Reviewed by: Empowering Communities: How Electric Cooperatives Transformed Rural South Carolina by Lacy K. Ford and Jared Bailey Casey P. Cater Empowering Communities: How Electric Cooperatives Transformed Rural South Carolina. By Lacy K. Ford and Jared Bailey. Foreword by James E. Clyburn. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 216. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-64336-269-4.) In ten thematically driven chapters, Lacy K. Ford and Jared Bailey make the case that since the 1930s, member-owned electric cooperatives have been the principal force behind empowering neglected rural communities in South Carolina. Though Empowering Communities: How Electric Cooperatives Transformed Rural South Carolina is the product of a prominent historian and an academic press, the book aims to reach a broader audience with a heretofore untold tale. The authors claim they are not offering a “formal history” of the state’s electric cooperatives but are simply narrating their story (p. xi). Nevertheless, this volume homes in on several key themes—including the importance of cooperative organizations, the politics of electric power, and the centrality of local people’s efforts—making it a useful addition to recent scholarly literature on rural electrification in the South. The point the authors make most consistently throughout Empowering Communities is that the electric cooperative, as a public institution created with the support of the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Administration (REA), was a heroic entity that rescued rural South Carolinians from perilous backwardness and backbreaking drudgery. The text is replete with quotations from early cooperative members who praised their co-ops as “really the [End Page 179] salvation of farming and the rural areas” and as the force that “changed completely the way that we lived” (pp. 12, 14). This perspective is unsurprising given both that the book was commissioned by a trade association, the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina (ECSC), and that the rural South’s first recipients of electric power often used such language to describe their experiences. Yet assigning the cooperative the role of rural South Carolina’s savior sidesteps the possibility of examining matters—such as race and access to rural electrification, the REA’s debt- and market-driven model, and the cooperatives’ complicated relationship with privately owned utilities—that might cast these entities in a more revealing, if less flattering, light. In addition to positioning cooperative organizations as rural people’s deliverance from darkness, the book also argues that cooperatives had to defend against the constant threat from private power and its allies in positions of political influence. The cooperative, the authors point out, was “born in politics” and has long been a fundamental component in the history of rural electrification (p. xv). They review the broader national narrative—and examine South Carolina in rather granular detail based largely on local newspaper accounts and ECSC publications—of the ongoing power struggle over, first, the very existence of a separate public power complex in the 1920s and 1930s and, later, just how independent that project would be. The strongest element of Empowering Communities is its reliance on oral history accounts from cooperative members, which dominate the source base for this study and drive the story. Everyday people’s voices shine through in nearly every chapter, revealing just how much rural electrification meant to their lives: the co-ops not only lit members’ homes and eased the burdens of daily labor, but they also fostered a sense of community and participatory democracy. Chapter 3, “Working the Lines,” which shows how cooperatives both provided and depended on local employment, and chapter 5, “South Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives and the Changing Role of Women, 1950s–1980s,” which discusses how the cooperatives, with fits and starts, afforded women opportunities for advancement and even authority, are particularly valuable. Though perhaps overly sympathetic to the role electric cooperatives played in empowering South Carolina’s rural communities, this book provides an excellent summary of rural electrification’s history within a single state. Most notably, by highlighting individual experiences and efforts at making rural electrification a successful and ongoing project, it emphasizes a point too often lost in energy history: not only did electric power matter to people, but people mattered to electric power as well...
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Jun 11, 2024
Melanie Otto 
Open Access