Fighting to get the REA

It took Sam Rayburn and FDR to make rural power possible

By Carol Pelosi

(The second of three parts.)

“I’m going back to Muscle Shoals,

Times are better there, I’m told.”

            – Doc Watson singing “Deep River Blues”

While people in towns and cities enjoyed electric lights, modern bathrooms, radios and vacuum cleaners, 6 million of America’s 6.8 million farms were powered by muscle.

And for more than a decade, the dam at Muscle Shoals, Alabama stood as a symbol of that darkness.

The dam had been built by the federal government during World War I at a cost of $145 million to make ammunition, nitrates and fertilizer. After the war, proponents of electricity for rural America wanted to use the dam to produce some of that power.

But the privately owned utility companies were very powerful – and very rich because pyramids of ownership allowed them to siphon off both profits and capital. And they wanted the dam on the Tennessee River turned over to them.

Senator George Norris from Nebraska believed that power generated from America’s rivers – rivers that belonged to the people as a whole – should provide power for the American people. Twice during the 1920s he pushed bills through Congress that would have kept Muscle Shoals permanently owned and operated by the federal government.

Those bills were vetoed by Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. At the same time, Norris fought off efforts to sell the dam to private utilities.

It was not until 1933, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt swept to power, that Norris’ dream became a reality. In 1933 the Tennessee Valley Authority was approved by Congress. It gave preference for the sale of low-cost wholesale power to states, cities, counties and cooperative organizations.

TVA was the incubator for the rural electrification program, and through it the first cooperative, the Alcorn County Electric Power Association, was begun in 1934 in Corinth, Mississippi.

The next year, Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Rural Electrification Administration as part of the federal relief efforts during the Depression. For a year, the first REA administrator, Morris Cooke, tried to encourage existing utilities to extend electric lines to the rural parts of America using those low-cost loans.

The power companies agreed to study the proposals. Three months later, in July of 1935, their report was issued.

“There are very few farms requiring electricity for major farm operations that are not served,” the study concluded, and “the utilities consider the immediate urge for rural electrification as a social rather than an economic problem.”

Out around Stony Hill, farmers like Worth Pearce, Bervin Woodlief and L.K. Stephenson surely would have been surprised to hear that. Norris Rogers had asked Carolina Power & Light for years to extend line a line to his farm that was only half a mile from the Rolesville school.

Farmers and rural people did what they could – installed gasoline engines to pump up water, put in carbide lamps to have better light after dark than kerosene lamps – but they knew that electricity was what they really needed.

The National Grange and the American Farm Bureau both urged during 1935 that a permanent REA program, one not dependent on private utilities, be organized.

In North Carolina the General Assembly established its own Rural Electrification Authority, a promotional agency charged with getting rural lines built by any organization, public or private, that would build them.

Pressure was building all over the country for electricity. On Jan. 6, 1936, Norris introduced a bill in the Senate for a permanent REA. In the House, Rep. Sam Rayburn of Texas introduced a similar bill. Despite opposition in the Senate, where some senators called it socialistic and subversive, the bills passed in both houses, but they had different provisions. It took all of Rayburn’s skill to finally reach a compromise and get to Roosevelt’s desk. It was signed on May 20, 1936.

But even if there was low-cost money available for cooperatives – as low as 1 1/3 percent – electricity wasn’t any closer for most people. They had to create those cooperatives, get those loans and start building those lines.

It was not until four years later – on Groundhog Day 1940 – that things got underway around Wake Forest.

Randolph Benton had been principal of the school at Apex where the vocational teacher was E.T. Kearns Jr. When Benton came to Wake Forest as superintendent of the school district, he hired Kearns for the high school here. Kearns was here just one year, but that was enough.

Kearns called the meeting (and we do not know where it was but it might have been in the auditorium of the then-Wake Forest High School on Sycamore Avenue) and told about 40 farmers how farmers in Davidson and adjoining counties had organized a cooperative and were serving themselves with electricity.

At the meeting were people like Benton; Russell Wiggins, the postmaster and a farmer who was later elected president of Wake Electric Membership Corporation; and Dr. Thurman Kitchen, president of Wake Forest College. There was J.P. Bailey, an original board member who served as treasurer for many years; Rogers from Rolesville; and E.C. Hunt, a board member and secretary.

What these pioneers had to do was convince enough others to join in a cooperative to make it a success. That meant having enough customers to guarantee paying back the loan in 25 years – and that meant having at least three customers per mile. And another REA provision was that right-of-way would not be purchased but would be donated by those who wanted the lights.

They had to ask cash-poor people – “Everybody was living in poverty except the bootleggers,” Pearce said – to pay a $5 deposit to join the cooperative, then expect a $2 minimum bill every month. “We had to beg people to sign up,” said Stephenson. “Didn’t any of us have any money.”

Those first leaders fanned out across five counties like Bible-thumping revival preachers bringing the word. “We would go out to churches and country stores,” remembers J.L. Shearon, who had been helping his father operate a cotton gin in town as well as farming before he was hired by the group as project-supervisor in 1940. He was to be the manager of Wake EMC up through his retirement in 1971.

“Some would go out and give their time. They would go right down the road, talking to everyone there,” Shearon said. “Finally it was every night that there was a meeting in a

church or a store about the cooperative.

The editor has encountered several problems trying to place pictures supplied by Wake Electric showing conditions on farms in the Harricane before they had electricity and after. If I solve the problems you will see several next week.

The series will continue next week.

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