I once was unknown by the happy and gay
And the friends that I sought did turn away...
But now what a change! Our house is so grand,
No one is so fine throughout the whole land.
And we can now live in the very best style,
And it’s simply because my “Pa has struck ile.”
Popular American song, 1860s
When the United States married petroleum, the nation matured into a carbon-rich fairy tale. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission (OCC), which has regulated oil drilling in that state for nearly one hundred years, tells the story in a blunt PowerPoint presentation it calls a “History of Energy.” Oil supplies 40 percent of U.S. energy needs and “keeps our country moving,” declares the OCC. “Almost our entire transportation fleet—our cars, trucks, trains and airplanes—depend on fuels made from oil. Lubricants made from oil keep the machinery in our factories running. The fertilizer we use to grow our food is made from oil. We make plastics from oil. It is quite likely that the toothbrush you used this morning, the plastic bottle that holds your milk, and the plastic ink pen that you write or draw with are all made from oil.” Without black gold, says the commission, America wouldn’t be America. Or free.
The presentation then asks its school audience to conjure up a fantastic vision: “Imagine a lake 10 miles long, 9 miles wide and 60 feet deep. Fill that lake with oil. That would be about as much oil as the entire world uses in one year. The United States would use about ¼ of it.” The commission hints that there might be problems ahead but doesn’t elaborate. Imagine, for example, this great lake of oil getting smaller, thicker, and costlier by the day. Now imagine most of the lake has actually moved offshore, to foreign countries whose names many Americans don’t know or can’t spell. Then imagine more countries demanding a bigger share of the lake to live the American dream—a vision Americans are progressively losing due to the high cost of extreme or imported oil. The pioneer of oil has grown fat slurping his own petroleum frontiers and now holds a straw but no milkshake.
The Age of Petroleum began in the United States with fire, mayhem, and the promise of easy wealth. Men like Henry R. Rouse pioneered the trade. While the “clear headed and prosperous” New York lumber dealer was felling the wilds of western Pennsylvania in 1859, he caught scent of a “rock oil boom” in the region. A former dry-goods clerk known as “Crazy Drake” had drilled an oil well at Titusville, and “the news flew like a Dakota cyclone.” The oil, refined into kerosene, made a cheaper lamp fuel than pricey whale oil.
Henry Rouse headed for the oil regions. He wasn’t alone. It was the nation’s biggest adventure since the California gold rush. According to early oil historian J.T. Henry, the boisterous cast of characters included “anxious drillers, the smiling, wealthy fortunates, the downcast, ruined unfortunates, the busy teams conveying the barreled liquid to the water, the oil-begrimed and mud-besmeared boats, the eager barterer and the earnest seller.” At the beginning of the boom, Rouse bought vast tracts of land near a place called Enterprise. Like Drake, he soon struck crude, and “wealth poured in upon him in fabulous volume.” But the market was volatile. Rouse sold oil sometimes at $14 a barrel, other times at 40 cents. It all depended on the number of new holes and the number of refiners.
Had Rouse lived, according to Henry, he could have been either “a giant or a bankrupt in the oil business.” But we’ll never know. On the evening of April 17, 1861, one of Rouse’s wells flowed giant amounts of liquid crude. Men scrambled for barrels to capture the wealth as it poured from the ground. Then came a sudden conflagration as leaking natural gas found an open flame. Two wells, a tank, and a barn burst into a ball of fire. Burning men ran from the inferno. One witness compared the running workers to “a rapid succession of shots from an immense Roman candle.”
Henry Rouse was only twenty feet from the well when it exploded. He threw his wallet and a book of valuable papers outside the line of fire then ran for a ravine but fell. By the time he got out of the petroleum furnace, half of his body had been burned to a crisp. Rouse maintained consciousness for an hour before he died. He dictated his last will and testament, including a stipend for his father, $100 to the two men who carried him out of the fire, and half of his princely fortune on Well No. 8 to the poor of Warren County.
The well burned for three days. Millions of drops of oil spouted off in one direction, “presenting all the hues of the rainbow making a scene like enchantment.” Nineteen men had lost their lives, and another ten or so bore disfigurements for life. The United States started a global energy revolution with blood, dirt, spills, and chaos. But the enduring boom would transform the country into the world’s “illuminator and lubricator.” Oil, as chronicler John J. McLaurin put it, would “dispel gloom and chase hobgoblins.”
Kerosene, oil’s first triumph, secured its initial hold on American life with substantial government backing. At the time, Americans could choose from a range of liquid fuels to light up their homes, including whale oil (the rich man’s fuel), camphene (turpentine mixed with alcohol), lard, coal oils (smoky kerosene), and candles. To pay for the costs of the Civil War, the government heavily taxed best-selling camphene, at $2 a gallon. That gave kerosene, taxed at only 10 cents a gallon, an unfair advantage. “The petroleum industry did not arise in response to market conditions but rather in response to government intervention,” explains journalist Bill Kovarik. “The petroleum industry was born with the silver spoon of subsidy wedged firmly in its teeth.”
Rock-oil developers also exercised a Yankee gift for self-promotion. The kerosene crowd claimed that their product saved whales, when in truth it was the rising cost of chasing fewer creatures that was doing that. In the 1880s, the Baltimore Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Directory hailed petroleum as “promotive of human civilization and happiness”; oil gladdened the cabins of pioneers, lit the huts of miners, and “cheered the home of the thrifty farmer.” In just 20 years, petroleum production had grown from 500,000 barrels to 25 million. “Its bright rays lend their kindly aid to the thousand homely cares which give zest and happiness to the family circle,” continued the merchants. “Thus the sum of human knowledge is increased and the aggregation of wealth added to by the useful occupancy of hours snatched from darkness and sleep.”
In 1896, John J. McLaurin, a vivacious oil salesman, described the success of the “grandest industry of the ages” in his Sketches in Crude Oil. Nothing kept a steam engine running faster and cleaner than petroleum, McLaurin wrote. The Galena Oil-Works, which he said ranked among “the most noteworthy representative industries of Uncle Sam’s splendid domain” (and which was a Standard Oil subsidiary), offered catchy jingles about its products on the home front, too:
Have you a somewhat cranky wife,
Whose temper’s apt to broil?
To ease the matrimonial strife
Just lubricate when trouble’s rife—
Pour on Galena Oil.
Oil also helped to change the fresh face of American capitalism. With oil, John D. Rockefeller, a thrifty Baptist bookkeeper with a knack for numbers, established a new business model for the country’s economy. Business was no longer about making a living. It was about making a killing, and the surplus capital created by oil made that possible. The savvy Rockefeller avoided the messy business of wildcatting and invested instead in refining, transporting, and distributing kerosene, creating one of the world’s first multinational corporations, Standard Oil. In short order, he demonstrated one of petroleum’s most singular attributes: its ability to concentrate power and generate capital.
In building his monopoly, Rockefeller pioneered several critical business practices. He set up a statistics department to keep track of costs and prices. Staff ate lunch together and talked about money and numbers. The board of directors met every day. The company also strove to create a standard kerosene product that didn’t immolate innocent consumers. (Fires caused by bad batches of kerosene dispatched as many as eight thousand U.S. citizens a year in the 1870s.) With a personal promise to “expose as little surface as possible,” Rockefeller introduced an abiding code of secrecy into the industry. And he committed his firm to the outright destruction of all competitors.
Rockefeller’s monopolistic tools included espionage, bribery, bullying, blackmail, sabotage, and drawbacks. By controlling costs for tankers, barrels, and other parts of the business, he systematically undercut the competition. Whenever independent refiners refused to sell, Standard dropped the price in the marketplace to create a “good sweating.” The oil titan helped to set up the South Improvement Company, which negotiated a secret rebate deal with railway companies forcing competitors to pay double what it cost Standard to move oil. The company bribed politicians and paid individuals to monkey-wrench uncooperative competitors. By 1880, Standard Oil controlled nearly 90 percent of the refining business and kerosene had become the United States’ fourth-largest export. It was even being sold to China.
Rockefeller’s ruthlessness toward small businesses started an “oil war.” Public outcry and angry newspaper articles described the company as a “monster” and “an anaconda.” Through it all, Rockefeller quietly maintained that “it is not the business of the public to change our private contracts.” Oil companies from BP to ExxonMobil still live by the Rockefeller creed.
It was Standard’s rude concentration of power that gave birth to the muckraking tradition in American journalism. In 1903, Ida Minerva Tarbell, the daughter of an oil refiner put out of business by Rockefeller, wrote a 19-part exposé of the company for McClure’s Magazine and published it the next year in book form: the 850-page investigative masterpiece The History of the Standard Oil Company. Tarbell documented how the nascent oil business had turned a forest into a $200 million global marketplace that supported 60,000 people. “But suddenly,” she wrote, “at the very heyday of its confidence, a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to seal their conquest and throttle their future. The suddenness and blackness of the assault on their business stirred... their sense of fair play and the whole region arose in a revolt which is scarcely paralleled in the commercial history of the United States.” Tarbell’s meticulous work, which documented the unethical nature of big business, haunts the highly concentrated industry to this day. (Nearly a hundred years later, a retired Shell Oil Company executive would write a book called Why We Hate the Oil Companies. Like Tarbell, he singled out self-interest.)
Standard’s money made banks and changed landscapes. One of Rockefeller’s partners, Henry Flagler, took his share of the Standard Oil fortune in the 1890s and developed Florida. Flagler turned swamps into tourist destinations, built fancy hotels, and constructed railways that later brought Americans by the millions to Miami and West Palm Beach. The elderly oil tycoon even built a marble palace full of gold for his thirty-two-year-old third wife. Finally, in 1911, the Supreme Court of the United States ordered the breakup of Standard Oil into thirty-four separate companies. Standard Oil of California became Chevron, Standard Oil of New Jersey morphed into Exxon, and Standard Oil of New York grew into Mobil. Together with BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Gulf, and Texaco, these private firms would dominate global oil markets between 1940 and 1970. All behaved like Standard Oil, setting the code for the state oil companies that would eventually control the majority of the world’s oil industry.
Just as electricity threatened to diminish the kerosene market, Henry Ford came to the rescue in 1908 with his Model T. Before that, “horseless carriages,” whether electric or powered by an internal combustion engine, had been playthings for the rich. Ford, who purposely made a product his workers could afford, democratized mobility and created a hot market for previously unsellable gasoline. Refiners had considered the flammable product a troublesome waste product of kerosene distillation and dumped it into rivers. At one point the Cuyahoga River in Ohio contained so much gasoline that steamboats often set the water on fire.
Henry Ford did with the automobile what Rockefeller had done with oil. He standardized the vehicle, mechanized its manufacturing, and concentrated the industry. Most early Ford buyers lived in farming communities in the north-central states, but the highest sales numbers occurred in oil-boom towns. Nothing changed the United States faster or more completely. The automobile promised to “renew the youth of the overworked man or woman” with a mobility that was, as one Oldsmobile advertisement put it, “always ready when you are—a race horse when you want speed.” Soon every major U.S. city complained about hellish traffic. In 1935, the Roosevelt administration estimated that the United States commanded 930 million kilowatts of installed power and that motor vehicles accounted for more than three-quarters of that energy.
Novelist William Faulkner would later remark that “the American really loves nothing but his automobile: not his wife, his child nor his country nor even his bank-account first.” Two Texas historians, Roger Olien and Diana Davids Olien, reckon that the turn-of-the-century revolt against Standard Oil was driven partly by panic at the demise of the American ideal of manhood. Founders of the republic such as Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin had envisioned an agrarian nation run by sun, muscle, and slaves, one whose citizens prized above all independence. They foresaw a country that shunned great wealth, valued quality craftsmanship, and championed self-sufficiency. Fossil fuels celebrated a different set of values. The mechanical slaves of oil and coal rewarded bigness, quantity, and concentration. Oil in particular promised fast money and a life of idleness. Petroleum accelerated industrial changes that reduced the number of self-employed men from 88 percent of the population in 1860 to one-third by 1910. “This change, making men economically dependent on others, was a calamity for masculinity,” write the Oliens in Oil and Ideology.
It didn’t take long for oil, combined with the marvels of electricity and coal, to create a distinct new political economy, too. Thorstein Veblen, a quirky economist of Norwegian heritage who spoke twenty-six languages, took advantage of Rockefeller’s generous endowment to the University of Chicago to write a critique of America’s new energy culture: The Theory of the Leisure Class. By 1899 Veblen was seeing the first marks of wasteful energy spending on a people in “the vicarious consumption of goods.” He foresaw the emergence of hydrocarbon’s many fruits, including the evolution of technology and science into the dominant shapers of everyday life. And by the time Veblen speculated on an oil stock in old age and lost his entire investment, he had witnessed oil’s transformation of the United States into the richest country on the planet. In 1920, 45 million citizens worked in the growing oil economy under industrial masters who paid out some $77 billion in wages. Mark Twain, who occasionally lunched at Standard Oil offices, often reflected on oil’s impervious hold on his country. “Like all the other nations, we worship money and the possessors of it,” he said. “We have the two Roman conditions: stupendous wealth, with its inevitable corruptions and moral blight, and the corn and oil pensions—that is to say, vote-bribes, which have taken away the pride of thousands of tempted men and turned them into willing alms-receivers and unashamed.”
Oil petrolized American geography wherever it was discovered, but nowhere so much as in Texas. In 1901, a gusher at Spindletop, near the town of Beaumont, roared for ten days and spilled a million barrels of oil before it was contained. Speculators and wildcatters invaded the field. Derricks sprouted like weeds and men slept in town on billiard tables. The rich field launched four major oil companies—Gulf, Texas, Humble, and Magnolia—and began a rush that transformed the state. Oil replaced the region’s agrarian Bourbons. Planters and lawyers were soon outnumbered by oilmen, refiners, and swindlers. Galveston and Houston, two of the greatest cotton ports, became global petroleum portals. Thanks to oil, Texas would send four presidents to the White House.
The next big oil rush, at Oklahoma’s Glenn Pool, fertilized Tulsa, a small trading post surrounded by cattle. With money and hype, Tulsa grew by the 1930s into a bustling city of more than 100,000. The population went up and down like a yo-yo. As many as six large wells gushed every day, dropping the price of oil to 30 cents a gallon. “The greasy fluid literally flowed all over the field and costly fires were daily occurrences,” wrote one journalist. “The low price of the product did not justify steel tank constructions [so] it was run into earthen reservoirs... Human life was almost as cheap as the oil that gushed from the ground.” One lease purchased for $700 became a $35 million bonanza. Both the Creek and the Osage people struck it rich. Osage men drove around town in black limousines chauffeured by white fellows, while Osage women wore silk stockings and fancy leather shoes. One Native American man bought a hearse so he could sleep anywhere.
The oil boomtowns of the Southwest consisted of workers and families who followed the money. Most lived in tents, flimsy shacks called “uglies,” or shotgun houses, so called because a blast through the front door would travel out the back door unimpeded. In just two years, the population of Mexia, Texas, exploded from three thousand to thirty thousand as fleets of Model Ts invaded the town. Thugs, pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, gamblers, and fortune hunters all demanded a piece of the oil pie. Men with high-powered guns guarded “houses of infamy” with names like Chicken Shack and Winter Garden. The “Invisible Order” of the KKK responded to the mayhem by lynching lawbreakers—black or white, real or imagined— or burning them in oil. Eventually, Texas governor Pat Neff declared martial law.
Thomas Hart Benton, a Missouri artist who sought to make Americans alive to their own realities, painted Boomtown in Borger, Texas. He described the scene as he saw it: “Out on the open plain beyond the town a great thick column of black smoke rose as in a volcanic eruption from the earth to the middle of the sky. There was a carbon mill out there that burnt thousands of cubic feet of gas every minute, a great, wasteful, extravagant burning of resources for momentary profit. All the mighty anarchic carelessness of our country was revealed in Borger... There was a belief, written in men’s faces, that all would find a share in the gifts of this mushroom town... Borger on the boom was a big party... where capital... joined hands with everybody in a great democratic dance.”
A string of gushers inside the urban limits of Oklahoma City nearly destroyed the place. The wild release of gas (“like an exhaust pipe connected with hell”) caused authorities to close six schools, put one-eighth of the city under martial law, and bring in two hundred state militiamen. People were forbidden to strike a match or light a fire. “In spite of these precautions,” writes U.S. sociologist Rupert Bayless Vance, “the North Canadian river caught fire, burning several bridges, and 168 acres of vacant land were ignited before a thousand trained workers, wearing helmets and rubber coats, were able to cap the well.”
Henry Adams, one of the greatest of U.S. historians, witnessed the acceleration of highly energized American life with some alarm in the early 1900s: “Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.” Adams penned a famous letter to American history teachers questioning the doctrine of “indefinite progress” based on the increasing use of Daimler motors, steam engines, and coal and oil. “Man dissipates every year all the heat stored in a thousand million tons of coal which nature herself cannot now replace, and he does this only in order to convert some ten or fifteen per cent of it into mechanical energy immediately wasted on his transient and commonly purposeless objects,” Adams wrote. “He startles and shocks even himself, in his rational moments, by his extravagance, as in his armies and armaments which are made avowedly for no other purpose than to dissipate or degrade energy, or annihilate it as in the destruction of life, on a scale that rivals operations of nature.” Adams feared that American expansion would be followed by a contraction and the degradation of democracy. “Every gain of power... has been made at the cost of man’s—and of woman’s—vitality.”
Sidney Armor Reeve, a celebrated U.S. steam engineer, worried about similar adjustments of the national character. Although he recognized that “the muscular system of our modern body politic is its array of energy-producing machines,” he understood that energy consumption was not a “flat-footed, static thing.” When engineers assembled a hundred bits into a machine, they drew on a science called mechanics. But when inanimate slaves served “a hundred million men and women... refederated into a modern State, we decline to admit that there arises therein a new and distinct form of life and energy.”
But it took a global conflagration to demonstrate unmistakably the new power of oil. The United States had already commissioned the world’s first oil-fueled warships, and in WWI U.S. oil powered some of the most energy-intensive machines ever deployed: airplanes, tanks, and submarines. Petroleum was also used in the industrial production of TNT. Allied armies guzzled 650,000 gallons of oil a day. French president Georges Clemenceau opined that gasoline was “as necessary as blood in tomorrow’s battles.” He spoke from experience. In one famous episode, the French commandeered every truck and taxi in Paris to transport troops to the front and repel a German advance.
According to the British Admiralty, the United States supplied two-thirds of the war’s oil needs. American oil firms put together a plan to ensure adequate gasoline supplies by introducing “gasolineless Sunday.” American motorists sacrificed Sabbath joyriding, a popular pastime, to power the war machine in Europe. Wartime industry cooperation gave birth to a powerful new organization, the American Petroleum Institute. In the aftermath of the Great War, Henry Bérenger, the French petroleum minister, wrote a 1921 memorandum that laid out the transformative power of petroleum: “He who owns the oil will own the world, for he will rule the sea by means of the heavy oils, the air by means of the ultra refined oils, and the land by means of petrol and the illuminating oils. And in addition to these he will rule his fellow men in an economic sense, by reason of the fantastic wealth he will derive from oil—the wonderful substance which is more sought after and more precious today than gold itself.” President Coolidge would later proclaim that “the supremacy of nations may be determined by the possession of available petroleum and its products.”
By 1920, oil had saturated every aspect of American life and the United States mistook its geological luck for global exceptionality. In addition to powering locomotives, ships, cars, and airplanes, oil was used to make more than 250 products, including paints, waxes, soaps, and artificial butter. The Evolution of Oil, a typical polemic of the day, saluted oil as a divine force that aided manufacturing, multiplied comforts, and standardized warfare. For centuries the “devil’s tar” had remained an unutilized curiosity, until “American ingenuity and adaptability... made it the marvelous agent that it is today.” In 1921, U.S. engineer Joseph E. Pogue, in The Economics of Petroleum, reflected on the speed of change with some caveats. Only cotton and breadstuffs still outvalued U.S. petroleum exports to Chile, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France. A million barrels now pulsed through pipelines from fields in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Louisiana, to five hundred refineries. Automotive transportation had grown at an astounding rate of 40 percent per year for a decade with “no industrial parallel.” Cars accounted for 25 percent of the volume and nearly 50 percent of oil’s value. But low prices, waste, and carelessness seem to characterize “American economic practice,” Pogue wrote. Industry routinely left more than 60 percent of the oil in the ground and stupidly burned off natural gas. The exhaust pipe of the average automobile contained nearly 30 percent of the heat from the gasoline. Pogue reckoned that 40 million of the 160 million barrels of fuel oil burned in the United States in 1917 could have been saved through more intelligent operation. He worried that “American petroleum has been brought into service at a tremendous cost of the oil itself.”
Geologists, for their part, worried about the depletion of oil fields. Most “rock hounds” reckoned that the United States had only a twenty-year supply left in the ground. They urged the U.S. government to encourage oil companies “to acquire foreign sources of supply wherever available.” Without government backing on this effort, some geologists worried, “the future is fraught with hazard to an industry that stands as a monument to American organizing genius.” And so the United States sent out its oil pioneers to conquer the world’s petroleum frontiers. Engineers and roustabouts peopled the industrial crusade, with the odd East Coast banker or accountant in tow. Everywhere the Americans went, they mechanized the landscape and made everything beholden to black gold. Edward Doheny opened up Mexico’s veins. Standard Oil invaded Venezuela. “The American oil driller is a distinct type,” wrote journalist Isaac Marcosson in 1924. “You can spot him anywhere, whether he is knee-deep in Galician mud or emerging from the mist of the Slavic steppes. He has set up a little Texas, Oklahoma, or California wherever he has gone, no matter how remote. His courage and character have been a credit to his country.” The spirit of this oil expansion embodied the 1907 vision of Elihu Root, secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt: “Our surplus energy is beginning to look beyond our own borders, throughout the world, to find opportunity for the profitable use of our surplus capital, foreign markets for our manufactures, foreign mines to be developed, foreign bridges and railroads and public works to be built, foreign rivers to be turned into electric power and light,” Root wrote. Oil would allow the United States to conquer the world the same way the nation had settled the American West.
On home soil, oil had begun its remarkable conversion of California. At the turn of the century, over two hundred companies drilled inside the city limits of Los Angeles, the world’s first oil port. During the 1920s, the state produced nearly a quarter of the world’s oil. California’s population grew by 365 percent between 1900 and 1940, but the state’s five oil-field counties expanded even faster, clocking in at 1,200 percent. The boom gave the region the boost it needed to eventually become one of the globe’s top ten economies.
Oil also did for California what it later did for Alaska: made the state an advertisement for easy living. Decades later, journalist Eric Schlosser would call Southern California “the Kuwait of the Jazz Age.” Petrodollars built roads to encourage more cars and funded Hollywood movies. The flow of cash corrupted politicians and underwrote extravagant estates. In the first of many sensational political scandals, California oilmen Edward Doheny, of Pan American Petroleum, and Harry Sinclair, of Mammoth Oil, “loaned” U.S. secretary of the interior Albert Fall $100,000 in 1922 to gain access to lucrative oil leases in Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. The U.S. government had previously set aside the reserves for its navy. Reporting on the story, Time magazine declared that oil “lubricated the jaws of the nation. Newspapers screamed it, preachers damned it, Mr. Average Citizen swallowed it and was shocked.”
Southern California provided the template for the suburban sprawl that would later redesign much of the United States. In some parts of the state, where one in four people owned a car, gas stations dotted the highways every 2.6 miles. California also showcased the industry’s ability to promote more oil spending with user-financed road building; highway taxes became so profitable that the government virtually abandoned the idea of public transit. Until the 1940s both San Francisco and Los Angeles possessed well-used electric trolley systems. But Big Oil changed that. A shell firm financed by General Motors, Exxon, and Firestone Tire bought San Francisco’s trolley system and then sold it with draconian conditions attached: the trolley cars had to be replaced with General Motors buses running on Exxon gasoline and Goodyear tires. General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone similarly dismantled L.A.’s electric train service. As journalist Carl Solberg would explain in Oil Power in 1976, “In this fashion the big companies blotted out 100 electric railway systems in 45 cities—including New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis and Salt Lake City. In 1949, they were convicted of criminal conspiracy. The ring leader, General Motor’s treasurer, H. C. Grossman, was fined one dollar.” To placate opponents of coastal drilling (and ultimately oil companies that wanted to drill horizontally into oceanfronts), California used oil royalties to create public beaches and redwood parks. Only automobiles, the main market for oil, made a visit to these places possible.
It was in California, too, that oil met and embraced a new form of religious extremism. Lyman Stewart, the president of Union Oil and a devout Presbyterian, poured his fortune into spreading the word of the Gospel as unerring truth. With his brother Milton, Stewart anonymously funded and distributed more than three million copies of The Fundamentals, a collection of essays that defended the Christian faith by attacking evolution, liberalism, progressivism, socialism, and Darwinism. Disturbed by oil workers’ profanity, Stewart built chapels close to oil derricks; one of his fields was called Christian Hill. His under-the-radar activism would later produce a fundamentalist president: oilman George W. Bush.
Critics of the U.S. oil boom emerged early on, though their voices were usually drowned out by the industry’s relentless boosterism. In his 1926 classic, The United States Oil Policy, Kansas economist John Ise reckoned that a Scientific American writer got it right when he compared America’s profligate oil spending and relentless draining of domestic oil fields to “the flight of a swarm of locusts across a fruitful land.” Ise, an old-fashioned conservative, also liked the story Gifford Pinchot told about a man stranded with one barrel of water on a boat that had drifted twenty days from shore: “What should we think of that kind of a man, if under these circumstances, he not only drank all the water he wanted, but used the rest of it to wash his hands?” That was the American oil consumer, wrote Ise. To Ise the automobile symbolized unprecedented extravagance. The joyride, he wrote, was not a “pursuit of happiness” but a stealing of energy from future generations. “We probably have a right to prefer our thousandth joy ride to the thousandth joy ride of our grandchildren, but whether we have the right to deprive them of their only ride in order that we may indulge ourselves with two thousand such rides is another question.” In a summation that could have been written today, Ise concluded that “the history of oil exploitation in the United States is a history of criminally rapid, selfish, and wasteful use of an exhaustible resource which, as far as present knowledge goes, will be indispensable in the economic lives of the next generation, as in our own.”
Two years earlier, in 1924, American journalist Isaac F. Marcosson had published The Black Golconda, an account of his visits to various U.S. oil fields and the global oil patch. Marcosson’s book provides a lively snapshot of the oil industry, which he called “a supreme necessity.” His frankness and clarity might startle even modern-day gasoline consumers. For starters, he worried about the United States’ ability to maintain its supremacy in the trade. As American, Dutch, and British oil companies battled for new global real estate, Marcosson realized, the prize lubricant had become an international irritant: “What scientists call the petroliferous epoch is in reality a pestiferous period because of the grand scramble for that product of Nature which has been well called flowing gold.” American car owners consumed over 5 barrels of oil a year each compared with .18 for the rest of the world, Marcosson wrote, yet they knew nothing about the industry supplying their billion-dollar-a-year gasoline addiction. The average John Jones was totally ignorant of “the hazards and handicaps that beset the evolution of crude petroleum after its release from long imprisonment in the bosom of Mother Earth until it gushes forth to heat, light and propel this humming universe.”
Like John Ise, Marcosson could see the economics of depletion at work. By 1924, the U.S. boasted 300,000 producing wells and was drilling 67 new ones a day. Shallow wells that cost mere thousands of dollars to drill had been replaced by 2,000-foot wells that cost $300,000 each. One-fifth of them came up dry. “Just as we pioneered the world,” Marcosson wrote, “so have we supplied the universe. The principal drain, however, has come from our own phenomenal demands, born of American temperament, initiative, and expansion. Though many other countries—and they include China, Japan, Burma, Russia, Galicia, and Rumania—were ahead of us historically in the commercial utilization of petroleum, we—and it is typical of our instinct for waste—have gorged ourselves with the product, with the inevitable result.”
When British social critic G.K. Chesterton visited this new material kingdom in the 1920s, he was impressed by its brashness. But he was also stunned by people’s zealous fondness for “selfish sensational self-advertisement.” The problem was this, he said: “A number of people who were meant to be heroic and fighting farmers, at once peasants and pioneers, have been swept away by a particular pestilence of a particular fad or false doctrine; the ideal of which has and deserves the detestable name of Making Good.” Americans didn’t want to venerate “the Oil King” Rockefeller, wrote Chesterton; “they wanted to imitate him.”
So did economists. Irving Fisher, a Yale professor and the son of a preacher, defined economics as “the science of wealth” and thought it should become the United States’ new physics. During the Roaring Twenties, Fisher was one of America’s most quoted economists. Unlike Veblen, who thought engineers should run the economy because they understood energy, Fisher championed money itself as the road to prosperity, preaching that mathematics was the lantern that would dispel “old phantasmagoria” and make the future predictable. Like the slaveholders of old, Fisher also advocated for the sterilization or elimination of people he called “life-waste” from the economy so that the “fit” could prevail. In 1929, he put all of his money into the stock market, declaring that Wall Street had struck a “permanently high plateau.”
Beginning in 1930, the U.S. oil industry too nearly died in a gusher of waste, theft, and overproduction. After the discovery of the East Texas oil fields, independent drillers invaded Kilgore, Texas, like some hungry horde. In just three years, the number of derricks exploded from 3,540 to 12,000. Eager for quick profits, the boomers flooded U.S. markets with a million barrels (more than half of U.S. demand), driving prices down from $1.10 to 10 cents a barrel in the middle of the Depression. Water cost more than oil in East Texas, and filling stations typically offered a dozen eggs or a free chicken dinner with a fill-up. The glut threatened the competitiveness of the country’s higher-cost oil fields and stripper wells, which produced barely 10 barrels a day. When Texas tried to control production, the independents cried foul and smuggled their oil out of state. As much as 100,000 barrels of illegal or “hot” oil left Texas every day. To restore order, the governors of Oklahoma and Texas declared martial law and sent in thousands of National Guardsmen. The crisis grew so protracted that U.S. interior secretary Harold Ickes proposed to President Roosevelt that he set up an “oil dictatorship” to investigate the industry, limit production, and set minimum prices.
After lengthy legal and political battles, the United States established the Interstate Oil Compact in 1935, ending the roller coaster of surplus and glut by stabilizing prices for decades. The shape of the oil-price graph changed from a yo-yo to an orderly ascending staircase. The major companies agreed to limit production in the name of conservation. The federal government banned hot oil and produced reliable consumption statistics to help establish state quotas. To keep peace in rural areas, rationing policies generally excluded the low-producing wells, most of which were owned by independent producers. Texas, the largest oil-producing region in the world, oversaw its price controls mostly through its Railroad Commission. The unusual system, which most Americans still know nothing about, directly subsidized high-cost marginal domestic producers but guaranteed that U.S. oil demand would be met by U.S. production. (It basically ended in the 1970s.) It was a “drain America first” policy that restored prices to a dollar a barrel and would provide consumers with stable oil prices until the 1970s yet guarantee oil producers higher-than-free-market prices. The system proved so successful that it served as the model for OPEC.
In 1933, the first American wildcatters landed in Saudi Arabia. “The prize,” in unbelievable quantities, was found by Standard Oil of California and Texas Oil’s CALTEX (it would become the Arabian American Oil Company, ARAMCO), created to mine the desert. “Within less than 10 years, Saudi Arabia had learned to be dependent to an almost alarming extent upon the income from oil; already the nation’s wants had proliferated under American example,” wrote the novelist Wallace Stegner in his little-known 1956 history, Discovery!. Stegner compared ARAMCO’s social engineering of Saudi society to the impact of Europe’s Marshall Plan. A couple of palm-thatched fishermen’s barastis in al-Khobar became “a solid half mile of glass-fronted, electric-eyed, mercury-vapor-lighted shops, bottling works, cement plants, garages and what not.” Thanks to oil, ARAMCO housewives could buy French perfumes, Danish furniture, and tranquilizers in a desert.
The importance of the world’s largest oil reserves after Texas did not escape the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1943, he recognized Saudi Arabia as a national interest. Though ill and spent by the war effort, Roosevelt devoted two entire days to meeting with Ibn Saud, the nation’s ruler, aboard a U.S. battleship. The leaders impressed each other. Roosevelt gave Ibn Saud a plane and a wheelchair. The two petro-kingdoms have played a game of master and slave ever since.
Oil and its deadly inanimate helpers dominated the Second World War just as they had the First. While Americans were busy taking their petroleum abundance for granted, Japan and Germany, as oil importers, had studied synthetic fuels and stockpiled U.S. supplies. (Hitler had a high-energy vision for Germany that included “people’s cars” and highways that would “usher in a new traffic epoch, the time of the automobile.”) The two expanding nations both recognized that a shortage of petroleum would limit their economic and political ambitions. (In 1938, Germany consumed 44 million barrels of oil annually, compared to the United States’ 1 billion.) And so both gambled on unique military strategies to obtain foreign energy supplies. German U-boats sank oil tankers in the Atlantic, and after the United States embargoed Japan’s oil, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. During the conflict, to compensate for their petroleum poverty, both Japan and Germany employed human slavery on a massive scale. Japan enslaved millions of Chinese workers, and the Nazis shackled millions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The United States concentrated its own oil spending on military hardware.
Germany, with few domestic oil sources, depended largely on coal liquefaction factories. The Nazis actually based their key military strategy, the blitzkrieg, on Germany’s lack of cheap oil. Quick strikes in Norway, France, and Poland captured more oil supplies. But the strategy ultimately failed when the Germans could not quickly secure Russia’s two largest oil fields.
German planes, which ran on poor-quality synthetic fuels made from coal, lacked the maneuverability and speed of Allied machinery running on high-octane fuels. In the end, the contest often boiled down to how many mechanical fighting slaves the combatants could afford to mobilize. Submarine warfare, a high-energy petroleum adventure, tells the story. Each side tried to use its submarine fleet to cut off oil supplies. To combat the German U-boat menace, a meager yet deadly $2 billion enterprise, the Allies eventually spent $26 billion in iron, oil, and ships. Meanwhile, the submarine war in the Pacific cost the Japanese $1 trillion. After the war, Japan’s munitions minister, Toyoda Soemu, admitted that “the shipping shortage and the scarcity of oil were the two main factors that assumed utmost importance in Japan’s war efforts.” In 1946, the U.S. military confidentially interviewed some of Germany’s highest-level officers and asked them why they had lost. To a man, they cited oil quality or shortages.
Prior to the war, Japan had imported nearly 80 percent of its oil from the United States. The imperial wannabe attacked Pearl Harbor with aviation fuel purchased in California. But despite a two-year stockpile and the capture of Dutch-owned oil fields, the Japanese navy and air force soon ran out of fuel. Desperate, they turned to substitutes made from potatoes, peanuts, coconuts, castor beans, and pine roots. (It would take nearly a million root-pickers to produce 12,000 barrels a day of pine oil; Japan never got beyond 75,000 barrels a month.) The Japanese even developed kamikaze, or suicide, air attacks to conserve as much oil as possible.
The war cemented ties between the U.S. government and the country’s powerful petroleum industry. President Roosevelt divided the country into five Petroleum Administration Districts and grabbed seventy-two executives from the oil industry to serve on the Petroleum Industry War Council. One of the council’s most important tasks was the construction in 1943 of two pipelines, Big Inch and Little Big Inch, from Texas to the east coast. Without them, the Allies would never have had enough oil to invade Europe. Texas pipeline builders followed General Patton and his tanks every inch of the way.
Meanwhile, faced with shortages of coal, salt, and wood—the usual ingredients for any chemical product—industry played with petroleum. U.S. chemists dabbled with oil to find new properties and discovered magical uses. They combined styrene with butadiene to make synthetic rubber, and thereby ended rubber shortages. They synthesized TNT (trinitrotoluene), referred to by Popular Mechanics as “one of the most powerful but obedient of all war explosives”; making toluene from petroleum instead of coal tar allowed the U.S. to produce more warheads. Next came a variety of plastics, fertilizers, and pesticides. Eventually the petrochemical industry would turn out as many as four thousand different products, including garbage bags, balloons, credit cards, fishing rods, and waterproof clothing. Chemical detergents dethroned animal-based soaps, and polyester challenged cotton. Anything that could be made with cheap oil took over the marketplace.
Near the end of the bloody contest (60 million dead), U.S. anthropologist Leslie White soberly reflected that a B-17 (Flying Fortress) bomber flying over Europe consumed more energy during just one flight than the continent’s entire population had during the Stone Age. White concluded that fossil fuels and their technological forces had created a unique “Power Age.” Cultures advanced when they tapped into an energy source that allowed them to “burst asunder the social system which [bound] it,” he wrote. But he did not see the United States’ future as preordained: “The triumph of technology and the continued evolution and progress of culture are not assured merely because we wish it or because it would be better thus... Culture will decline unless man is able to maintain the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year by tapping new sources.”
The United States rebuilt the war-ravaged economies and infrastructure of Europe and Japan largely with oil. What oil-powered machines had turned into rubble, petroleum-based industries could now raise from the dead. Oil also broke the back of powerful coal unions—the ambitious Marshall Plan, a $13 billion program funded by U.S. taxpayers, stipulated that Europe and Japan must replace coal with oil as their key energizers. The money built roads, purchased U.S. cars, and subsidized European carmakers too. One-sixth of the plan’s funds directly paid for oil pumped by U.S. oil companies operating in the Middle East. (According to Carl Solberg, firms like Exxon, over a fifteen-year period, took more wealth “out of the Middle East than the British took out of their empire in the entire nineteenth century.”) As laid out in the Marshall Plan, U.S. multinationals sold the world’s cheapest oil at prices 40 percent higher than that of Texas crude. And the restoration project worked another one of petroleum’s economic miracles: Japan and Europe experienced economic renaissances. Europe’s GNP rose by 32.5 percent after 1947, and industrial output increased 40 percent beyond prewar levels. Agriculture boosted production by 11 percent. The Europeans called it “supergrowth.” By 1960, oil’s share of Europe’s energy diet had risen from 10 to 30 percent.
While the Marshall Plan petrolized Europe, Norman Borlaug took oil and industrialized global agriculture. Recruited to go to nationalistic, petroleum-exporting Mexico in 1944 as part of a joint venture to research wheat production, Borlaug changed the energy of plant growth: the Iowa-born plant breeder shrank grains so that the plants directed more energy to making heads full of seedy protein. The new high-yielders grew so fast that they needed more water and more soil nutrients. Borlaug’s so-called Green Revolution depended on oil-based fertilizers, pesticides, and diesel-run irrigation systems. Without petroleum, the new agricultural system was a car without an engine. Aided by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, Borlaug developed other high-yielding grains in India, Pakistan, and China. Between 1950 and 2000, his industrial techniques increased agricultural productivity sevenfold. “I want science to serve a useful purpose,” said Borlaug, who went on to win a Nobel Prize. Today, his high-yielding grains feed billions.
Petroleum continued its conquest of the United States. President Dwight Eisenhower, impressed by Hitler’s idea of a national superhighway system, began the construction of a $27 billion interstate highway network in the 1950s. It was intended partly as a defense system in case U.S. cities had to be evacuated during a nuclear attack. Finally completed in 1991, the 47,000-mile highway system became “the largest engineering project the world has ever known.” Trucks replaced railroads as the movers of goods, and urban freeways crisscrossed cities. In 1955, before construction began, the average American consumed 202 gallons of gasoline to drive nearly 3,000 miles. By 1975, drivers were eating up 343 gallons to go an average of 4,481 miles. American consumers, who collectively traveled 1 trillion miles a year, now worked to drive.
As highway construction got underway, the United States invented an entirely novel form of urban living: suburbia. One of the first suburbs, predating the superhighways but anticipating the development they encouraged, was Levittown on Long Island. Built on potato fields, the standardized community, planned for seventeen thousand residents, provided cheap, identical three-bedroom boxes that could be erected in twenty-seven easy steps. Each came with an oil-burning furnace, a washer and dryer, and a garage. Each of the development’s ten neighborhoods boasted an elementary school, a pool, and a playground. Returning veterans flocked to Levittown, which became known as “Fertility Valley” and “the Rabbit Hutch.” Business writer William Whyte called suburbia “the dormitory of the new generation of organization men.” Herbert Gans, a sociologist who lived in Levittown for two years as a “participant observer,” praised the new form of living. Although “the critics have argued that long commutation by the father is helping to create a suburban matriarchy with deleterious effects on the children,” wrote Gans, “and that homogeneity, social hyperactivity, and the absence of urban stimuli create depression, boredom, loneliness and ultimately, mental illness,” suburban life actually produced “more family cohesion.” Gans dismissed the disappearance of farmland near big cities as “irrelevant now that food is produced on huge industrialized farms, and the destruction of raw land and private upper class golf courses seems a small price to pay for extending the benefits of suburban life to more people.” By the 1960s, these car-dependent “packaged villages,” as Whyte called them, had pulled more than 30 million Americans from major U.S. cities. It remains one of the greatest lateral migrations in North American history.
In 1957, Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, gave a sobering speech to a group of U.S. physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota. Rickover, who had served the republic since 1912, keenly appreciated how oil had reshaped the national character, and he encouraged his audience to consider soberly their responsibilities to “our descendants—those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age.” Responsible living, he said, meant energy conservation, excellent education for all citizens, a new culture of self-denial, and higher taxes to fund a larger, more complex United States. The alternative was doubt, indecision, chaos, and collapse.
Rickover began with a simple story. Only a century earlier, fossil fuels provided but 5 percent of the world’s energy; humans and animals did most of the rest of the work. By 1957, fossil fuels supplied about 93 percent of the world’s energy. With only 6 percent of the world’s population, the United States consumed nearly a third of its fossil fuels.
The admiral reminded his audience of the power that most Americans took for granted: “The enormous fossil energy which we in this country control feeds machines which make each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves,” he said. Machines furnished every American industrial worker with energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while the equivalent of at least 2,000 men pushed that worker’s automobile along the road and another 33 served as faithful household helpers. Each locomotive engineer controlled energy equivalent to that of 100,000 men, each jet pilot that of 700,000. “Truly the humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once owned by the richest nobles,” said Rickover, “and lives better than most ancient kings. In retrospect, and despite wars, revolutions, and disasters, the hundred years just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.”
Rickover told his listeners that he didn’t know of a society where a reduction in energy slaves—human or petroleum—had not resulted in a decline of civilization. “Our civilization rests upon a technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels,” he continued. “What assurance do we then have that our energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels? The answer is—in the long run—none.”
Rickover reflected that the United States had begun in 1776 as a nation of 4 million people and boundless resources. “We conserved what was scarce—human labor—and squandered what seemed abundant—natural resources—and we are still doing the same today. Much of the wilderness which nurtured what is most dynamic in the American character has now been buried under cities, factories and suburban developments where each picture window looks out on nothing more inspiring than the neighbor’s back yard with the smoke of his fire in the wire basket clearly visible.” The concentrated size of cities, government, and corporations now demanded “an ever larger share of what we earn to solve problems caused by crowded living.” The United States must undergo a transition, Rickover concluded. “Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.”
Three years later, a departing President Eisenhower issued his country another kind of warning. The United States, he said, now had a vast defense establishment that employed more than 3 million people and spent more money annually than all the corporations of the country combined. This “military-industrial complex,” a creation of surplus petroleum energy, influenced the economic, political, and spiritual life of every American, said Eisenhower, and “we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.” He described the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” as a real threat. But few took Eisenhower’s vision seriously. Today, at 400,000 barrels a day, the U.S. military remains the largest single institutional consumer of oil on the planet. U.S. troops in Iraq used four times more fuel during the Iraq War and subsequent occupation than had General Patton’s Third Army in Germany.
Petroleum changed the vocabulary and character of the whole of the United States, much the same way slavery had for the U.S. South. In 1962, Yale historian George Pierson declared that the United States owed its superiority to what he called the M-Factor: “movement, migration and mobility.” People were comers or go-getters or goners. The phrases that mattered said it all: “Get going!” “Don’t be a stick-in-the-mud.” “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”
But only ninety-two miles from the scene of the first oil boom in Titusville, Pennsylvania, resistance was blossoming. It began with Rachel Carson, a fisheries biologist from Springdale. In 1962, in Silent Spring, Carson exposed how the $300 million oil-spawned pesticide industry was deforming young birds and fish. E.B. White called her critique “an Uncle Tom’s Cabin of a book,—the sort that will help turn the tide.” Not surprisingly, the oil industry and its chemical associates branded the ecologist a Communist and a “fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.” They spent millions trying to discredit and defame her. But Carson’s book, combined with a 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, launched the environmental movement. Wrote Carson later in life, “The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”
As many had predicted, the U.S. oil boom was already reaching its limits. The American petroleum and economic machine quietly peaked in the 1970s, though the evidence is not yet all in. U.S. domestic oil production reached a height in 1970 that has not since been replicated. Then it settled into persistent decline. Between 1970 and 1974, U.S. dependence on foreign oil grew from 21 percent to 36 percent. Over the next couple of decades, the country would spend trillions of dollars to buy oil. Petroleum economist James Hamilton notes that “the real price of oil rose 8-fold from 1970 to 2010, while U.S. production of oil fell by 43% over those same 40 years.” The United States now imports about 50 percent of its oil, at a cost of nearly a billion dollars a day.
The world’s former petroleum master has become another struggling consumer dependent on either foreign oil or costly unconventionals. North American sources include tough oil pulled from two miles below the ocean floor, high-cost North Dakota shale oil, and dirty Canadian crude from the Alberta tar sands with the consistency of asphalt. All of these take more capital, more energy, and more carbon making to produce than conventional oil. Due to oil-price volatility, car sales and car mileage per capita are declining rapidly. A housing bubble built on cheap oil has burst, and Americans now forage for fruits and nuts in the backyards of foreclosed McMansions. The aviation industry, its infrastructure declining, grapples with high fuel prices and declining sales. The public highway infrastructure that oil built rots and decays; in 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave it a D–. The U.S. military, the world’s largest consumer of petroleum, has established new programs in an attempt to green its fuel train. The world’s most powerful industry, with its motto of “Drill, baby, drill,” continues to battle any transition with the vehemence of a Southern slaveholder. And the world’s wealthiest citizens are busy attending to their petroleum slaves.