HOWARD W. ODUM
(Howard Washington Odum)
The area covered by TVA was uniformly poor and backward, Those areas were among the poorest of each of the States they were in Professor Odium advocated making the area a state so that the government would place priority on the areas which rarely received any from the State Governments. He thought the sociological homogeneity would become a state with common interests. ironically, the State governments that did not think the areas were important enough to invest much money in developing them didn’t want to lose control over them either. The main economic reason was that they were the source of much of the coal in America. Then there was the reality that no government wants to control less land area and fewer people.
Howard Washington Odum was an American sociologist and author, publishing three novels in addition to 20 scholarly texts. Beginning in 1920, he served as a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, founding the university press, the journal Social Forces, and what is now the Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, all in the 1920s. He also founded the university's School of Public Welfare, one of the first in the Southeast. With doctorates in psychology and sociology, he wrote extensively across academic disciplines, influencing several fields.
