ABSTRACT
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is much the most ambitious regional development project ever undertaken by the United States government. In the 1970s, the TVA came under increasing attack on environmental issues. The TVA was the child of the New Deal of the 1930s, and was essentially the brainchild of Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself. During the New Deal era of the 1930s, when the National Resources Planning Board was at the height of its influence, a good deal of regional planning took place in the United States. The boldest and most sweeping of all frontier theories is the one formulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s by two American historians, Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb. Alvin Harvey Hansen, "the American Keynes," included a "frontier theory" in his general thesis concerning "economic maturity" or "secular stagnation."
