The technologies that support daily life often go unnoticed, even when they are physically obvious, economically vital, and omnipresent throughout the built environment. When new, as historians of business, technology, and culture have shown again and again, these engineered systems were widely noticed, occupying positions of intense social prominence. So how does a technology traverse the gulf between that historical past, when it was both dynamic and new, and the narrative present, when, in the words of one historian, it has “faded into the unconscious background of experience”?Footnote ¹ “Cultures of Power: Electrification, Politics, and Visibility in Greater Los Angeles” examines how one such technology—electricity—became socially prominent, remained so long after it had lost its novelty, and then gradually fell into social obscurity. To study the construction of social prominence, I use the framework of technological visibility, which I define as a technology’s conspicuousness in material culture, the richness of its symbolic connotations, and its position as a medium of politics. Examining technological change via visibility reveals a mechanistic assumption at work in previous histories of the institutions and people who drive or resist technological change. The term “technology” itself implies innovation and novelty, bolstering a widespread belief that a technology’s newness is what determines its social prominence.Footnote ² Instead, my dissertation approaches the shifting social prominence of electricity in Greater Los Angeles as the product of human decisions. In so doing, it shows how electric systems and the urban fabric of Greater Los Angeles shaped each other, in a process of co-creation that left indelible marks on both.

When incentives, habits, preferences, and institutions align, as they did for nearly seven decades in large swaths of Southern California, a durable and self-reinforcing regime of visibility can develop. In Greater Los Angeles, electric visibility depended on a tangled combination of orchestrated corporate action, instrumental political maneuvering, and broad-based cultural enthusiasm. It was neither wholly imposed from above nor entirely organic, but rather co-produced.Footnote ³ As they fought to keep electricity and electric systems in the limelight, electricity’s purveyors were participating in a regime of electric visibility which they had not explicitly designed and did not fully control, but which they powerfully shaped and encouraged. Their efforts to make and keep electricity visible both built upon and enabled the everyday aesthetic choices of the region’s other businesses, homeowners, laborers, public officials, and media outlets, further reinforcing electricity’s prominence in daily life. These efforts—intentional and unintentional, from above and from below—gradually created a distinct, durable, and widespread regime of electric visibility which outlasted electricity’s actual normalization in daily life by decades.

By contrast, when the incentives that encourage a diverse set of actors to reinforce a technology’s visibility grow misaligned, the edifice can crumble, and a once-prominent technology can begin to fade into social obscurity—even if it continues to grow in economic significance, technical sophistication, and mass adoption. In Greater Los Angeles, the interwoven fabric of electric visibility quietly began to fray even as many in the region continued to amplify electricity’s social prominence. In the postwar years, the regime began collapsing, and electrical symbolism began to vanish from Southern California’s built, political, and aesthetic landscapes. In its place, an inverted regime of electric invisibility fitfully took shape, as electric utilities, homebuilders, municipal officials, and a wide array of other Angelenos came to see the benefit of diminishing electricity’s material and cultural position.

While the construct of visibility can be applied anywhere, Greater Los Angeles reveals the workings of electric visibility and invisibility like no other place. Greater Los Angeles’ metropolitan history is not only coterminous with, but actually formed by, its electrification. Los Angeles’ urbanization, which began in earnest after the arrival of a second transcontinental railway line in 1886 and gained economic structure, political coherence, and promotional heft during the turn of the century, took place out of step with the major waves of urban transformation that swept the rest of the U.S.Footnote ⁴ Unlike other burgeoning American cities, Greater Los Angeles urbanized and industrialized as it electrified, inscribing electric networks into the metropolis’ physical form—and into the structure of its political and social institutions.Footnote ⁵ Both because of this coincident timing and because of the region’s singular mode of electric development, electrification also played a determinative role in extending and defining the boundaries of Greater Los Angeles. Over the first five decades of electrification, the Angeleno moniker spread to encompass portions of five Southern Californian counties, as real estate speculators’, transit barons’, farming cooperatives’, and ice entrepreneurs’ unusual appropriations of electricity stitched together a coherent economic and social whole. During Greater Los Angeles’ formational decades, transmission lines, hydroelectric power rights, electric streetcar lines, and electric groundwater pumps disseminated Angeleno affiliations and a common regional identity over mountain ranges, across watersheds, and throughout valley floors.

Greater Los Angeles has often been studied as a product of its most famous environmental attributes—water, oil, and sunshine—and transit regimes—the streetcars and the freeways. The region’s electric systems, by contrast, have received far less scholarly attention.Footnote ⁶ Nonetheless, in Greater Los Angeles, electricity was water’s inextricable correlate and a critical precursor of its oil-extraction regime. Electricity shaped, financed, and powered the region’s streetcar empires, and the rise of car-centric urban planning initiated the collapse of electric visibility.Footnote ⁷ Water, in particular, has long stood as the quintessential environmental determinant of Angeleno politics, culture, governance, aesthetics, and growth, dominating historical imaginations and yielding many of the region’s most outsized characters and enduring legends.Footnote ⁸ In Southern California as throughout the broader American West, though, water is fundamentally, unavoidably intertwined with energy, and with its historical product: power.Footnote ⁹ Hydroelectricity not only dictated the shape of metropolitan growth to a greater extent than water did but also served as the forgotten impetus for Greater Los Angeles’ most famous and well-studied water projects.

Likewise, when scholars have examined Greater Los Angeles’ position as an “energy capital” whose urban form and hinterland relations depend on its history of energy production and consumption, they have focused overwhelmingly on petroleum.Footnote ¹⁰ The “crude politics” of backroom deals and institutional turf battles that oil extraction brought to Greater Los Angeles, though, were paralleled by a power politics that embroiled the entire region in decades-long conflict over system regulation, governance, and ownership.Footnote ¹¹ While petroleum has often been used to analytically link Greater Los Angeles to places such as Houston, Bakersfield, Pascagoula, and Pittsburgh, its electric history suggests comparisons to a very different set of North American energy landscapes: Seattle, Buffalo, Phoenix, Mexico City, San Francisco, and the Four Corners. At the same time, while Greater Los Angeles is often represented as an archetypical oil city, its electric history is in many ways unique, offering a crucial alternative to standard national narratives of sociotechnical development.

That story started on New Year’s Eve of 1882, when the City of Los Angeles installed its first seven electric streetlights. Though the region’s earliest electric lighting systems were stubbornly unremarkable in their design and scale, electricity was immediately co-opted by local real-estate speculators, who harnessed electric light and power as an advertisement, a tool for boosting land values, and a widely legible means of segregating urban space. As successive waves of in-migrants came to view Greater Los Angeles as a territory whose urban form was being defined by its electrification, the region’s nascent electric systems also began to diverge from the standard pattern of American electric development. Despite enthusiasm for electricity as a tool of land speculation, Southern California’s glaring lack of accessible coal had convinced major, mainstream engineers and investors that the region had no profitable path to deeper electrification. In their absence, and isolated from their conformist social and professional influences, local electrical engineers and entrepreneurs assembled a set of electric systems uniquely dependent on hydropower and long-distance transmission.Footnote ¹² These developments made Southern California an international epicenter of transmission engineering and created an unusual set of possibilities that drove rapid rural electrification, widely dispersed residential settlement, and groundwater-intensive agricultural development. The region’s unique dependence on long-distance transmission of hydropower also turbocharged the development of the world’s largest electric streetcar network, further stitching Greater Los Angeles into a single social and economic space. As Greater Los Angeles’ unusual mode of electric development shaped regional growth, it also shaped Angeleno identity, creating strong and broad-based cultural associations of electricity with Southern Californian life and weaving the first strands of a local regime of visibility.

By 1905, the many cultural connotations created by Greater Los Angeles’ burgeoning hydropower systems allowed one electric company president to declare that “‘in Southern California water is life and electricity is power.’”Footnote ¹³ That year, when orchestrators of the Los Angeles’ proposed Owens River Aqueduct employed the prospect of abundant hydropower to obtain voter backing for aqueduct bonds, they unwittingly cemented that connection, establishing electricity as a tool of electoral politics and political debate.Footnote ¹⁴ Over the subsequent decade, as municipal bureaucrats, electric company executives, and political activists fought for control of the aqueduct’s lucrative hydropower, they imbued electricity with enduring political valences that firmly universalized it in regional culture. Those political battles shaped both Greater Los Angeles’ electric systems and Angelenos’ relationship to electricity. The so-called “apostles of city ownership” who transformed the aqueduct’s rump electrical project into the largest municipally owned electric system in the world did so by designing its technical components to support their public-power policies.Footnote ¹⁵ Private power executives, for their part, contested control of aqueduct power by cohering their disparate companies into a regional industry, coordinating lobbying, political expenditure, public relations, and eventually their actual electric systems in an effort to retain their control of power production. At a more fundamental level, Greater Los Angeles’ new electric politics changed the way Angelenos affiliated with and communicated political ideologies. Haltingly, the engineers, entrepreneurs, and managers who financed, designed, and administered Greater Los Angeles’ electric systems, and the people who used them, learned to express their political aspirations through electricity, making the electric network a medium, rather than merely an object, of politics. By 1917, when the Bureau of Power and Light took over the Los Angeles electrical systems of private power companies Southern California Edison and Pacific Light & Power, electricity’s political entanglements had joined its cultural and identarian connotations and its spatial specificity as a central plank in a mature regime of electric visibility.

For the next two decades, an ever-wider array of regional actors turned to electric products, electric iconography, and electricity itself to express themselves, communicate their ideas, and associate themselves with Greater Los Angeles. Despite electricity’s deep familiarity and unflagging ubiquity in daily life and popular culture, it grew ever more visible in Angelenos’ daily lives and Greater Los Angeles’ reputation. Most prominently, Greater Los Angeles’ two most recognizable boom industries, movie production and oil extraction, drew on massed electric light to establish distinctively Angeleno corporate identities. Across the metropolitan landscape, salespeople, religious leaders, architects, and residents all continued to harness electricity as a medium long after they had grown familiar with electricity as a means. First the Bureau of Power and Light and then Southern California Edison followed suit, employing costly and flamboyant architectural techniques to emphasize their electric systems’ place in the urban fabric. Electricity likewise remained at the white-hot core of regional politics, as continuing combat over control of electric systems inflected practically every electoral topic. The Bureau of Power and Light and Southern California Edison rapidly became some of California and the American Southwest’s most influential political institutions, and the all-encompassing electric politics they stoked drove electricity further into the recesses of popular culture and Angeleno self-expression.Footnote ¹⁶ By the dawn of the Second World War, Los Angeles’ self-perpetuating regime of electric visibility seemed poised to continue indefinitely.

Over the course of the next two decades, though, shifts in electric-system governance, municipal finance, and transportation unraveled Greater Los Angeles’ regime of electric visibility, allowing electricity to gradually fade in prominence. Within the City of Los Angeles, the Bureau of Power and Light’s hegemony within municipal government provoked political backlash from a reformist mayor with private-power allies, leading to a six-year power struggle that hollowed out both the Bureau’s leadership and its capacity for machine politics.Footnote ¹⁷ After a brief but debilitating strike stymied the mayor’s overhaul agenda, the resultant détente protected municipal ownership while politically demobilizing the Bureau. New, consciously apolitical leadership perceived the Bureau’s dependence on bond campaigns as a vulnerability rather than a strength, and altered its financial structure to depend on revenue bonding. By obviating the Bureau’s need to regularly contest elections, its postwar leadership unwittingly dismantled its vaunted public-relations apparatus as well, ending decades of nonstop electrical campaigning, removing electric power from regional political agendas, and drastically diminishing the attention voters paid to Greater Los Angeles’ political systems. Almost simultaneously, a generational shift within Southern California Edison’s leadership led to a drastic reorientation in the company’s public messaging and political priorities. Under its new proto-libertarian president, Southern California Edison reoriented its focus inward toward labor unrest within its own workforce and outward toward the specter of international communism, abandoning the more nuanced political terrain of local ownership in favor of the symbolic clarity of geopolitics. At the same time, electric visibility’s spatial and cultural components were also unravelling. Greater Los Angeles’ streetcar network, which had long stood as an explicitly electric metonym for geographic growth, regional unification, and daily mobility, entered terminal decline during the postwar automotive boom, stripping the region of one of its most prominent electric icons.

The midcentury car culture that rose in the streetcars’ place, though, also provoked a regional smog crisis characterized by both mass and scientific uncertainty. Greater Los Angeles’ “smog” was not the same stuff as the smog that wreathed trans-Atlantic coal plants and steel mills, leaving experts, regulators, and the public to blindly guess at its nature, origins, risks, and consequences.Footnote ¹⁸ By 1952, local research had proven that the region’s photochemical smog was primarily composed of ozone, the product of Greater Los Angeles’ sunlight, its geography, and its proliferating automotive tailpipes.Footnote ¹⁹ But while smog is a chemical and meteorological phenomenon, air pollution is a socially constructed category.Footnote ²⁰ In the years before smog’s sources and makeup became widely known, Greater Los Angeles’ electric utilities found themselves included within the rapidly expanding category of “polluter,” driving them to explore the possible benefits of intentionally obscuring both their electric systems and electricity itself. As smog reshaped the political economy of Greater Los Angeles, it also laid the foundations of a new regime of invisibility.

By 1969, Greater Los Angeles’ electric utilities, government agencies, and other institutions were committed to concealing electric systems from sight, and most Angelenos had learned to overlook electricity entirely. Electricity, in other words, had become an infrastructure—a “substrate” in that it had come to exist below and within the arrangements of daily life.Footnote ²¹ Under the regime of electric visibility, electric networks and objects in Greater Los Angeles were structural, overtly designed to express political ideology, communicate cultural alignments, and endorse specific visions of the future. As such, electricity drew its conceptual and social power from the people and institutions who paid attention to it. As incentives shifted and visibility gave way to invisibility, electric systems’ transformation into infrastructure was likewise the cocreated result of shifting social and political attitudes on the one hand, and intentional alterations to how electric objects were designed and located on the other.

Though electric systems were and are physically vast, sprawling, and often obtrusive, as analytical constructs, electric visibility and invisibility are metaphorical rather than literal descriptions of electricity’s prominence in society. Electric visibility was often most dramatically expressed through lightning motifs and searchlight beams, but its more meaningful expressions revealed themselves in primarily nonvisual modes, from political priorities to regional identities. Likewise, though under the contrary incentives of electric invisibility utilities did aspire to minimize the visual impact of distribution lines and substations, they did so in pursuit of more profound civic obscurity. Visual and material culture, in other words, merely provide evidence for and expressions of the more intangible regimes of visibility and invisibility which were helping to structure society.

To trace Greater Los Angeles’ intertwined electric and urban development, this project assesses both as products of particular conceptions of the Southern Californian landscape. It also analyses them as the result of political contestation, approaching engineering choices as efforts at ideological persuasion, electoral manipulation, and competitive posturing as much as simple results of demand, fiscal constraint, and technical ability. To do so, it depends first and foremost upon the records of Greater Los Angeles’ two dominant electric utilities, the Southern California Edison Company and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. To better situate these two institutions and their power systems within the broader political economy of Southern California, I have also drawn on the archives of the Los Angeles Public Library, the California Public Utilities (formerly Railroad) Commission, Los Angeles County, and half a dozen cities across the region. The personal papers of state and municipal politicians, utility executives, journalists, celebrities, and entrepreneurs have helped reveal that engineering and business choices were often as much efforts at ideological persuasion, electoral manipulation, and competitive posturing as they were the simple results of demand, fiscal constraint, and technical ability. Transcripts of regulatory proceedings have helped to uncover the personalities behind the capital assets. Oral histories, memoirs, newspapers, and trade publications have offered crucial windows into how electricity was perceived and valued by different nonexpert audiences.

Written sources, though, have provided only half of this project’s evidentiary base. Demonstrating the workings of electric visibility and invisibility has required sustained attention to landscape, ecological change, and material context—all of which are often better recorded in sketches, photographs, and maps than in text, or better recovered in situ than in the archive. Architecture and the built environment also provide critical evidence. Where physical traces have vanished, I have used architects’ sketches, engineering documents, and committee minutes to reconstruct sightlines, map the distribution of streetlights, and otherwise recover the material presence of electricity in the landscape of daily life.

Over the course of eight decades, Greater Los Angeles’ electrification remade the city again and again. In the hands of a broadening range of Angelenos, electricity became a tool not just for guiding real estate speculation and homebuilding, but for shaping emerging metropolitan boundaries and building common identities. As electricity gained new and varied political connotations, it gradually became a medium, rather than merely an object, of politics. Electric light became a richly varied mode of expression, and an ideologically potent form of fencing: For white Angelenos obsessed with a racially homogenous vision of modernity and for neighborhood associations determined to preserve class hierarchies, segregation by illumination and ostracization through darkness became prominent tools of urban design.

Under the regime of electric visibility, Greater Los Angeles also shaped and reshaped its electric systems. Small-time, heterodox electrical engineers, working largely uncontested by national electric conglomerates, designed electric systems which defied the technical and financial status quo and which irrevocably altered Greater Los Angeles’ geography of profit. As electric systems gained cultural valences of their own, others engineered them to support electoral platforms and buttress political coalitions as much as to generate electricity. Electric visibility flourished, and electricity’s foundational role in Angeleno senses of place and political life became ever more deeply entangled. Only as these meanings began to unwind from each other could electricity begin to fade from the forefront of daily life. Power politics became the simultaneous victim of its excesses and its successes, while electric transport folded under the growing weight of class stratification. As the turbines of electric visibility ground to a halt, fewer and fewer Angelenos learned to see electricity as Greater Los Angeles’ connective tissue. In this conceptual context, the political, medical, and identarian crisis of smog provoked Greater Los Angeles’ electric utilities to begin experimenting with intentional self-effacement.