only support so many dams, and by the late 1940s, the best places for hydroelectric power generation had already been staked out. This meant chasing after other sources of power, and the best option at that time was coal, specifically coal steam plants. Members of the board of directors were wary of this approach, feeling that it would force the TVA to overcommit to power generation and industrialization and thereby abandon regional planning and ecological work. In Washington, the federal government was uncertain what to do with the TVA—except when it came to power. Electricity fueled national defense, and with the Cold War in full swing, that was one area in which the TVA could win support.
The political solution between those like Dwight Eisenhower who saw the TVA as "creeping socialism" and those who wanted to maintain it was to make it self-financing, but limit its service area to what it already had. The 1959 Bond-Financing Act meant that the TVA would no longer have to go before Congress every year in order to get appropriations for plants. Instead, it could issue its own bonds. It used this self-financing model to complete its pivot over to coal.
Embracing coal meant that the TVA became an incredible polluter, even when compared to other utilities. If the wind blew the wrong way, coal ash would wind up in people's backyards, playgrounds, and houses. In the 1970s, TVA's coal-fired facilities were responsible for about 14 percent of all toxic sulfur-dioxide emissions nationwide. The TVA tried to diversify into nuclear power in part because it recognized that coal had bad optics, but construction on many nuclear plants stalled, and less than half of them were finished.
For decades, the TVA encouraged the worst practices in coal mining by relying on strip mines. Its mandate was to supply power cheaply, and strip mining was cheap, but it wreaked havoc on the region's landscape. The agency even lobbied against regulations meant to govern strip mining, arguing that it would be too expensive for power producers. The agency effectively abandoned any pretense of being a force for conservation. One chairman, Aubrey Wagner, defended strip mining by saying that "Strip mining, while it is going on, looks like the devil…but, if you look at what these mountains were doing before this stripping, they were just growing trees that were not even being harvested."
TVA's reliance on coal has waned since the 2008 spill in Kingston, but fossil fuels are still its leading source of energy. Depressingly, while coal seemed to be on the way out, there are now hints that it could actually return. Under Biden, the TVA had committed to mothballing the last of its coal plants by 2035, but the TVA's head recently suggested that they may live on after that point. When Donald Trump offered an exemption for all power utilities from Biden's clean air regulations, the TVA enthusiastically signed up for it.
The agency that was founded in order to transform the Tennessee Valley in the 1930s is barely recognizable today. There are no mobile libraries and no medical programs. For people who had hoped that it would bring industry to the Tennessee Valley, it succeeded. The TVA was a partner in helping to bring Ford Motors into Tennessee and Kentucky in 2021. But it has come at an incredible environmental cost, and as the Kingston Spill has made clear, the price is high in human terms as well.
And yet, an administrative body like the TVA would actually be useful to combat climate change and to build a green future. A climate-change strategy that is solely dependent on building lots of solar, nuclear, or wind power generation sites wouldn't go far enough in addressing how we consume electricity, sustainably steward the land, or mitigate the damage done to human beings by environmental racism. We desperately need wide-range, holistic, sustainable, and clean energy regional planning. And today, with utility rates turning into a national crisis and making everyday life less affordable for people, the solution is in government activism.
The TVA had more than its share of problems: paternalism towards the South, anti-Black racism, and indifference among many of its officers as to environmental consequences. The TVA might have failed to live up to its democratic ambitions and the hopes that it would be an example of "democracy on the march," as Lilienthal titled his history of the TVA. But it, or something like it, could be a viable strategy toward planning a just climate future.