Texas Metropole: Oil, the American
West, and U.S. Power in the
Postwar Years
Karen R. Merrill
In the spring of 1980 television viewers in the United States and across the world found
themselves swept up in what the New York Times called “an international mystery”: who
shot J. R.? Larry Hagman, the star of the immensely popular television series Dallas,
played the villainous J. R. Ewing who was head of the fictional Ewing Oil Company and
whose cowboy hat and Southfork family ranch signaled his Old West cultural roots. From
the beginning of the series, J. R. had wheedled and connived his way through power plays
involving oil, Texas politics, and women, and with enemies now arrayed around him at
the end of the third season, the final episode used one of the oldest tricks in the book to
keep its audience engaged: the cliff-hanger. Viewers heard the shots ring out, saw J. R. fall
from what appeared to be a mortal wounding, and then had to wait until the fall television season to find out who did the deed. Over the summer of 1980 the suspense built
until the night of the season preview, when more than 80 million U.S. viewers learned
that J. R.’s mistress Kristin had pulled the trigger and that J. R. was still very much alive,
able to return to his nefarious ways with barely a hiccup.1
American viewers were not alone in their fascination with the Ewings. Looking back
on the cultural phenomenon ten years later, the Los Angeles Times noted that the craze for
the show, which was the third most watched in tv history, spread around the globe: “The
show had become an international obsession, enthralling 300 million viewers in 57 countries.
It struck a nerve in Singapore, stoked passions in Australia and diverted the war-ravaged
residents of Lebanon. More than half of all Britons stayed home to watch the episode in
which J. R. got perforated.”2
What attracted American and worldwide viewers to the dramas of this Texan oil family
and to the exploits of J. R. Ewing in particular? How and why did J. R. Ewing become
the icon of the American oil industry in the late twentieth century at home and around
the globe—an icon drawn from particular popular images of the American West? His
Karen R. Merrill is a professor of history at Williams College. She is very grateful for the critiques and collegiality
from her co-editors, Ty Priest and Brian Black, and from the JAH editor Ed Linenthal, as well as for the sound
advice of an anonymous reader. Kenda Mutongi and Martha Umphrey also provided important feedback. Earlier
iterations of this essay took the form of conference or workshop presentations or public lectures and benefitted from
the suggestions of more people than she can name here. But she would like to thank in particular Robert Vitalis,
Brian Frehner, Sherry Smith, Martha Sandweiss, and her colleagues in the Williams College Department of History.
Readers may contact Merrill at [email protected].
Tony Schwartz, “Who Shot tv’s ‘J. R.’? It Was . . . , ” New York Times, Nov. 2, 1980, p. D1.
Richard Corliss, “Commentary: The ‘Dallas’ Shot THat Was Heard Round the World,” Los Angeles Times,
Nov. 23, 1990, http://articles.latimes.com/1990-11-23/entertainment/ca-5345_1_soap-opera.
1
2
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas096
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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emergence certainly did not happen overnight; it was the product of a post–World War
II American fascination with both the West and rich Texas oilmen at the very moment
that the United States turned to the Middle East as a source for oil. The show laid bare
the many ways that western tropes did a great deal of cultural and political work in shaping Americans’ postwar understanding of oil—as well as oilmen’s understanding of themselves—at a time of tremendous change in global oil politics.3
To explore this conjuncture, this essay will focus initially on a real oilman, as opposed
to a celluloid fiction—one who, at the surface, seems to represent the very antithesis of
J. R. Ewing: Everette DeGolyer. Although DeGolyer is hardly a household name, as Daniel
Yergin has written in The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, “No man more
singularly embodied the American oil industry and its far-flung development in the first
half of the twentieth century than DeGolyer. As a geologist—the most eminent of his
day—entrepreneur, innovator, and scholar, he had touched almost every aspect of significance in the industry.” On the one hand, the contrast between DeGolyer and the fictional
J. R. could not be starker: where DeGolyer was cosmopolitan, J. R. was provincial; where
DeGolyer relished his international network of colleagues in the oil industry, J. R. was
rooted solidly in Texas and cared much more about his own power than about professional collegiality; where DeGolyer was curious about the changing world around him,
J. R. was closed-minded, if always on the lookout for money to be made. On the other
hand, DeGolyer was attached to nostalgic visions of the West, and especially of Texas, in
a way that presaged the creation of J. R. Understanding Everette DeGolyer’s postwar
world view reveals the emerging popular connections between those visions and the new
geography of the oil market. Indeed, between the last fifteen years of DeGolyer’s life and
the creation of the character J. R., one can map a remarkable transformation in the American oil industry and consumer demand for oil—and Americans’ embrace of images of
the West suggests their capacity to render that transformation into a national story about
expansionism and American power.4
Among dozens of other interests, Everette DeGolyer had two great passions in his life that
drove most of his waking hours: oil and books. His reputation as a petroleum geologist
began early when as a young man he discovered the vastly productive Portrero del Llano
oil field in Mexico in 1910. This discovery established both his personal fortune and his
esteemed place in the oil business: first in the British-owned Mexican Eagle Oil Company, then as president of Amerada Corporation, and finally as a partner in a Dallas
petroleum consulting firm that he cofounded with Lewis MacNaughton in 1936.
DeGolyer also made a name for himself in helping found the company that would become
Texas Instruments. Throughout DeGolyer’s career, as his biographer Lon Tinkle noted,
American oilmen regarded DeGolyer with “universal respect . . . as the pioneer of
geophysical exploration. For at least a decade [during the 1920s] he was to know more
about it than any other living soul; for at least a decade he probably handled more geophysical
3
Surprisingly, we have very little scholarship to help answer these questions aside from work in media studies.
See Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (New York, 1985).
4
Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 1991), 391. A number of
scholars have explored how U.S. western expansionism shaped U.S commercial and diplomatic expansionism
abroad. For a fascinating look at how one of the West’s most prominent writers understood oil exploration in Saudi
Arabia, see Robert Vitalis, “Wallace Stegner’s Arabian Discovery: Imperial Blind Spots in a Continental Vision,”
Pacific Historical Review, 76 (Aug. 2007), 405–38.
Oil, the American West, and U.S. Power
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development than any other single individual.” DeGolyer’s eminence within the industry
led him to become increasingly active in the national politics of oil, culminating in his
leading the first government-sanctioned mission to the Middle East in 1943, which was
tasked with providing a rough estimate of the oil reserves there. His report declared
unequivocally that “the center of gravity of world oil production is shifting from the
Gulf-Caribbean area to the Middle East area—to the Persian Gulf area. . . . The conclusion is inescapable that reserves of great magnitude remain to be discovered.”5
Other Texas oilmen during this time shared DeGolyer’s cosmopolitan proclivities and
intellectual engagement with geophysical questions: Wallace Pratt, who worked for
Humble Oil and later Humble’s parent company, Standard Oil; William Wrather, who
was an independent oil consultant to notable Texas firms such as Gulf Oil and who
became director of the U.S. Geological Service in 1953; and DeGolyer’s partner Lewis
MacNaughton. Yet such qualities marked DeGolyer and his colleagues as unusual within
the world of Texas oilmen, and he distinguished himself even further with his scholarly
bent. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, DeGolyer amassed a remarkable book collection, particularly in the history of science and of the Southwest, and he
served on the editorial board of the Southwest Review and as chairman for the Saturday
Review of Literature. As chair of the library committee for the Dallas Petroleum Club, for
instance, he was not averse to poking fun at the club’s decidedly antibookish bent: in his
report on the committee’s activities for 1953, DeGolyer noted that “we have done nothing to report on except occasionally walk nervously into the library and gaze at a few of
the empty shelves. . . . I shall like to suggest for the future . . . that we might occasionally
buy a book.”6
Beyond his love for oil exploration and collecting books, in the last fifteen years of his
life DeGolyer would find himself reflecting deeply on American politics and power abroad
in ways that had meaning far beyond his own life. The rapidly changing order of the
postwar world and his own involvement in those changes forced DeGolyer to consider
new questions about the global roles of the American oil industry and oilmen. In particular, DeGolyer had to reckon with the rising fortunes of the Middle East as American and
British oil companies began to grasp the enormous size of reserves there after 1945. After
four decades in which the Texas and Oklahoma region was one of the centers of the world
oil economy, how would such a prominent oilman adjust to the new petroleum order?
One small but highly emblematic example of DeGolyer’s changing world map can be
found in a page he cut out from Time magazine in the autumn of 1950. In its regular
report on happenings in the art world, Time featured two short pieces. The first, under
the headline “Good and Authentic,” announced that “Texans swarming into Dallas for
the State Fair . . . found cattle on the walls as well as in the stalls.” The reason: the Dallas
Museum of Fine Arts had opened a show by the El Paso artist Tom Lea that featured
paintings on the history of western cattle ranching. “A prodigious researcher,” the magazine noted, Lea’s realistic paintings were the result of time he spent in Mexico to steep
himself in the origins of the American cattle industry, of visits to western ranches, and
even to the slaughterhouses of the Chicago stockyards. “The resulting pictures struck
5
Lon Tinkle, Mr. De: A Biography of Everette Lee DeGolyer (New York, 1970), 159. Everette DeGolyer,
“Preliminary Report of the Technical Oil Mission to the Middle East,” 1944, Middle East Mission folder 3459, box
52, Everette Lee DeGolyer Sr. Papers (DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Tex.).
6
Everette DeGolyer to the Dallas Petroleum Club president Henry Cortes, Jan. 7, 1954, Dallas Petroleum
Club folder 3136, box 42, DeGolyer Papers.
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The oilman Everette DeGolyer (ca. 1950)
embraced both the internationalization of oil
and nostalgia for the American West in postwar
America. Courtesy of DeGolyer Library,
Southern Methodist University.
Texans as not only good but mighty authentic. Looking at a Lea branding scene last
week, one grizzled cattleman remarked: ‘You can smell the smoke from the burned
hair.’” The other article, “Appetite,” reported on an exhibit of “forty paintings from
the collection of Oil Tycoon Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian” at the National Gallery of
Art. Quoting from the exhibition catalog, the magazine noted that “the Near East
genius” had all the qualities of a great art collector: “Appetite, leisure, wealth, knowledge, discrimination, and perseverance.” Widely acclaimed for its “taste” and “diversity,” the collection showed that “Gulbenkian’s appetite was wide and deep as his
wallet.”7
In retrospect, the juxtaposition of these two articles perfectly represents where
DeGolyer stood in 1950. On the one hand, in the last years of his life he was increasingly
turning to the memory of his region’s past, which Lea’s work both reflected and helped
fuel in its portrayal of “authentic” Texas ranch life. As I have explored elsewhere, DeGolyer’s
look backward in Texas history allowed him to find ideals in the past that provided meaning
during a time that had seen the great expansion of federal activity, a total war, the Cold
War, and the entrance of American oil companies into the Middle East. Of those ideals,
the most important to DeGolyer as he considered the origins of oil production in the
Southwest was his belief that places such as turn-of-the-century Texas provided men of
initiative the freedom to pursue their own paths, unencumbered by antiquated social
7
“Good and Authentic,” Time, Oct. 16, 1950, clipping, p. 76, Middle East: Press Clippings folder 3463, box
53, ibid.; “Appetite,” Time, Oct. 16, 1950, clipping, p. 76, Middle East: Press Clippings folder 3464, ibid. The editor
of Life, who originally commissioned the paintings though never showed them in the magazine, reportedly said,
“Although they are more modern, they are in the great tradition of Remington, Bingham, and Russell. They belong
to Texas.” The chairman of the board of the editors of Life quoted in advertisement for a 2010 event at the Dallas
Museum of Art, Tom Lea Institute, http://www.tomlea.net/news/Month_Schedule_2010.html.
Oil, the American West, and U.S. Power
201
orders or an overweening state. Finally, like many Texans and Americans more broadly,
DeGolyer clearly delighted in what he considered evidence of an “authentic” Texas, such
as Tom Lea’s work. Such delight stood in contrast to the rumbles of anxiety he experienced upon U.S. entrance into the imperial politics of Middle East oil.8
On the other hand, DeGolyer rarely wallowed in nostalgia. In fact he was remarkably
forward-looking, realizing that “the center of gravity” in the oil industry was shifting to
the Middle East, where Gulbenkian had an infamous history of cutting deals to suit himself and multinational oil companies. Although Gulbenkian had been operating in the
Middle East for decades, had DeGolyer run across Gulbenkian’s name ten years earlier, he
likely would not have paid attention (nor shown the level of interest he did toward the
brief Time article, as evidenced by his heavily underlining Gulbenkian’s name twice).
However, since his 1943 mission to the region, DeGolyer had expressed a searching curiosity in the politics of the Middle East, which involved buying as many books about it as
possible. From the months preceding the mission to his death in 1956, his “appetite” for
information about the region—particularly regarding the search for oil fields and the
political machinations of running the oil industry in Middle Eastern countries—never
ceased. Such profound interest can be found not only in his growing book collection but
also in the many articles he clipped on the Middle East, the conferences having to do with
the region that he was invited to attend, and his desire to write about the oil industry
there. The juxtaposition of the “good and authentic” Texas with “appetite” for oil marked
DeGolyer’s orientation, and it pervaded American culture in the 1940s and 1950s to such
an extent that scholars need to interpret it. What were the relationships between the two
terms? Were they in tension or in harmony with each other? Did the “good and authentic” West support or undermine the postwar “appetite” for oil? Did an “appetite” for oil
support or undermine the “good and authentic” West?
When it came to oil, Texas, and the West in the 1940s and 1950s, the American “appetite”
seemed bottomless. The rise of suburbia, explosion of consumer growth, and rapid expansion of the gross domestic product all required immense quantities of oil. Having already
contributed mightily to winning the war, Texas oil went a long way to fueling those
demands, and Texas oilmen grew extraordinarily rich as a result. By 1948, as Brian
Burrough notes in The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, Americans started to take notice of their wealth. In the spring of that year, both Life and Fortune magazines published articles about Texas oil millionaires; the effect was “as if a curtain
had been lifted and a new band of actors, mysterious Texas millionaires, had wandered on
to the national stage.” For many years afterward, Americans devoured the countless articles and books about “the big rich.” The apogee of all this fascination came with the
publication of Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel Giant and the release of the film version in 1956,
which featured Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean (in his last role before
his death), who starred as the poor-boy-turned-oil-tycoon Jett Rink. Ferber’s book caused
an enormous stir in Texas, with its dark portrayal of both the state’s ranching aristocracy
and newly rich oilmen like Jett Rink, as well as its unveiling of the tension between the
two groups. For many Texans, including DeGolyer, the novel—written by a non-Texan, and
8
On Everette DeGolyer’s turn to the past, see Karen R. Merrill, “The Illusions of Independence: Texas Oilmen and
the Politics of Postwar Petroleum,” in The Political Culture of the New West, ed. Jeff Roche (Lawrence, 2008), 89–92.
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June 2012
a woman no less!—was nothing more than an outside, inauthentic, and therefore unfair
critique of the state. However, the movie had the virtue of being filmed on location in
Marfa, Texas, and it cemented in the popular imagination the fusion of western ranch
motifs with Texas oilmen.9
That fusion coincided with a national appetite for all things western—in particular, a
deep nostalgia for the stories and artifacts of late nineteenth-century cowboys and openrange ranching. As Robert Goldberg has noted, the 1950s saw the Hollywood production
of more than eight hundred western films for the big screen, and the new medium of
television brought the Old West into people’s homes on a nightly basis: “by the hour and
half hour, Americans . . . learned the ways of men of action, virtue, and grit. In total
westerns accounted for nearly a quarter of all evening programming.” The consumer
world was also filled with western themes, most notably the “Marlboro Man, who exuded
‘masculine confidence’ . . . and appeared exclusively as a cowboy in 1964.” Texas oilmen’s
nostalgic appetite for vestiges of the mythic West was as great as that of the American
public—they just had more money to buy western things. In his 1961 book, The SuperAmericans, for instance, John Bainbridge noted how it was “de rigueur” for a Texas oilman
to own at least one ranch because it “confer[red] status.” Similarly, several Texas and
Oklahoma oilmen—or men who managed to get rich from oil—helped propel a nostalgia for the nineteenth-century West at the highest levels by building notable western
art collections that often included works by Frederic Remington or Charlie Russell as
their centerpiece. Given that the postwar oil boom in Texas was located in the western
part of the state—the Permian Basin, where George H. W. Bush lived with his family in
Midland for most of the 1950s—it is not surprising that many less wealthy individuals
than the “big rich” looked and understood themselves to be men cut from western cloth.
Indeed, Bainbridge delights in describing the scene in Midland where many ranchers
(“through no fault of their own”) became rich from oil and where a western ranch style
infused the west Texas oil business: in the lobby of the Scharbauer Hotel, for instance,
where the “old-timers” gathered to talk cattle and oil, “pointed Western boots and a lightcolored Western hat” were the fashion “in all seasons.”10
Texas oilmen had laid claim to western authenticity by the end of the 1950s, even as
many critics—especially outside the state—believed that oilmen’s great wealth undermined any claims they might make to heroic western values. Yet their appropriation of
the trappings of western authenticity held meaning beyond the oilmen’s emerging presence within American popular culture. Following the war, for instance, independent
Texas oilmen became an increasingly powerful lobbying force in Washington, rhetorically
linking themselves time and again to America’s pioneering legacy. This period also saw the
money, power, and influence of the “big rich” flow through modern American politics;
perhaps nothing symbolized that force more brazenly than the envelopes filled with cash
that Lyndon B. Johnson received from the likes of Sid Richardson, George Brown, and
Herman Brown in the 1940s and 1950s. More consequently, however, Texas’s postwar oil
9
Brian Burrough, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes (New York, 2009), 166. Edna
Ferber, Giant (New York, 1952); Giant, dir. George Stevens (Warner Bros., 1956).
10
Robert Goldberg, “The Western Hero in Politics: Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the Rise of the
American Conservative Movement,” in Political Culture of the New West, ed. Roche, 16. John Bainbridge, The SuperAmericans: A Picture of Life in the United States, as Brought into Focus, Bigger Than Life, in the Land of the Millionaires—
Texas (New York, 1961), 267, 41–42. Sid Richardson and Amon Carter in Fort Worth, Texas, and Thomas Gilcrease
in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were the most important regional collectors of western art during this time.
Oil, the American West, and U.S. Power
203
wealth funded and ideologically bolstered the conservative turn in state and national
politics that would ultimately transform America. As Goldberg argues, conservatives
nationally during this period turned repeatedly to mythic ideals of the American West to
shape their mission, and they ultimately found their seemingly authentic western hero in
the tough-talking Arizonan politician Barry Goldwater.11
Scholars have pointed out, of course, that the popularity of the western film during the
height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union is no mere coincidence; indeed, westerns
gave Americans—especially conservatives, all the way to Ronald Reagan, another selffashioned westerner—a language to express the struggle against the evils of communism.
But few have sought to understand the particular meanings that the West, and especially
Texas, provided during this time of extraordinary change in the international oil industry.
DeGolyer was correct, of course: the “center of gravity” of world oil production was shifting to the Persian Gulf, and while DeGolyer stood to profit as an international oil consultant, he also was concerned about the future of independent operators, who were
themselves extraordinarily anxious about how they could garner a future market share.
The greatest threat on their horizon was that the new Middle East riches seemed, in the
years immediately following World War II, to be locked up by the major British and
American companies. Even if the region were open to independent firms, they would
need enormous capital to expand into the Middle East. By the 1950s independents’ concerns that cheap Middle East oil would flood the U.S. consumer market and undercut
their position spurred them to lobby for import controls, resulting in the Mandatory Oil
Import Quota program (moip) of 1959. An executive order that Dwight D. Eisenhower
issued against his inclinations (he was much more inclined toward voluntary restrictions),
the moip restricted the amount of imported oil yet gave preference to imported oil from
Canada and Mexico.12
If the moip indicated the anxiety that independents experienced regarding price competition, it also presented them with opportunities. Ironically, in that same year, the first
viable oil field was discovered in Libya. That country, in contrast to Iran and Saudi Arabia,
entered into many concessionary agreements with large multinational firms such as Exxon
and British Petroleum as well as with independent American firms, the most well known
being the Texas firm Hunt Oil Company and Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum
Company.13 The following decade saw large independent operators seeking to expand the
reserves on their books through exploration to “new frontiers” abroad. Oil-services companies based in Texas also continued to expand into Middle Eastern projects; they were,
in fact, the first to leave Texas (and other parts of the West) for the Middle East and other
countries after World War II. But as a panoply of Texas oilmen increasingly entered the
11
Merrill, “Illusions of Independence,” 82–83. As Robert Caro notes, Lyndon B. Johnson’s “appetite” for
money was enormous. Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York, 2002), 406–9. By
focusing on the post–World War II period, I do not mean to suggest that Texas oilmen were powerless before the
war. As George Norris Green argued, one can chart the rise of their influence in Texas after the discovery of the
gigantic East Texas oil field in 1930. George Norris Green, The Establishment in Texas Politics: The Primitive Years,
1938–1957 (Westport, 1979). Goldberg, “Western Hero in Politics,” 20–22.
12
On the image of the westerner in Cold War culture, see Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the
Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1992), 347. For a concise description of the politics around the
Mandatory Oil Import Quota program, see Yergin, Prize, 537–40.
13
Yergin, Prize, 527–30.
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world oil market in the 1960s, the political economy of international oil was rapidly
changing. From the 1940s onward oil-exporting countries pushed for better terms with
firms doing business within their borders, making inroads but also meeting resistance—
the U.S.- and British-backed 1953 coup in Iran is the most notorious instance of such
resistance. With relatively little notice, at least to the American government, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) formed in 1960 and increasingly exerted
pressure through the decade on large western oil firms to allocate a greater piece of what
the oil-producing countries understandably believed was their rightful share of the wealth
generated from beneath their soil.
All of these signals of profound transformation in global oil roiled in the years
surrounding the peak of U.S. domestic oil production. As predicted by Shell Oil’s
M. King Hubbert in 1956, U.S. oil production topped out around 1970, and while
U.S. oilmen expanded into plenty of new oil fields domestically after 1970—primarily on
Alaska’s North Slope and in the Gulf of Mexico—the rate of U.S. oil production would
only fall after 1970. Given that fact, the oil shocks of the 1970s were particularly alarming
for U.S. policy makers: neither the U.S. government nor Texas oilmen could simply will
all the oil Americans needed out of American ground. When Arab members of opec
embargoed American oil in October 1973 as retaliation for U.S. arms sales to Israel and
support of Israeli policy, the United States seemed powerless. Indeed, as Melani McAlister
has pointed out, the first oil shock in 1973 should be understood not simply for what it
indicated about the shift in international economic relations but also for the way Americans
interpreted it “in profoundly nationalist terms, as a failure of U.S. political power to
secure national access to economic resources, and as a problem of national will and
authority.”14
Against this backdrop of American powerlessness and declining U.S. oil production
that so defined the 1970s, the 1978 pilot for the Dallas television series introduced the
pathos-soaked Ewing family and, with J. R. as its centerpiece, breathed new life into the
throwback figure of the “big rich” Texas oilman.
In contrast to DeGolyer, and as far as we can discern from the television series, J. R.
Ewing was not much of a reader beyond the morning newspaper and quarterly reports on
his volatile commercial empire. Whereas Everette DeGolyer was a unique amalgam, with
personal roots both in the oil cultures of the Southwest and in the international circulations of British oilmen, J. R. could trace his symbolic lineage to titanic figures specific
to the Texas oil industry—H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Glenn McCarthy, and Sid
Richardson—and perhaps most obviously, the fictional Jett Rink. Uninclined to selfreflection, J. R.’s primary motivator was power: how to leverage it in tight situations, how
to exert it, and how to hold onto it.
If the attempted murder of J. R. garnered the world’s attention in the spring of 1980,
an earlier episode from the show’s third season has significance far beyond the escapist
cliff-hanger. In the episode “Ellie Saves the Day,” J. R.’s brother Bobby discovers that J. R.
14
On the fall in U.S. oil production, see, Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage
(Princeton, 2008). Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–
2000 (Berkeley, 2001), 126. For a partial listing of scholarly works on the roiling political and economic changes in
international oil, see the bibliographic essay in Karen R. Merrill, The Oil Crisis of 1973–1974: A Brief History with
Documents (Boston, 2007), 163–65.
Oil, the American West, and U.S. Power
205
has mortgaged the much-loved Southfork Ranch to secure a loan for offshore oil leases in
Southeast Asia (though the show never specifies exactly where in Southeast Asia). As we
learn in the opening of the episode, a typhoon has just seriously damaged oil platforms,
and J. R. demands that his man in the field get them working to strike oil within a week.
The reason: the first payment on the mortgage for Southfork is due in one week, and he
does not have the money to pay it.15
Bobby’s discovery of this fact and its disclosure to his parents, Jock and Ellie, propels a
family crisis, but one of a different order of magnitude than the run-of-the-mill crises that
beset the Ewings each week. As each of the characters makes clear in one way or another,
the threat of foreclosure on the Southfork Ranch strikes at the very heart of the Ewing
family identity and most significantly at the heart of Ellie, who is the soul of the family.
The Southfork land belonged to Ellie’s father, and among the Ewings she is the most
rooted to it. In Ellie’s words, “Your own land is the most precious thing you can own,”
and she is incensed at the news that she might lose it to J. R.’s Southeast Asia oil scheme,
declaring that she did not marry her husband “to lose Southfork over an oil deal.”16
As it turns out, her decision as a young woman to marry Jock and hitch her personal
fortunes to Ewing Oil provided Ellie the money to save the ranch. That fact provokes
great soul-searching in Ellie, and she surprises her family near the end of the episode by
saying that she will now allow oil drilling on one section of the ranch, despite her father’s
explicit wishes that no drilling ever be allowed at Southfork: “Forty years ago,” she
explains, “Ewing [Oil] saved Southfork. It’s time now for Southfork to repay those debts.”
The bank will, of course, accept the prospect of that drilling as payment on the mortgage.
At the same moment, Cliff Barnes, the Ewing family nemesis who led the Texas Office of
Land Management, and who has effectively shut down Ewing Oil’s oil production in the
state, has decided to run for Congress, and the governor has replaced him with a man
friendly to the Ewing’s interests. “We’re gonna be back in the oil business in Texas,” J. R.
gleefully concludes.17
The articulation and resolution of the crisis holds several keys to understanding the
connections between the American West and Middle East oil during this period. At the
symbolic level, the lack of geographic specificity of J. R.’s leases in Southeast Asia is critically important: audiences would have associated the area with the Vietnam War—a symbol, like the oil shocks of the 1970s, of America’s seeming powerlessness in the world. At
the same time the geographical vagueness opens up a reading of the location as essentially
fungible. Southeast Asia? The Middle East? It is all the same in the Ewing universe, as the
location narratively indicates access to a natural resource and a certain exotic unpredictability. In the show, a typhoon disrupts production. In real life, Islamist revolutionaries in
Tehran took fifty-two Americans hostages only three weeks before the episode aired. The
tumultuous situation in Iran sharply reduced its oil production, rapidly increasing oil
prices for the second time in a decade. Sure enough, by the next season of Dallas a political revolt in the unspecified Southeast Asia locale shifts the political terrain, and the new
government nationalizes the oil industry (but not before the Ewing family had become
billionaires from their Asian wells).
15
“Ellie Saves the Day,” prod. Leonard Katzman, dir. Gunnar Hellström (episode of Dallas, ex. prod. Philip
Caprice), Lorimar Productions (cbs, Nov. 30, 1979).
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
206
The Journal of American History
June 2012
As the nation’s most popular villain in the early to mid-1980s, J. R. Ewing may have worn a black
cowboy hat to Ronald Reagan’s white, yet both J. R. and Reagan embraced cowboy iconography in
ways that projected American power abroad, particularly when it came to American demand for oil.
Photo by Geneva Brinton.
The Eastern Hemisphere, then, is both a place where the Ewing “appetite” for oil and
wealth can be satisfied and a source of ever-present threat; in “Ellie Saves the Day,” Ewing
Oil’s venture into Southeast Asia threatens what is framed in Dallas as the most fundamentally Texan part of the show, Southfork Ranch. Indeed, one could argue that amid all
the venality and scheming in the show, the ranch is the “good and authentic” centerpiece.
It is telling that the clues to Ellie’s soul-searching in this episode include seeing her at the
far reaches of the ranch (having ridden there on a horse) with a view toward expansive,
arid plains. In a world where the men jump in and out of their cars to finagle suspect
business deals, this quiet, dialogue-free interlude—with an iconic western backdrop—
signals Ellie’s ability to summon the strength to make the right decision.
But what, then, does the episode impart about the tension between the “appetite” for
oil and the “good and authentic” western past? Perhaps it suggests that the only way to
save the “good and authentic” Southfork Ranch is to destroy it, or at least a part of it.
Perhaps the episode is meant merely to underscore Ellie’s particularly fraught relationship
to the world inhabited by her husband and sons, while showing her as a hard-headed
pragmatist. But perhaps there is an additional message we can read against the grain. It is
not, in the end, Ellie who saves the day, but J. R.: only he is sneaky enough to imagine
that he could push Cliff Barnes out of the Office of Land Management by secretly funding Barnes’s run for Congress. With Barnes safely out of the mix, with the ranch secured
Oil, the American West, and U.S. Power
207
by the oil beneath its surface, and with Ewing Oil “back in the oil business in Texas,”
J. R. has free rein both at home and abroad to engage all his appetites.
Such was the petro-fantasy of America in the last decades of the twentieth century—
that oil and wealth could be had simply through the tough, western man of action. Two short
months after the airing of “Ellie Saves the Day,” Jimmy Carter declared in his secondto-last State of the Union address, amid the hostage crisis and soaring oil prices, that
the United States would defend its access to Persian Gulf oil by military means if necessary. With Dallas at the height of its popularity and American oilmen scouring the globe
for new plays, the image of the Texas oilman as a close cousin to a gun-toting cowboy was
now circulating worldwide. J. R. Ewing, one might argue, had become the pop-culture
corollary to the Carter Doctrine. Soon a “good and authentic” Hollywood cowboy would
stand at the country’s helm, militarizing America’s access to Middle East oil even further
and thus elaborating, as Toby Craig Jones argues in his essay in this volume, on the fantasy that such Pentagon-based approaches could ultimately provide Americans both security and the long-term supply of cheap oil needed to satisfy their appetites.18 Nowhere in
American policy was there a clarion call to summon American technological innovation
to solve the country’s energy needs beyond oil. It is therefore tempting to wonder whether
the United States could have integrated such innovation into its strategic vision had the
more complicated outlook of Everette DeGolyer prevailed, as opposed to those of Jett
Rink and J. R. Ewing. What would DeGolyer have done? Would DeGolyer’s fascination
with exploring new technological frontiers have triumphed over his nostalgia for the Old
West and love of oil? That question can only be answered in the imagination, of course.
Certainly, given his professional investment in seismic technology, DeGolyer would have
relished the challenge of finding oil in increasingly hard-to-reach places. However, the
rapidly changing context of oil in the late twentieth century might also have expanded
DeGolyer’s reckoning with American energy needs and piqued his interest in exploring
renewable forms of energy. J. R. Ewing might then have had the option of being a different kind of pioneer, investing his family’s fortune in Texas wind instead of Texas oil.
18
Toby Craig Jones, “America, Oil, and War in the Middle East,” Journal of American History, 99 (June 2012),
208–18.