Darren Dochuk. Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 2019. 688 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-06086-3.
Reviewed by Mark Boxell (University of Oklahoma)
Published on H-Environment (October, 2020)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)
Darren Dochuk’s Anointed with Oil is a sprawling history of the oil industry, its ties to distinctive forms of Christian missionizing, and the unraveling of a global twentieth century that, not coincidentally, centered on the duel powers of petroleum and the United States. Dochuk, who is a historian of American religion and capitalism, structures this story around the split between small-scale “independent” oil companies and their vertically integrated corporate counterparts. He argues that this division within the industry not only shaped political-economic relations but also helped give rise to differing conceptions of Christianity and its role in business, politics, and international affairs. The major oil companies’ “civil religion of crude” was embodied by Standard Oil’s Rockefeller family, whose large-scale global philanthropic efforts reflected their desire to control from the top down both the oil industry and the principles of capitalism and mainline Christianity that the industry was supposedly based on. The majors clashed—politically and religiously—with the “wildcat Christianity” of independent oil families. The independents were more prone to embracing an active, engaging God and espousing providentialism, and they viewed Christianity as an encounter between individuals and the divine. For the Rockefellers and their heirs, missionizing was a deliberately corporate affair founded on liberal principles of collective “progress.” Meanwhile, the independents espoused a grassroots Christianity that, at least on the surface, preached humility amid a chaotic and ultimately doomed secular world.
Dochuk divides the majors and independents in terms of not only their differing religious convictions but also their divergent perspectives on the rule of capture—the property regime that governed oil production in the United States, which held that oil could not be possessed by an individual until it was controlled at the surface. In Dochuk’s telling, independents were zealots for the rule of capture, standing in opposition to collective conservation rules that forestalled overproduction but prevented the wildcat prospector from winning his share of the next oil boom. These oilmen were also opposed to government regulation of oil production, viewing such authority as a conspiracy between Washington bureaucrats and “the trusts,” such as Standard. Dochuk suggests that independents held these views not only because conservation measures were “socialistic” and could be more easily weathered by large integrated companies but also because independents’ speculative drilling ventures reflected their brand of Christianity, which left chance up to God and situated proprietary, hands-on business enterprise as a righteous form of small-scale producerism.
If I have one criticism as an energy historian, it is that these clean bifurcations between “independents” and “majors” can be oversold. The political differences that separated independents from majors were often expedient inventions of the independents, meant to situate them within a larger Populist lexicon that resonated across the southern and western United States. Contrary to this, many independents advocated for conservation rules designed to save their market share when overproduction struck. While there were individual independents who were rule-of-capture zealots, independents rarely acted as a unified block and an individual oiler’s commitment or opposition to a liberal rule-of-capture regime often depended on the unique circumstances of any given moment. Furthermore, while independents may have opposed federal authority in the oil fields, they were eager to deploy production quotas and other conservation measures through friendly state legislatures. A closer focus on the history of the construction of the “independent” identity might have led to some important revelations, mainly how a sense of eternal victimhood amid growing affluence came to dominate right-wing politics, in this case through the rhetoric of the early twentieth century’s independent oilmen, who grew rich but were always staring up at the plutocratic Rockefellers of the world.
However, this criticism is a small one. Overall, this is an incredible work of history based on an enormous amount of primary research. And while Dochuk does not consciously write as an environmental historian, his work provides intriguing insights that are certainly relevant to the field. First, he ultimately suggests that both the nature and the economics of crude created a political ecology of evangelicalism in the Southwest. The material lives of boom-and-bust that the oil patch’s evangelical working class and its small-scale business owners experienced seemingly confirmed their faith in a fire-breathing, apocalypse-focused Christianity. The oil-based world they experienced was both full of opportunity and beset with staggering physical and economic destruction. Those boom-or-bust cycles largely boiled down to how the rule of capture sought to turn volatile geologies into private property and encouraged drilling free-for-alls that seemed to beckon the end of the world. These social fissures, produced in part by adherence to that property regime, fed into the region’s grassroots religious cultures. Early environmental historians of the United States were quite enamored with religion, but this is a different story than theirs. Instead of revealing how people’s faith intersected with their encounters with sublime landscapes and seemingly wild ecosystems, Dochuk shows how the difficult, explosive, industrial struggle to rip crude oil from the earth bolstered the beliefs of those who expected the apocalypse to begin any day.
Furthermore, Dochuk emphasizes how independents and majors took different approaches to the ecological and labor problems that the oil industry presented. While the wildcatters shared an awe for nature as it shaped their enterprises in the oil patch, the majors remained more aloof of the calamities and wonders that drilling for crude involved. Likewise, the independents embraced a hands-on approach to labor squabbles, appealing directly to the whiteness, manhood, and freedom they shared with their workers, while major oil companies erected sprawling systems of welfare capitalism to ameliorate worker disputes. Summing this division up, Dochuk writes, “At the very center of oil’s contests over natural and human ecology, in other words, rests a question of fundamental importance to modern American society writ large: Just who controls the levers of democracy?” (pp. 16-17). In this sense, Dochuk’s book offers another perspective on “carbon democracy” that is much needed in the wake of Timothy Mitchell’s influential 2011 book. Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil largely situates oil in abstract terms, as an object that could be used to gauge the economy on a global scale or as a material that “flowed” through markets in certain ways, and thus shaped the limits of twentieth-century political economy. In contrast, Dochuk argues here that the nitty-gritty stories of the political subjects and religious personalities who spearheaded crude’s production reveal much about how twentieth-century American democracy unfolded, as majors and independents fought over how to interpret oil’s occurrence in a divine world and how to funnel their profits into different tools for social, cultural, and political engineering.
Anointed with Oil comes in at over six hundred pages, but it is beautifully written and exhaustively researched. Archives in Texas, California, New York, Canada, and England are all represented, alongside major oil-focused works by the likes of Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and others as well as obscure but equally interesting published materials. It is a model for how the histories of culture, political economy, and environment are ultimately inseparable.
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Citation:
Mark Boxell. Review of Dochuk, Darren, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America.
H-Environment, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55316
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