"Electrification" was sold to me, during my liberal whıte-American grade school education, as a modern miracle. It was one of those unquestioned benefits of civilization—electricity everywhere, bringing on a veritable age of Reason, if I may quote O Brother, Where Art Thou? One of my grade-school civics textbooks was Robert F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, which Kennedy did not actually write. I feel like this hagiographic textbook could use a bit of critical examination because it's such a perfect embodiment of all the civic values that modern-day U.S. Democrats still pretend to uphold, including their nauseating idolatry of compromise. Anyway, one of the political heroes idolized in the book is Nebraska Senator George W. Norris, a liberal Republican who's credited with the Tennessee Valley Authority or TVA, a great federal electrification project that quietly enforced anti-Black social values (q.v. https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/tva-race-problem/ and many other sources.)
That's the other side of the miracle, the bit they don't like teaching about in American grade schools: the fact that electrification was a destructive process, spectacularly unequal in the distribution of its gifts. Numerous Black communities were destroyed by electrification projects (this has been usual with American public-works projects) and the indiscriminate damming of rivers for hydroelectric installations ruined many rivers and watersheds. The actual work of electrification—the massive construction projects and the cascading social consequences from them—is tossed off with a few words. Instead the usual history books teach only the miracle: electricity itself, on tap, for everyone (ideally) with all the costs swept out of sight and bundled up neatly with monetary arithmetic.
American grade-school history is mostly about teaching legends. It's a laundry list of things you're supposed to revere and never forget, mostly battles and great monuments and famous laws and other factoids. It's a dead, static thing to be scrutinized the same way you'd scrutinize a dead moth—consider that there are myriads of human beings still devoted to extracting every last possible scrap of verifiable detail that can be obtained from meticulous study of the Battle of Chancellorsville or the Tennis-Court Oath, as if we could somehow recapture the spirit of these events by knowing down to the last stitch what everyone was wearing that day. There's very little history in American history classes, from what I can remember. It wasn't until my Classics education at SDSU that I felt I was actually digging into the good stuff of history, the texture of life in the past.
~Chara of Pnictogen
