5.+Unit+Activity+-+DI+by+Interest+Student+Work+Sample

Unit Activity 6: DI by Interest Student Work Sample __** The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

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 * This New Deal program was launched by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in **1933.** Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act on May 18, 1933.

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 * During the early 1930s the Tennesse Valley area was in a horrible state. Much of the had been destroyed becaused it had been farmed too hard for too long causing the erosion and depletion of its soil. Crop yields had fallen along with farm incomes. The best timber had been cut down. So the TVA was developed to help American citizens living in the Tennessee Valley basin which consisted predominately of white rural farmers. This group of citizens were also known as "The Forgotten Americans".

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 * The TVA developed fertilizers, taught farmers how to improve crop yields, and helped replant forests, control forest fires, and improve habitiat for wildlife and fish, which was a great source of food for the people living along the Tennessee Valley. The most dramatic change in Valley life came from the electricity generated by the TVA dams. Electric lights and modern appliances made life easier and farms more productive. Electricity also drew industries into the region, providing desperately needed jobs. The TVA increased employment in the area..
 * The TVA dams were built to harness the Valley region's rivers. These dams controlled floods, improved navigation, and generated electricity to thousands of people at an affordable price. Another TVA responsibilty written in the act included improving travel on the Tennessee River.
 * The Tennessee Valley Authority has been effective through out American history. The TVA dams not only improved life for the rural farmers of the Valley basin by improving the farming soil and generating electricity in the Tennesse Valley basin, but the TVA program produced jobs for American citizens in that area. The TVA did not discontinue after FDR's terms in office. The TVA still exists today and currently helps America's economy. Today, the TVA is the largest public power company in the U.S. The agency carefully runs the nation's fifth largest river system in order to control flooding, it makes rivers easier to travel, provides recreation, and protects water quality. The TVA area includes most of Tennessee and parts of six other states that include Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. TVA's facitlities provide over 27,000 megawatts of dependable generating capacity. The TVA produces more that 130 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, making it the largest electric power producer in America.

[] [] [] __**Class Activities - Analyzing Primary Sources:**__
 * The strongest opposition to the TVA came from power companies who believed the government's TVA would interfere with Free Enterprise. Power companies resented the cheaper energy available through the TVA and saw it as a a threat to private development. The biggest fear was losing money. They charged that the federal government's involvement in the power business was unconstitutional. The fight against TVA was led by Wendall Willkie who was the president of the Commonwealth and Southern Company, a large power utility company. During the 1930s there were many court cases brought against the TVA. The Alabama Power Company brought a suit against TVA that was argued before the Supreme Court. They claimed that in entering into the electric utility business, the government had exceeded its Constitutional powers. In February 1936 the Supreme Court ruled that TVA had the authority to generate power at Wilson Dam, to sell the electricity, and to distribute that electricity. In 1939 the Court upheld the constitutionality of the TVA Act.
 * Poor white tenant farmers living in the Tennessee Valley who had to move due to dam construction had negative critiques for the TVA. These farmers were faced with the dilema of whether or not they would find a new home. Men who did not receive employment with the TVA were also not in favor of this government assistance program. This especially affected the poor black farmers who were not hired by the TVA due to their race. Black farmers were also forced to leave their homes due to dam construction.

1) **Political Cartoons:** Study and analyze the two political cartoons and answer the following questions. ([])
 * Identify the title of each political cartoon.
 * List the objects or people you see in the cartoons.
 * Which objects on your list are symbols?
 * What do you think each symbol means?
 * Describe the action taking place in each cartoon.
 * Explain the message of the cartoons.
 * What special interest groups would agree/disagree with the cartoon's message? Why? Would these groups agree or disagree with the TVA? Why or why not?
 * Compare and contrast the messages of the two political cartoons.
 * Title:** [|Franklin's Successful Experiment (//Cartoon//)]
 * Publication:** //Kansas City Star//
 * Source:** Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Cartoon Files
 * [|Date:]** February 18, 1936



March 22, 1938, Pittsburgh Post. //Permission granted by the Pittsburgh Post// 2) **Photo Analysis:** Study the photographs below and answer the questions. ([]
 * Create a three column chart to list the people, objects, and activities in each picture.
 * Based on what you have observed, list three things you might infer from the photographs.
 * Create a T-Chart to compare and contrast the method of washing clothes before and after the TVA.
 * What questions do these photographs raise in your mind?

3) **Exploring the Arts:** Study the art work below portraying life as a TVA worker. Complete the tasks below using this New Deal art piece.
 * Create a creative title for this art piece.
 * Write a short 1*3*1 paragraph describing life as a TVA worker during the 1930s.
 * Go to the following web link []. Create a New Deal art gallery on this website. Choose 8 - 10 art pieces portraying the New Deal's TVA program to place into your art gallery. Type a brief description informing your audience of what is going on in the art pieces in the caption sections.



[] 4) **Letter from Lorena Hickock:** Carefully read the letter below written by Lorena Hickock and answer the questions to help you analyze this primary source.
 * Identify physical qualities of this document.
 * Who is the author of this document? What position do you think the author holds?
 * For what audience was the document written?
 * List four things things the author said that you think are important.
 * Why do you think this document was written?
 * List two things the document tells you about life in the U.S. at the time it was written.
 * What is the author's opinion about the TVA and why?

Lorena Hickok Reports on the State of the Nation
From Lorena Hickok To Harry L. Hopkins Florence, Alabama June 6, 1934

Dear Mr. Hopkins: 
 * 1) A Promised Land, bathed in golden sunlight, is rising out of the grey shadows of want and squalor and wretchedness down here in the Tennessee Valley these days.
 * 2) Ten thousand men are at work, building with timber and steel and concrete the New Deal's most magnificent project, creating an empire with potentialities so tremendous and so dazzling that they make one gasp. I knew very little about the Tennessee Valley Authority when I came down here last week. I spent part of my first day, in Knoxville, reading up on it. I was almost as excited as I used to get over adventure stories when I was a child. This IS an adventure!
 * 3) Since then I have been traveling through the Valley and the state--a couple of days in Knoxville, a trip to the Norris dam and the town of Norris, a day's motoring across to Nashville, stopping enroute to look over a subsistence homestead colony a few miles from the Valley, a day in Nashville, a day's trip down here, visiting with farmers, relief workers, county agents in little towns along the way.
 * 4) Today I saw the Wilson dam and went down into the power house--which is the best way, I found, to get an idea of how big this thing really is--and drove 20 miles on up the river to watch workmen drilling in rock to lay the foundations of the Wheeler dam.
 * 5) I've talked with people who are doing this job, with people who live in the towns and cities that are going to feel the effects of this program, with ordinary citizens, with citizens on relief--as many kinds of people as I could find.
 * 6) They don't all get so excited about it as I do. They criticize some features of the program. I have an impression that thousands of people right here in the Valley don't really know what it is all about. But the people--the people as a whole--are beginning to "feel" already the presence of TVA, even though it hasn't made any dent on our relief rolls.
 * 7) Nearly 10,000 men--about 9,500--are at work in the Valley now, at Norris and Wheeler dams, on various clearing and building projects all over the area.
 * 8) Thousands of them are residents of the Valley, working five and a half hours a day, five days a week, for a really LIVING wage. Houses are going up for them to live in--better houses than they have ever had in their lives before. And in their leisure time they are studying--farming, trades, the art of living, preparing themselves for the fuller lives they are to lead in that Promised Land.
 * 9) You are probably saying, "Oh, come down to earth!" But that's the way the Tennessee Valley affects one these days.
 * 10) Ten thousand men at work may not seem like so many when Tennessee still has a relief case load of 68,000 and Alabama around 80,000. But it's something. And there's no "white collar problem" in Knoxville these days. And people say to you, "Oh, we're lucky down here in Tennessee. TVA's a help!"
 * 11) "Oh, I haven't heard anybody say anything about the Depression for three months," remarked a taxicab driver in Knoxville the other day. "Business is three times as good as it was a year ago. You ought to see the crowds at the ballgames."
 * 12) Over in Nashville the attitude seems to be:
 * 13) "Maybe we don't get so direct a benefit out of TVA as they get in Knoxville, but it will be coming eventually. And in the meantime, at least, Roosevelt is trying. He's doing something!"
 * 14) Another way by which people hereabouts are being made aware of TVA is in the lowering of rates for electricity. They've been forced down already, even where the distribution is still in the hands of privately owned companies.
 * 15) "I put in an electric hot water heater sometime ago," one man told me, "but I haven't been able to use it because it cost too much. But now, with this new rate, I can. I can run that, with all my other equipment--range, iron, mangle, vacuum cleaner, lights, and radio-- for the same cost as I went without it before."
 * 16) Before I leave the Valley, I'm going down to Tupelo, Miss., the first town to start buying its electric power directly from TVA, and see how they get along. Up here, one hears enthusiastic reports.
 * 17) Well.... Tennessee has got a huge job of rehabilitation on her hands. And with TVA setting up standards in rehabilitation, the rest of the state has got a long, long way to go.
 * 18) Out of nearly 70,000 families on relief in Tennessee, probably 30,000 or more live in small towns or in the country. Many of these are in abandoned lumber and mining camps. Most of them who are farmers apparently are living on sub-marginal or marginal land.
 * 19) Fairly typical, for Western Tennessee, I gather, was a district I visited yesterday. Table land. Thin soil. Terrible housing. Illiteracy. Evidence of prolonged undernourishment. No knowledge of how to live decently or farm profitably if they had decent land.
 * 20) "Five years is about as long as you can get any crop on this land," one farmer told me. " Then it's gone and you have to clear some more and start over again."
 * 21) Crops grown on it are stunted. Corn, for instance, grows only about a third as tall there as it does in Iowa. They tell me it isn't even good timber land. Just a thin coating of soil over rock. A county agent said it might make good orchard land, but any farming operation there should be under skilled supervision with authority to make farmers do as they were told.
 * 22) Eastern Tennessee is worse, of course. There you see constantly evidence of what happens when you cut timber off mountain sides and plant crops there. There are great "bald patches" of rock on those mountains!
 * 23) What to do with these people makes a nice little problem. Whether to move them off--and, if so, where to put them--or, on table land, for instance, where with careful and authoritative supervision they might eke out a living, leave them there and take a chance on their being absorbed in the industries that should be attracted down here by the cheap power furnished by TVA.
 * 24) There might be, I should think, the possibility of a sort of temporary supervision. Rehabilitate the present adult generation where they are. Try out orchards instead of corn on the table land, for instance. And have it understood that their children are not to inherit that land, but that it will be taken over by the Government as they die, the Government to pay the heirs for it, either with cash or land somewhere else. The idea was advanced by Grace Falke, Secretary Tugwell's assistant, who has joined me on this trip. Help the parents to get at least a fairly decent living now and do a bang-up job of public health and education on the children.
 * 25) This may sound wild, but I doubt if in Tennessee there is enough good land available for all of them.
 * 26) Near Crossville, for instance, a subsistence homestead unit, with some of the loveliest little houses you ever saw, is being set up on about 12,000 acres of new land. They are starting out to raise mostly vegetables on it. The farm expert in charge [says that the soil] won't stand up under anything heavier, although it's good soil if handled expertly. They haven't been able to dig cellars under those houses because, if you go down 20 inches below the surface, you hit rock! I wonder if any sort of farming can ever be carried on permanently on soil that thin.
 * 27) That homestead unit has the nicest houses I've seen anywhere. They are building them of a beautifully colored rock found on the place. They are grand houses, really. But it's the same old story. Each family moving in there will be somewhere around $2,500 in debt, and any definite plans for enabling those people to pay off those debts aren't in evidence. They seem to be trusting to God--and the Government.
 * 28) Well--so far, Tennessee hasn't got far with any rural rehabilitation program. As you know, they've had a lot of administrative trouble.
 * 29) They've at last got a rural rehabilitation man, out of the agricultural extension service. He's just finding himself. They're not thinking of rural rehabilitation in Tennessee for this year, but next year.
 * 30) And all over the state, in the rural areas, the story is the same--an illiterate, wretched people, undernourished, with standards of living so low that, once on relief, they are quite willing to stay there the rest of their lives. It's a mess.
 * 31) But then--there's TVA. It's coming along. My guess is that, whatever they do or don't do about rural rehabilitation down in Tennessee, in another decade you wouldn't know this country. And the best part of it is that here the Government will have control. There's a chance to create a new kind of industrial life, with decent wages, decent housing. Gosh, what possibilities! You can't feel very sorry for Tennessee when you see that in the offing.

Yours very truly,

__**Works Cited:**__ [] [|www.t][] [|www.topnews.in/usa/ tva-will-increase-rates-20...] [] [] [] []