The Colorado Plateau became the center for power generation in the late twentieth century, with transmission lines physically tying together formerly distant and independent systems, and exacerbating a political and economic power imbalance between the populations. In Power Lines, historian Andrew Needham reframes postwar urban development in the American West and even sheds some light (literally and metaphorically) upon the rural-urban divide that our current political climate suggests. The growth of cities like Phoenix was a phenomenon profoundly affecting urban residents, but in many ways the rural, largely Native American, populations and their environments even more acutely, as utilities and the federal government built a vast regional power network. Furthermore, Needham brings this story into the twenty-first century.
Set within urban/suburban historiography as well as that of the modern American West, this regional study stresses environmental themes in urban growth on the model of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (1992), but Needham's point is that, in this case, the periphery holds the political power, despite where the power is literally generated. Power Lines integrates many disparate stories to describe this phenomenon, dividing the book into four parts: “Fragments,” “Demand,” “Supply,” and “Protest.” The first chapter, “Fragments,” serves to establish the environmental conditions that created the energy resources. Communities within and around the Colorado Plateau existed independently until, Needham argues, the construction of Boulder Dam, marking the origin of this energy-defined region that would fuel the growth of cities after World War II, cities whose growth depended upon the energy stored in the lands of communities located miles away.
“Demand” focuses on the development of Phoenix from a sleepy farming oasis in the desert known as the Salt River Valley to a major metropolis boasting the moniker “Valley of the Sun.” Boosters projected clean living and manufacturing, with federal housing programs favoring the middle class and urban, white populations expanding the city corps to suburbs, and the infrastructure followed to service the utilities for not just light, but also, especially, air conditioning. The city's economy moved from agriculture to manufacturing and defense, ironically “clean industry,” necessitating the building of power lines out to coal-fired plants on the Navajo reservation 300 miles away.
The physical integration of these two landscapes merged energy policy with Native American policy, causing great challenges to concepts of environmental and social justice. The political and economic power remained at the periphery, the site of energy consumption, rather than the plateau, the site of energy production. Needham's final chapter, “A Piece of the Action,” stresses the political and grassroots resistance the Navajo have shown in recent years to the regional power structure and the autonomy they hope to assert, although it perhaps may be too late.
Power Lines presents a case study for how the rise of cities, and dependence on electricity in the postindustrial twentieth century, ironically increased dependence on coal, a resource associated more with nineteenth-century industrialism, for fuel. It is enlightening that by rejecting hydroelectric dams as harmful to the environment, environmentalist groups, as well as Native communities additionally concerned for sacred sites, inadvertently gave rise to rural coal plants. By May 1966, Pennsylvania Congressman John Saylor asked Reclamation's Floyd Dominy to “tell us why any dam built only to generate power is ever necessary, given the ability of atomic energy or coal to generate electricity far more inexpensively?” (p. 201). This comment shifts decades of dearly held conservationist values that underline the creation of the Bureau of Reclamation, an agency created to efficiently use and manage natural resources with little environmental impact. Instead of long-distance power lines bringing in hydropower, they could connect distant coal plants, hiding the methods and impacts of energy production from urban residents, and largely protecting them from pollutants.
For business historians, Needham provides considerable discussion about electrical utilities and how this urban regional development complicates our previous understanding of the private and public power wars with the creation of somewhat hybrid systems, such as CRSP (the Colorado River Storage Project). Chapter 3 reviews the development of Phoenix's postwar economy and how boosters attracted businesses like Sperry Rand, Motorola, Lockheed, and Honeywell. Tribes like the Navajo also saw energy development as a way to become economically independent, achieving greater sovereignty over their own political and economic affairs. Needham reviews Navajo efforts to control distribution through tribal utilities, but he does not emphasize their broader attempts to engage on the business side of power development, such as through the Council of Energy Resource Tribes.
Lastly, although a main argument is that power lines and the connections they make remain hidden throughout the history of urban development, Needham does not emphasize the history of the technology. The connection of these distant places was made possible with the advancement of long-distance transmission line technology. The relationship of technological advancement to political power shifts is fuzzy. Long-distance transmission technology across the desert landscape, in fact, was first developed to serve the Salt River Valley both water and electricity from Theodore Roosevelt Dam, promoted as the epitome of conservationist values. Rather, Needham marks the shift at Boulder Dam and the growth of hydropower projects under Franklin Roosevelt.
Using primarily newspapers and archival collections, as well as existing narratives, Needham's research tackles a herculean task of explaining the political and economic inequity that the vast interconnected power systems across the Southwest created, making a good companion to Christopher Jones's Routes of Power (2016). Such histories help explain why the struggle to convince large swaths of the population that renewable energies can replace fossil fuels remains a daunting one. Needham's explanation of coal's second life after the progressive conservation era promoting water power is a tragic consequence of often progressive intentions for the American West: economic independence for tribes, the growth of clean industry in postwar urban development, and environmental concerns about the water supply and health of the region's rivers. The Southwest's version of Carl Abbott's metropolitan frontiers obscured the pollution and subterranean contamination of the landscapes that made the region appealing to twentieth-century residents in the first place.
