The Most Laissez Faire: International Comparison as Energy Policy in the Interwar United States

• In Event: The Nature of American Foreign Relations: Taking Foreign Relations History and Environmental History Together

Abstract

In 1924, Daniel Dunlop of the British Electrical and Allied Manufacturers Association invited power industry and government representatives from around the globe to a World Power Conference. Part technical and part spiritual in design, the Conference aimed to create international unity through openly sharing technology and debating its social applications. It quickly became an institution: a permanent World Power Council emerged, and countries took turns hosting conferences on an array of themes spanning natural resource use, energy economics, industrial applications, and social responsibilities. By 1930, conference delegates would refer to the Council as a “Technical League of Nations.”

While the United States actively participated, U.S. delegates hardly presented a unified front. Instead, these international conferences provided more ammunition in fierce domestic debates over control of the country’s energy industries. By the first U.S.-hosted conference, in 1936, the country remained an outlier - at one “extreme” of those assembled, the U.S. showed the fullest expression of “laissez faire, private ownership of power resources.” Most other participating countries by that time had more intensive state involvement in regulating the power industry, managing natural resources, and providing public services.

The history of energy development in the United States looks quite different if one considers its extremism a choice in a vibrant international context of political and economic options, rather than a homegrown industry that by chance remained largely private. Rethinking the history of United States energy development as both an environmental history and a history of foreign diplomacy, this paper will highlight how international debates about resource use and the public good influenced the development of American energy landscapes in the 1920s-1930s. The paper will further consider how the U.S. justified its outlier status abroad, as well as how the conversation changed after the Great Depression.

Author

• Abby Elaine Spinak, Harvard University