Dam Crazy for White Coal in the New South - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 33

that moved people “across the continent without change of cars,” and he likened individu-
al energy companies to independent railroads that shared standardized railroad tracks and
equipment. Each energy company, Martin argued, was “independent, assumes a duty to
its own customers, provides its own management, adopts and pursues its own policies, at-
tends to its own financial affairs and is subject to the authority where it operates as to
rates and service and security issues. The component companies merely draw from and
contribute surplus energy to others which otherwise would go to waste and benefit no
one.” 48 By 1924, the well-organized southeastern interconnected grid relayed electrical
power over 3,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and served 6 million people in a
120,000-square-mile region encompassing a half-dozen states. 49
Critics condemned the early interconnections and the vast Super Power network. These
networks, in the words of historian Sarah T. Phillips, consolidated “power—electric power,
manufacturing power, economic power” in urban-industrial centers at the expense of rural
consumers and citizens. 50 Progressives and liberal reformers shifted their criticism from
railroads to electrical utilities, since the new enemy, like the former one, was a natural
monopoly. Customers were compelled to purchase services from a single unregulated pro-
vider that faced no market competitors. Industrial proponents considered these energy com-
panies and utilities natural monopolies because competitors recognized there was no eco-
nomic incentive to duplicate service and capital-intensive infrastructure in the same market
territories. A congressionally approved 1916 study by the Department of Agriculture, as
well as others that followed, confirmed many critics' early claims. 51 Based on a compre-
hensive study of the nation's public and private electric generation installations and own-
ership patterns, the report concluded, “There are several lines of evidence which show a
continuously increasing tendency toward concentration in the control of the development,
distribution, and sale of electric power. Each year shows a greater percentage of electric
power being produced by” privately owned entities. The report illustrated that distinct re-
gions were under the control of companies like Duke Power and Carolina Power and Light
(the two companies were responsible for generating and distributing 66 percent of all elec-
tricity in North Carolina). 52 Progressive and social reformers criticized state agencies and
fledgling public utility commissions for allowing corporate consolidation to accelerate in
the 1920s. The individual energy companies may have operated independently, as Tho-
mas Martin of Alabama Power claimed, but the interconnected electrical grids looked a lot
like Stephen J. Gould's railroad empire and bore a striking resemblance to Udo J. Kep-
pler's Standard Oil octopus. Indeed, in 1913 the editors of the Southern Farming period-
ical superimposed a “Water Power Trust” octopus over a map of the United States and
offered a rallying cry: “Do not let the New Octopus Monopolize the inexhaustible supply
of white coal in our Southern States.” 53 Super Power visionary William S. Murray surely
stoked agrarian, populist, and Progressive rage when he observed that “electricity is the