Ickes v. Norris

Unknown to the U.S. at large, one of the fiercest and most important struggles for power in the history of the New Deal went silently on last week. It was like a fight between monsters of the sea: only an occasional bubble of blood marked the threshing progress of the struggle.

The fight was over control of the electric-power plants the New Deal has built (Tennessee Valley Authority, Bonneville, Grand Coulee), is building (Shasta, Red River, Santee-Cooper), and hopes to build (Arkansas River, St. Lawrence Seaway). One man wanted to control them all. The man: doughty, venomous, honest Harold LeClair Ickes, Secretary of the Interior.

For months Harold Ickes had worn down the White House doormat, trotting in & out with pleas, arguments, documents, plans and maps showing how much more economically, honestly, efficiently the projects could be managed if he could be the sole manager.

But another man had also gone to the White House, and had said: "No." This man, now almost too old for public service, had done more for public power than any living contemporary: Nebraska's Senator George William Norris, 80, Father of TVA.

Old George Norris feared that now, in the midst of victory, when the utilities had been regulated into national decency, the fruits of that victory would be scattered, trampled, perhaps even lost, in the rush for its possession.

He wanted regional power authorities established all over the country, to furnish cheap power to U.S. citizens and U.S. industry--and he wanted fiercely to keep the control of those authorities out of Washington. His TVA was the model. Under the setup he devised, TVA has only ten very minor employes in Washington. The rest of the 18,000, including TV Administrator David Lilienthal, live and work in communities they serve. Norris feared that all this would be undone by Harold Ickes; that the now-broken system of absentee (Wall Street) ownership of the utilities would be converted into absentee (Federal) management.

After months of close in-fighting and wire-pulling, Ickes won over one all-important ally: Franklin Roosevelt. To George Norris this was the crowning disaster. With the President he had marched through one battle after another, to one victory after another, in the public-power fight. Almost in tears he prepared to break with the man who once called him "the shining symbol of integrity in public life."

The case at issue was the proposed establishment of a Columbia Power Authority, to combine Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dam in the largest public power project on earth. Grand Coulee was built by Ickes' Reclamation Bureau, and both are being temporarily managed by Ickes' able, shrewd Dr. Paul Raver. To make this control permanent, Ickes got a bill introduced in Congress setting up CPA under the Interior Department, with a single administrator to be appointed (and removed) by him. To counter this move, the Norris forces introduced a bill setting up CPA like TVA--with a three-man board, appointed by the President, with terms extending over a nine-year span.

At the President's request, Norris went to argue with Ickes. They fought fiercely. Pressure groups crossed the country to argue. The New Dealers warred, brother v. brother. Only hints of the story crept into the press. In one unpublished letter to certain Senators the President flatly espoused Ickes' case, though he himself is on record in a Bonneville speech of 1937 as utterly opposed to centralized control of power.

But World War II has changed many things. Ickes is handy and faithful, and already controls oil and coal. If power is added to his list, Ickes will become "Energy Tsar" of the U.S. This may be inconvenient, uncomfortable, even dangerous to large bodies of the citizenry. But it will be convenient, strategic, perhaps all-important to the Commander in Chief of the U.S., at a time when the Federal Power Commission already predicts a possible power shortage of 800,000 kilowatts for 1942.

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