Zeb Kantrowitz's Reviews > Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison’s American Utopia

It's not that this isn't a good book, but it is more of a middle of the road, it's ok type of book. The title is a little misleading in that Edison plays a small part and is never truly enthusiastic when it comes to Ford's vision. Much of the last third of the book has little to do with Ford, and he is mentioned only in comparison as to what did happen.

Just after WW1 Ford was in his most "prophetic" and what was like his "Robert Moses" period. Ford had wanted to recreate his company into the world's first conglomerate. He had gone on a buying spree of steel companies, glass manufacturers and other suppliers of parts for this cars. He even tried to build a city in Brazil (call Fordlandia) to supply rubber for tires. He wanted to be able to control every piece that went into his cars including seats.

Having built the largest car plant in the world at River Rouge, which was vertically integrated. Ford wanted to build a seventy-five mile long industrial park. He would use the electricity from the damming of the Tennessee River (in twenty plus places) interspersed with farming communities and small towns. It was the damming of the river that became controversial. Politicians in the area and those on the approving committees didn't want Ford to control that much electricity.

Ford's request bounced around the Congress for over seven years until he finally gave up. The book now takes up the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority under the Roosevelt Administration. The electricity would be government controlled and eventually force the local privately held Power Companies to lower their prices by half. Hager then discusses how the area around TVA ended up doing just as well as the Tennessee Valley.

My problem with this book is the amount of time that Edison was included, probably less than 20% and Ford (50%) and 30% for TVA. He would have been better to title it the "History of the TVA".