Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s
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An authoritative history of the energy crises of the 1970s and the world they wrought
In 1973, the Arab OPEC cartel banned the export of oil to the United States, sending prices and tempers rising across the country. Dark Christmas trees, lowered thermostats, empty gas tanks, and the new fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit all suggested that America was a nation in decline. "Don't be fuelish" became the national motto. Though the embargo would end the following year, it introduced a new kind of insecurity into American life—an insecurity that would only intensify when the Iranian Revolution led to new shortages at the end of the decade.
As Meg Jacobs shows, the oil crisis had a decisive impact on American politics. If Vietnam and Watergate taught us that our government lied, the energy crisis taught us that our government didn't work. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter promoted ambitious energy policies that were meant to rally the nation and end its dependence on foreign oil, but their efforts came to naught. The Democratic Party was divided, with older New Deal liberals who prized access to affordable energy squaring off against young environmentalists who pushed for conservation. Meanwhile, conservative Republicans argued that there would be no shortages at all if the government got out of the way and let the market work. The result was a political stalemate and panic across the country: miles-long gas lines, Big Oil conspiracy theories, even violent strikes by truckers.
Jacobs concludes that the energy crisis of the 1970s became, for many Americans, an object lesson in the limitations of governmental power. Washington proved unable to design an effective national energy policy, and the result was a mounting skepticism about government intervention that set the stage for the rise of Reaganism. She offers lively portraits of key figures, from Nixon and Carter to the zealous energy czar William Simon and the young Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Jacobs's absorbing chronicle ends with the 1991 Gulf War, when President George H. W. Bush sent troops to protect the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf. It was a failure of domestic policy at home that helped precipitate military action abroad. As we face the repercussions of a changing climate, a volatile oil market, and continued turmoil in the Middle East, Panic at the Pump is a necessary and lively account of a formative period in American political history.
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Meg Jacobs. (2016). Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Meg Jacobs. 2016. Panic At the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Meg Jacobs, Panic At the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
MLA Citation (style guide)Meg Jacobs. Panic At the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
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- bioText: Meg Jacobs is a research scholar in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Her first book, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (2005), won the Organization of American Historians' Ellis W. Hawley Prize for the best book on political economy, politics, and institutions of the modern United States, as well as the New England History Association's Best Book Award.
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An authoritative history of the energy crises of the 1970s and the world they wrought
In 1973, the Arab OPEC cartel banned the export of oil to the United States, sending prices and tempers rising across the country. Dark Christmas trees, lowered thermostats, empty gas tanks, and the new fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit all suggested that America was a nation in decline. "Don't be fuelish" became the national motto. Though the embargo would end the following year, it introduced a new kind of insecurity into American life—an insecurity that would only intensify when the Iranian Revolution led to new shortages at the end of the decade.
As Meg Jacobs shows, the oil crisis had a decisive impact on American politics. If Vietnam and Watergate taught us that our government lied, the energy crisis taught us that our government didn't work. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter promoted ambitious energy policies that were meant to rally the nation and end its dependence on foreign oil, but their efforts came to naught. The Democratic Party was divided, with older New Deal liberals who prized access to affordable energy squaring off against young environmentalists who pushed for conservation. Meanwhile, conservative Republicans argued that there would be no shortages at all if the government got out of the way and let the market work. The result was a political stalemate and panic across the country: miles-long gas lines, Big Oil conspiracy theories, even violent strikes by truckers.
Jacobs concludes that the energy crisis of the 1970s became, for many Americans, an object lesson in the limitations of governmental power. Washington proved unable to design an effective national energy policy, and the result was a mounting skepticism about government intervention that set the stage for the rise of Reaganism. She offers lively portraits of key figures, from Nixon and Carter to the zealous energy czar William Simon and the young Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Jacobs's absorbing chronicle ends with the 1991 Gulf War, when President George H. W. Bush sent troops to protect the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf. It was a failure of domestic policy at home that helped precipitate military action abroad. As we face the repercussions of a changing climate, a volatile oil market, and continued turmoil in the Middle East, Panic at the Pump is a necessary and lively account of a formative period in American political history.- reviews
- premium: True
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- content:
January 18, 2016
Jacobs (Pocketbook Politics), a research scholar at Princeton University, chronicles the evolution of American energy policy from the dying embers of New Deal politics, arguing that consumer unwillingness to stomach higher prices at the pump ultimately doomed energy reforms that would have weaned the U.S. economy off imported oil. Determined to break from big-government initiatives that imposed price controls on oil, conservatives such as George H.W. Bush, the “New England country-club Republican” turned Texas oilman, and William Simon, Treasury secretary under presidents Nixon and Ford, drove through policies that left the free market to regulate energy prices, battling New Deal liberals and angry environmentalists at every turn. It’s a riveting ideological clash, played out over decades against a backdrop of fed-up voters waiting in gas lines. Unfortunately, Jacobs chooses to emphasize the nitty-gritty of Congressional politics rather than a more sustained look at the intellectual and social currents that helped propel Reaganite conservatism. The result is shallow political analysis laid out in dull prose. The economic “malaise” of the Carter administration seems to have spilled into Jacobs’s tired recounting of the repeated energy crises the country faced, and the book’s too-brief conclusion offers no new insights into the future of energy politics.
- premium: True
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- content:
March 1, 2016
Political economist Jacobs (Woodrow Wilson Center/Princeton Univ.; Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, 2005, etc.) considers the effects of the 1970s OPEC embargoes on subsequent politics. It may surprise people too young to remember him, but Richard Nixon, though "not a New Dealer," actually declared in 1973 that seven years hence, America would become energy independent. What happened? Politics happened. By the author's account, Nixon's carefully assembled program of price controls, designed to smooth out the bumpier edges of supply and demand, gave way at the end of the decade to the Reagan administration's libertarian insistence that the market knows best. Nixon's expansion of the regulatory power of the federal government remains controversial even today, but it was neither without precedent nor without successors. As Jacobs writes, Gerald Ford took things a quiet step further, calling both for "fiscal restraint and higher energy prices" in a time of rampant inflation, as well as creating a comprehensive energy policy that included a strategic reserve and requirements that the automobile industry improve fuel efficiency. The anti-regulatory forces eventually gained the field, but they were there all along; the famed Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, for instance, insisted not just on the free market, but also on licensing avarice: "Greed motivates the world....If we will just unleash the greed, then we will solve our energy problems." Though unsuccessful on many fronts, the Reagan White House insisted that falling oil prices as a result of decontrol vindicated its policies. However, as Jacobs sagely notes, decontrol meant that the U.S. would "deregulate markets at home and protect them abroad," which required an increased military presence everywhere oil was produced. The author concludes, depressingly, by invoking the political insider James Schlesinger, who once remarked, "it's a hell of a lot easier and a lot more fun to kick asses in the Middle East than make sacrifices and practice conservation." A readable and neatly paced examination of recent history that sheds light on even more recent events.COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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April 1, 2016
Jacobs (researcher, Woodrow Wilson Sch., Princeton Univ.; Pocketbook Politics) has crafted a well-researched and detailed treatise of American efforts between presidencies, from Gerald Ford to George H.W. Bush, creating an effective energy policy to cope with the ongoing challenge of retaining a domestic energy supply. The 1970s energy crisis stemmed from nations affiliated with the intergovernmental Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reducing petroleum production to North America, Western Europe, and other regions. The long lines at U.S. gas stations led to a real sense of panic at the pump. The debate between increasing and decreasing regulations, and the effect such actions would take on American oil productivity coursed its way through four presidencies. Besides Ford and Bush, the issue affected the policies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. By the early 1990s, access to Middle Eastern oil would spur America's intervention in Kuwait and Iraq, setting the stage for our current engagement with the Middle East. VERDICT Jacobs has provided a useful and informative history of the past four decades of American energy policy debates, creating a worthy addition to a variety of collections.--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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April 1, 2016
With the recent surplus of gasoline radically reducing prices at the pump, it may be difficult for many car owners to believe that shortages were ever possible on our currently oil-rich American continent. For those who lived through the 1970s, however, memories of mile-long gas lines and violent trucker strikes are still all too vivid. In this probing look back at that politically charged energy crisis, Columbia University professor and public policy expert Jacobs provides a keen-eyed history and analysis of what went wrong. The crisis began in October 1973 when OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), led by Arab nations, announced an oil embargo in retaliation for American involvement in that year's Arab-Israeli war. For most Americans who relied on oil for heating as well as transportation, the embargo felt like a surprise attack, while politicians and business leaders were forced to improvise responses ranging from brownouts to gasoline rationing. Jacobs' well-written account faithfully re-creates the period's turmoil and demonstrates how governmental missteps more than 40 years ago still affect our energy policies today.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)
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An authoritative history of the energy crises of the 1970s and the world they wrought
In 1973, the Arab OPEC cartel banned the export of oil to the United States, sending prices and tempers rising across the country. Dark Christmas trees, lowered thermostats, empty gas tanks, and the new fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit all suggested that America was a nation in decline. "Don't be fuelish" became the national motto. Though the embargo would end the following year, it introduced a new kind of insecurity into American life—an insecurity that would only intensify when the Iranian Revolution led to new shortages at the end of the decade.
As Meg Jacobs shows, the oil crisis had a decisive impact on American politics. If Vietnam and Watergate taught us that our government lied, the energy crisis taught us that our government didn't work. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter promoted ambitious energy policies that were meant to rally the nation and end its...- sortTitle
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