The largest public gathering in Los Angeles history celebrated neither a military victory nor a baseball championship but rather the completion of a long-distance electric power line. On an October night in 1936, a million people jammed the streets to watch a ten-foot spark arc across a purpose-built tower. Meanwhile, spotlights swept the skies and illuminated floats paraded the streets—all to salute 266 miles of newly strung wire delivering hydropower from what was then called Boulder Dam.
Joshua Lappen uses this moment of technofrenzy to grab our attention on the first page of his compellingly written dissertation. Even more artfully, he takes us on an exploration of how the technology feted that night had shaped the development of Los Angeles and Southern California since the early 1880s. Towering arc lights and the cables that powered them preceded the development of new neighborhoods. Electric streetcars followed the wires and demanded ever more power. Dams and aqueducts delivered not only water but kilowatts. The results went far beyond infrastructure, creating a distinctive regional identity around electric light and power as markers of progress and modernity.
All of this did not just happen. The rise of what Lappen calls “electric visibility” led to massive accumulations of wealth and political influence, reinforced by a publicity apparatus that spread the gospel of electrical bounty. But visibility coexisted with an “invisibility” that masked political corruption, social inequality, and environmental degradation even as it disguised power stations as private homes or public monuments. After World War II, invisibility came to triumph over visibility, not least because utility executives found it profitable to retreat from a skeptical public’s attention. Power companies began to practice the unfamiliar art of obscuring, rather than highlighting, their electrical systems and electricity itself,” Lappen writes. They set out “to transform a fading icon of Angeleno identity into an infrastructural product defined by its silence and ubiquity, and denoted only by its absence.” The retreat was so complete that the revelry of 1936 now seems as if it must have happened on another planet. Or so it would seem except for Lappen’s indefatigable research, dynamic analysis, and narrative flair.