 could build his own house, farm his own acres, raise his children in freedom. They carved from the wilderness an empire of agriculture and industry. They set for themselves new and higher standards of living. And yet, in one of the great river valleys of America, something went wrong. Three centuries later, the descendants of the pioneers were neglected people, living in a ruined land. For these children, the hope and the promise were dead. For them, the only future was poverty, ignorance, drudgery. The struggle to scratch a bare living from the reluctant soil, once been bright with promise and with hope. Horace Higgins was one of the many who had given up the fight. Halley's in the first rain washes it away. It's the same with all the land that was in good land once, but it's bad land now. The eating away of the soil, the destruction which began innocently when the early settlers cut down the forests. When the farmers, out of ignorance, plowed straight furrows down the hillside. Destruction from the sky, hundreds drowned, thousands made homeless as if the river running to waste. The energies of the people, too. Henry Clark's trouble was the trouble of three million Americans in the Tennessee Valley. It became the direct concern of 130 million Americans in the 48 states. A challenge to democracy and its ability to care for its own. The valley of the Tennessee River lies in the southeastern United States. It covers an area of 40,000 square miles. Nearly as large as England. It was a problem of reconstruction. Reconstruction of land, reconstruction of people. Democracy met the test. It found the men to supervise the job. James P. Pope, United States Senator from the West. Court Morgan, President of the University of Tennessee, who had worked out an agricultural program for the whole area. David Lillianthal, Administrator and Champion of Legislation for Cooperative Electric Power. George Norris, the great American statesman. He deemed a regional plan of setting up a national experiment in one region which could serve as a yardstick for every region. This was the plan. To chain the river through a series of giant dams, checking the floods, to open it to navigation from its mouth to its headwaters. To give the farmers the benefit of modern science and research. To help them control the water on their land and restore the fertility of the soil. To reforest millions of acres on the ravaged hillsides. To exploit the mineral resources of the area. To use the electric power generated by the dams to develop and rehabilitate industry in the cities. To electrify the farms through rural cooperatives. Above all, to prove that human problems can be solved by reason, science and education. The Tennessee Valley was to be pioneered again. This time to be developed, not plundered. This time not for the benefit of a few, but for the many who lived in it. These were the new pioneers. The architects. The research chemists. The agricultural experts. The powermen. The designers of hydroelectric dams. Their method was to control nature not by defying her as in the wasteful past, but by understanding her and harnessing her in the service of humanity. In 1933, a new chapter was written in American public policy when the plan was brought before the representatives of the people in Congress. An act was passed creating the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority. President Roosevelt told the nation that the project would set an example of planning not for this generation alone, but for all the generations to come. Then things began to happen in the valley. Let the government men do things with machines over the mountain. None alive, but used, was more inquisitive, was still alive. Over the mountain was something new, big, exciting. They started coming to the dams to see for themselves just what it all had to business of John Warden, the TVA agricultural representative, to answer that. It has everything to do with the farmers, he said. The dams are just a beginning. Without the fullest cooperation of the people on the land, they are worth it, farmers. Ten inches of topsoil supports all the life on earth. Every drop of rain that falls on your fields carries away a bit of this soil. Every time it rains, the gullies, the scars on your fields, grow deeper and wider. The precious topsoil goes faster. The undersoil is hard and sterile. The water which should have soaked into your land runs off, uselessly. Your topsoil travels with it, uselessly, down to the delta of the river. Millions of tons of good farming soil, lost forever, going away with the wind. All this waste isn't necessary. It can be stopped. Your land can be saved if we work together. You've seen the dams, but they're only part of the plan. The rest of it is up to you. If we're to succeed, all of us, you must learn to stop the erosion of your own land. The TVA was created for you to teach you new methods, to provide you with fertilizers to restore your soil. The land is yours, the dams are yours. The whole TVA is yours. We want you to use it. This is how you can become a part of the plan. We need volunteers to try out the new methods, to prove that they are the right ones. Thousands of farmers have already volunteered. How about you? Once at the isolated back valleys, he had talked to hundreds of groups like this, and he knew they needed time. In signing with the TVA to serve as laboratories, whether new methods could be tested and observed by all. Using a terracer made available by the TVA, John Warden showed Henry the principles of contour farming, held it on the land. Through the exhausted soil, Henry used a new phosphate fertilizer, developed by the chemists from ore found in the region. The first season, Henry's chief crop, this was to provide the soil with nitrogen, and revitalize the land. But it wasn't a cash crop. Henry had been warned when he made up his accounts at the end of the year. He couldn't help but feel, well, he sort of set his heart on that new track. This was the crucial period, the first season. The TVA man had known it would be. They were sure of their equipment and methods. The human minds and emotions were another thing. It was a hard decision for Henry Clark, whether he should go on. But he was the descendant of pioneers. Of men who had taken a chance, and who had known that their salvation lay in cooperation. The old spirit of the pioneers was reawakened. The dam builders, farmers, the machines, began to work as one. Substantial quantities of food to market, 30,000 other demonstration farmers became teachers too. For the next year's harvest, Henry and his neighbors had a threshing machine, especially designed by the TVA experts for this valley. Farmers had a machine. Each farmer had an equal right to its use. No longer was it one man alone against the drought and the flood. For the first time they were acting together, cooperatively, for a common purpose. And even more important, a change was beginning to come into their thinking. For the first time they were thinking in terms of each other. What they could accomplish together by working together. With new machinery, new methods, with a definite plan to follow, a plan that embraced them all, the farmers worked and the land responded. He began to understand the real meaning of TVA. That the individual, through cooperation with his fellows, becomes a more important individual. John Warden says, when you develop people, you have something permanent to concern. The children learn how to use the things that were built. Up in the mountains on the tributary streams, high dams backed up reservoirs against the time of drought. Releasing the water when it is needed, holding it in check when the rains come. Down the Tennessee River itself, wide dams control the water step by step. Instead of the alternate floods and drought, water can now be dispatched, as trains are dispatched on a railroad system, the nation's constructive energy, Douglas, Gontesville, Cherokee, Wilson, Pickwick Landing, Chickamaug, the people of the United States. To run a million machines, running out aircraft, engine, shoes, cheap and abundant power to light the cities and villages, to a hundred homely uses, power working tirelessly, endlessly, raising standards, reducing drudgery, hands of the people, a measure of what men can build in peace, a measure of the stature of a new and better world, a world with dignity, and walk into it.