I appreciate the opportunity to respond to these two reviews of my book, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940

(University of California Press, 2005).  Many thanks to both Karen Merrill and Tyler Priest for their comments and reactions.

Karen Merrill raises interesting questions regarding the context of the California oil story.  The struggle over federal oil lands in

the 1910s was clearly part of the broader conflict over public control and management of natural resources in the United States. 

Certainly the conflict over oil followed its own political and legal trajectory, but the Taft Administration’s oil reserve policy

and the resulting fallout fits within the broader conservation effort that historians Samuel Hays and J. Leonard Bates and others

brought to the fore half a century ago.  My primary point in writing about the conflict over federal oil lands in California was not

so much to revisit the narrative of progressivism, but rather to explore the ways that property rights are created and then continually

contested, and the impact that property politics have on natural resource production and markets.  The ideological landscape of

the time ranged from proposals for nationalization of the oil fields to the call for continued distribution of the public lands to private

individuals and companies.  In retrospect, the American solution seems to be a political compromise that gave everyone a bit of

something.  Nationalizers retained public ownership of a significant portion of oil lands, while private ownership types kept the

government out of the oil business and insured that royalty rates would be low and the government would not reclaim previously

distributed lands.  American ambivalence toward bigness and monopoly also found its place—while large companies, led by

Standard Oil of California, continued to dominate the market, smaller companies drew on American ideas of competition, as

well as the fractured political structure, to keep a place in the oil game.  The compromises of the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920

and the lenient Interior Department administration of Albert Fall could not have satisfied any of the players one hundred percent,

but seem typical and predictable outcomes of the American system of governance.

With regards to what it meant to be a progressive in the 1930s, California Governor Culbert Olson’s attempts to open

the Huntington Beach tidelands to competitive oil drilling illuminate this issue in a helpful fashion.  While liberals today

tend to support beach drilling bans and California’s moratorium on offshore drilling, Olson’s progressive politics focused

instead on protecting California’s interest in its natural resources and using those resources for the benefit of the broadly

defined public.  Olson’s progressive politics represented a less romantic tradition in relationship to natural resources, one

far more in line with Pinchot and Roosevelt than Muir.  Olson believed that the beach front at Huntington Beach, for example,

had been despoiled by drilling up to the beach bluffs, with oil running down onto the beach and into the water.  One might

criticize Olson for lacking the vision to imagine this beach front with today’s surfers and roller bladers, but, in his time, Olson

believed that Standard Oil of California as well as smaller oil companies were looting the state’s treasury under the guise

of beach protection. Olson’s effort to investigate Standard Oil’s leases, raise royalty rates, and initiate tidelands leasing can

be seen as part of the broader Roosevelt-era effort to employ public natural resources on behalf of the broad public welfare,

through the mechanism of public ownership and control. The T.V.A. and Ickes’ work at Interior come to mind as contemporaneous

activities. In Olson’s case, California was in a severe budgetary crisis for much of the mid-1930s, and Olson sought to use

natural resource taxation and development to enable more equitable taxation and the maintenance of public services.  As part

of a broad historical tradition, you can link Olson’s efforts with more recent struggles to retain public control of resources,

such as Bruce Babbitt’s 1990s attempt to raise grazing permit rates or the more recent attempt to claim millions of dollars of

underpaid oil royalties.  Olson’s position, I think, also anticipated the current-day interest in conservative and elite aspects of

conservation, and the ways that conservation initiatives sometimes serve these private ends.  A present-day example might be

the current controversy over whether to build a wind-power facility off the coast of Cape Cod.  I think Olson clearly would

have sided with the wind power development over beach view protection.

I appreciate the many points of Tyler Priest’s review.  In retrospect, I might well have taken up the purchasing of the streetcar
lines, though in my view the streetcars that were purchased and dismantled generally were in a pretty sorry financial situation as
a result of some of the financial issues that I discuss from the 1920s and 1930s.   I would like to respond to Mr. Priest’s questions
about how much politics have structured oil supply.  As examples he cites the challenges of regulating oil production in California and
the difficulty of limiting drilling on public lands.  This reasoning does not make sense to me, as both are simply outcomes of fiercely
contested political struggles.  Yes, achieving collective action in the form of production controls is always very difficult.  But when
collective action fails, does it mean that the “free market triumphed”?  It would be more accurate to say that a particular set of economic
actors and interests prevailed in the conflict.  In the case of California’s inability to control oil production, for example, small independent
operators undermined the efforts of large companies like Standard Oil to make production more efficient and raise prices.   They were
able to do this largely for political and legal reasons.  Anti-monopoly laws prevented Standard Oil from setting market prices and
denying the small producers a refinery market for their oil.  Blocked from pursuing its preferred private solution, Standard Oil then
tried, but failed, to achieve a satisfactory public solution through state and federal political enforcement.  The effort to impose state
oil production controls would have succeeded except that the ballot initiative process in California enabled the smaller companies
to defeat the oil controls politically.  I suppose one might try to argue that this is all the natural course of events, except that there
are clear alternative scenarios. California’s experience differed greatly from other countries where oil resources have been developed
in large lease blocks or national output is set through OPEC negotiations.  With regards to the failure to restrict drilling on public
lands, one has only to look at the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge or California coast to see places where the drilling continues to
be blocked politically.  With these and many other examples of how political factors shape supply, saying that the California story
demonstrates the triumph of the free market illustrates for me the extraordinary malleability and resilience of the free market concept. 
It is fascinating how the idea of the “free market” holds such a compelling grip on the American imagination, in the face of all historical evidence to the contrary.

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Paul Sabin is executive director of the Environmental Leadership Program, a national non-profit organization that seeks to inspire visionary, action-oriented and diverse leadership to work for a just and sustainable future.