Politica, Istituzioni, Storia

Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna in cotutela con Università Sciences Po - Paris DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN Politica, Istituzioni, Storia Ciclo XXVIII Settore Concorsuale di afferenza: 14/B2 Settore Scientifico disciplinare: SPS/05 TITOLO TESI America's energy transition, the evolution of the national interest, and the Middle Eastern connection at the dawn of the Twentieth Century Presentata da: Gaetano Di Tommaso Coordinatore Dottorato Relatore Raffaella Baritono Massimiliano Trentin Relatore Mario Del Pero Esame finale anno 2017 Introduction 1. Oil Portraits 1.1 The Industry: The Spindletop effect, p. 15 1.2 The Country: The Rooseveltian Era, p.37 2. Fuel Oil and Empire 2.1 Going Global, p.72 2.2 The Nation and its Navies, p. 81 2.3 Liquid Fuels and Solid Bureaucracy, p. 95 2.4 Naval Logistics and Interior Logic, p. 110 3. Opening Up the Middle East 3.1. Persian Oil and British Control, p. 120 3.2 The Americans: Nosing into the Business, Attempting Control, and Finding Competition, p. 159 4. Towards War and Beyond 4.1 Oiling the War Machinery, p. 201 4.2 America Needs to Refuel, p. 222 4.3 Minding the Gap, p. 226 4.4 Forging the Oil-National Security Nexus, p. 229 4.5 Shifting Gears Up, p. 235 Conclusions Archival Note and Bibliography 2 Introduction No single commodity has been so important in delineating the frontiers American national security as oil. Concerns about the future availability (and price) of fossil fuels have factored heavily in the U.S. foreign policy-making process for the last several decades, shaping the country’s objectives, political alliances, and overall engagement with the world. The notion of energy security is usually considered to have become central in the American political debate in the 1970s, when a series of tumultuous events shook the Middle East and restructured the functioning of the industry, while the emergence of Washington’s real strategic interest towards oil is usually dated back to the WWII years. Yet the survival of the state and the access to petroleum had been interlinked well before. A compelling narrative about a vital and incoming “global struggle for oil” developed already at the beginning of the century, prompting a shift in the administration’s attitude toward petroleum and the identification of foreign sources of supply as direct U.S. interest. The dissertation investigates the origins of Washington’s interest in petroleum and the elements that originally shaped the country’s foreign oil policy in the early twentieth century. The chapters center on the analysis of the American political debate and give special consideration to the international race to secure oil concessions in the Middle East that began before WWI and that culminated in the early 1920s. The study follows the establishment of a new, more assertive stance towards the securing of sources of supply in U.S. politics, and looks at the parallel evolution of concept of national interest. In examining the process of actual policy-formation, the research looks into the discussion between the various branches and departments of the administration, as well as between the federal government and the other private actors involved in petroleum exploration and production. The aim is to reconstruct the arguments that were used to support Washington’s drive toward the acquisition of petroleum supply, in order to understand how the access to oil resources – both at home and abroad – was presented, justified, and pursued before the American public. 3 4 1.1 The Industry: The Spindletop Effect 1.1.1 The Shiny Well Upon a Hill A twentieth century of oil-fuelled energy and dreams of endless growth started with a small delay on the Gregorian schedule, on January 10, 1901. Captain Anthony Lucas was the man that unwittingly inaugurated the new era when he struck oil at 1,200 foot deep, under a small hill south of Beaumont, Texas, about twenty miles from the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The well came in around 10:30 in the morning. The first violent spurt of mud sent tons of 4-inch drill pipe shooting high over the derrick, carrying its heavy crown block into the sky before falling back ruinously to the ground. The three-man crew working on the hillock had barely the time to scamper away. Soon after, what they thought was a cannon shot anticipated a second powerful eruption. Following the rapid expulsion of high-pressure gas, an impressive 6-inch thick column of oil rose high above the top of the damaged derrick. The greenish, straight stream of oil went more than one hundred feet above the wooden structure1. The pressure at the head of the well was so high that petroleum flowed – and flew – uncontrolled for nine days before the drillers were able to cap it. The steady and continuous jet inundated the adjacent lands and fathered out in the sky, creating a heavy and oily mist that smeared the town. Lucas and his men tried to recapture at least part of the oil, hastily building earthen levees on the hill. The flood, however, seemed impossible to dam. Petroleum spilled over the barriers and run wild, starting to pool in ditches and pits. Sand was finally amassed to confine the oil within a close perimeter. When the flow was stopped, the final black lagoon was four to six feet deep and covered an area of almost one hundred acres2. There was no doubt: the Spindletop well was a “gusher” – one of gigantic proportions, too. 1 There are countless accounts about the Spindletop discovery, but (almost) all of them differ on this 2 The events that took place at Beaumont on January 10, 1901, are taken and condensed here from several different accounts. Besides the works mentioned above, the story of those days at Spindletop is found also in Paul N. Spellman, Spindletop Boom Days (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M Press, 2001); Jo Ann Stiles, Judith Linsley, and Ellen Rienstra, Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, Texas, in 1901, (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2002), pp. 89-184; John S. Spratt, The Road to Spindletop; Economic Change in Texas, 1875-1901, (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1955), pp. 273-285; Ruth Sheldon Knowles, The Greatest Gamblers; the Epic of American Oil Exploration (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2nd edition, 1978) pp. 21-45; Boyce House, Spindletop, The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Jul. 1946) pp. 36-43; History of the Southwestern Fields, North American Oil & Gas – A supplement to The Oil and Gas Journal, Vol. 18, May 1919, pp. 140-151. 5 Spontaneous gushes of petroleum occurred every time drillers perforated reservoirs whose overlaying strata had allowed the accumulation of gas in a compressed state – as in the case of the salt dome structure hidden below the hillock. These “fountains” or “spouters”, as they were known at the time, were actually not rare. In Russia, the first gusher was recorded in 1866 in the North Caucasus region; it was the area around Baku, however, that in the late nineteenth-century became famous for its frequent black geysers. In the United States too, oil fountains – although considerably smaller than their Russian peers – became part of the petroleum culture since the very beginning. The first gusher was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1861, just two years later the Drake well, which is traditionally considered the start of the American oil industry3. Lucas’s well, however, was different and, in many respect, unprecedented. As is often the case in an oil business obsessed with quantity, the numbers associated with the Spindletop field help to convey the scale and importance of the discovery. In 1900, in the United States produced around 64,000,000 barrels of oil, brought about by a total of about 65,000 active wells4. Those scattered in the Appalachian region, which included New York, Pennsylvania (the oldest oil state and the major producer until 1895), the eastern edge of Ohio, West Virginia, part of Kentucky and Tennessee, were about 36,000 and accounted for slightly less than half of the nation’s output, or about 36,300,000 barrels. Ohio, whose output peaked that year, accounted for 22,000,000 barrels. California, where the petroleum industry had developed intensely in the previous ten years, contributed with another 4,000,000 barrels. The only active field in Texas was in Corsicana, where about 800,000 barrels were extracted in 1900. Louisiana had no commercial production. The first well in the Corsicana field, about 230 miles northwest of Beaumont, was completed in 1885 and yielded two and a half barrels per 3 Edwin Drake drilled his (and America’s) first commercial oil well in 1859 in northwestern Pennsylvania. 4 Data in this section: for the number of the wells, see The Petroleum Resources of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), pp. 30-51. For the regional and national production, see: United States Geological Survey (USGS), Department of Interior, Mineral Resources of the United States, Calendar Year 1901 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1902) pp. 525- 584; Ralph Arnold and William J. Kemnitzer, Petroleum in the United States and possessions – A Presentation and Interpretation of the Salient Data of Geology, Technology, and Economics of Petroleum in Each State and Possession Treated According to the Conventional Major Field Divisions (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1931); Department of Energy (DOE), Energy Information Administration (EIA), Petroleum Navigator: Crude Oil Production, electronic database, at http://goo.gl/qzcOSL. For the world production, see: Valentin R. Garfias, Petroleum Resources of the World (New York, John Wiley & sons: 1923) pp.

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