Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy and the Modern South

By Casey Cater

Regenerating Dixie is the first book that traces the electrification of the US South from the 1880s to the 1970s. It emphasizes that electricity was not solely the result of technological innovation or federal intervention. Instead, it was a multifaceted process that influenced, and was influenced by, environmental alterations, political machinations, business practices, and social matters. Although it generally hewed to national and global patterns, southern electrification charted a distinctive and instructive path and, despite orthodoxies to the contrary, stood at the cutting edge of electrification from the late 1800s onward. Its story speaks to the ways southern experiences with electrification reflected and influenced larger American models of energy development.
Inasmuch as the South has something to teach us about the history of American electrification, electrification also reveals things about the South’s past. The electric industry was no mere accessory to the “New South” agenda—the ongoing project of rehabilitating Dixie after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Electricity powered industrialism, consumerism, urban growth, and war. It moved people across town, changed land- and waterscapes, stoked racial conflict, sparked political fights, and lit homes and farms. Electricity underwrote people’s daily lives across a century of southern history.
But it was not simply imposed on the South. In fact, one Regenerating Dixie’s central lessons is that people have always mattered in energy history. The story of southern electrification is part of the broader struggle for democracy in the American past and includes a range of expected and unexpected actors and events. It also offers insights into our current predicaments with matters of energy and sustainability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jun 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780822986898

Book preview

HISTORY OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Martin V. Melosi and Joel A. Tarr, Editors

REGENERATING DIXIE

ELECTRIC ENERGY AND THE MODERN SOUTH

CASEY P. CATER

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Portions of chapter 6 include edited material and extracts from a previous publication by the author, which appeared as Public Dams, Private Power: Electric Energy and Political Economy in the Post–Second World War US South, in Electric Worlds/Mondes Électriques: Creations, Circulations, Tensions, Transitions, edited by Alain Beltran, Léonard Laborie, Pierre Lanthier, and Stéphanie Le Gallic (Brussels: P. I. E. Peter Lang, 2016). Permission to reuse has been granted by Peter Lang International Academic Publishers.

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2019, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4564-2

ISBN 10: 0-8229-4564-9

Cover art: W. A. White Company, Eagle & Phenix Dam, Columbus, GA, postcard, ca. 1911, Collection of the Columbus Museum, GA; Gift of Mr. Kenneth F. Murrah. G.2002.59.1

Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8689-8 (electronic)

For Ewa, Krzysztof, and Zofia.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. An Unseen Force in the New South

2. Electricity and the Mind of the New South

3. A Mighty Outpost of Progress

4. Power for the Masses and the Farm

5. A New Power Era

6. Public Dams, Private Power

7. The Heart of the New South

CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Acknowledgments

LOTS OF PEOPLE have contributed to this book’s realization and I’m pleased to finally get the chance to thank them. First and foremost, thanks go to Joe Perry, who long ago urged me to consider southern electrification as a historical topic. His involvement didn’t stop there. Joe read multiple drafts, encouraged me to sharpen my thinking and writing, and made sure that I included enough cultural history. Many other members of the History Department at Georgia State University pitched in too. Chuck Steffen, Michelle Brattain, Alex Cummings, J. T. Way, Christine Skwiot, Rob Baker, Ian Fletcher, Richard Laub, John McMillian, Jared Poley, Glenn Eskew, Larry Grubbs, Ryan Prechter, Sam Negus, Lauren Moran, and Michelle Lacoss all helped me along, in ways large and small. The late Cliff Kuhn always had questions to ask and comments to make about my research and gets credit for the book’s title. Isa Blumi, wherever in the world he is at any given moment, remains a constant source of friendship and encouragement. Will Bryan has been a great sounding board. His work and advice have been invaluable. My good pals Hal Hansen and Jon Schmitt made comments on basically every part of the book’s early drafts. Jon even gave me a place to stay in Geneva and accompanied me on research trips. Clif Stratton expressed unbridled enthusiasm when I asked him to read the manuscript. No one invested as much time in poring over, and suggesting improvements for, the book as he did.

I’ve been fortunate to benefit from the insights and assistance of many people outside of Georgia State, including Bart Elmore, Chris Jones, and Shane Hamilton, who offered advice and constructive critiques. Andrew Pope, Katherine Stephens, and Michaela Thompson have offered all those things and have been great friends as well. Jon Hill, Marc Landry, and Fred Meiton, who have all done fine work on electrification and have been great dinner and drinking companions at locations ranging from San Francisco to Paris (and many places in between), have constantly inspired me. Brianne Bronka Wesolowski was kind enough to give me a place to crash and to host study hall on a research trip to Nashville. At conferences and workshops, scholars such as David Blackbourn, Marty Melosi, Chris Morris, Sarah Phillips, Mark Rose, and Emma Rothschild made helpful comments on parts of the book in stages both early and late, even if they have no recollection of having done so. Troy Vettese, Zachary Cuyler, Trish Kahle, Stephen Gross, and the other participants in the Energy and the Left workshop asked piercing questions about one of my chapters and prodded me to articulate my thoughts more clearly.

Institutional support was critical to the book’s completion. Grants through the History Project (a joint venture of Harvard University, Cambridge University, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking) and the Joel Williamson Southern Studies Visiting Scholar program at the University of North Carolina provided funding for travel to and research at several repositories. An IEEE Life Members’ Fellowship in Electrical History and a Lemelson Center Fellowship (Smithsonian Institution/National Museum of American History) together afforded me plenty of time and generous funding to conduct research and to write. Untold numbers of archivists and librarians at Appalachian State University’s Belk Library Special Collections Department, the Atlanta History Center, Duke University’s Rubenstein Library, the Georgia Historical Society, Georgia Southern University’s Special Collections Department, the National Museum of American History’s Archives Center, the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History’s Archives and Library, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, and the University of North Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection provided kind assistance and crucial aid when I visited for research. My heartfelt appreciation goes out to Sandra Crooms at the University of Pittsburgh Press for encouraging me to turn my work into a book and for patiently shepherding me through the entirety of the process.

Most of all, I want to thank my family. My family in Atlanta—my parents, Mike and Cheryl, and my siblings, Brent, Josh, Michelle, Steven Farrell, and Stephen Smith—and my family in Poland—my in-laws Maria, Michal, Olga, and Ryszard Urbowicz—have all been nothing but supportive and loving. Ewa provides the foundation for everything I do and has been by my side since before the idea for this book even existed. Without her, I probably would never have gotten close to finishing it. I cannot possibly settle the debt I owe her. So it is to her, and to our children, Krzysztof and Zofia, that I dedicate this book.

Introduction

IN AN APRIL 2011 speech at the US Chamber of Commerce’s CEO Leadership Luncheon, Thomas Fanning, chief executive of the Atlanta-based Southern Company, lamented that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had declared a war on coal. The EPA’s proposed strictures on coal-based power plant emissions, Fanning feared, would inflict massive damage on the US economy. The agency’s new guidelines, he concluded, would immediately jeopardize 35,000 jobs in the utility industry, but you also have coal mining, railroads and equipment vendors that will be impacted. Those jobs will go away too. And think about the tax base that would be lost to those communities. If business leaders failed to take adequate account of their foe, the entirety of American life would take a quick and decided turn for the worse.¹

Fanning’s discussion of prevailing, if not heavy-handed, energy policy under the Obama administration spoke to several key themes facing the US South in the twenty-first century: business–government tensions, natural resource exploitation, environmental politics, economic growth, job security, and the importance of electric power to daily life. Yet the questions Fanning raised were not limited to the 2010s. As this book demonstrates, all these matters had long weighed heavily on the South. A study of the advent and evolution of electric power in Dixie sheds light on a range of seemingly unrelated forces that have animated the southern past. Merging environmental, business, political, and cultural history together with the history of technology from the 1880s to the 1970s, Regenerating Dixie argues not only that the electric utility industry occupied a central place in the post-Reconstruction South. It also contends that a focus on the development of electric power affords a new, even revisionist, view of the region. From its emergence in the 1880s, the private electric utility industry in Dixie has been deeply involved with matters of politics, governance, the environment, economics, and culture. This book, the first full-length study of southern electrification that moves beyond those produced by electric utilities and those that deal primarily with the Tennessee Valley Authority, demonstrates that electrification played a critical role in shaping the modern South.

As the story of southern electrification is most often told—inasmuch as it has been told at all—the late nineteenth century is not the starting point. In the standard narrative, electrical modernization only came to this putatively backward place in the 1930s through federal government intervention in agencies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). Despite the existence by the early 1920s of sophisticated hydropower and coal-fired generating networks, as well as the United States’ most expansive regional transmission system, the history of TVA and REA is, in both the popular and scholarly mind, largely the story of southern electrification.² As such the corporate-directed electrification of the South before the New Deal has drawn little attention.³

Southern power companies’ pre–New Deal innovations constitute only part of the story. During and after the Second World War, southern utilities enthusiastically expanded their generating facilities and, as a result, their customer bases by leaps and bounds.⁴ Increases in production and transmission capacity during the 1940s and after—in concert with the South’s long-practiced policies of unfettered environmental manipulation, cheap and abundant energy, and low-wage, nonunionized labor—coincided with a dramatic surge in both federal largess and private investment. By the late 1960s these forces had transformed Dixie into the Sunbelt South. And as the region’s electrical capabilities grew, its prominence in the nation grew as well. In fact it was this southern model of development—trumpeted for so long by southern electric company leaders and political-business elites and sharpened in extended fights with public-power institutions—that informed national standards for large-scale, corporate-driven, and publicly subsidized economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century. The southern private utility industry stood at the cutting edge of American energy development before, during, and after TVA’s heyday.

Expanding the periodization of southern electrical history has importance beyond TVA. A broader chronology opens the way to a fuller understanding of electricity’s impacts on southern society. Viewing electrification across a century demonstrates that this process included more than the construction of generating stations, establishment of transmission systems, laying of streetcar lines, and formation of utilities. A broader temporal scope allows us to trace the remarkable changes electrification wrought on everyday lifestyles in the city and the country, in the workplace and the home, for the rich and the poor, and for black and white southerners beyond the 1930s.

In addition, an extended chronology enriches our understanding of energy transitions—or more precisely, fuel transitions—and environmental consequences in American life. Electrification’s first three decades coincided with the shift from coal-based energy to hydropower in much of the United States and across the world. From the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1930s, hydropower enjoyed unquestioned supremacy in many southern states. Nevertheless, by the onset of the Second World War, water’s secure position as the region’s primary fuel source began to falter. By the early 1940s steam-powered electricity constituted just over half of southern utilities’ generating capacity and total output; by the middle of the next decade, coal accounted for over 75 percent of southern electrical production and would continue to increase for the rest of the century. Although nuclear energy briefly represented a threat to its reign, fossil fuels (both coal and, more recently, natural gas) have maintained their place as king of southern electrical production since the late 1940s. Public debates, political fights, technological innovations, cultural matters, and ecological factors attended and influenced the shifts from one primary energy source to another.

To make the case for the broader significance of southern electrification across a century, however, is not to deny the region’s peculiarities. Given the weight of southern history—including its experiences with slavery, secession, defeat, poverty, Jim Crow, and relatively slow urbanization and industrialization rates—it could hardly have been otherwise. The burdens of southern culture affected the process of southern electrification. Different, however, does not mean exceptional. The South did not stand so far apart from the rest of the United States that its past offers little instruction. It was at once peculiar and universal.

These complexities also apply to the region itself. The South was never as single-minded or as solid—politically, culturally, or otherwise—as stereotypes and southern defensiveness have long held. Dixie cannot be reduced to a monolith of any kind and there certainly were differences in patterns of electrification across the region.⁵ At the same time, though, enough commonalities existed that we can safely make at least some generalizations. When I use the terms the South or southern, I am referring generally to the prevailing (but not universally shared, especially among white and black southerners) historical experiences, political positions, cultural proclivities, and electrification processes in the eleven states of the failed Confederacy plus Kentucky and West Virginia.

My analysis throughout the book, however, centers on the subregion of the Southeast, particularly Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. These states’ emerging industrial cores and leading cities—Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, Columbia, and Nashville—in many ways stood at the forefront of a post-Reconstruction agenda called the New South.⁶ An unofficial and contested (but nonetheless powerful) idea hawked within the region and across the nation by southern boosters, the New South program, thinly adorned with a patina of tranquil race and class relations, would modernize a thoroughly defeated and desperately impoverished region through rapid urbanization and industrialization. No state more than Georgia and no city more than Atlanta embodied the New South ethos. Regenerating Dixie thus most often zooms in on developments in Atlanta and Georgia and frequently looks to their past to illuminate key aspects of regional trends in the century after Reconstruction. Falling outside my exploration of southern electrification are Texas, where the grid evolved independently of the larger South; much of Florida, especially South Florida and Miami, which saw much different and much later development compared to the rest of the South; and the Coastal South. Dixie’s old port cities, such as Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans, were as much Caribbean settlements as they were southern ones and long retained unusual mixes of eighteenth-century social and business practices that largely precluded their full participation in the New South program.⁷

Regenerating Dixie is both an obvious riff on the New South and a term that clearly employs the present continuous tense. Many historical accounts lock the New South into the three or four decades following Reconstruction or imply that the more or less discreet goals of the program went unrealized until well after the Second World War—if ever—and focus largely on cotton mill magnates, planters, and race-baiting politicians.⁸ By contrast in this study I conceive of a long New South, an ongoing project that persisted well past the Second World War and was in many ways driven by the electric utility industry.

The rise and growth of the electric utility industry was no mere adjunct to the long New South and without an accounting of electricity’s career, we remain unable to fully understand the modern South. This book thus expands on anthropologists’ notion of energopower, asserting that energy development stood at the center of life in the modern South.⁹ Electric energy formed the material basis for the regimes of industrial and consumer capitalism that structured social hierarchies and daily life. From the beginning, those who led the electric utility industry’s expansion claimed that their business would be crucial to Dixie’s regeneration following the bloody upheavals of the 1860s and 1870s. They were not wrong to do so. In addition to the coal-fired units, hydroelectric dams, transmission systems, distribution networks, and streetcar lines they constructed, utility executives acted as investment conduits, within a few decades building the region’s most capital-intensive industry and helping court many other manufacturing enterprises.

This process proceeded in stages based on what utility managers deemed economically viable. Following a precarious infancy in the 1880s, electricity quickly grew to become a leading energy source for urban luxury, commerce, and transportation. By the 1910s electric power had become an almost required amenity in well-appointed homes and the prime mover behind the South’s push to take the lead in American textile manufacturing. In the middle of the twentieth century, electricity powered an expanding (if often troubled) southern industrial sector, fueled southern military production, made its way into nonelite homes, and began to illuminate farms. After the Second World War electricity played a vital role in virtually every facet of daily life and served as the foundation on which many southerners could finally stand as full and equal participants in the dream of American abundance.

Yet neither the long New South nor the phenomenon of electrification was ever the unquestioned property of financial-industrial elites. Yes, southern utility managers arranged for enormous investments and led the construction of electrical infrastructure before, during, and after the 1930s. Their stories need to be told. But Dixie’s electrification and regeneration were always contingent and contested processes—and that side of the story needs to be heard too. Though minimized by electricity’s historians, the near-constant conflicts between private- and public-power forces animated the electric industry’s development from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.¹⁰ Ordinary southerners played vital roles in making both the modern South and the electric utility industry from the 1890s to the 1970s, envisioning and fighting for a version of Dixie that would best serve their interests.¹¹ Nowhere was this struggle more evident than in the populist revolt of the 1890s, and the populist spirit carried on for decades in fights for control over electricity.¹² Scholars have recently argued for the importance of watershed democracy and carbon democracy.¹³ For their part, many southerners in the city and, by the late 1910s, on the farm strove for the realization of what we might call electrical democracy, and thereby a more democratic New South. While utility executives most often realized at least some version of their stated goal to preserve electric energy’s status as a privately controlled commodity, people’s efforts to define electricity as a public service—through municipal and statewide ownership campaigns, rural electrification crusades, and environmentalist and consumer movements—made deep imprints on the process of electrification.

One of the most consequential of these impacts concerned the role of government. Certainly, ordinary southerners tried to influence the state to better serve the public’s needs, but so did private utility managers. Electric utility leaders were not simply rational economic actors concerned only with profit-and-loss statements and the firm’s internal workings. Despite Fanning’s 2011 objections to new federal guidelines—just one example of such rhetoric in an extensive history of selectively castigating government interference—southern utilities had long participated in local and national politics and actively courted governmental involvement in their business. They did so in large part as a reaction to common people’s influence and in many cases transformed government—at the local, state, and federal levels—into a protective shield, a generous benefactor, and a channel through which private energy corporations could capture public resources. In other words, power companies used their influence to shape law and policy, extract rent, and gain control over nature.

Indeed electrification was—and remains—a fundamentally environmental project. It involved not just the interactions of infrastructure and human institutions but, critically, of the forces of nature as well.¹⁴ Until recently, electricity’s historians have failed to see these connections. Southerners’ views of their relationship to the natural world conditioned the ways they worked to seize and use their environs to their advantage. The exploitation of land- and waterscapes for the generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power was from the outset foundational to the realization of modern life in the metropolis and, ultimately, in the countryside.

If historians of technology have sidelined the role of nature in American electrification, environmental historians have traditionally had little to contribute to the history of electrification—aside from the ways technological choices have resulted in devastating but nonetheless unintended consequences.¹⁵ Yet this story is more than just one of the by-products that have resulted from a growing society’s perceived needs. The rhetoric surrounding and the successes in altering land and waterways did not simply reflect the appetites of swelling urban-industrial cores. Rather, southerners often cast environmental manipulation through storage reservoirs, dams, power plants, transmission lines, distribution systems, and other technologies as a necessary precondition for Dixie’s rehabilitation in the years following Reconstruction. Certainly, such projects did result in river modification, landscape degradation, and air pollution. Yet especially among business leaders and boosters, these changes were frequently cited as evidence of progress, as a positive good for properly conserving natural resources. They thus fed back into civic booster–leaders’ and utility executives’ ethos of perpetual regional growth, prompted even more development, and led to increasing infusions of distant capital and ever more consequential environmental alterations.¹⁶

Environmental change, though, was a two-way street. Despite boosters’ and utility executives’ treatises about modern humanity’s ability to seize natural resources for southern progress, the electric industry and the New South were often hostages to nature’s vagaries. Regional climates and land- and waterscapes made indelible marks on the electric utility business just as much as environmental factors have influenced southern agriculture.¹⁷ Much of the Southeast, for example, contained powerful rivers flowing from the Appalachian Mountains but lacked substantial deposits of fossil fuels such as coal. The kinetic energy of falling water thus became integral to the construction of an industrial South after the 1890s—when hydroelectric and long-distance transmission technologies became viable—and remained so for several decades. But the geography of southern power also influenced the shift away from hydroelectricity. The Southeast is a humid region but, like the American West, has long suffered from its own issues with devastating water shortages. Especially in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s—though those were by no means the only moments of rainfall famine—drought threatened to cripple private hydroelectric production.¹⁸ By the beginning of the Second World War southern utilities once again accepted a vision of the future powered by coal. Drought alone, of course, did not determine this path; no other single variable did either. A range of factors including rainfall shortages, federal hydropower competition, and skyrocketing demand combined to form a mid-twentieth-century politics of energy that would nudge southern utilities away from water and toward coal. Coal would help southern power companies defeat drought, the ongoing public power insurgency, and federal incursions deemed harmful to free enterprise. Moreover, coal would provide a firm basis for the increasing levels of consumer demand that would underlie the postwar economy. Private electric utilities in the Southeast spent the next four decades steadily abandoning hydroelectricity and dotting the landscape with coal-fired generating stations.¹⁹

The contours of southern culture shaped the electric utility industry as well. Southern culture to a large extent informed public–private-power debates on electrification. Electric company managers and southern boosters claimed that the harnessing of rivers by privately owned, well-regulated electric utilities for use in the city would—at least metaphorically—empower white men and women of all social standings to regain the racial dominance they had lost in the Civil War and Reconstruction.²⁰ Thus race, an especially important element in southern history but an almost completely neglected category in energy history, played a key role in the region’s electrification. Not only did power companies try to sell their product and stay in the public’s good graces by deploying racial tropes; they combined ideas about race, federal power, and socialism to halt direct government involvement in southern electrical markets. Class likewise had significant impacts on electrification in southern cities and states. Labor strife in the urbanizing and industrializing South, constantly fraught with racial overtones, made its mark on questions surrounding municipal ownership of utilities, regulation, the streetcar system, environmental change, and rural electrification.

Along with business, governmental, and environmental issues, these types of sociocultural matters play a large role in Regenerating Dixie. It goes without saying that technological innovations were also fundamental to the process of electrification. But electricity’s historians have thoroughly examined those elements—so thoroughly, in fact, that technology can seem, at least to some extent, determinative of the larger electrification project. Of course I take the history of technology seriously and explore technological shifts as they related to the South, but I do not cast the story as one centrally, and certainly not solely, of technical transformation. Instead I see southern electrification as a core driver of social change, and at the same time I view the sociocultural realm as a key influencer of electrification’s evolution. I maintain that perspective because it adds value to our understanding of energy history as a multifaceted affair that involved people’s beliefs, words, and actions. In a related vein, I also hold that position because southerners most often did not interface with or understand electric power in technical terms. They were primarily concerned with electricity’s effects on their daily lives, their pocketbooks, their jobs, their businesses, their political standing, and their natural environment.

The story of southern electrification as contained in the following pages speaks to all these inextricably intertwined elements: environment, politics, governance, business, culture, and technology came together through energy development in the creation of the modern South. The first three chapters examine the initial phase of southern electrification. They lay out the beginnings of electrification as a source of public illumination and demonstrate the importance of energy resources to the creation of an urban-industrial South while considering the environmental, technological, political, and cultural forces that led southern utilities away from coal and toward a new geography of power anchored in water. These chapters furthermore examine the impacts of electricity on daily life, the rise of popular movements for heritage preservation and publicly controlled electricity, and the roles race and class played in the electric industry’s first four decades. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 analyze the battles surrounding the extension of public-power movements in the 1920s and 1930s as well as the federal government’s foray into the realm of hydropower, especially as it concerned the gargantuan project of electrifying southern farms. These chapters explore TVA’s influence on the southern utility industry. But they devote far more attention to ordinary people’s efforts to bring electricity to underserved areas and to the impacts on southern electrical and physical landscapes resulting from REA’s and the US Department of the Interior’s interactions with local activists and southern utilities from the 1920s to the mid-1950s. This section of the book also considers the interlocking elements—including racial politics, the New Deal era, the exigencies of war, Cold War politics, technological innovations, and environmental problems—that both influenced the southern transition back to coal and brought an effective end to the spread of public power and hydroelectricity in the region. The final chapter tackles a persistent, if underexplored, issue in energy and commodity-flow history: invisibility. It asserts that energy’s seeming disappearance was no accident but occurred because of ongoing struggles between public and private power. Chapter 7 also discusses the collapse of the public-power movement in the 1970s as well as the related and simultaneous explosion in southern electrical expansion, coal usage, economic growth, and consumerism from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s. Finally it shows that despite the emergence of an environmentalist-consumerist movement and the intertwined economic and energy crises of the 1970s, the modern South—and thus the Sunbelt South—has remained addicted to and overly reliant on federally subsidized, corporate-distributed fossil fuel power in the quest for perpetual growth and Dixie’s regeneration.

Electric energy was foundational to the formation of the modern South, and the history of the South’s electrification has implications for the larger American experience with energy and economic development. A study of this process adds not only to our understanding of broader national processes of economic development but offers insights into our current predicaments with energy and sustainability.

1

An Unseen Force in the New South

IN ANTICIPATION OF the upcoming festivities on an October evening at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, a local reporter expressed exhilaration at the thought that tonight the exposition grounds will be a blaze of glory. Alongside flame-spewing volcano-like structures, the expo’s electric lights dart[ed] back and forth among the buildings like fiery serpents. Everything will be weird in the peculiar glow.¹ The fair’s official guidebook likewise emphasized electric lighting at the fair, which offered as its most stunning feature an electric fountain that glitters over beautiful Clara Meer like a rainbow of the night.² Even people with no direct stake in Atlanta’s reputation professed amazement. A writer for the Nation confessed that the Atlanta expo’s electrical display produced a fine artistic effect . . . and the general effect is fairy-like.³

Such scenes, and glowing descriptions of their electrical glory, were commonplace in fin-de-siècle America. World’s fairs, especially after the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, almost as a matter of course featured awe-inspiring electric light shows, electrically illuminated buildings and fairgrounds, and electricity departments. Yet more than simply standing as gaudy exhibitions of the latest innovations, electric lighting at late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expositions signified white America’s racial, cultural, and technological supremacy. These demonstrations gave Americans a feeling of participation in a national experience superior to all others, the fairs serving to establish America and Americans as special.⁴

Image: Figure 1.1 Fred L. Howe, Exposition at Night, 1895. Credit: Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center.

The Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition held to this pattern, calling on electricity to narrate in both symbolic and concrete terms the post-bellum South’s purported success story.⁵ Yet it was only one of Dixie’s world’s fairs. With displays of electrical prowess in cities such as Atlanta (1881, 1887), Louisville (1883–1887), and Nashville (1897), southerners announced their membership in the elite club of advanced societies. These expos furthermore declared that the New South, an agenda bent on modernizing the region through rapid urbanization and industrialization, was open for business. In Atlanta’s case, according to Henry Morrell Atkinson, the expo’s electrical department chairman, electricity . . . will do its part in demonstrating the progress of the age and the latest improvements in the comforts and necessities of life. And this is what the success of an exposition consists in.⁶

Electricity’s special role at the expo went beyond conspicuous display. For Atkinson, electric power was the unseen force that put the throb of life into every section of the exposition grounds; it powered the less obvious but crucially important elements of the fair as well. Aside from decorative purposes, electricity was responsible for the patrol and alarm systems, supplying motive power, transportation by land and water, and a host of other functions. But demonstrations of electricity’s uses far exceeded the limited scope of the exposition. According to Atkinson, electricity had helped turn Atlanta into the glowing, bustling New South capital. This unseen force signalized and manifested in many ways the general gains and advances in governing conditions of everyday life . . . , in social welfare, [and] in industrial progress. These lessons in southern advancement became possible through southerners’ cooperative efforts, with a swiftness and accuracy of purpose which are undoubtedly proofs of genius in those who had harmoniously made electric power a reality.⁷

Atkinson’s remarks about the significance of the unseen force are instructive in two primary ways. First, they point out that electricity was not simply an ornamental aspect of the exposition. It proved essential to seemingly mundane but indispensable operations at the fair and made modern life in a regional capital possible. His pitch is also telling in that, while it spoke to electricity’s seemingly underappreciated part in the making of Atlanta and its exposition, it contained a fundamental deception. As one historian writes about extravagant electrical shows at world’s fairs,