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Who was Leland Olds

Most Basin Electric employees and member-system consumers know that Leland Olds Station near Stanton, ND, is the namesake of a man. But how many really know anything about the man?

Basin Electric Power Cooperative - March 19, 2004

Most Basin Electric employees and member-system consumers know that Leland Olds Station near Stanton, ND, is the namesake of a man. But how many really know anything about the man? If you would like to know more about Leland Olds, this fascinating book "The Years of Lyndon Johnson Master of the Senate" by Robert Caro, published in 2002, devotes 72 pages to a story about Leland Olds.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson Master of the Senate

The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2003. It is volume three in Caro's ongoing biography of Johnson.

The chapters about Leland Olds start as a mini-biography of Olds, explaining how he became a New Dealer and supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It's Roosevelt who first nominates him to the Federal Power Commission (FPC) of which he becomes chairman. The FPC is what we now call the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC.

The story with Lyndon Johnson begins as Olds is re-nominated in 1949 to the FPC by President Harry Truman for a third five-year term. Chapters 10 through 12 chronicle how Johnson does the oil and gas industry's bidding by preventing Olds' reappointment to the FPC. Johnson is ruthless, and in the process, destroys Leland Olds' career in government service. Johnson wants to prove to the oil and gas industry that it can count on him so that it will support him in his re-election bid in 1954 and other elections to come. Olds doesn't see the ambush coming. He thinks Johnson is a friend. After all, they had both worked to bring electricity to rural areas. Olds comes to the hearing with no attorney, accompanied only by an FPC staffer and his wife Maud.

Johnson quietly and carefully plans the ambush months in advance. First, Johnson gets himself the chairmanship to the subcommittee that would look into Olds' re-nomination. Then he called in investigators from the staff of the Communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee. Olds' previous 10 years of public service on the FPC are exemplary, so the investigators focus on his years as a journalist for a wire service called the Federated Press for which he had written more than 1,800 articles in the 1920s. Many mainstream publications as well as the Daily Worker, the publication of the American Communist Party, picked up his articles.

Leland Olds

The investigators select excerpts of about 50 of those articles to convince the subcommittee - and later the full Senate - that Olds was a communist. Those charges had been leveled in his previous confirmation hearings and not taken seriously. However, times had changed. By 1948 and 1949, people were looking for communist conspirators in the government under every rock. Johnson stacked the subcommittee with senators that would be unsympathetic to Olds. During the hearing Johnson allowed his handpicked witnesses against Olds to speak freely and at length. When Olds tried to defend himself, he was constantly interrupted.

President Truman fights for Olds and writes a letter of support to the full Commerce Committee chairman that was read to the subcommittee. Despite this, Olds' nomination went down to defeat 7-0. The full committee voted 10 to 2 against his nomination. On the Senate floor debate only four senators, including Langer from North Dakota and Humphrey of Minnesota, were willing to take the floor in support of Olds. Leland Olds' re-nomination was defeated by a vote of 53 to 15.

Olds was not a communist. He believed in capitalism and that profits were necessary to keep industry around to serve consumers. However, he didn't believe in obscene corporate profits or allowing corporate power to corrupt America's representative democracy. If Olds were alive today, he would work to prevent the power market abuses and to protect consumers, stockholders and workers. Unfortunately, much of the protections Leland Olds instituted were reversed after he left the FPC.

Johnson's actions helped propel him to greater power. After his first term as a senator, he became the majority leader in 1955 at the age of 46, vice president in 1960 and the 36th President after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.

Without a job, Olds exhausted his savings quickly. President Truman eventually found Olds a government job that didn't require Senate confirmation, but after 1953 Truman was out of the White House, and Olds was out of government service. He took a different path to power.

Olds established a consulting business that rural electric co-ops and public power systems patronized. That's where Caro's story on Olds ends and a story of giant power begins.

Maud Olds, Leland Olds' widow,
and Art Jones, Basin Electric's first
president, unveil the bronze
medallion sculpture of her husband
at the dedication of the Leland
Olds Station on Sept. 24, 1966.

As early as May 1957, member-systems representatives of what is now Basin Electric Power Cooperative had heard Leland Olds speak at a meeting about his "Giant Power" concept: the integration of federal hydropower with large, efficient steam-generating plants, using fuel resources of the West.

In 1958 the assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior asked the entities receiving power from the Missouri River Basin, Bureau of Reclamation system to a meeting. These entities were told that the Bureau of Reclamation hydro facilities would meet no more than 88 percent of the requirements of the preference customers in 1963 and that they better get busy to arrange for other resources.(1)

The Mid-West Electric Consumers Association (MECA) was created to unite and organize consumer-owned utilities in the region. At the MECA annual meeting on Oct. 26, 1959, in Rapid City, SD, Olds told those attending how to provide themselves with a low-cost power supply. He told them to pool their resources and their collective needs to make possible the construction of large coal-based generating units, which would use existing federal transmission systems to deliver the electric power to load centers throughout the region.

Following are excerpts from that speech:

" . . . the public and cooperative electric systems in the eight Missouri Basin States covered by the Mid-West Electric Consumers Association have no cause to play second fiddle to the private power companies in such planning.

"By this I do not mean that there should be no cooperation between non-profit and profit power systems in a region. But I do mean that you, speaking in a peculiar way for consumers, and not the power companies, should have a final word on how the most economical power supplies for the region's future are to be assured.

"In other words, you should put yourselves in a position as a group to deal from strength rather than, as a large number of separate entities, from weakness.

"And I am sure that if you approach your long-range regional power supply planning as a group, positively undertaking the responsibility on a cooperatively financed and managed basis, you can count on the Federal power system in your region as a partner, as a servant. It will provide increasing supplies of hydroelectric power designed to supplement your big modern steam generating stations. It will provide the expanding super transmission system necessary to make the whole plan work."

"The secret lies . . . in establishing a single regional wholesale power supply system that can build and integrate such giant plants as a source of bulk power supply for all systems in the region." (2)

Olds died in August of 1960, but as a direct result of his advice, this region's rural electric cooperatives formed Basin Electric Power Cooperative and named their first power plant the Leland Olds Station.

Leland Olds also indirectly assisted Basin Electric in hiring its first general manager. In an interview for his retirement story for the Cooperative's March Report Magazine in 1985, James Grahl, Basin Electric's first general manager, told me that when he came to North Dakota for the job interview, he really didn't intend to take the position. He said there were three factors that convinced him otherwise. The first was the character of the directors and the people trying to form Basin Electric. The second was that the directors intended to do something about reclaiming land after strip mining.

"One other factor in my decision was they had already planned to name the first power plant after Leland Olds. He was a man with whom I worked in Washington (DC) and had admired for his integrity and dedication to public service," Grahl said. "I was surprised to find out that the people here in the Great Plains thought enough of his ideas to name their first power plant after him. The reason that impressed me was because I thought his ideas about the power industry were very farsighted and correct."

(1) A Farmer Takes a Stand - Ken Holum's Story of Life on the Farm and Consumer Power

(2) Giant Power Cooperative for the Midwest - A booklet prepared by MECA for an Aug. 22, 1966, meeting.

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