LIGHTING UP THE DARKNESS: ELECTRIFICATION IN OHIO, 1879-1945

Kevin L. Moore

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

May 2013

Committee:

Dr. Walter E. Grunden, Advisor

Dr. Rebecca Mancuso

© 2013

Kevin L. Moore

All Rights Reserved iii

ABSTRACT

Dr. Walter E. Grunden, Advisor

This thesis argues that electrification in Ohio, which spread from cities to the

countryside, required a strong impetus from the Federal Government to reach its ultimate

fulfillment. The author attempts to address a lacuna in the scholarship of electrification by

providing an original work on the history of electrification in Ohio. This thesis makes use of

a "case study” approach to examine the topic in a three-stage analytical framework: urban electrification in Cleveland to address the changes in public perception regarding power and the resulting municipal reform; the transition of Toledo's interurban railways from primarily traction companies to electrical power companies to illustrate the expansion of electrical access beyond the municipality making the issue a state concern; and restriction of Ohio’s utility holding companies and the electrification of Miami and Shelby Counties by the Rural Electrification Administration to examine how firm federal policies succeeded where state and local intervention could not. The case is made here using a synthesis of existing literature on electrification and archival research. The present work concludes that the earliest attempts to expand electrification were made by private enterprise, but private efforts were most successful in cities where higher population densities guaranteed higher profits. Government actions on the part of municipal and state institutions tried to further electrification beyond the areas serviced by private utilities, but they lacked the resources and authority of the federal government. iv

To my mother, my wife, and my daughter v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge and thank the faculty of the Bowling Green State

University History Department for their guidance and support, especially my committee members, Dr. Walter E. Grunden and Dr. Rebecca Mancuso. I also want to acknowledge the assistance of the staff at the Center for Archival Collections at BGSU, Jennifer

Fording, History Librarian at the Harris-Elmore Public Library, and the staff at the

Western Reserve Historical Society Library at Case Western Reserve University. vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER I. POWERING A CITY: ELECTRIFICATION, CORPORATISM, AND

PROGRESSIVISM IN CLEVELAND, 1879-1909 ...... 19

Bright Beginnings ...... 20

Electricity in Motion ...... 28

“Shocking” Profits ...... 32

The Mayor and Municipal Ownership ...... 39

Conclusion ...... 48

CHAPTER II. EXPANDED REACH WITH THE INTERURBANS: ELECTRICITY ENTERS

SMALL TOWN, OHIO AND STATE POLITICS, 1900-1930 ...... 50

The Electric Road ...... 52

The Home of Tomorrow ...... 62

Power for the People ...... 65

Still in the Dark ...... 72

CHAPTER III. AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE: THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ENTERS

THE POWER MARKET AND ELECTRIFIES THE COUNTRYSIDE, 1933-1945 ...... 78

Emergence of the Power Trust ...... 80

Power on Hold ...... 83

Breaking the Power Trust ...... 89

Uncle Sam: Power Provider ...... 94

CONCLUSION ...... 108 vii

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 116 1

INTRODUCTION

Electricity is the bedrock of modernity. Its cheap and reliable lighting broke the human

experience from the confines of the solar day. The energy stored within it powered industry and

began to minimize the amount of time the masses had to dedicate to labor. Its use in locomotion

ushered in the first instances of urban sprawl and provided the first stable connection between

suburbs and cities. It allowed for the separation of power consumer and power generator, greatly

reducing the pollution present in population centers. Electrical access allowed for the first

medium of instantaneous mass communication via the radio. Contemporaries of the first ventures

into electrification heaped onto the new technology all of their expectations for an advanced and

utopian world, and while utopia is certainly still wanting, the nearly century and a half since

electrification began has seen unprecedented advancements.

Philip F. Schewe writes in The Grid: A Journey through the Heart of Our Electrified

World, "Fairly, we could argue that much of what we call modernity is fundamentally electrical

in nature or at least dependent in a fundamental way on the electrical grid."1 To illustrate,

Schewe describes what happens to our electrified world when the power is turned off. Late in the summer of 2003, a hiccup in an Ohio power plant, caused by poorly maintained tree growth and an overly interconnected electrical grid with too few failsafe measures, resulted in a massive blackout in several parts of the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. Automatic teller machines (ATM) became inaccessible cash vaults. Gasoline at service stations stayed in the ground. Air conditioners quit running on what happened to be one of the hottest days of the year causing tens of thousands to vacate their apartments. Cities in the affected areas, especially New

York City, saw their streets clogged with pedestrians. This did not matter, however, because

1 Philip F. Schewe, The Grid: A Journey through the Heart of Our Electrified World (Washington: J. Henry Press, 2007), 13. 2 without functioning traffic lights the city’s traffic flow screeched to a halt anyway. Hundreds were trapped in stopped elevators, and the elderly and disabled stuck on the upper floors of their high-rise apartments became a concern for emergency services. With no refrigeration on a hot day, food quickly spoiled and the restaurant industry lost millions of dollars worth of inventory.

Confusion reigned supreme over both the trapped and the evacuated. News about the nature of the crisis could only be delivered via word of mouth as radio, television, the Internet and cellular communication was disabled. In the new post-9/11 world, rumors of a terrorist attack naturally spread quickly through the crowds. In many areas, water treatment stations stopped pumping fresh water, causing faucets to run dry and, in Cleveland, the wastewater treatment plant shut down sending millions of gallons of human waste into Lake Erie.2 The crisis even affected international relations as the U.S. initially blamed Canada for the blackout.

This catastrophic real-life scenario would seem to indicate that the girdle of civilization itself, especially in densely populated urban centers, has been transferred onto the back of the electrical grid. The might of Atlas has been usurped by microscopic electrons moving through current. This transition has not gone unnoticed. In 2004, Congress commissioned a panel of military and scientific experts to assess the nation’s dependence on electrical systems and their vulnerability to an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) resulting from the detonation of a high-altitude nuclear weapon by a foreign power or terrorist organization. The EMP Commission reported:

“Depending on the specific characteristics of the attacks, unprecedented cascading failures of our major infrastructures could result. In that event, a regional or national recovery would be long and difficult and would seriously degrade the safety and overall viability of our Nation. The primary avenues for catastrophic damage to the Nation are through our electric power infrastructure and thence into our telecommunications, energy, and other infrastructures. These, in turn, can seriously impact other important aspects of our Nation’s life, including the financial system; means of getting food, water, and

2 Schewe, The Grid, 11-13. 3

medical care to the citizenry; trade; and production of goods and services. The recovery of any one of the key national infrastructures is dependent on the recovery of others. The longer the outage, the more problematic and uncertain the recovery will be. It is possible for the functional outages to become mutually reinforcing until at some point the degradation of infrastructure could have irreversible effects on the country’s ability to support its population.”3

Before the risks of crippling blackouts or catastrophic system-wide attack and before the

national grid even existed, electricity was a phenomenon of nature. Very few anticipated its

numerous applications. But those scientists and inventors who did developed spectacles for

display in expositions and luxuries only affordable to the very wealthy. The process by which

this curiosity for a fortunate few became a necessary applied technology for the masses —

electrification — is the subject of this thesis. The scope of this work focuses on American

electrification, specifically as it occurred in the state of Ohio from 1879-1945. Electrification can

be studied through a wide range of historical perspectives: technological, economic, policy,

social, labor, corporate, regulatory and gender, and while it incorporates many of these

perspectives to varying degrees, this study of Ohio electrification primarily focuses on policy and

social history.

The following thesis argues that electrification in Ohio, which spread from cities to the

countryside, required a strong impetus from the Federal Government to reach its ultimate

fulfillment. The earliest attempts to expand electrification were made by private enterprise, but

private efforts were most successful in cities where higher population densities guaranteed higher

profits. Government actions on the part of municipal and state institutions tried to further

electrification beyond the areas serviced by private utilities, but they lacked the resources and

3 Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack: Volume I: Executive Report (2004), accessed January 7, 2013, http://www.empcommission.org/docs/empc_exec_rpt.pdf.. 4

authority of the Federal Government. This process can be understood in a three-stage framework

that considers the issue from the “bottom up,” beginning in cities where electrical networks were

first developed privately to service wealthy customers before becoming the subject of

Progressive municipal reform, then extending to smaller communities by electric rail making

their regulation a state concern, and finally, after the weaknesses in state regulation were

addressed by firm federal legislation against holding companies, onward to Ohio’s scattered

farms by means of a proactive New Deal program. The present thesis secondarily argues that as

electrification progressed through each of these three stages, the new technology altered the way

Ohioans conducted their labor, communicated with one another, related to the city, and pursued

their leisure.

This thesis provides an original work on the history of electrification of Ohio. Most of the

literature on electrification focuses on its national development, and while there are some works

that delve into regional electrification such as Preston J. Hubbard’s Origins of the TVA: The

Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920-1932, no widely-known scholarly work with a focus in Ohio

has been written.4 Even in monographs on Ohio history, electrification and its related issues like

the municipal ownership of utilities are only mentioned in passing and often in an unrelated

context such as Progressive reform in the state.5 This work attempts to consolidate primary research with the national scholarship on electrification and the brief acknowledgements found in

Ohio and local histories to create a singular and informative historical narrative dedicated exclusively to the subject.

4 Preston J. Hubbard, Origins of the TVA: The Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920-1932 (New York: Norton & Company, Inc., 1961). 5 See, for example: Andrew R.L. Cayton, “Tom L. Johnson and Progressive Reform in Cleveland,” in Builders of Ohio: A Biographical History, ed. Warren Van Tine and Michael, 192-206 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2003); George W. Knepper, Ohio and Its People (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1989); Robert C. Levee, Genoa Memories: Genoa, Ohio 1868-1968 (Genoa, OH: The Genoa Area Centennial-Homecoming, Inc., 1968); and Grace Luebke, Elmore, Ohio: A History Preserved (Mt. Vernon, IN: Windmill Publications, 1997). 5

The 150-year global history of electrification is a broad topic, one that is far too large in

scope for the present study, and is the subject of a moderately voluminous body of literature.

Most of the works in the existing literature of this field can be considered as falling into one of

three sub-topical categories. The first studies the history of the science of electricity and the

development of electrical technology.6 The next group analyzes the evolution of the electrical system after its establishment focusing on changes in power generation like nuclear power and the green movement as well as the deregulation of utilities in the late twentieth century.7 Finally,

many histories looks at the process of electrification — the establishment of Schewe’s “grid” —

by examining the creation of electric utilities, governmental response to the burgeoning

infrastructure, the application of electrical power to different facets of life via lighting and

appliances, and the expansion of electrical access. Of those historians who write on the

development of America’s electrical infrastructure, their works seem to promote one of two

schools of thought. The question at the heart of this scholarly debate is who was responsible for

the expansion of electrification? All scholars agree that the earliest electric power and lighting

was developed by private corporations for consumption by the wealthy, but there is less

agreement over assigning agency for further electrification to poor urban and rural customers.

Much of the literature asserts that initiatives as a result of the public power movement of the

1910s and 1920s and government regulation were the primary drivers of electrification,

6 Representative works include: Iwan Rhys Morus, Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2004), and Brian Bowers, A History of Electric Light & Power (London: Peter Peregrinus Ltd., 1982). 7 See, for example: Ken Billington, People, Politics, and Public Power (Seattle: Washington Public Utility Districts’ Association, 1988), and Richard Morgan, Tom Riesenberg, and Michael Troutman, Taking Charge: A New Look at Public Power (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Action Foundation, 1976). 6

especially rural electrification.8 However, another group of scholars argues for greater agency to

be credited to private enterprise for electrifying America.9

Seminal works in the study of electrification, regardless of one’s stance on the public

versus private debate, include: Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-

1930, by Thomas P. Hughes; Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology,

1880-1940, by David E. Nye; and Toward a National Power Policy: The New Deal and the

Electric Utility Industry, 1933-1941, by Philip Funigiello.10 Hughes’ Networks of Power is an in-

depth technological history of electrification that focuses on the development of the electrical

system. While Hughes analyzes the contributions of individual inventors and the components

they created, his argument emphasizes the birth and evolution of massive technical systems

(American, British and German) that were capable of transmitting power. Nye’s Electrifying

America concerns itself less with the technological aspects of electrification and explores what

those developments meant for the everyday lives of people who often knew very little about how

their electricity was produced or from where it came. Nye’s interdisciplinary approach as a

sociologist and his focus on social history greatly influenced the scholarship that followed,

8 See, for example: Amy Friedlander, Natural Monopoly and Universal Service: Telephones and Telegraphs in the U.S. Communications Infrastructure, 1837-1940 (Reston, Virginia: Corporation for National Research Initiatives, 1995); Leah S. Glasser, Electrifying the American West: Stories of Power, People, and Place (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Charles D. Jacobson, Ties that Bind: Economic and Political Dilemmas of Urban Utility Networks, 1800-1990 (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Thomas K. McGraw, TVA and the Power Fight, 1933-1939 (New York: J.P. Lippincott Company, 1971); and Ronald C. Tobey, Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1996). 9 See, for example: Richard F. Hirsch, Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley, Power Struggle: The Hundred- Year War over Electricity (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1986); and David Shapiro, Generating Failure: Public Power Policy in the Northwest (New York: University Press of America, 1989). 10 Thomas Parke Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1983); David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992); and Philip J. Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy: The New Deal and the Electric Utility Industry, 1933-1941 (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). 7

including the present thesis. Finally, Funigiello’s Toward a National Power Policy is a detailed

policy history examining the response of national political institutions to the rise of private

electric utilities. The monograph covers the efforts of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to

break up holding companies among private utilities, promote rural electrification by creating the

Rural Electrification Administration (REA), and generate hydroelectric power for the Pacific

Northwest through the Bonneville Project. Funigiello’s national narrative provides broad context

for the more focused study to follow here. These seminal works can be further divided into the two lines of thought on the public-private issue in the body of historical literature on the subject of electrification. Networks of Power and Electrifying America tend to credit inventors, innovators, and private companies for the creation of the electrical network. Toward a National

Power Policy, by the nature of its study on government action to promote greater electrical access during the New Deal, falls squarely in the pro-government agency school.

Among the scholars favoring government intervention, Ronald C. Tobey argues in

Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home

that electrical manufacturers and private utilities did not try to develop a large market, but rather

catered only to a wealthy minority, and that the development of a mass market was the result of

New Deal policies through the REA and the Federal Housing Administration. While

acknowledging that early electrification in urban areas resulted from private enterprise selling in

a capitalist marketplace, Tobey rejects what he calls the “consumer choice in the private

marketplace” thesis. He writes that “[the thesis] denies that domestic electrical modernization

significantly involved collective, public decisions. Historians of electrical technology shunt as

irrelevant the progressive reform tradition that drew issues of distribution of services by public 8 utilities, electrification, and electrical modernization into its debate over social democracy.”11 He goes on to argue that the inherent choice involved in buying in a marketplace is itself a public construct derived from cultural and political values. Similarly, Jacobson’s Ties that Bind is a study of three comparable public services: waterworks, electricity and cable television. He argues that traditional concepts of competition and the “invisible hand” of the market do not fully apply to these kinds of public goods and they require government involvement to flourish.

Utilities present a natural monopoly where the significant capital intensive infrastructure investment discourages market entry and competitors from attempting to service the same area or low population areas resulting in high monopolistic rates or no service at all.12

In contrast, historians Richard F. Hirsh and David Shapiro argue that private enterprise shaped the electrical industry. Hirsh makes the case in Technology and Transformation in the

American Electric Utility Industry that the managerial culture of the early electrical industry was geared toward a growth and build model where ever increasing expansion led to lower rates and broader access. He states that “utility managers also savored the feeling of being responsible stewards of technological progress,” and they functioned best with little outside interference.13

David Shapiro’s Generating Failure: Public Power Policy in the Northwest serves as a critique of governmental involvement in power generation in the Pacific Northwest. He expresses concerns that the prevailing opinion on the public versus private debate has left the existing historiography uncritical of public power policies, even in regional studies. He states: “The absence of studies that fully address these questions [on the efficacy of federal power policy] is less surprising than the virtually universal acceptance of the idea of the beneficence of New Deal

11 Tobey, Technology as Freedom, 3. 12 Jacobson, Ties that Bind, 8. 13 Hirsh, Technologies and Transformation, 6-7. 9 public power policy...This uncritical acceptance of the goodness of public power has also permeated academic policy studies of problems in the Pacific Northwest.”14 Unique among the historians in this camp are Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley who advocate a negative private agency. Their monograph Power Struggle: The Hundred-Year War over Electricity is an explicit indictment of private power’s hindrance to government intervention. Rudolph and Ridley charge that “amid ruthless battling against public interests, carefully calculated myths were put in place.

History was popularly rewritten...regulation of the industry was steadily undermined by a coordinated system of political influence and lobbying...consumption of electricity has been grossly inflated and technology used in a grand scam.”15

Another historiographical debate within the broader literature of technology history, concerning technological determinism, deserves mention. “Technological determinism” posits that "changes in technology exert a greater influence on societies and their processes than any other factor."16 Technology historian Merritt Roe Smith and American cultural historian Leo

Marx, editors of the book Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological

Determinism identify a spectrum wherein historians are “hard” determinists, “soft” determinists, or something in between. The so-called hard determinists argue that technological innovations, such as electrification, drive human behavior.17 For example, hypothetically, they would argue that the availability of electricity in cities would drive human migration patterns toward cities.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, “Instead of treating ‘technology’ per se as the locus of historical agency, the soft determinists locate it in a far more various and complex social,

14 Shapiro, Generating Failure, xv. 15 Rudolph and Ridley, Power Struggle, xi-xii. 16 Merritt Roe Smith, "Technological Determinism in American Culture" in Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 2. 17 Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, "Introduction" in Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), xii. 10

economic, political, and cultural matrix.”18 In a debate over the same hypothetical issue, soft

determinists would argue the reason electricity was more readily available in cities in the first

place was due to prerequisite politically, economically, and culturally-driven human settlement

patterns. The historians of electrification tend to avoid hard determinism and fall either into the middle or on the “soft” end of Smith and Marx’s spectrum. Thomas P. Hughes tries to bridge the extremes in his essay “Technological Momentum” by describing a middle position called technological momentum where technology is both the cause and effect of human behavior.19 He

elaborates in another seminal work, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and

Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970, that "technology is both a shaper of, and is shaped by,

values. It is value laden."20 Nye argues that technology is a human derivative and agency resides with its human creators: "No machine is an abstract force moving through history. Rather, every new technology is a social construction and the terms of its adoption are culturally determined."21 Jacobson confirms the trend set by the seminal authors on the issue by writing:

“the history of technology teaches us that forms taken by networked systems or other

technological artifacts cannot be understood without reference to the societies in which they are

embedded. And that technology does not predetermine many aspects of how such systems have

been developed. It is people who make choices and struggle with one another over how systems

are to be designed, built, and used.”22

18 Ibid., xiii. 19 Thomas P. Hughes, “Technological Momentum,” in Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 106. 20 Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5. 21 Nye, Electrifying America, 381. 22 Jacobson, Ties that Bind, 7. 11

The present study utilizes a soft determinism approach, or to use Nye’s terminology, a

social constructionist perspective, by arguing that the creation of the national grid and the

process of electrification in Ohio were originally driven by capitalism and private enterprise,

later augmented by government, and eventually adapted to meet the demands of consumerism,

all processes informed and influenced by human agency. This premise will be illustrated

throughout the following study through the agency given to such reformers as Tom L. Johnson,

the mayor of Cleveland from 1901-1909, who fought to expand the new technology to all

classes, townsfolk in small communities who were eager to have interurbans and their power

connections built in their towns for social and economic benefits, and the farmers who were

envious of the lifestyle of their urban counterparts and demanded to have labor-saving electrical

appliances.

Electrification is a broad subject, and its study cannot be contained merely to the

literature devoted exclusively to it. Electrification was an ongoing process in the United States

during the first half of the twentieth century and, as a result, it is a topic that appears in the wider

historiography of early twentieth century U.S. history. The development of the first electricity

companies like General Electric can be situated within the laissez-faire business culture of the

late nineteenth century as explored in such books as Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of

America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, and the push to reform how those companies conducted their affairs and charged their customers is but one of several arenas where a new

Progressive ideology clashed with the older politics of the Gilded Age. The popularity of electric rail in the early twentieth century, especially as an alternative to the better established steam railroads, is an important chapter in American railroad and transportation history. The creation of state regulatory commissions for utilities and New Deal legislation to restrict holding companies 12

are both part of broader themes in American monopoly and regulatory history. For example, in

The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, Ellis W. Hawley treats the subject of the Federal

Government’s response to a Power Trust among private electric utilities as only one part of a broader “Antitrust Tradition.”23 The substantial efforts on the part of the Roosevelt

administration to expand electrical access through programs like the REA and the Tennessee

Valley Authority (TVA) are ideal examples of the New Dealers’ philosophy of activist

government that was the driving force behind the numerous social programs created during the

Great Depression. Electrification is an important topic in the history of modern America that can

clearly be studied through a host of historical lenses. This thesis will be of interest to historians

of several fields, including: twentieth century U.S., Gilded Age, Progressive Era, technology,

social, gender, economic, Ohio and New Deal historians.24

Historians of electrification typically treat the subject as a national process.

Electrification certainly occurred across the United States in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries and, in fact, an argument can be made for it even being an international

phenomenon, as evidenced by Thomas Hughes’ study of concurrent electrical development in

the U.S., Germany, and Great Britain in Networks of Power. However, some historians have

supplemented the national narrative with regional studies such as Leah S. Glasser with

Electrifying the American West: Stories of Power, People, and Place, and David Shapiro with

Generating Failure: Public Power Policy in the Northwest. The political, cultural, and perhaps

23 Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, xi. 24 See, for example: Charles W. Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007); Friedlander, Natural Monopoly and Universal Service: Telephones and Telegraphs in the U.S. Communications Infrastructure, 1837-1940; Martin G. Glaeser, Public Utilities in American Capitalism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957); Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Michael Hiltzik, The New Deal: A Modern History (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2011); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956); Hoyt L. Warner, Progressivism in Ohio: 1897-1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964). 13 most importantly, the geographic differences between regions across the country greatly affected the course of electrification and thus require closer examination at the local level. Unfortunately, the electrification of Ohio has been the subject of very limited historical study. The two most informative works for the purpose of this thesis include: The Light and the Power:

Commemorating 50 Years of Electricity in Rural Ohio by Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc., which is nostalgic and unanalytical; and Victor C. Ballenger’s MBA thesis “The Development and Progress of Rural Electrification in Ohio,” which was written in 1936 and lacks an historical perspective from which to evaluate the outcome of rural electrification initiatives in Ohio.25

The national electrification narrative has not been fully tested on the local and regional levels, and the present thesis attempts to address the lacuna in the scholarship concerning regional and local electrification with a focus on Ohio. For example, Funigiello’s Toward a

National Power Policy and George W. Hilton and John F. Due’s The Electric Interurban

Railways in America briefly discuss, as part of a national history, attempts by state commissions to regulate utilities and state that interurban railways were often the first power providers in the communities along their routes, respectively. But what did these processes look like, who was involved, and why? This study examines the many milestones in the overall national electrification narrative that occurred in Ohio and the related policies drafted by Ohio’s cities and the state government and uses them to provide an important local context to elucidate broader national trends in electrification. This study attempts to examine the subject from a reverse angle

— from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Such an approach is warranted as electrification from the top down did not occur until the REA began granting loans in 1935. In the preceding decades, there were many influential developments that have often been overlooked by

25 Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc., The Light and the Power: Commemorating 50 Years of Electricity in Rural Ohio (Columbus: Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc., 1985); and Victor C. Ballenger, “The Development and Progress of Rural Electrification in Ohio” (MBA Thesis, The Ohio State University, 1936). 14 nationally-oriented works on electrification. As will be seen, Cleveland Mayor Tom L. Johnson’s efforts to curb electric utilities’ influence can be situated in a broader movement of progressivism that was sweeping the nation in the first decade of the 1900s. Ohio reformers later followed the lead of other state governments, notably New York, to create the Public Utilities

Commission of Ohio, which was described by newspapers as one of the most aggressive utilities commissions created at the time. Finally, Ohio’s farmers, impatient at being neglected by private utilities, began organizing rural cooperatives to construct their own power distribution systems similar to the farmers’ cooperatives that sprang up across the country, most notably in Idaho.

This thesis argues that electrification proceeded the way that it did because of human agency. Some people were fortunate enough live in areas with electrical access while others would go their entire lives being passed over by technology without ever enjoying even running water or indoor electric lighting, and some would make it their life’s pursuit to push electricity from the haves to the have-nots. There are important and instructive perspectives, personalities, and stories in the history of electrification that can only be addressed at the local and regional level, and the scholarship has been in need of such a “bottom up” history for some time. Such a perspective begs certain questions about the connection between the local and the national experiences in electrification, such as: Were all regional and state experiences comparable? Or, were there unique trends that played out in some areas, but not others? Does the evidence even support the existence of a broad pattern that scholars can define as a national trend of electrification? Furthermore, how does the case of Ohio fit into these comparisons? A more detailed study to uncover if Ohio's electrification experience was unique when compared to other regions lies beyond the confines of this thesis, but this study seeks to begin that discussion. 15

In order to analyze Ohio’s place within the historiography, this thesis will examine the

diffusion of centralized electrical power and lighting from their initial availability to wealthier

urban areas by private utility companies at the end of the nineteenth century to their democratization via government support to low-income farmers in the more far-flung reaches of

the state by World War II. This thesis supports the position held by the majority of scholars in

electrification history that gives credit to governmental involvement for the expansion of

electrification, but the present work argues the following nuance: that in Ohio’s case,

government actions on the local and state levels to promote the wider availability and

affordability of electrical access through the municipal ownership of power utilities and

statewide regulation of electric and light companies, while somewhat helpful for urban utilities

customers, were ineffective in diffusing electricity into Ohio's expansive rural areas until they

were backed by a national New Deal program designed to complete the task. Additionally, while

the use of centralized electricity became more commonplace in Ohio's cities, towns, and farms,

Ohioans’ daily lives were transformed by the amenities offered by electrical lighting, traction,

and appliances.

To make this case, this thesis will utilize a three-stage framework by which to understand

the development of electrification in Ohio. First, centralized electricity provided by private

electric and light corporations began to displace individual subsistence power generation in

Ohio's metropolitan areas in the decades immediately before and after 1900. The public's

perception of electricity changed from that of a privilege to a right as Ohio and the nation at large

were influenced by Progressive Era ideology and politics. Municipal government was the tool of

reform for city activists who wanted to broaden electrical access and make it more affordable.

The blessings urbanites derived from the new power source would become the envy of villagers 16 and rural farmers living outside the cities. Secondly, during the 1900s and 1910s, as interurban electric railways began bringing surrounding towns and villages into the orbit of Ohio's cities through new means of transportation, the electric railways also facilitated electricity's spread into the small communities along their routes. While the reach of centralized electricity radiated out from nodes in the state's cities, new applications for electrical power in the form of household appliances further bolstered its demand, and progressive lobbyists pressured the state government to regulate power and light utilities to check the growing influence of their parent holding companies. Finally, the electrification situation in Ohio and across the country prompted federal intervention. State commissions proved insufficient to rein in utility holding companies and the cause had to be taken up by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration by pushing for the

Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935. With the cost of transmission line construction greatly outweighing the potential revenue from the sparse population dotting Ohio's farmlands, rural electrification efforts on the part of private or even municipally owned utilities remained idle until Roosevelt created a national program for electrifying farming cooperatives during the

Great Depression.

A “case study” approach is taken here to illustrate each phase of the three-stage framework: urban electrification in Cleveland to address the changes in public perception regarding power and the resulting municipal reform; the transition of Toledo's interurban railways from primarily traction companies to electrical power companies to illustrate the expansion of electrical access beyond the municipality making the issue a state concern; and restriction of Ohio’s utility holding companies and the electrification of Miami and Shelby

Counties by the REA to examine how firm federal policies succeeded where state and local intervention could not. Ohio serves as an excellent laboratory to test this three-stage framework 17

and to explore national trends in electrification in a local context because the state was home to

several technical innovations in electrification, many influential agents in its shaping, and was a proving ground for government policies with national significance. The city of Cleveland is a logical choice because of its significance in electrical development, not only for the state, but the

nation as well, having been selected by Charles Brush to demonstrate the world's first public arc-

light lighting system, and because it was also the site of the nation's first electrically-powered

streetcar. For the interurban rail system, northwest Ohio, with its flat landscape, developed a far

more extensive electric rail network than did its more hilly southern and eastern counterparts and

so is a logical choice for examination. Miami and Shelby Counties, located in southwest Ohio,

are examined as they were home to the first electric rural cooperatives in the entire country

funded and developed by the REA.

Taken as a whole, these three localities provide a well-rounded sampling of electrical

development from three of the state's four corners, with the notable exception being southeast

Ohio. As part of Appalachia, southeastern Ohio faced unique geographic, social, and economic

challenges that delayed the development of an electrical network in the region. The area

contained no major cities for early urban electrification systems to develop and, due to the hilly

terrain, the construction of interurban lines was more difficult and costly. People living in

southeast Ohio and greater Appalachia lived in a culture that was hesitant to adopt new, outside

technologies, which has been documented in Jacob J. Podber’s The Electronic Front Porch: An

Oral History of the Arrival of Modern Media in Rural Appalachia and the Melungeon

Community.26 These challenges logically impeded electrical development in the region,

especially in the beginning years of electrification before government involvement when

26 Jacob J. Podbear, The Electronic Front Porch: An Oral History of the Arrival of Modern Media in Rural Appalachia and the Melungeon Community (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007). 18

capitalism was its driver. But even when the REA began building rural transmission lines,

construction in the Appalachian areas of Ohio still lagged behind construction elsewhere in the

state because building transmission lines along hillsides was more labor intensive, requiring

power poles to be placed closer together.27

The time period considered in this study is 1879 to 1945. At first glance, these dates may

seem arbitrary, but they hold strong relevance to the topic. The year 1879 marks the unveiling of

Charles Brush's public lighting system in Public Square in Cleveland and the first demonstration

to the greater public of the possibilities offered by electricity. Similarly, the original

appropriations that financed a newly permanent REA was set to expire in 1945, and while the

REA was continued through subsequent legislation (its essence still lives on today as the Rural

Utilities Service, a division of the United States Department of Agriculture) the salient mission

behind the program's creation, that of electrifying the nation's rural areas, was completed by the

end of the Second World War. Considered more broadly, 1945 also demarcates a useful

transition point between what are two distinct eras in the history of electrification: creation and

evolution. Electrification obviously continued into the postwar era for Ohio and the nation.

Nuclear power, the green movement, deregulation, and the explosion of electrical demand in the

late twentieth century and early twenty-first century are important developments in

electrification that deserve their own history, but they were modifications to an already existing

power network and are beyond the scope of this study. The "grid" was already in place. This

thesis concerns itself with the creation of that network from the time when virtually no one in

Ohio received service from a centralized electric utility up to the point when the vast majority of

Ohioans enjoyed the benefits of electric power.

27 Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc., The Light and the Power: Commemorating 50 Years of Electricity in Rural Ohio, 17. 19

CHAPTER I: POWERING A CITY: ELECTRIFICATION, CORPORATISM, AND PROGRESSIVISM IN CLEVELAND, 1879-1909

The city of Cleveland has a long and compelling story to tell. Situated in the northeastern

corner of Ohio, the settlement's founding predates the Buckeye State and in the first decades of

the twentieth century it grew into the fifth largest city in the United States.1 Cleveland has made

rich contributions to American political, cultural, sports and industrial history, but it holds a

special place in the history of electrification for both the State of Ohio and the larger nation.

Cleveland can boast of the first electric public street lighting system, the first electric street

railway car, and the first hotel to offer electricity as an amenity. But more than holding title to a

few “firsts” in the American electrification narrative, Cleveland was a leader in the electrical

industry both in research and manufacture, just as it was a major hub for steel production and

served as an early headquarters to John D. Rockefeller's oil empire.

As Ohio's largest and most "modern" city by the end of nineteenth century, Cleveland set

the precedent for urban electrification elsewhere in the state. Other Ohio cities like Toledo and

Cincinnati quickly followed on Cleveland's heels in building their own electrical infrastructure, making Moses Cleaveland's namesake a suitable case study for studying the first stage of Ohio electrification: urban electrification.

Cleveland was a pioneer in implementing electrical technology, and those developments

caused a revolution in modernity for Clevelanders. Illumination powered by electricity opened

up a whole new world after the sun went down, and electric rail reordered the city along class

and ethnic lines. Like most new technologies, the marvel of electricity was first a luxury for

those who could afford it, but as Ohio and the nation exited the Gilded Age electricity was at the

1 “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Areas in the United States: 1790-1990,” U.S. Census Bureau, accessed March 5, 2013, http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/twps0027.html. 20

forefront of Progressive societal restructuring. Cleveland was an early trendsetter in the technical

aspects of electricity, but the capitalist culture of amalgamation eroded the city’s lead as its

electrical industry became an extension of large national corporations. Then, when it came time

for the city to grapple with the nature of the blessings of electricity as either a privilege or a right,

its policymakers, although notably vocal and important to the movement, were swept up in an

already momentous wave of national Progressive reform. That wave influenced the philosophy

of Cleveland’s mayor, Tom L. Johnson, who fought against the “Privilege” of utility companies

by pushing for rate control and the public ownership of utilities.

Bright Beginnings

Cleveland's electrification began on April 29, 1879 when inventor Charles F. Brush

flipped the switch on his newly patented arc light system to light up Cleveland's Public Square

(at the time called Monumental Park). Brush was a mining engineer and chemist from Euclid,

Ohio who developed a fascination for electricity in the 1870s.2 The arc lamp that made him

famous was a precursor to the incandescent light bulb, and it produced light by passing a stream

of electricity at high voltage between two carbon electrodes kept slightly apart. The light they

emitted was described as purplish in the center and green-yellow along the edges. Whereas it was originally believed the light was created directly by the arcing electricity, it was later learned that the lamps' illumination came from the heating and limited combustion of the electrodes as electricity flowed between them.3 Brush's demonstration attracted several city officials and

2 Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, s.v. “Charles Francis Brush,” edited by Case Western Reserve University, accessed October 19, 2012, http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=BCF. 3 John A. Jakle, City Lights: Illuminating the American Night (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 39. 21

thousands of interested spectators from as far away as Pennsylvania, most of whom needlessly

shielded their eyes with smoked glass. For his debut, Brush wired together twelve poles topped

with arc lights, which were powered by his newly patented dynamo a few blocks away.4 The

Plain Dealer boldly proclaimed the next morning that "Cleveland is now abreast with any city in the matter of electric light for out-door illumination and in advance of most cities."5 Brush spent two months preparing the spectacle. The company he used to manufacture his patents, the

Telegraph Supply Company, had called on the Cleveland City Council to let Brush light the square, to which the Council assented on the stipulation that the system give twice the luminance already provided by the city's gas lamps but at a lower cost.6 While the overwhelming majority

of spectators were thoroughly amazed by Brush's invention, not everyone who visited the Square

was impressed. One "fellow" told a reporter, "The electric light is good enough, but give me the

old moon for a standby with an occasional lump of cloud and I'm here till midnight."7

Often credited as the first public outdoor electric lighting, Brush's April 29 demonstration

was not, in reality, the first time the world had witnessed electric lighting, electric lighting in

public, or even electric lighting outdoors. The very first arc lamps to light a public space, known

as Jablochkoff lamps after their Russian inventor Paul Jablochkoff, debuted in London in 1878,

illuminating the world's first nighttime soccer game before a crowd of 30,000 fans, and within

months his technology was adopted in Paris to light the Avenue de l'Opera, hence the French

4 Darwin H. Stapleton, “The City Industrious: How Technology Transformed Cleveland,” in The Birth of Modern Cleveland, 1865-1930, edited by Thomas F. Campbell and Edward M. Miggins (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1988), 80-81; George E. Condon, Cleveland: The Best Kept Secret (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967), 84-85. 5 “The Electric Light,” The Plain Dealer, April 30, 1879, 1. 6 Stapleton, “The City Industrious,” 80. 7 Untitled, The Plain Dealer, May 5, 1879, 1. For newspaper citations, every effort was made by the author to cite all pertinent information, but in some cases not all such information was available. Not every article gave credit to an author, and sometimes the date and page number were unreadable. Articles taken from the Grace Luebke Local History Room in the Harris-Elmore Public Library, cited often in the second chapter of this thesis, were most noticeably affected as most newspaper clippings had no record of what publication they were taken from. 22 capital's moniker as the "City of Light." Arc lights made an even earlier indoor appearance at the

1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.8 What was truly on display in Cleveland on that night in 1879 was the ability to light a civic space continuously through the whole night. Brush's system employed the novel concept of an automatic shunt which prevented the whole line of lights from shutting down when only one light burnt out, and his new dynamo and battery system was the first of its kind capable of all-night power generation.9

The world's response to Cleveland's public lighting demonstration was almost instantaneous. The lights in Public Square were not yet a month old before engineers from

Canada were inspecting Brush's modern marvel with the intent of illuminating one of nature's ancient wonders. "Electric Light at Niagara: The Falls to be Illuminated with the Brush Light -

Artificial Rainbows at Night" ran as the lead story in The Plain Dealer on May 21, reporting,

"representatives of the Niagara Falls Prospect Company visited Cleveland on Monday evening to inspect the operation of the Brush electric light in Monumental Park. They were so well satisfied with it they left an order with the Telegraph Supply Company for sixteen lamps and a supporting dynamo.10 The beauty of the rainbow-colored Falls, once electrified, were the subject of Mary F.

Lovering's poem, "Thoughts Upon Niagara Falls," published in 1881.11 Cleveland's mayor,

Rensselaer Herrick, entertained a delegation of several aldermen and public works officials from

Detroit who had taken a steamer across Lake Erie to tour the Public Square three weeks after

Brush’s lighting.12 By year's end, a San Francisco startup, the California Electric Light

8 Jakle, City Lights, 39-40. 9 Ibid., 40. 10 “Electric Light at Niagara,” The Plain Dealer, May 21, 1879, 1. 11 “Thoughts Upon Niagara Falls,” The Plain Dealer, November 5, 1881, 8. 12 “Detroit Officials,” The Plain Dealer, June 12, 1879, 1. 23

Company, would turn Brush's creation into a profitable enterprise, selling illumination as a service for those wanting electric light but unable to invest in their own dynamo-light system.13

The ensuing years saw arc lights begin to replace gas lights across the country. Private establishments were generally the first to electrify their lighting systems, but due to side effects of the arc lights that many found annoying such as flickering, intense glare, residual heat and a constant humming, electric lighting was primarily only adopted in large venues like theaters, department stores and factories.14 In Cleveland, the Academy of Music was advertising the inclusion of Brush lighting in their shows by 1885.15 Despite their issues, the cost savings associated with arc lighting still incentivized more intimate spaces to make the switch. In

Chicago, the Grand Pacific Hotel converted over 500 gas-fueled lamps in its lobby into seventeen arc lights and reported a monthly savings of $300, a sum further compounded by the discounts offered by insurance companies during the 1890s for customers who electrified.16

Liberty E. Holden, owner of The Plain Dealer, raised the bar in 1885 when he opened the

Hollenden Hotel, which was the first hotel in the world to offer electrically lit rooms as an amenity.17 In 1880s Cleveland, arc lighting became fashionable décor for many of the upscale downtown shops.18

It became evident in the arc light's first decade that the street corner was perhaps the most appropriate place for this kind of technology. The common light pole typified the street lighting

13 W. Bernard Carlson, “Technology and America as a Consumer Society, 1870-1900,” in The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, edited by Charles W. Calhoun (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 40. 14 Jakle, City Lights, 42-53; Carlson, “Technology and America,” 40. 15 “Academy of Music,” The Plain Dealer, May 15, 1885, 5. 16 Jakle, City Lights, 43. 17 Condon, Cleveland, 246. 18 Hal Hitchens and The Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, How Electricity Came to Cleveland (Cleveland: The Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, 1914), 28. 24

of most cities, but many cities evolved the arc light tower as a supplement to light poles in their

most heavily trafficked districts. Mounting several arc lamps on top of 150 to 200-foot-tall

towers capitalized on the arc lights' brightness while mitigating their notorious buzzing. They

were in many ways the grandiose ancestor of modern athletic field lighting. The largest of these

novel constructions was built in Minneapolis in 1883. At 257 feet tall, the Minneapolis "electric

moon" sported eight powerful arc lights.19 The city to rely most heavily on tower lighting,

however, was Detroit, perhaps on the advice of those very officials who had visited Cleveland in

1879. With 122 175-foot-tall towers, each capped with six 2,000-candlepower arc lights, there

was scarcely a shadow to be found in downtown Detroit.20

The era of the arc light tower was short-lived. Their light spilled down onto the street in uniform wide swathes which were incapable of taking into account the various needs of the different neighborhoods, businesses and residences underneath them. During the summertime, their light was often blocked by city greenery. Arc lamps required daily "trimming," manual service by a city worker who climbed atop the towers to replace the burnt up carbon electrodes.21

In that respect, the arc lamps faced the same issues as the gas lights they replaced. John A. Jakle writes in City Lights: Illuminating the American Night, "The technology was more spectacular than it was effective...what was created...proved merely an exercise in technological monumentalism."22 It was the shortcomings of arc lighting, particularly the tower system, which

prompted Thomas A. Edison to develop a more practical electric light that could offer the

flexibility customers had come to enjoy with gas lamps.23 Arc lighting would linger for decades

19 Jakle, City Lights, 48. 20 Ibid., 48-50. 21 Ibid., 50-57. 22 Ibid., 50-51. 23 Carlson, “Technology and America,” 40. 25

to come, but the massive arc towers would start to disappear by the turn of the century with

incandescent Edison bulbs shining in their place.

Caught in the first street lighting craze, Cleveland too built its share of arc light towers.24

However, the city also decided to retain much of its gas lighting system. Despite the spectacle and acclaim, the Cleveland City Council voted in July 1879 not to remove the gas lamps from

Public Square, deciding Brush's system was still an "experiment."25 The situation in Cleveland

changed little in the next five years. On December 23, 1884, the City Council voted to provide

“all-night lighting” through gas only partly supplemented by electricity. Mayor John H. Farley's

comments at that meeting illustrate the hesitancy on the part of city officials to adopt the newer,

more expensive technology: "No doubt parties interested and those who admire electric lighting

either for its brilliancy or novelty will urge a different course. Those willing to incur expense for

the sake of beauty and show in street lights without regard to usefulness, I ask... be impressed

with the good that can be done with funds saved."26 Despite lighting the way for the world in

1879, Cleveland would remain primarily a gas-lit town for years to come. In the summer of

1888, a delegation of aldermen and councilmen from Cleveland traveled to Detroit to inspect that

city’s public lighting system. The returning officials spoke favorably of Detroit's 136 150-foot

arc light towers, stating the towers and their 118 accompanying electric poles cost Detroit some

20 percent less per year than Cleveland's reliance on gas lighting.27 They proclaimed Detroit "the

best lighted city they [had] seen."28The city's debate on whether gas or electricity should be used

as an illuminant was still raging in 1891. The unaccredited author of an editorial in The Plain

24 “Board of Improvements,” The Plain Dealer, July 8, 1881, 1. 25 “City and General,” The Plain Dealer, July 22, 1879, 4. 26 “City Council: Proceeding of the Meeting Held December 22th, 1884: Official Report,” The Plain Dealer, December 23, 1884, 2. 27 This number is a discrepancy with Jakle’s figure of 122 Detroit towers in City Lights. 28 “Electric vs. Gas Light,” The Plain Dealer, July 24, 1888, 8. 26

Dealer argued that the issue at hand was no longer a choice between gas or electric but rather to

supply electricity with power purchased by contract or to manufacture it locally in a municipal

plant.29

Unfortunately for that author, the technological limitations of the day would postpone his

first proposition for nearly ten years. While Thomas Edison is most known for his invention of

the incandescent light bulb, most historians of electrification argue that his most significant

contribution was the creation of a commercial, centralized electricity generation and transmission

system, which he first demonstrated from his Pearl Street Station in New York City in 1882.

Such a system enabled electric companies to affordably distribute power and lighting to the

public from a central supply station, as opposed to private businesses and residences constructing

and running their own generators or electric providers having to set up new on-site generators,

for each new customer.30 Technology historian W. Bernard Carlson writes, "Electricity offered the fundamental advantage that one could separate power generation from consumption."31 No

longer was power exclusively for those located close to a power source or with the means to

build their own; electricity could be transmitted to the customer wherever he was. It has already

been seen that electricity, mainly for the purpose of lighting, became the must-have commodity.

But if the debate in Cleveland, public lighting's founding city, reveals anything it is that

electricity was still a novelty that struggled to compete with long-established alternatives.

Electricity, as a means of power, was still being developed and had significant limitations.

Edison's central service system utilized direct current (DC) to supply electricity. DC, the one-

way flow of electrical current through a circuit, had the advantage of operating at useful low

29 “Electricity or Gas?,” The Plain Dealer, January 21, 1891, 4. 30 Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1983), 41-42; Jakle, City Lights, 61-65. 31 Carlson, “Technology and America,” 39. 27 voltages, but its application was handicapped by the sharp drop-off in voltage over distance.32 At best, DC current could be transmitted about ten miles. When transmitting at a distance, a given in the central station model, the high voltage current of alternating current (AC) was preferable.

However, that same high-voltage made AC impractical and dangerous for customer use.33 What was needed was a means of converting low-voltage electricity to high-voltage for transmission and then back down to low-voltage for usage. Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla tackled the problem in the late 1880s with his invention of the polyphase system, which used an induction motor to transmit AC electricity followed by the "step down" of current to safe voltages via a transformer.34 Businessman George Westinghouse then tackled the problem of turning Tesla's genius into a profitable grid of electrical service, culminating in his construction of the world's first large-scale hydroelectric experiment at Niagara Falls in 1896.35 Science writer Phillip F.

Schewe credits the success of this experiment as the moment when "the grid" was put on a course toward economies of scale in terms of generation and subsequently affordable energy for all classes.36 The ramifications for their city were not lost on the people of Cleveland, who anxiously speculated in the newspapers on the potential for power waiting in the Falls.37

32 Jakle, City Lights, 71. 33 Phillip F. Schewe, The Grid: A Journey through the Heart of Our Electrified World (Washington: J. Henry Press, 2007), 45. 34 Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1998), 44-46; Hughes, Networks of Power, 112-117. 35 Schewe, The Grid, 59. 36 Ibid. 37 “Niagara’s Rival,” The Plain Dealer, December 26, 1895, 4; “Power Shipped by Rail,” The Plain Dealer, October 29, 1895, 4. 28

Electricity in Motion

Early electrification in Cleveland centered on the advent of electric lighting, but only a few years went by before inventors found new applications for the revolutionary energy source.

In 1884, Cleveland was host city to yet another “first” in electrification history as the world's first electric-powered commercial streetcar rolled through the streets.38 The first car from the

East Cleveland Railway Company (ECRC) ran a one-mile route at a steady eight miles per hour

on Saturday, August 2, and became the talk of the town by that afternoon. The event led the

news that evening: "Large crowds of people ride on the electrical car...and every one is

enthusiastic with its working." The typically pro-electric Plain Dealer went on to say, "This

settles the question of the application of electricity for power purposes without a doubt," boldly

proclaiming that electricity had long been established as the best illuminant available and that as

an energy source it had the potential to replace steam entirely as there "seems to be no end to the

applications that may be made of this agency."39 Despite the positive reporting, not everyone was

thrilled with the electric streetcar that day as it was reported the following week that Dr. Boltz's

horse was frightened by the machine and took flight.40

It is possible that Dr. Boltz’s horse was not as afraid of the electric car itself as much as it

was of losing its job. The streetcar was nothing new to the American urban scene. Cities with

considerable densities began struggling with traffic congestion early in their growth. By the

1850s, the horse-drawn omnibus, which traveled a circuitous route for a fixed price and offered

seating for up to twenty passengers at a time, became a common feature of urban living. Usually

38 William Ganson Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1950), 433. 39 “The Electrical Car: The Effort to Apply Electricity to Streetcars,” The Plain Dealer, August 2, 1884, 1, Saturday Latest Edition. 40 Untitled, The Plain Dealer, August 9, 1884, 4. 29 operated by small business owners, the omnibuses were the first instance of urban mass transit.41

The omnibus had spread to Cleveland's streets by this time and, by 1868, the pre-electric ECRC run by the company's founder Harry Stevens, was offering all night service.42

Before the inception of mass transit, cities had been organized into "the walking city" or

"the pedestrian city." The most notable characteristic of the walking city was its compactness.

Typically, the commercial heart of the city was clustered around a waterfront with city dwellers living within walking distance of the business district.43 The need to be near industry and business forced some "social integration" of ethnicities in many cities, and even the wealthy lived in close proximity to the poor. In fact, this necessarily compact environment prevented the division of land into specialized zones.44 Historian Robert G. Barrows writes, "As a consequence, there was little differentiation of land use. Commercial, residential, governmental, religious, educational, and even industrial structures were jumbled together. Different types of people were jumbled together too."45

But with the advent of mass transit, initially through the omnibus, American cities began to reorder themselves. These horse-drawn cars permitted those who could afford the six to twelve cent fare to commute to work. The upper and middle classes began leaving the jumble of immigrants, whites, blacks, rich and poor for the less dense suburbs.46 Each new technological

41 Raymond A. Mohl, The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860-1920 (Arlington Heights, IL: H. Davidson, 1985), 29. 42 “Omnibus Ordinance,” The Plain Dealer, February 25, 1853, 2; “Stevens’ Omnibus Line,” The Plain Dealer, June 11, 1868, 4; Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, s.v. “Cleveland Electric Railway Company,” edited by Case Western Reserve University, accessed November 1, 2012, http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=CERC. 43 Mohl, The New City, 28. 44 Mohl, The New City, 28; Joel A. Tarr, “Building the Urban Infrastructure in the Nineteenth Century: An Introduction,” in Infrastructure and Urban Growth in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Public Works Historical Society (Chicago: Public Works Historical Society, 1985), 62. 45 Robert G. Barrows, “Urbanizing America,” in The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, edited by Charles W. Calhoun (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 107. 46 Mohl, The New City, 30. 30

improvement to the streetcars, first the steam engine and then the electric motor, only accelerated

this restructuring effect.

Like the rest of the country, Cleveland too experienced the urban reordering associated

with mass transit. Ronald R. Weiner and Carol A. Beal write of the "industrial" Cleveland, circa

1900: "Thanks to the electric streetcar, many persons who worked downtown lived in outlying

areas and were trailed by certain retail and service establishments. But the streetcar, priced at

five cents per ride, was beyond reach of lower income workers, who as a result had to endure the

unpleasant conditions of living near the factory in exchange for being able to walk to work."47

An analysis of census records of the demographic makeup of Cleveland’s wards confirms

Weiner and Beal’s claims. By comparing the population growth in some of the city’s most

heavily industrialized wards along the Cuyahoga River, the Flats and the so-called Industrial

Valley, versus two suburbs serviced by streetcars, West Cleveland and Brooklyn, we can see that

during from 1890-1900, the decade when most railway lines electrified, this restructuring did

occur. The six industrial wards considered experienced only an average 7.8 percent growth

during the period while the suburbs witnessed a 115 percent average increase in their

populations. While it is clear that significantly more people were choosing to live away from

Cleveland’s business and industry centers, the question of who was moving remains. A look at

the number of native whites born to native parents and the number of first and second generation

immigrants living in the same wards reveals an urban reordering that, in Cleveland’s case, did

not break down along ethnic lines. In 1890, the six industrial wards had an average 15.9 percent

native-born white and 83.2 percent immigrant population versus the 43.2 percent native and 56.8

percent foreign population in the suburbs. By 1900, the native to foreign ratio in the same

47 Ronald R. Weiner and Carol A. Beal, “The Sixth City: Cleveland in Three Stages of Urbanization,” in The Birth of Modern Cleveland, 1865-1930, edited by Thomas F. Campbell and Edward M. Miggins (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1988), 34. 31

industrialized wards stayed roughly the same at 15.6 percent to 82.9 percent with the suburbs

showing the most dramatic change with a ratio of 33 percent to 66 percent. Surprisingly, the

statistics show that mainly immigrants, who apparently could afford to commute by electric rail,

settled in the suburbs during the period, with an average suburban growth rate of 157.5 percent.48

But at the same time as Cleveland's socio-economic structure was being re-molded, the

city was also experiencing considerable spatial and economic growth. From 1890 to 1920,

metropolitan Cleveland grew from 28 to 57 square miles.49 Weiner and Beal credit the "radial

streetcar lines" for giving the growing industrial city its shape as each day some 60,000

commuters flooded the city center, which was itself growing spatially and economically as new

service and retail businesses emerged to cater to the commuters.50

By 1900, electric streetcars in Cleveland had almost completely run their horse-pulled

counterparts out of business and had become an entrenched necessity for many. The electric

streetcars ran on DC electricity, but because they operated over short distances they were

unaffected by the major deficiency of direct current.51 Thus, electric rail lines in Cleveland and cities throughout the United States experienced tremendous growth in the 1880s and 1890s with little need of the AC electricity from Niagara Falls that would later benefit other facets of electrification. Nationally, the mileage of streetcar track increased nearly sevenfold from 5,783

48 United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Eleventh Census of the United States: Vol. I 1890 Census of Population: Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1895), 270-271, 425, 474, 547-549. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Twelfth Census of the United States: Vol. I 1900 Census of Population: Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904), 34, 308, 516, 634- 635, 672-674. The industrial wards considered were 3, 16, 24, 28, 37, 38, with the suburbs being 41 and 42. West Cleveland and Brooklyn were not annexed into the city until after 1890, so their figures are listed as separate municipalities in the 1890 Census. All the statistics cited are for white residents as the non-white populations for most wards was extremely small. 49 Mohl, The New City, 38. 50 Weiner and Beal, “The Sixth City,” 45-46. 51 George W. Hilton and John F. Due, The Electric Interurban Railways in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 53. 32 miles in 1890 to 34,404 miles in 1907, and the average annual number of rides per urbanite more than doubled from 111 to 250 during the same period.52

The life of the trolley on America's streets was a short one however. It was certainly not the short-lived fad that arc light towers had been and is considered in popular memory to have its own era of American heritage. From 1888-1902, 97 percent of all urban transit in the U.S. had become electrified.53 However, by the 1920s the versatile automobile would begin to replace most of the electric railways.

"Shocking" Profits

This new energy that lit city streets and made the streetcars move appeared as magic to many, but to those who created it electricity was a manufactured commodity. Power was the product of generators which ran on steam derived from coal. It was transmitted along miles of expensive copper wire. It was something to be metered, marketed, sold and consumed. The burgeoning electrical industry, which included power production and the manufacture of related electrical apparatuses, exploded onto the U.S. industrial economic scene in the 1880s and 1890s.

Edison laid the groundwork for the country's first national power company when he formed the Edison Electric Illuminating Company from which he would light lower Manhattan from Pearl Street in 1882.54 The demand for power and light in the 1880s produced three electricity magnates who competed fiercely to provide electrical equipment and central services to America's cities. British immigrant Elihu Thomson and American professor Edwin J. Houston formed the American Electric Company in 1880 to supply businesses in New England with

52 Tarr, “Building the Urban Infrastructure in the Nineteenth Century,” 73. 53 Mohl, The New City, 34. 54 Schewe, The Grid, 31. 33

Thomson's own version of the arc light system. After some financial and legal wrangling, the

American Electric Company became the Thomson-Houston Electric Company in 1883, and by

1890 Thomson-Houston was a leading developer and manufacturer of electrical equipment,

primarily arc light systems, but also incandescent lighting and dynamos.55 George Westinghouse

became the black sheep of the three titans by risking his enterprise on the development of AC

electrical equipment against the advice of all of his engineers and lawyers. He formed the

Westinghouse Electric Company in 1886, which quickly grew into the nation's third largest

electrical company (albeit a distant third) by 1891.56 However, after realizing the potential of

Nikola Tesla's designs and winning the contract to supply the AC equipment for power generation at Niagara Falls, Westinghouse's company would become a force to be reckoned with in the 1890s.57 While Brush lights lit New York City's Broadway into one of the nation’s many

"Great White Ways," Edison feverishly garnered investment to form the Edison Electric Light

Company in 1878 and then the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in 1880, the former a

producer of Edison lamps and the latter an electric utility.58 Backed by financial heavyweight

J.P. Morgan, Edison's various operations were consolidated into the industry's premier electric

company, Edison General Electric, in 1889.59 Finally, in 1892, the better managed rival of

Thomson-Houston bought out Edison General Electric at the behest of Morgan and without the

consultation of Edison. The resultant Edison-less merger was simply named General Electric

(GE). The “Wizard of Menlo Park” tried to put on a good show for the press by saying he had

55 Harold C. Passer, The Electrical Manufacturers, 1875-1900: A Study in Competition, Entrepreneurship, Technical Change, and Economic Growth (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 21-31. 56 Ibid., 136-150. 57 Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2004), 291-293. 58 Ibid., 57, 75-79. 59 Ibid., 225-226. 34 already moved beyond electricity to bigger and better ventures, but journalists were quick to realize Edison had been ousted largely for his rigid insistence on the superiority of DC electricity despite his company's decreasing market share against AC power.60 As journalist Jill Jonnes states, "Edison had been, in the vocabulary of the times, Morganized."61

The corporate history of electrification is as complex as it is tumultuous, with innumerable companies forming, closing up shop, and being bought out. The history of

Cleveland's power companies is just as muddy within their own context and within the broader national history. Once more, the story begins with Charles F. Brush. After his demonstration in

Public Square in 1879, orders from all over the world began pouring into his affiliate, the

Telegraph Supply Company, effectively marginalizing their telegraph supply operations. Brush and his investors bought the company outright to form the Brush Electric Light Company in

1880, and within a year arc light systems in cities across the country operated under the Brush umbrella.62 One such subsidiary was even lighting the streets of Shanghai, China. In its early days, Brush Electric was supplying 80 percent of the equipment used in the nation's arc lighting systems, but without improving its product the company was quickly overtaken by competitors in the 1880s, particularly Thomson-Houston, whose engineers had patented a better system.63

Thomson-Houston bought the Brush Electric Company in 1889, acquiring Brush's arc lighting patents, and the once Cleveland-based manufacturer became part of the GE empire when

Thomson-Houston merged with Edison's holdings in 1892.64

60 Ibid., 241-243. 61 Ibid., 242. 62 Rose, Cleveland, 440. 63 Henry Nothhaft. Great Again: Revitalizing America’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), 106. 64 Stapleton, “The City Industrious,” 81. 35

Similar to the business strategy Edison used in New York, Brush incorporated the Brush

Electric Light and Power Company in 1881 to light Public Square and nearby streets as a utility.65 But it fared no better than its arc light manufacturing counterpart. In 1892, the Brush

Electric Light and Power Company, which serviced many of Cleveland's larger thoroughfares, was merged with the Cleveland Electric Light Company, which was providing power to many storefronts in the downtown area, to form the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company

(CEIC).66 As its first order of business, the newly formed company began tearing down the arc light towers and began lighting the affected districts with "superior" incandescent lamp posts.67

The CEIC experienced significant growth in the ensuing years. The company built what was hailed as world's most modern generating plant in 1895, and after nearly twenty years in business the utility opened its first turbogenerator, a generator that uses a steam-powered turbine to create electricity, becoming the city's only multi-plant utility and providing electricity to the bulk of

Cleveland proper and many of its suburbs.68

The other main use for electricity during these early years, namely electric rail or

"traction" as it was called, also had a rich and checkered business history in Cleveland. The East

Cleveland Railway Company had made history with its first commercial streetcar run in 1884.

That experiment had been the product of an agreement between the Bentley-Knight Railway

Company of New York and the ECRC for the former to demonstrate their technology on the latter's tracks. Bentley-Knight had also contracted with Brush Electric to power the endeavor.

The streetcar obtained its electricity by using a plow to make contact with a wood-insulated

65 Rose, Cleveland, 444. 66 Ibid., 539. 67 Ibid. 68 Schewe, The Grid, 64; Rose, Cleveland, 703. 36

underground conduit made of copper that ran between the rails.69 The cost of laying the

underground conduit prohibited Bentley-Knight from expanding beyond that initial mile of track,

and the chronic maintenance issues associated with this method of traction made it impossible

for the electric car to compete with cheaper horse-drawn and steam-driven alternatives. Bentley-

Knight abandoned the Cleveland project in summer 1885, cut ties with Brush, and relocated to

New York to do traction work for Thomson-Houston. Harold C. Passer argues in his seminal

work The Electrical Manufacturers, 1875-1900 that Bentley and Knight's insistence on using

underground conduction instead of overhead trolley poles to power their streetcar, a difference in

installation cost of $25,000 per mile versus $3,000 per mile, was the source of their failure. They

wrongly believed that the public would never tolerate or permit a mass of overhead wires to

power a trolley system. The ECRC temporarily abandoned the electric line, but pressed on in the

industry of electric traction by acquiring new franchises to extend its rail service onto other

streets, eventually converting its Euclid Line and downtown extension to an overhead system.70

After thirty years of service in the transportation industry, the ECRC was consolidated on

May 15, 1893 with three other Cleveland traction companies to form the Cleveland Electric

Railway Company. Two weeks later, the remaining two rail lines merged into the Cleveland City

Railway Company, leaving Clevelanders only two choices when traveling by streetcar.71 The

mergers became known as "Big Con" and "Little Con," for Big Consolidated and Little

Consolidated, respectively. Big Con continued to grow throughout the 1890s, operating some

420 streetcars over 135 miles of track by the turn of the century.72 While investors may have

69 Passer, The Electrical Manufacturers, 225-226. 70 Passer, The Electrical Manufacturers, 226; Rose, Cleveland, 478; “Inspecting the Electric Cars,” The Plain Dealer, December 30, 1888, 7; Rose, Cleveland, 494. 71 Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, s.v. “Cleveland Electric Railway Company.” 72 Ibid. 37

been pleased with the growth of Big Con, the company's workers began to complain of low

wages, poor working conditions, and a desire to unionize and, on June 10, 1899, 850 Big Con

workers voted to strike. The Streetcar Strike of 1899 lasted throughout the summer and well into

the fall. Police and labor protesters clashed as pro-union forces attacked the nonunion workers

Big Con hired to run the streetcars. The biggest show of violence occurred when 8,000 strikers raided the barns where the company stored its trolleys, attacking nonunion workers and destroying Big Con streetcars. Despite glimmers of hope for reconciliation in late June, the workers struck anew in July alleging unfulfilled promises on the part of management, and Mayor

John Farley requested aid from first the Naval Reserves and then the state militia to handle the rekindled violence. In one dramatic incident, ten Clevelanders were injured in a streetcar bombing on Euclid Avenue.73 Enthusiasm for the strike waned in the following months, and Big

Con rehired much of its workforce despite a concerted effort by union officials to maintain of

boycott of rail service.74 With its most trying labor dispute behind it, Big Con was able to return to business as usual until 1903 when it finally acquired the assets of its only rival in town, Little

Con. The megamerger, dubbed "Con-Con,” created a monopoly of the city's mass transit.

All in all, the electrical industry was just as crucial to Cleveland's development as

Cleveland was to the industry's development. Due to its location on Lake Erie, at the heart of the

rail network connecting America's industrial north and within an agriculturally bountiful region

that could support a growing population, Cleveland was primed for becoming a leading industrial

city. Cleveland became that city by all measures. The U.S. Census showed that all sixteen of its

classifications for industry were present in Cleveland in 1900, and the city's figures for twelve of

73 Rose, Cleveland, 597. 74 Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, s.v. “Cleveland Electric Railway Company.” 38

those industries revealed heavier concentrations than the national average.75 The city had

developed a strong steel manufacturing presence, and its paint and textile industries had reached

national prominence. Similarly, Cleveland was a leader in the production of electrical

apparatuses, particularly arc lamps and electric dynamos. In the early days when Brush Electric

and Thomson-Houston operated in Cleveland, the electrical industry accounted for 3 percent of

all Cleveland manufacturing and was on the rise.76 By 1900, the electrical business was the city's

seventh largest industry, and that ranking would grow to fifth largest by the 1920s. The Walker

Manufacturing Company, a producer of trolley equipment, set up shop in Cleveland, as did

innovator Theodore Willard, who made storage batteries.77 Cleveland was even a leader in the manufacture of battery-powered electric automobiles which had a short heyday, including a purchase from the White House in 1909, until Henry Ford's gasoline-powered cars ran them out of the market.78 Technology historian Darwin H. Stapleton describes the electrical industry as

"one of the most significant to come into existence during Cleveland's era of industrialization."79

The city also became a center for research and innovation in order to supply its growing industry

with new ideas. The Case School for Applied Sciences finished construction of a new building

dedicated to electrical engineering in 1895, and in 1910 a handful of businessmen from the lamp

industry formed the National Electric Lamp Association (NELA), a unique research body that

would eventually become known as "The University of Light."80 Many of the youth of Cleveland

also wanted to become a part of the exciting new field as electrical engineers, but most of them

quit school after the sixth grade and lacked the necessary skills and had to be turned away. The

75 Weiner and Beal, “The Sixth City,” 39-41. 76 Ibid., 42. 77 Stapleton, “The City Industrious,” 81. 78 Ibid., 85. 79 Ibid., 81. 80 Rose, Cleveland, 560, 616. 39 associated problems of poor schooling and an undereducated applicant pool were the lead issues at the 1912 annual meeting of the Cleveland Engineering Society where its leaders advocated a bureau of vocational guidance to encourage students in public schools to finish high school.81

Business historian Harold C. Livesay observes, "[This] new phase of industrialization was soon followed by mergers across the entire range of Cleveland's industries. Hundreds of locally owned proprietorships and partnerships disappeared into the gaping, insatiable maw of

Wall Street merger artists and investment bankers. Sometimes — though not always — the jobs stayed in Cleveland, but ownership, control, and profits now went elsewhere."82 Cleveland's place on the cutting edge of electrical technology slowly became eclipsed by far larger economic forces. The electric railways had been consumed by Con-Con, and Brush's pioneering illumination business was now the property of General Electric, and even NELA Park would eventually become GE's research division. However, the kind of Gilded Age capitalism that had overshadowed Cleveland's role in electrification was about to collide with the nation's emergent

Progressive Era ideology.

The Mayor and Municipal Ownership

The coming of Progressivism to Cleveland politics can largely be attributed to the tenacity of one man, Tom Loftlin Johnson. Johnson was born in Kentucky in 1854, and his

81 The Cleveland Engineering Society, “Report of Annual Meeting,” Journal of the Cleveland Engineering Society, 5, no.1 (1912): 5-10. 82 Harold C. Livesay, “From Steeples to Smokestacks: The Birth of the Modern Corporation in Cleveland,” in The Birth of Modern Cleveland, 1865-1930, edited by Thomas F. Campbell and Edward M. Miggins (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1988), 62. 40

family had supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. As a result, he would later feel a

strong kinship with Southern Democrats and fancy himself a descendant of Jacksonian politics.83

Johnson started his career in the urban railway industry as an office boy for the Louisville

Street Railway Company, of which he became superintendent after two years. Like many

entrepreneurs in the traction industry, he was also an innovator, and his design for a transparent

glass money box for streetcar fares fetched him over $20,000. He used his earnings to buy his

first rail line in Indianapolis, which he later sold for great profit.84

Johnson is Januslike figure as he embodied both eras of the time. He was a self-described

"monopolist" and yet also a Progressive political reformer.85 His company grew to include

holdings in Detroit, St. Louis, and Brooklyn, NY, but when the twenty-five year-old inexperienced businessman came to Cleveland in 1879 he got his first lesson in political corruption. As he recalled in My Story, the autobiography he published just before his death in

1911, "The Law stipulated that new grants should go to the bidder offering the lowest rate of fare, but included also a provision (of which I was ignorant) for extensions to existing lines. The bid of the Hanna-Simms company [Mark Hanna and Elias Simms being well-connected in city council] provided for a five-cent fare, while mine offered six tickets for a quarter whereupon the council threw out all the bids and made the grant to Mr. Hanna and his associates as an extension to their lines at the five-cent fare. So that was the way it was done, was it?...I now purchased the

Pearl street line on the west side and subsequently got my various grants as extensions to that line."86 Johnson learned how to play the game and built his rail network along Cleveland's

83 Eugene C. Murdock, “The Life of Tom L. Johnson” (PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 1951), 1-10; Andrew R.L. Cayton, “Tom L. Johnson and Progressive Reform in Cleveland,” in Builders of Ohio: A Biographical History, edited by Michael D. Pierce and Warren Van Tine (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 199. 84 Murdock, “The Life of Tom L. Johnson,” 12-15. 85 Tom L. Johnson, My Story (1911; Reprint, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993), 1. 86 Ibid., 17-18. 41 periphery. Still, Hanna's company owned the only rail line into downtown, which forced central commuters to pay to ride Johnson's line (or one of the other periphery lines) and then pay Hanna to get into downtown. However, in 1883, Cleveland City Council built tracks over a newly built viaduct, which it had no legal authority from the Ohio State Legislature to do, and granted the rights to Johnson, giving him the first continuous line into downtown.87 Johnson reaped huge profits from the dramatic increase in commuter traffic that came with the transition from horse- pulled to electric-powered streetcars, and he became a multi-millionaire and one of the most influential figures in the city. Even Hanna eventually wanted to partner with Johnson, an offer

Johnson refused.88 It is reasonable to assume that Johnson could have turned his rail empire into a statewide or perhaps even a national enterprise. But by the mid-1890s he sold his companies and entered politics.

Johnson pointed to 1883 as the pivotal year in the evolution of his thinking when, while traveling by rail, a conductor urged him to buy a copy of Social Problems by Henry George.

Johnson devoured the book and quickly read George's most famous work, Progress and

Poverty.89 He began to adopt many of George's concerns such as: income inequality, the monopolization of land ownership by the wealthy, and the need for a land tax. "I continued on with my business with as much zest as ever," Johnson wrote, "but my point of view was no longer that of a man whose chief object in life was to get rich."90 Johnson eventually met George in 1885 and was encouraged to enter politics. Johnson worked on George's political campaigns in

87 Johnson, My Story, 20; Cayton, “Tom L. Johnson,” 196. 88 Cayton, “Tom L. Johnson,” 196. 89 Johnson, My Story, 47-49. 90 Ibid., 50. 42

New York, honing his abilities as a public speaker and, in 1890, he won a seat in the Ohio state

legislature after suffering a defeat two years earlier.91

In 1901, he was elected as the Democratic mayor of Cleveland on the promise of "equal

rights and equal justice for all and special privileges to none." His platform included Municipal

Home Rule, a three-cent rail fare, and a just taxation system, and his tenure would come to be defined as a war against "Privilege."92 His early reforms involved repaving streets in disrepair,

constructing public baths for improved health among the poor, and removing "Keep off the

grass" signs from the city's parks, opening them to all of its citizens and not just the elite. He was

also an early advocate for urban planning and initiated construction of several new and grand

public buildings: a downtown fountain, a federal building, and a public library. In Johnson's

view, these publicly funded resources should be shared by all citizens.93 Perhaps his most far

reaching reform upon becoming the city's executive was the Tax School, which brought to the

public’s attention the inequalities in the city’s assessment of taxes, and eventually resulted in

statewide taxation reform.94

But of significance to this study, Johnson led a movement against "Privilege's" monopoly

over services the public required. He identified a city that was in the pocket of a select few,

particularly the public utility companies. "Cleveland wasn't bossed by any one man. The city

government belonged to the business interests generally, but as the public utility companies had

more use for it than other kinds of business enterprise had, they paid the most attention to it."95

91 Ibid., 52-56. 92 Cayton, “Tom L. Johnson,” 199. 93 Ronald R. Weiner, Lake Effects: A History of Urban Policy Making in Cleveland, 1825-1929 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 119-123. 94 Robert L. Briggs, “The Progressive Era in Cleveland, Ohio: Tom L. Johnson's Administration, 1901-1909,” (PhD Dissertation, The University of Chicago, 1962), 45; Johnson, My Story, 125-131. 95 Johnson, My Story, 114.. 43

City Solicitor Newton D. Baker seconded this view when he wrote Johnson in 1903 to complain of his inability to enforce city statutes fining traction companies for blocking intersections for long periods of time.96 In pre-industrial cities, governments had granted charters to corporations to fulfill necessary public services that the municipal governments lacked the resources to perform themselves. But the Gilded Age culture of competition and aggressive expansion resulted in consolidation and eventual monopoly of these corporations. The interest of the public service businesses no longer rested in the public but with their own profits. As with his opening of city government and public space to the citizenry, Johnson also believed these enterprises should be placed within the public's ownership.97

The year 1903 saw Johnson make a push for public ownership of utilities, first with the light and power industry followed by the electric railway industry. Johnson urged City Council to pass a bond issue for $200,000 for the construction of a city-owned "light and power plant" in

May of that year. Johnson knew that he could get the reigning business in electricity, the

Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, to lower its rates by offering "power at cost" through a municipal plant. Despite the claim made in the CEIC’s 1914 self-published history, How

Electricity Came to Cleveland, that "while practically every other commodity in daily use in

Cleveland has advanced in price the price of electricity has been voluntarily reduced."98 The company went to great lengths to prevent having competition. At that time, municipalities could only act with the authority granted them by the state legislature in Columbus. Permission to own and operate some utilities had been granted to Cleveland in previous years. For example, the city

96 Newton D. Baker to Tom L. Johnson, December 5, 1903, Tom L. Johnson Papers, The Western Reserve Historical Society Library (WRHS), Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), MSS 3651. 97 Cayton, “Tom L. Johnson,” 202. 98 Hitchens and The Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, How Electricity Came to Cleveland, 32. 44 had been running a waterworks for some time. Ohio law allowed the city to own a light plant, but a light and power plant was not covered under the law.99

The first version of the ordinance which included "and power" in its wording passed unanimously, but to avoid future legal opposition the mayor’s office resubmitted the ordinance again without "and power" in its language. In the interim, the CEIC exerted its influence on the council, and the secondary measure failed.100 Johnson resolved to put the matter to a public election, but the ballot initiative was halted by Ohio Attorney General John M. Sheets, who set a hearing to review the constitutionality of the initiative until after the election. Sheets' actions, at least according to Johnson, came at the behest of the CEIC. Johnson's final appeal to the Ohio

Supreme Court three days before the election fell on flat ears as Sheets' injunction was upheld.101

Johnson, however, was as energetic and competitive as he was crafty. The next year, he decided to annex the suburb of South Brooklyn, which operated its own municipal light plant. If the powers that be would not let him build a plant, he would find one already in operation. Both

Cleveland voters and South Brooklyn voters supported the idea by wide margins in the election of 1904, and as a result the City Council appointed an annexation commission. The CEIC once more demonstrated its sway over the council by getting its members to appoint a second commission filled with interests friendlier to the utility. An exasperated Johnson refused to confirm the new appointments and publicly charged fifteen Republicans on the Council with misfeasance and two Democrats with bribery.102 His administration launched an investigation and the city solicitor ordered the CEIC to present its records to council for inspection. The

99 Rose, Cleveland, 635; Johnson, My Story, 192. 100 Murdock, “The Life of Tom L. Johnson,” 250-252; Johnson, My Story, 192. 101 Johnson, My Story, 191-194. 102 “Mayor Johnson’s Charges,” The Newark Daily Advocate, February 21, 1905, 6; Murdock, “The Life of Tom L. Johnson,” 256-257; Johnson, My Story, 217. 45

company filed an injunction against the city to protect their privacy and won the favor of the

courts, effectively halting Johnson again.103 However, after Johnson won reelection in 1905, the

City Council relented, and the city acquired South Brooklyn and its light plant. The city later

repeated the exercise in 1910, annexing a second plant with the suburb of Collinwood. Toward

the end of his administration, Johnson successfully passed a $2 million bond issue for

construction of the nation's largest municipally owned central service station, which opened in

1914, and was hailed as a "yardstick" to keep private utility prices in check.104

From the start of his tenure as mayor, Johnson had advocated a three-cent fare for electric

rail. Johnson argued that a three-cent fare was not only just for people but good for business too.

Drawing from his experience in the traction industry, he was adamant that a cheaper fare would encourage more riders and, in turn, bring in more revenue. More and more people using mass transit would assure future profits, and advances in electrical traction technology would greatly reduce operating costs.105 "Privilege" was not interested in the mayor's arguments. In 1901,

Johnson directed Council to offer a franchise to a streetcar company willing to charge three

cents, but private interests within the city disrupted the company's acquisition of right-of-way for

its line. Furthermore, Johnson's opposition managed to have Cleveland's system of centralized

administration, known as the Federal Plan, declared unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court.

Several of the mayor's powers were transferred to a three-man board. But Johnson's political

influence with members of the board allowed him to circumvent this roadblock. If anything, the

severity of the attacks on Johnson's administration only served to gain him sympathy, including

an unexpected letter of support from newly-elected Republican Governor Myron T. Herrick, who

103 “Ends the Investigation,” The Coshocton Daily Age, March 21, 1905, 3. 104 Rose, Cleveland, 636. 105 Briggs, “The Progressive Era in Cleveland,” 21. 46

had bested Johnson in the gubernatorial race the year before.106 Johnson and City Council tried a

second, more carefully worded three-cent fare franchise in 1902, but again saw it nullified in the

judiciary.107

Then, in 1903, while Johnson was still embroiled in his fight to build a municipally-

owned power plant, his conflict with Cleveland's traction industry erupted into war. That

summer, the Big Con and Little Con lines were united in the "Con-Con" merger, creating a

monopoly of all but a handful of Cleveland's streetcar lines. Con-Con rigidly opposed Johnson's

support of a three-cent fare, as the fare to ride their cars was five cents plus an additional fare to

transfer from one line to another. Without the authority from the State to regulate fares or operate

a municipal line to force competition on the monopoly, Johnson turned to other means. The

temporary franchises Con-Con and its predecessors had acquired still needed to be renewed. As

the company's franchises began to expire, Johnson refused to renew them unless Con-Con agreed

to a three-cent fare.108 Johnson wrote, "City ownership of tracks, the city's right to allow

companies the use of tracks, short-lived grants have always been the most powerful weapons in

the hands of the public for resisting the aggressions of street railway monopolies. Cleveland had

all three of these advantages."109 Johnson used those weapons aggressively, granting some of

Con-Con's expired lines to new companies willing to charge three cents, such as the Forest City

Railway Company in 1903, the Low Fare Company in 1906, and the Municipal Traction

Company in 1906.110 The Municipal Traction Company was a creative piece of financial wizardry: a holding company formed by many of Johnson's associates that simultaneously

106 Myron T. Herrick to Tom L. Johnson, January 1904, Tom L. Johnson Papers, WRHS, CWRU, MSS 3651. 107 Briggs, “The Progressive Era in Cleveland,” 19-23. 108 Rose, Cleveland, 637. 109 Johnson, My Story, 20. 110 Ibid., 237-242; Rose, Cleveland, 667. 47

controlled the Forest City Railway while at the same time leasing the right to operate from it,

thereby not directly owning any track itself. The company kept its books open to the public,

charged a three-cent fare and kept no profits, reinvesting all net income into improvement and

expansion.111 Con-Con refused to recognize the lapse of its franchises and continued to run its

cars over the tracks, prompting Johnson to take the extreme measure of having the tracks on one

line torn up in 1906 for supposed sewer work.112 Of course, the new "Threefers," were met with

numerous legal challenges, including allegations that Johnson had a vested pecuniary interest in

the operation of the Municipal Traction Company, but by Christmas 1906 the Threefers were

working as a means of competition; Con-Con began offering seven tickets for a quarter.113 At

last, in Johnson's final year as mayor in 1908, Con-Con and the low-fare companies reached an

agreement to merge their operations at a three-cent fare. Johnson celebrated by holding Streetcar

Day on April 28 where everyone in the city rode for free.114 But to maintain the three-cent promise, the new company had to cut wages and eliminate service to unprofitable lines, and within months found itself in the midst of a labor strike and later in receivership. Through the receivership proceedings, Federal Judge Robert Tayler offered a compromise by which the company agreed to operate at cost with a guaranteed 6 percent return for its investors, and the city was allowed some regulatory oversight via a railway commissioner.115

Tom L. Johnson presented his contemporaries with a dichotomy: a man who made

millions in big business and a mayor who was a leading activist against big business when it

hindered the public good. In many ways Johnson’s story personifies the transition Cleveland

111 Johnson, My Story, 224. 112 Briggs, “The Progressive Era in Cleveland,” 26. 113 Johnson, My Story, 242. 114 Rose, Cleveland, 667. 115 Murdock, “The Life of Tom L. Johnson,” 413-416. 48

made at the turn-of-the-century. In terms of progressive policies as they relate to urban

electrification, Johnson and Cleveland can be seen as both having agency while at the same time

being influenced by a much broader movement. On one hand, Johnson's reforms had piqued the

nation's attention. Governmental leaders in other municipalities who were facing similar issues

with their utility and traction companies looked to Johnson's example, and some even solicited

his advice.116 Renowned Progressive Lincoln Steffens called him "the best mayor of the best

governed city in America."117 But at the same time, there was a growing fear throughout the

United States about the size and influence of monopolistic corporations, and Johnson was able to capitalize on that trend when Con-Con locked in control over the city's railways.118 Johnson's

conversion to the more socially conscious ideas popularized by Henry George testify to a reform

movement predating his involvement. Additionally, Johnson's inclusion of a clause in the

franchise grants for the low fare traction companies that the city could purchase them whenever a

municipal ownership law could be passed show Johnson's recognition that state (and probably

national politics) had begun to favor Progressive reform.119

Conclusion

In terms of invention, the history of electrification predates the beginning of this study by

several decades. But for application and the use of electricity in the public sphere, the story really

begins in Cleveland. The city was fortunate to have the brilliant mind of Charles F. Brush. His

1879 lighting demonstration lit the way for other cities and attracted many “firsts” and an infant

116 Briggs, “The Progressive Era in Cleveland,” 25. 117 Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2004), 136. 118 Briggs, “The Progressive Era in Cleveland,” 25. 119 Johnson, My Story, 222. 49

electrical industry to Cleveland whose manufacturing prowess made it a leader in the field. But

the business core of the United States was elsewhere, and Cleveland’s head start could not

prevent it from entering the orbit of far larger interests. At the end of the nineteenth century,

consolidation made the Cleveland municipality just another extension of “Big Business.” At the

dawn of the twentieth century, a populist demand for reform against the status quo had launched

the Progressive Era in America. Cleveland, through Tom L. Johnson, played an important part in

that movement.

Electrification would continue in Cleveland. From 1910 to 1920, the Cleveland Electric

Illuminating Company would see over 500 percent growth as its 31,000 customers grew into a

clientele of 167,000. The utility would continue to grow throughout the twentieth century,

eventually adopting nuclear power in 1974 and becoming an affiliate of the holding company

Centerior Energy in 1986.120 The Cleveland Railway Company that emerged from the so-called

Tayler Grant in 1908 would serve Cleveland until 1942.121 In the 1910s, a whole new use for

electricity would arise from the invention of electric home appliances like the radio, clothes iron,

and washing machine.122 But by then, the urban electricity grid had largely taken its shape, and

Clevelanders could simply bring the latest gadget home from the department store to plug into the socket. But there were still areas without sockets for which to use the electronics. Indeed, many of Ohio’s small towns and rural farmers had been left behind during the urban electrical revolution.

120 Rose, Cleveland, 703; Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, s.v. “Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company.” 121 Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, s.v. “Cleveland Railway Company.” 122 David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 17. 50

CHAPTER II: EXPANDED REACH WITH THE INTERURBANS: ELECTRICITY ENTERS SMALL TOWN, OHIO AND STATE POLITICS, 1900-1930

In the years following 1900, electricity began to leave its birthplace in the city. A handful

of rural individuals, farmers and small municipalities began generating their own power for

lighting as soon as the technology had become available in the late nineteenth century, but such

an undertaking was cost prohibitive. Even if a homeowner did have access to electrical power,

electric lighting was still beyond the reach of most as a single light bulb in the 1880s cost half a

day’s pay for the average laborer.1

Historian David E. Nye describes electric lighting and traction as “turning the urban

landscape into a spectacle” and, indeed it did, but as has already been discussed the explosive

proliferation of such “spectacular” technology was only possible through the economy of scale

offered by centralized power generation service and the intervention of city governments.2 In

Cleveland, electricity became affordable for the masses through the ever expanding reach of

central service providers like the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company and rate reforms led

by Tom L. Johnson. By the time Johnson became involved, the public’s perception of electricity

had changed from a luxury for a few to a shared resource for the common good.

In similar fashion, the unelectrified households in rural towns were asking why city

dwellers were the only ones who got to enjoy such fantastic amenities? The answer rested in

economics and geography. Small communities not in close proximity to a sizable city would

either have to generate their own power or receive it from the urban utilities through

transmission lines spanning the miles of sparsely populated Ohio countryside. The necessarily

1 Nye, David E., Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 242. 2 Ibid., 85. 51

high rates associated with the first option were too expensive for towns of a few dozen or even a

few hundred inhabitants to bear, assuming the municipality could raise the capital to build a local

generator in the first place. The alternative of buying cheap electricity from a central service in

the city was self-defeating. In order to cover the significant construction costs of building transmission lines across large distances, utilities would have to charge rates beyond the price range of their potential small town customers. But utility companies could not justify the investment to service so few. The predicament of towns and villages seemingly placed them between the proverbial rock and a hard place, but many small towns did become electrified nonetheless. Many towns were the unlikely benefactors of a cross-purposed technology: the interurban. Like the electric railways that drew suburbs into direct contact with their neighboring urban centers and reordered their geodemographic makeup, the interurban railways also provided electric traction for outlying towns and an unprecedented speedy connection to the “big city.”

The interurban companies eventually realized the transmission lines they had built parallel to their tracks to power their cars could doubly provide electricity to the small communities they serviced with traction. This presented a lucrative side income for interurbans, and in many cases profits from electrical service overtook the revenue made from traction operations.3

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the reach of utilities and traction companies

grew beyond the confines of municipal boundaries. Once separated cities, towns, and villages

became technologically integrated for the first time and, as a result, efforts to regulate them

exceeded the confines of local politics. Utilities regulation became a leading issue in Ohio state

politics in the early decades of the twentieth century, and municipal home rule advocates began

pushing for constitutional reform to untie the hands of local reformers, like Johnson, in matters

relating to public utilities.

3 Ibid., 118. 52

The beginning of this chapter makes the case that interurbans were pivotal in furthering

electrification in Ohio and examines their role in that process. With its flat landscape and

numerous farming communities, Northwest Ohio was ideally suited for the construction of a vast

interurban network and, in fact, the area surrounding Toledo gave rise to the most developed

electric rail network in the state, rivaled only by the network that radiated from Dayton. The

development of this network, which would bring electricity into thousands of homes, occurred

during a period when the use of electricity in the home grew beyond interior lighting to include

several electrically-powered appliances. Finally, this chapter argues that this second phase in

Ohio’s electrification story brought concerns about power utilities to the attention of state

politicians and grew beyond the realm of municipal politics.

The Electric Road

The American interurban industry had a short lifespan from the turn of the twentieth

century through the late 1930s, but in its heyday it was tremendously popular with the public and

saw rapid expansion. After the feasibility of cheap and lightweight electric rail transportation

over several miles was first demonstrated throughout densely-populated New England, the

Midwest exploded with interest in interurbans.4 In 1890, Ohio saw its first electric interurban

railway, the Newark and Granville Street Railway, a seven-mile line connecting Newark and

Granville in central Ohio, and in the course of the next thirty years Ohio became the most

popular state in the Union for interurbans. No other state saw as many electric railway proposals

and completions as Ohio, with the Secretary of State granting 92 charters in 1901, 47 in 1902,

4 Hilton, George W., and John F. Due. The Electric Interurban Railways in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 7-9. 53

and 46 in 1903.5 As authors George W. Hilton and John F. Due write, "It is safe to say that there

was no route between points of any considerable population that was not projected — and

frequently several times over."6 The interurban boom of 1901-1904 did not have to wait for the

development of AC polyphase power generation such as that being employed by Westinghouse

at Niagara. Despite operating over long distances, interurbans adapted the low voltage DC

system that had served their urban counterparts so well and compensated for the power loss

associated with long distance transmission by erecting substations at varying intervals.7

Long before the arrival of the interurbans and even the Anglo and German settlers who

came to northwest Ohio in the late eighteenth century, the area was part of the Great Black

Swamp, an expansive, mosquito-infested quagmire that engulfed the lowlands for miles on either

side of the Maumee River. With the Ottawa Indians removed during the first two decades of the

nineteenth century, European settlers began forming permanent agricultural communities in the

area in the 1830s, eager to farm the Great Black Swamp's rich loam soil.8 Most of the villages within proximity of the growing port town of Toledo were founded by handfuls of frontiersmen, and by 1900 most towns did not have populations that exceeded 1,000. When northwest Ohio communities began debating the issue of whether or not to bring interurban lines into their town centers, their Main Streets were typically corduroy roads, wooden streets made of planks laid across the dirt and mud.9 For example, the major artery that ran through Ottawa County (and

would eventually become an interurban route) was known as the "Toledo Plank Road" and

5 Ibid., 12. 6 Ibid., 9-13. 7 Ibid., 53-55. 8 Jim Mollenkopf, The Great Black Swamp: Historical Tales of 19th-century Northwest Ohio (Toledo, Ohio: Lake of the Cat Publishing, 1999), 19-20. 9Robert C. Levee, ed., Genoa Memories: Genoa, Ohio 1868-1968, (Genoa, Ohio: The Genoa Area Centennial- Homecoming, Inc., 1968), 13. 54

would not be paved until 1913.10 Several such roads marred the not as yet tamed swampland, and

traversing their rough, bumpy paths was a scant improvement over slogging through the

swamp’s muddy trails. During extended periods of rainy weather, these planks would oftentimes

sink into the mud.

Ohio farmers continued to drain the swamp and convert the land into parcels dedicated to

agriculture. Toledo grew to become the twenty-sixth largest city in the nation from 1900-1920.11

A radial interurban network containing eleven primary lines connected these two extremes.12

Known as “the greatest electric railway in the United States” at the time, The Lake Shore

Electric Railway (LSE) was the first to establish a contiguous line between two major cities, in

this case Toledo and Cleveland.13 Young bankers Henry A. Everett and Edward W. Moore entered the competitive waters of the horse-drawn omnibus business in Cleveland during the

1880s. They were one of the first to electrify their line, the East Cleveland Railroad, in 1889.

Beginning in the Cleveland-Akron area in 1895, the Everett-Moore syndicate laid or purchased

1,500 miles of electric rail across northern Ohio, eventually merging their holdings in Toledo,

Sandusky, and West Cleveland into the Lake Shore Electric Railway in 1901.14 The growing

enterprise even purchased some of Tom L. Johnson’s remaining rail holdings, the Lorain Street

Railway Company, for $400,000 in 1906 as the reformed mayor divested himself from private

10 Grace Luebke, Elmore, Ohio: A History Preserved (Mt. Vernon, Indiana: Windmill Publications, 1997), 34. 11 U.S. Census Bureau, "No. HS-7 Population of the Largest 75 Cities: 1900 to 2000." Last modified April 1, 2003. Accessed February 4, 2013. https://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-07.pdf. 12 Hilton and Due, Electric Interurban Railways, 257. The lines in the area with the best documented histories are the Lake Shore Electric Railway and the Toledo, Port Clinton and Lakeside Railway, two lines which crossed paths in western Ottawa County about twenty miles southeast of Toledo. 13 Herbert H. Harwood, Jr. and Robert S. Korach, The Lake Shore Electric Railway Story (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000), xviii. 14 “Lake Shore Electric Railway Co. Consolidation Agreement,” January 1908, MMS 154 Cleveland, Ohio, Center for Archival Collections (CAC), Bowling Green State University (BGSU); Hilton and Due, The Electric Interurban Railways, 10-11. 55

industry.15 At its peak, the LSE ran 116 miles along one of two main lines, one hugging the Lake

Erie shore and the other reaching farther inland through Norwalk. Moore was remembered as

saying that it was the company's goal to control every single interurban line in northern Ohio,

and for a time he and his partner looked poised to do so. Everett and Moore's syndicate saw a net

profit of some $5.5 million in 1900 alone, and seeing such profitability in the new interurban

industry many smaller investors began pooling their resources to create rival electric railroads

that would service areas still left untouched by Lake Shore Electric.16 One such area was the

Marblehead Peninsula which protrudes eastward into Lake Erie separating it from Sandusky

Bay. In 1902, Everett and Moore announced plans to build a separate line extending from the

small town of Genoa, which the LSE already serviced in route from Fremont to Toledo, and on

through Elmore, Oak Harbor, Port Clinton and Marblehead Point. The syndicate was never able

to realize that goal due to financial hardships that started to plague the company following the

Rich Man's Panic in 1903.17 The task of building a line through Genoa connecting Toledo on one end and the Marblehead Peninsula on the other fell to a collection of East Toledo businessmen who incorporated the Toledo, Port Clinton and Lakeside Railway (TPCL) with $10,000 of capital stock on December 18, 1902.18

The newspapers read in Elmore reported positively on the coming of the railway. The

Elmore Tribune reported on Christmas Day, 1902, "Elmore citizens are much enthused over the prospects of the road and gladly welcome it to the town. Let every citizen use every effort to

15 Harwood and Korach, The Lake Shore Electric, 31-32, 174. 16 Hilton and Due, The Electric Interurban Railways, 10-11. 17 George W. Hilton, The Toledo, Port Clinton and Lakeside Railway (Montevallo, Alabama: Montevallo Historical Press, 1997), 6. Hilton and Due, The Electric Interurban Railways, 27. 18 “Electric Railroad,” Elmore Tribune, December 25, 1902, Roll No. 1: Elmore Tribune January 17, 1902-January 8, 1903, Microfilm, CAC, BGSU; “Electric Road in Sight,” Ottawa County Exponent, December 27, 1902, Roll No. 3: Ottawa County Exponent June 1, 1901-May 30, 1903, Microfilm, CAC, BGSU. 56 push the matter."19 In fact, the town appears to have been in wait for a connection for some time, especially once Elmorians saw how much their neighbors in Genoa appreciated the Toledo,

Fremont and Norwalk Railway, the company that operated the town’s interurban line before its assimilation into Lake Shore Electric in 1901. A newspaper reported in September, 1900,

"Genoa is in excitement over the beautiful new cars which began running on scheduled time last

Saturday. The travel has been very heavy and it is said that over five thousand people took advantage of this new line on Sunday...It is a great convenience and is thoroughly appreciated by all."20 A piece entitled "Growing Impatient" also appeared that September saying, "Many of the citizens of Elmore and vicinity are on nettles as to when the electric line will be built, connecting

Elmore with Toledo, via Genoa. The citizens are growing anxious for better accommodations to go to and from the city and other points as well."21

Elmore's impatience and excitement is an indicator of a positive shift in public opinion towards interurban railways. Less than a decade before, in 1896, the city of Bowling Green, some twenty miles due south of Toledo, was having an extensive debate regarding the proposed

Toledo, Bowling Green, and Southern Railway. There was widespread fear that the little town would either be consumed by a growing Toledo or become a ghost town as consumers with quick access to Toledo bypassed Bowling Green entirely. One newspaper headline illustrates the town’s anxiety: "Like an Octopus: Anticipates that Bowling Green, Fremont, Napoleon, and

Others of the Small Fry will be Gobbled Up."22 Both cases in Elmore and Bowling Green illustrate the importance of public support to the expansion of the interurbans.

19 “Electric Road,” Elmore Tribune, December 25, 1902. 20 Untitled, unknown publication, September 14, 1900, Folder 1: Electric Railroad ‘Interurbans,’ Grace Luebke Local History Room (GL), Harris-Elmore Public Library (HEPL). 21 “Growing Impatient,” unknown publication, September 4, 1900, Folder 1: Electric Railroad ‘Interurbans,’ GL, HEPL. 22 “Like an Octopus,” unknown publication, April 11, 1896, Folder 1: Electric Railroad ‘Interurbans,’ GL, HEPL. 57

Throughout the ensuing winter, TPCL increased its capital stock to $1.8 million, and officials began securing right-of-way for the line.23 The Toledo News Bee reported that right-of- way acquisition was "plain sailing, as the road has been desired by farmers and fruit growers for years."24 The TPCL line that opened in 1904 connected Genoa, Elmore, Oak Harbor, Port

Clinton, and Marblehead, but this was only half of the owners' vision. The company contracted with Lake Shore Electric to run its TPCL cars on the LSE line into Toledo after a changeover in

Genoa. In the meantime, the Toledo Interurban Construction Company, a TPCL subsidiary, began laying track for a line that would serve as an alternative to the LSE Railway. The second part of the TPCL ran due north from Genoa through Clay Center to Curtice, turning northwest to

East Toledo where it connected with the city’s streetcar lines. On October 22, 1906, exactly two years to the day after the line's first opening, TPCL cars were finally able to make the trip from

Marblehead to Toledo exclusively over TPCL track. Even after the Genoa-Toledo completion, the most expedient option for westbound passengers was still to switch at Genoa and take the more direct LSE into Toledo, but most Ottawa County riders avoided the inconvenience and rode the TPCL the whole way.25

The interurbans expanded upon on the technological accomplishments pioneered by their city railway cousins. Most ran on DC power, using the urban traction industry’s standard of 600 volts, and while it seems intuitive that interurbans should have employed AC power in light of the great distances they operated over, DC proved more cost effective for a multitude of reasons.

City lines still operated on DC, and since most interurban cars arriving from the countryside ran on city tracks, not wanting their passengers to have to switch lines, running on DC made it far

23 “Incorporated for Two Millions,” unknown publication, January 23, 1903, Folder 1: Electric Railroad ‘Interurbans,’ GL, HEPL. 24 Ibid. 25 Hilton, TPCL, 10-11. 58 easier for the interurbans and streetcars to form an integrated network. Furthermore, those few interurbans that did build entirely with AC learned that to do so required heavier equipment on their cars, better wire insulation due to AC’s high voltages, and significantly more maintenance from wear and tear. In the beginning, interurbans supplied their own power with steam-driven

DC generators, but after AC’s victory in the “War of the Currents,” most ended up upgrading to

Westinghouse AC generators or buying AC power from a utility and then using transformers to step-down the voltage for safe usage along their rail line. This was the case for the LSE, which inherited four power plants in its consolidation. The company closed two of them immediately due to redundancy and converted its remaining Beach Park and Fremont plants to Westinghouse

AC in 1906 and 1916, respectively. A significant cause for these conversions was that the interurbans’ residential power customers (once interurbans entered the utilities market) had little use for direct current since the home appliances they were buying were designed by electrical manufacturers such as GE to run on alternating current. But by powering their lines with direct current, the interurbans still faced a loss of voltage from resistance in their wires, or “copper loss” as it was called. This problem was overcome with the installation of substations to give the interurbans a “boost.” These were traditionally spaced about every ten miles, but the LSE had them placed as little as five miles apart in some places because of its exceptionally high traffic.

Some substations were even placed in mobile boxcars and could be deployed in special high- volume situations like fairs and sporting events.26

Interurbans changed small town living forever. While many towns like Genoa had received freight and limited passenger service from steam railroads for years, the electric interurbans could stop and start again quickly without significant time lost, maintaining an

26 Hilton and Due, Electric Interurban Railways, 53-58; Harwood and Korach, The Lake Shore Electric Railway Story, 287-288. 59 average speed of as much as twenty miles per hour.27 With the LSE and TPCL railways operational, trips to Toledo that were once arduous and slow-going for those in surrounding communities could now be completed in a matter of hours. A 1910 timetable for the TPCL

Railway reveals that the goal of hourly service was the standard for which the line’s motormen strived. A passenger from Genoa with business in Toledo could catch a train at 6:30am, 7:30am, or nearly every 60 minutes until the mid-day break at 3:30pm, which lasted until 5:00pm when evening service resumed. This same passenger, boarding the westbound train at 6:30 in the morning, would reach Toledo by 7:30.28 As technology improved, railway speed only increased.

Twenty years later, the same trip would only take 40 minutes.29

The speed, affordability, and versatility of the interurbans presented rural residents with opportunities to purchase previously unavailable goods and to sell their produce and animal products in new markets. Small town residents enjoyed an unprecedented quality in mail and newspaper delivery. The LSE contracted with the Electric Package Company, which was partly owned by the Everett-Moore syndicate, to deliver parcel post to the depots along its route.30

After the arrival of the interurbans, Ottawa County residents could get The (Cleveland) Plain

Dealer delivered on their porch every morning for “half the price of a postage stamp.”31 In fact, most interurbans at the time earned 10 percent of their revenue from light freight derived mostly from agriculture.32 Genoa resident Grace H. Niehousmyer recalled, "My father took five-gallon cans of cream to the depot on Washington Street in Genoa. The cream was put on a trolley to

27 Nye, Electrifying America, 118. 28 “Toledo, Port Clinton & Lakeside Ry. Time Table,” June 26, 1910, Folder 2: Trains and Trolleys, GL, HEPL. 29 “Time Table of the OPS Co.,” September 16, 1931, Folder 1: Electric Railroad ‘Interurbans,’ GL, HEPL. 30 Harwood and Korach, The Lake Shore Electric Railway Story, 15. 31 “The Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer Now 1¢,” The Ottawa County Exponent, Date Unknown, CAC, BGSU. 32 Nye, Electrifying America, 118. 60

Toledo."33 The ability to quickly transport perishable commodities without the expense of

refrigeration also attracted significant business from the fruit growers that littered Ottawa

County. Port Clinton sent $750,000 worth of peaches, grapes, and tomatoes to Toledo and

surrounding markets each year.34 Fishermen utilized faster limited service to transport Lake Erie

perch and pickerel in boxes packed with ice harvested from Sandusky Bay. Journalist and local

historian Glenn Everett writes that "fish caught in Lake Erie early one morning were the next day

on the menu of famous restaurants in Chicago and New York City."35

As had happened in Cleveland and other large cities around the country, the capabilities

of electric rail caused a reordering in rural agricultural life. Rather than see an increase in

agricultural production in Ottawa County after exposure to new markets via the interurbans circa

1900, census records reveal a twenty-year steady decline in the county’s fruit production, most

dairy production, and the overall number of farmers. We can speculate that proximity allowed

farmers closest to the rail depots to undercut the prices of those several miles away. Furthermore,

with access to goods from the much larger Toledo markets and conveniences like milk delivery,

it is likely the county began to experience the primitive workings of the modern supply chain

whereby, for example, it is cheaper for present day shoppers to buy produce from large growers

hundreds of miles away than it is to purchase the same items at the local farmer’s market.36

33 The Ottawa County Historical Society, The People of Ottawa County Volume II: Recollections and Voices: A Collection of Oral Histories (Port Clinton, OH: Timely Print, 2004), 10. 34 Hilton, TPCL, 5. 35 Glenn D. Everett, The Streetcars and Interurbans of Old Sandusky (Rutland, Vermont: Academy Books, 1988), 36-37. 36 United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Twelfth Census of the United States: Vol. V 1900 Census of Agriculture: Part 1: Farms, Livestock, etc. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904), 468, 554, 616, 659. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Twelfth Census of the United States: Vol. VI 1900 Census of Agriculture: Part 2: Crops and Irrigation (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904), 386, 568, 672-673. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Thirteenth Census of the United States: Vol. V 1910 Census of Agriculture: General Report and Analysis (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913), 744-745. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Thirteenth Census of the United 61

Play was just as much a part of riding the rails as was business. As interurban traffic

grew, Toledo increasingly became a destination. Author Robert Levee describes turn-of-the-

century Toledo as a "swashbuckling mecca" with its assortment of theatres, restaurants, and

department stores. W.L. Milner & Co., a Toledo department store, ran a half-page ad in The

Ottawa County Exponent in 1909, urging shoppers to visit for the day.37 Farmers previously

constrained by small town living arrived into Toledo in droves to indulge in the Casino at Bay

View Park or one of the city's many saloons and burlesque houses.38 Tourism also fueled a

significant portion of the interurbans’ business. Many American interurbans built and operated

their own amusement parks to increase ridership along their lines.39 In the case of northwest

Ohio, the attractions at Cedar Point and the Erie Islands resorts that developed during the 1890s

provided all the tourism stimulus the electric rail lines needed and no such parks were built.

Looking further afield, local newspapers advertised weekend trips by interurban to see the

multicolored marvel of the electric age at Niagara Falls.40

While this revolutionary technology was unquestionably beneficial to people living in

small Midwestern towns, it was not without its dangers. The interurbans' unprecedented speeds

created new threats to which train operators, passengers, and pedestrians had to adjust. Still

primarily an agricultural area, loose animals roaming freely near the tracks posed a concern.

Such was the case with Grace Niehousmyer's great uncle, Henry, whose escaped bull decided to

States: Vol. VII 1910 Census of Agriculture: Part 2: Reports by States Nebraska - Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913), 326, 334-335, 344. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Thirteenth Census of the United States: Supplement for Ohio (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913), 662. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Fourteenth Census of the United States: Vol. VI 1920 Census of Agriculture: Part 1: The Northern States (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1922), 16, 306-307. 37 “W.L. Milner & Co.,” The Ottawa County Exponent, August 11, 1909, A, Microfilm, CAC, BGSU. 38 Hilton, TPCL, 14; Everett, Streetcars and Interurbans, 68. 39 Nye, Electrifying America, 120-123. 40 “Niagara Falls,” unknown publication, August 4, 1910, Folder 2: Trains and Trolleys, GL, HEPL. 62

charge an LSE trolley in 1908. The car's cowcatcher saved the train and its passengers, but the

animal died.41 Another Ottawa County resident, George Rudes, recalled that an interurban

collision with an unsuspecting horse and buggy was not unheard of.42 In April, 1909, Lake Shore

Electric reached a $4,500 settlement with a Mrs. E. Dolph for injuries she incurred from an

interurban.43 As automobiles became more prevalent, motorists too had to be wary when

approaching interurban tracks. A newspaper reported in 1920 that an LSE car struck a truck. In a

scenario that is unfortunately still familiar a century later, the driver tried to beat the train to the

crossing and was thrown 50 feet from his vehicle in the collision.44 Racing to beat the streetcar

became such a common practice among motorists across the country that a description of it even

found its way into Sinclair Lewis’ 1922 novel Babbitt.45

The Home of Tomorrow

Small towns not only benefitted from the presence of interurbans in terms of

transportation, but almost half of the nation’s interurbans doubled as electricity providers, and

most were the first to offer electrical access to the towns they serviced.46 The revenue derived as an electricity provider often overshadowed the money most interurbans took in as a rail service.

In the earliest days of the industry, those lines that did offer electrical service saw profits nearly twice those of their strictly rail counterparts.47 Genoa entered into a ten-year contract with the

TPCL for residential power and the electrical service of twenty streetlights in 1909. Unhappy

41 The Ottawa County Historical Society, The People of Ottawa County, 10. 42 Ibid., 7. 43 “Lake Shore Electric Settles,” The Ottawa County Exponent, April 17, 1909, 4, Microfilm, CAC, BGSU. 44 “Wreck at Genoa,” unknown publication, June 18, 1920, Folder 1: Electric Railroad ‘Interurbans,’ GL, HEPL. 45 Nye, Electrifying America, 133. 46 Ibid., 118. 47 Ibid. 63 with the quality of their service a decade later, the town council rejected a motion to renew the contract, instead opting to build their own municipal light and power plant.48 In 1911, two years after entering into its agreement with Genoa, the TPCL struck a deal with the Village of Elmore to transmit electricity. Indeed, the people of Elmore had been in want of electric lighting for their homes and especially the town's streets as early as 1896, but at the time the town council refused to make any kind of investment. Mr. Fouke, editor of The Elmore Independent, quipped, "It's a mighty good thing that the moon gets full once a month or Elmore would always be in the dark!"49

The electrification of homes in small towns like Genoa and Elmore coincided with an explosion of new devices that could be run on electricity. Most residences initially adopted electricity because it provided a safer, cleaner and odorless alternative to gas lighting, but electrical manufacturers and their customers quickly learned the versatility of the new technology.50 The first known electrically lit Christmas tree was used to celebrate the season in

1882, and by 1901 GE was mass-producing a new holiday novelty. As Nye observes, “Thus from the start, home electrification was not merely utilitarian...Electricity enhanced and transformed the everyday, changing the familiar into something rare and strange.”51

Marketed as the harbingers of a revolutionary high-tech utopia, expositions traveled the nation demonstrating what electric ranges, washing machines and clothes irons would do for the home, especially for the housewife. By far, the most popular electrical innovation behind electric lighting was the iron. Women were all too eager to put the days of hefting a piping hot flat iron from a stove to the ironing board behind them. Nye argues, however, that the presence of all this

48 Levee, Memories of Genoa, 54-55. 49 Luebke, Elmore, Ohio, 227. 50 Nye, Electrifying America, 243. 51 Ibid., 245. 64

convenience in the home was not a liberating force for homemakers but a regression that

increased the number of tasks in the woman’s domestic sphere. Better interior lighting increased

the expected level of cleanliness. While the pre-electric middle class housewife was responsible for keeping the house in order while her husband was away at work, she outsourced many of her more strenuous chores like laundry, grocery and ice delivery to various servicemen who came right to her home. But electric washing machines, refrigerators and the like spelled the end to these traveling servicemen, meaning many of those tasks, especially going out to shop for groceries, became the housewife’s responsibility.52

To feed energy to their new gadgets, most homeowners typically ran wiring along their

floorboards or ceiling molding unless they were purchasing a newly built house with internal

wiring. Newer model apartments were usually equipped with a dozen electrical sockets with

houses sporting between twenty and thirty. Unlike today, most appliances had to be screwed into

the light socket as the electrical outlet would not make its debut until the 1920s.53 Following the wave of home economics appliances, the “wireless,” or radio, was the next “must have” device invading most households by the 1930s. Well-to-do urbanites who had the income to splurge on such a novelty when it was first released were among the first to learn the results of the Harding-

Cox election of 1920. The ability to be instantaneously connected audibly with events in the rest world through an RCA or Victor radio was tipping point for many straggling holdouts to electrification.54

Demand for electrical appliances began in Ottawa County almost as soon as the TPCL

switched on the power along its route. In 1909, a local furniture retailer began carrying Victor

52 Ibid., 256-257. 53 Schewe, The Grid, 70-71. 54 Ibid., 73-74. 65

and Edison brand “talking machines” (phonographs).55 Buying into the rhetoric that electrical

appliances would revolutionize the home, an ad from the New York Vacuum Cleaner Company

appeared in The Ottawa County Exponent two years later: “Hand: $15, Electric: $75. These

cleaners lighten homework, improve sanitary conditions and cleanliness of the home. Necessary

to good housekeeping.”56

Power for the People

While electrification in Ohio was expanding to include not only its most populous cities

but many of its small towns and hamlets as well, the political debate surrounding electrical

access and governmental interference into the rates charged by utilities surpassed the local

sphere. Nationally, political attitudes were in a state of flux, and Progressivism continued to

leave the Gilded Age further behind. One author, writing only twenty-five years after the

movement, commented, "One may mark McKinley's administration as the end of the period of

laissez-faire — the termination of a narrow and negative view of government — and the entry of government into all the secular affairs of society."57 The Social Gospel was sweeping through

the nation's churches, and Socialism through its intellectual circles, and both had profound

impacts on the progressive ideologies of Ohio Democrats. The same ideas of reform that had so

passionately gripped Mayor Johnson (and were made popular by writers like Henry George)

began churning elsewhere in the state through the policies of Toledo Mayor Samuel "Golden

55 “If you knew the pleasures of a talking machine,” The Ottawa County Exponent, February 13, 1909, 2, Microfilm, CAC, BGSU. 56 “New York Vacuum Cleaner Co.,” The Ottawa County Exponent, March 4, 1911, 7, Microfilm, CAC, BGSU. 57 Francis R. Aumann, “Ohio Government in the Twentieth Century: From Nash to White (1900-1931),” in Ohio in the Twentieth Century: 1900-1938, ed. Harlow Lindley, vol. 6 of The History of the State of Ohio, ed. Carl Wittke (Columbus: The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1942), 3. 66

Rule" Jones and future Governor Judson Harmon. The one niche that continued to draw

particular attention from Progressive-leaning policymakers was the role of government in the

affairs of utilities.

Politicians had become sensitive to the problem that utility companies were not paying

their "fair share" in taxes as early as the 1890s. Republican-controlled legislatures at the time

twice created investigative commissions that uncovered that utilities such as railroad, telephone,

and electric companies were not subjected to the same rigorous appraisal from the county

auditors’ offices as were other entities.58 Early on, customers had been permissive of excessive

rates and, as we have seen, municipalities were lax with taxation because of the great

conveniences being provided by utilities, but as a result, utility companies collected enormous

profits and held considerable sway with local political bosses. The nineteenth century style of

government in Ohio’s cities, like the Federal Plan in Cleveland, was not equipped to handle the

changing demands of a twentieth-century environment.59

In the northwest corner of the state, the calls for utilities reform by Samuel "Golden

Rule" Jones, whose nickname came from his genuine adherence of the Christian motto in his

daily life, actually predated the more significant efforts of Johnson. Jones was elected Mayor of

Toledo as a Republican in 1897, but he lost his party's nomination for re-election in 1899 after refusing to swear loyalty to the GOP, which forced him to run as an Independent.60 During the

1899 campaign, Jones advocated for the municipal ownership of utilities, arguing that utilities

were a necessity for everyone and that private corporations had no right to profit from them.61 In

58 Hoyt L. Warner, Progressivism in Ohio: 1897-1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964), 7-8. 59 Ibid., 12-13. 60 Carolyn Vasko, “The People’s Mayor: Samuel ‘Golden Rule’ Jones” (MA Thesis, The University of Toledo, 2007), 51. 61 Ibid., 57. 67

a book he published in 1899, The New Right: A Plea for Fair Play through a More Just Social

Order, Jones wrote, "All natural monopolies should be publicly owned, because, in the first

place, they cover a class of necessities that are common to all of the people. It may be urged that

the poor do not need gas, electric lighting or telephones, etc., but in the most just order of

society, into which we are coming, these utilities will be as accessible to the poor as they now are

to the rich."62

Despite their best efforts to effect change to bring the technological benefits offered by

utilities to the masses, politicians at the local level realized that so long as city governments

remained in the grip of political machines and large corporations, any hope of reform was futile.

Thus, like-minded reformers from across Ohio turned their attention to state politics.

The first attempt to select a public ownership policy for Ohio occurred in 1902. Ohio's

Constitution, adopted in 1851, prohibited the state legislature from "passing any 'special act conferring corporate powers'" that would delegate municipal policies from the capital.63 The

General Assembly maneuvered around this restriction by creating classes and sub-classes for the

state's cities and then legislating laws for the different categorizations. The Ohio Supreme Court

largely ignored the General Assembly's circumvention of the State Constitution until legislators

took the classifying to the extreme by targeting specific municipalities with legislation that

applied to, for example, "cities with a population of not less than 10,956 nor more than

10,960."64 By 1902, the Court began to strike down such city-specific bills, and the state's more

radical legislators, with the support of local progressive politicians like Jones and Johnson,

responded by proposing a streamlined municipal code that included: an end to the classification

62 Samuel Milton Jones, The New Right: A Plea for Fair Play through a More Just Social Order (New York: Eastern Book Concern, 1899), 282. 63 Warner, Progressivism in Ohio, 106-107. 64 Ibid., 107. 68 system; legislative powers vested solely through an elected city council and executive powers centered in a mayor; nonpartisan ballots; and the municipal ownership of public utilities. This attempt at what came to be called "Municipal Home Rule" had its provisions for nonpartisan ballots and municipal ownership removed in committee, and the leftover bill died before ever reaching the chamber floor.65 A much more conservative municipal code was passed later in the year, but it made no inroads into the utilities issue.

Progressives remained vigilant in their efforts to bring about utilities reform. In 1905, the

Ohio Democratic Party added the municipal ownership concept as well as the regulation of utilities to their political platform.66 Judson Harmon, who had served as Attorney General under

President Grover Cleveland and was a growing voice in Ohio politics, gave an address in 1906 on favoritism in taxation and rate control, specifically with regards to railroads, during which he stated that he too was beginning to see governmental control as a viable option. When Harmon was tapped by the Democrats to run for governor in 1908, municipal ownership of utilities and

Home Rule were at the top of the platform.67

Governor Harmon, while a Democrat, was more conservative than those in the progressive wing of his party and he did not take the initiative in creating a commission to regulate the state's public utilities. That responsibility was taken up by a progressive State

Representative from Medina, Frank W. Woods, a Republican. Taking inspiration from utilities commissions already in place in New York and Wisconsin, Woods proposed an ambitious bill in

1909 that called for a three-man commission tasked with regulating the rates utilities charged, making the finances of all utilities open to the public, enforcing a standardized method of

65 Ibid., 107-108. 66 Ibid., 162. 67 "Harmon on Rate Control," The New York Times, January 21, 1906. 69 accounting that eliminated favoritism, and controlling all stock and bond offerings of utilities.68

The Woods Bill was killed but resurrected by other legislators repeatedly over the next two years with utility companies using every legal and political avenue available to oppose it. The Newark

Daily Advocate reported in February, 1910, "The Woods public utilities bill seems to have a rocky road ahead of it, not so much on account of the sleepers it contains as because of provisions unsatisfactory to corporate interests."69 Woods’ legislation did not occur in a vacuum of anti-electric sentiment, but rather in an atmosphere of sweeping utilities and service reform.

Similar state legislation from 1911 in the form of the Yount Bill proposed new powers to regulate Ohio’s telephone companies. One pro-Yount editorial read: “Under existing conditions telephone patrons have no relief...Now the officers of a telephone company are supreme and can be dictatorial if they wish — under the provisions of the Yount senate bill the state telephone commission will not only be supreme but will have dictatorial powers.”70

As corporate lobbyists for the utilities continued to obfuscate legislators and resist reform, newspapers began to insist that some kind of regulatory body be created, as evidenced by a column in The Xenia Daily Gazette written the following June: "For several years the propriety of a public utilities commission has been seriously discussed. As many of [the utilities] are constantly devising ways and means to evade the operations of the law, so it becomes necessary to keep them within the law. This commission is a success in New York and Wisconsin, and there is no reason why it should not be a success in Ohio."71 Ohio became the tenth state in the

U.S. to create a utility regulatory commission when Governor Harmon allowed a bill approved by both houses to become law on June 14, 1911, increasing the scope and power of the Ohio

68 Ibid., 233. 69 "Embody Ideas of Woods Bill," The Newark Daily Advocate, February 12, 1910, 4. 70 “Yount Bill,” The Ottawa County Exponent, March 11, 1911, 4, Microfilm, CAC, BGSU. 71 "Public Utilities," The Xenia Daily Gazette, June 22, 1910. 70

Railroad Commission and transforming it into the Ohio Public Service Commission (OPSC).72

With the new authority slated to go into effect on July 1 of that year, The Newark Daily Advocate

reported public services corporations issuing stock as late as the day before to avoid having to

get OPSC approval.73

The OPSC would be altered again just two years after its implementation, becoming the

Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO). The new name was part of legislation signed into

law by the newly inaugurated Governor James Cox in 1913 that granted the Commission the

additional powers to "investigate and ascertain the value of the property of every public utility or

railroad in the State" in order to properly assess the "reasonableness" of the rates being

charged.74As author Hoyt L. Warner observes, "This law made the Ohio Public Utilities

Commission one of the strongest of the states."75

PUCO drafted rate schedules based on what the commissioners deemed to be reasonable.

The Commission also handed down verdicts on utilities' requests to issue new stock. One

example of PUCO's authority occurred in 1912 when The Northern Traction and Light Company

applied for permission to issue $2 million of preferred stock. Having been "satisfied that a

portion of the necessary expenditures in making said improvements, extensions and betterments

to its property should be raised by the sale of its said preferred capital stock," the Commission

granted its approval.76

72 Warner, Progressivism in Ohio, 279-280; The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, "90 Years and Counting: The History of PUCO," accessed March 2, 2012, http://www.puco.ohio.gov/puco/index.cfm/consumer- information/consumer-topics/puco-history/. 73 "Logan Company has Increased Its Capital," The Newark Daily Advocate, July 1, 1911. 74 James K. Mercer. Ohio Legislative History 1909-1913: The Administration of Judson Harmon, Governor of Ohio, 1909-1912 (Columbus: The Edward T. Miller Company, 1913), 397-399. 75 Warner, Progressivism in Ohio, 431. 76 The Public Service Commission of Ohio, 1912 Report of the Public Service Commission of Ohio (Springfield: The Springfield Publishing Company, State Printers, 1913), 246-249. 71

With one arena of utilities reform won, progressives in both parties set their sights on the

upcoming Ohio Constitutional Convention in 1912. The Ohio Constitution of 1851 required that

the people vote to have a constitutional convention every twenty years. In 1874, the previous

convention's proposed changes were voted down, and in 1891 the people voted not to have a

convention.77 The reformatory spirit of the early 1900s made the opening of a constitutional

convention for a third time a near certainty. As the delegates began their convention in January,

they debated issues that were radical for the day: women's suffrage, removing the word "white"

from the Constitution and eliminating capital punishment. The convention continued into April,

at which time delegates were faced with a federalist-style amendment that would allow

municipalities to exercise all the powers not explicitly denied them in the Ohio Constitution,

reversing the previous order where municipalities were only granted their powers through the

state legislature. Among those powers was the ability to own and operate public utilities.78 The

1912 presidential election (a three-way race between Woodrow Wilson, William H. Taft and

Theodore Roosevelt) saw an uncharacteristically weak turnout among Ohio voters. Yet, the

Home Rule Amendment passed along with forty other amendments, including state control over

public education and initiative and referendum, which allowed voters to bypass the legislature.

Municipalities could now function as self-governing local entities with the ability to own and

operate their own utilities.79 The New York Times reported that the power of Ohio municipalities

to own and operate utilities was "perhaps a larger measure of home rule than is possessed by the

municipalities of any State of the Union."80 It was with this new freedom that in 1914 Cleveland

77 Aumann. “Ohio Government in the Twentieth Century," 13. 78 Warner, Progressivism in Ohio, 332. 79 Warner, Progressivism in Ohio, 341-343; Aumann. “Ohio Government in the Twentieth Century,” 20; Knepper, Ohio and Its People, 333-337. 80 "Ohio Constitution Has Many Changes," The New York Times, June 1, 1912. 72 was able to open the municipal plant Johnson had fought so hard for in order to compete with the

Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. Municipalities across the state exercised the municipal home rule principle by purchasing or building fifty-one generating facilities and seventy distribution stations by 1937.81

Still in the Dark

The heyday for the interurbans occurred in the mid-1910s. While the decade was fraught with interchanging spurts of growth and loss, the period on the whole saw growth, albeit somewhat stymied. After the interurbans' peak in the years immediately following World War I, and with the rise in popularity of the automobile, their popularity as a mode of transportation began to steadily decline. Total passengers for interurbans in Ohio reached an all-time high of

257 million people in 1919, and after 1921, the amount of annual traffic decreased roughly 10 percent almost every year to a meager 40 million riders in 1933.82 The Toledo, Port Clinton, and

Lakeside was one of the first in the industry to succumb to the trend. As early as 1912, the railway's profits had become lackluster. This prompted W.S. Barstow, an engineer from New

York, to purchase all $1.5 million in TPCL bonds for sixty-five cents on the dollar and reorganize the company.83 It is likely Barstow bought the railway more for its ability to transmit electricity rather than the income its passenger service produced. Profits did improve during the

Roaring Twenties, but a customer base half the size of what it had been in the late 1910s and an expense-income ratio creeping on 95 percent proved to be too much. In 1924, Barstow sold the

81 United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Census of Electrical Industries: 1937 Electric Light and Power Industry (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939), 44. 82 Hilton and Due, The Electric Interurban Railways, 106. 83 Hilton, TPCL, 16. 73 line along with some of his other electricity and power holdings in the area to Harry L. Doherty, who reorganized the company yet again into the Ohio Public Service (OPS) Company, a subsidiary of Doherty’s Cities Service Company, and closed some of its less traveled extensions.

Similarly, the Lake Shore Electric came under the control of Doherty’s holding company. The

OPS continued to offer rail service despite astonishingly high expenses, but it drew the bulk of its income from power transmission.84 The culprit with the most responsibility for the slow, agonizing death of the interurban industry was unquestionably the automobile. As was the case with the TPCL, interurbans often lost money on individual runs even at the height of their popularity, but offering frequent, regular service was the linchpin to their being more popular than the railroads.85 As automobiles became more commonplace, offering more flexibility than either interurbans or railroads, passenger traffic on the electric railways began to decline. To cut their losses, interurbans logically cut their schedules and offered fewer trains, but this had the effect of making them even less attractive to rural passengers. In this regard, the industry's decline could be considered self-inflicted, but had there not been an increasingly more affordable alternative (i.e. the automobile) then an inelastic demand for the interurbans would have forced the public to accept the railways' cuts in service and further subsequent cuts would have been unlikely.86

As personal automobile ownership worked its way through the population, the coach bus provided a similar style of large scale transportation for those unable to afford their own automobile. Bus line usage rose rapidly during the 1920s, and even though they were slower and less luxurious than interurbans, their rates were often competitive. Railway operators apparently

84 Ibid., 22-23. 85 Hilton and Due, The Electric Interurban Railways, 105-108. 86 Ibid., 92-93. 74

did not view the bus as a legitimate competitor because few cut their fares to compete with the

emerging coach lines. Some interurbans even tried to start their own bus lines as an extension of

their railway networks, as the OPS did in 1929.87 The bus lines were joined by some clever

motorists in offering cheap competition for the interurbans. Automobile owners known as

"jitneys," the slang word for a nickel, would drive along the route of interurbans and inner-city streetcars and "steal" waiting passengers for the rate of five cents. Jitneys appeared in Toledo in

1915 and continued their proto-taxi services well into the 1920s, but were eventually outlawed by city regulations.88

The American interurban industry had a forty-year lifespan. Most closed during the

Depression and almost none survived after World War II. Lake Shore Electric, the most

prominent Ohio interurban and one of the most profitable in the nation, went into partial

receivership in 1933, but continued offering local service until January, 1938, when it was sold

to one of its creditors. The abandonment of the LSE line left Genoa with only one option for

electric rail service, but that would not survive much longer. The OPS ran its last passenger car

on July 11, 1939 after five years of consecutive losses totaling more than $93,000.89

In their time the interurbans did manage to spread the tentacles of electrical “progress” to

small towns and make electric power a statewide concern. In 1910 only one in seven homes had

been electrified, but by 1930 that demographic had swelled to 70 percent of all households.

However, 85 percent of the newly electrified lived in cities or their suburbs.90 Despite the

Progressive policy initiatives enacted in several states that were designed to reduce rates and

87 “Buses to Replace Cars on O.P.S. Route,” unknown publication, September 27, 1929, Folder 1: Electric Railroad ‘Interurbans,’ GL, HEPL. 88 “Quiz of the Month,” The Trolley Wire 14, No. 2 (June 1990), Folder 2, Box 4, “Wilbur Hague Papers,” MS 343, CAC, BGSU. 89 “Mayor Opposes Abandonment,” unknown publication, June 23, 1939, Folder 1: Electric Railroad ‘Interurbans,’ GL, HEPL. 90 Nye, Electrifying America, 261. 75

expand access, a very small percentage of the nation's farmers had power in the ensuing years.

By 1924, only 2.6 percent of farms were receiving power from a central generating station.91 Part of the slow expansion into rural areas can be explained by the substantial demand for power placed on utility companies during World War I. With resources scarce, building new transmission and distribution lines was not a priority. However, the continued reluctance among power companies to electrify America's farmland after the war had more to do with business rather than resources. As previously stated, building high voltage transmission lines into sparsely populated areas was a costly proposition with little expected return. Thus, many utility companies required farmers or groups of farmers to pay the construction costs of transmission lines before service could be offered, with the utility acquiring ownership of the line after its completion. With utilities commissions like PUCO issuing specifications on how lines were to be constructed, unskilled farmers were forced to hire expensive skilled labor pushing the construction costs to between $2,000 and $5,000 per mile. Farmers were also required to pay a minimum surcharge to guarantee that the utility made a profit, regardless of how much or how little power was consumed. Once farmers started to use electricity in their homes and businesses, most did not consume enough kilowatt-hours to receive the discounted bulk rate offered by utility companies for customers who used more electricity. Thus, rural customers paid ten cents per kilowatt-hour to the urban customer's rate of five cents. The only agriculturalists able to afford appliances and the electrical hook up to run them were wealthier farmers who lived close to already serviced towns. The prospect of electrification remained an unaffordable luxury for the small independent farmer.92

91 Harry Slattery, Rural America Lights Up (Washington: The National Home Library Association, 1940), 4. 92 Slattery, Rural America Lights Up, 4; D. Clayton Brown, Electricity for Rural America: The Fight for the REA (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980), 5. 76

In evaluating the efficacy of Ohio’s policy of municipal ownership with respect to the rural farmer, its major flaw becomes quickly evident: the primary function of municipally-owned utilities was to serve the citizens within the municipality. The task of electrifying Ohio's remote farms and ranches stayed in the reluctant hands of private power companies. Rural farmers in

Ohio did fare marginally better in electrical access than did farmers nationally. In the 1920 census, 452,620, or 7 percent, of farmers across the country reported making an expenditure on electric lighting, while 14.7 percent of Ohio's 256,695 farms reported the same expense.93 While the percentage of Ohio farms with electricity was nearly twice the national average, those farmers were still a minority in the agricultural community, and it should be noted that the

Census Bureau at this time did not differentiate between homes receiving central service and those with home generating plants. In the 1930 Census, 14.3 percent of farms reported having service, but adjusted estimates reveal only about 9.5 percent actually received their power from a central service company.94

At the dawn of the Great Depression, the farm was the last untouched frontier in Ohio’s electrification. Major cities had enjoyed the benefits of electrical power for fifty years and had largely resolved the associated political and economic issues. The electrification of small industrial and agricultural communities, however, had lagged behind that of their city counterparts by nearly a generation. The coming of the interurbans signaled their inclusion in the modern age of electricity, but another generation would pass before a significant portion of

Ohio’s far-flung and isolated farmers could enjoy electric lighting and electrical appliances.

Municipal and state policies lacked the will and momentum to expand electrification in Ohio.

93 United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Fourteenth Census of the United States: Vol. VI 1920 Census of Agriculture: Part 1: The Northern States (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1922), 351. 94 Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 10. 77

Farmers would have to wait for a bold national program from Washington dedicated to total electrification of America’s farmland.

78

CHAPTER III: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE: THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ENTERS THE POWER MARKET AND ELECTRIFIES THE COUNTRYSIDE, 1933-1945

On October 18, 1881, when a Cleveland suburb was erecting its first arc light tower, the

lighting of the beacon attracted the attention of farmers several miles distant and drew a

substantial crowd. The Plain Dealer reported the farmers were very interested to know what this

gasless light meant.1 For the next forty years, farmers would remain on the outside looking in as

major cities and small towns developed electrical networks and their citizens enjoyed the labor

and recreational benefits. Throughout the 1920s, solving the problem of how to bring electricity

into rural areas was a chief concern among farmers and their representative organizations. What

had been considered a luxury exclusively for city dwellers had become a necessary tool that

farmers felt was critical to their success in the new age. However, simply buying and

maintaining one's own generator was beyond the financial and mechanical skills of most

farmers.2 As more country folk migrated into the cities, farm labor became more expensive and

harder to find, and reliable electricity was increasingly viewed as a dependable alternative. In

Ohio, The Sandusky Star Journal printed an article in 1921 describing the unsanitary dangers

posed by the dish towel found in the common farm kitchen and the associated health benefits of

using an electric dishwasher. The article ended with a column, "Electricity Needed on Modern

Farms," which read, "Everybody on the farm wants town conveniences...Electricity is a form of

labor the farmer can depend upon every hour of the day. It is not a question of whether it is

cheaper for the farmer to use electricity than to hire labor, but rather that he cannot get the labor

1 “Electric Light on McGillin’s Block,” The Plain Dealer, October 18, 1881, 1. 2 Victor C. Ballenger, “The Development and Progress of Rural Electrification in Ohio” (MBA Thesis, The Ohio State University, 1936), 4. 79 necessary to do the work."3 In his 1936 MBA thesis for The Ohio State University entitled "The

Development and Progress of Rural Electrification in Ohio," Victor C. Ballenger questioned, "If we do not use coal oil lamps in the city, why should they be used in rural areas?"4

How this was to be accomplished was a politically divisive issue in the 1920s and 1930s.

The business community argued that the task of rural electrification should be left to private utility companies while progressives and a growing segment of the nation's farmers wanted the government to exercise a stronger hand in selecting and implementing some form of public power policy. By the 1930s, public opinion would shift in favor of the public power movement largely due to the hesitancy and in many cases refusal of private power and light companies to extend electrification into rural areas. As has been mentioned earlier, the high construction costs of transmission, the sparse population, and remoteness of rural customers discouraged companies from making the investment in rural electrification.

The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal programs are credited with some of the most forceful and successful power policy initiatives such as the Public Utilities

Holding Companies Act (PUHCA), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and the Rural

Electric Administration. While much of the literature on electrification places agency on

Roosevelt and his reforms on this issue, this thesis argues his policies should be understood in the context of earlier attempts at public power and an anti-utility sentiment that had been stewing for some time before he assumed the presidency.

Like the early technological breakthroughs in electrification and subsequent efforts at progressive municipal reform witnessed in Cleveland and the presence of one of the country's largest interurban conglomerates in northwest Ohio during the infant years of state utility

3 "Electric Dish Washer Avoids Danger of Unsanitary Towels," The Sandusky Star Journal, January 31, 1921, 10. 4 Ballenger, “The Development and Progress of Rural Electrification in Ohio,” 106. 80 regulation, Ohio played host to some historically noteworthy developments during the implementation of the United States' early national power policy. Miami and Shelby Counties, located in western Ohio, were the first counties nationwide to apply for REA funding and the first to see government-funded electric lines service its farmers. The state was also home to the

Parkinsons, a family who lived on a newly electrified farm in eastern Ohio, who were the stars of a documentary produced by Hollywood and the REA called Power and the Land, which showed a before-and-after glimpse of life on REA-electrified farms.5

Emergence of the Power Trust

Even though electrification — the further expansion of the "grid" — stalled somewhat during the 1920s, the affairs of private utility companies were in a frenzy of activity. The 1920s was an era of great profit and consolidation for the utilities industry, as it was across many sectors of the American economy, such as finance. It was a time when the country celebrated the

"bigness" that would be demonized in intellectual circles a decade later.

The rapid growth in urban and suburban electrification in the 1900s and 1910s saw the rise and fall of several local and regional electric companies. Due to their infrastructure, many interurban lines entered the electric supply market to see tremendous profits which often eclipsed whatever revenue they derived from the struggling electric rail industry. But the 1920s witnessed the slow and methodical consolidation of public utility holding companies, large conglomerates that reaped profits from several subsidiary "operating" companies. The corporate structures of these holding companies became increasingly more complicated and corrupt as they grew and

5 Power and the Land, film, directed by Joris Ivens (1940; Reprinted as Rural Electrification in Ohio: Historic REA Films, 1940-1941, Fresno, California: Heritage Productions, Inc., 2008), DVD. 81

centralized their control. Holding companies often assumed a pyramid-like organizational

structure with subsidiaries owning portions of other subsidiaries, all existing within the parent

company's framework. Historian Ellis W. Hawley describes what can only be called the scheme

of utility holding companies in his summary of the findings of an investigation conducted on

their activities by the Federal Trade Commission: "The power companies had loaded their capital

accounts with arbitrary or imaginary amounts to establish a base for excessive rates. Holding

companies had entered into transactions with subsidiaries for the express purpose of recording

arbitrary profits or fixing valuations unjustified by market values."6 This multi-faceted pyramid

structure allowing holding company executives to sell equipment or services from one internal

subsidiary to another, claiming it as a profit to investors, while at the same time using the

"expense" of such a sale as justification for raising rates on the consumer.

Ohio was not exempt from this trend of utilities consolidation and, in fact, the experience

of the interurbans discussed in the previous chapter are illustrative of the complexity and

confusion in the holding company hierarchy. According to Forrest McDonald, the seminal

biographer of the Midwest's premier utilities magnate, Samuel Insull, the bulk of the nation's

utilities rested in the hands of four major holding companies: Insull Utilities Investment, Inc.,

Standard Gas and Electric of Henry M. Byllesby, the Cities Service Company of Henry L.

Doherty, and the latest entry (1927) to the utilities industry, the United Corporation of J.P.

Morgan.7 Recall that in 1924 W.S. Barstow, who had purchased the Toledo, Port Clinton, and

Lakeside Railway in 1912 for its power transmission capabilities, sold the company to the Ohio

Public Service Company. OPS was a subsidiary of Doherty's Cities Service Company. The OPS

operated interurban lines, urban streetcar routes, and electric power plants throughout northern

6 Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 330. 7 Forrest McDonald, Insull: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Utility Tycoon (1962; Reprint, Washington, D.C.: Beard Books, 2004), 250. 82

Ohio, but of note here is the fact that OPS shared ownership of the Ohio Utilities Finance

Company (OUF) with another company, Toledo Edison. Toledo Edison was also a subsidiary of

Cities Service. The Lake Shore Electric had a tenuous relationship with Doherty's organization

from very early on. LSE had owned and operated the Toledo Railways & Light Company,

Toledo's primary electric utility and streetcar operator, since the turn of the century, but after

years of financial difficulty, Everett and Moore were forced to sell the holding to Doherty in

1913. It was from the Toledo Railways & Light Company that Doherty created Toledo Edison in

1921 by jettisoning traction operations to the independent Community Traction Company. In

1926, while LSE's subsidiary, the Lake Erie Power & Light Company, was selling some of its

territory to OPS, Lake Shore Electric's vice-president and general manager, Fred Coen,

mysteriously and abruptly resigned. One year later, he returned with enough cash on hand to buy

LSE outright from the Everett-Moore syndicate. As the new chairman and president of the

company, Coen outsourced all major decision making to an "A. Hayes, Esq." of New York who

never existed. Over the next five years, personnel from Toledo Edison and OPS filtered into LSE

upper management and the Ohio Utilities Finance Company became LSE's chief creditor,

moving LSE into bankruptcy in 1932. In 1937, OUF began a liquidation of LSE's holdings,

selling its power business to Toledo Edison and OPS, and a year later, OUF was sold wholly to

Toledo Edison and dissolved, giving Toledo Edison LSE's railway rights-of-way as an

inheritance. Toledo Edison leased those rights-of-way to a newly formed bus company, the Lake

Shore Coach Company, which was a subsidiary of the Cities Services holding company.8

8 Herbert H. Harwood Jr., and Robert S. Korach, The Lake Shore Electric Railway Story (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000), 11, 60, 108-110, 125-131; BGSU Center for Archival Collections, "Toledo Edison Company, MS 759," Accessed January 18, 2013. http://www.bgsu.edu/colleges/library/cac/ms/page42101.html; The Ohio Museum of Transportation, “The Community Traction Company,” Accessed February 21, 2013. http://www.omot.org/history/tolctc.html. 83

State regulatory commissions were not up to the task of handling utility holding

companies. Their primary duty became arbitrating disputes between utility companies as

opposed to protecting the public from corporate excess.9 The American public of the 1920s seemed to lack the fervor had been so prominent twenty years earlier. As Philip J. Funigiello writes in Toward a National Power Policy: "Prosperity-induced apathy had replaced public involvement."10 The problems associated with holding companies was further compounded by

the fact that many of them were national entities with operations spanning multiple states,

therefore eluding the jurisdiction of any one state regulatory body. Doherty exploited the limits

of Ohio to restrict his operation in 1919 when Toledo voters passed a referendum to mandate a

change in management for the Toledo Railways & Light Company. Doherty evacuated all of his

company's streetcars to Michigan via a connecting interurban that was also under the Cities

Service umbrella. With company operations having effectively relocated across state lines,

Toledo could not enforce its referendum and the state courts could not order Doherty to resume

service. Clearly beaten, the City of Toledo was forced to approve a fare increase to get the

Toledo Railways & Light Company to return.11

Power on Hold

As Ballenger asked in 1936, why should farmers have to use technology that was already

over fifty years out of date? That was exactly the question farmers across the nation and farmers

in Ohio were asking of themselves. Electrification, which had proceeded at a feverish pace in the

9 Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 325. 10 Philip J. Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy: The New Deal and the Electric Utility Industry, 1933-1941 (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 3. 11 The Ohio Museum of Transportation, “The Community Traction Company.” 84

previous decades, seemed to have stopped just shy of the farmer's door. Power providers had

found a great return on their investment in the densely packed quarters of the inner city and they

had discovered they could piggyback off the infrastructure laid down by the interurbans in order

to broaden their customer base with minimal fixed cost, but such was not the case when it came

to electrifying rural areas. As the opening Sandusky Star Journal article from 1921 illustrates, the patience of farmers was wearing thin as they increasingly viewed their lack of electricity as a competitive disadvantage. Farmers' wives were also seen as deserving beneficiaries of future electrification. An editorial in one newspaper from the central part of the state advocated, "In this fast moving age, women need more time to devote to themselves and to the care and companionship of their children. They should have opportunity to participate in social and civic work...Electricity is one thing which is helping to lift drudgery from the shoulders of long suffering women...This is particularly so in the case of farm women."12 Progress, it seemed, had

spread to the countryside, and farmers' demands for affordable service began to catch the

attention of the power industry. Indeed, if a cost-efficient means of bringing power into rural

areas could be developed, electricity providers would have access to an entirely untapped market.13

With the developments in alternating current transmission as pioneered by George

Westinghouse, the electrification of distant farms was technologically not a problem, but its

execution, however, was inhibited economically. As one utility official stated, "Unless rural

service is worth more than it costs, it should not be supplied."14 Samuel Insull was one of the

first to experiment with the business aspects involved in electrifying rural areas. As a personal

12 "Electricity versus Home Drudgery," The Richwood Gazette, February 2, 1928. 13 Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 3-4; Slattery, Rural America Lights Up, 6. 14 Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 124. 85

curiosity, Insull decided to run a line from one of his subsidiaries, North Shore Electric, to

Libertyville, Illinois, a small country town that barely managed nighttime street lighting from a

local farmer's barn generator. He noted, as wisdom within the power industry suggested, that the

construction of a six-mile transmission line forced him to charge rates that made electric street

lighting less affordable than kerosene lighting. Insull began a survey of the town in 1909, and the

following year, he began the country's first experiment in rural electrification under the premise

that just as electrical customers are strung together and serviced by one plant within a town, so

too should a series of communities strung together be able to receive central service from one of

his power companies. The results of Insull's Lake County Experiment were monumental in that

he was able to provide 22 towns and 125 farms around-the-clock power. He discovered that

powering a large portion of rural customers complemented his urban revenue because rural

power consumption peaked in mid-summer whereas cities used the most power in mid-winter.

(This was before the advent of electrical air conditioning.) The boost in income Insull received in

the summer from rural operations compensated for the slump in city revenue during the same

period, which allowed the utility magnate to quickly recoup his investment and slash rates for his

new rural customers.15

By 1912, Insull's operations in the Chicago area were servicing over a hundred

communities, and he began to employ the same "systematized" rural electrification in his west

coast holdings as well. This revolutionary system was picked up by some of his more friendly

rivals in the industry, such as Byllesby. McDonald writes that Insull's companies and those he

was associated with "were ten to twenty years ahead of the rest of the nation- or the world- in

developing systematized electric supply. The obvious inference, I believe, is that systematization

15 McDonald, Insull, 137-144. At the time personal air conditioning was not yet commonplace. Nearly a century later, the nation's annual peak load would shift toward summertime, which is part of what made the Blackout of 2003 such a health concern for the young and elderly. 86 and rural and small-town electrification were advanced almost a generation through the efforts of

Insull."16 While Insull's solutions were adopted by power companies throughout the Midwest and

Great Plains states, they were also rejected by much of the electric industry, possibly because they inverted twenty years of conventional thinking, or possibly just because they came from

Insull, who was a rather unpopular figure at the time. In any event, the evidence clearly shows that Insull's methods were not significantly adopted in Ohio.

The National Electric Light Association (NELA), which had broken its former connection with General Electric in compliance with antitrust law, further addressed the problem of rural electrification at its annual meeting in 1911. A fact-finding committee assembled by

NELA, the Committee on Electricity in Rural Districts (CERD), gave a pessimistic report on the prospects of rural electrification, and nothing except hopeful intentions were agreed upon. But as farmers' voices grew louder and the long-term results of Insull's Lake County Experiment were realized, the NELA set up the Committee on the Relation of Electricity to Agriculture (CREA) in

1923 to revisit the issue. The CREA panel was composed of representatives from the agricultural universities, farm bureaus, and utilities.17 It recognized that up until that time investment in rural electrification had been too risky and unprofitable for power companies to give the idea much attention, but farmers' recent interest in having the same amenities as their inner-city counterparts meant a growing market. CREA assembled the Rural Lines Committee to further investigate the matter. The committee determined that in order for rural electrification to become a reality more research would need to be done into the applications of electrical power for agricultural work, and farmers would need to be educated on the discovered benefits so that they would purchase more appliances and boost their consumption of electricity. The second finding of the Rural

16 Ibid., 141. 17 Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 123-124. 87

Lines Committee was that rural rates had to be reduced to a level that was within farmers' budgets.18 Historian D. Clayton Brown describes the cyclical state of affairs as "an expense for both parties — recipients of service used little power because of high rates, and the utilities charged such rates because of low usage."19 CREA's findings came under fire from public power advocates who criticized the committee's research models and experiments, arguing that they were conducted under unrealistic conditions with free equipment and expert supervision. Rural electrification in the “real world,” public power groups suggested, would require significant government involvement and oversight, and "until service replaced profit [as the goal], the rural dweller was doomed to remain the forgotten man."20

As part of NELA's research into the feasibility of rural electrification, it financed an experiment in Marysville, Ohio in 1926 in conjunction with the Department of Agricultural

Engineering at The Ohio State University. The equipment for the study was loaned by electrical appliance manufacturers who were also interested in the use of electricity on the farm. The experiment lasted three years and resulted in 75 percent of the participants purchasing the test appliances from the manufacturers. The study revealed a hypothetical power company incurred a construction cost of about $1,360 per mile (for the relatively flat topography around Marysville) and a minimum cost for current of five dollars per month per farmer.21 Cost estimates associated with rural electrification compiled by university and government organizations, such as those described here, would come into conflict with later quotes from private utilities asked to electrify rural areas.

18 Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 3-4. 19 Ibid., 5. 20 Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 124. 21 Ballenger, “The Development and Progress of Rural Electrification in Ohio,” 40-41. 88

While the power industry formed committees and conducted research, some of the country's more anxious farmers took matters into their own hands through the establishment of regional cooperatives, usually independent organizations, but sometimes partnered with the local chapter of the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) or the state agricultural college. Co- ops consisted of between 50 and 200 farms banded together, each paying a membership fee of

$100-$200. The collected fees went toward a sizeable down payment of the construction costs to bring a high voltage line to the area, and considered as a single unit, the accumulated power consumption of each member allowed the cooperative to get a discounted rate.22 The NELA openly discouraged agricultural groups from taking the initiative to build their own distribution lines.23 Despite their natural support for rural power, the existence of most cooperatives predated the rural electrification movement. Ohio farmers, for example, turned to cooperatives to buy necessities like fertilizer, feed, and fire and tornado insurance as early as the late nineteenth century.24 When electricity became the central issue for many farmers, cooperatives endeavored to provide their membership, which was growing rapidly due to the demand for electrification, with the cheapest power possible. One such project in Idaho distributed electricity to 1,200 farmers and made headlines across the country. Encouraged that Ohio cooperatives could see similar results, one Ohio newspaper reported, "Cheap Electrical Power Liberates Idaho Farmers to Happy Lives."25 The cooperative movement was largely successful with many co-ops able to pay their bills and have a reserve fund for lean times, but many co-ops failed in infancy because of inadequate management and poor financing. Some suffered harassment from private electric

22 Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 14. 23 Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 126. 24 Ballenger, “The Development and Progress of Rural Electrification in Ohio,” 79. 25 "Cheap Electrical Power Liberates Idaho Farmers to Happy Lives," The Sandusky Star Journal, December 28, 1923, 5. 89

companies who now had a desire to hold title to the suddenly profitable rural lines, and others

were regulated out of existence by state utilities commissions that had been co-opted by the

power and light industry. One official later wrote, "Neither the private companies nor the

unfriendly commissions ever seemed to tire of taking pot shots at the farm electric

cooperatives."26

Breaking the Power Trust

By 1925, when the Senate ordered the FTC to conduct an investigation into the utilities

industry, it was apparent to many in Washington that the time had come for the Federal

Government to step into the affairs of interstate holding companies. Nebraskan Senator George

W. Norris, who is widely credited as one of the most instrumental public power advocates,

authored the narrowly-passed bill which directed the FTC to open its investigation. He boldly

declared on the Senate floor that "practically everything in the electrical world is controlled

either directly or indirectly by a Gigantic Power Trust."27 When the FTC released its report two

years later, it found no conclusive evidence of such a grand cabal as the so-called "Power Trust,"

but did admit a tendency within the utilities industry to form large holding companies largely due

to the nature of their business as a natural monopoly where competition was counterproductive.

Public power advocates, alarmed at the commission's apparent support for the status quo,

criticized the investigation for not conducting a thorough examination of utility companies'

lobbying activities or their engagement in propaganda campaigns.28 Progressive, antitrust, and public power forces in the Senate fought an uphill battle to have the FTC launch a second, more

26 Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 15. 27 Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 4. 28 Ibid., 6-7. 90

exhaustive investigation, this time conducted openly under the direct supervision of the Senate,

and in early 1928 Norris and his colleagues such as Senator Thomas Walsh succeeded in setting

"in motion one of the most widely publicized and extensive investigations of all time."29

By the time the FTC reported its findings in 1934 and 1935, revealing the holding

companies' pyramid structuring schemes (outlined earlier in the chapter) as well as their vast and

coordinated pro-utility lobbying and propaganda campaigns, public opinion had shifted against

"Big Utility," and the United States had suffered the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and slipped

into the Great Depression. The effects of the depression reached the power industry in 1932

when Insull's Middle West Utilities holding company led the way in a series of utility holding

company collapses.30 The American electorate rejected the timid approach to government of

Herbert Hoover in favor of an activist Franklin D. Roosevelt who was willing to use government as a means to an end. This new president also did not think favorably of holding companies. On the campaign trail in 1932, Roosevelt issued his indictment of the industry's current practices, saying:

"There has been in the past few years, as the Federal Trade Commission has shown, a systematic, subtle, deliberate and unprincipled campaign of misinformation, of propaganda, and, if I may use the words, of lies and falsehoods. The spreading of this information has been bought and paid for by certain great private utility corporations. It has permeated the schools, the editorial columns of newspapers, the activities of political parties, the universities and the printed literature in our book stores...It is an undoubted and undeniable fact that in our modern American practice the public service commissions of many States have often failed to live up to the very high purpose for which they were created. In many instances their selection has been obtained by the public utility corporations themselves. These corporations, to the prejudice of the public, have often influenced the actions of public service commissions."31

29 Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 7-18. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 326. 30 Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 24. 31 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Portland Speech: Public Utilities, Hydro-Electric Power” (speech, Portland, OR, Sept 21, 1932), Works of Franklin D. Roosevelt. http://newdeal.feri.org/speeches/1932a.htm. 91

Perhaps one such "permeation" can be seen in a lengthy article which appeared in The Mansfield

News in 1927. The article cited business economist Roger W. Babson and argued that consolidation was not the same as monopoly and that increasing consolidation in the electric utilities industry had led to better efficiency and lower costs.32

Roosevelt established the National Power Policy Committee in 1934 under the chairmanship of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to formulate what would be the nation's power policy. Among this advisory committee to the president were David Lilienthal, Director of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and Morris L. Cooke, the future Administrator of the

REA.33 As part of its conversation on a broad national public power policy, the NPPC began to seriously consider holding company regulation. The NPPC sought the opinions of state regulatory commissions on how the Federal Government could assist their efforts to regulate utilities. The committee thought that any federal policy should work in tandem with state government and not usurp its authority, but likely fearing the Roosevelt administration wanted to do just that, most state commissions participated only passively. The commissions in states where the holding companies held the most sway did not participate at all.34 In the following months, the NPPC wrote several drafts of potential legislation that aimed at "the simplification of corporate structures; the elimination of intermediate companies through an orderly process of liquidation; the reorganization of service companies on an independent, competitive basis; and securities regulation."35 Despite the restrictions placed on holding companies present in the

NPPC bill, Roosevelt wanted legislation that extended further powers to the Treasury

32 Publisher’s Financial Bureau, “"Babson Shows Developments and Possibilities of Great Light and Power Industry," The Mansfield News, January 9, 1927, 19. 33 Jean Christie, Morris Llewellyn Cooke: Progressive Engineer (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1983), 136. 34 Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 42-43. 35 Ibid., 59. 92

Department to tax holding companies out of existence. In an earlier meeting with the committee,

Roosevelt had gone so far as to say, "you can't regulate holding companies so the only thing that can be done is to eliminate them entirely."36 The NPPC, most notably Ickes, opposed extreme taxation legislation, arguing their bill, as it was, effectively destroyed the holding company system. Roosevelt relented with a compromise that the NPPC bill include a controversial "death sentence" provision whereby any holding company operating more than one geographical utility system would be eliminated by 1938 and all holding companies would be dissolved by 1943.37

The essence of the NPPC bill made its way into Congress as the Wheeler-Rayburn bill, which was submitted to the commerce committees of the House and Senate on February 6, 1935.

The Power Trust's public opinion machine, which had been revealed in the second FTC investigation, set to work maligning the bill and its supporters. The American Federation of

Utility Investors (AFUI) called anyone who favored the bill a communist proposing state

Socialism.38 The AFUI coordinated a faux grassroots campaign to bombard Congress with fictitious letters of protest from concerned investors, and the Associated Gas and Electric

Company manufactured 1,300 letters with names arbitrarily taken from the telephone book.39 In

Ohio, private utility companies forced their employees into writing up to 100,000 letters to

Ohio's junior senator, Alvin V. Donahey, who was a vocal supporter of Wheeler-Rayburn, to pressure him to vote against the bill. In July 1935, he turned over documentary evidence to the

Senate's lobbying investigating committee that several Ohio utilities had threatened their employees with termination if they did not oppose the bill.40 The legislation emerged from the

36 Michael Hiltzik, The New Deal: A Modern History (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2011), 206. 37 Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 62. 38 Ibid., 102. 39 Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 334. 40 “Employes Coerced; Evidence is Given,” The Piqua Daily Call, July 23, 1935, 1. 93

fray, with its controversial "death sentence" clause, as the Public Utility Holding Company Act

of 1935, which Roosevelt signed into law in August 26.

PUHCA mandated publicity into the financial workings of holding companies, placed

their financial activities under the regulatory authority of the Securities and Exchange

Commission (SEC), prohibited internal transactions between holding company subsidiaries at a

"profit" to justify rate increases, required holding companies to completely divest themselves

from companies not directly integrated into their electric utility network, and legally compelled

them to simplify their organizational structures.41 This meant that electric utilities could no

longer operate unrelated businesses such as traction companies. In 1940, a federal court ordered

Cities Service to divest itself from either its public utility holdings or its large oil and gas

holdings in order to comply with PUHCA. The company decided to abandon its role as a public

utility and become Citgo. Cities Service divested itself of over 200 utility holdings, including

those in Toledo Edison and the Ohio Public Service Company.42

In 1944, the SEC ordered the newly abandoned OPS to divest itself of its interurban line.

OPS kept the right-of-way for the transmission lines and sold the railway itself to a scrapper, L.P

Kulka, who ran it as an unsuccessful freight line until 1951.43 What remained of the former Lake

Shore Electric, now owned entirely by Toledo Edison, was spared from mandated divestiture because its traction line had already been removed by LSE employees from 1938-1940 as an effort to keep the workers employed.44

41 E.D. Ostrander, “The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935,” The Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics. 12, no. 1 (Feb., 1936), 49-59; Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 80-96, 262-263. 42 Bobby D. Weaver, Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, The Oklahoma Historical Society, "Cities Service Company," accessed March 1, 2013, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/c/ci006.html. 43 George W. Hilton, The Toledo, Port Clinton and Lakeside Railway (Montevallo, Alabama: Montevallo Historical Press, 1997), 34. 44 Harwood and Korach. The Lake Shore Electric Railway Story, 141. 94

Uncle Sam: Power Provider

Ellis W. Hawley identifies a four-pronged attack on the private utility companies on the part of Roosevelt: regulatory policy, subsidies and loans from the Public Works Administration

(PWA) to municipalities to build or improve their own power plants, the construction of national public power projects like the TVA, and the electrification of rural areas via the REA.45 The first

point has already been discussed at length, and this chapter will only briefly mention the second

and third points as PWA subsidies to municipalities — while providing competition for private

utilities in order to keep urban rates low — did not further the electrification process into

unelectrified areas. Furthermore, the TVA had little direct impact on Ohio other than setting a

precedent for proactive federal government power policies. Thus, the remainder of this chapter

will focus on the Rural Electrification Administration and its successes in Ohio.

From its creation in 1933, the PWA began considering municipally-owned light and

power plants as the potential recipients of federal grants and placed them in a preferential

category above other public works projects like schools. One such project was proposed for

Sandusky, Ohio. The Ohio Public Service Company opposed the creation of such a plant in their

territory, and its director, T.O. Kennedy, accused the local municipal power champion and vice-

president of the Municipal Light, Power, and Protective League, Robert C. Beebe, of accepting

bribes from parties with pecuniary interests in building a municipal plant. Beebe responded that

he had indeed been approached by several men looking to bribe him, men he suspected of being

OPS subversives. Beebe denied that he had accepted any offers except a small contribution to

fund a trip to Washington to meet with PWA officials.46 Suspicion of the Power Trust's activities

45 Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 329. 46 "O.P.S. Co. Charges Muny Light Leader is Paid Agent" The Sandusky Register, October 20, 1934, 9. 95 spread nationally and led to rumors that the private utilities had inserted a mole into the PWA who was rejecting proposed "muny plants" in cities already serviced by private utilities.

Secretary Ickes had to release a statement dispelling such rumors.47 The idea of the Federal

Government offering grants to municipal power agencies was a concept the private utilities industry challenged in federal court. In 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that the Federal

Government did have the authority to subsidize municipally-owned power companies.48

The core issue in the fight over the TVA was what should be done with the Muscle

Shoals hydro-electric power facility in northern Alabama, a project which was started during the

First World War to power a massive nitrate plant for munitions. After the war, the facility presented clear peacetime opportunities for power generation and the manufacture of fertilizer, but the Republican administrations of the 1920s felt strongly that a small government should not run such an operation and sought to sell the property to a private business. No businesses were interested in buying, however, and even once the project was completed in 1925, it was kept in public hands by a few persistent legislators, among them Senator Norris.49 Regulatory historian

Thomas K. McCraw, writing in TVA and the Power Fight: 1933-1939, describes this time as one of conflict between a private tradition and public tradition arguing that "the public tradition had two components, regulation and government ownership. They developed independently of each other, but were closely related. Ultimately they would merge in the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The two shared a single ideological foundation, resting in an interpretation of the term 'public utility.'"50 President Roosevelt wanted the TVA to be "a corporation clothed with the power of

Government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise" that would

47 Scott, David R., "Ickes Explains Plant Financing," The Sandusky Star Journal. November 4, 1933, 7. 48 Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 340. 49 Thomas K. McCraw, TVA and the Power Fight: 1933-1939 (New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1971), 1-3. 50 Ibid., 12. 96 serve as a national "yardstick" with which to compare the rates of private utilities.51 Only 10 percent of those living in the Tennessee Valley, who were among the most impoverished in the nation, had access to electricity, and only 1 percent of those in the rural parts of the valley were electrified. Coordinating several generation and distribution projects in the Tennessee Valley, the

TVA was able to reduce rates for its customers to between 2 and 2.75 cents per kilowatt hour when the national average was 5.5 cents.52 There was early talk, particularly from Mississippi

Congressman John E. Rankin, of transmitting TVA power all the way to Ohio at rates not much more expensive than those paid in the Tennessee Valley, but these assertions were rejected as not being feasible.53

Despite the obstacles faced by the cooperative system, those thinking about rural electrification saw it as the basis for a potential solution. In fact, many of the nations that had made significant progress on the problem were using a co-op model augmented with governmental support. By 1930, France had achieved 71 percent electrification among its rural citizenry.54 On the other side of the shared hydroelectric powerhouse of Niagara Falls, Sir Adam

Beck had implemented a partially subsidized provincial co-op program that had electrified two- thirds of Ontario by 1923.55 Senator Norris toured the Canadian province's power system in 1925 and shared his findings on the floor of Congress.

Of the four points in Roosevelt's plan to weaken the Power Trust, the president had a special interest in the idea of rural electrification. He devoted a chapter to the subject in his 1933 book, Looking Forward. Roosevelt, like Norris, saw Canada as an inspiration. He wrote,

51 Hiltzik, The New Deal, 73. 52 McCraw, TVA and the Power Fight, 61. 53 Ballenger, “The Development and Progress of Rural Electrification in Ohio,” 105. 54 Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 16. 55 Paul McKay, Electric Empire: The Inside Story of Ontario Hydro (Toronto: Between The Lines, 1983), 27. 97

"[Electricity] can relieve the drudgery of the housewife and lift a great burden from the shoulders of the farmer. It has not done so yet. We are backward in the use of electricity in our homes and on our farms. In Canada the average home uses twice as much electric power per family as we do in the United States. What prevents us from taking advantage of the great economic and human agency?"56 Roosevelt's first interest in "getting electricity into farm homes" began in

1924 during a stay in Warm Springs, Georgia where he discovered the rural electric bill was quadruple his rate at Hyde Park.57 As Governor of New York, Roosevelt revamped the mission of the New York Public Service Commission from an "umpire" arbitrating disputes between utilities and their investors to a body which ensured "that utilities do two things — give service and charge reasonable rates."58 He concluded by stating what would be his policy as president:

"State-owned and Federally-owned power sites can and should properly be developed by government itself."59

Roosevelt began implementation of a rural electrification policy for the entire nation in

1935 after the persistent recommendations of Morris L. Cooke. Cooke had served as director of the Giant Power Board, a failed rural electrification plan in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania

Governor and former Chief of the United States Forest Service under Theodore Roosevelt,

Gifford Pinchot, appointed Cooke to direct the Giant Power Survey which was tasked with determining the efficacy of utility regulation within the state. Cooke believed electricity was a public resource and should be distributed in a fashion more beneficial to the public good.60 The

Survey issued its report in 1925 recommending the Giant Power Board be granted authority to

56 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Looking Forward (1933; Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2009), 117-118. 57 Slattery, Rural America Lights Up, 27. 58 Roosevelt, Looking Forward, 115. 59 Ibid., 123. 60 Christie, Morris Llewellyn Cooke, 71. 98 coordinate the centralization of public generation facilities near the state's abundant coal resources to produce a low-cost "pool" of cheap power that could be distributed at cost to regional retailers. As part of its efforts, Pennsylvania was to set up a subsidized rural distribution system for farmers. The Survey's recommendations fell on deaf ears in the Pennsylvania legislature, and criticism from the state's utility holding companies made the organization politically unpopular. Pinchot dissolved Giant Power in 1926.61

Despite Giant Power's failure, then Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt saw a kindred spirit on the issue of rural power and appointed Cooke as a trustee of his newly created New York

Power Authority. Under Cooke's tenure, the Power Authority conducted the first in-depth study on the costs of rural electrical development, and the study's findings showed that the power industry's figures of $2,000 per mile of line were two to three times over-inflated.62 As Roosevelt settled into the White House after his inauguration, he tapped Cooke as a consultant to the PWA, and Cooke spent the following two years trying to get the president to commit to a national rural electrification program. Cooke focused his attention on gradually winning the support of

Secretary Ickes through multiple proposals. Roosevelt, to Cooke's dismay, showed little interest in committing to any kind of grand power plan throughout 1933 or into the first half of 1934.

However, the catalyst for selecting and implementing a policy for rural electrification seems to have been a meeting on power and agriculture between the president and Edward O' Neal, the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), in September during which O'Neal recommended the president take advice from Cooke about starting some kind of rural electrification program.63 Over the following winter, estimates of the potential costs and benefits

61 Ibid., 75-82. 62 Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 33. 63 Ibid., 43-44. 99 of rural electrification were performed by an AFBF advisory committee to the president, which was headed by O'Neal, who was under pressure from electricity-starved farmers, particularly in

Ohio. In February 1935, the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation (OFBF) passed a resolution of all 88 counties for "establishing cooperative utility companies in rural areas throughout the state, and if possible to seek part of the [$4.8 billion] Federal Works Appropriation to aid in the construction of power plants."64

On May 11, 1935, the president issued Executive Order 7037 thereby creating the Rural

Electrification Administration with Cooke as Administrator. The program's mandate was "To initiate, formulate, administer, and supervise a program of approved projects with respect to the generation, transmission, and distribution of electric energy in rural areas."65 The president funded the organization's activities with $100 million allocated from the $5 billion Congress had authorized for relief projects one month earlier.66 The New York Times described the policy as

"Authority to do an electric power business so broad as to appear unlimited."67

In its first months, the REA was anything but unlimited. In addition to the constraining budget unsuitable for the REA's grandiose assignment, Cooke quickly realized his organization would have difficulty working as a relief agency. Relief agencies were required to use 25 percent of their funding to hire labor, and 90 percent of the hires had to come from the unemployed. But the vast majority of the unemployed were unskilled, and what little labor the REA would need would have to come from specially trained workers. The president converted the REA into a

64 Slattery, Rural America Lights Up, 30. 65 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Executive Order 7037: Establishing the Rural Electrification Administration,” May 11, 1935. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Wooley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15057. 66 Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 45. 67 The Associated Press, "Broad Powers are Granted," The New York Times, May 12, 1935, 8. 100

lending agency, a move one economist called "the first and most far reaching fundamental policy

decision in the history of the REA."68

The REA was in business. On July 24, a committee from the power industry issued a

report of what REA loans could look like. It suggested that with $113 million (more than the

REA's budget for the year), 250,000 farms could be electrified at a cost of about $1,400 per mile.

The report ignored the issue of rural rates and insinuated that few farms were not currently

receiving service. Cooke was unsettled by the industry's conclusions but resolved to work with

them on some kind of compromise. While proposals from electrical co-ops accumulated, Cooke

was hesitant to approve any of them in hopes that the power industry, with the necessary

equipment and personnel already in place, would rise to the occasion. Cooke received his first

and only loan application from a private company in the fall which he rejected outright due to its

proposed high rates and lack of specification on what areas should be electrified. Cooke's

patience was exhausted. In November, he signed off on loans to eleven waiting cooperatives at

an interest rate of 3 percent. The loans also carried provisions for low-cost financing for farmers

to purchase appliances and install wiring in their homes.69

The first applications from Ohio were submitted in August by Shelby and Miami

Counties requesting loans to benefit over a thousand farmers and, by early October, the OFBF

had facilitated the requests of six more co-ops.70 After months of waiting, The Piqua Daily Call reported on November 4 that "Under a contract just signed and also approved by the Rural

Electrification Administration at Washington, the Piqua municipal light plant is to furnish current to a wide network of rural lines soon to be built, covering Miami and Shelby counties and

68 Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 47-48. 69 Brown, Electricity for Rural America, 50, 55. Slattery, Rural America Lights Up, 34. 70 "Shelby-co Is Seeking Rural Electrification," The Sandusky Star Journal, August 22, 1935, 1. The Circleville (Ohio) Herald, "Rural Electrification Pushed by 25,000 Farmers," October 2, 1935, 6. 101

possibly Champaign county as well."71 Piqua wasted no time in getting the $254,000, 193 line-

mile project underway. The town hosted a ceremony with 500 attendees the next week

"celebrating establishment of the first farmer-owned cooperative electric line in the United

States."72 The Piqua rural power grid would be switched on the following summer giving light to

190 Miami County farms with an additional 200 Shelby County farms getting their power the

next week.73 The New York Times reported that across the nation, the REA's first round of loans

had totaled more than $1,274,000 for 1,125 miles of line servicing over four-thousand farms.74

Upon receiving news that federal relief was becoming a reality, farmers began organizing

into electric cooperatives. The OFBF released a pamphlet instructing farmers not yet involved in

the rural electrification movement on how to organize their county OFBF chapter to create a

local electricity cooperative in their area.75 It also formed the Farm Bureau Rural Electrification

Cooperative, Inc. in June, 1935, to serve as liaison for farmers, offering legal, engineering, and

accounting support so that local cooperatives could properly apply for REA loans.76 A genuine grassroots effort developed on the part of farmers to recruit their friends and neighbors to join a cooperative and give right-of-way for transmission lines. One Huron County teenager, Paula

Porter, spent the summer of 1936 going door to door collecting consent to rights-of-way and five-dollar memberships, a markedly cheaper amount than the fees of earlier co-ops likely due to the lower construction and equipment costs of the REA. She recalled several years later,

"Electricity was a dream for rural people, and [five dollars] was hard to come by. So you can see

71 "Rural Electrification in Two Counties is Approved," The Piqua Daily Call, November 4, 1935, 10. 72 "First REA Power Line in Miami-Co," The Sandusky Star Journal, November 12, 1935, 1. Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc. The Light and the Power: Commemorating 50 Years of Electricity in Rural Ohio (Columbus: Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc., 1985), 15. 73 "Rural Power System Opens," The Lima News, June 16, 1935. 74 "4,247 More Farms to Get Electricity," The New York Times, November 5, 1935, 8. 75 Ballenger, “The Development and Progress of Rural Electrification in Ohio,” 81. 76 Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc. The Light and the Power, 13. 102 why they didn't agree immediately. Maybe I'd pick one up here and one there. But I kept going back and going back, knocking on doors. I don't remember how many families I signed up. But I do know I signed up more than anyone else in Huron County."77

Until the REA began building lines, prevailing practice had required that farmers cooperatives pay the private utilities' inflated costs of $1,600-$2,000 per mile upfront, putting the entire prospect out of reach of most co-ops. But the site engineers and unskilled workers involved in the construction of REA quickly learned how to trim costs to $600-$900 per mile without sacrificing quality. They adopted a Taylorite assembly line system with each unit specializing in a particular task such as digging holes, attaching hardware, or setting the poles.

REA workers also redesigned the means of mounting the transmission wires to the poles by securing the wires directly to the pole and eliminating the need for a horizontal crossbar entirely.78 A laborer was likely to make about 25 cents an hour if they maintained a production quota with bonuses if they exceeded it. As one hole digger remembered, "We were told dig eight holes a day or don't come back tomorrow."79 The private utilities attempted to block the progress of REA construction in Ohio and of REA laborers nationally by building "spite lines" through the middle of rural electric cooperatives and using a "cream-skimming policy" to acquire enough rural customers to fatally disrupt a cooperative's ability to organize an area and apply for a loan.80 The conflicts between the cooperatives and the private "spite lines" often resulted in legal disputes. The Miami County co-op, for example, encountered this problem with a local power company shortly after it began construction in November 1935, and the offending company was ordered to stop its activities. Elsewhere in Ohio, farmers took axes to the poles of the "spite

77 Ibid., 13. 78 Ibid., 16. 79 Ibid., 17. 80 Funigiello, Toward a National Power Policy, 143. 103 lines," incensed that after being ignored for so long, the private utilities had the audacity to block the progress of their co-ops.81

Administrator Cooke quickly realized the task of bringing rural electrification to millions of un-serviced farms across the United States would require more than a $100 million allotment of emergency aid. He decided the REA needed to become a ten-year program with the goal of 50 percent electrification by its expiration. With the help of Senator Norris, Cooke was able to bring the issue before the Senate, and on May 20, 1936, Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act.

The Act gave the REA a lifespan of ten years with an annual budget of $40 million (following a one-time $50 million allowance for fiscal year 1936) to make loans of a term no greater than 25 years with priority given to public co-ops and non-profit organizations.82

With the REA policy on permanent footing, Cooke stepped down as Administrator. His successors continued to approve loans for rural co-operatives and the electrically lit houses became a more common sight in the countryside. The New York Times calculated in early 1937 that of the $50 million allotted for 1936, $42 million had been loaned out to service 180,000 farms with another $5 million pending.83 According to the Census of Electrical Industries for

1937, the nation was generating 52 percent more electricity than it had been in 1932. Ohio had increased its generation by 65.8 percent during the same five years.84 Representative Harold K.

Claypool of Ohio's Eleventh District recognized the program’s accomplishments as early as 1936 when he battled for permanence for the REA on the House floor: "I am pleased to say that one- seventh of the [$7,566,525 authorized to Ohio] has gone to the Eleventh Ohio District...When

81 Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc. The Light and the Power, 19. 82 U.S. Congress, “The Rural Electrification Act of 1936,” May 20, 1936, accessed April 13, 2012, http://www.ccrh.org/comm/moses/primary/electrif.html. 83 "Farm Loans Reach $42,000,000," The New York Times, April 7, 1937, 10. 84 U.S. Department of Commerce, Census of Electrical Industries: 1937, 34-35. 104

this program was inaugurated, electricity was available to only a little more than 10 percent of

the farms in my district. When we have completed the projects for which loans have already

been approved, 50 percent of the farms in my district will be able to secure electric service."85

Electricity revolutionized life on the farm for millions of Americans and thousands of

Ohioans. Fifty years after the creation of the REA, farmers in Ohio were asked by Ohio Rural

Electric Cooperative, Inc. to remember what life was like before they had electrical access. One

woman wrote, "We [women] carried the water and in the summer it was just sweltering — to

heat the water on the stove and do the laundry and the ironing. Mother always tried to be up

exceptionally early on [wash day] to get it done as early in the day as possible so the house

would have time to cool down a little bit before time to go to bed. The heat was just

unbearable."86 A Ross County resident said, "It seems we did everything with gasoline in those

days. Mother washed the clothes with a gasoline washer. She ironed with a gasoline iron, with

flames flowing out the side. Our food was cooked with a white gasoline stove. The chicken

tasted like gasoline, cakes tasted like gasoline. Mother was reluctant to take her cake to a church

social because it tasted like gasoline."87

The drudgery of life on the farm without electricity was the subject of three films, Power

and the Land, Bip Goes to Town, and Worst Farm Disasters, produced in Hollywood in

coordination with the REA. The film's director selected the Parkinson family of Belmont County

in eastern Ohio to star in the "documentaries," which were shown in over a thousand movie

houses across the country to encourage farmers to join their local cooperative. The first and

primary film in the series, Power and the Land, opens with a somber depiction of Mrs. Parkinson

85 Harold K. Claypool. “Rural Electrification in the Eleventh Congressional District of Ohio,” in The Documentary Heritage of Ohio, ed. Phillip R. Shriver and Clarence E. Wunderlin, Jr. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 370- 371. 86 Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc. The Light and the Power, 4. 87 Ibid., 5. 105

carrying heated water from the stovetop to the wash basin as the narrator states, "There is a

machine to do the wash, but it runs by electricity. Here on the farm where it's needed most,

electricity is hard to come by."88 In a portrayal of the difficulties associated with running an

unelectrified farm, Mr. Parkinson's check from the dairy depot is short because two of his milk

canisters have spoiled. Hand pumping water over the freshly-filled canisters is too inefficient to

keep the milk cool, and with the advent of refrigeration, farmers like Parkinson can't keep up

with higher standards for milk quality. "Power companies want a profit," continues the narrator.

"They get it in the city where people are scrunched up together. But the farmers are left in the

dark. Three farms out of four are left in the dark, 75 percent of all farms in this big, inventive

country. Seems wrong somehow."89 In the film, after Mr. Parkinson and his neighbors meet to

discuss the pros and cons of "government power," the farm becomes electrified, and the

members of the Parkinson family smile for the first time. Now relieved from much of his dawn- til-dusk drudgery, Mr. Parkinson becomes playful with his son, Bip, splashing him with the new running water.90 Ivens described his own support for public power in an interview during

filming: "The real drama of rural electrification in the United States is the conflict with the

private utilities, who refuse to put up lines to farmers, but who fight any attempt of cooperating

farmers to put up their own. In our film...we had a task into which this natural drama did not fit

as a main line, but it will be there."91 The two remaining complementary short films produced by

the REA, only six and three minutes long, respectively, Bip Goes to Town and Worst Farm

Disasters, present specialized appeals for rural electrification. In the first, Bip is forced to forego

88 Power and the Land. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 328. 106

the play a child should have because he is always needed to on the farm, and in the second, when

a barn catches fire, the slow hand-held bucket brigade is unable to douse the flames. If only the

farmers had running water from electric pumps.92

The propaganda inherent in the films' messages notwithstanding, electrification was

perceived as arrival of civilization to the country. Nye observes that while the farmer had at one

time been the personification of Jeffersonian ideals, by the 1920s the farmer had become a

backwards "bumpkin."93 Like many major life events, those living at the time remembered the

day power was first switched on in their home and their confusion of how, when, and in what

circumstances it should be used. Some farm wives debated whether pies cooked in electric

ranges would be disqualified from baking contests.94 A study from the TVA reported that

farmers used electric lighting to extend their workday by two to four hours, and running water

allowed farmers to focus on more productive tasks instead of spending large amounts of time

hand pumping water for their animals. Refrigeration in the farmhouse reduced the rate at which

the family's food spoiled and prevented the occurrence of debilitating diseases like dysentery.95

With new machines to ease farmers’ workloads, farms required less manual labor and, as a result, Gretchen T. Cornwell and Warren C. Robinson have observed through statistical analysis that fertility rates fell throughout America’s rural areas.96 Just as in the city, the housework expected of farm women did not decrease as higher standards compensated for the labor savings

92 Bip Goes to Town, film, directed by Joris Ivens (1940; Reprinted as Rural Electrification in Ohio: Historic REA Films, 1940-1941, Fresno, California: Heritage Productions, Inc., 2008), DVD; Worst Farm Disasters, film, directed by Joris Ivens (1941; Reprinted as Rural Electrification in Ohio: Historic REA Films, 1940-1941, Fresno, California: Heritage Productions, Inc., 2008), DVD. 93 Nye, Electrifying America, 291. 94 Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc., The Light and the Power, 24. 95 Nye, Electrifying America, 323. 96 Gretchen T. Cornwell and Warren C. Robinson, “Fertility of U.S. Farm Women during the Electrification Era, 1930-1950,” Population Research and Policy Review, 7, no. 3 (1988): pp. 282-289. 107

of electrical appliances. One Ohio woman was not overjoyed when her new electric lights were

turned on for the first time: "I didn't know my house was so dirty!"97

By October 1, 1940, the REA had brought power to over one million rural residents in

forty-five states at a cost of just over $321 million. Interestingly, by the end of fiscal year 1940,

the REA reported a surplus showing that its borrowers had overpaid their loans by nearly

$400,000.98 The 1940 Census of Agriculture revealed that "45.6 percent of all farms in the

United States in 1940 had an electric power line available within [one-quarter] mile of the

dwelling; that 33.3 percent of all farm dwellings were lighted by electricity; that 30.4 percent of

all farms, or 91.2 percent of farm dwellings lighted by electricity, obtained current from a power

line."99 In Ohio, 64.5 percent of the state's 233,783 farms also had electric power by 1940.100

In 1945, the legislation enacted by Congress in 1936 to set the REA on permanent footing

was due to expire. As legislators considered renewing the REA's charter, the private utilities and

their trade associations like the National Association of Electric Companies, formerly NELA, led

a campaign to let the program expire. The power companies argued that rural electrification was

now complete and that the REA was no longer necessary. Congress, however, renewed the

program, and it would double the number of customers in the next five years. The program still

exists as a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But, for the purposes of this study, the

third and final stage of electrification had been realized, and in the ten years since its inception,

the REA had created a means and a method for electrifying the farthest reaches of Ohio's

countryside.

97 Ohio Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc., The Light and the Power, 25. 98 Slattery, Rural America Lights Up, 77. 99 United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 Census of Agriculture Vol. III: General Report (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 454. 100 John M. Weed, “Business–As Usual,” in Ohio in the Twentieth Century: 1900-1938, ed. Harlow Lindley, vol. 6 of The History of the State of Ohio, ed. Carl Wittke. (Columbus: The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1942), 193. 108

CONCLUSION

The film Power for the Land concludes with the screen fading to black and the narrator saying, "The long day ends. Things will be easier now."1 The line symbolizes the end of a life of

toil for farmers, and the beginning of a future that contained much more time for cultivating

social relationships and enjoying leisure activities. As they each acquired access to electricity

either in public spaces or in their own homes, city dwellers, townsfolk, and rural farmers

undoubtedly thought that the newer power source would make life easier.

For electrification in Ohio to proceed into the sparsely populated areas of the state, where

private utilities could not obtain the same profitable return on investment they received in

concentrated population centers, the state of Ohio and its rural residents needed a strong federal

program to work on their behalf. Municipal reforms and state regulation were helpful in lowering

rates for providing a form of competition to the natural monopolies of electric utilities and for

reducing rates for the already electrified, but they were ineffective in promoting further

electrification throughout the state. As each segment of the state's population became electrified

— cities, towns, and farms — the associated benefits of the new power source drastically altered

Ohioans' lives. Street lighting permitted an increase in unprecedented nocturnal activity, and

electric traction permitted a demographic reorganization from cities to their suburbs. All the

while, new advances in electrical appliances decreased reliance on human labor, bolstered

economic production, and improved sanitation.

Charles Brush demonstrated that electricity could be used in very practical applications

through his public street lighting experiment in 1879. Even though Thomas Edison unveiled his

central service model of generation and distribution in New York City, Cleveland was arguably

1 Power and the Land, film, directed by Joris Ivens (1940; Reprint as Rural Electrification in Ohio: Historic REA Films, 1940-1941, DVD, Fresno, California: Heritage Productions, Inc., 2008). 109 the birthplace of electrification. Cleveland became a hotbed for electrical apparatus manufacturing for many companies, including the Brush Electric Company, but within a few years most of the Cleveland-based enterprises were consumed by much larger national financial interests in the Gilded Age era of "big business." While George Westinghouse was pioneering

AC power transmission from Niagara Falls, Cleveland introduced a new form of mass transit that ran on DC. The electric streetcars permitted the growth of suburbs as middle class professionals and wealthier workers moved away from the city's industrial districts. Out of the streetcar industry came a zealous politician, Mayor Tom L. Johnson, who took the new Progressive ideology to heart. He openly fought against Cleveland's utility interests to put in motion plans to build a municipal power plant that would compete with the Cleveland Electric Illuminating

Company, and created a "Threefer" streetcar line that pushed the dominant Con-Con line into lowering its fares.

Electrification radiated from cities such as Cleveland and Toledo to numerous towns and villages by means of the interurban electric railways. Interurbans like the Lake Shore Electric

Railway and the Toledo, Port Clinton and Lakeside Railway placed small towns such as Genoa and Elmore, Ohio into the orbits of nearby cities like Toledo. Farmers had new markets for their perishable produce, and new goods and services that included newspaper and milk delivery were now available from the city. Small town residents who had previously been confined to their communities could now take day trips to visit the downtown department stores or casino and, in the case of those living in Ottawa County, residents could travel in the opposite direction to spend the day at the Cedar Point amusement park. Interurban rail service eventually became an unprofitable business in the 1910s and 1920s, however, largely due to the popularity of the automobile, but interurban companies discovered a way to replace and usually surpass their 110 railway income by selling electric power to the towns and villages they serviced. About the time towns like Genoa and Elmore began receiving electric power for the first time, electrical manufacturers started to release electrical appliances that gave electricity a variety of uses other than that of an illuminant. Electric irons, refrigerators, and radios began entering urban and suburban homes which improved the standard of living in those areas and increased the overall demand for electricity. With technology allowing electricity to extend beyond the confines of singular municipalities, the politics of utility service moved to the state level. Ohio's Progressive

Era policymakers, especially Governor Judson Harmon, questioned the restrictive ways in which municipalities were required to administrate and fought to open the State Constitutional

Convention in 1912 to create a federalist-like system known as Home Rule in which Ohio's mayorships and city councils would have more autonomy and broader powers such as that of the municipal ownership of utilities. Similarly, Ohio's state government created PUCO, a state regulatory commission, one of the toughest in the nation, to enforce transparency in utilities' affairs and ensure fair rates to consumers.

Electrification nearly stopped when the interurbans fell into decline. Many towns and villages in Ohio were serviced by electric rail, but a very significant portion of Ohio's population, particularly its agrarian population, did not live in any kind of community at all. It was not possible for an interurban line to be built to every cottage and farmhouse, and power companies found it too costly to build transmission lines several miles into the countryside for the benefit of only a handful of farmers. After Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1932, he came into office as a personal believer in affordable electrification for all Americans amidst a popular movement calling for a federally supported public power program. Roosevelt's first steps involved restricting the influence and lack of accountability of massive, interstate public utility 111 holding companies. Companies such as Henry L. Doherty's Cities Service Company employed pyramid tactics which allowed them to own subsidiaries within subsidiaries and effectively falsify profits and expenses as well as escape the jurisdiction of state regulatory commissions.

The Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 and its controversial "death sentence" opened holding companies to public scrutiny, placed them under federal regulatory authority, and required them to reduce their operations which made them once again subject to state commissions like PUCO. During the same period when his administration was fighting in

Congress to rein in some of the reach of private utilities, Roosevelt began pushing a power policy that involved the federal government becoming an agent of electrification for the first time. Through projects like the Bonneville Project, TVA, and REA the United States government assumed the role of power provider in a system that was both partially public and partially private. In Ohio, which was directly affected only by the REA, applications for rural electrification loans poured into Morris L. Cooke's office from farmers' cooperatives, some of which had been in existence since the 1920s and others which had only been organized as a response to the REA. After he did not receive the cooperation from private utilities he was hoping for, Cooke approved the first REA loan in the country to a cooperative in Miami and

Shelby Counties. REA workers encountered some resistance from private utilities in the form of

"spite lines," but by the following year the REA's funding in Ohio allowed thousands of miles of transmission lines to be built and hundreds of farmers to wire their homes, finance appliances, and hook into the cooperatives' lines.

Farmers' lives, which required intensive manual labor, were forever changed by electricity. Electric tools, barn lighting, and specialized farm equipment both extended the workday and increased productivity, allowing for more leisure time which was often filled by 112 still more electric devices such as the radio. Electric appliances in the home also eased the labor involved in the farm wife's daily and weekly chores, but at the same time raised the standards to which she had to perform. By 1945, when the REA's first charter was nearing expiration, the process of electrification in Ohio was complete.

Private enterprise drove electrification in Ohio's cities and small towns, and municipal and state initiatives helped democratize it to the masses in those areas, but what finally pushed electrification into places private utilities were unable and unwilling to go was a decisive government program. But it is not the case that federally funded and organized public power was successful in every place it was tried. For example, David Shapiro's Generating Failure provides a critique of federal power policy in the Pacific Northwest. Nor is it the case that federal programs are always a successful solution to issues in energy policy or for other policies, for that matter. However, what the present thesis illustrates is that in Ohio's case during the early twentieth century, a federal government initiative in the form of the REA was an extremely successful and necessary power policy solution to a problem local governments and private corporations were ill-equipped and unwilling to handle.

This thesis has attempted to document and analyze that expansion of electrical access — electrification — from its inception as a novelty to its completion in a fully functioning electrical grid on a statewide level. There has been a sizable body of literature written on the subject of electrification, including works on the inventors and innovators who created the technology used in the process, the financial interests who turned the new power source into a profitable business and the reformers who believed everyone had the right for their "long day" to end through affordable access to this technology. The vast majority of historians on this subject have treated electrification as a national phenomenon, and indeed it was, but most of the historians' treatment 113 of the issue has been solely from a national perspective. The "top down" approach is good for the identification and analysis of macro-issues in the history of electrification, but it often overlooks how electrification affected people and communities on a local level as well as the unique deviations in the national trend that may vary from place to place. This thesis has attempted to address a vacancy in the scholarship on this topic both in terms of a history of electrification for

Ohio and in terms of a "bottom up" account which analyzes the contributions of individual actors and localized events that happened in the microcosm. Ohio proved to be excellent laboratory for such a story because of its significance to the history of electrification and because three of its areas — Cleveland, northwest Ohio, and Miami and Shelby Counties — serve as representative case studies for each of the three stages of electrification.

The evidence indicates that the process by which electrification occurred in Ohio, even with the influence of its local players, did not deviate drastically from the national trends in electrification and related fields as identified in the historical literature. The Progressive Era in

Ohio saw the rise of grassroots reform movements in cities such as Cleveland and Toledo that were typical throughout the United States as evidenced by Henry George’s influence in New

York and the national popularity of his books. Ohio’s experience, as studied in this thesis, also confirms the existence of a national conversation during the 1920s and 1930s about the inability of state governments to sufficiently protect the public from and check the influence of large corporations and the need for stronger federal oversight and authority. The developments in electrification which prompted the Roosevelt administration to push forward the Public Utilities

Holding Company Act of 1935 are similar to those that resulted in regulatory reform in other areas of the private sector such as banking reform via the Emergency Banking and Glass-Stegal 114

Acts of 1933 and securities reform through the Securities Act of 1934.2 The aforementioned

regional studies that examine electrification in areas directly affected by such projects as the

TVA and the Bonneville Project demonstrate that some differences exist in the electrification

experience between regions. At a minimum, the present thesis suggests that Ohio’s electrification

narrative is representative of electrification in the American Midwest, but only further

investigation could verify where electrification in Ohio fits into a regional comparison. For

example, Nye indicates in Electrifying America that the REA was not as necessary to rural

electrification in western states such as California, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming as it

was in Ohio because the installation of an electrical transmission lines to power pumps for

irrigation provided an infrastructure from which to electrify farms.3 What other regional

differences can be identified? Was race a more important factor in electrification in the Deep

South than in the North? Did the extreme terrain of the Rocky Mountains cause a significant

delay in electrification as compared to other areas? Did federal regulatory policies affect

electrification in U.S. territories such as Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico differently than in states in

the continental U.S.? Additionally, expansion of the study begun in this thesis can illuminate

other fields of scholarship that have bearing on electrification. What impact did the development

of electric railway have in the broader history of the railroad industry in the United States? Ellis

W. Hawley identifies in The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly that the regulation of utility holding companies was part of a broader antitrust movement in the early twentieth century, and future investigation is needed to explore what influence efforts to break the Power

Trust had on the rest of the antitrust movement. This thesis, with its “bottom up” approach, has

2 Michael Hiltzik, The New Deal: A Modern History (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2011), 40-50, 85-94. 3 David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 300. 115 attempted to fill some of the lacuna in the scholarship on electrification and in Ohio history, but several gaps remain that will have to be addressed by further research.

116

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119

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