The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880–1930 by Harold L. Platt

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 593 many hogs and cattle slaughtered, how many freight cars loaded, and how did the totals of 1900 compare with those of 1840, when wagons on dirt roads served as the means of transport? One aspect of the fundamental geography is almost totally neglected: Part of the natural ambient of the city was the mineral wealth of the region—iron ore in what seemed unlimited abundance lay readily accessible in the mines of upper Michigan and Minnesota while incalculable quantities of coal were available in southern Illinois and Indiana and in the Pocahontas region to the east. The concentration of this wealth guaranteed that Chicago would become in its heyday the center of the railway supply industry and the production of finished iron and steel as well as the manufacture of farm machinery. Symbolic culture goes entirely unmentioned, yet it marked a crowning of the civic dream and a lasting achievement in the life of the human spirit. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Public and the Newberry libraries, the permanent home of the Art Institute, and the University of Chicago were all founded during the decade of the world’s fair. It was an extraordinary chapter in urban history and it made Chicago one of the great cities of Western civilization. It would not be necessary to write another book to dojustice to this achievement. Quantitative data can be compressed into tables; the civic creations of the 1890s can be and should have been integrated with the material on the world’s fair (chap. 8), while the rest could constitute the necessary evaluative and interpretive matter of preceding chapters. Nature’s Metropolis is a valuable contribution to urban history but is too much entrepreneur­ ial celebration, too little solid economic, material, and cultural history. Carl W. Condit Dr. Condit is professor emeritus at Northwestern University. The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880—1930. By Harold L. Platt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. xviii + 381; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $34.95. Chicago’s electrification followed a pattern not unlike that in other American cities and one experienced by other urban utilities as well. The story of the initial diffusion of the electric generating industry among many competitors in a single market and the eventual con­ centration of production in a single Chicago-based holding company is well recounted in Harold Platt’s study, The Electric City. In each of ten chapters, Platt links the miraculous fluid with local and metropol­ itan economic development and, along the way, manages to treat effectively the structural evolution of Chicago Edison. Nothing happened during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that matched in future consequences the intensification of energy use 594 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE in industrializing nations and the modernization of energy indus­ tries, particularly in the United States, Britain, and Germany. On one level, Platt’s book is a welcome addition to Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power (1983), and Richard Hirsh, Technology and Transfor­ mation in the American Electric Utility Industry (1989). Dynamic and revolutionary organizational and structural change occurred during the period 1880—1930, setting the stage for the explosive growth that followed World War II. Platt rejects the inevitability of it all that pervades Hughes’s work. In Platt’s Chicago, little was inevitable except tomorrow and growth. As with any other American city, one cannot imagine that growth proceeding in the same way without electricity. Corporate power, as Platt asserts, mastered electric technology. Into the 1930s, consumers were offered better fuses and generators and light bulbs. By the end of the 1920s, Chicago and its growing suburbs were partially the creatures of the Insull system. While the electric utilities contributed to the creation of managerial techniques capable of governing vast and complex empires, they contributed only marginally to technological advances. In the steel and oil industries, the larger firms invented new and remarkable processes; the electric utilities invented only images such as the all-electric house and Reddy Kilowatt—tantalizing to be sure, but of no utility. Why? What was there in the nature of the utility industry structure that...