2012/05/22 by K. Morse, Kimberly J. Morse
Environmental Science · #American Environmental and Regional History #Art #Dominance (genetics) #Environmental protection #Geography #History #Literature #Media studies #Narrative #Newspaper #Oil spill #Sociology #White (mutation)
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/jahist/jar651
openalex publication_date 2012/05/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Between 1967 and 1977, with a string of marine oil spills, national newspapers and magazines expanded their century-old repertoire of oil disaster images beyond gushers and fires to include photographs of oil-soaked birds and other wildlife, crippled, dying, or dead. These images of oil’s wild victims marked something new. They contested older visual narratives of oil as abundant and powerful, the source of American economic and national dominance.1 The oil-soaked bird or mammal, paired with the oft-seen image of volunteers bathing the animal, suggested a range of new stories. These included oil as a threatening evil and the individual American oil consumer (affluent, white) as guilty, through demand for oil, of victimizing innocents. Those images also created narratives of guilt-ridden consumers as rescuers, seeking salvation from oily sin through efforts to save the helpless. Finally, through these images, stories were able to project the fate of oil-soaked birds and mammals onto oil consumers: wounded, powerless victims of technology and oil dependence. “Not only was it man’s fault that they suffered,” a 1977 Boston Globe editorial stated of rescued auks and loons, “but we can look at their sad plight and see in it our own fate.” Just as Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film of California oil business, There Will Be Blood, made murder the inevitable product of oil wealth, so too, by the late 1970s, had media images of oil disasters settled on a single trope.2 Americans’ new oil stories reflected key historical developments of the post–World War II era: a broad shift in middle-class values from the primacy of industrial growth and economic gain to a focus on consumption of environmental amenities at home and at play, including fresh air, clean water, and open space in local, state, and national parks; the resulting rise of modern middle-class environmentalism, characterized by widespread concern about pollution as a threat to human health, wildlife populations, and residential and recreational environments; and the oil embargo of 1973–1974 by Arab oil exporters and the resulting energy crisis, which intensified American anxiety over oil supplies, prices, sources, and consumption. Print media images of oil disasters cannot fully explain the intersections among these historical changes, but the shift in imagery in the 1960s and 1970s suggests that these events deserve further attention. This transformation in visual narratives also provides historical context for the media coverage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. To paraphrase the historian Martha Sandweiss: images cannot fully explain the past; they can, however, describe it in new ways and draw attention to and forge connections among events often forgotten.3 The first gushers or “flowing wells” burst from the earth near Pennsylvania’s Oil Creek in the spring of 1861. From the 1880s into the 1920s, newspaper and magazine portrayals of gushers captured oil’s serendipitous abundance, power, and naturalness. Reporters described both the exhilaration of nature beyond human control and nature’s providence in granting Americans such vast energy and wealth. Americans often saw petroleum safely within tanks, cars, and pipelines; they saw the liquid itself only when it escaped containment, gushing, exploding, and spilling. Uncontained, oil became not only visually spectacular but also subject to a range of cultural meanings, including naturalness and vastness. California journalists used the metaphor of a volcano to describe the Lakeview gusher, which spewed for eighteen months between March 1910 and September 1911. (See figure 1.) The Los Angeles Times reported of its “volcanic glory”: “from the very first, the gusher was beyond control.”4 “The Lake View property & 25 Hill, Kern County, California, c. 1910.” Courtesy Panoramic Photographs collection, Library of Congress, PAN US GEOG, California No. 315. Most visual records of gushers included measurements: how long the oil gushed, its greatest height, and the daily and total volume of oil spewing forth. From the “gigantic spouter” of the 1874 Lady Hunter in Butler County, Pennsylvania (100 feet high, 3,000 barrels the first day), to the Lucas geyser at Spindletop, Texas, in 1901 (40 feet high, 30,000 barrels per day) to Lakeview (300 feet high, 50,000 barrels per day), gushers represented bigness, energy, and wealth in dramatic visual form. The oceanic pools beneath gushers proved a photographic spectacle as well. A front-page Los Angeles Times photograph of the Lakeview pool captured the entire landscape reflected in the mirror of the oil’s surface, a dark sea held by earthen berms.5 Photographs and engravings of gushers also featured awestruck spectators; hundreds flocked to these scenes, either transfixed by the earth’s power or jubilant in newfound wealth. The Atlanta Constitution reporter Fred Haskin noted of the Lucas geyser at Spindletop that “The railroads did a flourishing business in hauling spectators” and that five thousand people crowded the scene the Sunday after the blowout. The Los Angeles Times offered country excursions for homeseekers that featured a stop at the Lakeview gusher to view its flowing wealth and million-barrel reservoir. The members of the San Francisco Stock Exchange visited in 1910; in a panoramic photograph the group framed the gushing well. To pose with an oil gusher was to embrace a limitless future.6 Land gushers faded from view in the 1920s, when blowout preventers brought them (sometimes) under control. No such innovation could prevent fire. In newspapers across the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, pictures of explosions and fires were even more common than those of gushers. Images of billowing black smoke shared with gushers the spectacle of power beyond human control. As the Los Angeles Times reported of a 1912 Spindletop fire, “no power on earth could stop the fury of the flames.” While oil fires claimed human victims—captions usually mentioned injuries and deaths—few newspaper photographs showed any visual evidence of human loss. Instead, images of oil fires spoke consistently to the power and even the beauty of oil. At Cherry Grove, Pennsylvania, in 1883, a Century Magazine writer found a burning well “probably the most beautiful sight ever witnessed in the oil regions … the blazing fluid, spouting up high in the air and breaking in a shower of fiery drops.” It burned for four days, “a wonderful fountain of fire in the midst of the forest.” The stereograph memorializing the 1875 Oil City fire, also in northwestern Pennsylvania, portrayed its “awful grandeur”: “The dense black smoke which rolled from it, towering aloft into the air and darkening the country for miles, the glare of the flame, the frequent explosions, the jets and bursts of fiery spray, and the intense heat distinctly felt several miles from the spot render it unsurpassable in the history of the oil country.” (See figure 2.)7 This stereograph, “Burning of the Imperial Refinery,” shows an Oil City, Pennsylvania, fire in 1875. The description on the back of the photograph reads, in part, “In this view are represented two tanks of about 12000 bbls capacity each, a few moments after their ignition.” Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-stereo-1s01745. As they had with gushers, publications focused on scale. In 1900 a photographer called a conflagration at Bayonne, New Jersey, “the great fifteen day fire of the standard oil company’s tanks.” Time described a 1938 tank fire at Linden, New Jersey, as a “flaming geyser of 1,680,000 gallons of gasoline.” Captions often cast an eye toward the superlative. A writer claimed that a 1913 incident at Mooringsport, Louisiana, stood as the “largest single well fire in history of the U.S. of A.” The Los Angeles Times pictured “two of the worst oil blazes in history” at Brea and San Luis Obispo, California, in 1926.8 During and after World War II, the forms and causes of American oil disasters expanded. Oil out of control increasingly meant oil at sea. Wartime ships and submarines in the Atlantic Ocean sent oil slicks onto East Coast beaches. With increased postwar production from offshore rigs, blowouts and gushers moved underwater; with shipments from the Persian Gulf, tankers wrecked at sea, often on approach to shoal-filled harbors. Abundant oil imports fueled American prosperity, but that affluence drove social and cultural changes—including environmentalism—that in turn brought new meanings for oil itself, especially when it escaped human control. Bigness, power, and abundance remained part of the media narrative, but images expanded to include oil-slicked bays and harbors, soiled beaches, and, above all, birds, ducks, turtles, seals, and otters imperiled by oil.9 The historian Samuel P. Hays roots postwar environmentalism in a shift among members of the American middle and upper classes from being concerned about efficient use of natural resources in support of economic growth to having an increasing desire for high-quality outdoor experiences, as defined by clean air and water, and recreational and residential contact with beautiful landscapes and seascapes. New values concerning the aesthetic quality of American life and leisure emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as incomes rose and millions of white Americans moved to the suburbs and embraced outdoor recreation. The scholar Karl Brooks writes, with subtle reference to oil, that in those years “widespread prosperity gushed across the landscape, floating millions toward a level of material security previously known only to a relative handful of the wealthy.” Concern for environmental “beauty, health, and permanence,” as Hays puts it, followed clear demographic patterns; younger, more educated white Americans living on the East and West Coasts, in the upper Midwest, and in Florida made environmental amenities central to their understanding of a good life. With increased fears of air and water pollution came a growing anticorporate sentiment. Thus the oil spills of 1967–1977 for the most part washed up on the shores of those Americans most likely to experience them as a direct assault on the values most central to their lives and identities, and on their visions of the future.10 In her landmark 1962 book Silent Spring, the biologist Rachel Carson had already alerted Americans to the ecological and health threats of DDT and other pesticides, using birds as her central symbol for “man’s assaults upon” and “universal contamination of the environment.” Carson wrote for an audience awakening to a new sense of environmental privilege connected to outdoor leisure and aesthetic pleasure. “To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds,” she wrote, “anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right.” Thanks to Carson, interested Americans spent the mid-1960s learning in great detail of the threats pesticides posed to robins, bald eagles, and peregrine falcons. Starting in 1967 media coverage of oil spills brought more injured and dead birds into the public eye.11 Though images of oiled waterfowl sporadically appeared in newspapers from the 1950s on, the grounding of the American oil tanker Torrey Canyon off the British coast on March 18, 1967, sparked the first widespread American newspaper reports of oiled wildlife and volunteer rescue efforts, including a handful of images of imperiled birds. When slicks from undetermined sources oiled hundreds of birds off the New Jersey and Massachusetts shores just weeks after the British spill, more and more images from both sides of Atlantic cropped up, as American reporters connected the two stories. News of wildlife losses prompted warnings of apocalypse. The New York Times noted that even in peaceful Cornwall, England, “there is no escape from the destructiveness of our industrial society.” The Washington Post decried, with a bird metaphor, “the systematic fouling of our nest.” In June a New York Times Sunday Magazine spread echoed Carson’s earlier work, The Sea around Us, with its title, “The Oil around Us.” The story included a picture of an imperiled puffin and stated that “petroleum has become a devil in our civilization … creating a survival issue both for sea life and for man himself.” Such rhetoric echoed Carson’s linkage of overuse of pesticides with nuclear annihilation. “The question,” Carson had written, “is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself.”12 Spills at Santa Barbara, Tampa Bay, and San Francisco in 1969–1971 catapulted such concerns, and images of oil-damaged wildlife, to new heights of media visibility. In January and February 1969 an eleven-day blowout on a Union Oil Company rig off the southern California coast sent waves of oil onto Santa Barbara beaches. The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and Time ran photographs of the rig, the slick, the makeshift oil booms, the beaches, and volunteers and workers bathing oily grebes (diving birds that spend almost all of their time in water). Newsweek included a dying cormorant (a coastal seabird), along with workers raking up oil-absorbent straw. Life published images of two grebes, one dead, one being bathed. Reports and images emphasized a sense of tragic, heartbreaking helplessness. Volunteers watched, the Los Angeles Times reported, as cormorants “tried vainly to clean one another off with their beaks,” and then died from ingested oil. Fleeing well-intentioned rescuers, birds headed into the surf. “Falling into the black liquid,” the report read, “they lay in the ooze, crying weakly.” In June Life covered the spill’s effects with photographs from San Miguel Island off the coast. Pictures included an oil-drenched seal pup stranded in slippery rocks. The island, the reporter wrote, provided “the black vision of the dead world which may come.”13 Those images both reflected and drove public anger at the spill, Union Oil, and lax government regulation of offshore drilling. Quotations from Union Oil president Fred Hartley worsened public reaction to wildlife losses and the ruination of sand beaches crucial to Santa Barbara’s tourism economy. The New York Times truncated Hartley’s statement before the U.S. at the for the of a few The Boston Globe provided a more which did to public by the the of birds with that of to that from in our the of the offshore area of Santa and a we are fully a he with the Santa Barbara in March called for not at the of the of all those of beauty without which all the material is than two years the had an In at one the and the and the year also brought the and in the could of the oil however, or of pictures of oil’s weeks of the the tanker oil into Tampa Images in Life included the photographer of a (See figure In the a with no clear several birds off the Washington Post featured a front-page photograph of their In used an oil-soaked from Santa Barbara on the of its issue in January two tankers and in the in San Francisco Bay, of volunteers to beaches and rescue to spread and birds. The Los Angeles Times captured those images, as did for provided along with of and grebes as they to was to their they were floating on the were the and the The writer and witnessed the and wrote of moments at in the he wrote, “a man as a in This photograph shows a dead on its in an oil from the tanker in Tampa Bay, on January in March Courtesy & Life and the millions of Americans to and on to their about air and water In a of the visual of environmentalism, images common in the spring of people and the ecological of he sent the that American as and the greatest and environmental of up the and he is the visual narratives of oil-soaked birds rescued by volunteers had these other images in their stories of individual and Oil spills and Americans to oily birds, up and save and their of individual faded as the 1970s Oil even national with the Arab oil embargo of which brought high oil prices, long at and a growing sense of anxiety and The the historian writes, U.S. power by the in its its increasing on remained high into the late of spills in brought oil-soaked birds more into visual narratives of consumer and individual salvation this time with even on and by oil. the tanker off of and gallons of oil a threatening toward the to the the of the the of newspaper images showed the stranded tanker itself, including front-page photographs in the Boston Globe and New York front-page images included a and photograph of the flowing from the from five thousand feet before the ran a editorial not a bird but the entire with and a in a black sea Oil other tanker followed within or a tanker in Los Angeles the thousand gallons into the in the ran in the near The president energy and in a January 1977, to on oil and energy, just after the tanker of with and gallons of oil. weeks a ran in Bay, The of January 1977, brought oil images in U.S. News and World and Time and ran of a and a Newsweek focused on the slick, from a an of The Boston Globe, Washington Post, and published images of birds or rescue the Boston Globe ran a picture of a with a of and As a reporter of a stranded on any bird ever a this one It was one of In a further for individual in the of one day after as called on Americans to turn their years on a after the oil tanker ran in the New York Times ran a dead on the of a bird in oil, in a at a rescue Most coverage followed the 1970s with images of volunteers birds and (See figure The and that both and national used images of birds and otters as of the who and provided visual for the by loss. and framed them as victims as about beyond their rescue volunteers an oil-soaked sea in on March a after the oil tanker the in for coverage of the Deepwater Horizon fire, and in the of Though oil-soaked birds and made the the central narratives and the production technology of the disaster were expanded beyond the 1970s and on older coverage focused on the and the burning rig, even long after the fire was The oil gusher as this time on film of the spewing efforts to the became the media also out to fully the human of the not only for rig workers and their but also for and other business They appeared in images as with and not as powerless victims but as In the World national newspapers and as well as to shows with hundreds of could among visual images of and wildlife rescue beaches, and, of and This range of visual narratives suggests that concern for the health of marine has in ways to include a of all of for and on the sea and it and all of demand for ways of and by exploding, and oil. Americans may to see reflected in images of oil-soaked wildlife, as powerless victims of their own but they may also in this new that are other stories to