Word: powermen
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week U. S. powermen were frantically looking for plants with spare capacity to help out others whose capacities had already been overtaxed. They had already begun to give impressive orders for new equipment : $70,000,000 ordered since the war began. They were drafting specifications for perhaps as much as another $100,000,000, to be ordered before the end of the year...
Summoned to the White House one day last week was Floyd Leslie Carlisle, chairman of not one but two of the country's great utility companies, Consolidated Edison and Niagara Hudson Power. President Roosevelt is not on intimate terms with any powermen but Mr. Carlisle's and the President's cordial dislike of each other is something of a record, dating as it does from pre-New Deal days, when Franklin Roosevelt was Governor of New York State, Mr. Carlisle's bailiwick. But now, with a Grade A business recession on his hands, the President, like...
Fact was that, in spite of his vague offers of truce and invitations to Messrs. Carlisle & Willkie, so far President Roosevelt had not even hinted a willingness to compromise his power policies on any ground acceptable to private powermen. And in the opinion of Washington ob- servers he was not likely to compromise unless Recession grew even blacker. The pressure from the Right wing of the Administration was heavy but his advisers on the Left wing urged him to hold out until after the major legal tests of the power program are decided. The Duke Power case (PWA grants...
...first things that put the Government in the power business in the first place was the New Deal's inability to enforce such ideas in the face of the Supreme Court. So-called "yardstick" rates were to be based on the Government's "prudent investment." But the powermen soon found that the Government held down the original cost by the simple expedient of writing off large chunks to such things as flood control or navigation improvement. In the opinion of powermen, who must pay interest on the entire cost of their dams and plants, these write-offs made...
...appealed. The Federal Power Commission then intervened in the case to attempt to convert the Supreme Court to the "prudent investment" concept. This week, while the Court will be pondering the case, President Roosevelt will discuss his rate-making ideas at the White House with a platoon of potent powermen, as did Mr. Hoover...