During his CNN Town Hall last week, hedge fund billionaire and trailing presidential hopeful Tom Steyer added his voice to an increasingly common refrain from fellow billionaire candidate Mike Bloomberg and much of the right-wing press, suggesting Senator Bernie Sanders is too radical, too socialist, for ordinary Americans. “I don’t think a government takeover of major parts of the American economy is a good idea,” he said, contrasting himself with the current front-runner. “I don’t think it’s good for working people.… It’s never worked in the past, and it’s not going to work for us now.”



Whether Sanders’s platform really calls for taking over “major parts” of the economy is up for debate. In the 1970s, Sanders talked favorably about “public ownership of utilities, banks, and major industries,” and he urged President Richard Nixon to “give serious thought” to nationalizing oil companies during the 1973 oil crisis. That’s a while ago, though. Sanders has since said his vision of democratic socialism isn’t about either workers or the federal government owning all the “means of production.” His Green New Deal plan does call for publicly owned clean power generation, and he’s joined calls in California to bring PG&E—the bankrupt California utility found to have sparked deadly wildfires—under the control of the state government there. He advocates the expanded use of already federalized institutions like the Tennessee Valley Authority and Power Marketing Administrations and for giving workers an ownership stake in corporations.

Even if all these plans were enacted, a Sanders presidency might still be considerably behind its predecessors when it comes to seizing private property. Far from an unprecedented and radical act, federal government takeovers of one form or another—often called nationalization—have a rich history in American politics, particularly when it comes to navigating out of big crises. And it’s tended to work out better than Steyer implied.

Sanders isn’t the first politician to propose public ownership of parts of the power sector. In his successful 1932 presidential bid, Franklin D. Roosevelt railed against the “monstrosity” of private utility holding companies and argued that people should have the right to take control of their privately owned power lines. He didn’t want all utilities under public ownership, to be sure, but “where a community—a city or county or a district—is not satisfied with the service rendered or the rates charged by the private utility,” Roosevelt said in one campaign speech, “it has the undeniable basic right, as one of its functions of Government, one of its functions of home rule, to set up, after a fair referendum to its voters has been had, its own governmentally owned and operated service.”



The New Deal that followed displaced all manner of private business. Having started in the Hoover administration, the response to Black Monday nationalized several functions of the banking sector through the creation of institutions like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Federal National Mortgage Association (“Fannie Mae”), and Export-Import Bank, before ultimately nationalizing the country’s gold reserves. The Tennessee Valley Authority, created to provide power and jobs to the hard-hit mountainous region, was formed in part by nationalizing the Tennessee Electric Power Company, over the protests of its executives. Building on the TVA’s early success, the Rural Electrification Administration, or REA, quite literally electrified the nation with public power: At the time, some 90 percent of rural homes lacked electricity, their inhabitants being too poor for private power companies to see a profit in serving them. Like the TVA, rural electric cooperatives were set up in the name of affordable power and rural economic development, with the federal government providing funds and technical assistance to construct utilities owned and operated by their members. In just 10 years, with a $100 million annual appropriation from Congress—$1.8 billion a year, in 2020 dollars—the REA built 380,000 miles of transmission lines: 42 percent of the transmission lines ever built in the United States. Many still exist and, today, co-ops and other publicly owned utilities, including the TVA, serve 49 million Americans.