United Against Nature: Oil Pageantry as Modernist Teaching Tool

• In Event: Pedagogies of the Anthropocene: Constructing and Disrupting the Human and the Natural Through Public Display

Abstract

In 1952, the American Petroleum Institute (API) launched the Oil Industry Information Committee (OIIC) in the midst of national controversy over offshore drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico and a growing national oil refinery strike. While the API had already established itself as the oil industry’s Washington lobbying arm, this new organization was designed to combat oil’s increasingly negative public image as wasteful, greedy, and monopolistic. The OIIC toured nation-wide for over ten years, using theater, song, and dance to exonerate oil industry expansion and demonstrate the industry’s connection to a mythical, “authentic” America. A fundamental part of these displays was the reassurance that industry deregulation – and expanded drilling operations – would provide unlimited energy and drive perpetual prosperity.

Recently, scholars such as Stephanie Lemangier, Bob Johnson, and Matt Huber have explored the deep connections between oil and twentieth-century American understandings of nature, waste, and the economy. They describe the ways in which oil consumption defined US popular culture and shaped the expansion of neoliberal policy. In this paper I take such analysis inward to focus on the “fables of abundance” the oil industry told about itself to its own people. I show that industry leaders used a mix of science jargon, sex, and cowboy pageantry to refashion nineteenth century narratives of manifest destiny and human dominance over the natural for postwar industry employees. I describe OIIC rallies, as well as regional events such as the Odessa Oil Show, and the Houston Oil and Gas Convention to describe an anachronistically mechanistic, modernist understandings of oil and nature that shored up masculine pride in the face of waning US labor power and fostered a belief in the industry’s unwarranted persecution by outsiders. I show that such pageantry helped to insulate the industry from calls for environmental protection and constant indications that geological processes and geological time existed beyond human control.

Author

• Sarah Stanford-Mcintyre, University of Wyoming