Forgotten Man, The Read Online Free PDF

the South.” Ford had tried to write a contract with the government to run Wilson Dam as a nitrate plant—indeed, Hoover hoped to broker the deal. But Congress had rejected it. Lawmakers like George Norris believed the government should control power.
    Another hero on the horizon throughout the decade was Thomas Edison, the man who started the electrification boom. Across the country, people revered him; from time to time Edison would mount a contest to find young men of “all around ability” at his East Orange labs, and hundreds signed up. A young Vermonter named Bill Wilson who sat for and won one contest later recalled that seeing Edison in his lab coat, with the faint scars from a chemical explosion on his cheek, was to see the personification of American genius. In the summer of 1928, Congress would ask Mellon at the Treasury to strike a medal in Edison’s honor. Mellon traveled to Llewellyn Park in New Jersey to give Edison the medal. From the base of a “small and illustrious company,” Mellon told the crowd in his whispery voice, Edison had delivered what a businessman ought to. Edison had “not only changed the conditions under which men live” but also “helped to bring about a new social order.”
    Yet another hero was the British-born Sam Insull, who had started out in America keeping Edison’s books. While on the East Coast with Edison, Insull had discovered that selling electric irons to Schenectady housewives was a good way to increase household use of power. His second insight had involved the economy of scale. Wall Street believed that each family or street needed a generator. There was even the idea that each gentleman should have his own generator, just like his own yacht; J. P. Morgan had one belching on his property in New York’s Murray Hill. But Insull, feeling that the yacht was inefficient, had gone to Chicago. What Wall Street could not see, La Salle Street perceived, providing Insull capital to finance central power stations. In this fashion he achieved a miracle: he established power prices that were acceptable to the small consumer.
    Insull’s Chicago was a rough place. Before the war a college student from Indiana named David Lilienthal described his experience on a visit in 1917: he came across a crowd surrounding a puddle, and stuck his head among the others to see “what these busy-men-of-the-world were watching with such evident enjoyment.” It was “but a tiny mouse, swimming about in the pool.” Lilienthal was disgusted to see that “whenever he would struggle to a place of safety—someone would stick out his mahogany cane and throw the poor quivering thing back to his death. When this would happen,” Lilienthal noted, “some portly comfortable looking son-of-a-gun would shift his cigar and chuckle.” The young man commented on the Chicagoans in his diary: “And such creatures expect mercy for themselves from some higher authority, as they are to mice!”
    Where others saw lawlessness, though, Insull saw opportunity. He was brave, he was aggressive—a frontier man—and few laws stood in his way. Insull wired the city, then the state, and then other parts of the country—like Ford, always plowing cash back into projects. When banks could not provide cash, he had used equity vehicles to raise the money, repeatedly creating holding companies, parent companies that owned operating utilities.
    Critics said that he was watering down stock. But all Insull saw was the need for cash—the industry was the world’s most promising and would grow only if it got capital. And it did: the line on graphs of the American utilities industry in the 1910s and ’20s moved up in an incontrovertible diagonal, consumption increasing each year, even in the early 1920s recession, seemingly independent of the overall economy. At his high point Insull provided a full eighth of America’s electrical power. To reward Chicago for the prosperity it had given him, Insull would spend the late