The United States’ ascendance to superpower status in the twentieth-century is exhaustively covered in American history, typically involving discussion of political, economic, and military prowess in the rise to global domination. The role of oil in propping up each of these forces in American society cannot be understated. Mid-century, as historians began to evaluate the deep implications of the economic shift to oil, the totality of American culture had already been fused around the assumption of oil as integral to daily life, affluence, and national security. In 1948, historian Leonard Fanning authored The Rise of American Oil, in which he observed that “In no other country has there been a petroleum development comparable to that in the United States; in no other country is there a greater dependence on petroleum products than in the United States. A typical American adventure and enterprise is oil.”[1]The truth of this observation (regardless of its ethical implications) has only grown in magnitude over the last 70 years, and a body of scholarship has emerged with varying perspectives on the role of oil in defining foreign policy, consumer behavior, and economic health. This scholarship represents the divergence of popular American thought on the same contentious issues.
Early twentieth century historians like Fanning lauded the petroleum industry for stimulating economic growth, defeating the Axis powers, and raising the standard of American affluence. The simultaneous rise of the automobile urged further dependence on oil over coal, and drove the cultural trend of mass consumption which resulted in the expansion of oil technologies into nearly every other commodity market. Subsequently, environmental, business, and cultural historians are all forced to confront the conflation of corporate and government interest in the oil economy. The degree to which corporate greed drove demand – or vice versa – is, however, a point of contention. Two main schools of thought have emerged since the 1970s as the reality of oil crisis has unfolded. Determinist historians argue through varying methodologies that the introduction of new oil-operated technologies into American life transformed the political, economic, and social landscapes irreversibly. Contextualist and social constructionist historians, on the other hand, believe that cultural systems were key in defining the trajectory of the oil industry, including its convergence with government interests.
For the most part, oil historians have stayed apolitical in discussions of government regulations, while remaining fiercely critical of the extent to which federal dollars have become soaked in petroleum. A consideration of cultural norms is insufficient to explain how the US government became oil’s biggest subsidizer, “championing the development of resources on public lands by private interests.”[2]A complex narrative emerges, involving elements of domestic and corporate greed, efforts to find and drive down the bottom line, pursuit for energy independence and diversification, government involvement in energy planning, and importantly, a cultural fear of scarcity.
Other divergences in the history of oil surround the question of who – or what – bears responsibility for America’s petroleum dependency. In the 1970s, during and immediately after the Oil Crisis, a body of scholarship materialized which placed chief blame on US government interests and the emerging marriage of petroleum access and national security. This narrative has been echoed in more expansive publications as the field of environmental history has increased in scope. A much smaller number of historians argue that benevolent government subsidization of the oil industry serves US economic interests, amounting to a defense of national security. Still others view industry or consumer greed as the culprit. Twenty-first century historians increasingly evaluate political, industry, and consumer agency as all having actively contributed to the monopolistic dominance of oil on the American market.[3]
The Journal of American History published in June 2012 a special issue entitled Oil in American History, which featured the works of several prominent historians (some of whom are highlighted here) and examined this recent historiographic trend’s political, business, and cultural implications. Petroleum’s machinations are so thoroughly embedded in American life that political, foreign policy, environmental, socio-cultural, military, and business/economic contexts are all essential readings. The goal of this essay is to examine the major threads that have shaped a comprehensive reading of oil history and how they have informed the trajectory of emerging scholarship. I contend that the socio-political perspective most sufficiently explains how the United States became One Nation Under Oil; how the American economy not only became dependent on petroleum but on armed protection of foreign oil assets; and how the real and imagined marriage of oil and national security has come to define American consumer, political, and economic interests.
Industry Consolidation
Contextualist historians like David Nye, Bob Johnson, and Joseph Pratt argue that industry is primarily responsible for the degree to which the American economy is structured around oil. This narrative structure was developed by early environmental historians as the Oil Crisis began to unfold and a more critical eye was turned toward the economic concentration of the energy sector. Daniel Yergin proclaims oil to be “the worlds’s biggest and most pervasive business,”[4]whose rise to dominance was mirrored by that of American nationhood. Joseph Pratt chronicles the rise of Standard Oil to its premiership as ExxonMobil today, originally pioneered by John D. Rockefeller in what is known to be the swiftest and most successful wealth and power acquisition of modern history. By the time business regulations were passed, Standard had already established monopolistic dominance over the industry.[5]Much has been written about how Rockefeller’s cult of personality influenced the emerging oil business in its earliest years. Writing in 1904, influential muckraker Ida Tarbell noted:
“Mr. Rockefeller was driven to this new task of organization not only by his own curious intellect; he was driven to it by that thing so abhorrent to his mind – competition. If, as he claimed, the oil business belonged to him, and if, as he had announced, he was prepared to refine all the oil that men would consume, it followed as a corollary that the markets of the world belonged to him.”[6]
Tarbell’s exposé into Standard Oil’s corruption invariably contributed to the 1911 Supreme Court decision which determined Standard was operating as an illegal monopoly. However, the subsequent fractioning of Standard did little to dampen an entrenched profit stream, dominated by several of Standard’s progeny companies and others that made up the “Seven Sisters” of oil: Exxon, Mobil, Gulf, Texaco, Chevron, British Petroleum, and Royal Dutch-Shell. These companies “played nations against each other while controlling the supply of oil through a system of overlapping ownership ties in the major producing nations,” supported by the US government “with tax breaks and the threat of military action to keep oil flowing to their citizens,” demonstrated as early as 1953 by the British-American coup of Mohammed Mossadeq and subsequent installation of Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran.[7]
The 1960s and 1970s also saw an increasing number of environmental disasters, including pipeline breaks and oil spill that startled environmentalists, intellectuals, and legislators alike, forcing a closer examination of federal regulations. Joseph Petulla’s American Environmental History: The Exploitation and Conservation of Natural Resources (1977) is an early analysis of how government subsidization, protection, and promotion of the oil and gas industry facilitated monopolistic growth under the guise of laissez faire capitalism as early as the 1901 Spindletop strike. Because of extensive government corruption that included financial entanglements between petroleum companies and state leadership, industrial oligopoly was solidified even before the automobile had become a driving force in oil consumption.[8]Historians have also highlighted the oil industry’s role in the expansion of private transportation, which fueled US dependency on both foreign and domestic oil production. The public transportation system was largely dismantled by petroleum corporations in a widespread effort to make the automobile ubiquitous. Petulla’s indictment of “the economy of monopoly capital developed in tandem with centralized political arrangements, new technologies, and social institutions alone with imperialism, intensified resource exploitation, and the willing acceptance of a consumerist philosophy”[9]is representative of other bodies of scholarship published during the same era (including those of noted environmental historian Roderick Nash), an Oil Crisis-era reading of history that delivers a tri-level prosecution to industrial greed, political acquiescence, and consumer gluttony.[10]
The rise of the automobile – disproportionate in the United States to other first-world nations – is a critical movement which worked in tandem with the rise of oil. Christopher Wells, too, places primary culpability on industry and political collaboration which ensured that automotive infrastructure transformed American culture. The dark side of the privilege of mobility includes not only environmental consequences, but an entire landscape premised on the necessity of private transportation. Politicians legislated the rise of the automobile – and, consequently, the oil industry – through policies and incentives designed to boost economic and land development through the expansion of private transportation. The environmental hazards of oil production – including groundwater pollution, refinery hazards, and public water supply contamination – were clear in the early twentieth century, but corporations were unwilling to invest in solutions that would compromise profits.
Industry has succeeded in its economic endeavors only “by imposing a brittle simplicity on the landscape that sacrifices environmental resiliency and complexity… [that is] not just ecological, but social, technological, and economic as well.”[11]Christopher Wells offers a partial absolution to the American consumer in his argument that political and industry forces so strongly enforced private transportation incentives (masked as “’free-market’ choice”) that Americans really had no choice but to participate in the economy of Car Country.[12] Wells’ contemporary concern is that the nation’s economy is rooted in the continuing flow of a “limited (and geopolitically contentious) natural resource,” and that even innovative energy technologies will not fix the numerous other problems that the automotive industry and its supportive industries, including federal and state government, support and benefit from.[13] Martin Melosi notes that free enterprise existed only in theory since “the energy economy shifted from limited external constraints to several diverse and more stringent constraints, including governmental intervention, the lack of competition, and environments ‘costs.’”[14] Attempts by both historians and consumers to defend industry dominance in the name of free market capitalism belie an inherent bias toward a structural façade in the American economy, masking a fragility that is exposed with each successive oil crisis, foreign intervention, and the looming threat of peak oil.
Petro-Imperialism
A dominant position among twenty-first century historians who have witnessed the rise of American imperialism in the Persian gulf is one of oil as government business. Historians tend to agree that oil has played a key role in the United States’ rise to global domination over the last hundred years. Daniel Yergin’s The Prize(1991) stands as the preeminent authority on petroleum history, liberally referenced and built upon by any other history that touches on the subject. Published twenty years after The Prize, Yergin’s sequel The Quest(2011) brings his argument up to the present and fills in the gap of a critically important twenty years of historical development. In both books, Yergin disputes the environmentalist argument of “peak oil,” which hold that the industry will soon enter a precipitous decline as the current extraction rate becomes unsustainable due to dwindling resources. Yergin theorizes that that rate of technological development should facilitate a transition to alternate energy sources before this phenomenon occurs; he is far more concerned by the increasing reliance on foreign exports to meet energy demands, which has resulted in a political system ensnared in complex global trade geopolitical conflicts. The Prizesets the stage for the ongoing saga that is The Quest; both analyze petroleum as an “essential element in the strategy of nations” since the Great War, and only increasing in importance since that time in the “common perception that the postwar world would require ever-greater quantities of oil for economic prosperity and national power.”[15] Yergin’s momentous volumes serve as a jumping-off point for more specific and argumentative analyses, and is deserving of some credit for the vast numbers of environmental and oil histories published over the last twenty years which have used The Prizeas groundwork.
Dependence on oil poses not only an environmental problem, but an “economic and strategic liability”[16]due to the degree to which American interests have been shaped around it. Cold War and foreign policy historian David S. Painter weaves a narrative in which access to this prized resource determined global power dynamics as early as World War II. Naval power facilitated and benefited from easy access to oil reserves in both the Gulf of Mexico and the Persian Gulf, and contests over this access were persistent dynamics in nearly all major military conflicts of the twentieth century. It is difficult to imagine the United States’ vested interest in middle eastern affairs if not for the strategic position to the Soviet Union and the abundance of oil reserves in the desert. The threat of oil nationalization by Iran, deposition of Iran’s Shah, and the subsequent Oil Crisis were key elements in the revolution’s capitulation of traditional monarchy and establishment of the regressive theocracy that is in place today.
Nearly every contemporary historical study of oil features an account of President Jimmy Carter’s January 23, 1980 proclamation that “an attempt by any outside power to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”[17]This landmark speech effectively tied the American concept of national security and military necessity to the easy access of foreign oil. This pairing solidified a legacy of American military intervention based on economic interests, and was tacitly accepted by lay Americans due to a newfound and unassailable socioeconomic structure premised on cheap oil which facilitated transportation needs, suburban expansion, and a growing love affair with plastic.
The Oil Crisis represents a key historic landmark which has influenced the direction of foreign and domestic oil policy in the years since. Policy, social, and economic historians alike tend to view modern oil history as beginning in the 1970s and hinging on how the Oil Crisis and subsequent establishment of client-states played out. Among many historians, however, there exists a deficiency in the historical narrative that fails to properly analyze how the United States bore significant responsibility for the Arab embargo of 1973 as well as the reverberation of its consequences on a global scale. Yergin argues that attempts by Nixon, Ford, and Carter to limit oil imports (including Nixon’s Project Independence, which failed spectacularly) were wistful dreams in the face of increasing consumer demand, a shifting international economy, and environmental restraints.[18]Price controls set by Nixon stimulated demand for and consumption of oil, while concurrently enforcing greater reliance on foreign imports.
The Nixon Shock, which ended American currency’s convertibility to gold, resulted in significant stagflation which intensified the effects of price increases on crude oil and caused widespread panic that translated into a national “crisis of confidence,” according to Carter in his poorly-received “malaise” address on July 15, 1979. The subsequent election of Ronald Reagan, whose mission of “energy redemption” relied on domestic drilling rather than conservation, confirmed that the trajectory of the oil crisis led deeper into the belly of the beast, rather than upward and out of a politically and economically strained system of dependence. The most impactful effect of the oil crisis, writes Tyler Priest, was the establishment of the Petrodollar as the most valuable American currency, recycled from foreign investments back into the domestic economy through unfettered consumer demand, and an increasingly rapid descent into the quagmire of middle-eastern petro-politics. This argument holds that American supremacy was challenged, rather than strengthened, by the Soviet Union’s collapse, and the problems of access and control manifested in the 1990s transfigured the US military into a “global oil-protection service,” the vanguard of America’s petro-imperialist crusade.[19] Toby Craig Jones argues that “the militarization that began in earnest under the United States’ watch exacerbated and accelerated those uncertainties and helped further destabilize oil-producing states and the region.”[20]
Newer scholarship is increasingly examining American petro-imperialism from the OPEC perspective. While American historians have typically attended to the Oil Crisis as an American tragedy, Christopher Dietrich’s Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonizationtreats the crisis as just one piece in the long narrative of global decolonization, whose causes and consequences had more to do with economic justice and middle eastern sovereignty than consumer behavior or even corporate interests. Dietrich argues that the Oil Crisis – more appropriately called the Oil Revolution – was capitalized by elite intellectual groups in the OPEC nations to wrest control of resources from the dominion of western industrial powers.[21] It ultimately failed due to strategic alliances designed to undercut the independence of oil-producing nations in the Persian Gulf, as well as a concerted effort in US policy to “shift the agenda from redistributive economic justice to human rights,” which justified continued quasi-imperialist involvement in sovereign affairs.[22] Dietrich expounds carefully upon Yergin’s contention that “If oil was power, it was also a symbol of sovereignty. That inevitably meant a collision between the objectives of oil companies and the interests of nation-states, a clash that was to become a lasting characteristic of international politics.”[23] If Yergin’s The Quest holds a nugget of truth, this characteristic will continue to define international politics for the indefinite future. The question of middle eastern assertion is central to this discussion. The Oil Crisis would not have unfolded had OPEC nations had not asserted their own deterministic role in distribution and price control. The ashes of political colonialism gave rise to a new form of economic colonialism, as well as a struggle for sovereignty over natural resources, resulting in the geopolitical framework that dominates global conflict to this day.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, a narrative of democratic and capitalist victimization was foisted upon – and eagerly digested by – the American people, which caricaturized Al Qaeda and their motivations as anti-liberty and anti-Christian.[24]This simplified interpretation rarely takes into account oil-related motivations of Al Qaeda and conveniently extends the innocence of individual 9/11 victims onto the US government as a whole, justifying expansive military offensive in the subsequent War on Terror. Although oil neither wholly explains nor justifies the terrorist attacks of 9/11, any reading of 9/11 history which neglects to discuss Al Qaeda’s position on oil is selective and suspect. Steve Yetiv outlines the connection between oil and transnational terrorism, significantly highlighting the degree to which Saudi petrodollars “facilitated the rise of the Afghan resistance” under a Wahhabist ideology during the Soviet War in Afghanistan.[25]Because the Oil Crisis tied national security to our strategic access point in the Persian gulf, the Soviet invasion represented an imagined threat which necessitated a multi-billion dollar financial commitment to the Afghan mujaheddin, which was swiftly countered by the Saudis in contributions to resistance organizations like Al Qaeda.[26]Nearly all Al Qaeda and Taliban schools and training camps received some measure of funding from Saudi oil.
Osama Bin Laden famously purported, on many occasions, that the American dominance of middle-eastern oil production was a violation of state sovereignty, representing nothing less than theft by the United States and corruption of Saudi elites. Bin Laden recognized that the American economy is fueled by cheap oil which undermines middle-eastern sovereignty, and that fair oil prices would benefit the gulf economy while undercutting the American economy. These motivations, tied to fanatical religious presuppositions and a tribal-ideological conceptualization of sovereignty, present a more complete explanation for the rise of Al Qaeda in the 1980s. It also begs the question of why the United States designed an economy dependent on “[the use of] militaryto protect foreign oil fields, pipelines, and sea lanes, the price of which has never registered at American gas pumps, [and which] increasingly endanger[s] US fiscal health,”[27]according to Priest. Jones agrees that “Americans trying to determine the true price of oil in the United States must take into account the financial cost of maintaining a massive military presence in the Gulf region,” which amounted to $7 trillion between 1976 and 2007, not accounting for the cost of the 2003 Iraq war.[28]Increased oil prices would honor state sovereignty, invariably diversify transportation methods and reduce greenhouse emissions, arguably diminish military spending in the Persian gulf, and place greater emphasis on energy efficiency. They would also force the United States to balance its economic interests. Such an imperative, however, seems impossible given the extent to which American business has become rooted in petroleum consumption.
Unconscious Consumers
The complicity of the American consumer in the rise of petro-imperialism is a subject of debate among social and economic historians. Bob Johnson’s Carbon Nationasserts that the conversion of real energy expenditure from food calories and muscle to burning fossilized carbon transformed culture more drastically than any other event in human history.[29]The mechanization of American industry effectively freed a majority of Americans from hard labor and transformed American life from labor-oriented to service-oriented. It also created immense disparities in energy consumption and wealth. As carbon-fueled energy created new opportunities and luxuries, the American consumer – with the help of industrial and political interests – redefined affluence around an opposition to scarcity. The public’s ignorance of how oil has shaped national affluence and personal luxury is, perhaps, a marker of the industry’s success in integrating oil so seamlessly into American life. In Petroleum and American Conspicuous Consumption, Brian Black argues that a cultural force of demand and consumption that came to define the middle class created a new postwar social standard of abundance that stood in opposition to war-era rationing. The new American lifestyle of mass consumption, curated by Exxon Mobil, and eagerly consumed by the public, transformed lifestyle patterns so rapidly and effectively that it served as patriotic symbolism of American prosperity during the Cold War. Affluence, nationalism, and convenience were now offered at a low price per barrel, persuading American society “to organize itself into an ecology of oil in which basic human needs – such as acquiring food – became reliant on crude.”[30] This ecology of oil, a dangerous synthetic world, was constructed from a finite resource on which American consumers came to depend in their quest for more that costs less. Martin Melosi notes that the low price and cultural commodification of oil beginning in the 1920s and accelerating in the postwar years were responsible for the transition to mass consumerism.[31]This commodification first assumed an ideal of limitless energy, or energy abundance, which gave way to a cultural standard of plenty fueled by seemingly abundant energy. Wells, Black, and Melosi all highlight the dangers of an economic system entirely premised on a limited resource, aiming a careful critique at the American consumer for failing to calibrate demand.
Alternate perspectives examine the transition of energy sources throughout American history as a story of power systems that exercise restrictive controls over the people who developed them. David Nye favors a contextualist view that society constructed its own systems of energy which lost their flexibility once structures of power and control take hold. Patterns of luxury in one generation rapidly transformed into necessary commodities in the next. Nye views the stagnation and inflation of the 1970s as symptomatic of overconsumption, rather than a national security issue: “The shortages revealed the energy dependence and the vulnerability that the United States had been building up for decades. The high-energy middle-class standard of living was not a victim of the energy crisis; it was the source of the crisis.”[32]Herein lies the assumption that unencumbered economic growth has led to ambivalence regarding energy expenditures and environmental consequences, with the creation of jobs becoming the only real measure of success.[33]
Still others dispute that American consumerism is a necessary ill. Patrick Allitt’s A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism posits that Americans only became concerned about environmentalism as a result of industry-fueled affluence, and that the environmentalist movement is essentially biting the hand that feeds it. Allitt considers his “counterenvironmentalist” perspective to be an optimistic view of human progress which relies on technological innovation to drive beneficial change, as it has in the past. This analysis imagines the Oil Crisis as a moment where two options were presented: the opportunity to find alternate energy sources and move toward energy efficiency, or the option to increase domestic oil production and move toward oil independence. Indeed, according to Allitt, the Oil Crisis saved the trans-Alaska pipeline by convincing legislators and laypeople that the latter option was most reasonable. By routinely championing the success of industry pursuits (combined with benign government efforts), this work diverges from the majority of environmental and cultural histories, offers a historical rationalization for the antienvironmentalist and counterenvironmentalist policies of Reagan, James Watt, Julian Simo, et al and challenges environmental historians to separate their sympathies from factual analysis of industrial progress. Perhaps the influx of publications over the last four years can be considered a response to this call.
A number of historians have noted that environmental advocacy began as a bourgeois pursuit to protect the aesthetic assets and physical health of the affluent.[34]New definitions of leisure and recreation in the postwar era breathed life into a self-interested environmentalist movement. Criticisms of environmentalist histories, including Allitt’s, typically underscore the failure of these histories to acknowledge the self-interest inherent in the environmentalist movement under the pretext of do-goodism. A complex history of consumer environmentalism must evaluate the degree to which preservation of middle-class spaces, neighborhoods, and values has shaped the movement. Indeed, would the Exxon-Valdez and Deepwater Horizon crises have fueled so much backlash if the spills had not spoiled beachfront property or impacted the availability of uncontaminated seafood in subsequent months? Kathryn Morse argues that Americans “continue to see themselves reflected in images of oil-soaked wildlife, as powerless victims of their own dependence.”[35]This perspective inflames anger toward oil producers but conveniently neglects to place any impetus on the consumer to alter spending and modes of consumption that facilitate oil’s supremacy and ultimately finance the next oil spill or foreign invasion.
Conclusion
In 1948, Leonard Fanning pointed to the great technological advances, financial successes, and geological exploration of the “oil man” and asserts on his behalf: “There is plenty of oil in the world, an adequate supply for all nations. The oil resources of the world can be developed for the service of mankind and for raising the living standards of nations throughout a peaceful world.”[36]Assuming the truth of that statement in its time, we must ask how American oil exploration charted so far off course. My contention, supported by a comprehensive historiographic review, is that the irreversible marriage of mass consumerism and national security has birthed an American Petro-Leviathan whose destruction to cultural clarity, the natural world, and global stability far outweighs the fragile economic benefits of its moment in the sun. American freedom has come to be defined more by the individual “right to consume” than the collective right to life.
The abundance of scholarship on energy history by twenty-first century historians is indicative of a new focus on how fossil fuels have molded modern America. Perhaps the incontrovertible depletion of carbon fuels has driven this reinvigorated interest in the American oil economy – crude oil will, sooner or later, become an artifact of history. Historians now turn to the quantitative and qualitative damages of oil as we examine a culture so embedded in non-renewable energy that the coming shift will require vast and existential changes. Energy dependence is the bedrock of the American economy, argues Robert Johnson, and the continued “cartoonlike, and even infantile, calls to drill petroleum no matter what the cost and the vociferous denials of climate change are in historical context simply the desperate pleas of a portion of the public (reinforced by the industries and politicians that manipulate them) to insist the party is not winding down in the face of evidence to the contrary.”[37]As we move further into the twenty-first century, marked by even quicker successions of energy crises and led by factional interests prioritizing short-term economic gain over long-term sustainability, historians will continue to examine the cultural, political, and economic forces that restrained human progress to the effect of extreme weather patterns, existential politics, temperature increases, death of aquatic and land life, and destruction of coastal communities globally.[38] Vaclav Smil appropriately summarizes the American energy conundrum in that:
“Neither the possession of abundant energy sources nor a high rate of energy consumption guarantees the security of a nation, economic comfort, or personal happiness… Indeed, the only guaranteed outcome of higher energy use is greater environmental burdens whose global impacts may imperil the very habitability of the biosphere.” [39]
Dependency, it appears, is the culprit – dependency of political forces on military might fueled by carbon; dependency of the American economic system on an oligopoly of energy giants; and perhaps most damning, dependency of the American lifestyle on cheap and easy transportation, luxury household commodities, and convenience items manufactured from petroleum with little regard for the environmental or geopolitical consequences. An examination of cultural consumption patterns by future historians should also extend to a critique of America’s eager digestion of a political-economic narrative which views the United States – and the consumer itself – through a lens of capitalistic innocence, rather than truth.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Allitt, Patrick. A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2014
Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden, eds. Oil Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Black, Brian, “Oil for Living: Petroleum and American Conspicuous Consumption,” The Journal of American History, 99, no. 1 (2012).
Buell, Frederick, “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exhuberance,” Journal of American Studies, 46 no. 2 (2012).
Dietrich, Christopher. Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Fanning, Leonard. The Rise of American Oil. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1948.
Graf, Rüdiger. “Claiming Sovereignty in the Oil Crisis ‘Project Independence’ and Global Interdependence in the United States, 1973/74,” Historical Social Research,39 no. 4 (2014), 43-69.
Haycox, Stephen, “Unlearned Lessons from the Exxon Valdez,” Journal of American History,99 no. 1 (2012): 219-228.
Jacobs, Meg. Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2016.
Johnson, Robert. Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture. Lawrence, KS: University of Press of Kansas, 2014.
Jones, Toby Craig, “America, Oil, and War in the Middle East,” The Journal of American History, 99, no. 1 (2012).
Melosi, Martin. Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America.Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1985.
Morse, Kathryn. “There Will Be Birds: Images of Oil Disasters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” The Journal of American History, 99, no. 1 (2012).
Owen, Edgar. Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum. Tulsa, OK: American Association of Petroleum Geologists, 1975.
Nye, David. Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Painter, David. Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of the U.S. Foreign Oil Policy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Petulla, Joseph. American Environmental History: The Exploitation and Conservation of Natural Resources.San Francisco, CA: Boyd & Fraser Pub. Co, 1997.
Pratt, Joseph. “Exxon and the Control of Oil,” The Journal of American History,99, no. 1 (2012)
Priest, Tyler. “Dilemmas of Oil Empire,” The Journal of American History, 99, no. 1 (2012).
Smil, Vaclav, “World History and Energy,” Encyclopedia of Energy, vol. 6 (2004).
Tarbell, Ida. The History of Standard Oil Company, Vol. 2. New York: Mc Clure, Phillips & Co, 1904.
Wells, Christopher. Car Country: An Environmental History. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2012.
Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Yergin, Daniel. The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2011.
Daniel Yergin, “US Energy Policy: Transition to What?” The World Today, 35 no. 3 (1979), 81-91.
Yetiv, Steven A. The Petroleum Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and Terror.Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2011.
CITATIONS:
[1]Leonard Fanning, The Rise of American Oil(New York, NY: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1948), xii
[2]Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power(New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 212
[3]See, particularly: Brian Black, Frederick Buell, Toby Craig Jones, Martin Melosi, David Nye,David Painter, Joseph Petulla, Tyler Priest, Ida Tarbell, Christopher Wells, Daniel Yergin, all of whom discuss government subsidization of industry consolidation efforts which drove consumer demand of petroleum-fueled lifestyle conveniences and commodities.
[4]Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power(New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 13
[5]Joseph Pratt, “Exxon and the Control of Oil,” The Journal of American History,99, no. 1 (2012), 147
[6]Ida Tarbell, The History of Standard Oil Company, Vol. 2 (New York: Mc Clure, Phillips & Co, 1904), 32
[7]Joseph Pratt, “Exxon and the Control of Oil,” The Journal of American History,99, no. 1 (2012), 149
[8]Joseph Petulla, American Environmental History: The Exploitation and Conservation of Natural Resources(San Francisco, CA: Boyd & Fraser Pub. Co, 1977), 296
[9]Ibid, 390
[10]See, also: Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America.New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1985. Jackson examines the rise of suburbanization from cultural and economic perspectives, highlighting how a bourgeoning, federally subsidized economic system premised on cheap transportation facilitated the growth of an oil-dependent consumer class unmatched by wage-comparable residential communities on a global scale.
[11]Christopher Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History(Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2012), 289
[12]Ibid, 293
[13]Ibid, 294
[14]Martin Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1985), 11
[15]Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power(New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 185
[16]David Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of the U.S. Foreign Oil Policy(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 39
[17]David Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of the U.S. Foreign Oil Policy(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 35
[18]Daniel Yergin, “US Energy Policy: Transition to What?” The World Today, 35 no. 3 (1979), 81-91
[19]Tyler Priest, “Dilemmas of Oil Empire,” The Journal of American History, 99, no. 1 (2012): 245.
[20]Toby Craig Jones, “America, Oil, and War in the Middle East,” The Journal of American History, 99, no.1 (2012): 210
[21]See, also: Rüdiger Graf, “Claiming Sovereignty in the Oil Crisis ‘Project Independence’ and Global Interdependence in the United States, 1973/74,” Historical Social Research,39 no. 4 (2014), 43-69
[22]Christopher Dietrich, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 290
[23]Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power(New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 229
[24]Steve Yetiv, The Petroleum Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and Terror(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 56
[25]Ibid, 63
[26]Ibid, 64
[27]Tyler Priest, “Dilemmas of Oil Empire,” The Journal of American History, 99, no. 1 (2012): 245
[28]Toby Craig Jones, “America, Oil, and War in the Middle East,” The Journal of American History, 99, no.1 (2012), 218
[29]This argument echoes anthropologist Leslie White’s deterministic contention that “Other things being equal, the degree of cultural development varies directly as the amount of energy per capita per hour harnessed and put to work.” See: Frederick Buell, “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exhuberance,” Journal of American Studies, 46 no. 2 (2012): 273
[30]Brian Black, “Oil for Living: Petroleum and American Conspicuous Consumption,” The Journal of American History, 99, no. 1 (2012): 45
[31]Martin Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1985), 116
[32]David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 223
[33]In his rendering of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, Allitt mitigates the severity of the environmental damage by highlighting the abundance of temporary local employment facilitated by Exxon in the subsequent cleanup. Patrick Allitt. A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism(New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2014), 152
[34]See: Samuel Hays, Kathryn Morse, Andrew Hurley, Joel Tarr
[35]Kathryn Morse, “There Will Be Birds: Images of Oil Disasters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” The Journal of American History, 99, no. 1 (2012): 134
[36]Leonard Fanning, The Rise of American Oil(New York, NY: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1948), 169
[37]Robert Johnson, Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture(Lawrence, KS: University of Press of Kansas, 2014), 164
[38]For an analysis of government complicity in regulatory failures that compounded the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters, see: Stephen Haycox, “Unlearned Lessons from the Exxon Valdez,” Journal of American History,99 no. 1 (2012): 219-228. Haycox argues that failed government oversight of hazardous resource development projects compounds a “substantive, continuing policy failure by the oil industry regarding risk management” (228). Overt resistance of the federal government to implementing tighter safety regulations, despite industry pleas, suggests a softer stance toward domestic than foreign oil sources.
[39]Vaclav Smil, “World History and Energy,” Encyclopedia of Energy, vol. 6 (2004): 561
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