Down in the Flood.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

The Coen brothers' new movie recalls a federal agency with a screwball story of its own.

For fans of bluegrass music and electoral hanky-panky, the Coen brothers' new movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, offers a hit parade for the ages. The power of demagoguery, the relationship between self-interest and racial bigotry, the idiotic points on which elections turn--all are on glorious display. But the film's most deft maneuver may be its use of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a prime plot mover: O Brothers' Depression-era protagonists are racing to recover a treasure buried on property that's about to be flooded by the TVA.

The theme of fortunes flooded under by the fabled federal energy project has a real historical antecedent in the saga of George Berry, a real estate speculator, U.S. senator from Tennessee, and National Recovery Administration official. In 1932, Berry led a group purchase of mineral and marble leases in the Clinch River valley. When the TVA moved to condemn his properties in 1933, Berry sought damages from the agency.

Arthur Morgan, the TVA's first chairman, suspected that Berry had been aware of the property's probable condemnation when he bought it; he decided that Berry was just trying to rip off the government and that such questionable ethics rendered him beneath negotiation. When his fellow board members sought conciliation with Berry, Morgan criticized them publicly, exacerbating tensions within the TVA and prompting Franklin Roosevelt to remove him as chairman in 1938, less than five years into a nine-year term.

Morgan's opposition to what he considered a federal giveaway to a well-connected government official highlights a generally unacknowledged point about the TVA: This high-minded agency, "built for the people of the United States," charged in its own charter with the economic and social well-being of the area's residents, and enshrined in story and song as a triumph for the common people, provided its most generous benefits to those who needed them least.

No less than the history of warfare, the history of political exchange tends to get written by the victors. In the official TVA story, the authority's dominion was challenged almost exclusively by wealthy utility magnates like Wendell L. Willkie, the one-time president of Commonwealth & Southern Corporation and the feckless challenger of FDR's third-term election bid. In fact, Willkie made out extremely well, selling parts of his failing utility to the TVA...