Oil and American Identity

A Culture of Dependency and US Foreign Policy

Sebastian Herbstreuth

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781784531492
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857738387
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

American dependence on foreign oil has long been described as a serious threat to U.S. national security, and continues to be a political flashpoint even as domestic fracking eases the US' reliance on imported energy. Oil and American Identity offers a fresh perspective on the subject by reframing 'energy dependency' as a cultural discourse with intimate connections to American views on independence, freedom, consumption, abundance, progress and American exceptionalism. Through a detailed reading of primary literature, Sebastian Herbstreuth also shows how the dangers of foreign oil are linked to American descriptions of foreign oil producers as culturally different und thus 'undependable'. Herbstreuth shows how even reliable imports from the Middle East are portrayed as dangerous and undesirable because this region is particularly 'foreign' from an American point of view, while oil from friendly countries like Canada is cast as a benign form of energy trade. Oil and American Identity rewrites the history of U.S. foreign oil dependence as a cultural history of the United States in the 20th century.

CHAPTER 1

CONSTRUCTING THE HYDROCARBON SOCIETY

On the evening of 13 April 1949, the Hollywood motion picture Tulsa premiered in the town that carried its name. Starring Susan Hayward and Robert Preston, the film took its audience back to the great Oklahoma oil boom of the 1920s. It told the story of Cherokee Lansing, a strong-willed half-Indian farm girl, fighting her way up to fabulous wealth and power with the help of oil she finds on her family's land.

Tulsa did not do particularly well at the box office at the time. And yet, while it may not have been commercially successful, the film certainly is a very interesting cultural text about the role of oil in American life. Tulsa can teach us a great deal about the United States as an oil society, containing as it does almost all the major tropes in American oil discourse. There is oil as “black gold”, creating opportunities for prosperity and social mobility for anyone in the United States. Then there is the corrupting influence of petroleum encapsulated in images of “Big Oil's” power and greed. Even the good-natured Cherokee Lansing finds it hard to resist the temptations of money and power. Importantly, there is also the destructive power of large-scale commercial oil extraction, transforming pristine nature into a hellish landscape of industrial waste. It is fair to say that Tulsa is an early example of environmentalist thinking about some of the inherent tensions between practices of economic production and the necessity to conserve the natural environment. As such, the film offers a stark reminder that current environmental debates about tar sands, offshore drilling or hydraulic fracturing for shale oil and gas have long historical roots.

Finally, Tulsa offers a very explicit narrative about the role of oil in modern American society. More than anything else, it is this tale of oil in American life that makes the film so interesting here. Oil is hailed as a catalyst for material progress, as an indispensable raw material for the American way of life, even as the very substance of modernity itself. In the opening scene, which is set in the present of the late 1940s, a folksy Oklahoma singer played by Chill Wills aims to give us some context for the ensuing story with a brief explanation of oil's emergence in American society:

An oil well, a gusher blowing high and wide and handsome in the great state of Oklahoma. Oklahoma means red man's land, and less than fifty years ago, all this was Indian Territory […] [They] raced their horses over the prairie, fished the streams, grew their crops and raised their cattle. And all the time the oil was underneath the ground. Well, it had to come out, and refineries had to be built to process it and make it what it is today: the lifeblood of our civilization. It's oil that drives the ships, powers the trains, and the planes, and fills the traffic lanes, and serves men in a thousand and one ways. Yes sir, oil's a mighty valuable commodity, sought for and fought for all over the globe.¹

There are three points in these lines that nicely sum up the main ideas discussed in this chapter. First of all, the claim that oil had become America's “lifeblood” underlines the centrality of petroleum for all aspects of life in the United States. In 1950, soon after Tulsa was produced, oil accounted for about 38 percent of all primary energy consumption in the United States, overtaking coal for the first time. The United States, as observers were pointing out, had entered an “age of oil”. Not only was the transportation sector almost entirely dependent on petroleum-based fuels, the petrochemical industry had also begun to develop a broad range of products that permeated US markets and soon became indispensable to consumers and companies alike—myriad forms of plastics and chemicals, lubricants, cosmetics, drugs, fertilizers and pesticides. Oil, as a 1945 industry publication put it, was America's “molecular treasure chest.”²

By the end of the 1940s, the United States had become what Daniel Yergin aptly calls a “hydrocarbon society”—a society so fundamentally premised on the supply of oil that, as he writes, “we hardly stop to comprehend its pervasive significance”. The notion of the hydrocarbon society is useful because it can take us beyond the simple observation that oil has been the most important source of energy in the US energy system. Oil does not just keep the wheels of industry turning. It also shapes, Yergin suggests, “where we live, how we live, how we commute to work, how we travel—even where we conduct our courtships”.³ In other words, oil has seeped into American culture. The hydrocarbon society is a vast socioeconomic structure that is made up of material, economic and technological elements but also an intangible yet dense fabric of symbols, practices and representations. It is a system based on oil-fuelled automobility, constituted by specific patterns of production and consumption, certain forms of social organization and by specifically American discourses about energy that give meaning to these practices and hold the entire structure together.

The second point concerns the origins of this society. As the narrator in Tulsa explains, a tremendous amount of human labor was required to make oil work in the United States. “Refineries had to be built to process it and make it what it is today.” As the title of this chapter suggests, the hydrocarbon society had to be constructed. Building it required the redesign and partial removal of an older socioeconomic structure based on coal and steam and railways, which had itself been constructed as part of the Industrial Revolution. In order for the hydrocarbon society to come into existence, pipelines and other transportation infrastructure had to be put in place, oil technologies—the thermal cracking of hydrocarbon molecules, the oil lamp, rotary drilling, the internal combustion engine and many others—had to be researched, developed, manufactured, advertised and distributed on markets. Massive infrastructure projects to build thousands of miles of paved roads and highways required planning, legislation, funding and execution. A dense network of gas stations, garages, parking lots and retail stores had to be established. With every mile of freshly constructed road, with each new oil-based consumer product, the hydrocarbon society became a little bit more real. Americans had begun to construct the hydrocarbon society early in the twentieth century. Shortly after World War II, an energy system fundamentally based on oil had become a physical, manifest reality in the United States. It is still so today.

Thirdly, constructing the hydrocarbon society involved more than simply the development of certain technologies and physical infrastructure. Oil is a social construction. The minute it first gushed up from American soil in the nineteenth century, oil became an object of the American imagination. Laying the material base for the hydrocarbon society went hand in hand with a process of assigning meaning to oil as an increasingly important commodity, a process of imagining, representing, interpreting and narrating the energy-related change that the country was undergoing. Cultural texts like Tulsa demonstrate this clearly.⁴ The lifeblood metaphor used in its opening scene offers one poignant example of how Americans actively sought to express the meaning oil had acquired for their society as a whole. The central point is this: constructing the hydrocarbon society was a process in which material and ideational practices were inextricably bound up with each other. The remainder of this chapter examines several key tenets of this society as they emerged between the early twentieth century and the energy crises of the 1970s.

Energy Eras and Energy Policy

In the United States, the history of energy is often written with the help of the twin concepts of “energy eras” and “energy transitions”. Martin Melosi explains: “The concept of ‘energy transitions’ is based on the notion that a single energy source, or group of related sources, dominated the market during a particular period or era, eventually to be challenged and then replaced by another major source or sources.”⁵ American energy historiography usually observes two such transitions: the first one from wood to coal in the mid-nineteenth century, the second one from coal to oil in the first half of the twentieth century.

From a bird's eye view of aggregate energy statistics, oil appeared on the scene with the construction of the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. The following year, oil accounted for 0.1 percent of American energy consumption. By 1880, it had almost reached 2 percent, surpassed 6 percent in 1910, exploded to 24 percent by 1930, verged on 30 percent just before World War II and finally emerged triumphant at its all-time high of 44 percent in 1960. There it lingered for several decades, only to decline slightly in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2013, oil satisfied about 36 percent of America's energy hunger, still more than any other energy source. The use of coal, in turn, declined steadily after about 1910. Put most simply, the hydrocarbon society is the energy era resulting from this second energy transition.⁶

But these figures alone cannot give us more than a rough periodization of energy history. They say nothing about how these transitions happened and in what ways people used new energy sources to alter life in the United States. In order to capture the essence of this chapter's main argument—that the hydrocarbon society is both a physical and cultural construction—we need an approach to energy eras that is open to studying links between energy, technology and culture.

The work of David Nye contains many important ideas on which such an approach can be based. In his fascinating study Consuming Power, Nye examines historical linkages between energy technologies and culture in the United States. Nye does not see technology as an autonomous force that causes change in a society, but instead describes the concept of energy transitions as the “social construction of technological systems”. Energy technologies, he argues, do not exist in isolation from the society in which they are created and used. American culture plays a role in selecting which technologies are used. These technologies then become part of the American lifeworld. “Each energy system”, Nye explains, “has been used to shape distinctive domestic patterns, work routines, urban structures, and agricultural methods, imparting particular rhythms and contours to the everyday round.” Energy, in other words, enters American society on the most basic level: it becomes part of daily life and thus helps define what people experience as normal.⁷

Beyond people's daily routines, energy is also part of culture in a deeper, less tangible way. As Nye explains in a different study, American culture is saturated with different “energy narratives”, that is, widely held implicit or explicit conceptions about energy and its role in society, which surface in public debates, political arguments and cultural texts.⁸ Through such narratives and other forms of symbolic representation, energy technologies can acquire, as Nye writes, “a dominant cultural position for decades or even generations”.⁹

Nye argues that there is nothing inevitable about the rise of certain energy technologies over time. But he also emphasizes the importance of path dependencies in shaping the course of energy history. In his view, energy eras tend to persist for a long time because of their inherent “technological momentum”. The emergence of any one energy technology may not be predetermined, but once the required physical infrastructure exists and becomes entrenched, it becomes very costly for a society to change course. As Nye puts it, “A society may choose to emphasize either mass transit or private automobiles, but a generation later it is difficult to undo such a decision.”¹⁰

Nye's approach can be extended in a number of ways to provide a useful conceptual framework for the principal argument of this book. Most importantly, his contextualist approach to energy can be enlarged to encompass a more decisively political dimension. In other words, we can use Nye's social history of energy approach to write a social history of energy policy, based on the proposition that the process of formulating political definitions, goals and strategies in the field of energy is inextricably intertwined with the socially constructed energy eras in which these choices are made. Adopting such a perspective means, in essence, treating culture as an important factor shaping major energy policy choices. The argument here is not that energy culture simply determines energy policy as a causal force, but the rather different assertion that any dominant energy discourse makes certain political courses of action more urgent, logical, reasonable or justified while actively foreclosing other possible ways of acting. To write about energy in this manner is to enquire about the cultural conditions of possibility for the making of energy policy in the United States.¹¹

In order to do this, we first need a better sense of the many ways in which oil has entered American culture in the hydrocarbon society—in the form of technologies, practices linked to energy consumption, energy narratives and other forms of symbolic representation. This is what the present chapter seeks to do. Only then can we examine how the political problem of dependency has been defined out of these cultural raw materials. This will be the aim of the following chapters.

One way of conceptualizing these links between energy culture and energy politics is to broaden the notion of technological momentum as offered by Nye. The argument that energy choices are made in the context of what is already there does not need to be confined to path dependencies arising from physical energy infrastructures. The hydrocarbon society also rests on a cultural energy infrastructure, an infrastructure that allows for certain courses of action more readily than for others. The concept of the “discursive economy” provides a useful tool for understanding how this works. David Campbell offers a working definition, according to which a discursive economy is “a managed space” in which “investments have been made in certain representations; dividends can be drawn by those interests that have made the investments; representations are taxed when they confront new and ambiguous circumstances”.¹² Adapting the concept for the purpose at hand, we could say that the totality of American cultural practices, images, assumptions and representations regarding oil are stored in a discursive economy of oil. Some of these representations dominate in the sense that they have come to be seen as self-evident, obvious or true. Others remain marginal. Any political course of action in the field of energy is inevitably assessed, interpreted, weighed and debated against the reservoir of meanings contained in this discursive economy. In the process, some energy choices are constituted as more necessary or desirable than others. An example: during much of the twentieth century, American patterns of individual energy use were underpinned by a body of assumptions according to which energy consumption was a symbol of progress, a prerequisite for social mobility and rising living standards, an American birthright and an expression of the fundamental freedoms enjoyed by all US citizens. These powerful assumptions help explain a certain historical tendency in the United States to define energy problems in terms of supply, not demand. Writing about US energy policy in the mid-twentieth century, for example, oil historian David Painter concludes: “The realization that US oil consumption threatened to outpace domestic reserves led to plans to assure access to foreign oil reserves. The alternative of reducing, or at least slowing, the growth of rapidly rising consumption was not seriously considered.”¹³ Moreover, whenever such policy proposals to manage, restrict or reduce per capita energy consumption were made by policy makers—for instance in the wake of the energy crisis of the early 1970s—they had to fight an uphill struggle against established views about the benefits and necessity of consumption. It has usually proved difficult to act in ways which contradict the key cultural tenets of the hydrocarbon society.

American Oil Discourse

Oil has entered th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction A Culture of Dependency
• 1. Constructing the Hydrocarbon Society
• 2. Defining Dependency
• 3. The Dangers of Foreign Oil
• 4. The Foreignness of Foreign Oil
• 5. Fighting for Oil
• Conclusion Oil and American Identity
• Notes
• Bibliography