Well, I can build that myself!

More from the REA news in 1940. The New Deal was all about DECENTRALIZING power. Henry Wallace hammered on the theme endlessly, and agencies like WPA and REA and TVA were serious about letting local coops and companies determine their own way of using the federal funding. Every aspect of their structure and rhetoric was deeply infused with modularity.

Here’s an item from Caddo County, southwest of OKC.

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The Caddo Electric Cooperative, at Binger, built a set and put on demonstrations in the eight counties served by the cooperative. Billie Bryan, the superintendent, wanted to show farmers in the area that they could make some types of electrical devices for themselves at low cost. The demonstrations aroused a great deal of interest, and the most common reaction of the farmers was “Well, I can build that myself!”

The Caddo cooperative also worked up an arrangement with a local lumber dealer to build the equipment for farmers, either singly or in groups.

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Here’s what they built: Pig brooder, chick brooder, stock tank warmer, room-cooling device, and garden irrigator.

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Billie Bryan also penned a deliciously sardonic Open Letter to EK Gaylord, the editor of the Daily Oklahoman. Gaylord is not named, but Okies didn’t need the identification. (He was still editor when I moved to Enid in 1970. He died in 1974 at age 101.)

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Recently one of the metropolitan newspapers of Oklahoma carried an article entitled “All’s Not Well With REA.” In the first paragraph this great newspaper requests us to take another look at REA.

We think, if we are to look at REA, the best way to look at it is to see some of the things that REA is doing. We have always been of the opinion that the farm folks are as much entitled to electricity as anyone, and are still of the same opinion. We believe that they have more need for it than the man living in town because they don’t have the modern food store just around the corner where they can go get their fresh meats and vegetables. They must make a trip of 6 or 7 miles and maybe 20 in order to receive food from a refrigerator. What city resident has any feed to grind, any wood to cut, any milk to cool, other than a bottle that the farmer has brought in?

Every girl and boy in the United States, whether they live in a thickly populated area or a sparsely settled area, is entitled to electric service and the very best that the Government can give them. They are the Government’s richest resource, and we feel that if some of the editors of our great papers had half as much foresight as the administration of REA, in Washington, we believe we would have a different place to live, and such books as the “Grapes of Wrath” would never have been written about Oklahoma.

We believe that one of our social problems today is to keep the folks on the farm and keep them on the type farm that can make a living. If we are to do that, we must give them every advantage possible. We must make a farm attractive to the boys and girls, and we must make it possible to make a living on that farm, or no one could stay.

Electricity is doing that in many cases. We believe that the editor is “haywire” when he says that farm folks can’t afford electricity; we believe he should have said that farm folks cannot afford to be without electricity.

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Amen. Keeping farmers on the farm was Wallace’s main goal, and it worked. Fortunately Gaylord’s editorials had little effect. Okla went solidly for FDR in both 1936 and 1940. In 1940 the richer north central counties, less affected by the Depression and thus less helped by the New Deal, reverted to R, but they weren’t enough to tip the overall result.