The 1964-65 New York World’s Fair brought the latest global innovations to Corona Park in northern Queens. For a whole year, under the theme of ‘Peace Through Understanding’, the Fair exhibited a veritable wunderkammer of 1960s scientific marvels and cultural curiosities, ranging from the staggeringly sophisticated to the cringingly kitsch. There were colour televisions, computers, jet packs, a monorail, an ancient Chinese pavilion, large dinosaur sculptures, and Belgian waffles. Among the corporate exhibitions, IBM, the American technology titan, had its own pavilion, dubbed ‘the Egg’. At the heart of it all, at the centre of Corona Park, stood a 120-foot tall unisphere built by US Steel especially for the Fair. It still stands there today – a nod to postwar America’s position as a pre-eminent global power.

It was in this vast symposium of futuristic artefacts, amid an atmosphere of industrial exuberance and technological boosterism, that the American Car manufacturer Ford launched the first Mustang in April 1964. By choosing the Fair for the launch of its new model, Ford was making a statement: the Mustang would be the car of the future. By marrying world-class American manufacturing, honed in the then booming industrial powerhouse of Detroit, with an elegant European style, it presented itself as a modern technological marvel – the natural car of choice for a young, self-confident and rapidly expanding middle class. In its own internal documents, Ford described the Mustang as ‘demure enough for church-going, racy enough for the dragstrip, modish enough for the country club.’

Ford’s campaign to dazzle American consumers did not stop there. After introducing the car to a packed out press conference, Ford took to the airwaves; a flurry of radio and television commercials followed. The first Mustang ad, which featured on all three major TV networks, shows a group of twenty-somethings enjoying Ford’s exhibit at New York World’s Fair as they gaze longingly at an immaculate, brand new Mustang. Suddenly, one of them – a young man – is transported into the driving seat. He imagines himself roaring down an empty country road in the smooth, sporty, saloon-style Mustang, which glides along, kicking up dust in its wake. ‘This is the car that dreams are made of, so dream your own Mustang’, an assured voice says.

The slogan was apt. In hawking its latest model, Ford was not just selling a car, it was selling a dream, and a distinctively American one at that. Its commercials distilled a sense of unburdened freedom and restless adventure that had found its boldest cultural expression in Jack Kerouac’s beat-era classic On the Road (1957). One of Kerouac’s itinerant protagonists ponders: ‘Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.’ Ford’s great coup was to bottle this fantasy and sell it at a price that was affordable for the aspirational middle class. As a result, the Ford Mustang captured Americans’ imagination, and became a roaring success. Almost overnight, it became one of the most popular American cars ever made: within four months, Ford had sold 100,000 units; within two years, one million.

In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had signed the Interstate Highway Bill, a massive roadbuilding project which would, upon its completion, create a 42,500-mile long superhighway system connecting all corners of the country. The concrete used in the building of this arterial network, Eisenhower boasted, ‘would make a parking lot big enough to hold two thirds of all the automobiles in the United States.’

As well as linking states together and intensifying cross-country trade, by the 1960s this flurry of roadbuilding also enabled millions of Americans to live a new kind of lifestyle. Owning a car allowed more and more people to live in new residential neighbourhoods on the outskirts of cities, travel widely for work, and see far-off parts of their own country for leisure. Car ownership drove suburbanisation: between 1950-1976, the number of Americans living in suburbs grew by 85 million. In this brave new world, a car provided mobility, and mobility conferred opportunity.

This golden age for the white middle class – with its nuclear families in their white-picket-fenced suburbs, drive-in cinemas, and motel holidays – was founded on one fundamental ingredient. That ingredient was oil, the essential commodity of the modern world.

At the beginning of the Second World War, the US was responsible for 60 per cent of the world’s petroleum production. Its vast petroleum supplies – gushing forth from the oil fields of Texas, California and Oklahoma – enabled the Allies to defeat the fascist powers, and played a crucial role in the Marshall aid used to rebuild the shattered postwar economies of America’s allies in Europe. At the war’s end, the US was still a net exporter of petroleum.

By the end of the 1940s, however, the US had become a net importer. This great shift had been caused by a surge in demand as petroleum powered rising living standards. Gasoline sales were 42 per cent higher in 1950 than they were in 1945, and despite the fact that the US’s proven reserves were 21 per cent higher in 1950 than in 1946, production could not keep pace with consumption. Between 1949-1950 alone, consumption jumped by 12 per cent. Automobiles took the lion’s share – rising from 50 to 70 per cent in the postwar decades – as the number of vehicles rose. In 1945, 26 million cars were in service. By 1950, there were 40 million. Cars, new household appliances, and heating for the winter – all were fuelled by crude oil and its refined hydrocarbon products: gasoline, diesel, liquefied petroleum gas, kerosene. This was the age of what Daniel Yergin calls ‘hydrocarbon man’.

As a consequence, the United States became reliant on other parts of the world to supply the extra oil required to meet demand. As part of this system, rising living standards in the US became yoked to the whims of foreign governments. Some of these, such as Canada and Mexico, were close by and could be depended upon. Others, in Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, were further afield and might use oil as a weapon to coerce and blackmail American governments.

Ever since, this reliance has created a deep sense of unease. It has generated the fear that a dependency on imported oil compromises national security and corrupts American democracy. It has led some to dream of new schemes to free the republic from the shackles of dependency through new domestic sources of fuel. One such opportunity was believed to lie in synthetic fuels extracted from coal or shale. In 1948, a New York Times editorial declared that ‘The United States is on the threshold of a profound chemical revolution’: ‘The next ten years will see the rise of a massive new industry which will free us from dependence on foreign sources of oil. Gasoline will be produced from coal, air and water.’

This revolution ran aground before it even started. The problem with synthetic fuels was that they could not produce energy that was as readily available and cheap as imported foreign oil. They were not the only proposed solution, however. Other, eventually more successful ventures lay in locating and cultivating new domestic sources of oil, whether offshore in the Gulf of Mexico or in the depths of Alaska, and in connecting cheap natural gas reserves in the rural South West to customers in the industrial North East. With time, these plans reduced the US’s reliance on imported energy, but did not end it altogether.

Eisenhower’s answer to the dependency conundrum was import quotas. In 1959, the President introduced the Mandatory Oil Import Programme, which decreed that oil imports could not exceed 9 per cent of domestic consumption. With nearly unchallenged access to a booming domestic market, US oil companies rushed to ramp up production. Buoyed by these conditions, total domestic US oil production would reach 9,637 barrels per day in 1970 – a volume that was not exceeded again until 2018, when the US produced just short of 11,000 barrels per day.

The quota system worked while international oil prices remained cheap. Indeed, oil prices fell throughout the 1950s and 1960s, driven downwards by a global oversupply of oil. However, the system, along with the entire ‘postwar petroleum order’, was shattered by the Oil Crisis of the 1970s. Between 1945-1972, total oil US consumption tripled from 5.8 million barrels per day to 16.4 million. By the early 1970s, the US’s surplus capacity, a security reserve of domestic supplies, was quickly running dry. The Texas oil fields were operating at 100 per cent production and could no longer step in to provide emergency capacity. In April 1973, President Nixon was forced to end Eisenhower’s import quotas and, by the summer of that year, US imports had nearly doubled from their 1970 levels. The postwar oil glut had vanished amid rising global demand across the industrialised world, from London to Tokyo.

It was in this context of tight global supply that the oil-exporting Arab states imposed an embargo on the United States over its support for Israel in October 1973. The effect was devastating. Within the space of a few months, gasoline prices rose by 40 per cent. There was ‘panic at the pump’ as motorists scrambled to secure fuel for their cars. Ford Mustang’s dream of the open road had quickly turned into a nightmare of long and seemingly endless petrol station queues. The crisis was brought to a close in March 1974, and the embargo ended, but oil prices would remain high until the mid-1980s. As important as the economic impact of the Arab states’ oil weapon was its psychological impact. As Yergin writes, ‘the embargo and its consequences sent shock radiating through the social fabric of the industrial nations.’ The US was no exception.

The panic generated by the Oil Crisis intensified Americans’ search for an alternative to foreign oil. In November 1973, Nixon had launched a series of new energy policies under the name of ‘Project Independence’. ‘Let us set as our national goal’, he declared,

in the spirit of Apollo, with the determination of the Manhattan project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy source.

Yet by 1978, US consumption of oil imports had nearly doubled and demand for oil had risen by over two million barrels per day. The 1979 Iranian Revolution and the ensuing hostage crisis compounded this situation, sending global oil prices soaring into the 1980s.

By 1982, the US had managed to reduce its imports of oil to 28 per cent of all consumption, down from a peak of 45 per cent in 1977. Falling global demand, rising non-OPEC production, conservation measures and price deregulation all worked together to bring oil prices down from a yearly average of $35 per barrel in 1981 to under $15 in 1986. However, plummeting oil prices created new vulnerabilities: collapsing prices discouraged investment in domestic production and led US oil companies to prioritise cheaper, less risky operations abroad. Imports began to steadily climb once again, and with it America’s oil anxieties.

One significant figure who perceived the dangers of this new age of abundance was George H.W. Bush, then Vice President to Ronald Reagan. As a Texas oil man himself – in 1953 he co-founded an independent oil company, the Zapata Petroleum Corporation – Bush the elder believed that a strong, viable domestic oil industry was essential for the preservation of America’s freedom. In April 1986, on the eve of a trip to the Arab Gulf states, he said unequivocally, ‘I happen to believe, and always have, that a strong US domestic industry is in the national security interests, vital interests of this country.’ In the early 1970s Nixon and his éminence grise, Henry Kissinger, had gone cap in hand to the Arab states asking them to lower the price of oil; now, Bush Senior was asking them to raise it.

Bush the elder’s campaign set off the firing gun on a renewed race to build up America’s domestic capacity. His clarion call would be taken up by his son, George W. Bush, during the latter’s presidency. As the nineties progressed into the noughties, the stunning industrial development of China and India once again drove up demand for fuel, and with it global energy prices. In his 2006 State of the Union Address, Bush the younger warned that ‘America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.’ ‘The best way to break this addiction’, he argued, would be ‘through technology’, and particularly cleaner renewable energy. Like the schemes of the 1940s before them, however, renewables have not punctured oil’s imperium: the growth in the proportion of renewable energy in the US’s overall energy consumption portfolio since 2006 has largely been accomplished at the expense of coal, not oil or natural gas.

Towards the end of the noughties, popular anxieties surrounding costly imported oil unleashed a new wave of demands for intensified domestic production. In 2008, the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, Michael Steele, called for the country to ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ – a rallying cry for Republicans championing greater domestic oil and gas production as an antidote to America’s foreign oil dependency. The slogan was amplified by Sarah Palin, the proto-Trumpian Alaskan vice-presidential nominee, who was chosen by Senator John McCain to join his Republican ticket in the 2008 presidential election.

President Donald J. Trump reprised the call to ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ in his successful campaign for the presidency in 2024. In his inauguration speech on 20 January, he proclaimed this slogan to rapturous applause and vocal approval from his supporters gathered in the Capitol Building’s Rotunda. There is a seductive curtness and simplicity to the phrase. Along with Trump’s praise for President William McKinley, it voices a yearning for a time when the US was strong and self-sufficient. It also expresses a certain nostalgia for a lost idyll – of a self-confident, secure and more masculine America at ease with itself. ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ is a call for a return to the boosterish optimism and prosperity of the first two postwar decades, before this golden age was punctured by the Oil Crisis. As with all golden ages, of course, the vision is more alluring the further away it is.

Achieving energy self-sufficiency through increased domestic production is also likely to be an elusive goal. It is true that the US has re-emerged in the last decade as a major exporter of crude oil. President Barack Obama may have mocked the ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ slogan, but he also sought to unleash the potential of domestic production and liberate America from its dependency. The shale revolution, begun during Obama’s tenure, has dramatically reduced the US’s reliance on foreign oil and has turned it into the largest exporter of crude oil in the world by market share. In March 2024, the Energy Information Administration confirmed that the United States produced more crude oil than any other country at any time in history between 2018-2023.

This does not mean that the US is poised to enter a new golden age of energy autarky, however. There are two obstacles that confront Trump’s new crusade for cheaper energy. The first revolves around the workings of the market. Analysts have warned that, as in the 1980s, low energy prices will reduce US companies’ incentives to drill. Without higher prices, they are unlikely to have the vast resources required to invest in new oil and gas projects. This is important because the physical costs of extracting oil in Texas rather than Saudi Arabia remain greater. Where the average oil well in the US produces 27 barrels per day, the average Saudi well produces 3,000. While one barrel of oil in Saudi Arabia costs about $4 to produce, a barrel of US shale costs between $35-45. The President can issue executive orders to deregulate the oil and gas industry, but he cannot overcome the laws of supply and demand.

The second obstacle revolves around the chemistry of US oil itself. Much of the crude oil that comes out of the American fields, particularly those in Texas, consists of what is known as ‘light sweet’ – it tends to be low in density and sulphur. However, many of America’s existing refineries are not optimised for refining this type of oil into its useful products. It is, therefore, more viable under these conditions to export the light sweet crude, and then to import crude oil that is more suitable for American refineries from abroad.

As with previous cycles in the history of US oil, the consequences of Trump’s drive for cheap energy are as yet unclear. One thing, however, is certain: like death, taxes, and fluctuations in energy prices, America’s oil anxiety is always with us.