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of the rural United States, would not see electric lines until after the Great Depression and World War II, government intention ensured that most of the rural countryside was electrified much earlier than rural areas in the United States. Evans noted that "the kw.h. production of electricity per unit of population in Ontario is more than twice as great as in the United States and is increasing much faster in Ontario than it is in this country." Although only about 3 percent of American farms were connected to central stations in 1924, he remained hopeful that half of the farms in the United States would be electrified by the early 1930s.

In reality, when Thomas Edison died in October 1931, less than 10 percent of the farms in America were connected to central station power. As he was buried at dusk on October 21—fifty-two years to the day after the first successful experiment with an incandescent bulb at Menlo Park—his widow, the New York Times reported, could see from the cemetery in West Orange, New Jersey, "far off above Manhattan, the sky-glow from the lights his genius gave to the world." As a tribute to Edison, President Herbert Hoover requested that at 10:00 P.M. Pacific time—the hour when the sun would have set over the entire country—the nation turn off all its lights simultaneously for one minute and plunge itself into darkness. Radio stations across the nation would announce the moment. "Mr. Hoover left it to each individual citizen to participate in the minute of darkness, pointing out that if the generation of electric current were halted even for an instant, it might cause death somewhere in the country. 'This demonstration of the dependence of the country upon electrical current for its life and health,' the President declared, 'is in itself a monument to Mr. Edison's genius.'" Most farm families didn't have a radio to hear the announcement, and they would already be in the half dark anyway, gathered around their kerosene lamps.

13. Rural Electrification

IN 1908 PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT appointed the Country Life Commission to investigate the deteriorating quality of life in rural America. When the commission published its report, it concluded, "It is more important that small power be developed on the farms of the United States than that we harness Niagara." But not until the 1920s, when Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot undertook the Giant Power Survey, did any government agency, federal or state, look extensively at what electrification could mean for rural America. The survey suggested that rural electrification would make it possible for factories to move out of the center of cities and not only relieve overburdened, overcrowded urban areas and the people in them but also modernize rural life and "drive a wedge between women and drudgery." And, the survey said, it could do all this cheaply and cleanly. Pinchot proposed an intensive plan, largely based on coal-fired generating plants, to electrify rural parts of his state, but the Pennsylvania legislature, under pressure from utility companies, failed to approve the plan. Only with the implementation of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s did widespread rural electrification begin to become a reality.

Modernization of the countryside had been a concern of Roosevelt's during his tenure as governor of New York, when he'd become aware of the inequalities in electric power distribution at his rural retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. "When the first-of-the-month bill came in for electric light for my little cottage," he recalled, "I found the charge was 18 cents a kilowatt-hour, about four times as much as I paid in Hyde Park, New York. That started my long study of proper public utility charges for electric current and the whole subject of getting electricity into farm homes."

Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933 as part of the blitz of legislation aimed at alleviating the effects of the Great Depression. The TVA oversaw development along the Tennessee River and its tributaries, which drained all