IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2018 - 89

and ridley noted that "cleveland [ohio]
came to embody the early struggles
over electric power that also emerged
in san francisco, chicago, Detroit, and
hundreds of smaller cities." cleveland's
mayor set an example that reverberated
across the country when he accused 17
city council members of receiving large
campaign donations or outright bribes
from the cleveland electric Lighting co.
(ceLc), owned by Ge. "I believe in municipal ownership of these monopolies,"
declared Mayor tom Johnson, "because
if you do not own them, they will in time
own you. they will destroy your politics,
corrupt your institutions and, finally, destroy your liberties." the city fought
Morgan for more than a decade before
establishing a publicly owned company
that charged Us$.03/kwh compared to
ceLc's Us$.10/kwh.
hughes and the stevens commission
exposed price manipulation by publicly
interrogating executives of consolidated,
former commissioners, and the chiefs
of tammany hall (the Democrats' New
York political machine). he had spent
weeks in preparation, studying the accounts of various companies and uncovering how they consistently inflated the
costs of production and thereby reduced
their visible profits. according to his biographer wesser, most important "were
the revelations affecting the huge holding
company at the apex of the utility pyramid.
hughes carefully analyzed the successive
stages through which consolidated Gas
had moved in its drive toward monopoly.
he thus learned that the company was
overcapitalized in the amount of almost
$8,000,000... . when company officials
tried to pass off this $8,000,000 sum as
'good will,' [hughes] sardonically replied that in a monopolistic situation there
could be no true criteria by which to judge
good will." from Ge's records, hughes's
showed that the cost of producing 1 kwh
of electricity came to Us$.0366 while
New York consumers paid an average
of Us$.1227, yielding almost 300%
profit for consolidated Gas.
hughes's popularity grew along with
consumer outrage. President theodore
roosevelt convinced him to run for
governor because, he wrote to hughes,
march/april 2018

"you believe in reforming the relations
between the government and the great
corporations as drastically as is necessary to meet the needs of the situation,
but you believe in having it done in a
spirit of sanity and justice." as historian wesser wrote, hughes "forthrightly
championed the roosevelt theory of

regulation, a theory basic to his own
gas and electric commission bill." even
before his election, hughes proposed a
new commission of Gas and electricity,
which the legislature later adopted.
hughes argued that "there should
be effective governmental control of all
great enterprises in which the public is

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