Excessive Rigidity: FDR’s Battle to Energy America

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took workplace within the depths of the Despair, excessive pressure―or excessive voltage―energy strains had been marching throughout the nation for many years, delivering city People a parade of life-transforming innovations from electrical lights and radios to fridges and washing machines. However most rural People nonetheless lived within the punishing pre-electric period, unconnected to the grid, their lives consumed and our bodies damaged by backbreaking chores.

Excessive Rigidity is the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s battle towards the “Energy Belief,” an elaborate Wall Road-controlled net of holding firms, to impress
all of America―even when the corrupt captains of the business and their cronies (led by a formidable and sincere champion, Wendell Willkie, whose position within the battle propelled him to a presidential bid to unseat Roosevelt in 1940) cried that operating strains to rural areas wouldn’t be worthwhile and that in a free market there would merely should be a divide between the electrical energy haves and have-nots.

FDR knew higher. And on this story of shrewd political maneuvering, controversial laws, New Deal authorities organizations just like the Tennessee Valley Authority, the packing of Federal courts, towering enterprise figures, grasping villains, and the crying wants of farmers and different rural residents determined for providers essential to their each day lives, John A. Riggs has chronicled democracy’s biggest balancing act of presidency intervention with personal market forces. Right here is the story of how FDR’s efforts introduced inexpensive electrical energy to all People, powered the commercial may that received World Struggle II, and established a mannequin for public-private options at the moment in areas comparable to transportation infrastructure, broadband, and well being care.