Origins of the TVA

“Peculiarly a feature of the 1920s, the Muscle Shoals controversy neatly spans the time between World War I and the New Deal. [What was] a wartime nitrate facility underwent a tortured evolution, through several stages of development, to become the Tennessee Valley Authority. . . . Professor Hubbard pursues the fantastic controversy, step by detailed step, in this solid book. He tells the story quietly and with admirable detachment, [although] a story involving Henry Ford, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, George Norris, and Gifford Pinchot could not make solemn history.--Mississippi Valley Historical Review

 

"Professor Hubbard's painstaking study, Origins of the TVA, shows the thorny course of events before TVA was born....Students of legislation and party politics will be grateful to Professor Hubbard for his careful and useful narrative of the long conflict over policy. His work is well done. He has examined the public records and some of the private papers....Professor Hubbard's volume is a credit to its author and to the press which published it." --J. B. Shannon, The University of Nebraska, in Political Science Quarterly