Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T05:29:42.940Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Picturing a Crude Past: Primitivism, Public Art, and Corporate Oil Promotion in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2012

ROSS BARRETT
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay examines the first monument dedicated to the US oil industry, the Drake Memorial in Titusville, Pennsylvania (1899–1901), as an influential project of corporate self-representation. Commissioned by Standard Oil, the memorial shaped a public image for the petroleum industry that addressed concerns about the sustainability and social effects of oil capitalism, and established the key terms for a promotional discourse that would circulate throughout the twentieth century. This discourse, which I call “petro-primitivism,” reimagined the ultramodern oil industry as an extension of timeless practices rooted in an imagined archaic past. By shaping a primitivist spectacle that figured oil as an eternal component of the natural world and a primordial object of “human” endeavor, I argue, the Drake Memorial encouraged audiences to take the long view on oil: to adopt an expansive perspective that reconceived oil as a timelessly abundant element, and the boom-and-bust oil industry as an age-old venture. These tropes proved useful to the industry throughout the crises of the early twentieth century, reappearing in corporate displays and filtering into the rhetoric of industry advertising and publicity. Accordingly, I examine two later projects that appropriated the themes of petro-primitivism: the Sinclair Oil exhibit at the 1933–34 World's Fair, and Sun Oil's exhibit Oil Serves America at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (1953–c.1962). Echoing the earlier Drake Memorial, these displays employed strategies drawn from public art and civic architecture to organize collective experiences around the image of oil. By examining these popular exhibits alongside the Drake Memorial, I aim to offer a new account of the promotional culture of the early petroleum industry that explores the intersections between the traditional arts and industry publicity and illuminates the vital role that cultural representations played in accommodating twentieth-century Americans to the dynamic structures of petro-capitalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Oil Cultures , May 2012 , pp. 395 - 422
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Washburn, Mark and Davis, Maria, “Answering Oil Questions,” Miami Herald, 13 June 2010Google Scholar.

2 “Honoring Co. E. L. Drake,” Petroleum Gazette, 6 Oct. 1901, 2.

3 In tackling the early cultural projects of Standard Oil, this essay aims to complement the excellent work done by Ulrich Keller, John Ott, Roland Marchand, and other scholars who have addressed Standard's later patronage of modernist photography and painting. See Keller, Ulrich, The Highway as Habitat: A Roy Stryker Documentation, 1943–1955 (Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, 1986)Google Scholar; John Ott, “Landscapes of Consumption: Auto Tourism and Visual Culture in California, 1920–1940,” in Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds., Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 51–68; Marchand, Roland, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

4 On Drake see Williamson, Harold F. and Daum, Arnold R., The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Illumination (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1959), 1–135Google Scholar; Black, Brian, Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 1–59Google Scholar.

5 See “Monument to Colonel Drake,” Titusville Morning Herald, 13 Feb. 1872, 3; “Colonel E. L. Drake,” Titusville Morning Herald, 19 March 1880, 4; M. N. Allen, “In a Reminiscent Vein,” Titusville Morning Herald, 21 Oct. 1899, 3; Bell, E. C., History of Petroleum (Titusville, PA: The Bugle, 1900), 132–39Google Scholar. On Ream's interest in the project, see D. J. Morrell, Johnstown, PA to Vinnie Ream, Washington, DC, 26 Aug. 1881, Papers of Vinnie Ream Hoxie, Box 2, Correspondence 1874–1889, Folder 8, Library of Congress.

6 Letters from Calvin Payne, Oil City, PA to Laura Drake, Germantown, PA, 7 Aug. 1901; 25 Sept. 1901; 11 Aug. 1902, Charles B. Stenger Collection, Drake Well Museum Library, Titusville. On Payne see The Derrick's Hand-Book to Petroleum (Oil City, PA: Derrick Publishing Company, 1898), 932–34.

7 On Woodlawn Cemetery see Bates, Samuel, Our County and Its People (Boston: WA Ferguson & Co., 1899), 357–58Google Scholar.

8 See Niehaus, Regina, The Sculpture of Charles Henry Niehaus (New York: De Vinne Press, 1901)Google Scholar; Caffin, Charles, American Masters of Sculpture (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1903), 117–28Google Scholar.

9 “In Granite and Bronze,” Titusville Morning Herald, 5 Oct. 1901, 1; “Artists and Their Work,” New York Times, 23 June 1901, 12.

10 “A Beautiful Memorial,” Oil City Derrick, 5 Oct. 1901, 1.

11 Williamson, Harold F. and Daum, Arnold R., The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Energy 1899–1950 (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 8–9Google Scholar.

12 Black, 60–82.

13 Ibid., 38–41.

14 “After Petroleum,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Dec. 1864), 59.

15 “Three Days among the Oil Wells,” Beadle's Monthly (March 1866), 242.

16 See “A Carpetbagger in Pennsylvania,” Atlantic Monthly, 23 (1869), 746; and “A Ruined City,” Youth's Companion, 25 Dec. 1873, 421.

17 On Burning Oil Well see Jacobowitz, Arlene, James Hamilton: American Marine Painter (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1966), 42Google Scholar. I thank Heather Semple for her assistance in tracking down information about Hamilton's painting.

18 On the Rouse Well fire see Williamson, and Daum, , The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Illumination, 112Google Scholar. On the implications of the distant gaze see Boime, Albert, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, 1830–1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Miller, Angela, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 154–65Google Scholar.

19 Burns, Sarah, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 72–74Google Scholar; Youngner, Rina, Industry in Art: Pittsburgh 1812 to 1920 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 41–55Google Scholar; Wolf, Bryan, “All the World's a Code: Art and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” Art Journal, 44 (1984), 334–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Hughes, Thomas, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

21 On the ideology of progress see Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4–26Google Scholar.

22 Williamson, and Daum, , The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Illumination, 372–429Google Scholar.

23 Michael Watts, “Petro-violence: Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology of a Mythic Commodity,” in Nancy Paluso and Michael Watts, eds., Violent Environments (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 205.

24 Lloyd, Henry Demarest, Wealth against Commonwealth (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894), 42, 45Google Scholar. Perhaps the text's most spectacular passage imagines the Trust's corporate headquarters as a “heart of a machine” counting “out a gold dollar for every drop of blood that used to run through the living breasts of the men who divined, projected, accomplished, and lost.” Ibid., 117.

25 “For Andrew Carnegie,” Petroleum Gazette, 9 (Dec. 1901), 16.

26 “Drake Monuments,” Petroleum Gazette, 4 (Nov. 1899), 8. See also untitled article, Petroleum Gazette, 3, 11 (Feb. 1899), 1.

27 The Oliens’ helpfully incisive account of early conservationism appears within a text otherwise devoted to a curiously defensive and elaborate apologia for Standard Oil. Olien, See Roger and Olien, Diana, Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 120–27Google Scholar.

28 John F. Carll, cited in Harold Williamson and Arnold Daum, The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Illumination, 376.

29 Claypoole, E. W., “The Future of Natural Gas,” American Geologist, 1 (Jan. 1888), 33Google Scholar.

30 “The Day's Proceedings,” Titusville Morning Herald, 5 Oct. 1901, 1.

31 See, for example, “A Beautiful Memorial,” 1.

32 “Monument for Titusville,” New York Times, 2 March 1901, 8.

33 “A Work of Art,” Oil City Derrick, 5 Oct. 1901, 1.

34 Ibid., 1. See also “In Granite and Bronze,” 1.

35 “Monument for Titusville,” 8.

36 See also “A Shaft for E. L. Drake,” Washington Evening Times, 7 Oct. 1901, 3.

37 Standard Oil's displays at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 similarly invoked petroleum's past; both included painted murals depicting “the discovery of oil.” See Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States to the International Universal Exposition 4 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 120; The Exhibit of the Standard Oil Company of New York at the Pan American Exposition (New York: Standard Oil, 1901), online at www.panam1901.org/mines/standard_oil.htm.

38 McLaurin, John, Sketches in Crude Oil (Harrisburg, PA: The Author, 1896), 1Google Scholar.

39 The Derrick's Hand-Book of Petroleum (Oil City, PA: The Derrick Publishing Company, 1898–1900), 5.

40 See Forbes, Robert James, Bitumen and Petroleum in Antiquity (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1936), 1–42Google Scholar; idem, Studies in Early Petroleum History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1958).

41 Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 12–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lears, No Place of Grace, 103–17.

42 Rotondo, Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1994), 227–32Google Scholar; Pettegrew, John, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 1–20Google Scholar.

43 Slavishak, Edward, Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 73–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dabakis, Melissa, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 82–104Google Scholar.

44 Charles de Kay, “Essays on Sculptors,” New York Times, 26 Dec. 1903, BR1; “Monument for Titusville,” 8; “Memorial to Edwin L. Drake,” Titusville Morning Herald, 5 Oct. 1901, 1.

45 “In Granite and Bronze,” 1; “Memorial to Edwin L. Drake,” 1.

46 On the Sinclair Exhibit see Ganz, Cheryl, The 1933 Chicago World's Fair: A Century of Progress (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 2008), 74Google Scholar; Official Guidebook of the Fair (Chicago: A Century of Progress, 1933), 105; Millions See Weird Sinclair Dinosaurs (souvenir newspaper) (New York: Sinclair Refining Company, 1933).

47 On Sinclair's appropriation of the dinosaur see Mitchell, W. J. T., The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), passimGoogle Scholar.

48 A souvenir paper distributed onsite thus noted that while “nothing we could use would graphically portray tremendous age as well as do these dinosaurs,” the company's “oils were formed before the dinosaurs came into being.” See Millions See Weird Sinclair Dinosaurs, 3, original emphasis.

49 Olien and Olien, Oil and Ideology, 185–208; Nordhauser, Norman, The Quest for Stability: Domestic Oil Regulation, 1917–1935 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979), 74–115Google Scholar.

50 Harold Ickes, “The Crisis in Oil: A Huge National Problem,” New York Times, 11 June 1933, XX1.

51 Olien and Olien, 191.

52 Reprinted in Ibid., 137.

53 Nordhauser, 82.

54 Millions See Weird Sinclair Dinosaurs, 6.

55 The latest reference I have found to the exhibit is a 1962 Life article; see “Franklin Institute,” Life, 13 April 1962, 12.

56 On Morris Berd see “Morris Berd, 93, Artist,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 Oct. 2007, B14; Who's Who in American Art (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1984), 67; “Four Seasons: Morris Berd,” American Artist, 44 (Feb. 1980), 52–55.

57 Oil Serves America: A Presentation by Sun Oil Company (Philadelphia: The Company, 1960), 5.

58 Period reviews reaffirmed the nationalist emphasis of the display; see, for example, “Educational Oil Exhibit,” World Petroleum, 24 (1953), 174.

59 Johnson, Arthur M., The Challenge of Change: The Sun Oil Company, 1945–1977 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 57–58, 99–106Google Scholar.

60 Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 472–75Google Scholar.

61 Johnson, 101.

62 Investigation of Petroleum Sources: New Sources of Petroleum in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946), 4.

63 Ibid., 25, see also 15–21, 31–35.