Projects with construction specifications approved, under construction, or completed as of November 15, 1936-Continued Projects with construction specifications approved, under construction, or completed, as of Nov. 15, 1936 Projects with construction specifications approved, under construction, or completed as of Nov. 15, 1936-Continued Projects energized in whole or in part, as of Nov. 15, 1936 Rural Electrification Administration—Administrative expenses by functions, fiscal years 1938, 1937, and 1936 Mr. WOODRUM. Mr. Cooke, we will be very glad to hear whatever you have to say to us in regard to this activity. Mr. COOKE. Having gotten the justification in the record, I want to say-and this is the first opportunity I have had to say it to the Representatives of the Congress-that we have found our law a very satisfactory act to work under. If I were asked today how we would suggest changing it, I would pass it up, because I really think it is an admirable piece of work. I also want to say that the demand for rural electrification has proven to be, through our experience, beginning with our correspondence and later with our operations, allotments, and contracts, away ahead of what we anticipated when I was put in charge of the work under the Emergency Act. MONEY LOANED ON SELF-LIQUIDATING PROJECTS Just to get it into the record, let me say that under this act we are only lending money for self-liquidating projects. There are no grants, and we are trying to carry out the terms of the act by only giving financial aid to projects which we believe will be truly selfliquidating. The terms authorized by the act are a 2.77 interest rate this year and an amortization period of not more than 25 years. We are continuing the 20-year amortization period that we used under the Emergency Act as being slightly more conservative. Now, because the Congress gave us a 10-year period to work this thing out, we feel that the best thing we could do in these early months and years was to cut the cost of the service. At the present time there are about, in round numbers, 800,000 farms having electrical service, and there are nearly 6,000,000 farms without it. Therefore, the task ahead of the Government, if we are to reach any considerable percentage of those unelectrified farms, is quite a heavy one. We may sometime reach the point where we may want to subsidize this service to a certain extent, as has been done in many countries abroad; but we think that we should for the present adhere religiously to self-liquidating projects, hammer away at the cost, and postpone the day when we will be tempted to subsidize. SIMPLIFIED TYPE OF RURAL CONSTRUCTION OF POLE AND DISTRIBUTING LINES In the matter of pole lines or distribution lines, we have simplified the type of rural construction very materially. Rural electrification up to the present time has been carried on pretty largely not only by urban-minded men but in an urban fashion, so that the same type of line that was proper, and still is appropriate to the city, was being introduced out into the country. The fact that we have simplified the lines, after having made an extensive study, has led private companies, or a great many of them, to change their type of rural construction. We hear of no criticism of the type of line that we are now building. It is possible for the private companies, through this building of a less expensive type of line, to go into territory that heretofore they considered as not being for the time desirable. Now, it has been a pleasant experience-though, perhaps, not a full surprise-in carrying on this work in the way we have, day by day, and month by month, to improve our relations with the private companies. Many of the leaders of the industry are taking our point of view, that in building these lines, through cooperatives, we are providing a service which is really complementary-not in any way antagonistic but complementary-to that of the private industry. As you know, 95 percent of the electrical business of this country is carried on by private companies. It is a fact that in a great many instances we have made loans to private companies to build lines. Some of them have come to us for the money instead of going to bankers, and through this type of loan, we have made it possible for them to reach territory that heretofore they had avoided. EDUCATIONAL WORK CARRIED ON IN RURAL ELECTRIFICATION In addition to that, the educational work that we have carried on has made the countryside electricity-conscious in a way it never was before. The presidents of these companies have told us that whereas heretofore when they built a line they might get at the start 50 percent of the customers, they now get 75 to 90 percent of them. That has been made possible through our educational work. My personal interest in rural electrification began about 1925 through talks that I had at that time with Owen D. Young. I do not know whether you have read any of his dissertations on rural electrification, but he said when he looked back on his boyhood days, and saw what his mother had to go through with in the way of washboards and other tough stuff that women, especially those living on the farm, had to go through with, he felt that he ought to do all that he could to ameliorate those conditions. So, I think, it was he who took the initiative, perhaps somewhat at his own expense. He took the rural territory around his childhood home, I think at Van Hornsville, N. Y., and really electrified that countryside. Therefore, he was able to talk to the industry in the way he could not do if he was handling rural electrification in a theoretical way. In order to get some basis for operation, quite early in the game I used a young woman who had been an associate professor in the University of Chicago and sent her to three States, Virginia, Ohio, and Minnesota-those being States with different types of agriculture. I asked her to go to two counties in each of those States, one county with electricity and one county without electricity, and report to me the changes that electricity had brought in the diet of the people through refrigeration and in the improvements in social conditions which running water and inside bathrooms were bringing about. I think you gentlemen would be moved if you could read the reports that she made on the interviews she held. For instance, one family carried 50 tons of water 100 miles a year, or perhaps it was 100 tons of water 50 miles a year. She obtained that figure by taking account of how much water they used and the distance at which the well was located from the kitchen. In the case of one woman, I recall that she was in bad health, and the doctor told her that she should have hotwater baths. This woman described what they had to do in order to get a hot bath, and after 3 months of lugging water she was more poorly than when she started, and so the doctor told her to give up the hot baths. That shows the necessity of having bathrooms inside. I knew a man who lived in the Maine woods, and I have heard him say that he would not dream of living in a house without an inside bathroom. You gentlemen may be interested to know that in order to get the three pieces necessary to make an inside bathroom-namely, a bathtub, wash basin, and toilet-they have to pay only $24. That is for the three pieces. Of course, they are practically indestructible, and |