President Franklin Roosevelt created the TVA in 1933 during his first 100 days in office. By December of 1941 when America entered WW II this New Deal agency had already constructed numerous hydropower dams, but now electricity demand for military production was soaring. Round-the-clock construction on Douglas Dam began in February of 1942. Employment reached a peak of 6,200 in June when Arthur Rothstein documented the project. These drillers were making holes for dynamite charges needed to excavate 622,000 cubic yards of earth and rock.

The dam was completed in record time and began generating power in March of 1943. It powered production of aluminum, and the nearby Oak Ridge facility that produced uranium for the first atomic bomb. The TVA had committed to employ Black workers in proportion to the regional population but did not fulfill this promise in the agency’s early years. By 1943, ten percent of the agency’s 24,000-person workforce was African American, but long-established discrimination still kept Black TVA workers out of higher-paying jobs within the agency.