• tractors were a fairly easy investment for larger farms--if you sold 10 horses you could buy a tractor
• in the south many farms still used mules because the farms were too small to make a tractor worthwhile and cotton still required a lot of labor
  
• Tractors provided not only pulling power but also power for machines
• all of this new technology meant that farmers grew more food than was needed so prices fell, a big part of the Great Depression
• the trend continued after WWII with larger machines, pesticides, and herbicides as well as improved seeds
• focus on mass production, lower cost
  

Technological change in agriculture focused almost entirely on increasing production.  Is that the only alternative?

• local food
• in the last 40 years more people are moving to rural areas than leaving
  

Houses changes as a result of electricity and other new technologies

• soot and airing out rooms were not the issue they had been with gas light
• integrated garages were part of choices that reduced interaction with neighbors
• the interstate highway system took businesses away from city centers--shopping centers grew up between the end of WWII and 1960 and enclosed malls after 1960
  
• 
  

• Electricity was generated by burning coal plus some hydroelectric
• much hope for nuclear power as the next technological miracle
• note p. 203, after the 1930s workers wanted more pay, not more time off
• they wanted a car for every adult, televisions
• culture emphasized small group loyalty (the 1950s organization man), but exclusion increased
• the vision of the future was more and more technology--film: 2001 a Space Odyssey
• air conditioning spread in the 1960s
  

why Anderson SC is known as Electric City

• William C. Whitner got a degree in civil engineering from University of South Carolina
• he returned home to Anderson to recover from an illness and was commissioned to build an electric power system for street lights in 1890  (Edison's first system went online in 1882)
• this was a private company funded by local people to improve their city
  
• he installed a steam-powered direct current generator downtown with funding from local citizens
  
• the cost of electricity was too high and there was a demand for more power, and he traveled to investigate the new alternating current systems in the early 1890s
• a 5,000 volt alternating current generator was purchased (the first one made by a company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts) and set up at High Shoals on the Rocky River six miles east of town
  
• the hydroelectric system began to supply power to the town in 1895
• in 1897 Whitner's company built a 10,000 volt hydroelectric generating station at Portman Shoals, 11 miles west of town, to provide enough electricity to run textile mills and cotton gins as well as provide household electricity and streetlights in the cities.  This a pioneering system in using high voltage AC
• Anderson Cotton Mill was the first mill in the south to be powered by electricity carried over long distance lines (some mills already had their own DC generators)
• the Portman Shoals generator is now on display in a park a Whitner and McDuffie Streets in Anderson (Portman Shoals is under Lake Hartwell).

Background information on rural electrification:

1930 census figures:

• 14% of farms had electricity--about 840,000 farms
  
• of which 4.5% generated their own
• in the south between 1 and 9%

The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of the bills passed in the first 100 days of the New Deal (May 1933)

• flood control
• better farm practices
• rural electrification--used co-ops
  

The Rural Electrification Authority came later, in 1935 in temporary form, permanent in 1936.  How should it go about the work?

• provide subsidies for private industry to extend service to farms--but industry was greedy
  
• state power districts and municipal plants (government owned systems)--but the municipal systems did not show much interest
  
• farm cooperatives
• direct contracting for systems by the federal government (which worked for dams)

what worked was non-profit cooperatives which used federal loans to build lines and bought power from private industry

• where the necessary expertise would come from was a problem
• farmers did need to be persuaded to use more electricity, not just lights, an iron and a radio
• in 4 years the agency sponsored the building of 180,000 miles of lines serving 400,000 customers