David Lilienthal
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David Eli Lilienthal (July 8, 1899-January 13, 1981) was a capable and controversial American public official. Appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt one of three directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, Lilienthal served as TVA chairman from 1941 until 1946.
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, barely five feet tall at 17, 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.The abuse left scars. When a mature David Lilienthal 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 but raised in several Indiana towns: principally Valparaiso and Michigan City. Lilienthal considered himself a small-town Hoosier at heart. His father Leo was a gentle, generous man who would have liked to have been employed in an intellectual position of some kind. But undereducated and with a wife and children to support, Leo 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.
But Minna was far more devoted to Judaism; Leo showed almost no interest in it whatsoever. And with Leo's business career often shaky, Leo and Minna Lilienthal had an often stormy relationship, and young David learned that money and status were precarious things. All his life, he had a mild anxiety about falling into poverty.
David Lilienthal was marked by his small-town Hoosier childhood in a number of ways. He always took special pleasure in talking to farmers and small-town people. He used to say the best medicine for a cold was a half-pint of Old Granddad bourbon.
Higher Education
Lilienthal attended DePauw University where he met his wife, Helen, a fellow student, and then Harvard Law School, where his grades were only average until his third and final year. But at Harvard Law School, he acquired a very important mentor in Felix Frankfurter.Helen Lamb was also from a small-town background, in her case from Oklahoma, still called "Indian Territory" in those days.
In May of 1917, as a 17-year-old college freshman at Depauw, Lilienthal met a young lawyer in Gary, Indiana. "He 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 this journal to the end of his life.
Also in his freshman year at Depauw, Lilienthal had a German class with a magnetic professor named Henry Longden. Professor Longden claimed that he could take any student at Depauw, of average ability, and make him or her a great man or great woman, simply by talking to them frankly about what the world expected. After class, Lilienthal presented himself to Professor Longden and challenged him to make Lilienthal a great man. The professor laughed and promised to do so.
A Bold New Government Venture: The TVA
David Lilienthal's credentials for overseeing the 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, but he was aided in joining the TVA by the persistent lobbying of Lilienthal's old law professor Felix Frankfurter.The essence of the Tennessee Valley Authority TVA was the idea 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 staunchest allies were thinking well beyond hydroelectric power; they favored sweeping Federal powers to improve the economic and social lives of rural people all across America. Accordingly, TVA had extensive education programs, and a library service that distributed books in rural hamlets that had never had a library.
Not surprisingly, many Americans in Tennessee and elsewhere strongly opposed this way of thinking. They believed the Founding Fathers had clearly intended America to be a country where the Federal government had sharply limited powers, where decisions were made on the state and local level and where legally operating industries were not interfered with by government. Federally subsidized power would clearly put great pressure on the commercial power industry.
People with these views were often wary, or openly critical, of education efforts sponsored by the Federal government. Might this not lead to the sort of brainwashing that routinely went on in fascist and Communist nations where a central government had enormous powers? In short, many Americans approved of technical engineering being brought to the Tennessee Valley -- but not 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, relished the long hours, and the chance to bring some measure of prosperity to poor southern families. Lilienthal's book "TVA: Democracy on the March" is as exuberant a celebration of the TVA concept as has ever been written.But Lilienthal was not a native Tennesseean, nor even a southerner. He was only 34 years old. He was of Jewish descent. He had been trained at Harvard Law School, a suspect institution to many TVA opponents as it was minting many of the most fervent young New Dealers. And Lilienthal felt, as President Roosevelt did, that severe hard times called for vigorous experimentation, in the power field as in many other fields.
Lilienthal had an expansive -- some would say grandiose -- view of the TVA. He wrote in 1944 of the Tennessee River and then added: "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.
And Lilienthal annoyed powerful Tennessee political interests, notably Senator Kenneth McKellar, by his refusal to let such a major Federal project as the TVA become a place for patronage appointments.
Out of one famous tangle with Senator McKellar came a prolonged Lilienthal reply, marked by the words "This I Do Believe," which is still an eloquent statement of the liberal political creed. Lilienthal appeared to onlookers at the Senate hearing to be speaking entirely from the heart, in an unscripted moment. But there is some evidence that Lilienthal prepared his statement in advance and waited for the chance to unleash it on McKellar. Lilienthal would later turn the phase into the title of a successful book.
TVA was, in many respects, a great success and has been one of the most enduring legacies of President Roosevelt's New Deal. It strongly influenced regional development in Mexico, and in Latin America generally. But the TVA also suffered from internal disputes, growing out of 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 very day they met. In 1933, Morgan interrupted a long-awaited vacation of Lilienthal's to invite him, over the telephone, to discuss becoming a director of the TVA. Lilienthal was flattered to be asked but replied he would like to defer a full discussion of the matter until the end of his vacation. Morgan would not accept this; he insisted the matter could not wait. They met the next day, and Lilienthal -- with real excitement and gratitude -- agreed to take the job. But a pattern of conflict had been set.Arthur Morgan was an intense man, justly proud of his achievements as an engineer and an educator. Raised in Minnesota, Morgan's father was a surveyor and his mother a religious zealot. From his father he learned respect for the use of engineering as a tool of planning. From his mother, he absorbed the idea that all men and women must be held to the highest moral standard.
After the Miami River Floods of 1913 killed over 300 people in Ohio, the State of Ohio hired Arthur Morgan to devise a flood control plan. The plan he devised was a generation ahead of his time, involving creation of an entire "conservancy district" rather than the usual makeshift measures.
After 1921, Morgan had also been an autocratic but skillful president of little Antioch College in Ohio, building its reputation considerably. Twenty years older than Lilienthal, Morgan was apt to treat his younger colleague as a willful protege rather than an equal.
Arthur Morgan and David Lilienthal disagreed over the power program. Morgan felt it was both ethical and practical to use the existing power companies in the Tennessee Valley to distribute TVA power. Lilienthal, who did not respect or trust the private power companies as much as Morgan did, favored having the Federal government control the power and perhaps working through rural power co-ops. The two men passionately disagreed on this issue 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.
But Arthur Morgan could not, or would not effectively substantiate his charges. 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 of 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 proper position of the President and also the U.S. representative to the United Nations about the brand new menace, the atomic bomb.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 1947-1949, 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 had 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 bringing 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 anticommunist politicians to require loyalty oaths and scrutiny of the political views of scientists doing unclassified research in atomic energy.
In February of 1949, Lilienthal parried the concerns of U.S. Senators Brien McMahon and Joseph 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 of 1949, after U.S. weather reconnaisance planes detected radioactivity east of the Kamchatka Peninsula, 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.
This announcement showed 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 good; and it was effective.
But, to some extent, Lilienthal's AEC term also reflected the diminishing ability of avowed U.S. liberals to resist anticommunist 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.
David Lilienthal, the Businessman
David Lilienthal tendered his resignation, effective 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, quietly made a lot of money but found banking an arid disappointment. 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.
So, in 1955, 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) with many of the objectives of TVA -- 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.
But as a private company, D&R had a flexibility which major Federal projects did not. And no longer would Lilienthal's work -- and Lilienthal personally -- come in for 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.
David Lilienthal, the 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, and Harper & Row eventually published Lilienthal's journals in five volumes, appearing between 1964 and 1980. They received largely positive reviews in serious periodicals.
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." But this book he never wrote. Nor did he ever 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 1970's, but 1979 and 1980 were painful years for him. His enormous personal energy and vitality -- always a comfort and shield against anxiety -- was 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. It was a jolt to Lilienthal to realize that the man who, in 1956, had seemed 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.
But in January 1981, Lilienthal was upbeat. He could see properly again, and was eager for another year of consulting, lecturing, writing, and editing the last volume of his journals. On January 13, 1981, David Lilienthal retired early in the evening and died peacefully in his sleep.
References
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.External link
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