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The tenant farmers Agee wrote about found a use for the discards of electricity long before the lines came through. In a country burial ground in Alabama, he saw graves of mounded earth marked with pine headboards that would weather away in time. The decorations on and around the graves would outlast the soft wood, however. Some were bordered with white clamshells. Others—women's graves—were decorated with plates, butter dishes, and baskets made of milk glass. And still others were marked with what the people had never had in life. "A blown-out electric bulb is screwed into the clay at the exact center [of one grave]," Agee wrote. "On another, on the slope of clay just in front of the headboard, its feet next the board, is a horseshoe; and at its center a blown bulb is stood upright. On two or three others there are insulators of blue-green glass."

The slow and halting extension of electric lines into the countryside was not inevitable. Historian David Nye notes that "street lighting in the United States quickly developed far beyond functional necessity to include advertising and public-relations spectacles. In contrast, in Scandinavia, Germany, and Holland, spectacular lighting developed more slowly, but the electrification of every home was considered a desirable political goal, and had been 90 percent achieved before 1930." In countries where government regarded the establishment of electric power as a social and political responsibility—and took an active role—rural electrification often developed much more quickly, although government interest couldn't ensure success without the money and infrastructure to develop long-distance lines.

When Vladimir Ilyich Lenin created a long-range plan for Soviet national and economic recovery after years of revolution and war, electrification was central to the plan. It would, Russian Marxists believed, "provide a link between town and country, [which would] make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of the land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism." But in 1920, not even the cities in Russia had much of an electric infrastructure. When electrical engineer Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii "displayed an illuminated map of a future electrified Russia to convince the 8th Congress of Soviets to approve a plan for state electrification ... Moscow's generating capacity was so low ... that lighting the bulbs on the map resulted in blacking out parts of the city." Without funding for the infrastructure across the vast country, rural electrification fell far short of Lenin's hopes, though the electric bulb came to be called the "Ilyich light" and stood as a symbol of modernization in Soviet propaganda.

But there were many successful instances of countries developing rural electrification programs. In 1924 Harold Evans, counsel to the Rural Electric Committee of the Pennsylvania Council of Agricultural Organizations, published a survey of rural electrification throughout the world. He described the manner in which Sweden, France, Holland, New Zealand, Canada, and other countries had progressed. Sweden, for instance, had been cut off from coal and oil supplies during World War I and had immediately turned to the production of electricity for power. "Ten years ago, rural electrification was practically unknown in Sweden," Evans wrote. "Today 40 per cent of the 9½ million acres of tilled land has access to electric power.... This rapid development has come about through many different agencies, the most important of which are the state owned electric systems in central Sweden, the larger private power companies and the farmers' cooperative societies."

Canada began harnessing the hydroelectric power of Niagara Falls in 1910. The government controlled much of the power, and by 1911 the province of Ontario decided to make the delivery of affordable electricity to the countryside a priority. Although parts of Ontario, which covers more than 400,000 square miles, like parts