Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification by Richard F. Hirsh (review)

Reviewed by:

• Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification by Richard F. Hirsh
• Abby Spinak (bio)

Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification By Richard F. Hirsh. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 400.

It's hard to imagine being afraid of a refrigerator, but if your neighbor had died from the chemical leaks that plagued early models, you likely would have been. Even so, you might have been optimistic about crop yields from electrically stimulated soil. Or your time might have been better spent "lobbying for better roads [over] electric lines" (p. 249). As Richard Hirsh cautions, histories of early electrification programs "should not reflect today's appreciation of electricity but rather the attitudes of people living almost a century ago" (p. 252).

Powering American Farms is an explicitly revisionist history that sheds new light on private power companies' contributions to rural electrification in the United States. Hirsh rightly notes that energy historians have privileged the institutional narratives of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) [End Page 378] and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—New Deal–era federal projects that spurred rapid power extension out to (as the story goes) anxiously waiting ruralites. In this narrative, federal agencies stepped in after frustrating negotiations with power companies left rural America in the dark, artificially depressing the countryside and spurring urban migration.

By contrast, Hirsh shows, the REA/TVA built on years of study by private utility coalitions. Private experiments extending power to sparsely populated communities and using electricity on farms were especially impressive, Hirsh argues, given the arm's-length interest in electricity at the time. Hirsh doesn't excuse the "morally and legally ambiguous tactics" that have provided fodder for more critical histories of the power industry (p. 227). But, he argues, these narratives obscure the work that private companies did prior to—as well as alongside—government programs. Powering American Farms thus adds a utility-centered perspective to a small but growing literature that contests the common narrative of the REA/TVA as grassroots electric democracy and instead takes them seriously as federal bureaucracies with shifting national agendas (e.g., David Nye, Electrifying America, 1990; Leah Glaser, Electrifying the Rural American West, 2009; Brent Cebul, "Creative Competition," 2018).

Hirsh has been writing about the electricity industry for decades, and his deep familiarity with American electrification archives, both public and private, shines bright in this latest book: in a wealth of new stories about farmers' and agricultural engineers' experiments with energy sources and practices; the comparative politics of state-level rural utility regulation; and, of course, a deep dive into the private power sector's rural electrification projects prior to 1935, particularly the industry's Committee on the Relation of Electricity to Agriculture (CREA) and subsidiary state-level CREAs.

But Hirsh is also attentive to method. Historians of technology who have been influenced by Thomas Hughes should read this book carefully for Hirsh's extension of Hughes's theories of systems momentum (pp. 8–10). Of equal value is his attention to counterfactual history—those "viable choices at moments of indeterminacy" through which "the electrical landscape of nonurban Americans might have evolved differently, but also as 'logically'" (pp. 91–92). For example, Hirsh documents how rural electricity was as likely to become a system of distributed generation as a network of far-flung transmission lines connected to central station power. Nor does he find it inevitable that electricity would come to be associated primarily with farm efficiency. Both of these practices, he argues, reflect the economic ideologies perpetuated by power magnates and federal agents more so than rural ideas of electric modernity.

Such counterfactuals have poignant environmental implications. For example, Hirsh shares a 1914 political cartoon "Time to Wake Up," in which a more "efficient" future dawns over a dusty Plains farmstead. Rays of new sun shine on promises of "alfalfa" and "dairying" (p. 49), both of which have since come under critique for accelerating groundwater depletion (see Lucas [End Page 379] Bessire, Running Out, 2021). Powering American Farms thus invites questions of whether different electro-agricultural logics could have produced more sustainable rural landscapes. Hirsh is not aiming to write environmental history, but he...