Mississippi Remake

"Life in the Mississippi Valley of the future need not be poverty-stricken or precarious. ... Its quality can be enormously improved. It need not go the way of the valley of the Nile, the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates . . . the stripped valleys of China. . . .

"The future cannot undo all the Binders of the past. . . . But there are things we can certainly draw into our map of the future if we wish. Such a map might show the disastrous kind of erosion finally checked. Instead of gullied hillsides and slopes ... it would show terraces; alternations of tilled land and grasslands; new forests springing up in belts and patches. ... It would show ... the scientific uses of all the land in the Valley, determined after long studies of soils and climatic conditions. No farmer would be trying to grow corn on land fit only for timber, or wheat on land best fitted for grazing, or anything at all on land best fitted for recreation and the preservation of wild life.

"The rivers might not be entirely under control in times of major floods, but the crest of the floods would have been lowered. . . . Power lines would have flung an intricate, interconnected network over the whole region. . . . Every farmer's family would find its work lightened by the use of electricity. New manufactures, perhaps new inventions, might have restored some of their lost traffic to the rivers. Possibly recreational uses would have supplanted commerce on most of them. Playgrounds of all sorts . . . would be more extensive and more thickly spotted over the map."

Such was the vision conjured up last week by a committee of technicians and scientists which President Roosevelt year ago set to studying the use and control of water in the Mississippi Valley. For chairman the President had chosen a sturdy, handsome, enthusiastic Philadelphian whom he, as Governor of New York, had put on that State's Power Authority. A topnotch consulting engineer and one-time president of the Taylor ("Scientific Management") Society, Morris Llewellyn Cooke was an old hand at broad-gauge planning through service on the War Industries Board and the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care. As members of PWA's Mississippi Valley Committee he and his eight colleagues had the inspiration of a President to whom vast schemes of national betterment are political meat & drink. Exalting, too, was their vast field of operations--sweeping from the Appalachians to the Rocky Mountains, from the pine forests of Minnesota to the cypress swamps of Louisiana, containing more than one-third the total area of the U. S.

Exuberantly the Committee set out to produce a plan which in grandeur and sweep should be worthy of its subject. Power, navigation, flood control, low-water control, erosion control, water supply, sanitation, irrigation, industry, commerce, water storage, forestry, recreation, wildlife conservation and employment were woven into "a pattern on which are dependent the lives and happiness of millions now living and millions still to be born." Chief components:

Power. Only one-eighth of the Mississippi River system's potential electric power is harnessed. Only one Mississippi Valley farm in 16 is served by power lines. The Valley's present power map shows "a crazy patchwork of operating areas and a mass of independent, unrelated generating units." Remaking that map, the Committee would bring cheap electricity to every home by Federal coordination of all power transmission not only in the Valley but in the entire U. S. Lining up with the Roosevelt "yardstick" policy, the Committee was nonetheless careful to point out that such unification would not necessarily mean extension of Government ownership. It would, indeed, benefit the private producer by eliminating duplication of plant and equipment, creating a larger and steadier market, opening up new sources of energy. But: "During the next 20 years [the Government] could profitably spend $1,000,000,000 on river works in the Mississippi Valley, half of which would be for self-liquidating power installations." "A safe and socially justifiable experiment" would be the allotment of $100,000,000 for independent, self-liquidating rural electric projects.

Erosion. Granary of the U. S. is the Mississippi Basin. Wind and water have stripped one-fourth of its tilled lands to the subsoil, hopelessly gullied much more. "The very land is dying," said the President's Committee. "Measured by man's brief generations it is losing forever its ability to produce food." In this national emergency the national Government must lead. Conservatively estimated, erosion costs the U. S. $400,000,000 per year. In a 20-year program of co-operation with States, counties and individual farmers, the Government could check erosion at a cost of $20,000,000 per year.

Floods. "Floods pay no attention to political jurisdictions. Any coordinated system of control will demand the co-operation of neighboring States with each other as well as the cooperation of States with the Federal Government. ... It is suggested that the Federal Government might pay 30% of the cost of labor and materials for projects of chief benefit only to local communities; a larger proportion as the measurable general benefits increased; and 100% of the construction cost when the benefits to be derived were ... a national affair."

Plan To End Plans? Throughout the Committee's report ran a repeated emphasis on cost-sharing by localities. President Roosevelt's only comment on the report last week was to reiterate that point. And it was that feature which fostered a widespread belief that the Mississippi Committee's report might be the plan to end all such New Deal plans. When the Federal Government undertook to spend hundreds of millions of Federal dollars in the Tennessee Valley for local improvements, it was welcomed with open arms by local beneficiaries. This reception would certainly have been less enthusiastic if the Mississippi Valley Committee's share & share plan had been applicable to the Tennessee Valley, and its States, counties and cities had been required to pay part of the bill.

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