n the 1920s and 1930s, electricity wasn’t just the stuff that made the light bulb work. For populists and reformers, it was a force to reshape society.
A good place to start in understanding that thought is the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt as governor of New York on January 1, 1929. His inaugural remarks became a blueprint not only for his next four years in the governor’s mansion but also, in many ways, for his years in the White House—especially pertaining to publicly owned electricity.
FDR’s inaugural address to the people of New York remains to this day a strikingly progressive document, in which he lays out many of the themes that came to define him as president. It’s an appeal to American society to abandon its rugged individualism for a new age of social cooperation.
“Our civilization cannot endure unless we, as individuals, realize our personal responsibility to and dependency on the rest of the world,” he said. “The ‘self-supporting’ man or woman has become as extinct as the man of the stone age.”
Nowhere did he see a better opportunity to realize this vision of public cooperation, he told the crowd, than on the rivers of New York, where he envisioned a system of dams producing cheap electricity for all the citizens of the state.
“In the brief time that I have been speaking to you, there has run to waste on their paths toward the sea, enough power from our rivers to have turned the wheels of a thousand factories, to have lit a million farmers’ homes—power which nature has supplied us through the gift of God,” he said.
Roosevelt considered any hydropower produced on the rivers of New York the possession of the people. And he believed it was his duty as governor to see to it that the power being turned into electricity was delivered to citizens at the lowest possible cost. He went on to outline his general views on transmission lines and power sites.
Went unsaid in Roosevelt’s address was that at the start of 1929, a handful of powerful holding companies controlled the vast majority of America’s power supply. By 1930, ten companies owned 75 percent of the electrical supply. Leading the companies was a who’s who of American capitalism: John D. Rockefeller Jr., J. P. Morgan Jr., and Samuel Insull. State governments gave the companies charters, which granted exclusive access to power-generating stretches of rivers. But rarely did the companies act in the people’s interest. In particular, the companies did a disservice to rural residents—those “million farmers” that Roosevelt referred to. Companies by and large had calculated how much it would cost to build transmission lines in sparsely populated areas and decided it didn’t make business sense. This left huge swaths of America in the dark as electricity became a mainstay in urban areas. A United States Department of Agriculture study in 1925 found that of 6.3 million farms in the country, only 205,000 had electrical services.
For populist thinkers, it all added up to a raw deal. Private companies, given access to natural resources by the government, used them to selectively offer electricity to residents at a huge markup. In the ’20s, progressives had started pressing for a new system in which the government oversaw the production and distribution of electricity itself to ensure that it benefited all citizens.
Indeed, that Roosevelt devoted nearly a fourth of his first speech as governor to hydropower demonstrates the populist hopes contained in hydroelectricity in the late 1920s.
“It is our power,” Roosevelt said in his inaugural address. And “no inordinate profits” should be made from it.
Harry Shaw’s promotional piece for a WPA production called Power
By the time he was running for president three short years later, in 1932, Roosevelt had only grown more strident in his calls for the natural power created by rivers to be harnessed by the people for the people, rather than private corporations. Current events had made the public even more inclined to support his ideas. The stock market had crashed, the Great Depression had begun, and government investigations had found that private electric utilities had contributed to the economic collapse by fraudulently misrepresenting their earnings to inflate stock prices. A study by the Federal Trade Commission also found that private power companies had paid less in taxes than what they’d earned overcharging customers.
Roosevelt clearly thought it was time for his vision for New York rivers to be brought to scale on the national stage. On the stump in 1932, he stopped in Gresham, Oregon, then in Portland, and laid out his ideas for a socialized power system that would get more electricity to more people.
FDR with Frank A. Banks, chief construction engineer of the Grand Coulee Dam, 1937
Speaking to a crowd of eight thousand, Roosevelt said that electricity was no longer a luxury but “a definite necessity.”
“It can relieve the drudgery of the housewife and lift the great burden off the shoulders of the hardworking farmer,” he said. And yet he said Americans were “backward in the use of electricity,” that even the Canadians were doing a better job—a statement sure to rile any red-blooded American.
It was time, Roosevelt said, to restack the deck and put citizens first with electrical power. Under his presidency, no utilities would gain private access to rivers, and power rates would drop.
“I have spoken on several occasions of a ‘new deal’ for the American people. I believe that the ‘new deal,’ as you and I know it, can be applied to a whole lot of things. It can be applied very definitely to the relationship between the electric utilities on the one side, and the consumer … on the other,” he said.
The Columbia River makes its final, lumbering push to the Pacific Ocean not far from where Roosevelt proposed his new deal on energy. Whatever unrealized wealth Roosevelt had seen in the undammed rivers of New York State, the Columbia dwarfed it in magnitude.
By volume, the Columbia ranks as the fourth-largest river in North America. But its true might comes from the breakneck speed at which it carries that water from the northern Rocky Mountains to the sea. The river’s drop of two feet per mile is almost four times greater than the Mississippi, an incredible source of power that in 1932 was still largely untapped. A study by the Federal Power Commission in the ’30s estimated that the Columbia Basin contained 41.4 percent of all undeveloped hydroelectricity in the United States.
Many in the Pacific Northwest suspected that private utilities failed to develop the river on purpose so they could “corner the supply and hold up the price,” as Seattle City Light superintendent J. D. Ross put it. It was deeply frustrating to the local farmers who—like farmers across the country—went underserved due to profit motives. Rural housewives were particularly galled, making them a major agent of change in the coming decade as they recognized that washboards were a thing of the past.
This rural agitation toward large private energy companies was expressed most forcefully through a farmers’ organization that has long been the very manifestation of rural populism: the Grange. Founded in 1867, the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry was conceived as a way farmers could come together to “learn and grow to their full potential as citizens and leaders.” In modern terms, it’s tempting to label Grange politics of the ’20s and ’30s as “liberal,” but in truth they defy any contemporary labels. Best put, the Grange was an organization that looked after the interests of small independent farmers, and more often than not, those interests were directly at odds with large corporations, including the power trusts.
BPA poster illustrated by Lloyd Hoff, circa 1943
Well before Roosevelt arrived in Portland, the Washington State Grange was mounting campaigns to establish publicly owned utilities to ensure that rural residents could get access to electricity at a reasonable rate. In a 1930 campaign to change Washington State law to allow for so-called “people’s utility districts” (the “people’s” being a populist spin on the more subdued “public utility districts” language actually used in the legislation), Grange Master Albert Goss employed the sort of lofty rhetoric that was commonplace in the fight for public power at the time. “The biggest trust of all time is the power trust,” he said. “Its immediate aim is to lay hold of the water power of the nation and set the ever-falling streams to pour gold into its coffers.”
If there could just be the political will to do so, people like Goss believed, the power of the Columbia River could be put into the hands of the people, not corporations, and sold at cost, not for gold going to company coffers; this big unharnessed engine of a million horses would be the catalyst for creating a new society, better technology, and the new infrastructure in which to build a “new promised land.” And it would bring jobs.
In Gresham, Roosevelt was promising such a political will.
“The next great hydroelectric development to be undertaken by the federal government must be that on the Columbia River,” he told the crowd.
Less than two months later, every state in the Columbia Basin—Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana—voted for Roosevelt and his New Deal. And the New Deal wasn’t long in taking shape.
Congress acted rapidly after the 1932 elections and authorized funds for construction of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. By 1937, the Bonneville Dam, forty miles up the Columbia from Portland, was producing power.
Looking for work at the Bonneville dam site
The sudden damming of the Columbia was an accomplishment in itself, but the Roosevelt administration wanted to go a step further. It wanted the federal government to sell the new power directly to customers—similar to what it had done in Appalachia with the Tennessee Valley Authority starting in 1933. Roosevelt’s plan for the Columbia didn’t sit right with many in the region, however, and just a month before Bonneville went live, a compromise was struck to create the Bonneville Power Administration. Put under the leadership of Ross,* a strong public-power advocate, the BPA created a transmission grid across the Pacific Northwest, from which it sold power to local utilities—preferably ones owned by the public. He died an untimely death in 1939 after undergoing abdominal surgery at the Mayo Clinic, so he never had the chance to meet the folksinger who put the populist dream of the Columbia River projects to song. But it was Ross who laid the groundwork for Woody Guthrie’s experience in the Pacific Northwest.
J.D. Ross, first BPA administrator, 1938
Ross wasn’t one to play the aloof bureaucrat, staying above the messy political debates over electricity. Rather, he spoke forcefully about the ways in which he envisioned people using power in the future—he rightly predicted Americans would soon be using a lot more of it—and insisted that the best way for people to light their homes was through a partnership between the federal BPA and local public utility districts (PUDs).
Ross hired Stephen Kahn to run public relations for the agency, and Kahn immediately became interested in how he could use film to make the case for public power.
From his vantage point in Portland, it wasn’t hard for Kahn to see the benefits of public dams, no matter which way he looked. In the Hooverville at Sullivan’s Gulch, Kahn saw real evidence of people who would benefit from cheap home electricity and better farm irrigation—a major byproduct of the dams. In Kahn’s eyes, the huge projects on the Columbia River created a sense of tangible hope.
“The purpose of this whole development of the river is to raise the standard of living of the people here by giving them water and power and navigation and flood control,” Kahn reasoned while surveying Portland’s slums. He also saw the war industries flocking to the area, in part thanks to the availability of electricity, a strong economic force literally being powered by the government’s harnessing of the mighty Columbia.
Stephen Kahn, left, the BPA’s information officer
Kahn’s first attempt to make the case for the BPA with film was a short documentary called Hydro, released in 1939, which he made with the help of producer Gunther von Fritsch. Running thirty-three minutes and scored with soaring orchestral music, Hydro was exactly the movie you’d expect to be produced by an agency of the Department of the Interior.
The movie was popular as far as it went. In 1944, Vice President Henry Wallace had the film translated into a half dozen languages for a tour of Asia, during which he pointed to the Columbia projects as an example of how democracy could be used to generate power for the people.
As displayed by Hydro, early in their efforts to promote PUDs, Bonneville officials were keen to make their case with technical and financial arguments. It’s hard to blame them: the figures were on their side. Early adopters of PUDs saw cheaper power than those served by private corporations, and, as expected, they used more electricity.
Despite the low rates and technical prowess exalted by the BPA, it was clear that the region wasn’t totally sold on public power at the close of the 1930s. In a major defeat for public power, voters in seven Oregon counties rejected a measure that would have created a large publicly owned utility company in 1938. The measure had come under heavy attack from private utility companies, and the election results showed that voters were still wary of the concept of the government becoming too heavily involved.
Poster for the BPA film, Hydro, 1939
Immediately after the release of Hydro, Kahn was contemplating how he could make an even better film. He was not the only government employee using film to sell the New Deal, and he began talking to directors in Washington, DC, and New York City for guidance on how to create a successful political documentary. Among those he consulted was Pare Lorentz, who had worked on Great Depression documentaries. Dubbed FDR’s filmmaker, Lorentz was instrumental in promoting the Tennessee Valley Authority’s dam project and land reclamation in the 1937 documentary The River, which he wrote and directed for the Department of Agriculture. He had also produced the Dust Bowl classic The Plow That Broke the Plains in 1936.
Kahn came to believe that an effective film would not only relate the hard numbers of public power, but would capture the spirit of it as well.
“You have to have something that will introduce entertainment value and will go away lifting peoples’ spirits and singing their songs,” Kahn remembered thinking at the time. “You know, someone said, ‘I don’t care who writes your laws if I can sing your songs.’ ”
In other words, the Columbia River needed a song.
He himself tried his hand at writing some ballads about the Columbia and its power. The opening stanza of one of his songs went:
We face Columbia’s fury from the Rockies to the sea
And we brought to life the vision of a land that was to be,
Of a land that men had dreamed of, from the Grecian days ’til now,
Where true democracy is realized, can Columbia show us how?
The Grand Coulee Dam with transmission lines carrying hydroelectricity
Those lines never found their way into the Great American Songbook, but they display the sort of romance Kahn hoped to infuse the BPA’s staid rhetoric with. By 1940, work was underway to create the BPA’s feature film—a movie that would make the most forceful sell yet on why people should want their government involved in the power business. Kahn put together a script that was good enough for superiors in Washington, DC, to allow him to move forward. Then he called on von Fritsch again to help him produce the film.
It would be called The Columbia: America’s Greatest Power Stream, and it would capture once and for all the spirit and power of the Columbia River.
Now it just needed someone to sing its songs.
*J. D. Ross had a unique relationship with the Columbia River projects. As head of Seattle City Light and a catalyst for public power since the turn of the century, he was hand chosen by FDR to be the first administrator of the BPA. Both Ross and FDR advocated for the “postage stamp” plan, a system based upon charging customers uniform rates for power, regardless of their distance from the generating facility. Roosevelt secured his vision of the widest distribution of power at the cheapest possible price when Ross built his master grid in 1939—a region-wide network of transmission lines connecting both dam projects. Ross held both his city and federal jobs simultaneously but waived his salary for holding the federal post. He is buried at the site of his greatest achievement and the place he called home near the dam and lake that bears his name in the North Cascades.
“Jackhammer John” Words and Music by Woody Guthrie. WGP/TRO – © 1959, 1963, 1972 (copyrights renewed) Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY (administered by Ludlow Music, Inc.)
