Petrodocumentary and the Remaking of New Deal Culture

In 1942 Assistant Attorney General Thurman W. Arnold launched an investigation into Standard Oil of New Jersey (SONJ)'s relationship with the German petrochemical company IG Farben. Not only had SONJ profited from their association, he argued, but the corporations' agreements were depriving the United States of badly needed synthetic rubber during the war. Arnold appeared before the Senate Committee on National Defense, after which then senator Harry Truman told a reporter "I think this approaches treason." As the war progressed, new revelations piled up indicating that SONJ had allowed Germany to gain a wartime advantage.¹ Opinion polls reflected this scandal, showing, among other things, that Standard Oil was the US public's least favorite corporation.² It was not just government scrutiny and national sentiment that seemed to be damaging US oil companies' reputations: in both the United States and oil-producing Latin American countries, workers and governments were pushing back against foreign corporations in more concrete ways. The Bolivian and Mexican governments had nationalized their oil industries in 1937 and 1938, and even in friendlier Venezuela, workers pressed a newly responsive government to allow workers and citizens a greater share of oil profits, recognizing, as Fernando Coronil writes, "that the subsoil was national property and that the role of the state was to safeguard this property on behalf of the collectivity."³ The United States, for its part, witnessed its first nationwide oil-worker strike in September 1945, beginning with Michigan refinery workers and ultimately encompassing forty-three thousand workers in twenty states.⁴ US oil companies may have been large, but in that moment they seemed neither stable nor popular.

By the end of the decade, however, things looked different. The US government quickly backed down from prosecuting SONJ for its collaboration with IG Farben and in 1945 called in the military to break the nationwide strike. In the late 1940s, under the auspices of Cold War security, the US government consolidated a foreign policy that, as David Painter argues, entailed unwavering "public support for and nonintervention in the private operations of the major oil companies," along with sometimes-covert intervention abroad to secure those companies' ongoing access to the world's oil.⁵ Domestically, as New Deal drilling controls and housing and highway construction policies took effect, "petromodernity" reached its classic form within the built environment, and the United States entered what Matthew Huber calls "the postwar period of naïve petro-capitalism."⁶ Beyond these infrastructural changes, in Frederick Buell's evocative description, "wartime petrochemistry was reworked into the chemical equivalent of ploughshares." Oil, Buell explains, "changed into what people dressed in, evacuated into, viewed, and even ate, not just what they put into their power machinery. … Bodies became literally oily, in what they ate, and in the cosmetics and clothes they put on; pharmaceuticals began doing the same thing for minds."⁷

This essay contends that this exculpation and expansion of the petroleum industries, which looks like a smooth process only in retrospect, was helped along by a series of photography and film campaigns on behalf of the US oil and transportation industries. Rather than directly promote themselves or particular petroleum products, oil corporations undertook the more ambitious project of creating "symbols of ideal life," in John Dewey's evocative phrase.⁸ They did this by enlisting celebrated documentary administrators and artists to produce visions of oil extraction as both good work and harmonious nature–machine integration, imagining a postwar America characterized by cleanliness and abundance while promising Latin American countries a similar future. Working for Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of American Affairs (OCIAA) and SONJ, as well as for auto barons such as Alfred and Harold Sloan, these 1940s documentary cultural workers drew on the frontier-nostalgic, sociological, and even workerist social protest sensibilities honed in the milieu of New Deal agencies and the 1930s Left, brightening and simplifying these sensibilities to produce lively, hopeful visions of an oilpowered world. Directed deliberately at an educated professional class, these images and narratives not only countered critics' charges that oil extraction was dirty, dangerous, and (for US...