So, all through the ’20s, Norris used his influence as part of the Republican majority—he was variously chairman of the Senate Agriculture and Judiciary Committees—to block Ford and other would-be tycoon-developers.
Indeed, Norris managed to rally a bipartisan majority in Congress in support of a national public venture at Muscle Shoals. But President Calvin Coolidge pocket-vetoed the bill in 1928. Three years later, President Herbert Hoover outright vetoed it, stating the free-enterprise case against federal ownership:
The real development of the resources and the industries of the Tennessee Valley can only be accomplished by the people in that valley themselves. Muscle Shoals can only be administered by the people upon the ground, responsible to their own communities, directing them solely for the benefit of their communities and not for purposes of pursuit of social theories or national politics. Any other course deprives them of liberty.
Yet by then, Hoover and the free-enterprise faith were drowning in the Depression.
In 1932, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned for the White House declaring his opposition to Hooverism and his support for Norris-ism: “The question of power, of electrical development and distribution, is primarily a national problem.” Having embraced an activist role for the federal government, Roosevelt further pledged to combat the “many selfish interests in control of light and power industries.”
That November, FDR defeated Hoover by 18 points, giving his New Deal a clear mandate, including for nationalized public power.
The following year: TVA. The massive project, built without much regard for environmental impact statements, proved itself a dynamo, driving not just prosperity for the area, but security for the nation. The major reason the Manhattan Project chose Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for its uranium-enriching plant was its proximity to the abundant hydropower generated by TVA dams.
The question unasked in those days: Could Henry Ford & Co. have built the same dams and provided the same power? Maybe cheaper, faster, better? Could, perhaps, private capital have made Muscle Shoals into Manhattan, as the capitalists had envisioned? We’ll never know.
But we do know that there’s a Norris Dam in Tennessee. So the Nebraskan has his legacy in TVA.
We also know that the Power Question continued to radiate, one of the hottest topics of the interwar era. Even as the New Dealers proceeded with the public TVA, they targeted private utilities. In 1935, the administration teamed with Rep. Sam Rayburn, chairman of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, to advance the Public Utility Holding Company Act. PUHCA included an ominously named “death sentence” provision for then-prevalent holding companies.