David Eli Lilienthal (July 8, 1899 - January 13, 1981) was a capable and controversial American public official. Appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as one of three directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, Lilienthal served as the Authority's chairman from 1941 to 1946 and was known as "Mr. TVA."
Lilienthal's wife, Helen Lamb Lilienthal, was his closest friend and advisor.
Hoosier childhood
David Lilienthal was the oldest son of immigrants. His mother, Minna Rosenak Lilienthal, had left a devoted mother behind in Szomolany, Austria-Hungary, emigrating to America with her 11-year-old brother. Lilienthal's father Leo, from Hungary and then Vienna, had been forced to do heavy labor as an 11-year-old, and had been brutalized by the Austro-Hungarian Army. When Lilienthal later offered his father a trip back to Vienna as a gift, the old man bluntly refused: "Never want to see it again."
David Lilienthal was born in Morton, Illinois in 1899 and raised in several Indiana towns, principally Valparaiso and Michigan City. Lilienthal considered himself a small-town Hoosier at heart. His father was a gentle, generous man who would have liked to be employed in an intellectual position. But, undereducated and with a wife and children to support, he felt obliged to become a small-time merchant, despite having little aptitude for business. Both of David Lilienthal's parents passed on to their three children classic American immigrant virtues: ambition, respect for education, patriotism and a desire for public service.
His mother was devoted to Judaism, but Leo Lilienthal showed almost no interest in it whatsoever. With Leo's business career often shaky, he and Minna Lilienthal had an often stormy relationship, and the young David learned that money and status were precarious things. Throughout his life, he had a mild anxiety about falling into poverty.
Lilienthal's Hoosier childhood was later reflected in his taking pleasure in talking to farmers and small-town people, and in his belief that the best medicine for a cold was a half-pint of bourbon.
Higher education
Lilienthal attended DePauw University, where he met his future wife Helen Lamb, a fellow student, and joined the Delta Upsilon Fraternity. Lamb was also from a small-town background, in her case from Oklahoma.
In May 1917, as a 17-year-old college freshman at Depauw, Lilienthal met a young lawyer in Gary, Indiana. He later recalled that the lawyer
noted how seriously I was looking at life in general and suggested as a remedy for this and as a source of amusement and self-cultivation the keeping of a diary of a different sort than the "ate today" "was sick yesterday" variety, but rather a record of the impressions I received from various sources; my reactions to books, people, events; my opinions and ideas on religion, sex, etc. The idea appealed to me at once...
He would keep such a journal until the end of his life.
Lilienthal then attended Harvard Law School. Although his grades were only average until his third and final year at Harvard, he acquired a very important mentor there in Felix Frankfurter.
Lilenthal and the Tennessee Valley Authority
David Lilienthal's credentials for overseeing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) were earned as a member of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission under Wisconsin's innovative governor Philip La Follette. Lilienthal performed very well in that post, and he was aided in joining the TVA by the persistent lobbying of his old law professor Frankfurter.
The TVA was established on the basis that the Federal government ought to bring cheap hydroelectric power into rural areas which had not enjoyed access to it. But in the darkest days of the Great Depression, many of the TVA's allies were thinking well beyond hydroelectric power; they favored sweeping Federal powers to modernize the region's infrastructure through electricity, attract industry, and improve the economic and social lives of rural people. Accordingly, the TVA established extensive education programs, and a library service that distributed books in rural hamlets that lacked a library.
Opponents led by Wendell Willkie said the TVA was hostile to private enterprise and socialistic. Willkie became the Republican Presidential candidate in 1940, losing to Lilienthall's sponsor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Federally subsidized power would clearly put great pressure on the commercial power industry.
Others approved of technical engineering being brought to the Tennessee Valley - but not the systematic social engineering.
David Lilienthal, controversial figure
David Lilienthal tended to polarize people. He was a tall, well-educated and well-spoken man when he came to Tennessee, an effective orator who made friends and allies easily in small groups. He tackled his job with vigor, relishing the long working hours and the chance to bring a measure of prosperity to poor southern families. His book, TVA: Democracy on the March, is an exuberant celebration of the TVA concept.
But Lilienthal was not a native Tennessean, nor even a southerner. He was only 34 years old and a Jew. He had been trained at Harvard Law School, which produced many of the most fervent young New Dealers. Lilienthal felt, as did President Roosevelt, that severe hard times called for vigorous social experimentation and aid to the poor.
Lilienthal had an expansive view of the TVA. In 1944, he wrote of the Tennessee River:
In Missouri and in Arkansas, in Brazil and in the Argentine, in China and in India, there are just such rivers...rivers that in the violence of flood menace the land and the people, then sulk in idleness and drought - rivers all over the world waiting to be controlled by men - the Yangtze, the Ganges, the Ob, the Parana, the Amazon, the Nile....
This kind of rhetoric made many small-government conservatives seethe.
Additionally, Lilienthal annoyed powerful Tennessee political interests, notably Democratic Senator Kenneth McKellar, by his refusal to let such a major Federal project as the TVA become a place for patronage appointments. One famous tangle with Senator McKellar produced a prolonged Lilienthal speech, marked by the words "This I do believe", which is still an eloquent statement of the liberal political creed.
The TVA was, in many respects, a great success and has been one of the most enduring legacies of the New Deal. Lilienthal used it to promote regional development in Mexico, and in Latin America generally. But it also suffered from internal disputes, deriving from deep differences between Lilienthal and his fellow TVA director, Arthur Morgan.
The struggle between Lilienthal and Morgan
Arthur Morgan and David Lilienthal locked horns on the day they met. In 1933, Morgan invited Lilienthal to become a director of the TVA.
Morgan was an intense man, justly proud of his achievements as an engineer and an educator. Lilienthal was a confident, at times arrogant, young man, skilled as a lawyer and orator. It was not surprising that these two men should disagree over the TVA program. Morgan felt it both ethical and practical to use the existing private power companies in the Tennessee Valley to distribute TVA power. Lilienthal, who neither respected nor trusted the private utilities companies as much as did Arthur Morgan, favored Federal government control of the power and perhaps working through rural power co-operatives. The two men passionately disagreed on this matter, and, in 1936, their disagreements spilled into public view.
Around 1936, Arthur Morgan tried to convince President Roosevelt not to reappoint Lilienthal to his post. Ever the moralist, Morgan accused Lilienthal—and others at TVA—of corruption and abuse of power. Conservatives in Congress, enormously frustrated by President Roosevelt's landslide re-election in 1936, eagerly and at great length investigated the corruption charges in a TVA which they felt was almost un-American.
Yet, Arthur Morgan could not, or would not, substantiate his accusations. In 1938, President Roosevelt asked Morgan to resign from the TVA. When Morgan refused, the President fired him. In a test of wills—and political skills—David Lilienthal had prevailed.
Atomic energy years
In January 1946, U.S. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked Lilienthal to chair a small panel advising the President and the Secretary of State about the position of the President and the U.S. representative to the United Nations on the new menace of nuclear weapons.
Lilienthal was fascinated and appalled by the information he soon absorbed about the power of the atomic bomb. On January 28, 1946, he wrote in his journal:
No fairy tale that I read in utter rapture and enchantment as a child, no spy mystery, no "horror" story, can remotely compare with the scientific recital I listened to for six or seven hours today...I feel that I have been admitted, through the strangest accident of fate, behind the scenes in the most awful and inspiring drama since some primitive man looked for the very first time upon fire...
From 1947 to 1949, Lilienthal chaired the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and was one of the pioneers of civilian control in the American atomic energy program. He hoped to administer a program which would "harness the atom" for peaceful purposes, principally atomic power. This might have been a legacy even more dramatic than the introduction of hydroelectric power to the Tennessee Valley.
But the AEC was responsible for managing atomic energy development for the military as well as for civilian use, and Lilienthal spent more of his time than he would have liked essentially insuring that the Commander-in-Chief would have the use of a number of working atomic bombs.
As chairman of the AEC in the late 1940s, during the early years of the Cold War, Lilienthal played an important role in managing relations between science and the U.S. Government.
Lilienthal was publicly critical of efforts by anti-communist politicians to require loyalty oaths and scrutiny of the political views of scientists doing unclassified research in atomic energy.
In February 1949, Lilienthal parried the concerns of U.S. Senators Brien McMahon and Millard Tydings that the Atomic Energy Commission was releasing too much information about U.S. atomic stockpiles, and about the A-bomb generally. Lilienthal met privately at some length with President Harry S. Truman to reassure the President on this score.
In September 1949, after U.S. weather reconnaissance planes detected radioactivity east of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, it was principally David Lilienthal who convinced President Truman that the President should publicly announce, as soon as possible, that the Russians now had atomic weapons of their own. The announcement demonstrated that the U.S. had good intelligence even about top-secret projects of the Soviet Union, and that the President was neither afraid of a Soviet A-bomb, nor afraid to share such dramatic news with the American public. In this instance, Lilienthal's advice was effective.
To some extent, though, Lilienthal's AEC term also reflected the diminishing ability of avowed U.S. liberals to resist anti-communist ideology in the early years of the Cold War. Lilienthal would have liked to be remembered for the principled and spirited defense he gave to civil liberties in his 1947 confirmation hearings. But when he left office, he was at least as well known in the popular mind for having been forced in 1949 to accede to FBI investigations of fellowship recipients, in the wake of a "scandal" in which a Communist Party member was granted an AEC fellowship for unclassified research.
Furthermore, while Lilienthal had originally joined with Oppenheimer and others in opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb, he reversed his position and joined with Secretary of State Dean Acheson in recommending that President Truman pursue the H-bomb. Lilienthal was a proud man and he never entirely got over the sting of realizing that his political opponents in this matter had made many in the public believe that those like Lilienthal who were skeptical of the hydrogen bomb were somehow queer or unpatriotic.
Lilienthal as businessman
David Lilienthal resigned from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1950, weary of bare-knuckled politics, and concerned that after years of relatively low-paying public service, he needed to make some money to provide for his wife and two children, and to secure funds for his retirement.
He worked for several years for the investment bank Lazard Freres, where he quietly made a lot of money but found banking to be an arid disappointment. Some years later, Lilienthal wrote of himself in his journal: "A serene life apparently isn't the thing I crave. I live on enthusiasm, zest; and when I don't feel it, the bottom sags below sea level, and it is agony, no less." Once he was financially secure, money per se did not interest him much; he wanted to travel, to advise important men, to build things and to defend them in the public arena.
In 1955, therefore, Lilienthal did something new - something he had dreamed of doing while still at the TVA. He formed an engineering and consulting firm called Development and Resources Corporation (D&R) which shared some of the TVA's objectives: major public power and public works projects. Lilienthal was able to leverage the financial backing of Lazard Freres to found his company. He hired for D&R some gifted staff from the pool of professionals he had known well in the TVA, notably Gordon Clapp.
As a private company, D&R had a flexibility which major Federal projects did not. No longer would Lilienthal's work - or Lilienthal personally - be subject to Congressional oversight, which had often been a severe strain.
D&R focused on overseas clients, for whom the TVA was a great American model, and did substantial work in a number of foreign nations, including the Khuzistan region of Iran, the Cauca Valley of Colombia, Venezuela, India, southern Italy, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, and South Vietnam. As a young man, Lilienthal had recognized that he had a great desire to travel widely; D&R gave him a professional structure for doing so. It was serious work but it was also engaging; in his memoirs he called the Iran project "the Persian adventure." Iran was the foreign land closest to his heart.
Lilienthal as writer
Lilienthal wrote a number of successful books, including TVA: Democracy on the March (1944), This I Do Believe (1949), Big Business: A New Era (1953) and Change, Hope and the Bomb (1963).
Lilienthal was skillful in his use of words and was a born phrase-maker - "multinational corporation" is a term he invented. Vigorous, idealistic and politically deft, TVA: Democracy on the March was, and remains, a first-rate piece of political rhetoric, though conservatives pointed out that it sidestepped many of the implications of its soaring rhetoric.
In 1959, Lilienthal's son-in-law Sylvain Bromberger suggested that Lilienthal consider publishing his private journals. Lilienthal wrote to Cass Canfield at the New York publisher Harper & Row, which eventually published his journals in seven volumes, appearing between 1964 and 1983. They received largely positive reviews in serious periodicals.
Lilienthal was proud of his journals, perhaps overly so. A March 12, 1972 entry in his fifth volume of memoirs notes tartly an article Lilienthal read by the esteemed historian Barbara Tuchman which Lilienthal felt disparaged journals as a source for serious history.
At least one business associate felt that Lilienthal was sometimes hurt by his habit of journal-keeping, declining to attach himself to difficult projects or tasks since doing so would require eventually admitting defeat in a published journal.
Though dated now, to some degree, Lilienthal's journals contain brief, lively portraits of the distinguished company that Lilienthal kept in those years. They also reveal how much Lilienthal relied on his wife Helen, and how effective her gentle, persistent prodding was with him.
A journal entry of March 1975 makes clear that, for a great many years, Helen Lilienthal wanted her husband to write a book about "development". He never did so; nor did he write the ambitious novel he had often dreamed of writing, both as a young man and - more occasionally - while in public life.
Last years
Lilienthal continued to work hard through the 1970s, but 1979 and 1980 were painful years for him. His enormous personal energy and vitality—always a comfort and shield against anxiety—were beginning to fade.
His company D&R struggled financially, for complex reasons that Lilienthal could do little to change. The Rockefeller family seemed to promise D&R a crucial infusion of capital, but did not fully deliver it.
In 1979, the Iranian Revolution made clear how hated a figure the Shah of Iran was in his own homeland. Lilienthal had worked closely with the Shah on various TVA-like projects in Iran, and it was a jolt to realize that the man who, in 1956, had seemed to him so capable and composed, such a welcome source of modern thinking in the ancient nation of Iran, was no longer safe in that country. TVA-style "grass-roots democracy" had never taken root there at all.
The taking of 52 American hostages by Iranian radicals underscored not only how useless Lilienthal's warm relationship with the Shah had become, but what a liability it was. Clearly, the ascendant political group in Iran deeply resented American support for the Shah.
In 1980, Lilienthal had two separate serious health problems, requiring both a bilateral hip replacement and cataract surgery in one eye. He needed crutches and a cane at various points. Eye problems made it almost impossible to read or write, two of his great comforts in times of stress.
By January 1981, Lilienthal was again upbeat. He could see properly again, and was eager for another year of consulting, lecturing, writing, and editing the last volume of his journals. However, on January 13, David Lilienthal retired early in the evening and died in his sleep.
References
- David Ekbladh, "'Mr. TVA': Grass-Roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for U.S. Overseas Development, 1933–1973" Diplomatic History Summer 2002 Vol. 26 Issue 3 pp 335-374
- Erwin E. Hargrove, Prisoner of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933-1990 (1994)
- Lilienthal, David. TVA: Democracy on the March (1944) promoted TVA for cheap power, grassroots regional democracy, environmental conservation, and the peaceful use of energy. Called it model for rest of USA and Europe.
- Lilienthal, David (1971). The Journals of David Lilienthal, Vol. V, 1959-1963
- Lilienthal, David (1983). The Journals of David Lilienthal, Vol. VII, 1968-1981
- Wang, Jessica (1999). American Science in an Age of Anxiety. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-4749-6.
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