NOTE: This article by Tom Morain is his adaptation of an essay he wrote in 2000, that appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000 Issue of Iowa Heritage Illustrated in an issue devoted to the opening of an exhibit at the State Historical Society of Iowa, where he was then Director, called “A Few of My Favorite Things” that displayed significant and ordinary inventions that changed daily life for Iowa families.
A huge advancement for farm families was the introduction of electricity made possible by the Rural Electrification Act of 1935. Electric power had come to towns before the turn of the 20th C. but farm families for the most part remained in the dark.
Many Iowa communities were constructing local power plants and stringing wires house to house before 1900. In Jefferson, the local paper crowed with delight in 1892 when the generators of the Jefferson Light, Heat, Power and Water Company fired up for the first time: "The first electric light that ever shone in Jefferson struggled into existence down at the power house not far from nine o'clock last night and threw a strong radiance all about the premises that showed its intimate acquaintance with the Grand Master Workman of all light—the sun."
In 1907, the power company offered Jefferson women a free home trial of electric irons. Try one for three weeks, the notice read, and if you don't like it, bring it back and return to the drudgery of your heavy stove-heated irons in sweltering kitchens. The campaign was so successful that in a few months the power company had to beg local matrons to use their irons only on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings when the generators could go into high speed to produce the extra power the irons required.
Irons and electric lights were but the first wave of home improvements. Portable vacuum sweepers, invented in the years shortly before World War I, were commonplace by the 1920s. Electric waffle irons, radios, fans, water heaters, kitchen ranges, toasters, refrigerators, and washing machines all made their debut in Iowa households wired for electricity. Those homes, however, were overwhelmingly in towns and cities, not in the rural countryside. By 1925, when two-thirds of Iowans were living in rural areas, only one out of ten farm families had electricity. It was far easier and more economical to wire up homes across small backyards in town than to connect power lines to a few farm houses scattered across acres of corn, hay, and pasture.
Farmers without electricity milked cows by hand in the light of kerosene lanterns. Farm women cooked over a wood- or coal-burning stove and washed clothes by hand on a washboard. Farm children pumped water and carried it in buckets to the kitchen and the barn. An icehouse, well, or farm cellar provided the only means of keeping foods cool. The privy took on an identity as a rural institution.
The problem, of course, was not that farm life was growing worse; it was that life in town was growing better. Farm families' awareness of what was possible rose with each trip to town or each issue of an illustrated magazine. For more than four decades after town homes were wired for electricity, Iowa farm families endured the pity or condescension of townsfolk who took electric lights, central heating, or bathrooms for granted.
What was sapping the morale of the farm family was the seemingly inescapable fact that no matter how hard they worked or how profitable their operation was, they were doomed to physical drudgery, unhealthy conditions, and daily discomforts that their town neighbors were forgetting had ever existed. As long as farm homes could not offer the comforts of town, farm children had to choose at some point between their parents' farm traditions and the conveniences they wanted for themselves and their own children.
Iowa farm editor Herbert Quick put his finger on the dilemma in a 1913 magazine article for Good Housekeeping: "There is a woman here and a woman there who sees that the whole scheme of family life falls to ruin if the [farm] home suffers in comparison with homes of those friends and relatives who live on wages in the towns. She and her husband begin to realize that it does not pay to build the farm up into a profitable property which is despised by the very children for whom they are giving their lives."
Salvation came with the 1935 passage of the Rural Electrification Act, a New Deal measure that provided low-interest loans to finance the construction of rural electric lines. Cooperatives composed of the farm families who used the service formed to apply for the loans. When private power companies showed reluctance to supply the co-ops with electricity, the co-ops built their own generating plants. Slowly across a Depression-weary countryside, the lights started to go on. One woman remembered that her mother cried as the family stood in their farmyard at sunset and watched as her brother flipped the switches that lit up the newly installed light bulbs. She said she didn't understand at the time what having electricity meant to her mother. It wasn't just that her mother could enjoy labor-saving devices. It meant that her parents could want her to stay on the farm if she chose to do so.
Another woman remembered the first thing she and her mother did the morning the "juice" was hooked up to their home. They jumped in the car, drove into town, bought several boxes of Jell-O, drove back home, and made it for supper. Before rural electrification, only town families could make Jell-O because it required refrigeration. For that woman, the Rural Electrification Act—and perhaps the entire New Deal—could be summarized in one word: Jell-O. They could now have what town families had. In addition to the automobile, rural electrification did much to eliminate the disadvantages that threatened to stigmatize farm life into a second-class existence.
The electrification of the home was a tremendous technological accomplishment of the 20th century. It was the Rural Electrification Act of 1935 and the developments that flowed from it that spread the blessings of electrical technology to the rural half of the American public. We could again aspire to be one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty, justice, and electric toasters for all.
