During the past fifteen years, historians have discovered the 1970s—that “pivotal decade” when “something happened” and “the shock of the global” arrived and “brought you modern life,” to invoke a few popular titles. Recent scholarship by political historians has pushed back the timing of America's “right turn,” downplaying the Ronald Reagan administration and stressing earlier cultural, political, and foreign policy struggles that accompanied economic stagnation, weak productivity growth, and rising global commercial integration. In her much-anticipated new book, political historian Meg Jacobs makes a valuable contribution to this burgeoning field by linking the extended energy crisis of the 1970s to the long arc of American politics. Energy scarcity and the new—and ultimately permanent—dependence on foreign oil were vital, she argues, to the pervasive sense of national weakness and opposition to New Deal–style economic solutions that “helped shift American politics to the right in the 1970s” (p. 7).
Jacobs is at her stylistic and interpretive best on the occasions when she takes a broad view of the politics of energy, explaining the real effects on American political culture of higher energy prices and fuel shortages. In her discussion of unrest within the trucking industry during both the 1973 and 1979 OPEC crises, for example, she effectively and memorably ties popular disapproval of specific government policies to a fundamental political shift. Echoing an argument made by Shane Hamilton and others, she explains that the truckers’ revolt succeeded because “their grievances resonated with American politics” and indicted “too much government regulation as the one thing that blocked their path to greater prosperity” (p. 75).
Although historians of modern America have incorporated the broad contours of the energy crisis into the standard narrative of the period, Jacobs distinguishes her study by focusing in great detail on the interplay among policymakers at the highest levels of the national government. Drawing primarily on presidential archives and contemporary journalism, Panic at the Pump charts energy policy debates from the Nixon administration forward, and most of the story unfolds during the hot years of the energy crisis, between 1973 and 1980. With admirable clarity, given the subject matter, Jacobs reconstructs a dizzying story of price control schemes, production quotas, tiers, categories (“old” versus “new” domestic oil classifications, based on when the crude came out of the ground), and distribution regulations. This insider account of the deal-making, gamesmanship, and conflicting policy preferences among a host of players—many of whom would reappear in American politics in the 2000s, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney—makes the book a valuable resource. In spite of the general clarity of Jacobs's prose, however, the regulatory details will likely remain hard to follow for those not already versed in the history of the oil industry, while adding little new information for those who are.
Panic at the Pump shows that the energy crisis did more than foment antiregulatory sentiment; it fractured long-held political alliances and, in Jacobs's view, permanently disabled the New Deal coalition within the Democratic Party. Faced with higher energy prices and a great reliance on (often undependable) foreign supply, the political establishment split into three camps. “New Deal” liberals, worried principally about higher consumer prices, urged strict price controls on oil. Market-oriented conservatives, increasingly influential within the Republican Party during the Gerald Ford administration, argued that “taking off controls and removing regulations would stimulate domestic production” and were willing to see prices rise to accomplish their goal (p. 135). Environmentalists and conservationists (including Jimmy Carter) likewise opposed price controls, but for the opposite reason: higher prices would discourage consumption. “Nixon and Ford,” Jacobs summarizes, promoted “a program to boost domestic production; Carter believed the path to independence was to reduce consumption” (p. 163). Her clear delineation of this schism complicates the simplistic view of America's “right turn” as a straightforward morality play between “big government” liberalism and “free market” conservatism. Conservatives—in this case, antiregulatory and anti-price-control policymakers—succeeded as much through the disunity of their opponents as from the popularity of their vision.
Business historians familiar with the story of the energy crisis will likely learn new policy details and gain a greater appreciation for the interplay between policy and domestic political alliances. Jacobs's habit of privileging the politics over the economics of energy policy, however, may frustrate readers of the Business History Review. In a style that echoes an irritating habit of modern media, she frequently gives equal weight to contradictory economic positions—Did price controls cause shortages? Did deregulation help or hurt?—without weighing in on their relative merits. For example, she links the 1973 OPEC embargo to the growth in “the belief that the crisis was somehow the result of corporate manipulation.” As Americans lined up for rationed gasoline, consumer advocate Ralph Nader argued that the world was really “drowning in oil” and that the shortage was nothing but a “phony crisis” created by greedy corporations. Treasury secretary William Simon rebuked Nader's “misconception” (p. 81). Jacobs makes her point about the political repercussions of the crisis clearly, but leaves unclear whether Nader or Simon was actually correct.
In a related vein, scholars of business history may wish Jacobs had engaged more directly with the rich literature on the political development of the regulatory state in the twentieth century. Such engagement might have allowed her to weigh in more clearly on the relative virtues of competing economic views, or at least to explain the points where scholars disagree. Yet works by Judith Layzer, Thomas McCraw, Elizabeth Sanders, and Richard Vietor receive only scant mention, or none at all, in the notes.
Jacobs has produced a highly useful account of the energy crisis. Reflecting the best inclinations of the new scholarship on political economy and the 1970s, she successfully illustrates the centrality of energy dependence to both geopolitical strategy and persistent ideological, regional, and factional debates within American domestic politics.
