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Mark H. Lytle, Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry. By Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xx, 305 pp. Cloth, $49.95, isbn 0-8078-2523-9. Paper, $18.95, isbn 0-8078-4835-2.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Page 1096, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700466
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The mystery writer Josephine Tey called the problem Tonypandy. Popular myths and distorted understandings of historical events persist despite the efforts of historians to set the record straight. Tonypandy is the target of this history of the oil industry from its birth in western Pennsylvania in 1859 until the end of World War II. The authors, Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien, make the case that many of the sins charged against the oil industry in general and John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Standard Oil of New Jersey in particular are more myth than credible history. Recent popular histories by Daniel Yergin (1991) and Ron Chernow (1998), they argue, have perpetuated many widely held distortions.
The problem is not simply one of popular misperception. The Oliens suggest that public officials have used those misperceptions as the basis for federal regulation. The result has been the repeated failure of national oil policy. Or, as they put it, “if the past remains guide to the future, unless the role of public discourse is addressed and assessed, and old ideas are re examined, it will be hard to avoid mispercep tions and misfires in future public policy relating to petroleum.” To make this case, the Oliens adopt an unusual strategy. Rather than offer a traditional political and economic history of the oil industry, they have written an intellectual history in which they explore public discourses and how they have been constructed. That approach allows them to highlight the moral fervor that informed many studies of the industry, from Ida Tarbell's muckraking exposé of Standard Oil (1904) to Harold Ickes's Fightin' Oil (1943), a propagan distic brief for federal participation in developing Middle East oil reserves.
