Democracy in Power

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"Private money, public good, and the original fight for control in America's energy industry. Private corporations administered electrical power in the United States until 1932. FDR's Rural Electrification Program changed that, using public money to extend the country's energy grid to 97 percent of rural communities within two decades. In doing so, the program also ushered in a new kind of public industry-the democratically managed cooperative-that has persisted as an alternative to private ownership ever since. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly owned and controlled utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in the American power sector was beset not only by bureaucratic challenges, but by public and private actors determined to maintain a status quo of privatization. In detailing how American energy transitioned from largely-private to sometimes-public, Vaheesan offers a blueprint of not only how US alternative energies may proceed in coming decades, but also the false narratives and missteps that will accompany it. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history and a deeply relevant accounting of traps we've fallen for before"--