Power

“A deeply detailed exploration, by someone who witnessed it, of the inevitable and controversial reshaping of Texas”—Bill Minutaglio, 25-year member of a Texas co-op and author of A Single Star & Bloody Knuckles: A History of Politics and Race in Texas

“Joe Holley has a strong and tender gift for making a historical tale of personal struggle and gritty resolve as compelling as any fine novel. In his hands, what might have been a dry political past seethes on the page with immediate presences: of poor, hard-working farm families, of bull-headed Texas Congressmen fired-up by the sights of their own mothers’ backbreaking labors, of a piney-woods matron determined to change her whole world, of all the co-founders of electrical co-ops who discovered solutions to their own and their neighbors’ bleak conditions through the principles of true cooperation. The heroic story of how the pioneer advocates of rural electrification literally brought the power home to the people—defying both the giants of private electric companies and the Washington D.C. bureaucracies through the means of communal customer ownership, in order to switch on farmhouse lightbulbs and milking machines over the dark vastness of the state—is not only riveting but moving. The personalities of Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, and other warriors battling for the futures of country folk stride across Holley’s chapters with true outsized vitality. Holley’s writing never fails to bring the sounds, smells, and pictures of one-hundred-fifty-year-old towns into vivid cinematic life. And his account of how the farmers of Bartlett, a tiny community between Temple and Waco, banded together to become the first Rural Electrification Act project in America actually sprang tears to my eyes. I could not put this book down.”—Carol Dawson, author of Miles and Miles of Texas: 100 Years of the Texas Highway Department and House of Plenty: The Rise, Fall and Revival of Luby’s Cafeterias “Not only is Power an insightful (and delightful) history of public power and rural Texas, it is a reminder that material progress doesn’t only come from the latest mad-child tech genius. Good things also spring from an overlooked civic virtue: cooperation.”—Bill Bishop, founding editor of The Daily Yonder and co-author of The Big Sort: Why The Clustering Of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart