Cultures of power: electrification, politics, and visibility in greater Los Angeles

Thesis

Cultures of Power is an environmental history of technology that examines the electrification of greater Los Angeles between 1882 and 1956. Unlike other American cities during this period of urban intensification, greater Los Angeles electrified as it urbanised, allowing the emerging metropolis and its electric systems to determine each other’s form. As real estate speculators, transit barons, agricultural cooperatives, and political reformers appropriated electricity to shape the growing region to their advantage, they created not only a new model of American urbanism, but also a divergent mode of electric system development.

Metropolitan Southern California remains largely absent from the historiography of electrification. Likewise, the role of electric power systems in shaping greater Los Angeles’ cultures, politics, and landscapes has received little scholarly attention. By examining greater Los Angeles as the co-created product of its electricity, this thesis not only rewrites familiar narratives of electrification and metropolitan growth, but also poses a larger question about the nature of electrification itself: When does the social process of electrification end?

In greater Los Angeles, electricity’s prominence in society long outlasted its novelty in everyday life. For decades after it became ubiquitous, electricity continued to accrete new cultural and political connotations, growing ever more popular as a medium of social expression. This regime of electric visibility structured Angelenos’ social lives, aesthetic visions, and political ideologies, encouraging individuals and institutions alike to pursue their disparate goals by directing, controlling, consuming, and symbolically displaying electricity. Electric visibility, rather than mere novelty, determined electricity’s social prominence in greater Los Angeles. Likewise, the decline of that regime shrank electricity’s range of meanings, and the rise of a countervailing regime of electric invisibility gradually encouraged Angelenos to obscure electricity’s position in culture and the urban landscape. That transit from visibility to invisibility defined the social process of electrification.

Authors: Lappen, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-5j20r1gvq
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Southern California; municipalization; John Barnes Miller; transmission; energy system; landscape change; utility; W. B. Mathews; public ownership; electricity; John Randolph Haynes; William Mulholland; W. C. Mullendore; Los Angeles; municipal politics; H. H. Sinclair; R. H. Ballard; electrification; Almarian Decker; Ezra Scattergood
• Subjects: political history; geography; energy history; history of science, medicine, and technology; urban history; environmental history