The First Prophet of Abundance

To liberals of the 1940s, David E. Lilienthal was the man who promised abundance, and the Tennessee Valley Authority was the government agency that delivered it. Under Lilienthal’s leadership, the TVA accomplished spectacular feats of engineering. Through the construction of a dozen dams, it brought electricity to the seven states that the Tennessee River watershed spans. Its projects used enough material to fill — they claimed — all the great pyramids of Egypt 12 times over; all the more impressive given that most were completed during the shortages of World War II.

Their renown was all the greater because the TVA began as an experiment with an impossibly broad mandate. The TVA was founded in 1933 as the pet project of Senator George Norris, a Republican from Nebraska. Norris took a keen interest in the Tennessee Valley, where per capita income at the time was around half the national average, and whose residents suffered from constant floods. After several attempts to pass bills that would improve their situation, Norris saw success with the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933. It was tasked with developing the watershed — everything from flood control, to electrification, to battling malaria, to reversing the land’s erosion. No small task, that. Crucially, the Act also established the TVA as a public corporation, outside of any other government department.

It started auspiciously. President Roosevelt offered critical support. In part, it fit into his dream of modernizing the South; as a staunch public power man, it also fed his vendetta against private electric utilities. FDR hand-picked the first members of the TVA’s three-man board; Lilienthal, a former utilities lawyer, was one. But things soon went downhill. The TVA’s sprawling mission led to increasingly public fights between the three directors, each of whom held a different vision for the agency. The spats resulted in a Congressional investigation of the TVA, after which Lilienthal increasingly took charge, finally becoming the chairman in 1941. Once at the helm, he focused the TVA on its ambitious program of dam construction

The program bore fruit as the first few dams began to control floods and bring electricity to the region. Much of the early bickering was forgotten when the TVA delivered the enormous Douglas Dam in just over a year, with a low accident rate, all in the wartime conditions of 1943. The dam powered factories essential to the war effort, including the then secret Clinton Laboratories (now Oak Ridge National Laboratory), which enriched uranium used in the Manhattan Project. 

The TVA won widespread public acclaim, and the American people were eager to hear the story of its success. Lilienthal published Democracy on the March in 1944, dedicated to the people of the Tennessee Valley region. As he pondered moving on from his role, he told, in an almost evangelical tone, his narrative of what the TVA meant, and why development mattered.

It is difficult today to imagine the hold Lilienthal once had on the liberal imagination. It is tempting to call him the Ezra Klein of the 1940s, but the comparison is not wholly accurate — unlike Klein, Lilienthal is exciting. A generation of liberals dreamed of living in the world that the TVA was building, and of being the men that Lilienthal challenged them to be. 

The author John Gunther spoke for postwar liberals when he called the TVA arguably “the greatest single American invention of this century, the biggest contribution the United States has yet made to society in the modern world.” Although hyperbolic, Gunther’s judgment carried weight; he had just toured the entire United States while writing his masterpiece of Americana, the travelogue Inside U.S.A.

Having surveyed everything the United States had to offer, from the commanding heights of industry to the nascent welfare state, Gunther judged the TVA the fullest embodiment of America’s promise. Liberals like him trusted Lilienthal for two reasons: the soaring rhetoric that cast Abundance as a moral project, and the record of achievement that proved it possible.On both counts, today’s Abundance movement has something to learn from the Tennessee Valley Authority. They could learn it from Democracy on the March – though they should read it with caution. With respect to rhetoric, Lilienthal remains unparalleled in describing prosperity as a fundamentally American value. But he was unreliable at describing the reasons for the TVA’s success, instead portraying the TVA’s self-serving compromises as visionary ideals. Both matter for proponents of Abundance: TVA’s real approach shows how to deliver projects that inspire confidence, while Lilienthal’s language gives people a reason to believe in their importance.

Lilienthal’s book is less like Klein and Thompson’s book, and more like a much better-known work from the 1940s — Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, albeit if George Bailey had lived in the Deep South and built hydroelectric plants.

Both works are about Abundance. It’s a Wonderful Life is rightly remembered as a Christmas classic, but the main character, George Bailey, ought to be considered a YIMBY hero. He gives up his dreams to finance affordable housing that wealthy locals disapprove of! It is odd, and somewhat telling, that the Abundance movement has never claimed the film for themselves, despite Bailey being the perfect distillation of their policy goals.

Lilienthal’s vision of Abundance is forgotten for the same reason that Capra’s is unrecognized. He framed economic development as a question of personal character and collective purpose, two values arguably absent in today’s Abundance movement, which often speaks in the detached idiom of Twitter policy debates. In Lilienthal’s telling, prosperity is a human — not technocratic — endeavor. 

The difference is visible on the first page. Klein and Thompson begin by imagining a future where Abundance has delivered a solarpunk Eden, replete with lab-grown meat and supersonic jets. Their vision is set in 2050 in some unnamed city. They offer moderate analysis — environmentalism and community involvement are good, but only in the right amounts. Their book offers policies that support a better America.

Contrast this with Democracy on the March. Lilienthal’s first page locates his story of progress in a specific time and place:

While Lilienthal starts with a geographic description, he goes on to offer a sermon. He was an optimist about economic growth — the “Grand Job of This Century” — but not a booster. As he warned:

Lilienthal’s language was unapologetically moralistic. For him, technology mattered insofar as it shaped character and built up communities. His vision began with the individual: people must first believe they can make a difference. From there, they could join with others to build a stronger civic life. This moral vision was not blind to the challenges of the modern era. His two guiding principles — the need to respect the “unity of nature” and the imperative that “the people must participate actively” in development — directly addressed what we now call environmentalism and community involvement. His moral vision turned these from obstacles into opportunities for shared action. Like Klein and Thompson, he offered policies that could improve America. But more than that, Lilienthal wrote in a way that makes you want to be a better American.

Lilienthal believed development was an imperative, but not the only one. What mattered just as much was the fate of Average Joe, the ordinary people who wondered whether they could matter in mass society. As he put it:

For Lilienthal, science could conquer nature, but only democracy could make this conquest meaningful. Expertise had to reach down into the lives of ordinary citizens, not hover above them. “Science,” he wrote, “would enable the average man (on a farm or in the town) to learn what it is that technology makes feasible, for him, what, in short, are the people’s alternatives; without that knowledge what reality is there in the free man’s democratic right to choose?”

Expertise was crucial but far from self-justifying. It had to prove itself by giving people agency. Even in something as practical as rural electrification, Lilienthal insisted the goal was not only prosperity but pedagogy: showing people that collective will and technical skill could tackle their problems. New power lines made it possible for farmers to buy new appliances — a refrigerator, or an electric stove — which in turn sparked a new kind of pride in the condition of their homes. The payoff was psychological as well as material — people not only had new possessions, but a sense of stewardship over them. Lilienthal noted that one could “follow the trail of new electric lines in many sections by observing the houses that have been thus tidied up.”

This philosophy ran through all of the TVA’s programs. Agricultural initiatives relied on demonstration farms where neighbors could see new techniques in action. Even in its dealings with manufacturers, TVA emphasized teaching over control. It developed new fertilizers and farming equipment suited to the valley’s conditions, but once it had shown that a real market existed it stepped back and let private industry take over. Across the board, the TVA approached development as a chance to help people see the choices they might take.

In Lilienthal’s telling, this was the deeper promise of technology. It was not just about power lines or flood control; properly deployed, it gave individuals a new sense of agency in a modern, impersonal society. Most crucially, that agency could then be turned outward, to serve the needs of the community:

Lilienthal’s vision of community involvement was active rather than defensive. Today, public participation often takes the form of lawsuits and permitting battles. But even in the 1940s, public participation was contested amid the centralization of the New Deal and wartime mobilization. Lilienthal framed public participation as neighbors coming together to build and take responsibility for shared resources. He preempted those who would view public participation as the right to veto.

His favorite example was the electric cooperatives, community-owned distributors that carried the TVA’s power the final mile to farms. The TVA imposed firm standards on accounting and wholesale rates, but encouraged the locals to take ownership themselves. Lilienthal claimed one of the most moving sights was the co-op meetings, sometimes drawing thousands of farmers, debating the future of their grid.

The same pattern appeared outside TVA’s core mandate. In library projects, for instance, the TVA would only launch programs on the condition that communities eventually take them over. The library system spread outward: one county, then its neighbors, and finally a statewide system — the first for Tennessee.

The TVA rarely began programs without a plan for withdrawal. Parks, libraries, and other ventures were deliberately handed back. In Lilienthal’s telling, the point was never state-led development for its own sake; it was government equipping citizens with the tools to govern themselves. At the deepest level, Lilienthal envisioned abundance as a democracy of builders: citizens confident in their power to act, communities bound together by shared work, and government experts who provided the knowledge to make that work possible.

What can Lilienthal’s vision offer Abundance liberals today?

It offers a patriotic language of virtue and belonging. Instead of proposing policies, Lilienthal spoke to people’s desire to matter, to join a movement, and to work together for their communities. These human concerns were as common then as now. He spoke less about what people might do in a better world and more about who they might be.

Lilienthal also grappled with the same objections that shape today’s debates: environmental protection and public participation. He didn’t downplay these values or try to balance them uneasily against development. Instead, he outflanked these objections by redefining what participation and environmental stewardship could mean: communities acting together, drawing on technical expertise to guide their future. In doing so, he offered his generation a way to avoid the very dysfunctions that now plague us.

That world is gone. Environmental review now serves as a weapon against development, with the post-NEPA permitting regime smothering projects in the crib. Participation now means litigation. Given this, the Abundance movement has sensibly focused first on technocratic fixes for technocratic problems. What’s still missing is a larger vision, a patriotic call to arms that gives reform meaning.

Yet for all that, vision alone won’t cut it. People listened to Lilienthal’s stirring rhetoric, but they believed it because they could see the dams he built. Tangible achievements gave his words power. Abundance, too, must be able to point to real achievements. It may have much to learn from how the TVA delivered them.

And on that score, Democracy on the March is a very different book — a far less reliable one.

Lilienthal was a dreamer. He was also a ruthless and ambitious operator. Democracy on the March reflects both sides of him. It does not simply reflect the TVA’s history; it tries to shape the TVA’s reality. It does not merely celebrate the organization’s ideals; it rewrites its political horse-trading as if it followed from high principles. In short, the book was also a work of propaganda.

The propaganda worked because the TVA’s success was undeniable — but the story that Lilienthal told was incomplete.

There are, in fact, two ways of evaluating the TVA. The first is the story that Lilienthal did tell: a flexible and decentralized TVA, practically a town hall meeting in hard hats. The second is the one that Lilienthal could have told: a high-functioning bureaucracy, staffed with technical experts and guided by disciplined procedures that enabled it to deliver results.

The second story, of a disciplined Weberian bureaucracy, seeps through in Lilienthal’s account despite his attempts to downplay it. The story he did tell is a doubtful narrative made to protect the TVA’s political independence. His propaganda saved the TVA from being absorbed into a cabinet department.

It also ensured that there would never be another TVA. By insisting that the TVA was nothing like a conventional bureaucracy, Lilienthal made it harder for other agencies to imitate its actual strengths. Over time, it even warped the TVA itself, as its freewheeling self-image led it to sloppy engineering and paternalistic behavior that would have appalled Lilienthal. Proponents of Abundance who envision a more competent government need to look beneath the surface of Lilienthal’s narrative to learn how the government actually tackled what employees called “one hell of a big job.”

Lilienthal insisted that the TVA’s strength lived “in the minds of men,” namely the sense of common purpose that provided the TVA with vision and mission. This purpose, he claimed, was what attracted first-rate talent, helped settle internal disputes, and drove its achievements. Debate, he argued, accomplished more than hierarchy. 

Lilienthal deployed his most detailed anecdote to make his case, highlighting the TVA’s fight against malaria. Wartime dams were essential for power production, but their reservoirs also created ideal mosquito breeding grounds — a problem brought to a head by the unusually dry spring of 1942. In most organizations, public health officials and power engineers would have been at loggerheads: draining water to kill larvae meant cutting electricity. At the TVA, Lilienthal claimed, a shared sense of mission bridged these divides. Entomologists sent daily reports on mosquito larvae that engineers used to raise or lower dam levels whenever conditions allowed. The TVA’s electricity kept flowing, and malaria was kept in check. “The effect of the principle of unity upon the minds of technical men,” Lilienthal wrote, produced a successful compromise where paperwork would have failed.

For all that, the TVA was a bureaucracy. And effective bureaucracies do not emerge fully formed from charisma and improvisation. The TVA excelled because it mastered the mechanics of administration: hiring, bookkeeping, and contracting. Indeed, one observer of federal management singled out the TVA and noted that the roots of its successful day-to-day operations “are likely to be found in the development of overhead management.” ² Despite Lilienthal’s protestation, the TVA’s sophisticated procedures made it an exemplar of well-managed centralization. 

Take personnel, where Lilienthal’s focus on TVA’s vision downplayed its strikingly distinctive approach to recruitment. At the TVA’s founding in the Depression, it drew upon the unusually strong labor pool of unemployed engineers, and then selected the cream of the crop through targeted recruitment and ruthless proficiency testing. The testing requirement applied to blue-collar laborers, too, with even entry-level construction workers being selected via occupational aptitude tests. ³ The TVA’s vision mattered, but the truth is that its disciplined recruitment, based on unprecedentedly rigorous assessment of merit, mattered even more.

Personnel was far from the only area where TVA’s back office outperformed. Its accounting system was equally remarkable. Lilienthal casually remarked it was as good as any private firm, but he was underselling it — a review of federal agencies highlighted the TVA’s accounting system as a model of modern management, especially in its ability to help managers run an organization rather than merely track its funds. ⁴ The TVA brought on Eric Kohler, one of the most accomplished accountants in American history, to keep its books. Kohler designed a system that could track the cost of each team’s work, assign value to TVA’s long-lived infrastructure, and generate clean financial reports — all derived from a single, unified set of books. ⁵ Decades later, the business world would rebrand this idea as activity-based costing. When a Harvard Business Review article popularized the concept in 1988, its author doubted such a system could be run without multiple overlapping ledgers, unaware that the TVA had achieved exactly that half a century earlier. ⁶

The TVA’s construction, too, was closely managed. Unlike other New Deal projects that (as was standard federal practice) relied on outside contractors, the TVA carried out nearly all work with its own staff. It was an immense in-house operation, fought tooth and nail by construction companies that coveted federal contracts. For TVA’s other, ancillary goals, Lilienthal stressed that the TVA partnered with local institutions for everything from developing parks to establishing libraries, that it had even intended to be “working itself out of a job” — but the TVA’s core infrastructure work was kept tightly within its own chain of command. 

On every front, the TVA was a deeply bureaucratic creature. Its success was built on procedure — the personnel testing, disciplined accounting, and insourcing that provided oversight and direction to its top-tier engineers — not on decentralization or belief in a regional mission. Lilienthal downplayed these facts because they conflicted with the story he wanted to tell, of a TVA that achieved great things through improvisation.

From its founding, the TVA was designed as a uniquely independent agency: a government corporation charged with developing the Tennessee River Valley. Lilienthal fought fiercely to keep it that way. Other government agencies constantly eyed the TVA’s portfolio, with rival organizations wanting its soil conservation program or its recreational parks. FDR’s own interior secretary, Harold Ickes, tried to fold the TVA’s work into his department. Lilienthal responded by casting the TVA’s independence as its defining virtue, attempting to shield it from meddling by rival agencies and cabinet departments.

The TVA internalized Lilienthal’s narrative. Employees came to believe they could deliver results others could not because of their vision and flexibility. This ethos was baked into practice: engineers prided themselves on altering plans on-site based on local conditions. The TVA avoided state utility commission oversight, and during World War II, successfully pushed for the construction of the Douglas Dam over the opposition of Tennessee’s senior senator. To the TVA, it seemed proof that the agency, not elected politicians, best understood the Valley’s needs. ⁷ Over time, this self-image hardened into arrogance, with the TVA pursuing projects with a cold superiority foreign to the agency’s early years.

By the 1970s, engineering discipline had collapsed. The improvisation tolerable in the 1930s, when the TVA had built dams using elite talent, became malpractice in nuclear construction. With weaker in-house expertise and poor documentation, every reactor suffered massive cost overruns and serious safety violations.

Lilienthal had once boasted that vision united experts against malaria, but by the 1970s the TVA was consumed with infighting. The agency had grown siloed as its old hands retired, and the bureaucratic backbone that once bound specialists together had vanished. Budget discipline withered into ritual, grid planning degenerated into wish lists, and nuclear projects spiraled out of control. TVA had inherited Lilienthal’s faith in vision, but without the structure that once gave it force, vision by itself could not hold.

Its community relationship soured as well. Early dams had powered the region, whereas in 1967, the TVA began constructing the Tellico Dam — an economically unjustifiable project that submerged Native American graves and rural communities to make room for golf courses. Convinced that it knew best, the TVA brushed aside the politicians who might have put a stop to the folly.

Lilienthal’s narrative distorted the TVA’s legacy too. By the 1960s, with liberalism once again ascendant, Lyndon Johnson and his allies looked to the TVA as a national model. But they absorbed only its myth of decentralized flexibility, ignoring the bureaucratic discipline that had delivered success. War on Poverty institutions such as the Office of Economic Opportunity were launched with free rein, minimal oversight, and little technical expertise. These agencies were inspired by Lilienthal’s description of the TVA, not the agency as it actually functioned.

Lilienthal believed that confronting the “Grand Job of This Century” required more than dams and power lines. It required understanding “the aspirations of men and women”, their need to be enlisted in a moral crusade larger than themselves. The TVA, in his telling, was not just an agency but a movement, proof that government could thrill the public imagination.

What, then, was Lilienthal’s legacy really? The TVA brought electricity and prosperity to an impoverished region. It helped win a world war. It proved that a government agency, armed with technical expertise and disciplined administration, could achieve feats once thought impossible for the public sector. Yet the TVA was never the freewheeling democratic crusade Lilienthal portrayed. Its independent structure and regional mission were not a replicable template for modern governance, and its success depended on a centralized, tightly managed bureaucracy that Lilienthal himself disguised.

Perhaps Lilienthal never fully saw this. The staggeringly ambitious director of the TVA and, later, the Atomic Energy Commission, might have mistaken his own aspirations for institutional reality, believing the TVA embodied a mostly fictitious participatory spirit. That misperception helped doom the TVA’s later ambitions and led later reformers astray — results that could not have been more contrary to his hopes.

And yet, the United States was better for having had Lilienthal. The Abundance movement, too, would profit by reading his book and learning from both halves of it — the dream he proclaimed and the reality he concealed. Lilienthal’s optimistic vision offers a language that ties Abundance to virtue and community. Its language is rooted in the needs of rural America, concerns that modern advocates of Abundance too often overlook in their focus on urbanism. The real TVA — not the mythical TVA Lilienthal constructed — is worth studying as well, as an example of bureaucratic excellence. The agency proved that the administrative state could achieve inspirational, even monumental things, and those who hope to achieve the same should learn from its disciplined execution.

Ultimately, when John Gunther traveled the United States and declared the TVA the greatest American invention of the century, he was wrong. But he wasn’t a fool. He saw an extraordinary institution still worth imitating, and believed in a dream still worth believing.