Race, Water, and Foreign Policy: . The Tennessee Valley Authority's Global Agenda Meets "Jim Crow"

Abstract

On 22 June 1963, less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis, the United States acquired a new “diplomatic weapon.” In his formal remarks dedicating the Tennessee Valley Authority’s new International Visitors Center in Knoxville, Tennessee, Robert I. Biren, the director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), reassured an audience of “citizen diplomats” that in “a divided nuclear-armed world” the new center would have a “real and lasting effect on international relationships.” According to Biren, 10 percent of all government-sponsored foreign visitors to the United States came to Knoxville to witness firsthand the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) internationally acclaimed successes.1 Indeed, since the late 1930s thousands of foreign visitors had come to see and to study TVA facilities and programs. By the 1960s, Knoxville had become one of the top five most frequented cities by foreign visitors to the United States, ranking behind Washington, D.C., Detroit, San Francisco, and New York.2 As early as the 1950s, however, hosting these visitors had begun to create a financial strain on TVA resources. Foreign visitors were overtaxing both TVA budgets and personnel. Seemingly always short of funds and constantly under political attack, the TVA needed assistance to meet its growing obligations.