Electric City by Thomas Hager

Author:Thomas Hager [Hager, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Maybe the republicans figured that making Norris chair of the Senate’s Committee on Agriculture and Forestry would make it difficult for him to stir up much trouble.

They were wrong.

He had seen what floods and drought could do to Nebraska farmers. He believed the answer was public control of waterways, putting government money into projects that would protect the land and the people. These public improvements, he thought, should not be left to private corporations, because the natural tendency of a private corporation was to make as much money as possible. That’s why they existed. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing—stockholders deserved a return on their investment—but neither was it necessarily in the public’s best interest. The public deserved to benefit from their nation’s rich public lands and waterways, getting the most goods at the lowest price.

Norris was not antidevelopment. He just thought that the development of the people’s resources should benefit the people, not corporations. He’d fought against corporate interests and in favor of public control of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite to bring fresh water to the people of San Francisco (in doing so drowning one of the most beautiful valleys in Yosemite); for publicly owned electrical systems in Nebraska; and for government completion and oversight of the great dam at Muscle Shoals. He believed that America’s rivers were “the common heritage of the people.”

He also thought Ford’s bid should have gone to Military Affairs instead of becoming a headache for his Agriculture Committee. When it ended up on his desk, he wrote, “I found myself confronted with a responsibility which I did not want.” But there it was, so he devoted himself to it with his usual close, patient, meticulous attention. Norris read everything he could find about dams, river navigation, fertilizer, and electric power generation. He reviewed the Weeks critique. And the more he read, the less he liked the Ford offer.

When his committee opened hearings on the issue on February 16, 1922, Norris started things with a bang by announcing that the members would consider two bids, not only Ford’s, but another he had crafted himself proposing government ownership of Muscle Shoals. The Agriculture Committee would weigh them side by side. It was a clever move, making sure that each of Ford’s ideas was constantly measured against a public alternative.

Then he made sure that his hearings lasted a very long time. Weeks kept hinting that other bids were coming in; Norris intended to delay Ford’s bid until they did. He dragged his hearings out over four long months, hour after hour, session after session, probing and pulling apart the Ford bid. He and his panel quizzed what seemed like an endless procession of engineers, military officers, politicians, fertilizer experts, power company representatives, investment bankers, and farm organization figures. They pored over charts, graphs, photographs, estimates of fertilizer production, crop yields, electricity production costs, and the fine points of contract language.

The chairman requested testimony from Senator Underwood, who, in his deep, reassuring Alabama tones, told the

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