The battle between a powerful industry and America's most politically astute president produced one of America's greatest achievments, electrifying the entire nation. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in the depths of the Depression, high tension power lines had been marching across the country for decades, delivering urban Americans a parade of life-transforming inventions from electric lights and radios to refrigerators and washing machines. But most rural Americans still lived in the punishing pre-electric era, unconnected to the grid, their lives consumed and bodies broken by backbreaking chores. Utilities cried that running power lines to rural areas would be unprofitable. But FDR knew better. In this story of political maneuvering, controversial legislation, giant utility holding companies, New Deal government organizations like the Tennessee Valley Authority, the packing of Federal courts, towering business figures, greedy villains, and the crying needs of farmers and other rural citizens desperate for services critical to their daily lives, John A. Riggs has chronicled democracy's greatest balancing act of government intervention with private markets.