The Tennessee Valley Authority in the Golden Age of Capitalism (1933-1974)

Adam Benjamin, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is often celebrated as a landmark project in public planning under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. This paper argues that the TVA was not merely a regional development program but a crucial foundation of American capitalism in the mid-twentieth century. Established through the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933, the TVA was granted unprecedented authority to reshape the economic, environmental, and social landscape of a seven-state region. The agency’s early feats, including the construction of twenty hydroelectric dams, transformed the Tennessee Valley into a beacon of cheap electricity and industrial growth. During World War II, TVA power was redirected towards wartime manufacturing, attracting defense industries seeking low energy costs and cheap, nonunion labor. Key installations included the uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Paducah, Kentucky, developed under the Atomic Energy Commission. To meet the insatiable energy demands of the permanent arms economy, the TVA pivoted from hydroelectric generation to coal-fired steam plants, drawing heavily on coal from Central Appalachia. The agency secured cheap coal through purchasing policies, land appropriation, and extractive mining methods that degraded Central Appalachian coalfields and depressed miners’ wages to near-starvation levels. Deploying a world-historical perspective, this paper situates the development of the TVA within the capitalist world-system that, by 1945, revolved around the orbit of the United States. I argue that the TVA governed a regional system of ecologically unequal exchange, whereby raw materials and surplus labor were extracted from an Appalachian internal periphery to subsidize military-industrial expansion in the Tennessee Valley. From this perspective, the TVA’s socio-ecological regime contributed to the material foundations of American hegemony in the mid-twentieth century.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 134. Comparative-Historical Environmental Sociology Part Two: Modernity and its Others