The TVA began with high, contradictory hopes for a region that the whole country saw as troubled. The Tennessee Valley was one of the poorest regions in the United States by the time of the Great Depression. Only three percent of farms in the region had access to electricity, and most farmers worked as cotton sharecroppers. The Tennessee River was difficult to navigate, and when it flooded, it devastated communities. Malaria affected close to 30 percent of the population. Millions of acres of farmland were badly eroded from years of cotton overproduction, and the median income in the region was close to one-third the national average.
For years, progressives in both parties had taken aim at democratizing private utilities. Senator Gerald Norris of Nebraska made the issue into his own crusade. At Muscle Shoals in Alabama, the federal government had started a dam during World War I that was finished in 1924, but it only generated a fraction of its full power. Norris's attempt to use the dam to provide cheap public power was stymied by Herbert Hoover, who vetoed a bill in 1931 that would have adopted the project. Norris felt that the issue was blocked by private companies, who "want no yardstick which would expose their extortionate rates…" But Norris's vision won out a few years later when Franklin Roosevelt was elected. Roosevelt liked the idea of expanding on what had been done at Muscle Shoals, and in April of 1933, he asked Congress to "create a Tennessee Valley Authority, a corporation clothed with the power of government, but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise." With that, the Muscle Shoals dam was adopted into the TVA system.
While the TVA began as a Great Depression relief program, it was far more ambitious than programs like the Works Progress Administration or the Civilian Conservation Corps. The TVA's mandate was broader than any peacetime government program established before it. It would be responsible for flood control, erosion control, disease eradication, fertilizer manufacturing, dam construction, and electricity generation. The TVA also sold electric power to communities rather than offering it to private companies, a move that lowered the cost of energy and, as a result, improved people's lives by giving them access to modern amenities and attracting manufacturing jobs to the region.
One of the TVA's most important mandates was to make the Tennessee River navigable, as river management was a prerogative of Congress. Vagueness was part of the mission. When asked by George Norris about what the TVA would do, Roosevelt responded that "it's neither fish nor fowl, but whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley."