On May 18, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt leaned back in his chair and handed Senator George Norris the pen with which he had just signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act.  While Roosevelt was an enthusiastic supporter of the TVA ideas, he could hardly have guessed that this act of signing a bill, previously vetoed in 1928 by President Coolidge and in 1931 by President Hoover, would result in the creation of one of the most enduringly controversial and also saluted projects to emerge from the famous "hundred days."
     Roosevelt believed the crucial compromises had already been made.  In his signing the bill he hoped he had laid the "socialism" and "regional favoritism" criticism to rest with his promise that TVA would be a "corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise."  The president, who had fought high utility rates as the governor of New York, hoped that the agency would be a "yardstick" of true power production costs; but he wanted more.  TVA was to be more than dams and water and power lines.  It was to be more than a Washington-based bureaucracy mired in the competing jealousies of tired and faceless federal agencies.  It was, the president said, to be a near contradiction as a federal agency:  "a return to the spirit and vision of the pioneer,"  based in the region it was to serve, concerned with the complexities of national development, but also an agency that "touches and gives life to all forms  of human concern."  It was, in short, a mere first step in a national experiment where--if it succeeded--"we can march on, step by step, in the like development of other great national territorial units within our borders."
     Even though it was favored several times by the Supreme Court, and beat government-inspired conspiracies like Dixon-Yates of the early 50s, even though it successfully defeated one of the toughest onslaughts ever organized by private power trusts, and even though it made a remarkable record of achievement imitated world-wide, the TVA idea never sprouted successfully in any other area of the country.
     In 1965, Lyndon Johnson sat down at a desk in the White House Rose Garden to sign another bill to deal with the nation's southern mountains, the Appalachian Regional Development Act.  Not unlike his mentor in 1933, Johnson had a vision for a new federal effort to deal with the impoverished and disaster-plagued region.  As his pen left the paper creating the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), Johnson proclaimed:  "the pork barrel is over."
     Much as TVA was a conservationist's dream, finally putting a structure together to end what Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt had called, "the piecemeal execution of projects without a plan definitely laid on one man or group of men who can be held accountable," the ARC promised a planner's heaven and --it might be hoped--a pork barreler's nightmare. Through ARC, at long last, the planners saw a  structure for making sense of public investment:  forcing the locals to plan, the state bureaucrats to administer; and the feds to be responsive.  Instead of the haphazardness of spending by chance and by whim there would be order, coordination, and -- ultimately -- solutions to problems.  States would finally become equal partners with the federal government and each other, resulting in progress where artificial boundaries, vagaries of nature, and the greed of corporations had established previously insurmountable problems.
     On the other hand, ARC was viewed by the poverty fighters in Washington as a New Frontier-Great Society sop for governors upset by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and its power of override over state vetoes of agency spending.  It was at best, in their view, a bricks and mortar program supervised by Chamber of Commerce types and the courthouse gangs at the local level, by the governors and their chief political aides in the state houses, by the public works committees in Congress, and by conservative planner-politician types at ARC headquarters in Washington.  The "people-oriented" poverty fighters were right in their description, but wrong in their subsequent projection that the "politician" oriented ARC would mire in its own contradictions and disappear from the scene. Quite to the contrary, the agency has been approved across the American political landscape, welding into a mighty lobby governors as diverse as Nelson Rockefeller and George Wallace, Jimmy Carter and Arch Moore;  senators as diverse as Jim Eastland and Fred Harris.

     Regionalism ARC style is chic at a time when TVA's is ragged.  That situation momentarily aside, the two represent a unique national concentration on one region of the country.  Some would say both are political progeny reflecting  the mystifying fascination the nation has always had for southern mountaineers.  Some, like author Harry Caudill, see them as merely the outstretched federal hands clasping those of exploitative corporations.  Regardless, both are native to this region, and nowhere else.