HIGH TENSION

From the highest halls of power to the most remote corners of rural America, featuring amazing technological innovation and an epic battle between the captains of a corrupted industry and America's most politically astute president, HIGH TENSION is the story behind the greatest peacetime achievement in US history - the electrification of an entire nation under Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

This is also the story of AC vs. DC electricity, Edison vs. Westinghouse vs. Tesla; the TVA and the building of huge dams to harness the power of rivers; and how electricity fueled World War II's "Arsenal of Democracy."

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in the depths of the Depression, high tension - or high voltage - power lines had been marching across the country for decades, delivering urban Americans a parade of life-transforming inventions from electric lights and radios to refrigerators and washing machines. But most rural Americans still lived in the punishing pre-electric era, unconnected to the grid, their lives consumed and bodies broken by backbreaking chores.

HIGH TENSION is the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's battle against the "Power Trust," an elaborate Wall Street-controlled web of holding companies, to electrify all of America - even when the corrupt captains of the industry and their cronies cried that running lines to rural areas would not be profitable and that in a free market there would simply have to be a divide between the electricity haves and have-nots. John A. Riggs has chronicled democracy's greatest balancing act of government intervention with private market forces - one that brought affordable electricity to all Americans, powered the industrial might that won World War II, and established a model for public-private solutions today in areas such as transportation infrastructure, broadband, and health care.

John A. Riggs, currently a Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute, has been at the center of energy policymaking in Washington, DC, for more than thirty years. As a senior official of the Department of Energy, the House of Representatives, and the Aspen Institute, he observed the recent transformation of the electricity industry and helped develop the policies that govern it. He taught a graduate seminar in energy policy for five years at the University of Pennsylvania, moderated energy forums at the Aspen Institute, and testified over a dozen times before Congressional energy committees.