The cozy relationship that had been established between Washington and Big Oil during World War I grew more complicated in its aftermath when questionable public-private ties were exposed. As early as 1910, Congress gave the president authority to set aside strategic oil fields in California and Wyoming for emergency use in the event that military oil supplies ran low. This provision would lead to one of the more notorious moments in American political history—the Teapot Dome scandal.
In 1921, Albert Fall, President Warren Harding’s secretary of the interior, who oversaw millions of acres of public land, was caught taking bribe money from oilmen. Fall, who had worked as a chuck wagon cook, a hard-rock miner, a rancher, and a lawyer before he won political leadership, had secretly leased more than 100,000 acres of land located inside of the military oil reserves in eastern Wyoming (named Teapot Dome after a boulder in the shape of a teapot that overlooked the oil field) to prominent eastern oil prospectors. He had done so in exchange for personal gifts and loans totaling more than $5 million in today’s dollars.
When Fall was investigated, Congress was hard pressed to find a lawyer to represent him who didn’t have a conflict of interest with the oil industry. “Just think; America has 110 million population, 90 percent of them lawyers,” remarked the popular humorist Will Rogers, “yet we can’t find two of them who have not worked at some time or another for an oil company. There has been at least one lawyer for each barrel that ever came out of the ground.”
In response to the scandal, rumblings arose about the oil industry’s influence inside Congress itself: “[I can] name a dozen senators spotted with this flood of oil,” said Senator George Moses, a New Hampshire Republican. “Those yet unnamed are greater in number.”
GREASING PALMS
The love affair between the petroleum industry and politics endured long after Albert Fall was imprisoned and replaced with a more responsible executor of public land. In the 1940s, for instance, eighteen oil executives were mysteriously forgiven sizable federal penalties for manipulating the price of petroleum distribution over their pipelines; according to some reports at the time, they dodged their fines by bribing members of the Democratic Party with contributions totaling about $13 million in today’s dollars.
That same decade, as the oil industry was beginning to explore offshore oil fields, debate raged over who owned the shallow coastal areas known as the tidelands. One side argued that drilling in this region should be controlled through tight federal restrictions to preserve the oil for military use and protect the nation’s fisheries. The other argued that it should be managed by states and more loosely (and favorably) leased to private companies. In 1945, President Harry Truman declared the tidelands federal land, infuriating the industry, which battled on to reverse this decision. During his 1952 presidential campaign, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who received large contributions from the oil industry, pledged to support state control of the tidelands. He honored the promise soon after he was elected. “Eisenhower’s smashing personal victory,” wrote historian Robert Engler, “was quickly followed by a fulsome display of gratitude to its oil supporters.”
Indeed, at the presidential level, even the most respected administrations of the twentieth century—especially the most respected administrations, including Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, John F. Kennedy’s, and Ronald Reagan’s—have brokered and nurtured relationships with oil producers both domestic and international that openly abetted America’s appetite for oil. “The trouble with the country is that you can’t win an election without the oil bloc,” Roosevelt famously said, “and you can’t govern with it.”
In the last century, the federal government leased tens of millions of acres of public lands for oil drilling, upholding a philosophy that affordable, free-flowing energy was a matter of public well-being—a resource that functioned as a public service as much as it did a private commodity. For close to a hundred years, this resource has also been seen as the linchpin of America’s national security.
America’s relationship to petroleum was irrevocably altered in 1970 when the country hit peak oil. From that point forward the U.S. could no longer hope to provide this public service entirely for itself, but had to buy ever-increasing amounts from outside its borders—putting our national security increasingly into the hands of political allies and enemies alike. In the 1970s America went from being the world’s premier source of oil to being a net importer of oil. The shock of the Arab oil embargo in 1973 exposed this vulnerability for the first time to the American public. The embargo—along with rising concern in the 1970s over pollution caused by drilling and burning crude—sparked widespread public criticism of the marriage of oil and politics in America.
The industry has adapted. Today the American Petroleum Institute is one of the most powerful business lobbies in U.S. politics, representing a membership of more than four hundred companies and investing between $3 million and $5 million annually in recent years on lobbying efforts. Most notably, the API has led the fight to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the Outer Continental Shelf to oil drilling, opposed federal requirements for greenhouse gas reduction, and fought to secure and prolong industry-specific tax breaks.
In 2001, President George W. Bush selected as his chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality a former API lobbyist, Philip A. Cooney. Cooney, who had been the climate team leader at API, came under fire in 2005 when the New York Times reported that he had been altering government reports to raise doubts about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global warming. Days after the Times published its report, Cooney resigned. He went on to work at ExxonMobil.
No administration has been so overt in its ties to the petroleum industry as the George W. Bush administration, which employed more than fifty Oval Office staff members who had previously worked for oil companies, named the CEOs of the nation’s biggest oil companies to the task force that shaped the administration’s energy and war policies, and opened up a record amount of public land to development, including vast areas of the Gulf of Mexico, home to Chevron’s Cajun Express. Though I was a critic of Bush’s energy policies, after my study of history I began to see that the administration’s collaborations with Big Oil was a fairly predictable (which is not to say optimal) extension of political patterns that had been in place throughout the entire twentieth century.
For all that has shifted in America’s relationship to oil over the last century, what is most surprising is how much of the basic dynamics of petroleum policy and prospecting have stayed the same. At the core, the industry has been fueled by an abiding optimism: “Oil drilling isn’t for the pessimist,” Michel Halbouty said, “or even for the realist. You’ve got to be an optimist. You’ve got to believe no matter how many dry holes you drill, the next one is going to hit.”
In one of my favorite scenes from the TV show Dallas, J.R. Ewing describes his passion for oil to his disenchanted wife Sue Ellen:
J.R.: There’s nothing realer than oil, that’s for sure.
Sue Ellen: Not to you darlin’, except perhaps money.
J.R.: Same thing, honey, same thing.
Today, America’s obsession with drilling well after deeper well has eclipsed our ability to scale back demand by developing more enduring energy sources that could take the place of oil. This obsession has, in essence, taken us back to the roots of our domestic oil production. As technology evolved over the decades between the 1920s and 1950s, drillers continued to grind down to ever greater and more pressurized depths—from 1,000 feet to 2,500 feet and then 8,000 feet—unleashing deeper pockets of reserves. In recent decades, prospectors have begun double-dipping in already exploited wells—even in some surrounding Spindletop. They are now venturing as low as 40,000