The Wizard and Wendell
Steve Mitnick is Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly and author of the book “Lines Down: How We Pay, Use, Value Grid Electricity Amid the Storm.”
Thomas Edison, the wizard of Menlo Park and inventor of the electricity industry, was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio. ’Nuf said.
Wendell Willkie, the electricity industry’s undisputed leader through the tumultuous 1930s (as president of Commonwealth & Southern Corp.), and Republican presidential candidate in 1940, was born on February 18, 1892 in Elwood, Indiana.
Here are ten things you may not have known about the only utility CEO that ran for president of the United States:
10. Willkie’s mother was one of the first women, if not the first, ever admitted to the Indiana bar, in 1897, after giving birth to her fifth child.
9. Willkie served as legal counsel to the film industry during the notorious U.S. Senate hearings in September 1941, successfully rebutting the insidious criticism by isolationist senators that the Hollywood executives were Jewish moguls bent on bringing the country into the war against the Nazis.
8. Willkie also negotiated with the film industry on behalf of the NAACP, winning Hollywood commitments to give African-Americans more and better on-screen and off-screen opportunities. He famously attended the 1942 NAACP convention in Los Angeles and posed with the great Lena Horne.
7. Willkie battled the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt throughout the 1930s as one of the most respected voices for private enterprise, versus government intervention and control of the economy as the Great Depression dragged on. In his June 1935 article in Public Utilities Fortnightly, Willkie wrote: “Many companies in 1930 completed generating plants or installed additional capacity already started or planned under the earnest urging of the Federal government that there was a patriotic obligation to continue the employment of people and upon the prediction by government that the financial depression would be of short life.”
6. An extensive glowing bio of Willkie in the May 1937 issue of Fortune magazine made him a national sensation that in three years propelled him to the Republican nomination. Fortune said: “It has been an industry [electric utilities] run almost exclusively by two types of minds: the financier’s and the engineer’s. As a result its engineering technique has been by and large the best in the world, its finances both the stablest and the fanciest, and its public relations the worst… The utilities [have] found a leader who is neither a reticent banker nor an inarticulate engineer but a lawyer, and a lawyer both able and willing to talk.”
5. Willkie’s utility holding company, Commonwealth & Southern, was one of the fourteen companies of the so-called power trust, that accounted for over three-fifths of electricity industry revenues in the mid-1930s when the Public Utility Holding Company Act became law. Under the new law’s “death sentence,” Willkie’s company would separate its scattered holdings that were originally assembled for diversification, including parts of what are now the Southern Company, Tennessee Valley Authority, South Carolina Electric & Gas, Consumers Energy, First Energy, Southern Indiana Gas & Electric, and Springfield Illinois’ City Water, Light & Power.
4. Dragging the Republican Party from isolationism, his support was decisive in 1940 in Congress’ passage of the draft, and in 1941, after he lost the presidential election to Franklin Roosevelt, Congress’ passage of Lend-Lease and repeal of the Neutrality Act, to assist the British battling Nazi Germany.
3. In 1942, he successfully argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of a communist, preserving his citizenship, and wrote the immensely popular book, “One World,” laying the groundwork for the post-war United Nations. President Roosevelt planned to make Willkie the first U.N. Secretary General. Willkie also criticized the internment of Japanese-Americans that year, albeit indirectly, so as to not offend Roosevelt.
2. After years of wrangling with Roosevelt and his administration, he finally agreed in 1938 to sell key assets of Commonwealth & Southern to the Tennessee Valley Authority that enabled TVA to emerge in its modern form. Despite the contentions, Willkie sold for a relatively high price and ended up admired by the public and, reluctantly, by the administration.
1. Courtesy of historian Michael Beschloss (New York Times, August 29, 2015), in the run up to the Republican national convention of 1940, where he was nominated, Willkie said “I’m in business and proud of it… Nobody can make me soft-pedal any fact in my business career. After all, business is our way of life, our achievement, our glory.”
