A lot has been written about the reluctance of power company executives to build distribution lines out into farming and ranching areas before the federal government got involved in rural electrification in 1935.

But there was something else going on too: These city-based businessmen had a low opinion of rural people. They thought of them as “backcountry rubes with little technical or economic savvy,” writes Virginia Tech professor Richard F. Hirsh in his 2022 book, Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification.

Even Morris L. Cooke, the Rural Electrification Administration’s first chief, carried this bias. He expected that 90 percent of the job would be done by the power companies, because, he told an Ohio co-op organizer, building power lines and operating utilities was too complicated for rural folk.

The bias wasn’t confined to people in the utility business. Hirsch quotes a New York City official musing in 1910 on the grimness of rural life, and a historian who said that in the 1920s, city people thought rural America as “a dull foreign country.”

Hirsch notes that by the early 20th century, farmers had been transformed, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, from “paragons of virtue” to a national problem. They had devolved “from backbone to backwater” and were viewed “as retrograde elements in an increasingly sophisticated society,” according to David Dambom’s 2017 book Born in the Country, considered the first and only general history of rural America.

Hirsch claims these negative views have been largely overlooked by other historians of rural electrification and should be given equal weight to the impact of power companies’ skepticism.

Farm journals of the time exhorted their readers to get with it and modernize. The May 1914 cover of The Banker-Farmer magazine showed a county agent knocking on the door of a sleeping farmer at 6:05 a.m. He carried a rolled-up piece of paper with the words “business methods,” “science,” and “practice” showing. A tagline at the bottom said, “Time to wake up – the dawn of a new agriculture.”

“A 1919 article in System on the Farm magazine implicitly acknowledged ruralites’ deficiencies by exhorting them to get up to speed with new technologies and to modernize their farmsteads,” Hirsch writes.

But they ought not expect the power companies or the federal government to help them. Belief in the virtues of free enterprise and individual responsibility ran hot in the first decades of the 20th century.

“The executives felt no great pressure to achieve goals of social improvement, nor did they think it reasonable to force one group of customers to subsidize another,” Hirsch says. “In the days before Franklin Roosevelt’s administration altered the perceptions of the roles of government and business, such practices appeared un-American, socialistic and unworthy of serious consideration.