Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The “Seventy-Five Mile City” was the subject of a long, laudatory
Scien-
tific American
piece in September. The new Tennessee Valley industrial cen-
ter would depend on the establishment of linked “hydro-driven plants.”
Between these factories would be the “farm-homes of the factory work-
ers.” An employee, it was asserted, could “be a food-producer and salary-
earner at the same time.”
5
The idea was “factory and farm close together,
yet co-operation between them.”
6
Shortly thereafter, in an interview with
the magazine
Automotive Industries,
Ford envisioned “a great industrial city
on the banks of the Tennessee, which will rival Detroit.”
7
Ford's plan was ultimately rejected by Congress.The opposition was led
by Senator Norris, an advocate of public power. Though Ford bitterly
blamed “the international Jews” for the failure of his plan, he did make one
claim that rings true: “If we haven't done anything else, we have shown
what Muscle Shoals are worth.”
8
Ford had indeed changed the public's
thinking about Muscle Shoals. No longer would the question be about fer-
tilizer and hydroelectric power alone; it would increasingly focus on the
larger vision—a regional plan to uplift the area from backwardness to lead-
ership.The Tennessee Valley could be a great utopian experiment in revers-
ing some of the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, which Ford himself
had done so much to advance. Ford was not a proponent of urbanization.
He decried the movement of farmers from the land into the cities. “Fac-
tory and farm,” he said as early as 1918, “should have been organized as
adjuncts of one another, and not as competitors.”The city, in his view, had
been a mistake.
9
THE COMING OF THE NEW DEAL
These ideas resonated with those of another public figure from another side
of the political spectrum: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One historian writes
that within a year of the signing of the Tennessee Valley Authority legis-
ation President Roosevelt invited Ford to the White House to discuss
“getting people out of dead cities and into the country.”
10
Ford and
Roosevelt shared a commitment to “the land.” Roosevelt, the Hudson
Valley patroon, had a visceral distrust of high-density urbanization. And,
like Ford, Roosevelt was seeking a new way to mitigate the worst excesses
of industrialization.
For Roosevelt, unlike Ford, one way out was through planning, and espe-
cially regional planning. Roosevelt became interested in regional planning,
