Meeting the Challenge from Totalitarianism: The Tennessee Valley Authority as a Global Model for Liberal Development, 1933–1945

Ekbladh, David

doi:10.1080/07075330903516637

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…66 This programme was rooted in a US faith in development that owed much to the experiences of the Depression years, and many Americans believed that development would bolster international trade and inoculate backward areas against the lure of totalitarian ideologies. 67 Incidentally, it also provided the United States with an opportunity to augment the production of strategic raw materials in the areas of the world that fell outside the purview of the ECA.…”

Section: The International History Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interdependent Hegemon: the United States and the Quest for Strategic Raw Materials during the Early Cold War

Ingulstad¹

2014

The International History Review

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Section: The International History Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interdependent Hegemon: the United States and the Quest for Strategic Raw Materials during the Early Cold War

Ingulstad¹

2014

The International History Review

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“…Through interregional economic planning, so conceived, the nation could bolster its ability to combat communism directly while avoiding the perils of overcentralized statism. For many stakeholders, this was a key function of the TVA’s reconstitution of the political economy of the Tennessee Valley (see Ekbladh, 2010). At the time, the region was a hotbed for Southern Black communist organizing, with the first All-Southern Communist Party Conference held in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1937—a crucial step toward party legality below the Mason-Dixon line.…”

Section: Agrarian Abstractions and The “National Economy”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Land reform, race reform: Interwar anticommunism and U.S. racial capitalism

Ayazi

2022

Environ Plan D

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Across the 1920s and 1930s, expansive domestic infrastructural and institutional developments consolidated the U.S. national economy and generated the conditions for U.S.-led international commerce and finance. As the United States transformed from a debtor nation into a creditor nation that captured markets across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, it reckoned with the racial and labor antagonisms of the U.S. South, and ascendant interconnected Black worker-led liberation movements throughout the broader “American Mediterranean.” By interrogating their engagement with Southern agrarian labor-capital relations, this essay addresses how race-liberal U.S. social scientists helped shore up the nation and an ascendant modern U.S. racial capitalism by translating such crises into the geoeconomic commensurabilities at the heart of a universalist U.S. nationalism and U.S.-led international finance. It focuses on how Charles S. Johnson, Rupert B. Vance, and others helped disavow the plantation system as a modern(izing) institution while recasting it as an object of national developmental intervention. Through the concepts of the “plantation economy” and the idealized “national economy” it presupposed, race-liberal social scientists not only framed the U.S. nation-state as that which could foster social forms of security through the market. They did so in ways that helped suture an “official” antiracism to U.S. nationalism bearing the agency for international finance and transnational capitalism.

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“…In general, scholars tracing the historical geography of a US‐styled development have focused primarily on the postwar period, and the intersection of development with Cold War policies and practices (Escobar ; Farish ; Peet and Hardwick ; Rahnema and Bawtree ; Rist ). Although some recent scholarship is tracing US development practices to the first decades of the twentieth century, if not earlier, and to events that occurred as much within the US as outside of it (Adas ; Birn ; Ekbladh , , ; Sneddon and Fox ), these studies do not take up the issues central to much postcolonial work within the European context—the role that the domestic and the space of the home played in the governing of “unruly” peoples. Most work that has examined the social complexities and oftentimes unintended consequences of governing peoples through “expert” advice and practices in the name of development has focused on grand schemes of techno‐science (Adas ; Ekbladh ; Scott ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Practising Development at Home: Race, Gender, and the “Development” of the American South

Domosh

2015

Antipode

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Drawing on a range of works that extend from gendered historical analyses of colonialism to critical histories of development, and based on archival research in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, I argue in this paper that what we now call international development—a form of hegemony different from but related to colonialism—needs to be understood not only as a geopolitical tool of the Cold War, but also as a technique of governance that took shape within the realm of the domestic and through a racialized gaze. I do so by tracing some of the key elements of the US international development practices in the postwar era to a different time and place: the American South, a region considered “undeveloped” in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the agricultural extension practices that targeted the rural farm home and farm women, particularly African‐American women.

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Meeting the Challenge from Totalitarianism: The Tennessee Valley Authority as a Global Model for Liberal Development, 1933–1945

Cited by 13 publications

References 7 publications

The Interdependent Hegemon: the United States and the Quest for Strategic Raw Materials during the Early Cold War

The Interdependent Hegemon: the United States and the Quest for Strategic Raw Materials during the Early Cold War

Land reform, race reform: Interwar anticommunism and U.S. racial capitalism

Practising Development at Home: Race, Gender, and the “Development” of the American South

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