Just a little history: Fighting to get the REA

‘Everybody was living in poverty except the bootleggers.’ – Worth Pearce

In 1940, 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 provide the power 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 electric utility companies were very powerful – and very rich because pyramids of ownership allowed them to siphon off both profits and capital. They wanted the dam on the Tennessee River turned over to them.

Sen George Norris from Nebraska believed power generated by America’s rivers – rivers that belong to the people as a whole – should provide power for America’s 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 was swept to power, that Norris’s 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 organization.

The 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 to alleviate the hardships of 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 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 now 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. Half a mile from the Rolesville school, Norris Rogers had asked Carolina Power & Light to extend lines to his farm for years.

Farmers and rural people did what they could – installed gasoline engines to pump up water, put in carbide lamps to have better light than kerosene lamps after dark – but they knew 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 for electricity was building all over the country. On January 6, 1936, Norris introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate for a permanent REA. In the U.S. House, Rep. Sam Rayburn from 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 as a negotiator to finally work out a compromise and get it to Roosevelt’s desk, who signed it 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 getting any closer for most people. They had to create those cooperatives, get those loans and start building the lines.

It was not until four years later, on Groundhog Day 1940, that things got underway around Wake Forest. Randolph Benton, who is remembered by the Benton Building on the Wake Forest Elementary campus (that was razed in 1991 to make way for a one-story building), had been principal at the school in 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. That was enough.

Kearns called the meeting 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 farmer who was later elected the first president of the Wake Electric Membership Corporation; Dr. Thurman Kitchin, president of Wake Forest College; 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 its 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. 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 and then expect a $2 minimum bill every month. “We had to beg people to sign up,” Stevenson said. “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,” remembered 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 series will continue next week.)

The photographs for this week’s article from the Wake Electric archives are of Alonzo Lewis of Wake Forest in August 1950 with his flock of chickens; four unnamed people in overhauls and wide-brimmed hats setting tobacco by hand in April 1954; and Emma J. Wright of Louisburg drawing water from her family’s well in July of 1954.