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Samuel Insull and the Movement for State Utility Regulatory Commissions*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Forrest McDonald
Forrest McDonald
Affiliation:
Executive Secretary, American History Research Center
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Abstract

It was one of history's sardonic pranks that the forces deriding business efficiency and clamoring for regulation made Samuel Insull a favorite scapegoat. He had built his early electric system in Chicago with vision, administrative and political skill, and a conspicuously advanced concept of public relations. Insull espoused the “natural monopoly” principle, but he shocked contemporaries by insisting upon the corollary necessity for public control. He fought hard and effectively for state regulation, not as a radical theorist hut as a realist with a record of public service unsurpassed in the infant electric utility industry.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1958 , pp. 241 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1958

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References

* Bibliographical Note: Adequate annotation of this article would require almost as much space as the article itself. Of the large quantities of materials being used in my research toward a biography of Insull, however, a few may be singled out as bearing most directly on Insull's role in the movement for regulation:

On Insull's personal and political affairs, four sets of manuscripts are most important — his Memoirs (dictated in 1934); his correspondence files (covering the years 1897–1935); the notes of Burton Y. Berry of the State Department, recording Insull's shipboard conversations upon his return from Greece in 1934; and his public addresses. All these manuscripts are the property of Samuel Insull, Jr, and are on loan to the American History Research Center, quartered in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. A number of the speeches were published, as Central Station Electric Service (Chicago, 1915) and Public Utilities in Modern Life (Chicago, 1924).

On Insull's business activities, of greatest importance are the Insull and Edison papers in the Edison Museum, West Orange, New Jersey, the corporate records of Commonwealth Edison Company, Peoples Gas Company (each in company archives), and Middle West Utilities Company (in the archives of Central and South West Corporation, Chicago). Commonwealth Edison also has several file drawers of Insull papers, newspaper clippings, and miscellaneous data relating to public relations and political activities.

On Insull's efforts to sell the electric utility industry on regulation, the most important source is the annual Proceedings of the National Electric Light Association (published annually by the Association in New York), particularly for the years 1897–1910. On the activities of the National Civic Federation, see its Municipal and Private Operation of Public Utilities (3 Vols.; New York, 1907); especially Vol. I. Of key importance also is John R. Commons' autobiography, Myself (New York, 1934), which describes the work of the Federation and tells of Commons' drafting of the law establishing the pioneer Wisconsin Railroad Commission, on the basis of his experience with the Federation.

On Chicago and Illinois politics, the Insull papers mentioned earlier are the most valuable, but the files of the Chicago Tribune and other Chicago newspapers are also important, as are several Illinois state documents. See particularly the Report of the Special House Committee Appointed to Investigate the Charges of Corruption Concerning Traction Legislation (Springfield, 1903); Majority and Minority Report of the Special Committee on Public Utilities … together with a Draft of a Bill to Provide Local Control of Public Utilities in Chicago (Springfield, 1917); and Illinois Senate Committee on Public Utilities, Reply of Public Utilities Commission to Criticisms … (Springfield, 1919). The unpublished Memoirs of State Senator Richard Barr (copy in possession of William H. Stuart, Chicago) and Carter H. Harrison's autobiography, Stormy Years (Indianapolis and New York, 1935), are of great importance, as are numerous secondary works, such as William H. Stuart's The Twenty Incredible Years (Chicago, 1935), William T. Hutchinson's Lowden of Illinois; The Life of Frank O. Lowden (Chicago, 1957), and Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, Big Bill of Chicago Indianapolis and New York, 1953).

Various other sources are generally useful. Among these are the files of the Wall Street Journal; the Henry Villard Papers (Houghton Library, Harvard); Forrest McDonald, Let There Be Light: The Electric Utility Industry in Wisconsin, 1881–1955 (Madison, 1957), especially pages 114–122; Carl D. Thompson, Public Ownership (New York, 1925), especially the tables on pages 268–289. Finally, interviews with a wide variety of persons in Chicago have been quite informative.