| Today, Americans generally take for granted their access to basic technological infrastructures, such as roads and electricity. The regulation of utility companies by American state and federal governments only strengthens this presumption. How did Americans acquire this expectation and why did their governments promise to police these technologies? My dissertation addresses this question, finding that citizen activists, radial scholars, and progressive engineers made access to public utility networks part of American citizenship. By the end of this period, Americans could expect---as citizens, rather than as consumers---levels of access and service from utility companies that these corporations would have otherwise been unwilling to offer.;To date, historians have typically understood this development as part of the rise of the regulatory state, characterizing it as part of the expert-driven expansion of governmental powers in the Progressive Era. This dissertation suggests, however, that the growth of regulation during this time is better interpreted as a compromise that American governments struck between a citizenry that was demanding control over infrastructure providers and utility companies that clung to the principles of profit-making and private ownership. The compromise of technological citizenship, an arrangement in which individuals have a right to buy technological services, is ideal that continues to influence policy debates to this day. The benefits of technological citizenship were welcomed by many voters in the years leading up to the First World War. During the interwar years, industrialists themselves adopted the rhetoric of technological citizenship once they realized that it shielded them from leftist calls to eradicate the capitalist basis of the infrastructure industry. |
