Needham, Andrew. Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
In 1970, Phoenix lawyer Frank Snell attributed the city’s rapid growth to its recent emergence as a “year-round city,” thanks to the prevalence and expansion of air conditioning (63). In Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest, author Andrew Needham focuses on the rapid population and manufacturing growth of Phoenix and how the energy needed to power the “Air Conditioned Capital of the World” was created and distributed. Needham argues that the supply and demand of energy was instrumental to the growth of the modern Southwest. The thesis is examined through an environmental, political, and economic lens in the book. Power Lines offers a new perspective of postwar growth and a substantial contribution to the existing literature and understanding of postwar politics and economics in the Southwest.
The thesis of the book examines the effects of energy on Southwestern growth, but Power Lines also addresses a variety of other themes. One such recurring theme examines how the development of the energy business in response to the growth of the region created a new system of inequality between the “electrical consumers in Phoenix and the people and landscape of the Navajo Nation” (17). Needham considers how contracts between Navajo energy producers and electric distributing companies trapped the Navajo in undesirable conditions. Another prevailing idea is that of the “urban oases” (14). Throughout the mid-late 20th century, local and regional politicians constantly battled against the idea of Arizona as a barren desert in the middle of nowhere. The reader’s focus is consistently drawn to the dichotomy between the modern city of Phoenix and the ancient surrounding desert. Needham also argues that metropolitan growth was spatially larger and more encompassing than recent histories have portrayed. Power Lines illustrates suburbanization as a catalyst for environmental changes with far-reaching and long-lasting effects (17). Needham organizes his analysis around two main ideas on systems of postwar politics: federal growth initiatives creating spatial inequality between inner cities and suburbs as well as metropolitan areas and outside regions, and federal growth initiatives being undermined in part by local businessmen and politicians (growth machines) pursuing economic development. Finally, the book continually reinforces the idea that the flow of energy is unperceived. Connections between the production and consumption of energy are relatively obscure, which makes identifying, examining, and ameliorating systems of inequality in the energy business difficult.
Power Lines is organized into four parts: “Fragments,” “Demand,” “Supply,” and “Protest.” Part One gives a detailed and expansive environmental history of the Southwest, from dinosaurs to the construction of the Hoover Dam in 1931. Needham focuses on the importance of water by tracking water’s role and location in the area through time: from ruling the area when it was swampy, shaping the area when it was a desert, and ending with the construction of the Hoover Dam and its manipulation of the Colorado River. In the early settlements of the Southwest, water was a hotter commodity than land. To reinforce this point, the author tells the story of the “Arizona Navy.” Sent by the governor of Arizona (a landlocked state), the “navy” attempted to hinder the construction of the Hoover Dam and thus prevent the relocation of tons of precious water from Arizona to Southern California. Unfortunately for the navy, their boat became tangled in cables and, to their dismay, had to be rescued by a boat owned by the City of Los Angeles (34).
While Part One is well-written and the narrative format makes it easy to read, it seems redundant in light of the rest of the book. That water predated coal as the main source of energy for Phoenix is essential knowledge to understand the book, but surely an entire section is not required to convey the importance of water in a desert. Part One could have been reduced to four or five paragraphs at the beginning of Part Two, and Needham could have used the extra space to further analyze other themes, such as the emerging inequalities between the suppliers and consumers of energy.
The next two parts, “Demand” and “Supply,” encompass the majority of the book. Needham focuses on the rapid population and manufacturing growth of Phoenix and the consequent rising demand for energy. “Demand” comes first in the book, and this section examines local “growth machines:” politicians and downtown businessmen interested in economic development and expansion (77). The author looks at how power structures benefited from each other and from the growth of Phoenix. Valley National Bank benefited from the New Deal, housing developers benefited from Valley National Bank, downtown businessmen benefited from housing developments, and politicians benefited from all of it. “Supply” examines how coal replaced water as the number one energy source in the Southwest. The growth of Phoenix meant a rising demand for inexpensive energy, and land on the Navajo Reservation was full of coal. Originally, the Navajo looked forward to making energy production their main source of income; they saw it as the solution to the rampant poverty and unemployment on the reservation. Although energy production brought in lots of revenue, contracts were long term in order to stabilize and fix the price of energy. Consequently, the Navajo were left with little say in the process of energy production taking place on their land once the contracts were signed.
When thinking of economics, one normally considers supply to come before demand. Needham’s reversal of the order of the two lends to the narrative aspect of the book and aids the readers’ understanding of the history of energy in the Southwest. It also mirrors a point the author makes through the two parts: power plants take so long to build that the decision to begin construction on one occurs in response to projected energy demand, rather than current and actual energy demand. These chapters also reinforce Needham’s argument that energy inequalities are obscure. The relationship portrayed between the local growth machines and the Navajo energy producers in Parts Two and Three shows how consumers were unaware of the effects of energy. Consumers were disconnected from the source of energy because all they had to do to turn the lights on was flip a switch. In contrast, the Navajo could see the effects of energy in the pollution marring their skies.
Part Four, “Protest,” expands upon the history articulated in Parts Two and Three. Needham shows how the replacement of water with coal and the consequent increase in byproducts led to protests critiquing southwestern suburban growth and pollution. In the late 20th century, environmentalists began to see Phoenix as representative of the uncontrollable growth plaguing America. Needham articulates the struggles of environmentalists and the Navajo in protesting suburbia (“The BLOB That Ate Arizona”), pollution, and energy inequalities (197). In the conclusion of the book, Needham considers the future of energy through the lens of environmentalists and economists by contrasting two 1971 articles: Jack Neary’s Life article entitled “Good Bye, Big Sky,” and an article from the Financial Analysts Journal called “Coal: The Giant Revived” (241). Both perspectives are sufficiently analyzed, and Needham ends with a call to raise awareness surrounding global climate change.
Andrew Needham is an Associate Professor of History at New York University. While he has written a variety of articles relating to the subjects found in Power Lines, Power Lines is his first and only monograph, and is impressively well-researched. Needham draws from a multitude of primary sources throughout the book, including census data and government documents, interviews and newspapers, and personal correspondences, memoirs, and diaries. There are also a variety of secondary sources used, including environmental, political, and economic histories, as well as some anthropological works. Unfortunately, an extensive bibliography is not included in the book, only endnotes. If someone were interested in further research on some of the topics and themes presented in Power Lines, they would have to weed through endnotes.
Power Lines offers an extensive history of energy and growth in the Southwest and the thesis is well-defended, but the book lacks in its analysis of inequalities. Parts Two and Three are the only sections of the book devoted to the thesis–Part One gives contextual background knowledge and Part Four shows the Navajos response to inequality and environmentalists’ response to increased energy production, byproducts, and suburban growth. Parts Two and Three are the only ones to really consider the relationship between energy and Southwestern growth. Power Lines also would have benefited from examining other groups of people alongside the Navajos. While African Americans and Latin Americans are mentioned in the book, it is only briefly and with few details. An analysis of multiple people groups would have reinforced Needham’s argument on emerging systems of inequality. In the introduction, Needham states that he plans to examine inequalities between residents in metropolitan areas and people outside of them instead of inequalities between the inner city and the suburbs. While the emerging inequalities between producers and consumers of electricity is examined, Needham does not go beyond that. More examples of inequality between consumers and the Navajo, as well as examples of regional versus metropolitan inequalities between different groups of people, like farmers, would have strengthened Needham’s argument. An analysis of the unequal distribution of energy in and out of metropolitan areas would have been an intriguing and appropriate addition to the book. Needham briefly touches on the fact that people living in more rural parts of the region had more frequent power outages than those living in urban and suburban areas, but does not provide detailed analysis into these inequalities or its effect on Southwestern growth.
Some of the terms Needham used throughout the book were problematic. The biggest culprit was the name of the book–“power lines.” Needham used the term “power lines” to refer to three things: (1) relationships between people and people groups where the power balance is unequal, (2) the flow of natural resources and energy from its production source to the consumer, and (3) actual electrical power lines that line the road. Needham switches back and forth between these definitions frequently and without warning. The confusion is seen especially in the last paragraph of the first chapter: “Power lines did not only change relations between places. They changed politics, as the effort to claim energy, and the lands upon which it was contained, became one of the central political struggles of the following years. Finally, the power lines changed nature itself” (59). The book would have benefitted from an explanation of the term in the introduction, or simply using a different word. In the introduction, Needham states that the term “Sunbelt” is only used occasionally throughout the book. Needham’s avoidance of the word stems from the fact that historically, the term “Sunbelt” did not exist until the 1970s and people only used the term as a contrast to the “Rustbelt” of the Midwest and the “Frostbelt” of the Northeast (25). While this critique is a personal preference, Needham should not have used the word at all. Explaining why the term “Sunbelt” is never used in the book would be understandable, but devoting an entire page and a half to explaining why even though the term does not fit, “Sunbelt” will be used a few times makes no sense. If Needham has a problem with the term, then he should not use it at all.
Despite these critiques, Power Lines is a unique and intriguing account of the history of energy in the Southwest. In the introduction, Needham comments that the analytical focus of the book “broadens narratives of postwar growth, both in scale and subject” (17). This most certainly is true. Needham moves away from typical analyses of postwar politics and economics. The author studies regions instead of cities, resources and consumerism, and focuses on the Native American perspective of energy growth rather than strictly examining large energy corporations. Overall, Power Lines contributes significantly to existing literature and previous understandings of postwar population and manufacturing growth in the Southwest.