Car Country: An Environmental History

5. Fueling the Boom

173 five Fueling the Boom the same sWelling Car Use that sPaWneD a neW motor-age geography had environmental repercussions that extended well beyond the emergence of the nation’s first car-dependent landscapes. Among these, soaring car use generated surging demand for gasoline, which had particularly portentous implications for the environment. Fueled by automotive demand, oil companies entered a period of rapid, sustained growth that catapulted an industry originally designed to supply kerosene for lamps into direct competition with coal as the major supplier of the nation’s energy needs. Moreover, the same skyrocketing demand for gasoline that transformed the oil industry also offered a serendipitous solution—in the form of gasoline taxes—to the long-standing problem of how to pay for phenomenally expensive improvements to the nation’s vast highway system. As a result, vast quantities of inexpensive oil became a cornerstone of the country ’s political economy during the interwar period, providing the fuel for swelling numbers of vehicles and financing the spread of an ever-more-expensive infrastructure of highways, particularly as states began to Panorama of the oil fields, Los Angeles, California, 1906. E. W. Kelley, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, lC-UsZ62-72117. 174 || Fueling the Boom forge nearly unassailable legal links between gasoline-tax revenue and highway improvements. Together with new planning methods, these developments created a dynamic, politically insulated system in which growing car use and expanding road construction fed one another in a self-fueling cycle. Yet even as the pieces of this powerful new system moved into place, the combination of growing traffic problems and outspoken advocates for a national system of toll-financed “superhighways ” threatened to upend the carefully crafted designs of highway administrators as the nation prepared to enter World War II. Fueling Cars Of the new establishments populating the interwar period’s Great American Roadside, the most essential—and most completely car-oriented —was the gasoline filling station. Filling stations with dedicated pumping equipment had begun to appear in the mid-1910s to cater to motorists seeking a more convenient alternative to the assortment of grocery stores, hardware stores, drug stores, repair shops, machine shops, car dealers, and automotive garages that made the vast majority of gasoline sales during the 1910s.1 This changed dramatically during the 1920s, however, as filling stations blossomed into an omnipresent feature of the American landscape. By 1927, roughly 265,000 curbside and drive-in filling stations accounted for better than 80 percent of all gasoline pumps in the United States.2 Even during the Great Depression , gasoline retail outlets expanded even faster than car ownership , leaping from 317,000 in 1929 to 450,000 in 1939. Filling stations accounted for virtually all of the increase.3 Filling stations soon added new services, built stronger ties to big oil companies, and developed more car-friendly layouts. Beginning in Los Angeles, and becoming ubiquitous nationally by the mid-1930s, specialized filling stations began to remake themselves into “one-stop shops” for automobile service, repair, and upkeep by selling automotive accessories, performing repairs and maintenance, and eventually even adding car washes.4 Likewise, service stations that had once been characterized by healthy numbers of independent owner-operators became increasingly affiliated with large oil companies, which were fighting to vertically integrate their operations as a way to ensure Fueling the Boom || 175 reliable outlets for growing quantities of fuel.5 In addition, as owners of one of the first entirely car-oriented businesses, gasoline station proprietors were among the earliest to experiment with radical new ways to handle the on-site circulation and storage of automobiles, developing site arrangements that profoundly influenced the site layouts that other car-oriented retailers adopted.6 The proliferation of filling stations—and, eventually, the fortunes of the entire oil industry—closely paralleled the rise of the automobile . During the first American oil boom, which began in 1859 after Edwin L. Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, oil’s market value derived from the illuminant kerosene, and it was upon kerosene that John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil, the ruthlessly effective monopoly that dominated the industry until 1911, when the Supreme Court ordered its dissolution.7 In these early years, many refiners simply dumped gasoline, a volatile and inexpensive by-product of kerosene production that was notoriously prone to explosions.8 When the number of cars began multiplying in the 1910s, however, demand...