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By Root 7954 0

increasingly restive at the steady monopolization of the industry. Establishing a Gas Consumers Association, they called for the state legislature to investigate the situation; the resulting report denounced rampant stock watering and excessive profit-taking. In 1886 the state passed a bill lowering the maximum price from $1.75 to $1.25 per thousand cubic feet, though a reputed seventy thousand dollars in gas company bribes spread around Albany warded off threats to Consolidated itself. Gasmen proved unable to freeze out powerful new competitors, however. In 1894 the New York and East River Gas Company (1893) built a tunnel under the East River from Long Island City, permitting delivery of Ravenswood gas to Manhattan, and both Russell Sage and J. P. Morgan weighed in with new companies. Outfits like these exerted sufficient pressure to lower prices enough to satisfy big users, and the issue of gas reform was taken off the table.

Morgan achieved a clearer preeminence in electricity than the Rockefellers did in gas. In May 1889 Henry Villard set about consolidating Edison’s various American properties into a new Edison General Electric Company, capitalized at twelve million dollars. The initial stock offering, handled by Drexel, Morgan, was parceled out among various German and American banking concerns, and Morgan became the major investor in his own right. The merger provided Thomas Edison with enormous sums to run his laboratory—and to improve his living standard: he leased a Gramercy Park mansion, bought a yacht, and expanded both his investment portfolio and waistline.

In 1890 Edison General president Henry Villard set out to end what he considered the “ruinous competition” between his company and the other major players in the new electric universe. Villard first worked out a price-fixing agreement, but it was nullified by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. He then tried to persuade Edison to merge with his enemies, but Edison objected that “no competition means no invention.” Events were no longer in the Wizard’s control, however. Morgan arranged a grand consolidation that in November 1892 pulled rivals together into General Electric, more popularly if less affectionately known as the Electric Trust. A scant fourteen years after Edison had invented a practical electric light, General Electric and Westinghouse between them had swallowed all competitors and controlled the market in generating equipment, transformers, meters, motors, and lighting apparatus. Edison, distraught at his loss of control and the obliteration of his name, announced he would “not be held responsible for the acts of an organization in which my voice is but one amongst a great many.”

Capital-intensive electrification helped make the old republican competitive free enterprise order seem hopelessly inefficient and quixotic, as the AC-supplied electric grid made feasible ever bigger generating stations for the centralized supply of power. The financial grid would make entrepreneurial autonomy seem equally outmoded and facilitate the concentration of economic power in a handful of centralized financial institutions.

Electrification-cum-corporatization would also force the issue of how vital city services were to be delivered onto the metropolitan agenda. Should energy provision remain in private and largely unregulated hands, to be distributed to citizens on the basis of their ability to pay? Or should the city and state again become more active agents in the production and distribution of social goods, the model New York had followed in the development of its water and canal systems? And if so, would countering private corporate power perhaps require the metropolitan area to construct a civic grid, connecting the various independent political constituencies scattered around the harbor? These were murky issues, and it would take more than an Edison to illuminate them.

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Châteaux Society

In the winter of 1883 Mrs. William Kissam Vanderbilt, born Alva Smith of Mobile, launched an assault on New York Society’s inner circle—still presided over by