"Not Quite So Freely as Air": Electrical Statecraft in North America

In the early twentieth century, a rhetoric of freedom developed around networked electricity in North America, providing opportunities and challenges for industrializing states to define their responsibilities to their citizens. Vibrant forums within and between industrializing nations ranged widely over whether electricity was a right or a privilege-and where and for whom. Policymakers questioned whether the proper role for government was to provide public tax-funded electricity, to regulate the private sector, or to guide infrastructure development through targeted financing. These debates became particularly fierce over the role of electricity in eliminating disparities between urban and rural lifestyles. This paper traces the development of electrification programs in Ontario, Canada, and the rural United States as intentionally divergent outcomes of a transnational dialogue. In doing so, it explores early public interventions in electrification as experiments in governance.