Date: Fri, 24 Mar 1995 07:50:39 -0500 (EST)
From: "Jonathan P. Gill" <jgill@casti.com>
To: Americans Communicating Electronically <ace-mg@esusda.gov>
Cc: John Schwartz <jswatz@well.sf.ca.us>
Subject: 1935

Does this sound familiar?  Are we destined to recreate this split?

As late as 1935, farmers had been denied electricity not only in the Hill 
Country [of Texas] but throughout the United States.  In that year, more 
than 6 million of America's 6.8 million farms did NOT have electricity.  
Decades after electric power had become part of urban life, the woo
range, the washtub, the sad iron and the kerosene lamp were still the wa
of life for almost 90 percent of the 30 million Americans who lived i
the countryside.  All across the United States, wrote a public-power 
advocate, "Every city "white way" ends abruptly at the city limits.  
Beyond lies darkness."  The lack of electric power, wrote the historian 
William E. Leuchterberg, had divided the United States into two nations
"the city dwellers and the country folk"; farmers, he wrote, "toiled in a 
nineteenth-century world; farm wives, who obviously eyed pictures in the
Saturday Evening Post of city women with washing machines, refrigators, 
and vacuum cleaners, performed their backbreaking chores like peasant 
women in a preindustrial age."
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, by Robert A. Caro, 198
Chapter 28, page 516.

Clearly, just as there was a very important role for the public sector in
the electrification of America, there will be a very important role for
the public sector in the datafication [connectivity] of America.  Or do w
have to repeat this whole sorry process all over again
My thanks to John Schwartz of the Washington Post for bringing this 
important aspect of our history to my attention and for faxing over the 
material.
What do you think?

Jock


___________________________________________________________________________
                              Jonathan P. Gil
                             Penfield Gill, Inc. 
Boston, MA                                                  Washington, D.C. 
+1 (617) 396-0492                                          +1 (202) 667-1747
             ... the thoughts & words of a private citizen ...
                              jgill@casti.co
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