This post introduces a symposium on Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States. Look forward to replies from Brett Christophers, Shelley Welton, and William Boyd!
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I am honored to kick off this symposium and to be in conversation with a group of illustrious scholars. In writing Democracy in Power, my aim was to tell the now-mostly forgotten history of electrification in the United States, show what worked and what didn’t, and explain how this history can inform today’s urgent fights against climate change and oligarchy. Long story short, the federal government, as developer, planner, and regulator, was the true architect of universal electrification. In the 1920s and 30s, private power companies dismissed the residential market—particularly rural households—as unprofitable, leaving roughly nine out of ten farms in the United States without electricity. It was the New Deal state, not the private sector left to its own devices, that ultimately delivered affordable electricity to all.
Starting in 1933 and continuing for the next three decades, the federal government dramatically expanded public participation in and strengthened public control over the American electric power sector. First, the government, which already owned and operated hydroelectric dams in the Western United States, qualitatively expanded its generation of electricity. As part of a regional development project, Congress created the Tennessee Valley Authority and authorized it to build and operate dams and transmission lines. Across the nation, the Roosevelt administration launched other dam construction projects, including Bonneville and Grand Coulee on the Columbia River, to aid national economic recovery. Second, Roosevelt set up the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935—made permanent by Congress the following year—to provide low-cost credit for rural line construction. Third, Congress broke up and regulated the private holding companies and utilities that had previously dominated the power sector. In many ways, power policy represented the radical edge of Roosevelt’s twelve years in office.
This program yielded transformative results. Low-cost electricity, paired with New Deal housing reforms, brought higher living standards for millions of Americans. In the countryside, electrification went from the exception to the rule. Whereas most farms remained in darkness in 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration, in partnership with consumer-owned rural electric cooperatives, helped bring power to more than 90% of farm households by the mid-1950s. For rural families, electrification meant refrigeration, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners, easing the crushing burden of domestic labor.
Federal power initiatives spurred the private sector to do better. Holding company promoters and executives in the 1920s had pursued control and easy profits through debt, corporate pyramiding, and mergers and acquisitions. The New Deal, through a combination of direct regulation and public competition, redirected private utilities away from short-term financial extraction and toward public service at reasonable profit. Public competition came in the form of head-to-head rivalry with federal agencies like the TVA, publicity comparing the rates of private utilities with those of public agencies, and the credible threat of municipal takeovers, or what FDR colorfully termed the “birch rod in the cupboard.”
In the book, I sought to present the New Deal electrification program sympathetically but critically. Its unrealized potential and shortcomings are undeniable. Despite the emancipatory promise of electricity in the home, electric modernization changed the character of domestic work for the better but deepened the gendered division of labor in the American family. Further, New Deal electrification was delivered unevenly, largely due to racist federal housing policy. Electric modernization was not offered to all at the outset and was delivered to whites before Black and brown Americans.
Dam construction had major social and environmental costs. Even as they controlled floods, irrigated drylands, and generated large quantities of electricity, federal dams displaced many already-marginalized people and severely damaged the salmon stocks of the Columbia—a vital resource that had supported Native Americans of the region for millennia.
Though not without flaws, the project of electrification during the New Deal offers a useful template for addressing what is sometimes called the polycrisis. For all the growth in solar and wind over the past two decades, fossil fuels still accounted for 60% of power generation in the United States in 2023—a modest reduction from around 71% in 2003. When methane leaks from natural gas wells and pipelines are considered, the American power sector may be no less damaging to the global climate than it was two decades ago. What amounts to, at most, a glacial pace of change echoes the rural electrification challenge a century ago, when private utilities similarly made incremental progress in building rural lines between 1925 and 1935. Then too, progress was unacceptably slow. In 1936, Morris Cooke, the first head of the Rural Electrification Administration, estimated that, at the private sector’s then-pace, electrifying just half the farms in the United States would take another 50 years.
Today, a renewed commitment to public power—where state, local, and someday federal agencies build and operate wind, solar, geothermal, and other clean energy facilities—could dramatically accelerate decarbonization. Further, it can allow ordinary Americans to shape the energy transition, instead of continuing to allow financiers and corporate executives to decide both the pace and the methods of cleaning up our power supply.
Done right, public power offers a more effective, efficient, and democratic path to a net-zero power sector. Rejuvenating public ownership of our energy infrastructure provides our best chance of achieving truly “just and reasonable” rates, ensuring equitable siting of necessary but often intrusive long-lived infrastructure, and elevating demand-side solutions as an essential component of controlling climate change. Further, public power agencies can serve as competitive catalysts, spurring private utilities through both direct rivalry and publicity to embrace higher standards and a more social orientation.
My hope for readers of Democracy in Power extends beyond the energy sector to a broader reimagining of democratic control and public-private competition across our economy. While many likely believe that democracy and public control are worthy principles that should be generally applied in our political economic life, the devil is always in the details. Creating a more publicly accountable housing or telecommunications sector will likely look quite different than the same project in power. I hope nonetheless that this study of electrification can illuminate a few pathways toward building a democratic economic future, and inspire others to take up these important questions.
