 More than 300 years ago, the first pioneers crossed the oceans to a new world. A promise called the promise of a land where a man 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. In the Tennessee Valley, 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. Even the older men had forgotten that the valley had once been bright with promise and with hope. Horace Higgins was one of the many who had given up the fight. What's the use, he said? You fill up those gullies and the first rain washes it away. It's the same with all the land around here. It may have been good land once, but it's bad land now. Bad land. Hopeless land. Henry Clark wondered. Erosion, the scientists call it, the eating away of the soil. A 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. This is the way it was, year after year, in a forgotten part of the United States. This was the havoc caused by greed and neglect and men working alone and unaided against the forces of nature. Farm, towns, industries, smash, hundreds drown, thousands made homeless. The energies of 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. Harcourt 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, who long had dreamed of regional planning, 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 headwater. 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 power men, 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 May 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 was to be developed in the United States. The project was to be developed 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. To many of the valley people, the plan was an intrusion. They said, let the government men do things with machines over the mountains. None of our business. But youth was more inquisitive and the pioneer spirit was still alive. Over the mountain was something new, big, exciting. Music The damn builders 200,000 of them in all 4,000 on this one project. Valley farmers and miners, mountaineers and city workers. To them, this was more than a job. They had a stake in what they were doing. They were building for themselves and for their children, for the future of the valley. As the month passed, the farmers started coming to the dams to see for themselves. 1,000. 1,000. 1,000. 1,000. They were impressed by the magnitude of the work, but even the open-minded ones, like Henry Clark, couldn't understand at first just what it all had to do with them. It was the 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 the beginning. Without the fullest cooperation of the people on the land, they're worthless. Music There were small meetings up and down the valley. John Warden told the farmers, 10 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. Every year 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, blowing 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? It isn't easy for men bound by habit and tradition to change their whole way of thinking. John Warden knew the farmers of the isolated back valleys. He had talked to hundreds of groups like this, and he knew they needed time. In signing with the TVA, Henry Clark became what was called a test demonstration farmer. His farm and thousands of others were to serve as laboratories where the 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. This was a radical departure from the old method of square farm. Flowing by contour, Henry learned to follow the curve of the land. No longer could the water run down straight ferns, the curves held it on the land. Then, to put life into the exhausted soil, Henry used a new phosphate fertilizer developed by the chemists from ore found in the region. The first season, Henry's cheap crop was clover. This was to provide the soil with nitrogen and revitalize the land. But it wasn't the cash crop. Henry had been warned. Still, 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 tract. This was the crucial period, the first season. The TVA men 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. By the next year, there were results. Henry Clark had the best crop of tobacco ever grown in the county. He was sending substantial quantities of food to market, and giving his neighbors plenty of food for thought. They came to see the new fertilizer, the new methods, and the student became a teacher. In the Tennessee Valley that year, 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. Each group of farmers had a machine. Each farmer had an equal right to its youth. 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. When Hollis Higgins saw Henry riding his new tractor, he began to understand the real meaning of TVA, that the individual, through cooperation with his fellows, becomes a more important individual. As John Warden says, when you develop people, you have something permanent. The development of people is the first concern of a democracy. In school, the children learn how to use the things that were built for them. They learn how the dams work. Up in the mountains on the tributary streams, high dams back 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 droughts, water can now be dispatched, as trains are dispatched on a railroad system. Music These are the symbols of a nation's constructive energy. Douglas, Gontesville, Cherokee, Wilson, Pickwick Landing, Chickamauga, Iwasa, Montana, Hale's Bar, Watts Bar, Fort Lauderdale, Breland, Appalachia, Norris, built for and owned by the people of the United States. Music Day and night in peace and war, the dams work for the people. Power for the factories, power for new industries, power to run a million machines running out airfacts, practice, textiles, engines, shoes, fertilizers, aluminum, cheap and abundant power to light the cities and villages, power for the farmers, power that can be converted to a hundred homely uses, power working tirelessly, endlessly, raising standards, reducing drudgery, power in the hands of the people. Music The children of the Tennessee Valley have recaptured the hope of their grandfather. They have learned that the TVA is indeed a artist, a measure of what men can build in peace, a measure of the stature of a new and better world, a world with dignity, work and hope for all. A world a child can walk into. Music