As governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt crusaded for
“public power,” government-owned electric plants. He was outraged by the high
prices that monopolistic utility companies were charging and by their refusal
to bring electricity to rural parts of the state, which, they said, could not
be done economically. Public plants, Roosevelt said, could bring power to those
who needed it and serve as a yardstick for measuring and keeping in check the
prices charged by private power companies.
In the early 20th century, electricity was a hot political
issue. It was expensive and did not reach many parts of the country. To
Roosevelt, it was an important social justice issue. “When he talked about the
benefits of cheap electricity he did not think in terms of kilowatts,” a top
adviser said. “He thought in terms of the hired hand milking by electricity,
the farm wife’s pump, stove, lights and sewing machine.”
When he ran for president in 1932, Roosevelt made public
power a cornerstone of his campaign. In a speech in Portland, Ore., he
explained that it could be a “birch rod in the cupboard,” which the citizenry
could use to punish private power companies that were gouging the public or not
providing good service. Critics accused Roosevelt of Bolshevism, but he was not
deterred. Public power was no more radical, he said, than the public mail.
F.D.R. championed public power as president. During his
first 100 days in office, he backed a bill to create the Tennessee Valley
Authority, a federal authority that brought affordable electricity to an
impoverished 40,000-square-mile stretch of the rural South.
Roosevelt had hoped to create other projects like the
T.V.A., to establish yardstick pricing power on a national scale, but it proved
to be a heavier logistical and political lift than he expected. In 1935, he
brought government into the electricity business in another way. By executive
order, he created the Rural Electrification Administration, which used federal
money and local farm co-ops to lay electric lines in parts of the country that
private companies had no interest in serving. The R.E.A. drove down electricity
prices and helped bring lighting, sewing machines and radios to the 90 percent
of rural Americans who were without them.
