Destructive Beauty
Historian Kathryn Morse of Middlebury College tells us about the beauty some observers discerned in the first oil “gushers.”
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PETER: Welcome to the show. I’m Peter Onuf here with Brian Balogh.
BRIAN: Hey, Peter.
PETER: And Ed Ayers.
ED: Hey, everybody.
PETER: We’ll begin 1901. Oil had just been struck at a place called Spindletop in East Texas. Emerged from the earth in what was called a gusher, a tremendous plume of oil that shot from the top of the dirk and flooded the area around it. Here’s a firsthand account from a person who witnessed the event.
MALE SPEAKER: It looked like snow. And it had discolored all the houses in town, and the silverware, and the silver in your pocket.
PETER: It looked like snow. Quite the description of what was in essence a gigantic oil spill.
KATHRYN MORSE: American’s saw oil as exciting, as dynamic, as abundant, and as a promise of wonderful things. It was a visual spectacle to be celebrated, and they didn’t think much beyond that.
PETER: This is Kathryn Morse, a historian at Middlebury College. She combed through news reports of oil industry accidents from the turn of the century and found out that they were often portrayed in almost sublime terms, as kind of wonders of nature. She describes one account of a 1910 gusher in California when oil spewed uncontrollably for a year and a half.
KATHRYN MORSE: The Los Angeles Time featured a beautiful photograph of the gusher spouting high into the air, showing the reflection not only of the gusher in the sky, but in the pool of oil as well, and proclaimed it California’s most wonderful oil picture. The Lakeview gusher and it’s great lake of oil.
PETER: Morse says gushers were events. Crowds would come from miles around to sit and watch. Families with children would bring picnics. And when a spark caught and lit the disastrous scene on fire, well, then it was a bigger event. Here’s how one witness put it.
MALE SPEAKER 1: It was the most beautiful sight ever witnessed in the oil regions. Blazing fluids spouting up high in the air and breaking in a shower of fiery drops. A wonderful fountain of fire.
KATHRYN MORSE: It was truly seen as a spectacular visual spectacle. And there are postcards showing these flaming geysers at night lighting up the night sky and drawing hundreds to watch this intense visual spectacle of a flaming line of light shooting into the air.
PETER: It’s a pretty far cry, obviously, from the way we tend to think about oil accidents today. Think back to Exxon Valdez, or to the BP oil spill the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Now Kathryn Morse says that early witnesses to oil accidents did worry about containing all the valuable oil.
KATHRYN MORSE: But it wasn’t really a question about the health of the earth for a very long time, until Americans’ ideas about oil and understanding of its effects changed dramatically later in the 20th century.