Crusade to Restore America

WE MUST ACT!

After President Roosevelt signed the TVA Act in 1933, Morris Cooke proposed a public rural power initiative. However, Roosevelt's attention was absorbed by relief efforts to combat the Great Depression. To attract Roosevelt's attention, Cooke designed a memo on public power that was short and visually striking. With a black and white zebra-patterned cover and a note promising the entire memo could be read in less than 12 minutes, this memo would not be lost in piles of reports and requests, and it would not take long to read. Cooke's strategy worked. He submitted the memo to Roosevelt in February 1934, and fourteen months later on May 11, 1935, Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Rural Electrification Administration (REA).

Initially, the order established REA as a relief agency and appointed Morris Cooke to manage it. Cooke quickly realized it was impossible to run REA according to relief agency guidelines, which required that 90 percent of labor come from the unemployed. Working with electrical lines required training, and most unemployed workers had no experience in this dangerous work. Cooke made REA a lending agency instead. At first he hoped to loan money to private utilities to run lines to rural areas. However, these companies wanted all of the REA loan funds to provide electricity to just a fraction of the potential rural customers. Cooke and his staff explored other options and eventually decided to work with farm cooperatives that had been submitting applications for loans to REA in great numbers.