The untold story of the power industry's efforts to electrify
growing numbers of farms in the years before the creation of
Depression-era government programs. Even after decades of
retelling, the story of rural electrification in the United States
remains dramatic and affecting. As textbooks and popular histories
inform us, farmers obtained electric service only because a
compassionate federal government established the Tennessee Valley
Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) during
the Great Depression of the 1930s. The agencies' success in raising
the standard of living for millions of Americans contrasted with
the failure of the greedy big-city utility companies, which showed
little interest in the apparently unprofitable nonurban market.
Traditional accounts often describe the nation's population as
split in two, separated by access to a magical form of energy: just
past cities' limits, a bleak, preindustrial class of citizens
endured, literally in near darkness at night and envious of their
urban cousins, who enjoyed electrically operated lights,
refrigerators, radios, and labor-saving appliances. In Powering
American Farms, Richard F. Hirsh challenges the notion that
electric utilities neglected rural customers in the years before
government intervention. Drawing on previously unexamined
resources, Hirsh demonstrates that power firms quadrupled the
number of farms obtaining electricity in the years between 1923 and
1933, for example. Though not all corporate managers thought much
of the farm business, a cadre of rural electrification advocates
established the knowledge base and social infrastructure upon which
New Deal organizations later capitalized. The book also suggests
that the conventional storyline of rural electrification remains
popular because it contains a colorful hero, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and villainous utility magnates, such as Samuel Insull,
who make for an engaging-but distorted-narrative. Hirsh describes
the evolution of power company managers' thinking in the 1920s and
early 1930s-from believing that rural electrification made no
economic sense to realizing that serving farmers could mitigate
industry-wide problems. This transformation occurred as
agricultural engineers in land-grant universities, supported by
utilities, demonstrated productive electrical technologies that
yielded healthy profits to farmers and companies alike. Gaining
confidence in the value of rural electrification, private firms
strung wires to more farms than did the REA until 1950, a fact
conveniently omitted in conventional accounts. Powering American
Farms will interest academic and lay readers of New Deal history,
the history of technology, and revisionist historiography.
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