Over the course of the mid-20th century, federal policy transformed the electric power sector in the United States. By 1967, nearly a thousand rural electric cooperatives covered the nation and served most of the country’s geographic territory and about 10 percent of the population. Thanks in part to federal support, hundreds of communities municipalized private utilities and established public agencies to distribute power. In 2021, public and cooperative utility served more than 28% of all customers. The State of Nebraska fully embraced consumer-owned electric utilities: All Nebraskans are served by either publicly owned or cooperative power systems.
TVA Chairman David Lilienthal touted the TVA and its activities as exemplars of “democracy at the grassroots.” In his 1944 book, TVA: Democracy on the March, Lilienthal reviewed the TVA’s many accomplishments and offered his philosophy for the TVA. He highlighted rural electric cooperatives in the TVA region as an example of grassroots democracy. Farmers had come together and set up their own institutions to obtain power service. Lilienthal described municipal and cooperative power systems that distributed TVA power as democratic, with control “lodged with the people themselves.”
Do Lilienthal’s lofty words describe the record of the TVA, distributors of TVA power, and cooperative and public power generally in the United States? Have they been models of “grassroots democracy”? Or is the phrase an empty platitude? The answer is that some cooperative and public power institutions have lived up to Lilienthal’s lofty words some of the time. The nearly century-long experience of these institutions reflects an inconsistent democratic record.