Kline 5

electricity was initially seen as a luxury
how did it come to be seen as a right?

was electrification something to simply be left to the process of capitalism, or should government step in?
Industry was taking the approach that it was too expensive to provide electric lines to farms unless farmers paid in advance the cost of constructing the lines (for example $1000 per mile of line in Michigan)

Example: 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).

There were lots of proposals for rural electrification before REA.  Why pay attention to the proposals that failed?

• To understand the REA didn't just come out of the pressures of the Depression
• to see the different choices of how rural electrification might be organized
• private industry focused on development of more electric-powered technology for farmers, so they would use enough electricity to be profitable

p. 138 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