How kilowatt socialism saved L.A. from the energy crisis
                                                      
 SFBG News | May 9, 2001
 		 		 		 		
Labor made public power a key issue                                             

By Jeffrey Stansbury
 						
Editor's note: San Francisco's central labor council voted 
[http://www.sfbg.com/News/35/33/33ogmud.html] May 14 to endorse a 
plan to create a municipal utility for San Francisco and 
Brisbane. This article provides some useful perspective.
 						
Why has Los Angeles been an island of tranquility in the electric 
power crisis that has rocked California since early January? 
Communities to the north, south, and east have endured blackouts 
and soaring electricity rates, which are just a foretaste of what 
lies ahead this summer. Oil wells and manufacturers with 
interruptible power contracts have repeatedly shut down. One big 
investor-owned utility is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, 
and another has already gone over the edge. Power-related layoffs 
mount, and Standard & Poor has just let the air out of the 
state's economically vital bond rating. Yet Los Angeles residents 
continue to enjoy reliable, cheap electricity. Why?
 						
News stories have repeatedly told us that the city's ownership 
and operation of its own generating stations is the principal 
reason. By staying clear of the state's 1996 deregulation scheme, 
the Department of Water and Power was able to hold on to its 
power plants, when the giant private utilities had to unload 
theirs. Today the DWP is feeding its electrical surplus into the 
state's overburdened power grid while it continues to subsidize 
L.A.'s general fund.
 						
So far, so good. But when we ask how Los Angeles came to enjoy 
public power in the first place, the usual answer makes a hash of 
history.
 						
Most historians and political scientists credit the city's 
progressive reform movement of 1890-1915 for having wisely 
settled on a municipal utility. True, some of the entrepreneurs, 
lawyers, and reform-minded professionals who called themselves 
"the best men" during that era agitated for the city-built Owens 
Valley aqueduct and its generating stations. But many reformers 
opposed the city's effort to distribute its own power. Because 
they had allied themselves with railway magnate Henry Huntington, 
who owned an electric company, or because they favored regulation 
over municipal ownership, they expected L.A.'s three private 
electric companies to sell and profit from aqueduct power.
 						
Meyer Lissner, a reform attorney often portrayed as a champion of 
public power, opposed the holding of a decisive 1911 citywide 
straw poll on the subject because he knew most Angelenos would 
cast their ballots for municipal ownership. This, he said, would 
be "unfair" to the three utilities. The most steadfast partisans 
of public power were not reformers like Lissner but the city's 
much-maligned labor unions, and for a simple reason. While a 
mistrust of oligopoly ran through nearly all sectors of society, 
it burned hottest in the working class. Without organized labor's 
dogged campaign for "gas and water socialism," as well as its 
willingness to hand control of these resources to the antiunion 
regimes of mayors George Alexander and Henry Rose, there would be 
no DWP today and no escape from the power crisis for Los Angeles.
 						
Organized labor played a key role in the city's original decision 
to municipalize its water distribution system. How former mayor 
Fred Eaton, William Mulholland, the L.A. city council, and a few 
bankers later schemed to purloin water from the Owens River via 
an improbable 240-mile aqueduct is a tale oft told, most notably 
in the movie Chinatown. But it needs a first chapter and 
appendix, both blue-collar.
 						
On Oct. 24, 1892, 700 union members met to demand that the city 
build a small neighborhood waterworks as a step toward public 
control of the entire water supply. Voters backed the requisite 
bond issue that November, and the Council of Labor's pro-bond 
allies thanked the unions for turning "a seeming defeat into a 
victory." From that day on, L.A.'s unions never wavered in their 
call for a publicly managed public water supply. They mobilized 
their rank and file behind the water company buyouts of 1901-04.
 						
In 1906 their Public Ownership Party's citywide campaign primed 
voters to pour $23 million into construction of the Owens River 
aqueduct a year later. The aqueduct was the sine qua non of 
public power. At a time when most progressive reformers were mute 
on the subject, organized labor insisted that the aqueduct be 
used to generate electricity for the city's streets, homes, and 
businesses.
 						
A broad consensus backed the city's construction of hydroelectric 
plants while the aqueduct was being built. Committed to public 
subsidies for, but not public ownership of, aqueduct power, the 
L.A. Realty Board, Merchants and Manufacturers' Association, key 
banks, insurance firms, and the city's private power utilities 
all assumed the plants would generate electricity that the 
utilities would then distribute. The 1911 straw poll, in which 
city voters declared their support for the municipal ownership 
and distribution of Owens River power, upset their plans. With 
that decisive vote the aqueduct consensus disappeared. The three 
electric companies and their corporate allies turned against 
public power.
 						
The most consistent fighters for public power during the decades 
after the straw poll were the Central Labor Council, 
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, other unions, 
and city employees who stuffed campaign envelopes, canvassed 
precincts, and brought out voters on election day. Sometimes the 
L.A. Chamber of Commerce joined them, often it did not. Voters 
who favored power bonds and initiatives bolstering the DWP tended 
to be working class and Democratic; those opposed were mainly 
middle- and upper-class and Republican.
 						
In this polarized political climate Mayor Alexander called for a 
$6.5-million bond issue to complete the aqueduct power 
distribution network; he left open the question of who would sell 
the power to consumers. Unions and socialists tied their support 
for the bonds to a city charter reform guaranteeing proportional 
representation in council elections. Under proportional 
representation an outpolled party would not be shut out of the 
council but would capture a number of seats proportional to its 
share of the vote. This reform stemmed from organized labor's 
long failure to win an inside role in city government. Voters, 
mayors, and city councils had routinely spurned efforts by the 
unions to place their members in elected or appointed office. In 
this sense L.A.'s workers were classical political outsiders, and 
their achievements in the public arena were all the more 
remarkable for that.
 						
"Do you want to vote for bonds under the present incompetent, 
inefficient administration where you have no representation?" 
asked labor's official weekly newspaper, the Citizen, in January 
1913. The Central Labor Council, Building Trades Council, and 
Union Labor Political Club answered with an unequivocal "no 
representation, no bonds!"
 						
Rank and file unionists, especially in the building trades, made 
good on this threat. When proportional representation failed at 
the polls, they withheld support from the power bonds and these, 
too, went down to defeat in 1913. Much of the rancor workers felt 
was aimed at progressives like Lissner, head of the Good 
Government Organization, who fought labor's charter plank because 
it would bring Socialists onto the city council.
 						
The labor movement's dedication to public ownership soon 
reasserted itself, however. With a citywide election coming up 
that June, five unionists seeking council seats on the Socialist 
Party ticket revived labor's long-standing demand for city 
operation of all public utilities at cost. Appearing at a public 
forum, Fred C. Wheeler and T.W. Williams of the Carpenters, Curly 
Grow of the Machinists, Ralph Criswell of the Typographers, and 
Frances Noel of the Women's Union Label League urged the city 
council to hold a new power bond election at the earliest 
possible date – this time with a clear public ownership mandate. 
They attacked the power companies' efforts to buy aqueduct power 
from the city and sell it to Angelenos at a profit. Soon the 
great majority of unions paying per capita to the Central Labor 
Council were locked in what turned out to be a decisive struggle 
against the power oligopoly made up of Southern California 
Edison, Pacific Light and Power, and Los Angeles Gas and 
Electric.
 						
An unprecedented event considerably brightened the bonds' 
chances. Fred Wheeler, a union carpenter, won his June 3 election 
to the L.A. city council – the first labor candidate to do so in 
the 20th century. Undaunted by the absence of labor colleagues on 
the council, Wheeler led a successful fight against an attempt to 
split the power bond issue into two separate ballot propositions 
– one to complete the aqueduct's generating stations, the other 
to create a city-owned distribution system. Such a division might 
have doomed public power. "Segregation," Wheeler said, "means 
that the power companies would have the people finish their power 
plants, bring the electricity to Los Angeles for one-fourth to 
three-eighths of a cent a kilowatt, turn it over to the power 
companies, and let them charge the people five or six cents for 
it."
 						
The large majority of unionists who favored public power had 
little time to savor Wheeler's victory. While pressing the attack 
on the three electric companies, they faced a small but angry 
split in their own ranks.
 						
Dissenters in the Building Trades Council and a few of its unions 
argued that labor's grievances against the progressive regimes of 
1909-14 had turned the argument for municipal ownership on its 
head. What good was municipal ownership in the hands of a council 
and mayor who had caused the arrest of hundreds of peaceful 
picketers during the citywide strikes of 1910, had underpaid 
aqueduct workers and fed them bad food, had denied unionists 
influential city jobs, had fought and were still fighting 
proportional representation? The final blow was the council's 
rebuff of a petition signed by thousands of workers for a "living 
wage" law. Was it not folly to reward labor's foes with control 
of the aqueduct's power?
 						
Union activists who favored the bonds conceded that the 
dissenters were dead on the mark in their assessment of 
"progressive" city government.
 						
But regimes came and went – and the progressive star was waning. 
What counted in the long run was whether Los Angeles could wrest 
the city's electric power system from the grasp of private 
utilities. The Central Labor Council's unions took this challenge 
to heart and voted 60 to 4 for a resolution favoring the bonds.
 						
On its own, as well as through a People's Power Bond Committee, 
the labor movement marshaled its rank and file on behalf of 
public power. It brought out hundreds of poll-watchers and 
canvassers on election day. The pro-bond unions never did win 
over the dissenting faction; rather, they overwhelmed it at the 
polls. On May 8, 1914, L.A.'s voters endorsed the power bonds by 
more than the required two-thirds margin.
 						
A key fact emerges from an analysis of the balloting. While the 
bonds barely squeaked by in the city's silk-stocking wards, their 
winning margin in working class wards was 50 percent greater. 
Last-ditch opposition to a city-run electric distribution system 
came much more from employers and professional people (including 
progressives) than from the building trades.
 						
Within a year Los Angeles sold its bonds and began buying out the 
three investor-owned utilities. The first public power flowed 
into local homes and businesses in 1916. Two decades later the 
DWP eliminated the last of its private competition and 
consolidated the working class legacy of kilowatt and water 
socialism that has served the city so well in the current crisis.
 						
This is a longer version of an article that appeared in the Los 
Angeles Times Opinion section on April 29, 2001. 
						
Stansbury (stansbur@ucla.edu [ stansbur@ucla.edu] ), a Ph.D 
candidate at UCLA, is writing a dissertation on the labor 
movement's role in the building of L.A.'s modern infrastructure. 
He was formerly a staff activist with the UAW in Michigan and the 
ILGWU and HERE in California.
 						
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