Mr. TVA Grass-Root Development PDF

        
“Mr. TVA”: Grass-Roots Development,

David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall
of the Tennessee Valley Authority
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

as a Symbol for U.S. Overseas
Development, –*
The word “Tennessee” is well known all the way across from the Mediter-
ranean to the Pacific. . . . They know about Tennessee because they have
heard of the Tennessee Valley Authority. It is the Tennessee Valley Author-
ity that fits their needs and will solve many of their basic problems. The TVA
can also be utilized as one of the major influences to turn back the tide of
communism which today threatens to engulf Asia.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, 
TVA are magic letters the world over.
Milwaukee Journal, 
It comes as a surprise to some visitors that the national monument to Franklin

Delano Roosevelt in Washington, D.C. is a hydraulic monument. Throughout,
cascades of water are used as metaphors for the crises confronted by his
administration. At one site the viewer is faced with a controlled stream of water
rushing down a set of stone steps. Etched into a wall next to this sculpture is a
quote by FDR: “It is time to extend planning to a wider field, in this instance
comprehending in one great project many states directly concerned with the
basin of one of our greatest rivers.”
*The author would like to thank Michael Adas, Nick Cullather, David Hamburg, Hiroshi Hori,
Michael Latham, Frank Ninkovich, Sarah Phillips, Noel Pugach, Rosalind A. Rosenberg, Patricia
Rosenfield, Anders Stephanson, and Eric Yellin, as well as the anonymous reviewers at
Diplomatic History, for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The author also expresses
appreciation to the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication.
The ideas presented here have benefited from discussions in the University Seminar on
American Civilization.
. Address of Justice William O. Douglas Before the General Assembly of the State of
Tennessee,  February , Appendix to the Congressional Record, nd Congress,  sess.,  May .
. R. G. Lynch, “TVA’s World Offspring,” Milwaukee Journal,  March .
D H, Vol. , No.  (Summer ). ©  The Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc.,  Main Street, Malden,
MA, , USA and  Cowley Road, Oxford, OX JF, UK.

 :                 
The river is the Tennessee and the “great project” to deliver the planning
he promised was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The conspicuous
placement of the TVA in the monument is a lingering reminder of the power
the concepts behind the institution held through much of the twentieth century.
The multipurpose development program that was the TVA sought to harness
the energy locked in Tennessee River for the benefit of those in the region it
cut through. Dams and other imposing technologies would not only control

flooding and improve navigation on what had been an unpredictable river but
also harvest electricity that could be employed for any array of other purposes.
Added to this were agricultural and educational programs that were meant to
support a larger program of regional modernization. This multipurpose type
of development was attractive for many in the United States and internationally.
This may not have been entirely what FDR intended when he suggested
extending planning to “a wider field.” Nevertheless, the TVA’s appeal extended
far beyond the Depression years, and its example became intertwined with
modernization programs offered by the United States to many parts of the
developing world well into the s.
Today, there is considerable criticism of the multipurpose development so
exemplified by the TVA – “the granddaddy of all regional development
projects,” in the words of one recent scholar on the subject. Many members of
the development community, as well as scholars, find these sorts of efforts
questionable, if not dangerous. They regularly do not deliver on their grand
promises and can have unintended and drastic social, environmental, and
economic impacts. Too often, detractors assert, the imposition of these vast
undertakings hurt the people in their path as the grand, “high-modernist”
visions at the core of these programs ignore people’s needs, values, experiences,
and knowledge.
This is a well-founded critique, but it does not fully explain why large-scale
multipurpose development found such a powerful and enduring emblem in the
TVA. The TVA concept was not simply a way to deliver technologies to the
American South or any number of regions across the globe to help them
modernize. It was seen as a means to achieve development democratically.
People in the United States and around the world put their faith in the TVA
idea because of its promise to reconcile the impersonal (and, in some contexts,
threatening) forces of applied technology, scientific management, and planning
. I use the terms “modernization” and “development,” as many during the period discussed
did, as nearly synonymous terms. Nevertheless, there is debate over definitions of the terms, as
both can be used to describe far-reaching and continuous processes of change in social, economic,
cultural, and political spheres of societies. However, today modernization usually implies what is
“up to date” as well as Western and involves changes that are often seen in contrast to previous
“traditional” systems. See David Harrison, The Sociology of Modernization and Development (London,
), –.
. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New Haven, ), .
. Ibid., , , , –; World Commission on Dams, Dams and Development: A New
Framework for Decision-Making (Sterling, VA, ), –.
“Mr. TVA” : 
with an inclusive, grass-roots emphasis on democratic participation by the

people affected by the programs. This philosophy, refined and clearly articu-
lated by David Lilienthal, one of the TVA’s first directors, was the major reason
for the institution’s allure.
It was an attraction that carried over into international affairs during the
Cold War, where the sort of modernization with which the TVA was associated
emerged as a key part of U.S. strategy in the “Third World.” The attention the

TVA received during the Depression and World War II made it an easily
recognizable symbol for the U.S. government as well as for nongovernmental
groups carrying out modernization programs postwar. Domestically, compari-
sons to the TVA made the various projects the U.S. government proposed
overseas explicable to American audiences. More importantly, the democratic
ethos of the TVA helped to set U.S.-sponsored development apart from that
offered by the communists. The Soviet Union, and later the People’s Republic
of China, showed themselves to be masters of various technologies, including
those concerning dams and electrification. Because of these capabilities, they,
too, could promise a rising standard of living to peoples in the developing world.
However, according to the Americans, communist methods could not promise
equal voice, participation, or share in that development – things that were
assured by the grass-roots orientation of the programs the United States
advocated.
The TVA model reached its high tide during the Vietnam War. The United
States sought to show that its involvement in Southeast Asia was positive
through the high-profile support of an extensive regional project to develop
the Mekong River. A variety of individuals compared the benefits of American-
led development of the Mekong to the TVA. Lyndon Johnson brought in
Lilienthal himself to oversee aspects of the Mekong’s development, all to show
U.S. involvement in the region could have positive economic and social impacts.
Yet, in its application to the world, grass-roots development based on the
TVA retained many of the failings that beset the New Deal program. Without
denying the tangible accomplishments of the TVA, it must be acknowledged
that there was a disconnection between the grass-roots ideology and the actual
operation of the organization. This was true in its overseas application as well.
The TVA model often could not accommodate the realities of implementing
these programs with its rhetoric of inclusion. It was this failure that helped bring
the TVA model to grief in the face of the demands of the war in Southeast Asia
and a rising environmental movement that highlighted development’s ecologi-
cal and human costs. As the perception of development changed in the s,
the TVA model lost its favored position.
The TVA’s popularity as a means to achieve international development was
linked to ambitions to modernize the American South in the first three decades
of the twentieth century. The authority emerged from attempts to develop a
section of the United States commonly seen as backward, the existing social
and economic relationships in which could be casually referred to in the mass
 :                 

The Heavenly City – Lilienthal at the Wilson Dam, Alabama,  (Tennessee Valley Authority)
media as “feudalism.” The TVA’s direct inspiration came from the various
plans to turn the Wilson Dam in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, into a mechanism
for the economic improvement of the Tennessee Valley. The dam, originally
planned to facilitate the production of explosives for World War I, had been
completed too late to play a part in the conflict. In the early s, industrialist
Henry Ford considered buying the dam and making it the keystone of a
commercial plan to create a “new Eden of our Mississippi Valley.” After this
scheme foundered, progressives continued to push for the federal government
to put the dam’s electric power generation capacity to public use, only to have
this idea fought to a standstill by private utilities.
Franklin Roosevelt eventually broke this logjam. After a personal visit to
Muscle Shoals, Roosevelt put forward a sweeping plan in  as part of his “First
New Deal.” Although inspired by earlier programs proposed by Senator
George W. Norris for the public use of the Alabama dam, FDR’s plan went far
beyond Muscle Shoals. It would create a regional program to build more dams
for flood control and power generation, generate and distribute hydroelectric
. Paul Hutchinson, “Revolution by Electricity,” Scribner’s Magazine (October ): –.

. David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, – (Cambridge,
MA, ), .
. David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, – (New
York, ), –. For the pre-TVA plans for the development of the Tennessee River and the
Muscle Shoals dam, see Paul K. Conkin, “Intellectual and Political Roots,” in TVA: Fifty Years of
Grass-Roots Bureaucracy, ed. Erwin C. Hargrove and Paul K. Conkin (Chicago, ), –.
“Mr. TVA” : 
power, produce fertilizer, support agricultural programs, combat soil erosion

and deforestation, and dig an inland waterway on the Tennessee River. Essen-
tially, it was a massive program for the modernization of a swath of the American
South, to be overseen by a public corporation: the Tennessee Valley Authority.
From the beginning, how the TVA was to carry out these plans raised
controversy. It drew fire not only from the utilities it was competing with
directly but also from those who deplored its government-sponsored planning,

which was seen as an overture to state socialism. However, in the valley itself
there was some apprehension, but more often there was hope that the plan
would bring needed economic opportunity. Nationally, progressives wel-
comed the TVA – their most powerful vision of a “Heavenly City,” in the words
of William Leuchtenberg – as a means to highlight a collection of reform ideas,
from scientific planning to social engineering.
The TVA received a similarly warm reception from those working on interna-
tional development projects in the s. Even before the advent of the TVA,
numerous American organizations saw multipurpose development projects as
a means to solve social problems abroad. Many of these groups shared a
perspective held by most American engineers and planners at the time. They
saw rivers and other natural systems anywhere as vast, untapped sources of
potential energy that, if harnessed by technology, would provide irrigation,
electric power, or other commodities that would further connected develop-
ment projects. Accordingly, the New Deal experiment fell on fertile ground
in the world of overseas development.
The two private institutions with the largest overseas development pro-
grams, the China International Famine Relief Commission (CIFRC) and the
Rockefeller Foundation, were struck in the s by the potential of the TVA
to instruct their programs, which emphasized the modernization of aspects of
Chinese society. Rockefeller Foundation officers directly compared its own
efforts for “rural reconstruction” in China with the ongoing New Deal project
in the American South. Differences between programs in these two parts of the
world were felt to be in “degree and not kind,” and clear similarities were seen
in their “principles, objectives, and obstacles.” Throughout the late s and
s, the foundation sent a number of Chinese engineers and agriculturists to
. “Tennessee Valley Authority Act,”  May , New Deal Network,  December ,
http://newdeal.feri.org/acts/us.htm (last accessed  February ).
. Nye, Electrifying America, –.
. “Roosevelt’s Development Plan Seen as Boon to South,” Greensboro Daily News,  April .
. William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, – (New York, ),
; Dewey W. Grantham, “TVA and the Ambiguity of American Reform” in TVA, ed. Hargrove
and Conkin, .
. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, ),
–; J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century
World (New York, ), –.
. J. B. Grant, “Tennessee Valley Authority,”  December , box , RG ., Series ,
Rockefeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, New York (hereafter cited as RAC).
 :                 
Tennessee to witness the accomplishments of the New Deal effort. Rockefel-

ler’s example of education (or re-education) of Asians through the model of
the TVA was to be repeated with regularity throughout the coming decades.
Within the CIFRC in the s, there was also considerable interest in the
potential of the New Deal. On a personal visit to Tennessee in , the CIFRC’s
chief engineer, Oliver J. Todd, was impressed by the TVA’s unique use of
technology for “revamping the whole life of this broad region.” He carried a

belief back to China that “Roosevelt democracy” showed the best way for China
out of its present difficulties to a modern, healthy state.
Much of the domestic and international interest in the TVA could be linked
to the energy of one of the authority’s directors, David Lilienthal. Described
as a “wonder boy,” the youthful Lilienthal was not only a fine administrator but
also someone who knew how to motivate supporters. Lilienthal’s activities
made the organization a powerful symbol of the New Deal as well as of the
benefits brought by modernization based on large-scale technological programs
and scientific planning.
The son of an Indiana shopkeeper, Lilienthal was no stranger to reform. After
graduating from Harvard Law School in , where he was a student of Felix
Frankfurter, he cut his teeth in Chicago with eminent labor lawyer Donald
Richberg. His progressive work there and on public utilities questions brought
him attention and eventually an appointment to Wisconsin’s Public Service
Commission in . Throughout, Lilienthal remained loyal to his Brandeisian
background – skeptical of distant, central authority but nevertheless accepting
an activist government as a positive force. Such a view and his experiences fit
well in the atmosphere of the early Roosevelt administration and were reasons
for his selection in  as one of the directors of the newly created TVA.
Perhaps Lilienthal’s greatest accomplishment during his tenure with the
TVA was his articulation of a clear philosophy for the organization. The essence
of this vision was grass-roots democracy, a theme popular with many during
the New Deal. The more utopian elements of the vision were actually the
products of Arthur E. Morgan, one of Lilienthal’s fellow directors and bureau-
cratic rivals at the TVA. Lilienthal cribbed some of these ideas and effectively
. Favrot to Gunn,  March , box  and Interview (Leonard S. L. Hsu),  August ,
box ; A. R. Mann to Gordon R. Clapp,  May , box , RG . Projects, Series  China, RAC.
. Roscoe C. Martin, TVA and International Technical Assistance: A Report to the Board of Directors
and the General Manager Tennessee Valley Authority (Syracuse, ), ; Knoxville Journal,  October
. By the s, over , international visitors visited the TVA annually to view first-hand
how planning and engineering were reconciled within an American, democratic framework.
. Todd to Snow,  June , box , Oliver J. Todd Papers, Hoover Institution on War
Revolution and Peace, Stanford University (hereafter cited as HI); Oliver J. Todd, Two Decades in
China (Peking, ), –.
. “Digest of TVA,” September–October , box , RG . Projects, Series , RAC.
. Steven M. Neuse, David E. Lilienthal: The Journey of an American Liberal (Knoxville, ), 
and chs. –.
. Daniel T. Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, ),
–; and Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt, .
. Roy Talbert, Jr., FDR’s Utopian: Arthur Morgan of the TVA (Jackson, ), –.
“Mr. TVA” : 
tailored them for public consumption. However, it was not a case of borrowing
concepts wholesale. Lilienthal meshed these and other ideas with his own
beliefs that the TVA’s programs were means to allow the inhabitants of the
valley to “change their thinking,” thereby permitting them to unleash their
“latent abilities.”
Lilienthal synthesized these existing ideas into what was to become a
fundamental part of the TVA creed in a speech before the Southern Political

Science Association in . As the United States was a large and diverse country,
its central government was bound to suffer from a “lack of knowledge of local
conditions.” In view of this, bureaucracies centered in Washington had the
potential, over the long-term, to be a threat to democracy. However, the answer
was not to limit the authority of the government, but to change the way in which
its powers were exercised. A decentralized administration of federal functions
could overcome the dangers of a top-heavy and overcentralized bureaucracy.
Lilienthal saw the TVA as the boldest and best example of this decentralization.
As a matter of course, he claimed, its operations reached far down into the
“grass roots,” allowing decisions to be made in the field as well as utilizing local
people and institutions in its programs. Administrative agility within the TVA,
unthinkable in a centralized bureaucracy, meant technology and expertise
could quickly and easily be dispersed for use by ordinary people. Lilienthal
was clear that “cookie-cutter” copies of the TVA could not simply be trans-
ferred anywhere they might be needed. The point lay in the basic grass-roots
concepts behind the institution. These ideas, because of their decentralized and
inclusive nature, had the potential to be applied in a variety of places and
situations.
Lilienthal’s philosophy resonated with a collection of reformers and tech-
nocrats. The depression set off a search for ideas to deal with the economic
crisis. Historian and critic Charles Beard, who was in the ranks of those
captivated by the effect of technology on the American republic, was quick to
notice Lilienthal’s formulation. Beard thought that science and technology had
wrought a revolution, the total nature of which meant that contemporary
“disputes about democracy . . . creak with rust.” He felt Americans needed to
. Erwin C. Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority, –
(Princeton, ), , –.
. Quoted in John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York, ), .
. David E. Lilienthal, “The TVA: An Experiment in the ‘Grass Roots’ Administration of
Federal Functions,”  November , box , David E. Lilienthal Papers, Mudd Library, Prince-
ton University (hereafter cited as MLP). For a later and broader discussion of this concept, see
David E. Lilienthal, “The TVA and Decentralization,” Survey Graphic,  June , New Deal
Network, http://newdeal.feri.org/texts/.htm (last accessed  February ).
. Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage: Sociological Essays and Journeys (New Brunswick, NJ, ),
–; William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocracy Movement, –
(Berkeley, ); Nye, Electrifying America, –.
. Charles A. Beard and William Beard, American Leviathan: The Republic in the Machine Age
(New York, ), –; John Jordan, Machine Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism,
– (Chapel Hill, ), –.
 :                 
take into account the new social and political landscape constructed by the
forces of science and technology and saw the concepts within Lilienthal’s
“Grass Roots” speech as a means to reconcile questions of state administration
of technology with the needs of popular government. Appreciation of Lilien-
thal and his ideas did not stop with Beard: others, including Stuart Chase, Max
Lerner, and Felix Frankfurter, as well as Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, found
the grass-roots concept compelling. The president’s opinion of Lilienthal was

such that during one of the TVA’s many administrative feuds FDR informed
Arthur E. Morgan that failing to reappoint Lilienthal might be seen as acting
against the principles for which his presidency stood.
This fascination with coupling democratic ideals with planning continued
through World War II. After assuming the chairmanship of the TVA in ,
Lilienthal broadened his thinking to contend with the international problem
of development. In the midst of the conflict, he wrote: “There seems to be a
definite sequence in history in the change from primitive or nonindustrial
conditions to more highly developed modern industrial conditions. Whether
all of those steps have to be taken and all the intervening mistakes made is open
to question. . . . Don’t we have enough control over our destinies to short-cut
those wasted steps?”
Toward the end of the struggle, Lilienthal gave his answer to these questions
with TVA: Democracy on the March, first published in  and reprinted in several
editions. The book was an evolution of ideas articulated in his “Grass Roots”
speech, but Lilienthal explicitly extended his ideas to the entire world. It has
been called a masterpiece of American rhetoric and the chief expression of the
organizational ideas – and myths – around the TVA. TVA: Democracy on the
March extolled the authority as an example for the massive task of reconstruc-
tion. Because the TVA spoke in “a tongue that is universal, a language of things
close to the lives of people” it was bound to have an appeal. But this was not an
appeal based on simple material development. The TVA idea promised all
peoples the possibility of grass-roots democratic participation in technical
programs which would assure development would be done by the people, not
for them. Each variant of the “public development corporation” built on
. Charles A. Beard, “Administration, A Foundation of Government,”  December ,

box , Lilienthal Papers, MLP; and David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. I,
The TVA Years, – (New York, ), , , . Shared perspectives built a friendship
between the two men, and Beard provided preliminary comments for Lilienthal’s  book on
the TVA.
. Neuse, David E. Lilienthal, –. For Stuart Chase’s opinions on the promise of the TVA,
see Stuart Chase, “TVA: The New Deal’s Greatest Asset. Part I: Landscape and Background,” The
Nation,  June , New Deal Network, http://www.newdeal.feri.org/texts/.htm, (last accessed
 February ).
. Roosevelt to Morgan,  May , box , Subject Files, President’s Secretary’s File,
Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.
. Quoted in Charles Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American Inter-
national Economic Policy after World War II,” International Organization  (Autumn, ): –,
.
. Neuse, David E. Lilienthal, ; Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, .
Democracy on the march, literally – the cover of David Lilienthal’s book, TVA: Democracy on the
“Mr. TVA” : 
March
 :                 
TVA-style practices would reflect the needs and desires of particular local
peoples and situations. Such methods assured a just framework in which
technical assistance could be provided to targeted areas.
Lilienthal also saw the TVA as an effective response to a world in the throes
of decolonialization. In his view, the TVA had been a tool against colonialism
(which he defined as the exploitation of hinterlands by a center) within the
United States. Successful programs in the Tennessee Valley provided a rising

tide of economic development that lifted all boats. This exposed the biased
policies and transportation rates that kept the South and West subordinate to
the Northeast as fearful and unnecessary. From the Tennessee Valley it was
only a short leap to the rest of the world. To prevent global exploitation of the
many by an elite few, the TVA could provide an example of inclusive develop-
ment that would allow people local control over their own economic futures
while providing for economic growth. By using this example from “our own
backyard . . . we can best prove our aims for the wide world, and best learn the
great truth of universal interdependence.”
Despite all the hopes Lilienthal and others attached to the TVA, in its actual
operations it did not live up to its philosophy. The authority’s flagship programs
of agricultural improvement and electrification achieved definite successes in
the valley. These accomplishments aside, operationally the TVA was often
neither as original nor as inclusive as its boosters asserted.
Farm extension programs conducted by the TVA produced remarkable
results in land conservation and fertilizer use. Still, little difference existed
between the TVA’s work and the extension efforts of other government agen-
cies. Despite similarities, there was little cooperation between the TVA and
these other bodies. The TVA also had a habit of demonstrating new technolo-
gies that were difficult for smaller and poorer farms to apply. African-American
farmers were largely excluded from these programs, reflecting the general
treatment they received from the TVA, despite its frequent references to social
and economic justice. On top of this, there was little analysis of programs and
their results because of the staff’s conviction that their grass-roots approach
offered the most effective ways to help farmers. Such an outlook made it difficult
to find and correct failures.
The production and distribution of electric power proved to be perhaps the
most visible activity of the TVA. Power cooperatives put in place by the TVA
increased power consumption while reducing prices. Lilienthal earned credit
. David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March, rev. ed. (New York, ), –
(emphasis in original). Ideas quoted here did not change from the first edition, published in .
. Ibid., –.
. Charles H. Houston and John P. Davis, “TVA: Lily-White,” Crisis (October ): –,
; Cranston Clayton, “The TVA and the Race Problem,” Opportunity (April ), New Deal
Network, http://newdeal.feri.org/texts/.htm (last accessed  February ); and Nancy L.
Grant, TVA and African Americans: Planning for the Status Quo (Philadelphia, ).
. Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, –; Norman Wengert, Valley of Tomorrow: The TVA and
Agriculture (Knoxville, ), –.
“Mr. TVA” : 
for getting companies to market affordable appliances to the people in the

valley, allowing them to put the electricity to personal or community use.
Nevertheless, there was not as much participation in the authority’s electric
power policy as might have been claimed. The TVA’s electrification program
set rates without input from the federal or state governments, and its distribu-
tion network allowed no elected officials on its boards, leaving the organization,
in some respects, unaccountable to locally elected authorities.

Electricity production skewed toward heavy industry in the years preceding
World War II. Indeed, a virtual partnership emerged between the TVA and
Alcoa Aluminum in the course of the conflict. The TVA increased its power
production massively from  onward, feeding critical war industries from
chemicals to aircraft production and, most of all, the Manhattan Project.
Extraction of the uranium isotopes for an atom bomb required enormous
amounts of electricity. The choice of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as the site for a
massive plant to produce the fissionable material was due to the bountiful
current produced by the TVA. Power production focused on industry even-
tually became an end in itself rather than simply an offshoot of other programs,
leaving some to feel the TVA had moved away from its origins. A sign of that
occurred in , when the TVA pushed through the Douglas Dam in Tennes-
see over the opposition of farmers and others affected by its construction.
Adding to this perception was the displacement of perhaps , persons in
the course of the TVA’s various construction projects.
While proponents of the organization often spoke of the TVA as a symbol
of the potential of comprehensive regional planning, the administration fre-
quently emphasized the process through which it solved problems rather than
any general plan. In fact, by  the idea of comprehensive regional planning
had essentially been abandoned by the leadership. Lilienthal preferred to
describe the TVA’s operations as “pragmatic,” meaning that planning was
oriented toward particular problems rather than any master plan. With regards
to regional planning, this meant the promotion of economic growth for a section
of the South, rather than any holistic, interconnected effort. As one historian
put it, the TVA was a bundle of solutions in search of problems.
The point here is not to detract from the real accomplishments hammered
out in the Tennessee Valley, but rather to show a larger organizational myth at
work. The TVA was new to American life and did not easily find a niche. It was
. Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, , –.

. Neuse, David E. Lilienthal, .
. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, ), –; and Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear, –.
. Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, .
. William U. Chandler, The Myth of TVA: Conservation and Development in the Tennessee Valley,
– (Cambridge, MA, ), ; Bruce Rich, Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental
Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development (Boston, ), .
. C. Herman Pritchett, The Tennessee Valley Authority: A Study in Public Administration (Chapel
Hill, ), –; Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, –.
 :                 
bitterly opposed by power companies threatened by its operations and those

ideologically hostile to what it stood for, making it, in some views, a microcosm
of the struggles over the New Deal. But the rhetoric of grass-roots democracy,
used to justify its operations and existence in these clashes, did not often match
reality in the authority’s operations. This was a sign to many scholars that
concepts brandished by Lilienthal and others were actually about siting the
TVA within public debates, defending the organization from its numerous

critics, maintaining its autonomy, and positioning it among similar government
programs. The grass-roots philosophy encapsulated by Lilienthal’s statements
and given the potential for global application by Democracy on the March would
play a similar role of justifying and positioning U.S. overseas development
programs in the postwar period. It would also suffer from similar shortcomings
in bringing the promise of grass-roots rhetoric into actual practice.
The demands of waging a world war may have marked an end of New
Deal reform at home, as “Dr. Win-the-War” came to replace “Dr. New Deal,”
but in the reform movement Americans found a new export commodity with
international appeal in their Depression-era medicine for the Tennessee
Valley. The appeal of TVA-style overseas development, present in the s,
expanded dramatically in the s, in no small measure due to the formulations
of Lilienthal. The grass-roots TVA model picked up a cross-section of domestic
and international adherents who largely overlooked any shortcomings within
the organization. Midway through the war, the TVA became a great hope for
those grappling with the looming concern of postwar reconstruction.
By , some , translated copies of Lilienthal’s book had been distrib-
uted by the Office of War Information (OWI) in China alone. American advisors
there soon found the Chinese quoting the “principles” of Democracy on the March
to them. This interest probably had a connection to the hopes of the Nation-
alist regime for help in postwar reconstruction, which included plans for a
“Yangtze Valley Authority.” The TVA was so popular with the OWI and State
Department that they considered sending Lilienthal himself to China on a
speaking tour to help energize reconstruction efforts.
. Richard A. Colignon, Power Plays: Critical Events in the Institutionalization of the Tennessee
Valley Authority (Albany, ), –.
. Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization
(Berkeley, ), –, ; Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, –; Neuse, David E. Lilienthal, .
. Quoted in Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New
York, ), .
. Lilienthal, Journals, vol. I, , .
. Chinese News Service Press Release, “Y.V.A. Project to be Carried out on Smaller Scale
Within Six Years,”  December , box , John D. Sumner Papers, Harry S. Truman Library,
Independence, Missouri (hereafter cited as HTL); Arthur N. Young, China and the Helping Hand,
– (Cambridge, MA, ), .
. Lockhart to Collado,  April , Office Files of the Assist. Sec. of State for Economic
Affairs, –, and the Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, –, box , Record
Group , HTL.
“Mr. TVA” : 
In Europe, British planners floated ideas for a “DVA” in the Danube Valley
after the war, although this proposal did not escape the withering attack of an
eloquent foe of planning, F. A. Hayek. This criticism notwithstanding, to many
abroad the TVA came to stand for the multiple uses of a single river to fulfill
human needs. More importantly, in the words of popular English science writer
Julian Huxley, it was a “symbol of a new possibility for the democratic coun-
tries – the possibility of obtaining the efficiency of a coordinated plan without

authoritarian regimentation,” making its appearance of “first-class importance
in the evolution of human society.” Before the end of the war, the International
Labour Office of Canada commissioned a major study on the lessons of the
TVA for international programs, concluding that it would be an excellent tool
to provide technical assistance to war-damaged regions. The tirelessly progres-
sive vice president of the United States, Henry A. Wallace, was more blunt. For
the world to effectively confront the task of reconstruction, he stated, “there
must be an international bank and an international TVA.”
Following the war, there were many in the United States who saw the TVA
as one of the brightest lights that lingered from the reform movement of the
s. Journalist John Gunther thought the TVA “proves that the idea of unified
development works” and that the possible applications of its concept were
“almost boundless . . . its horizon could be illimitable.” This was hardly
surprising for “the greatest single American invention of this century, the
biggest contribution the United States has yet made to society in the modern
world.” Historian Henry Steele Commager also embraced the authority,
describing it as “probably the greatest peacetime achievement of twentieth-
century America.” What it had accomplished he described in breathless prose
as “a triumph [proponents] had scarcely dared to anticipate. . . . It was politics,
but in the Aristotelian sense of the word. . . . It was a shining example of William
James’s moral equivalent of war.” The positioning of the TVA as a fulfillment
of the promise of the s reform effort was part of a larger postwar “recon-
struction” of the New Deal where liberals preferred to focus on the movement’s
particular successes rather than its failures in achieving broader goals. Its new
historical status provided the TVA further credibility when it was invoked to
justify public or private development ventures.
In the years following the war, Lilienthal maintained the personal cachet
built up during his tenure with the TVA. The TVA’s connection to the
. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, ), –.

. Julian Huxley, TVA: Adventure in Planning (London, ), , .
. Herman Finer, The TVA: Lessons for International Application (Montreal, ), i. On Wallace’s
view of how American “know-how” could contribute to an international New Deal for the postwar
world, see Mark L. Kleinman, A World of Hope, a World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and
American Liberalism (Columbus, ), –.
. Gunther, Inside U.S.A., .
. Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and
Character since the s (New Haven, ), –.
. Brinkley, End of Reform, .
 :                 
Manhattan Project made him a logical choice to be a pathfinder for the

uncharted issues around atomic energy. “Living with the atom” over four years
led to the  “Acheson-Lilienthal Report,” a blueprint for the international
control of nuclear energy and directorship of the Atomic Energy Commis-
sion. Despite his position, or perhaps because of it, Lilienthal was unable to
avoid the rampant anticommunism that beset American political life, facing
accusations by congressional opponents that he harbored communist sympa-

thies. Nevertheless, Lilienthal and his ideas maintained their prominence.
This carried over into the realm of foreign affairs. Books and ideas of his were
circulating at high levels in the State Department by the early s.
The TVA-style development that Lilienthal and others advocated struck a
strong chord with U.S. planners, not only for its emphasis on multipurpose
technological programs in less developed areas but also for the singular Ameri-
can nature of the program. In the late s, policymakers in the government
were comprehending the role economic development of newly independent
areas of the globe would play in American Cold War strategy. In Europe,
American planners, flushed with the success of the New Deal, grounded the
new European Recovery Plan (the Marshall Plan) in the concept of “produc-
tionism.” Informed by the experience of the Depression, reconstruction activi-
ties in Europe encouraged collaboration among government, business, and
labor. Such cooperation assured that harmful disputes and competition over
the fruits of industrial production would be curtailed. Contentious issues were
to be solved by supposedly impartial forces of engineering and scientific
management, as well as state and regional planning. The result would be
increased productivity that would provide economic benefits for all which, in
turn, would ease social divisions. There was a hope that something like the
Marshall Plan could be transferred to strategic areas in Asia where economic
growth was needed not only for recovery but to inspire economic stability and
stifle the potential of communist subversion. However, planners within the
State Department were clear that the concepts that had worked so well in
Europe could not be simply injected into Asia. Americans assured themselves
that Asians lacked the capabilities to master the technological aspects of
. Committee on Atomic Energy, A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy (Wash-
ington, D.C, ).
. Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, th ed. (New York, ), .
. Lilienthal to U. Alexis Johnson,  November , Records of the Bureau of Far Eastern
Affairs, Records of the Directors of Northeast Asia Affairs, Records of Northeast Asian Affairs
relating to Foreign Policy Decisions, Records of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs (Briefing
Books), –, reel , RG  General Records of the U.S. Department of State, National Archives,
College Park, Maryland (hereafter cited as NAMD).
. Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe,
– (New York, ), –; and Maier, “Politics of Productivity,” –.
. Nitze to Butterworth,  October , “A Coordinated Economic Policy for the Far East,”
reel , RG , International Conferences, Commissions, and Exhibitions, –, NAMD.
“Mr. TVA” : 
modern society and therefore needed American technical assistance to fill in

the gaps in their competencies.
The high profile means to deliver this technical assistance came with the
unveiling of Harry Truman’s “Point Four” program. In the fourth point of his
 inaugural address, the president proposed a “bold new program” to help
the peoples of the developing world. It promised technical assistance to achieve
the economic growth that assured social stability and, therefore, immunity to

the lure of communism. In pitching Point Four to the public, Truman was
quite comfortable equating the foreign-assistance program with the TVA,
noting: “We [the United States] are somewhat famous for . . . technical
knowledge. What I propose to do is to present to the peoples of the world that
know-how. . . . That is what Point Four means. . . . I see immense undeveloped
rivers and valleys all over the world that would make TVAs. . . . All it needs . . . is
somebody who knows the technical approach to their development.” The history
and experience of the TVA showed it to be the best mechanism to transfer
American technology and develop local capacities to press modernization
forward. Truman’s comments show how quickly the TVA became, in many
circles, synonymous with foreign assistance, which itself was an integral part
of a Cold War strategy that found development essential.
In the months after Truman’s speech, there was a chorus of support from
various quarters, with the loudest voices coming from liberals and New Dealers
who saw the program as an extension of the promise of the New Deal to the
world. Their embrace of international technical assistance was part of a broader
liberal acceptance of Truman’s leadership and Cold War policies. Point Four
itself inspired an almost religious fervor among the editorialists at Chicago
Sun-Times. Quoting St. Matthew, they asserted that Truman’s program was
“concerned first with righteousness and second with material cost.” The editors
were certain the plan would “pay off” for the entire world if the United States
remained loyal to the principles “which have made it great.” These had not
been part of the speech itself, but had nevertheless been enunciated just a few
days before the inaugural by Lilienthal. He had stated that America’s strength
was not “in material things at all,” as “the well-springs of our vitality are ethical
and spiritual.” The Sun-Times seconded Lilienthal’s assertion, as it was seen to
be not mere philosophical musing but grounded in his practical experiences.
. Memo on Far Eastern Economic Policy,  March , U.S. Delegation Subject Files,
–, reel , RG , NAMD.
. Harry S. Truman, “Inaugural Address,”  January , Public Papers of the Presidents of the
United States, Harry S. Truman, , –. See also Thomas G. Paterson, Meeting the Communist
Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York, ), –; and Sergei Shenin, The United States and the Third
World: The Origins of Postwar Relations and the Point Four Program (Huntington, NY, ).
. Harry S. Truman, “Remarks at the Women’s National Democratic Club Dinner,”  No-
vember , Public Papers, Harry S. Truman, , , and “Point IV,” Fortune (February ): –.
. Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the
Cold War (Stanford, ), .
. Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the s and s,
d ed. (Hanover, NH, ), –.
 :                 
The validity of his vision came from an understanding that the TVA, while a
massive technological accomplishment, was “built on an idea, an ethical idea.”
The New Republic, long an advocate of the TVA domestically (although not
always of Truman), joined the choir in support of international technical
assistance. As “nearly all countries are backward, from the American standard
of mass production,” the large and complicated technologies common in the
United States could not simply be transferred lock, stock, and barrel. There

was a call to provide technology on a smaller scale, tailored to the needs of
developed countries. The Point Four proposal acknowledged this reality and
could take its operational methods from the example of the TVA, which
represented the finest “American ‘know-how’ available for export.” The inter-
national appeal of Democracy on the March had helped the TVA “become our
best-known, most highly appreciated institution.” Because of this acceptance
and its adaptability to programs of various sizes and locales, TVA-style devel-
opment around the globe promised to serve as the “foundation on which to
base all phases of an enriched and growing economy.”
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., also chimed in with his support for international
development. In his call to arms, The Vital Center, he saw the importance of the
TVA in the confrontation with the Soviet Union. He believed that the TVA’s
example showed how the state could effectively engage in economic programs
without becoming overcentralized and a “total planner.” These lessons could
play an even more important role outside the United States in a world
experiencing a “social revolution.” The postwar wave of decolonization had
given the USSR considerable status with former colonial peoples because of
its stands for racial equality and against imperialism. The democratic and
inclusive model of the TVA allowed the United States to set its greatest asset,
its “technological dynamism,” against the “political dynamism” of the Soviets.
Schlesinger felt that
[n]o other people in the world approach the Americans in mastery of the
new magic of science and technology. Our engineers can transform arid
plains or poverty-stricken river valleys into wonderlands of vegetation and
power. . . . The Tennessee Valley Authority is a weapon which, if properly
employed, might outbid all the social ruthlessness of the Communists for
the support of the peoples of Asia.
Walter Lippmann echoed Schlesinger’s point of view, believing that TVA-
inspired programs highlighted the vital difference between U.S. and communist
development styles. The Soviet model promised rapid economic growth, but
with the penalty of authoritarian regimentation. Lippmann thought the U.S.
model – illustrated by a  United Nations (UN) survey mission report for
. “O Ye of Little Faith!,” Chicago Sun-Times,  January . The quote from St. Matthew
was “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
. Morris Llewellyn Cooke, “Down to Earth with Point Four,” New Republic ( July ): –.
. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, ), –, –.
“Mr. TVA” : 
the development of the Middle East led by Lilienthal’s successor at the TVA,
Gordon Clapp – showed that modernization could be reconciled with popular
government.
As technical assistance became an increasingly important component of the
confrontation with the Soviet Union, the TVA example provided a means to
set American development programs apart from communist counterparts. At
first glance, large, multipurpose technical programs based on government-

dominated planning looked similar to Soviet industrialization efforts. Seen
through this lens, New Deal efforts at bringing electric power to the countryside
through the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) and the TVA came
uncomfortably close to Lenin’s dictum that “Communism is Soviet power plus the
electrification of the whole country.”  
However, to supporters of U.S. foreign aid, Lilienthal’s TVA served to
highlight the differences between the development concepts pushed by each
camp. While both the United States and the Soviet Union might see technology
embodied by dams or electric power plants as the means to modernize societies,
the American variant could be billed as faithfully democratic. Communist
exertions were dominated by a state that conscribed how the fruits of the
program would be used. Using the TVA as a model, America’s new technical
assistance programs could be inclusive, assuring that communities and indi-
viduals would be franchised in their administration. This made any American
undertaking necessarily more flexible, alert, competitive, and, by extension,
effective than their communist competitors. It also reassured American liber-
als, who had only recently been roused to the dangers of centralized state
planning by the excesses of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, that they were
not exporting a potentially totalitarian concept.
Lilienthal joined the ranks of these new development efforts, albeit in a
private capacity. In , he helped to found a consultant group, Development
and Resources (D&R). This company advised Colombia, Puerto Rico, Iran, and
eventually South Vietnam on a number of modernization projects. The com-
pany sought to make a profit by putting U.S. “government development expe-
rience” accentuated with “private business and financial talents” to work in
. Walter Lippman, “Two Approaches to the Misery of Asia,” Washington Post,  January .
See also Final Report of the United Nations Economic Survey Mission for the Middle East (Lake Success,
NY, ).
. V. I. Lenin, “Report of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee and the Council of
the People’s Commissars on the Home and Foreign Policy at the Eighth All-Russia Congress of
Soviets,”  December , in V. I. Lenin, On the Development of Heavy Industry and Electrification
(Moscow, ),  (emphasis in original). See also Robert Lewis, Science and Industrialization in the
USSR (London, ); Anne D. Rassweiler, The Generation of Power: The History of the Dneprostroi (New
York, ), –. Contrary to what Americans asserted, Lenin hoped that the dissemination of
his  electrification plan to schools and power stations would provide people in the Soviet Union
with a grass-roots means to learn about and participate in this technological change that would
necessarily lead not only to economic development but to social revolution as well.
. Willard R. Espy, Bold New Program (New York, ), , –.
. Pells, The Liberal Mind, –; and Brinkley, End of Reform, –.
 :                 
promoting modernization around the world. Much of D&R’s work centered on

water-resource development, as most of the executive leadership of the com-
pany was drawn directly from the offices of the TVA. Private life did not lessen
Lilienthal’s prominence as a spokesman for international development. In fact,
after leaving government service he elaborated his ideas on the subject, and his
new enterprise provided the grist for the further explication of the TVA as a
means to develop the world.

Through the s the fundamental goal of modernization for Lilienthal
remained the release of the “creative energies of men.” The critical accom-
plishment was not the transformation of people’s physical surroundings or their
material well-being but the alteration of their basic outlook. Participation in
the modernization campaign not only gave people a host of new skills, it also
changed their worldview. Lilienthal felt the payoff could be dramatic:
If a great dam or new system or roads inspires people in a country with a
feeling that this is theirs, and that it provides an opportunity, a leverage by
which they and their young people can look to the future with hopefulness
in specific ways, then that great dam as an inspiration will produce more
than electricity and irrigation, the road network more than transport. It will
produce a change in spirit, a release of energies and self-confidence which
are the indispensable factors in the future of that country.
Lilienthal pointed to how the TVA had transformed the landscape of
Tennessee by bringing the river to heel, making electricity widely available,
and upgrading industry as well as education. The TVA’s decisive contribution
was not how it altered the physical environment but the changes it made to
people’s psychologies. What made the Tennessee Valley unrecognizable from
its pre- days was the fact that its seven and a half million inhabitants had
been able to find the “self-reliance, independence, and creativity” inside
themselves through their collective work with the programs of the TVA.
D&R’s work was proof that the story was similar overseas. Work in Iran’s
Khuzestan region and in Colombia had shown Lilienthal that if a foreign
program were based on the experience of the TVA, such a program held
promise not only for the successful transformation of the natural environment
but also for the people who inhabited it. In this way, a modernization program
catalyzed by outside authorities could have a radical impact on the target
society. Technology provided through a program in which the locals were “given
a chance to become a part of that process of change” would uncover “latent” technical
talents of a people or would provide new technological skills. Eventually, some
local people would take on certain technical and managerial tasks. They would
. Neuse, David E. Lilienthal, –; Grace Goodell, The Elementary Structures of Political Life:
Rural Development in Pahlavi Iran (New York, ).
. David E. Lilienthal, “The Road to Change,” International Development Review  (December
): –, .
. Ibid., .
“Mr. TVA” : 
be an important wedge in the drive to replace backwards, ignorant, and

traditional outlooks with those that were optimistic, forward-looking, hopeful,
and decidedly modern.
It is no surprise that Lilienthal’s thinking found an audience. It was a model
that found its proofs in the United States. Lilienthal’s examples reached back
to the American South to demonstrate that the United States understood how
to successfully implement development programs in poorer areas. At the same

time he offered reassurance that technology, an American vision of democracy,
and modernization were not merely reconcilable but mutually reinforcing.
Faced with an unsteady world where they had to contend with competing
models of social organization that also promised to deliver the rewards of the
modern world, many at home and abroad gravitated to this thinking.
The influence of Lilienthal’s thinking on modernization efforts was direct
and palpable. In , Eugene Black, the president of the World Bank, picked
up a copy of Collier’s magazine to discover an article by Lilienthal offering a
solution to tensions between India and Pakistan in the Kashmir. Black’s interest
in the region was a function of his new program for the bank that emphasized
lending to the postcolonial world. In this, Black and the World Bank were part
of a larger shift toward modernization in various international organizations
that included the UN, large foundations, voluntary groups, and businesses.
Increasingly, groups like these came to see economic development as a funda-
mental part of international affairs. Like many of his contemporaries, Black had
considerable faith in the idea that technology and planning, guided by Western
experts, could bring about necessary economic growth. This belief undoubt-
edly helped make Lilienthal’s concepts attractive.
Lilienthal’s article, written after a personal trip to South Asia in , asserted
that the Kashmir issue, while “pure dynamite,” did not necessarily have to be
so. Lilienthal felt the whole dispute was solvable if the issues surrounding it
were broken down and solved one by one. Central to this solution was the
development of the Indus River as “a unit – designed, built and operated as a
unit, as is the seven-state TVA system back in the U.S.” The article galvanized
Black, who, after calling Lilienthal for his opinions, contacted the Indian and
Pakistani prime ministers, extending World Bank technical assistance to
resolve the Indus water resources question “on an engineering basis.” The
offer of the Bank’s good offices and technical assistance helped to bring the
two countries to the negotiating table. Black dispatched the head of the World
. Ibid.; David E. Lilienthal, “Overseas Development as a Humanist Art,” in Management: A

Humanist Art (New York, ), – (emphasis in original).
. David E. Lilienthal, “Another ‘Korea’ in the Making?,” Colliers ( August ): , –.
. Jochen Kraske, William H. Becker, William Diamond, and Louis Galambos, Bankers with a
Mission: The Presidents of the World Bank, – (New York, ), –.
. Lilienthal, “Another ‘Korea’ in the Making?,” .
 :                 
Magic Letters – The TVA model’s global reach,  (Milwaukee Journal)
“Mr. TVA” : 
Bank engineering staff to support the discussions and, following prolonged

negotiations, the parties signed an agreement over the river in .
The success of these negotiations is, in part, attributable to Indian Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s affinity for multipurpose development programs.
Lilienthal spent a week as Nehru’s guest during his  trip and came away
with a positive view of Nehru, seeing him as a “predominately modern man.”
Lilienthal was perceptive in seeing a man who was enamored with the power

of science and technology, yet held a deep understanding of India’s past.
Lilienthal was also pleased to see the massive river development projects that
Nehru had begun. Nehru, like many in newly independent countries, held
great hope that large, multipurpose development programs would strengthen
his nation’s economy and society. Before independence, a number of Indian
technologists looked to the United States as an example. One leading engineer,
Kanwar Sain, felt the United States, itself a “child of modern engineering,” had
successfully shown how to tap rivers for their cheap and renewable energy,
which was the “life-breath of industry.” However, the lessons for India were
not just in the technical accomplishments of the Americans. The United States
also provided some of the best thinking to contend with the deep impact science
and technology had on societies. After India’s independence, the Damodar
Valley Corporation (DVC), a water resource program directly modeled on the
TVA, was among the first major development projects to be established by
Nehru. Numerous other programs for India’s river valleys followed. Nehru
viewed the dams and related technologies built by the DVC and later programs
as modern temples. With an intensity many American supporters of the TVA
shared, he rhapsodized in a speech at a new Indian dam complex in  about
the accomplishments and sacrifices made in its construction, asking “where can
be a greater and holier place than this, which we can regard higher?”
For all the domestic and international interest in the TVA, however,
support was not universal. Criticism from conservatives, who had long
opposed elements of the New Deal within the United States, did not relent
after World War II. In the s, Donald Davidson, one of the leading members
of the “Southern Agrarian” clique of writers, took aim at the TVA for being
. “Terms of Reference in Exchange of Letters Between President Black and the Two Prime
Ministers,” box , Raymond Wheeler Papers, HI; Transcript, Eugene R. Black oral history
interview by Robert Oliver,  August , interview , tape , Oral History Research Office,
Columbia University, –; Edward Mason and Robert Asher, The World Bank since Bretton Woods
(Washington, DC, ), –; and McNeill, Something New under the Sun, –.
. David E. Lilienthal, “Are We Losing India?” Colliers ( June ): –, –, .
. Balkrishna Govind Gokhale, “Nehru and History,” History and Theory  (October ):
–.
. Kanwar Sain, America Through Indian Eyes (Lahore, ), , .
. Sain, America Through Indian Eyes, –.
. Henry Hart, Administrative Aspects of River Valley Development (New York, ), v, –; Henry
Hart, New India’s Rivers (Bombay, ), –.
. Jawaharlal Nehru, “Temples of the New Age,”  July , in Jawarharlal Nehru’s Speeches,
vol.  (Calcutta, ), –.
 :                 
unaccountable to the people of the valley and for displacing tens of thousands.
Through the s, comparisons of foreign-aid programs to the New Deal
raised the hackles of Republicans in Congress and the executive who already
derided foreign aid as mere “giveaways.” Opponents of foreign aid found
further ammunition with the publication of William Lederer and Eugene
Burdick’s  novel, The Ugly American. It decried most U.S. development
activity in the Third World as dilettantish, disjointed, and largely ineffective

with a tale set in the fictional Southeast Asian nation of Sarkahan. In the story,
Homer Akins, the “ugly American” who is an engineer by trade, scolds imag-
ined American, French, and Vietnamese officials for putting too much emphasis
on programs derived from the TVA, saying, “You want big industry. . . . You want
big TVAs scattered all over the countryside. . . . [T]hat all takes . . . a whole lot
of people who are production-minded. . . . I recommended . . . that you start
small with little things.” Still, Lederer and Burdick could not entirely escape
grass-roots development as a means to provide the economic stability needed
to hold back the communists. Akins (with a bit of extension work TVA advocates
might have claimed as their own) saves the day by working directly with the
Sarkahanese to design a new type of pump for their rice paddies.
On the surface, President Dwight Eisenhower was also an adversary of the
TVA. In , with terms that pleased more conservative elements of his party,
he dismissed the TVA as “creeping socialism” and later suggested selling it off.
However, despite Eisenhower’s public rhetoric, and the divisions within his own
administration that pitted the more aid-minded John Foster Dulles, Harold
Stassen, and Nelson Rockefeller against the likes of Herbert Hoover, Jr., and
George Humphrey, who were opposed to development aid, the skulking
example of the TVA had some foreign-policy uses. A  report by the TVA
on the Jordan River Valley was an important component of the Eisenhower
administration’s “Water for Peace” program. Its recommendations were seen as
a basis from which Middle Eastern negotiations for a lasting peace could grow.
. Donald Davidson, The Tennessee, vol. , The New River: Civil War to TVA (reprint, Nashville,
), –. Davidson derided Lilienthal’s “genius” in implementing plans that displaced persons
and upset the social life of the valley. Most of the Agrarians, however, were generally optimistic
about the effects the TVA would have on the region. See Edward Shapiro, “The Southern Agrarians
and the Tennessee Valley Authority,” American Quarterly  (Winter ): –.
. William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York, ), . The novel
was seen as such a threat to foreign aid that the International Cooperation Administration
published a pamphlet refuting the authors’ assertions point by point. See International Coopera-
tion Agency, Reply to the Criticism in the Ugly American (Washington, DC, ).
. “The President’s News Conference,”  June , in Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D.
Eisenhower,  (Washington, DC, ), ; James T. Paterson, Grand Expectations: The United States,
– (New York, ), .
. Walt W. Rostow, The Diffusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History (New York, ), ; Kimber
Charles Pearce, Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid (East Lansing, MI, ), –.
. NSC ,  June , box , Records Relating to State Department Participation in the
Operations Coordinating Board and the National Security Council, –, RG , NAMD;
Dulles to Embassy in Israel,  September , Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United
States –: The Near and Middle East, Part  (Washington, DC, ), :– (hereafter cited as
“Mr. TVA” : 
Thus, while support for development based on the TVA model was certainly
not unequivocal in the Eisenhower White House, on occasion it did find a place
in its foreign policy.
Regardless of the status of the TVA in the U.S. government’s overseas
development policies, by the mid- to late s there was a genuine concern
that the communists were having greater success in the “Third World” with
their development models than the United States. The Soviet Union seemed

to show that a country thought of as backwards could remake itself into a
modern, industrial society in a relatively short time. This fanned concerns in
Washington that the example of the “Great American Experiment” was being
overshadowed by a “Great Russian Experiment.” In Asia, the Soviets were
understood to be assiduously cultivating the perception that communism was
the wave of the future. After the United States withdrew its funding for the
Aswan High Dam in Egypt in , it was stung by the USSR’s coup in assuming
the responsibility for the funding and technical assistance needed by the project.
American uneasiness about its position as a technical leader for the postcolonial
world only deepened when the USSR put Sputnik, the first man-made satellite,
into orbit around the earth in . The overheated reaction by the American
press included searching questions about whether this dramatic technological
accomplishment gave the communists increased leverage in the Third World.
There was a feeling that the “American monopoly” on world technological
leadership was slipping away in light of Russian accomplishments and aggres-
sive aid programs.
Even more frightening to the Americans was the apparent economic success
of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the ten years following the
communists’ rise to power, the PRC posted considerable economic gains that
offered an even more attractive vision to societies recently freed from colonial
domination and determined to modernize. This appeal was even more ominous
considering Chinese attempts in the mid-s to take a leadership role in the
Third World. In the face of this varied and dynamic communist challenge,
American aid officials in the second half of the s could candidly ask, if “we
FRUS, followed by appropriate year); Report by the Special Representative to the President, 
November , FRUS –, :–. See also Charles T. Main, Inc., The Unified Development of
the Water Resources of the Jordan Valley Region, Prepared at the Request of UNRWA under the Direction of
the Tennessee Valley Authority (Boston, ).
. Memo of discussion at the d meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, 
January , FRUS, –: Foreign Aid and Economic Defense Policy (Washington, DC, ), :–;
Walt W. Rostow, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Foreign Aid (Austin, TX, ), ; Burton I. Kaufman, Trade
and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, – (Baltimore, ), –; Peter W. Rodman, More
Precious than Peace: The Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World (New York, ), –.
. Robert A. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York, ), –; Walter McDougall,
The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York, ), –.
. Statement of Representative Henry S. Reuss,  December , box , John H. Ohly
Papers, HTL.
. Gordon Chang, Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and The Soviet Union, –
(Stanford, ), –; Rostow, Foreign Aid, .
 :                 
say we are not in an ‘aid race’ . . . then why are we running scared?” Distress
that the United States was being outpaced was not confined to the aid agencies.
There were real worries at the highest levels of the Eisenhower administration
about the “boldness” and success of Sino-Soviet attempts in courting underde-
veloped countries. This anxiety caused a rethinking of U.S. strategy in many
areas of the world, including Southeast Asia.
In this setting, Americans took notice of an evolving UN plan to tame the

Mekong River in an increasingly tense Southeast Asia. This was pushed initially
by two Chinese engineers who were inspired by the example of the TVA but,
frustrated by civil war in their attempts to bring comparable hydraulic programs
to the Yellow River, sought instead to implement similar plans in Southeast
Asia. Their ideas were eventually taken up by the UN’s Economic Commission
for Asia and the Far East in the early s. The plan was eagerly embraced
by the riparian nations of Southeast Asia – Cambodia, Laos, South Vietnam,
and Thailand. Through the UN, they devised a multipurpose river develop-
ment scheme to serve them all. The Eisenhower administration was at first
hesitant about these efforts. It preferred to emphasize its own bilateral program,
which centered on a Bureau of Reclamation study to produce TVA-style
programs in the region. In , the United States put aside these earlier
reservations and placed its support behind the multilateral program. In fact,
the United States moved quickly to exert control over the project, making sure
that the first executive agent of the Mekong Commission, the body created to
oversee the river development program, was an American.
As the program gained momentum a number of nongovernmental organi-
zations invested in the Mekong effort. Chief among these organizations was the
Ford Foundation. Ford made its presence felt with a large socioeconomic study
on the impact of the Mekong program, headed by geographer Gilbert White.
The study showed that putting the Mekong in harness would have multiple
effects far beyond the banks of the river. It would control the waters and generate
electricity and also expand and stabilize agriculture, improve fishery and forest
production, promote manufacturing, and lower transport costs.
The Ford-funded report shaped the budding efforts on the Mekong, and
through the first half of the s an international effort took form. From  to
 over $ million dollars of aid were pledged internationally. Aid was diverse,
. Caldwell, “Pitfalls in re ‘Soviet Economic Penetration,’”  December , box , Ohly
Papers, HTL.
. Rostow, Foreign Aid, –; “Sino-Soviet Bloc Economic Activities in Underdeveloped
Areas,  October– December ,”  March , FRUS, –: Foreign Economic Policy (Wash-
ington, DC, ), :–; “The Nature of the Sino-Soviet Bloc Economic Threat in the Under-
developed Areas”  August , FRUS, –, :–.
. Hiroshi Hori, The Mekong: Environment and Development (New York, ), –.
. Ibid., –; Thi Dieu Nguyen, The Mekong River and the Struggle for Indochina: War, Water,
Peace (Westport, CT, ), –.
. Gilbert F. White, Egbert de Vries, Harold B. Dunkerley, and John V. Krutilla, Economic and
Social Aspects of Lower Mekong Development, Report to the Committee for Coordination of Investi-
gations of the Lower Mekong Basin, , .
“Mr. TVA” : 
and so were the sources: Canada provided for aerial mapping; Israel supported
irrigation planning; Japan provided engineering teams; India provided rain-
gauges; Iran gave petroleum products; and a cross-section of UN agencies
undertook a battery of studies and surveys. Despite this variety of backgrounds,
comparisons to the TVA remained direct. The Indian engineer, Kanwar Sain,
who had assumed the post of Director of Engineering Services for the Mekong
Commission, acknowledged some key differences but nevertheless drew clear

connections. He understood that in the United States the TVA was responsible
for “igniting, encouraging, educating, and coordinating the efforts of the seven
states for economic and social development.” If a realistic program were adhered
to in Southeast Asia, the riparian nations could reap similar gains.
The TVA method also came to be seen as a means to defuse the growing
conflict in the region. White, fresh from his surveys, saw that the options
available to the United States were becoming more limited as its involvement
deepened in Southeast Asia. Most choices only promised prolonged and
possibly heightened violence. All was not lost, however, as White proposed the
multipurpose Mekong project as a “Fourth Course” to steer out of the situation.
Basing a regional political solution on this indigenous plan for the river held
possibilities, as the enthusiasm of the riparian states for economic development
promised by the project had muted the hostilities that often lingered between them.
For the United States, support for the Mekong offered a “graceful” way out of
its dangerous commitments and was far cheaper than military action. White
thought armed conflict could give way to a struggle for prosperity that would
be waged on the river. He wondered if this course of action would “mean to
the world increasingly aware of its network of mutual responsibilities what
the Tennessee Valley Authority meant to proponents of national development
thirty years ago?”
White’s determination to see the cooperative program get the attention it
needed to lift Southeast Asia out of a growing crisis brought him to seek, in
early , the support of Lilienthal. The geographer had picked someone who
was already a partisan of the Mekong project. In , Lilienthal had contacted
Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles and urged the Kennedy administration
to take a hard look at programs on “the key river in Southeast Asia.” From D&R’s
experiences in Iran, Lilienthal could see similar potential in Southeast Asia. He
was confident that Bowles, a New Dealer himself, shared this vision, as he
“understood the TVA idea and method” and that it could “represent a great
. Franklin P. Huddle, The Mekong Project: Opportunities and Problems of Regionalism (Washing-
ton, DC, ), –.
. Kanwar Sain, “Informal Consultation Concerning Comprehensive Development of the
Lower Mekong Basin as TVA-Type River Basin Development Project,”  May , box ,
Raymond A. Wheeler Papers, HI.
. Gilbert White, “Vietnam: The Fourth Course,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists  (December
): –, reprinted in Geography, Resources, and Environment: Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White, vol. ,
ed. Robert W. Kates and Ian Burton (Chicago, ), –.
 :                 
political asset of the United States in parts of the world other than our own.”
White hoped that Lilienthal would contact President Lyndon Johnson and
emphasize the benefits that lay within the modernization program, notably the
means it provided to maneuver out of a martial situation. Although Lilienthal
read White’s article with “fascination,” events outpaced action, leaving White’s
plan to influence U.S. policy moot.
What made Lilienthal’s renewed attention unnecessary was expanding U.S.

governmental interest in the potential of the Mekong project to satisfy its
strategic ends. Part of this interest had roots that went back to the early s.
In , before a wide-ranging trip to Asia, an old friend, Arthur E. “Tex”
Goldschmidt, contacted then–Vice President Lyndon Johnson. The two had
met one another while working for the New Deal National Youth Administra-
tion in Texas during the s. Goldschmidt’s time with the New Deal agency,
work on the Colorado River, and position with the Economic and Social
Council of the United Nations had given him faith in the possibilities of large,
multipurpose development programs.
An article of this faith was a  piece for Scientific American in which
Goldschmidt outlined the effects of development on the American South.
Goldschmidt saw the South retarded not only by the after-effects of a slave
economy and defeat in the Civil War but also by government policies that
favored the industries of the North. The states of the South found themselves
left to linger as a sort of colony within the United States itself. What finally
broke this cycle in the South were policies by the federal government that
attacked problems at their root. Federal largesse made activities such as land
reform, conservation, and electrification possible. These programs, beyond the
capabilities of existing Southern institutions, provided new opportunities for
Southerners. For Goldschmidt, the “pacemaking” organization in all of these
efforts was the TVA, setting precedents that had economic effects far beyond
its own immediate area of operation. The success of the American South had
a “direct parallel with the economic development of the former colonial regions
of the world.” Yet the South’s achievement was also a reminder to the Third
World that built-in disadvantages of poverty and underdevelopment stood in
the way of modernization. Outside aid was absolutely vital to begin to break
down these barriers. Goldschmidt held similar beliefs before he put these ideas
down in Scientific American. Meeting with Johnson over hamburgers and cokes
. Lilienthal to Bowles,  February , box , Lilienthal Papers, MLP; Lilienthal to
Bowles,  January ; box , Lilienthal Papers, MLP; Lloyd Gardner, “From the Colorado to
the Mekong,” in Vietnam: The Early Decisions, ed. Lloyd Gardner and Ted Gittinger (Austin, TX,
), .
. Lilienthal to White,  January , White to Lilienthal,  March , Lilienthal to
White,  April , and White to Lilienthal,  May , all box , Lilienthal Papers, MLP.
. Arthur Goldschmidt, “The Development of the U.S. South,” Scientific American 
(September ): –. Goldschmidt’s view of the South as a colonial dependency of the North
was a view held by many at the time. For an influential exponent of the idea, see C. Vann
Woodward, A History of the South, vol. , Origins of the New South, – (Baton Rouge, ), –.
“Mr. TVA” : 
in Washington in , Goldschmidt urged the vice president to visit the

Mekong Commission to get an understanding of what a TVA-style program
could do in Asia.
Johnson took Goldschmidt’s personal advice on investigating the Mekong
Commission. On a swing through Thailand during his  Asia trip, the vice
president did indeed visit the Mekong Commission’s offices in Bangkok. He
showed a “keen interest” in the project, something apparent when he overstayed

his appointment by an hour, keeping the Prime Minister of Thailand waiting.
During his extended visit, Johnson declared to U Nyun, the commission’s
executive secretary, that “[a]ll my life I have been interested in rivers and their
development.” Johnson also read Goldschmidt’s  article, commenting that
“we are in a better position to handle some of the problems of the developing
countries because of the problems we faced so recently in developing our
own.”
The urgings of Goldschmidt and his personal observations in Bangkok aside,
Johnson needed little convincing on the question of multipurpose development
projects. The Texan had seen for himself the effect of rural electrification and
other programs that had sprung from the New Deal and the TVA. They had
brought many aspects of the modern world to poor and isolated areas of his
home state. This had a profound impact on Johnson, and historians have seen his
entire political career as tied to the politics of economic development. He
remained enamored with programs that held similar promise for other parts
of the world. To Johnson, leaving the “footprints of America” in Vietnam meant
supporting efforts “to turn the Mekong into a Tennessee Valley.” Robert Komer,
Johnson’s special assistant, good-naturedly recalled that his boss “was a fanatic . . .
on rural electrification [in Vietnam]. Good God, you could drive me up a wall.”
While Johnson’s personal opinions should be emphasized, he was one among
many in the U.S. government who saw large-scale, technologically based
development as a tool to solve social and political problems. This belief was
strong among the advisors to both Johnson and his predecessor, John F.
Kennedy. Men like William Bundy, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Robert
Komer, Robert McNamara, and most notably Walt Whitman Rostow nurtured
. Goldschmidt, “The Development of the U.S. South,” , ; Transcript, Arthur
Goldschmidt oral history interview by Paige Mulhollan,  June , interview , tape , –,
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (hereafter cited as LBJL); Memo, Arthur
Goldschmidt to the Vice President,  May , Confidential File, Oversize Attachments, box ,
LBJL.
. Press Release ECAFE/,  May ; Memo, Ortiz-Tinoco, nd, Vietnam Country File,
National Security File (hereafter cited as NSF), box , LBJL.
. Johnson to Goldschmidt,  September , Confidential File, Oversize Attachments,
box , LBJL.
. Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (New York, ),
.
. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York, ), ; Transcript,
Robert Komer oral history interview by Joe B. Frantz,  January , interview , tape , , LBJL.
 :                 
a belief in the transformative power of development led by the United States.

This faith in development became an important part of the deepening Ameri-
can involvement in Vietnam. As U.S. policy slid toward overt military action in
Southeast Asia during –, the Mekong project broke the surface as a means
to highlight America’s long-term and peaceful commitment to the region
against the backdrop of an expanding war.
In February of , the United States unleashed a series of airstrikes on

North Vietnam as an apparent reprisal for National Liberation Front (NLF –
the Viet Cong) attacks on U.S. military positions in South Vietnam. However,
these attacks were really meant to shore up the flagging regime in the Republic
of Vietnam (RVN). Johnson and his advisors realized that bombing was a
double-edged sword. Air attacks would provide some support for the regime
in the south, but they also could have a negative effect internationally. Many
American allies were concerned about or outright critical of this military
escalation. Within his administration, there was a push for the president to
announce a “Johnson Doctrine” that would bring the benefits of America’s
domestic efforts at a “Great Society” to the peoples of Asia. Such an emphasis
would not only placate world opinion but also show that the United States had
an enduring commitment to its Southeast Asian allies. McGeorge Bundy and
Rostow wanted something akin to the Marshall Plan to drive this point home.
There were discussions about creating a “Southeast Asia Economic Develop-
ment Plan” to fill this role.
Johnson and his aides eventually nominated the Mekong program to play
this important part. As they drafted a speech and plan that would highlight the
new role the river would play in American strategy, Johnson contacted
Goldschmidt to consult him on what was to be a major policy announcement.
On  April , at Johns Hopkins University, before a packed auditorium lit by
television lights, Johnson unveiled the plan. In a stern, measured voice, the
president assured allies and opponents alike that the United States would not
withdraw from Vietnam. But the address was more concerned with carrots than
sticks. Johnson advocated a “greatly expanded cooperative effort for develop-
ment” that could “improve the life of man in that conflict-torn corner of our
. Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation-Building” in
the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, ). Opinions of Walt W. Rostow and Dean Rusk regarding
modernization were expressed in author’s interview with Walt Whitman Rostow,  June .
. Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, – (New York,
), –; George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States in Vietnam, –, d ed.
(New York, ), –; and David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the
Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA, ), –.
. Memo from Rostow, “A Foreign Policy for the Johnson Administration,”  March ,
and memo from Rostow, “A Johnson Doctrine,”  March , Foreign Affairs (–), both
White House Confidential File (hereafter cited as WHCF), box , LBJL; Memo for the
President,  April , Bundy Memos, box , LBJL; Walt W. Rostow, The United States and the Regional
Organization of Asia and the Pacific, – (Austin, TX, ), ; Gardner, Pay Any Price, , .
“Mr. TVA” : 
world.” The president noted that the United Nations had already broken
ground on that cooperative effort in the form of the Mekong Commission.
The Mekong project promised to “provide food and water and power on a
scale to dwarf even our own TVA.” Johnson recalled that “[i]n the countryside
where I was born, and where I live, I have seen the night illuminated, and the
kitchens warmed, and the homes heated, where once the cheerless night and
the ceaseless cold held sway. And all this happened because electricity came to

our area along the humming wires of the REA.” His reminiscences made clear
that the endeavor behind which the United States was preparing to put its
weight would give Southeast Asians opportunities similar to those granted
Americans by the New Deal. American participation in this effort would come
in the form of a billion dollars and a team of advisors headed by Eugene Black.
Johnson’s speech, as had been hoped, drew considerable international press
attention. In Europe there was general approval of the American move. Com-
munist states were mostly wary, while the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
(DRV – North Vietnam) and the PRC denounced the plan. From the riparian
nations there was delight, as the American move promised substantial support
to a project so long in the making. In the short run, this reaction fit the hopes
of the Johnson administration. The suggestion of a “TVA on the Mekong” was
a bid by the United States to find a way out of the quagmire into which it was
sinking in Southeast Asia. The major development project, conspicuously
compared to the example of the TVA, had become pivotal for American strategy
in Southeast Asia.
American action on the Mekong in the wake of the Hopkins speech was
significant. The new tack on the Mekong brought a reversal of the long-standing
U.S. opposition to an Asian Development Bank (ADB). This institution was
eventually pulled into existence in December  to support efforts in
regional development – not the least of which was the Mekong project itself.
The United States and Japan each contributed $ million of the bank’s $
billion capitalization.
However, this interest could not last in the face of the deepening American
military activity. In , U.S. contributions to the Mekong Commission slid to
. Lyndon Johnson, Address at Johns Hopkins University: “Peace Without Conquest,”  April
, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, , vol.  (Washington, DC,
), –; CBS Television Network coverage of the Johns Hopkins Speech,  April , video
recording, Museum of Television and Radio, New York City.
. Johnson, “Peace Without Conquest,” .
. Johnson, “Peace Without Conquest,” ; Gardner, Pay Any Price, –.
. Research report, foreign-press reaction to President Johnson’s Johns Hopkins Speech on
Vietnam, WHCF, box , LBJL; Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the
Escalation of the War in Vietnam (Berkeley, ), ; Nguyen, Mekong River, –; Kaiser, American
Tragedy, –.
. Po-Wen Huang, The Asian Development Bank: Diplomacy and Development in Asia (New York,
), , ch. , ch. ; Yung-Hwan Jo, “Regional Cooperation in Southeast Asia and Japan’s Role,”
The Journal of Politics  (August ): –.
 :                 
a mere $. million. Adding to these strains was the troubled U.S. relationship
with Cambodia. As the situation in the region worsened in the s, Cambo-
dia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk became increasingly critical of U.S. interfer-
ence in his country and the region in general. In , he refused all U.S. military
and economic aid, while turning a blind eye to North Vietnamese sanctuaries
on Cambodian soil. Sihanouk also made demands that the Mekong Commis-
sion direct more of its efforts toward his country and shift its headquarters to

Phnom Penh. Sihanouk’s fears about the U.S. domination of the project
eventually led to Cambodia’s withdrawal from the Mekong Commission in .
This caused considerable apprehension. If Cambodia excluded American aid,
it was unlikely many of the projects within that country necessary for the
success of the whole program would be completed. These concerns were stilled
when relations between Cambodia and the United States improved in .
Nonetheless, this fracture had profound effects on the Mekong effort at an
important juncture, as work on several dams was curtailed for a number of years
because of the disputes. American involvement, which had originally held
the promise of completing the vast plans for the Mekong River, now stood as
one of the major stumbling blocks to cooperation among the participants.
Even as the regional program with the riparian nations sagged, the impor-
tance of development symbolized by a TVA-style program on the Mekong
River grew. The promise of U.S.-led modernization was expanded to include
Southeast Asia, the larger Asia-Pacific, and even the world at large. Accordingly,
the United States’ involvement in Asia could be pitched as a long-term
developmental boon for the peoples there, even as a war raged.
This idea was on the agenda at the Honolulu Conference of – February
, at which Johnson, his advisors, and their South Vietnamese counterparts
made the “revolutionary transformation” of the Vietnamese people a funda-
mental goal of the war effort. Following the meeting, the United States
expanded its “Revolutionary Development” program to push development
programs backing this transformation down to all levels of Vietnamese life. The
program was far from the first U.S.-sponsored development aid program for
Vietnam and bore more than a passing resemblance to some of the Kennedy
administration’s programs. However, what came to be known as the “other war”
in Vietnam had a broad outline as to how the countryside could be transformed.
The plan included increased fertilizer production, agricultural reforms, irriga-
tion projects, and most of all, rural electrification, all of which had a distinct
similarity to operations carried out by the TVA.
. Nguyen, Mekong River, .

. Ibid., –; Robert J. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States in Southeast Asia
since the Second World War (New York, ), , .
. Nguyen, Mekong River, –.
. “Declaration of Honolulu,”  February , NSF – National Security Council Histories,
box , LBJL.
. Memo, Komer to the President, “The Other War in Vietnam: A Progress Report,”
 September , NSF, Files of Robert Komer, box –, LBJL; Douglas A. Blaufarb, The Counter-
“Mr. TVA” : 
The need to gather support for a destructive war that was coming under
increasing international criticism drove Johnson to further clarify America’s
role in the Asia-Pacific region. In a July  speech, he emphasized the place
of the United States on the Pacific Rim, a position that justified military and
economic interventions and singled out U.S. involvement in the ADB and the
Mekong project as some of the best examples of this engagement. This
position was further highlighted at the Manila Conference that October, which

emphasized that stability in the Asia-Pacific could only be achieved through
“economic and cultural cooperation for regional development . . . open to all
countries of the region.” Manila made it clear that while the war in Vietnam
was the immediate problem that hung on the Pacific Rim, the long-term key to
American goals in the region lay on a path of integrated economic progress
moved by the guiding hand of development. During his visit to Thailand
following the Manila meeting, Johnson singled out the Mekong project as the
“visionary” means to carry out this regional development. At the same time, he
directly connected work on the Mekong to America’s own domestic attempts
at a Great Society. To the Johnson administration, the Mekong project stood
as a template for other programs that would eventually construct an economi-
cally advanced Asia-Pacific under American guidance.
The rhetoric that emerged from Johnson’s Asia-Pacific interlude comple-
mented ideas that were evolving to produce a large-term plan for the economic
development of a postwar South Vietnam. However, much of the motivation
for the plan had to do with short-term political concerns to show that the United
States accepted its responsibilities there, and would not end with the conclusion
of the armed conflict. Komer suggested a study “led by a prestigious individual,
and working jointly with a Vietnamese team.” Johnson’s choice for this high
profile task was, unsurprisingly, David Lilienthal.
The choice of “Mr. TVA” – as Lilienthal was described in the press – was
a culmination of the attempts over the preceding year and a half to prove
that the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia was that of a builder and
insurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance,  to the Present (New York, ), –; Latham,
Modernization as Ideology, .
. Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks to the American Alumni Council: United States Asian Policy,”
 July , Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, , vol.  (Washington,
DC, ), .
. “Manila Declaration,”  October , NSF – National Security Council Histories, box
, LBJL.
. Cable, State (Wm. Bundy) to Moyers,  October , and cable, Moyers to Bundy, 
October , Manila Conference and President’s Asian Trip, October –November , , vol. ,
backup material not referenced in narrative [III], NSF – National Security Council Histories,
box , LBJL; Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks at Chulalongkorn University,”  October , in U.S.
Department of State, The Promise of the New Asia: United States Policy in the Far East as Stated by President
Johnson on His Pacific Journey (Washington, DC, ), –.
. Moorsteen to Komer,  August , “Study of Postwar Reconstruction and Development
in Vietnam,” Komer-Leonhart File (–), NSF, box , LBJL; Nguyen, Mekong River, .
 :                 

A TVA on the Mekong – Air Force One en route to Guam, . L–R: Robert McNamara
(in background), President Lyndon B. Johnson, Walt Rostow, John McNaughton, and David
Lilienthal (Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library)
not a destroyer. The choice of a man with Lilienthal’s reputation, experience,

and connection to the TVA, whose image lay behind much of the develop-
ment work on the Mekong, was an attempt to demonstrate to international
opinion that the United States was determined to push modernization plans
forward.
However, the undertaking Lilienthal joined was already wilting under the
pressures of war. The American vision for the Mekong River, while still looming
large as a symbol of regional integration, in actual practice had shrunk.
Tensions produced within the region by an escalation of the fighting had made
work in the riparian nations difficult. The American plans for development
of the Mekong receded to an effort on the waterway restricted to the confines
of the struggling RVN. Nevertheless, the river project still had the capacity
to hold the imagination of those outside the administration. Schlesinger,
remaining loyal to his earlier opinions on the potential of development
modeled on the TVA in Asia, highlighted the Mekong project as a possible part
of a neutralization scheme for Southeast Asia. In his eyes, the collective
economic development it promised could be “an honorable resolution to a
tragic situation.”
. North American Newspaper Alliance, press release,  December , box , Lilienthal
Papers, MLP.
. “What Should We Do Now: Five Experts Give Their Answer” Look ( September ):
–, .
“Mr. TVA” : 
Lilienthal brought the resources of D&R (for a hefty fee of $,) to the
U.S.-South Vietnamese Joint Development Group (JDG). The group itself was
devoted to laying out a general blueprint to guide long-term economic devel-
opment of the RVN. Keeping to his development philosophy, Lilienthal pro-
posed a program that, like the TVA, would be decentralized and autonomous.
Referencing D&R’s experiences in Colombia and Iran, he pitched the program
as the best way not simply to induce economic growth but also to impart the

right set of modern industrial and agricultural skills to the Vietnamese.
The lion’s share of the JDG’s attention was placed on the agricultural sector.
Most of this attention was due to the fact that the majority of the Vietnamese
population remained rural. However, it was also an acknowledgement that the
war had badly disrupted the countryside. From  through , as the war
had deepened with the rising American military commitment, paddy rice
production fell dramatically, from . to . million tons, forcing the RVN to
import the staple. Things had gotten so bad by  that the United States was
encouraging changes in the Vietnamese diet to get the people to eat cheaper
imported wheat in order to safeguard the RVN’s balance of payments.
Any significant development undertaking would have to contend with these
critical agrarian shortfalls. Boosting agricultural production was crucial not
only for self-sufficiency but for exports as well. The JDG divided South Vietnam
into a number of regions, among which the Mekong River Delta held pride of
place. It received the most attention because Lilienthal was enthralled by what
he saw as one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. He believed that
“properly developed, the Mekong Delta could feed all of Southeast Asia.” In
the group’s eyes, well-managed development could facilitate a rapid increase
of delta rice production and a wide variety of other crops. However, such an
expansion required greater water control (e.g., flood control, drainage, salinity
control, and irrigation), infrastructural improvements, and changes in agricul-
tural practices. Coupled with the new strands of “Miracle Rice” that were the
product of Los Baños research institute in the Philippines (a program initiated
by the Rockefeller Foundation under Dean Rusk in the s) and new chemical
fertilizers, a comprehensive program could provide the necessary agricultural
production and help push a wider transformation of Vietnamese rural life.
. Martin Skala, “Old Hand at Development,” Christian Science Monitor,  March .
. Joint Development Group, The Postwar Development of South Vietnam: Policies and Programs
(New York, ), ; U.S. Agency for International Development, Asia Bureau, “Economic Context
United States Economic Assistance to Viet Nam, –,” Vietnam Terminal Report, December
 (available directly from USAID), ; Memorandum to the President, Attachment A: Vietnam
Rice Situation,  August ,Vietnam B()a Economic Activity File, box , NSF, LBJL.
. “Selling Self-Help – at a Profit” Business Week,  August , –, .
. Memo, Leonhart to Johnson,  December , Vietnam B()a Economic Activity File,
box , NSF, LBJL; Joint Development Group, Postwar Development, ; “Selling Self-Help – At a
Profit,” Business Week,  August . On Los Baños and rice research, see Dean Rusk with Richard
Rusk and Daniel S. Papp, As I Saw It (New York, ), ; and James Lang, Feeding a Hungry Planet:
Rice, Research, and Development in Asia and Latin America (Chapel Hill, ).
 :                 
To accomplish this, Lilienthal and the other members of the JDG proposed
a Mekong Delta Development Authority (MDDA). Although tethered to the
regional Mekong project and thus limited in scope to the boundaries of the
RVN, the MDDA’s programs would nevertheless affect the lives of millions of
Vietnamese. In keeping with the general philosophy that had guided the TVA,
the MDDA was to be separate from but work in cooperation with the govern-
ment. It would be responsible not only for planning and executing the large-

scale plans for the Delta region and the river but also for administering a
conglomeration of local development associations. These would allow the
authority to reach down to the grass roots to educate farmers to change local
practices in order to upgrade production and to carry out village-level projects
that served the larger modernization campaign. This reformation was to be the
bedrock of any larger national reconstruction plan.
While the JDG proposed major changes to village life, it did not see any
major alteration of land tenure as necessary. Echoing the favoritism of larger
farms that had driven many agricultural programs in the American South, the
JDG emphasized that “many crops cannot be grown economically . . . other
than on a large scale. . . . [L]and reform should not be carried so far as to make
such profitable enterprises and potential employers of labor impossible. The
solution to rural poverty in some areas may be found in an efficient farm labor
force rather than in small tenant holdings.” Although change that brought about
certain developments was sought by the JDG, any larger social reforms that
might threaten the overall strategic necessity of maintaining the stability of the
regime in Saigon were to be avoided.
Whether Lilienthal’s MDDA could have been successful is open to question.
Its role as a central means to spur agricultural growth in the delta region, the
dynamo for South Vietnam’s economic recovery, faced serious hurdles. While
the JDG’s report presumed these operations would take place postwar, it still
would have faced a society badly shaken by a prolonged and violent conflict.
In the course of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, refugees and their relief and
resettlement absorbed the largest single share of U.S. aid funds. People were
resettled, only to be uprooted again by a constantly shifting battlefield. In 
alone, over one million South Vietnamese were driven from their homes. The
scale of this problem – the effects of which would not immediately disappear
even if peace came quickly – was clearly one of the largest problems the JDG’s
plans faced. Talk of implementing programs at the grass-roots level based on
the example of the TVA was confronted by the fact that people at that level
faced lives pushed into a persistent state of flux by armed conflict.
. Joint Development Group, Postwar Development, , , and –.
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., ; Agency for International Development, Asia Bureau, “War Victims and Relief
and Rehabilitation United States Economic Assistance to Vietnam, –,” Vietnam Terminal
Report, December , , , .
“Mr. TVA” : 
As the JDG’s investigations were entering their final stages, the military and
political situation in Vietnam changed radically. The Tet Offensive of early 
called into question U.S. assertions that the war would end any time soon and
necessarily cast doubts on whether any postwar planning could be put into
operation. Too, Johnson had grown weary. On  March , in the same speech
in which he announced his refusal to seek or accept another term as president,
he again offered up the Mekong project as proof of “our determination to build

a better land [in Vietnam].” He pleaded with North Vietnam to “take its place
in this common effort just as soon as peace comes.” The North Vietnamese
ignored this proposal as they had the others. These changing political and
military fortunes assured that when the JDG issued its final, massive report for
the reconstruction of the RVN in  there was little public or official interest
in its recommendations.
Even as the chance receded that the American-sponsored modernization
program on the Mekong would actually be completed, the rhetoric that sur-
rounded the potential impact of the program grew. Despite the decline of his
presidency, Johnson could not shake dreams of development. Even after recus-
ing himself from another term, he continued to play up the “fantastic” rewards
that remained to be drawn from the Mekong River and development in Asia.
He made this point at the Korean Consulate in Hawaii to drive home the fact
that America “was a Pacific nation.” Geography demanded that U.S. efforts in
Vietnam continue to be an example for any larger attempt to “develop the New
Asia.”
Johnson’s continued faith was mirrored by his two proconsuls on Southeast
Asian Development, Lilienthal and Black, who remained outspoken propo-
nents of the Mekong project, even in a changing world situation. Black, writing
in , saw a renewed emphasis on the Mekong program as a means to shore
up American credibility in the region as pressure increased for the withdrawal
of U.S. forces. By providing funding for the Mekong through multilateral
organizations (the United Nations and the ADB), there was an “opportunity to
change our policy image . . . where we . . . now have the reputation of trouble-
maker.” The Mekong project would release the river’s potential while reviving
America’s credibility. Black also saw the end of the s as the conclusion of
the New Deal era. Drawing this curtain meant that the United States had to
acknowledge changes in its global position. The Mekong project, a direct
descendant of the New Deal, now found its role revised to ease the United
States into this new era. The economic power and influence of a reconstructed
Japan had to be reconciled within a regional framework, the security needs of
Southeast Asia had to be recognized, and foreign aid had to be given a new
. Lyndon Johnson, “President’s Address to the Nation,”  March , Public Papers, Lyndon
B. Johnson, –, vol.  (Washington, DC, ), –.
. Neuse, David E. Lilienthal, –.
. Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks at the Korean Consulate in Honolulu,”  April , Public
Papers, Lyndon B. Johnson, –, vol. , .
 :                 
rationale – and all of these concerns could be contained by the Mekong

program. Black believed the Mekong “affords us [the United States] the
opportunity to join the rational and moral dimensions of our foreign policy in
a manner, if not on a scale, that has not been possible since the Marshall Plan.”
Lilienthal shared the sentiments of the banker but stretched them further.
On “The Today Show” and other public-affairs television programs, as well as
in prominent publications, he emphasized the importance of reconstructing

South Vietnam, while relating this to his experiences with the TVA and D&R.
He held out the JDG’s plan for the Mekong Delta as the primary mechanism
to reverse the flagging economic fortunes of the RVN. Yet modernization work
on the Mekong promised an integrative mechanism that could operate on a
number of levels. Successful development was a benchmark as “the future
standing and influence of the United States in the Pacific Basin will depend
largely on the skill – or lack of it – with which the postwar reconstruction of
Viet Nam, both South and North, are carried out.” Tied to the larger regional
Mekong project, the development of South Vietnam promised to foster coop-
eration not only between the sometimes antagonistic riparian nations of South-
east Asia but also between the United States and its estranged partners on the
Pacific Rim.
But the impact of the Mekong project was not bounded by the shores of the
Pacific Ocean. Lilienthal emphasized the emerging primacy of a new Asia-
Pacific with its economic motor revving in Japan and was convinced that “this
Pacific Asia will resolve the whole world’s future.” However, this new world in
Asia could not be divorced from the vigor and imagination of the United States,
whose interests lay on the Pacific’s shores. Lilienthal believed it was “trade and
technology” that brought the peace and prosperity that “no amount of abstract
ideology or bitterness and hatred and military force” could bring. In the
Mekong project, the world had a concrete example (literally and figuratively)
of how technology could achieve positive ends. Cooperative efforts by the
riparian nations, with technical assistance and other aid from advanced states
like Japan and the United States, promised immediate benefits to the whole
Asia-Pacific by making it an interdependent unit that expanded the prosperity
of the world at large.
Even as Black and Lilienthal continued beating the drums in support of the
Mekong idea, policies of Johnson in Asia gave way to the “Nixon Doctrine.”
The cost-cutting policy continued the long-standing American focus on Asian
regionalism but was more skeptical of the capabilities of economic assistance
. Eugene Black, Alternative in Southeast Asia (New York, ), , –, –.
. Transcript, Speaking Freely, NBC Television Network,  March , and transcript, The
Today Show, NBC Television Network,  May , both box , Lilienthal Papers, MLP.
. David Lilienthal, “Postwar Development in Viet Nam,” Foreign Affairs (January ):
–.
. David Lilienthal, “Japan and the New World of the Pacific,”  May , box ,
Lilienthal Papers, MLP.
“Mr. TVA” : 
to face down the communist threat. The Nixon White House desired to reduce
American obligations in foreign aid and share them out among other developed
countries through multilateral organizations. Nixon did not abandon the
Mekong project altogether. In fact, it remained a symbol of American support
for regional efforts. Particular segments of the project were emphasized to gain
immediate political or military leverage. During the Paris peace negotiations,
the Mekong project surfaced as part of economic aid packages meant to entice

the DRV into an agreement. By and large, however, the Mekong development
program continued its drift into the realm of symbols rather than concerted
action. When the tottering regime in South Vietnam collapsed in the face of
the DRV’s invasion in , the United States decided to give up its seat on the
Mekong Commission. With the strategic situation changed, the United States
no longer had any use for the development program.
Into the s, Lilienthal continued to advocate the type of development he
had promoted for much of his life. He saw the signing of the Paris agreement
in  as a moment to implement the plans of the JDG. Tapping the Mekong
would be an effective means to repair the damage of large-scale technological
war. A renewed commitment to the Mekong for reconstruction would provide
not only a “unifying political mechanism” for Southeast Asia but also a unifying
mechanism for the United States itself. Turning to the task of rehabilitation
would also carry Americans away from the “mutual enmity and vilification of
Americans by Americans” that had characterized the war years. For Lilien-
thal, the TVA model had swung back on the Americans who had for so long
been seeking to make it an export. Now the development the United States
needed to achieve was not just economic growth in Vietnam or the world at
large but its own moral and national regeneration.
However, in his hopes to return the TVA model to its place of prominence,
Lilienthal was no longer in step with the times. The interlude in Vietnam was
part of a larger international shift in perception of development that had begun
in the s and continued through the s. In the United States, the convo-
luted aims and overwhelming violence of the war in Vietnam had helped
undermine a consensus that had supported technologically driven modern-
ization projects since World War II. Within the larger development commu-
nity, there was an increasing feeling that the first goal of any project should be
to eliminate poverty and meet the “basic needs” among the people they were
aiming to help rather than to impose large projects that were often focused on
. William Bundy, A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (New
York, ), ; Nguyen, Mekong River, .
. Nguyen, Mekong River, –, –, .
. This point had personal resonance for Lilienthal, as he and his son had bitterly disagreed
about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. See Neuse, David E. Lilienthal, –.
. David E. Lilienthal, “Reconstruction Days,” New York Times,  January .
. Lucian Pye, “Foreign Aid and American Involvement in the Developing World,” in The
Vietnam Legacy: The War, American Society, and the Future of American Foreign Policy, ed. Anthony Lake
(New York, ), –.
 :                 
raising economic indicators. Broadly conceived development projects lost favor

in the face of the belief that “small is beautiful” in economics and other areas
of human activity.
Dams of the sort that were intimately connected to the TVA model did
regain an important symbolic position, only now they could be emblematic of
the problem of big and insensitive bureaucratic and technocratic authority. In
this atmosphere, Arthur E. Morgan, Lilienthal’s former colleague at the TVA,

wrote a book calling many recent dams unmitigated disasters. There was
increasing awareness of dams’ negative effects on ecosystems as well as on the
human populations who found their lives radically altered by the demands of
these programs. By the end of the s, it was obvious that development
programs worldwide had displaced hundreds of thousands, exposing these
groups to social and cultural turmoil as well as to epidemic disease and
economic hardship.
The Mekong project itself was not immune to this building concern over
the negative ecological impacts of development. In the late s, some began
to ask what damage such a massive restructuring might do to the ecology of
the river system. Its effects on the lives of the peoples of the riparian nations of
Southeast Asia were also a concern. It was expected that the construction of
one dam alone (out of a total of thirty-four planned or discussed), the Pa Mong,
on the border between Laos and Thailand would require the removal of ,
people from their homes. Even Robert McNamara, a supporter of “Revolu-
tionary Development” in Vietnam, changed his tune after he assumed the
presidency of the World Bank in . McNamara’s bank, in line with the larger
redefinition of development in the s and early s, began to place much
more emphasis on programs that explicitly aimed at alleviating poverty along
with a greater sensitivity to environmental concerns – at least rhetorically. It
. Martha Finnemore, “Redefining Development at the World Bank,” in International Devel-
opment and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge, ed. Fredrick Cooper and
Randall Packard (Berkeley, ), –; Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty
of Nations,  vols. (New York, ); E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered
(New York, ).
. Arthur E. Morgan, Dams and Other Disasters: A Century of the Army Corps of Engineers in Civil
Works (Boston, ).
. Patricia L. Rosenfield and Blair T. Bower, “Management Strategies for Mitigating Adverse
Health Impacts of Water Resource Development Projects,” Progress in Water Technology  ():
–; Sanjeev Khagram, “Toward Democratic Governance for Sustainable Development:
Transnational Civil Society Organizing Around Big Dams,” in The Third Force: The Rise of
Transnational Civil Society, ed. Ann M. Florini (Washington, DC, ), .
. Thayer Scudder, “The Human Ecology of Big Projects: River Basin Development and
Resettlement,” Annual Review of Anthropology  (): –; John E. Bardach, “Some Ecological
Implications of Mekong River Development Plans,” in The Careless Technology: Ecology and Inter-
national Development, ed. M. Taghi Farvar and John P. Milton (New York, ), –; Agency for
International Development, To Tame a River (Washington, DC, ), .
. Finnemore, “Redefining Development,” in International Development, ed. Cooper and
Packard, –; Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (New
York, ), –; Rich, Mortgaging the Earth, .
“Mr. TVA” : 
also sent a clear and early signal that it would provide no support for projects
on the Mekong.
The fate of Lilienthal’s own business highlights the sea change of the s
and the decline of the TVA model. D&R’s programs in Iran had often been held
up as prime examples of inclusive TVA-style development. During the s,
Lilienthal predicted that under D&R’s guidance the Khuzestan region would
become another “Garden of Eden.” Instead, D&R’s program helped lead to

debacle. Favoring large agribusinesses in a vast reconfiguration of the life of the
region, the government imposed a plan and an administrative hierarchy on the
countryside during the s that were unaccountable to existing local political
structures. Those on the land were trod upon, as the grass-roots ideology was
shown to be largely barren. Villages were demolished and tens of thousands of
people displaced as they were moved to “model” villages where their labor
could be better employed by the corporations. The program foundered in the
mid-s, leaving the rural share of gross domestic product less than half the
level of a decade earlier. By the s, following economic crisis and an Islamic
revolution, many buildings that once housed technical staff for the program
sheltered only the growth of wild barley. For Lilienthal, these failures were the
overtures to larger personal complications. After the shah of Iran’s abdication,
D&R declared bankruptcy, dissolving itself in . Despite these setbacks,
Lilienthal continued to advocate technical programs in the service of develop-
ment until his death in ; but increasingly his voice went unheeded.
By the early s, a shift had occurred in how development was conceptu-
alized by many in the United States and internationally. The large-scale,
multipurpose technological projects the TVA had motivated and symbolized
were now commonly viewed as expressions of the broader flaws of development
thinking. Rather than being the keys that unlocked the latent potential of a
society, dams and similar programs could now be seen as forces that did damage
to a nation’s health, environment, social systems, and cultural heritage. The
TVA’s foundational grass-roots ideology had been assumed to be able to
reconcile local needs with universal forces, but the experiences of the s and
s gave the lie to this. Vietnam was emblematic. American-sponsored mod-
ernization, with the Mekong project serving as its standard, was touted as the
means to show how U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia would be constructive
for the whole region, the greater Asia-Pacific, and even the world. Yet, the
rhetoric of grass-roots inclusion in the development process was more a means
to emphasize the potential of American patronage than a guide for actual
. David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, vol. , Unfinished Business, –
(New York, ), –.
. Goodell, Elementary Structures, .
. Ibid., –, –, ; Neuse, David E. Lilienthal, .
. Steve Neal, “The Man Behind the Mighty TVA Now Sees Energy in Our Streams,”
Philadelphia Inquirer,  June ; Neuse, David E. Lilienthal, .
. Pete S. Michaels and Steven F. Napolitano, “The Hidden Costs of Hydroelectric Dams,”
Cultural Survival Quarterly  (): –.
 :                 
operation. No matter how embedded these plans were in the ethos of the TVA,
the American visions for the development of the Mekong could not coexist
with the realities of war and the limitations of the grass-roots ideology.
The new synthesis on development that emerged in the s did not spell
an end to the use of multipurpose development projects as a means to grasp
the benefits of modern society. Today, in places as different as China and Turkey,
hydraulic programs are underway that see the construction of dams as the

hinges upon which broad transformations of swaths of the countryside will turn.
However, these programs are now viewed with much greater skepticism than
were their predecessors of the postwar period, which had the mystique and the
then-untarnished reputation of the TVA to shield them.
. Tom Zeller, “Ebb and Flow of Opinion: Big Dam Projects,” New York Times,  November
; Robert S. Devine, “The Trouble With Dams,” Atlantic Monthly Au g ust ,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/environ/dams.htm (last accessed  February ).

Mr. TVA Grass-Root Development PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Mr. TVA Grass-Root Development PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

        

“Mr. TVA”: Grass-Roots Development,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

It comes as a surprise to some visitors that the national monument to Franklin

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

with an inclusive, grass-roots emphasis on democratic participation by the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

. Paul Hutchinson, “Revolution by Electricity,” Scribner’s Magazine (October ): –.

power, produce fertilizer, support agricultural programs, combat soil erosion

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Tennessee to witness the accomplishments of the New Deal eﬀort. Rockefel-

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

. Charles A. Beard, “Administration, A Foundation of Government,”  December ,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

for getting companies to market aﬀordable appliances to the people in the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

. Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, , –.

bitterly opposed by power companies threatened by its operations and those

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, ), –.

Manhattan Project made him a logical choice to be a pathﬁnder for the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

modern society and therefore needed American technical assistance to ﬁll in

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

promoting modernization around the world. Much of D&R’s work centered on

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

be an important wedge in the drive to replace backwards, ignorant, and

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

. Ibid.; David E. Lilienthal, “Overseas Development as a Humanist Art,” in Management: A

Bank engineering staﬀ to support the discussions and, following prolonged

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

in Washington in , Goldschmidt urged the vice president to visit the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

a belief in the transformative power of development led by the United States.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

. Nguyen, Mekong River, .

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

not a destroyer. The choice of a man with Lilienthal’s reputation, experience,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

rationale – and all of these concerns could be contained by the Mekong

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

raising economic indicators. Broadly conceived development projects lost favor

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/26/3/335/378400 by El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. user on 09 August 2020

You might also like