The story behind one of the greatest peacetime achievements in US history and a model for today's ongoing government fight with big techâFranklin Delano Roosevelt's crusade to electrify the entire nation.
Ranging from the highest halls of power to the remote corners of rural America, it was an epic battle between powerful industry captains and America's most politically astute president.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in the depths of the Depression, high tension-or high voltage-power lines had been marching across the country for decades, delivering urban Americans a parade of life-transforming inventions from electric lights and radios to refrigerators and washing machines. But most rural Americans still lived in the punishing pre-electric era, unconnected to the grid, their lives consumed and bodies broken by backbreaking chores.
High Tension is the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's battle against the "Power Trust," an elaborate Wall Street-controlled web of holding companies, to electrify all of America-even when the corrupt captains of the industry and their cronies (led by a formidable and honest champion, Wendell Willkie, whose role in the battle propelled him to a presidential bid to unseat Roosevelt in 1940) cried that running lines to rural areas would not be profitable and that in a free market there would simply have to be a divide between the electricity haves and have-nots.
FDR knew better. And in this story of shrewd political maneuvering, controversial legislation, New Deal government organizations like the Tennessee Valley Authority, the packing of Federal courts, towering business figures, greedy villains, and the crying needs of farmers and other rural citizens desperate for services critical to their daily lives, John A. Riggs has chronicled democracy's greatest balancing act of government intervention with private market forces. Here is the tale of how FDR's efforts brought affordable electricity to all Americans, powered the industrial might that won World War II, and established a model for public-private solutions today in areas such as transportation infrastructure, broadband, and health care.
Industry Reviews
"The little known but captivating story of electricity is at the heart of the New Deal. John A. Riggs is the perfect person to tell the tale. The battles between America's most politically astute president and a powerful industry created the hybrid, public-private electricity system that we know today. The compromises necessary to ensure equity and the public interest while unleashing the energy of private markets can inform the discussion of current issues such as telecommunications, infrastructure, and tax policy."
-Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators, Leonardo da Vinci, and Steve Jobs
"Electricity was the internet of its day-and bringing it to the countryside affected more Americans than any other New Deal program. It was also the source of a bitter struggle between public and private power, full of 'high tension'-the double entendre title of John A. Riggs's lucid and compelling tale. This is a fresh angle of vision on one of the most important and under-appreciated stories of the first half of the 20th century."
-Jonathan Alter, author of The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope
"[A]n exhaustive look at President Franklin Roosevelt's multipronged war against the private utility sector....Riggs dives deep into the legislative, judicial, and public opinion battles over Roosevelt's energy initiatives, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, and argues that the hybrid public-private system that emerged in America was critical to the nation's 'economic global supremacy' during and after WWII....[T]his authoritative account is a valuable resource for students of America's energy policy."
-Publishers Weekly
"High Tension: Franklin Roosevelt's Battle to Power America is an innovative history of the chaos and conniving that created America's transformative electricity system (judged by The Atlantic to be the greatest invention since the printing press). Jack Riggs has given us a compelling read. Thoroughly researched and gracefully written, it crisply covers the historical panorama of the New Deal's hard-won achievements of breaking up the giant utility holding companies and bringing light and power to the vast darkened regions of our nation. A must for historians, it is also a gripping read for all."
-Martin J. Sherwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies
"High Tension vividly tells of FDR's struggle to control giant utility holding companies, build government dams, and electrify rural America. He took on powerful interests and reshaped the electricity system as a novel public-private enterprise-a legacy that continues to this day. John A. Riggs tells an important story with relevance today, from reinventing electricity regulation to accommodate new clean energy technology to offering lessons for universal broadband access."
-Ernest J. Moniz, U.S. Secretary of Energy, 2013-2017, CEO Energy Futures Initiative
"Narrative history at its best. Riggs brings FDR to life as he gathers a team of brilliant and eccentric New Dealers to battle for public power, rural electrification, and the abolition of holding companies. The industry fights back with a coalition of stock manipulators and free enterprise proponents led by a remarkable advocate named Wendell Willkie."
-Bruce Babbitt, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, 1992-2000
"The story of electrification is the story we must return to, over and over again, to understand what it really means to build a public utility. Our age, like every age, has its essential services, and as John A. Riggs demonstrates, getting it right does not happen by accident, nor without a fight,
