Harvey Crowley Couch was born on August 21, 1877 in Calhoun, Arkansas, United States. He was one of six children and the eldest son of Thomas Gratham Couch, a farmer and Methodist preacher, and Manie (Heard) Couch. The families of both parents had moved west from Georgia, where his mother was born.
He attended a one-room schoolhouse in Calhoun and the Southwestern Academy in nearby Magnolia.
Couch worked briefly as a clerk in a local drugstore. He then, in 1897, took a job as mail clerk on the Cotton Belt Railroad. In this capacity he met many small-town businessmen and politicians, making friendships which in time he put to profitable use.
He conceived a plan of building a number of interconnected telephone exchanges along the railroad line, and in 1903, with about $150 of borrowed capital and credit from equipment manufacturers, he installed his first exchange in Bienville.
He resigned his railroad job in 1905. Obtaining franchises from town councils and raising capital locally by selling bonds, he steadily built his network until, in 1910, he was operating fifty exchanges over 1, 500 miles of lines. The following year he sold his properties to the Bell system for upwards of a million dollars. Couch was already hatching a grander scheme.
In the wake of the successful harnessing of Niagara Falls for electric power in 1904, enterprising promoters the nation over dreamed of growing rich in the hydroelectric power business, and near Couch's base of operations, on the Ouachita River, were several good dam sites. There was no industrial market for power in the area, but Samuel Insull was just then completing his much-publicized Lake County Experiment in northern Illinois, demonstrating the economic feasibility of interconnecting small towns and farms into integrated electric systems, and Couch determined to build such a system in Arkansas.
After acquiring electric and water properties in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and initiating negotiations for the purchase of a power plant in nearby Magnolia, Couch in 1913 organized the Arkansas Power Company, which the following year was reorganized as the Arkansas Light & Power Company. The methods he employed in expanding this enterprise were typical of those of other utility promoters during the period.
He obtained franchises through his growing political influence, and built markets by promoting and attracting industry. He raised capital through local banks and private subscriptions (his greatest natural gifts being personal charm and ability as a salesman), reviving a "booster" spirit that had been more or less defunct in the area since the days of the early railroad promoters. When his ventures outgrew such methods, he established financial connections in New York and sold bonds through investment banking houses. In one respect Couch was particularly imaginative. The demand for electricity was highly seasonal, being heavy during the long nights of the winter months and almost nonexistent during the other three seasons.
Couch created a summer demand by promoting the use of electric power for irrigation in the Arkansas and Louisiana rice fields and a fall demand by persuading cotton gin owners to electrify their operations; in both cases he induced equipment manufacturers to provide the consumers with easy credit for their conversion to electricity.
As Federal Fuel Administrator of Arkansas during World War I, Couch saw to it that Arkansas Light & Power did not suffer for lack of coal. Sorely needing legally authorized rate increases to compensate for wartime inflation, he induced the Arkansas legislature in 1919 to establish a state utility commission, replacing local regulation; the commission authorized a general round of rate increases before being abolished in 1921 because of adverse public opinion.
By 1925, following the completion of the Remmel Dam on the Ouachita River, the construction of a steam-electric plant at Sterlington and the purchase of several plants in Mississippi, Couch operated an extensive, integrated electric system that served most of Arkansas and much of northern Louisiana and western Mississippi. That same year Couch sold his enterprises to the Electric Bond and Share Company, a gigantic holding company directed by Sidney Z. Mitchell. He continued to preside over the company he had created (now called Arkansas Power & Light) and, having established favorable connections with New York investment bankers and stockbrokers, regularly participated in lucrative financial syndicates.
After the Rural Electrification Administration was set up in 1936, Arkansas Power & Light (like other utilities) first sought federal funds for rural electrification. When, however, it became clear that federal money would be used only to underwrite farmer-owned electric cooperatives, Couch attempted, with a large measure of success, to acquire such cooperatives as wholesale customers.
At his instigation two of his engineers developed the "Pittman line, " halving the cost of rural power lines, and Couch worked out a plan whereby depression-ridden farmers contributed their labor instead of money toward the cost of farm extension lines. Both innovations hastened the spread of electric service to Southern farmers.
At the age of sixty-three, Couch died of a heart attack at Couchwood, his summer home near Hot Springs, Arkansas. He was buried in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he had long made his home.
Couch is regarded as the father of Arkansas Power and Light Company and other electric utilities now part of Entergy; he helped mold the Louisiana and Arkansas Railway and the Kansas City Southern Railway into a major transportation system. He contributed a great deal to the progress of rural electrification. Couch was widely heralded for service to his state and generally regarded as the businessman who contributed most to its economic development.
Because he was one of the few big businessmen who happened also to be an influential Democrat, his value to his Eastern friends increased with the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. His prominence had already led President Hoover that year to appoint him a director of the Reconstruction Finance Commission, and Roosevelt persuaded him to retain the post until 1934.
In 1940 he attended the Democratic National Convention and warmly supported Franklin Roosevelt's bid for a third term, but he opposed the left wing of the party and was among those who unsuccessfully fought the vice-presidential nomination of Henry A. Wallace. It was generally supposed that the strain and disappointment of the 1940 convention contributed to the failure of his health.
On October 4, 1904, Couch had married Jessie Johnson of Athens. They had five children: Johnson Olin, Harvey Crowley, Kirke, Catherine, and William Thomas.
