Astraddle two centuries of tumult in the American society, I am in agreement with much of what the “old-timers’” have to say about the Great Depression.
Being there and living through it only now reveals just how different that time was compared with today. The difference is almost incomprehensible in its relevance; the Depression years were nothing like today’s circumstances.
If the smell of fear was in the air then, I never smelled it. I didn’t even realize the level of poverty we lived in; being fearful of “fear itself” (that meaningless FDR slogan) was not practiced by anyone my family knew. But we all lived frugally because there was not much money, barter was much in use.
The small farm near Prattville, Alabama provided almost enough sustenance to our family of five with vegetables, apple pears in the fall and corn for both us and “Crip” the crippled mule. Crip and I got along famously; he taught me how to plow.
While I learned to appreciate hard work and its many benefits such as using a cross-cut saw for cordwood, shucking corn to eat for us and Crip and fodder for him in the winter. Chickens were “free range” and they and the dogs ate the table scraps. I learned how to do it, I know what it actually looks like when a “chicken runs around with his head cut off” which is analogous to an out of control agency. “Wringing” was another option and not bloody at all.
Mother’s wood stove baked the most delicious biscuits and helped warm the house. No electricity or running water or inside “facilities” in our old farm house. Same as in a couple of share-cropper’s houses on the farm. But there was not enough arable land to do much sharecropping. Water was drawn from a well in the yard but had to be toted up a hill to the house.
Saturday mornings meant wash time of both clothes and bodies. Two large black cast iron pots in the yard were heated, one to near boiling soapy water (Octagon was used most and on the scrub board), the other cooler pot was for rinsing. Bathing was inside in a large galvanized tub.
The clothes washing procedure was quite simple, dirty clothes filled one pot and a long stick was used to poke the clothes until they were clean enough (a magical time unknown to any but Mother) and the same stick was used to transport the steaming hot clothes to the rinse pot. Next came the clothes hand-wringing and hanging them to dry on a clothesline using wooden clothes pins.
My father was very handy with tools besides being a functioning genius and got a contract to build a huge drum sign for the brand new Prattville office of the REA (Rural Electrification Administration, 1935). The letters were a jagged REA in neon. I call myself helping him build it. He used a very small Delco AC generator for his power tools. Then he ran some wiring to a few hanging light fixtures in the house but the result was a 60-cycle flickering of even a couple of light bulbs. That was in 1939 or 1940 and the depression still was going strong.
The war already was raging in Europe and Dad went to work at Gulf Shipbuilding in Chickasaw, Alabama, building Liberty ships. He was the chief electrician on their “stiff-leg” crane. We soon moved to Mobile and not long thereafter, we all moved to Richmond, California where Dad, then with Kaiser Shipbuilding, invented a device to speed up the forming of cable straps for the quickly expanding fleet of Liberty ships. He received a patent and a reward for that significant war effort.
So as I review what we lived through without a bone of remorse or feeling as poor as we were, (yes, I went barefoot to school), we survived those tough times and went on to prosper individually and as a nation.
The prolonged depression essentially was over when a wartime economy took hold in 1940 and 1941 in earnest. As America grew and prospered during the post WWII era and despite the Korean “War”, it seemed there was no end to our good fortune of a full workforce and money ready to be spent after WWII for cars, houses and every imaginable electrical gadget. Electricity was cheap, available and was begging for more use.
Many years later while visiting the Shoals area in North Alabama did I better understand the bad hand it had been dealt by the TVA. Government is fickle and makes decisions for its own security instead of for the people. TVA literally abandoned the Shoals, ostensibly the headquarters of the TVA according to the TVA Act, leaving it in shambles from my visits 40 years earlier.
TVA was and is a good example of the failure of the government to “get out of the way”. Instead of turning over its capacity to produce cheap electricity to private enterprise, the TVA instead started on a long destructive path of gross mismanagements to where we are today. Left to its own devices, the TVA has jerked millions of people around with its dogmatic rulings the latest of which has been a huge jolt of electricity rate increases of about 20 percent.
TVA’s rates are uncontestable by any state or local government within its seven-state domain of 80,000 square-miles; it is “illegal” for the millions of customers inside their 2500-mile “fence” to seek lower rates elsewhere, even just on the other side of the fence. And TVA runs its electricity through 17,000 miles of its own federal transmission lines.
State utility commissions regulate electricity rates, among other things, that come under the jurisdiction of elected officials within each state. Not so with the anti-competitive TVA, a federal government agency, which has the unassailable power to set and to collect “taxes” of $10 billion annually in the form of electricity rates.
This is money that is sucked out of every local economy using TVA electricity, money that goes directly to the federal government.
It was called socialism back in the days of FDR; today it is called, “I’m your government and I’m here to help you”. But we’re suckers for taking that sucker bait of “payments in lieu of taxes” gambit held out by a benevolent government. It’s not an inconsiderable amount, about $450 million a year and it is doled out prorata to state and local governments whose customers use the most electricity and for property owned by the TVA. And to some even who have never used a kilowatt of TVA power as far away as Illinois.
A free-enterprise structured power system would provide much more in state and locality taxes and would provide the needed checks and balances not available through the TVA structure.
The state of Alabama decided it would give 5 percent of its TVA largess to dry counties because the poor souls collected not a penny from the Alabama Beverage Control levy on liquor from wet counties.
As history professor Harvey Jackson, Jackson State University, put it in his column in the Anniston Star (10/26/08), TVA is in essence subsidizing prohibition, like it or not.
The point of mentioning the Alabama situation is to show how the TVA has inveigled its way into the far reaches of state and local government with its “bribes” in lieu of taxes.
As a longtime advocate for the privatization of the TVA, I believe the time has come to sell off its assets and to liquidate as much as possible of TVA’s overleveraged $25 billion debt.
We have seen what non-supervision of government sponsored creatures such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have wrought on world financial markets, almost wrecking them. It is time to clean house of an even worse example of an agency under the direct control of Congress and the Administration. The question, the same point presidential candidate Wendell Willkie raised in 1940 is before us still.
“Do we want a nationalized electricity grid in America?” And if so, would that be called “socialism?”
Ernest Norsworthy
emnorsworthy@earthlink.net
http://norsworthyopinion.com
