The development of electric utility systems illustrates one frequently misunderstood aspect of the complex relationship between ethics, politics, and technology: the resolution of legitimately conflicting interests. Adversarial political rhetoric identifying any one side's agenda as "truly reflecting the American Way" or the opposing views as "destructive of democratic principles" does disservice to democratic ideals as often as it promotes them.

It has been persuasively argued, by Langdon Winner and David Noble among others, that technological choices are inherently political in cases where the implementation of large technological systems constrains subsequent actions and reinforces existing social institutions. Some of these political choices have been explicitly recognized in the past, particularly when they have involved economic relations, but those which occasion the deepest concern are choices entraining subtle and allegedly implicit effects on "democratic values." We are being called to make explicit these potential effects, and to include them in the arena of political discourse.

Discussion of these issues has largely been urged by the Left, often in adversarial or confrontational terms. The shrill tone of these urgings, engendered by the perception that "the adversary" seems imperturbably indifferent, obscures the underlying policy dilemmas. First, a non-homogeneous society will by definition include a variety of groups with legitimately conflicting interests, compromises among which must be sought in the political arena. Second, massive technological artifacts such as roads, bridges, and utility systems seem to endure longer than the social value-structures embodied in them. Third, previous attempts to predict the long-range social impact of new technologies have notoriously been unsuccessful. The case study presented here bears predominantly on the first of these dilemmas.

The effort between 1918 and 1927 to forge a regional interconnected electrical network in the heavily industrial northeastern United States illustrates many of the political nuances associated with large technological systems: the subsequent history of changing public (and governmental) perceptions and attitudes highlights the dangers of any implicit assumption that one day's interpretation of "democratic values" will persist unmodified.

Various political dimensions of electric utility operation have been explicitly acknowledged from the beginning. In support of his petition for a franchise in New York City, Thomas Edison found it expedient to treat a delegation of aldermen to a demonstration and reception (catered by the famous Delmonico's) in Menlo Park. It was only after Edison was able to counter the gaslight lobbyists that he could develop his Pearl Street Station (the first in the world to supply electricity from a central station to a geographically defined service area). By the early twentieth century, electric light and power had become deeply entrenched in the American economic and cultural system, leading such Progressive politicians as George W Norris and Gifford Pinchot to cast the direction of the electric utilities' further growth as a dramatic conflict between "the robber barons" and "the people."

Superpower: A Federal Dream

Industrial shortages and snarled transportation logistics during World War I focused attention on the need for systematic regional planning for electric supply. Construction of electric generating plants at mine mouths and transmission of "coal by wire" was an attractive proposal to achieve economies of scale and at the same time release a substantial proportion of the nation's rail capacity from the need to transport high-bulk, low-cost coal. The option to electrify trunk-line railroads, and the likely lowering of costs and expansion of markets for electricity and various consumer goods, further enhanced the proposal in the eyes of interested parties. The self-interest of business and the national-security interest of the Federal Government seemed closely parallel.

A Superpower Survey was commissioned, under the general auspices of the U.S. Geological Survey, to investigate the feasibility of constructing such a project in an approximately 150-mile wide stretch of coast between Boston and Washington, D.C. William Spencer Murray, the engineer responsible for articulating the most comprehensive and persuasive proposal, was put in charge. Murray divided the task between two groups: an Engineering Staff to assess technical aspects, and an Advisory Board to consider political, legal, and financial aspects in the necessary detail. Survey members worked diligently for a year, and submitted their Report (USGS Professional Paper 123) at the end of June, 1921.

Political issues proved an intractable barrier to Superpower implementation. One Advisory Board member, a lawyer, plaintively noted "It is easy for any lawyer to draft an Act. . .or anything of that sort when he is told exactly what is wanted." Determination of "exactly what is wanted" involved compromises between Federal, State, and private interests. Advisory Board members were familiar with various solutions to similar issues which had arisen in respect to the railroads and to the development of hydroelectric plants on navigable waters.

The initial, preliminary proposal of the Board was that the Superpower project be Federally chartered with the right of eminent domain, to be financed by shares sold to the utility companies which would be its customers. The Board felt that a minor modification of the Federal Water Power Act, extending its Jurisdiction to large steam plants and transmission lines, would be an appropriate and sufficient legislative foundation.

This proposal met with broad opposition from individuals whose recommendations were solicited by the Board. "Progressive" politicians such as Herbert Hoover (who became Secretary of Commerce during his tenure on the Advisory Board, where he had been initially a representative of the USGS), opposed the unprecedented delegation of Federal authority. Utility operators vigorously rejected both additional Federal regulation and the extension of the "fifty-year-recapture" clause of the Waterpower Act, which would allow the government to purchase any generating station or transmission line built under the Superpower aegis. Such "recapture" would move essential elements of the developing electrical system out of the private sector entirely.

Faced with powerful opposition from both government and private sources, the Board made no financial, organizational, or legal recommendation at all in the Superpower Report. At their final meeting, they agreed that "any expression on these phases at this time might do more to injure the project than to help it." The Superpower Report was warmly received in the press, receiving substantial notice as far away from the Superpower Zone as California. Lacking an organizational framework, however, the Superpower project did not attract political support and was indefinitely postponed.

Giant Power: The Pennsylvania Connection

Soon after the apparent demise of the Superpower project, Pennsylvania embarked on its own survey, called Giant Power. Giant Power's chief promoters were Clifford Pinchot, newly elected Governor of Pennsylvania, and Morris L. Cooke, a reform-minded engineer later to become first head of the Rural Electrification Administration. The men were natural allies: Cooke had fought waste, corruption, and mismanagement in a term as Philadelphia Director of Public Works, and Pinchot had long fought the efforts of the utilities to obtain unrestricted use of hydroelectric sites, during his tenure as the first Chief Forester of the United States. In addition to planning for the integrated development of Pennsylvania's energy resources, Pinchot and Cooke sought changes in the rate structure and valuation procedures, as well as extension of rural electrification.

Social goals were explicitly espoused as an integral part of the Giant Power proposal, and claimed as distinctive. In the introduction to the Giant Power Report submitted to the Pennsylvania legislature in 1925, Pinchot wrote (from material prepared by Cooke):

Giant Power and super-power [sic] are as different as a tame elephant and a wild one ...Giant Power seeks the cheapest sources of power, and hence the cheapest rates. . . [A]and the chief idea behind it is not profit but the public welfare.

The "public welfare" included a revivified small-town life, decentralization of populations and manufacturing facilities (powered by rural electrification), and the triumph of the "little man" against the "monopolists." Inherent in the Giant Power proposal, however, were items which not only ran directly counter to established utility interests but could be easily interpreted as "grandstand plays" detracting from the Giant Power project's credibility.

For example, the Giant Power proposal insisted that all power generation take place in the western portion of the state, in plants to be built at the mouths of bituminous (brown coal) mines, thence to be transmitted across the state to the more heavily industrialized east. The transmission lines would be tapped for local electrical distribution as they passed through the central, predominantly rural, areas of the state. No coalburning plants were to be permitted in the east: this provision seems tailored to arouse the hostility of eastern utility operators by making Pittsburgh and Philadelphia hostage to the historically volatile labor conditions in the bituminous mine areas.

The legitimate interest of the public in reliability of service was simply ignored, or at best subordinated to Pinchot's desire to promote rural electrification and humble the existing utility operators. Further, since Pinchot had been instrumental in settling some previous labor disputes in that area, reliance on bituminous coalcould be interpreted as a simple ploy to reinforce Pinchot's political base.

Other provisions, of a more technical nature, were to the public less obviously attempts to change the existing political and economic order. Pinchot, Cooke, and the electric utility industry saw them as such, however, and based national campaigns on their perceptions. After the predictable defeat of the Giant Power proposals in the Pennsylvania legislature, Pinchot went on a national tour proclaiming that Giant Power's anti-monopolistic stance was the moral equivalent of Prohibition's war on alcohol (Pinchot was a zealous "dry"). The utilities fought back, through the National Electric Light Association, by distributing thousands of copies of rebuttals to Pfnchot's proposals.

By casting the issues as adversarial, Pinchot and Cooke deliberately pitted their interpretation of the public interest against the perceived selfishness of the utility operators. The fact that the utility operators were indeed making a handsome profit obscured the legitimate consumer interests they served in order to do so. At the same time, the fact that Pinchot and Cooke had a definite political agenda cast a cloud over the credibility of their own proposal. In such a contaminated atmosphere, it is no wonder that no progress was made.

The Pennsylvania-New Jersey Interconnection: A Private Peace

The economic benefits obtainable through interconnection were too great to be easily foregone, and three private utility companies on the east coast found their own route to cooperation. The Philadelphia Electric Company, the Pennsylvania Power & Light Company, and the Public Service Electric & Gas Company (based in Newark, N.J.) signed in 1927 an agreement to buy and sell electricity amongst themselves under certain carefully specified conditions. They also agreed to build a high-voltage transmission ring to facilitate their transactions (each utility was responsible for construction inns own service area). Plants and lines remained the property of the independent utilities. No new company was formed, no new powers required, no changes made in ownership or financial procedures of the participants. No interstate treaties were required, nor changes in existing regulation. The state and federal governments retained their existing jurisdictions over the utilities and there was no new corporate or governmental entity to spark jurisdictional dispute.

General administrative arrangements for the Interconnection were elegantly simple, and remain fundamentally unchanged today. An Operating Committee (now called the Management Committee) consisting of one representative from each member utility has the authority to make all policy decisions pertaining to the operation of Interconnection facilities, the interchange of energy and capacity, and the formulation of the estimates and forecasts which are necessary for economical and reliable power supply. The representatives have equal voices on the Committee, and all decisions must be unanimous.

Since 1927, the Committee has had the delicate task of maintaining the smooth and economical functioning of the Interconnection and at the same time preserving the interests of the individual utilities: of maintaining the balance between autonomy and integration. Committee members are high-ranking executives in their "home" companies, typically vice presidents who have spent over twenty years in positions dealing with interconnection affairs. By the time they become Committee members, they have absorbed both the practical aspects of Interconnection operation and the spirit of community which makes effective cooperation possible.

This agreement might be considered unremarkable in its conservatism were it not for the preceding efforts of the Superpower and Giant Power surveys to solve similar problems. Morris L. Cooke, who might be expected to find fault with any such cooperative agreement, wrote to Pinchot exulting "I am convinced that if you had not been Governor of Pennsylvania the execution of this plan would have been postponed five -possibly ten years." He has conveniently forgotten the Superpower survey, and now seems to perceive the private utilities' cooperation as socially responsible, although there is not a hint of rural electrification, social consciousness, or use of bituminous coal from western Pennsylvania in the interconnection agreement.

Epilogue

The Superpower and Giant Power projects may have been doomed by their scope, which brought into conflict a large number of opposing interests. In addition, the legitimate areas of negotiations were obscured by rhetoric attempting to identify one side or the other with American ideals, whether of governmental jurisdictions or individualist principles. The success of the private companies' agreement (their interconnection, the first of its kind in America, has now grown to 11 members including utilities in Maryland, Delaware, the District of Columbia and Virginia) may be due at least in part to the avoidance of issues extraneous to the essential operation of the transmission ring.

It is an interesting index of perceptual change to note that Herbert

Hoover, now considered generally "pro-business," objected to the delegation of federal authority (i.e., the right of eminent domain) to private companies, while some decades later the "anti-business" administration of John Kennedy not only gave the regional networks the right of eminent domain, but strongly suggested additional interconnections in the name of national security. The utilities, still privately owned, were no longer perceived as monopolistic parasites, but as patriotic and essential participants in the American economic system.