Meg Jacobs. Panic at the Pump

Early on in her wonderfully insightful Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s, while discussing growing environmentalist concerns about the multipronged costs of the U.S. dependence on fossil fuels, Meg Jacobs quotes ecologist Barry Commoner’s adage “Everything is connected to everything else” (25). Beyond its applicability in that specific context, the idea of interconnectedness serves as an overarching theme for the entirety of Jacobs’s study. Making excellent use of a plethora of published and unpublished sources, Jacobs deftly draws together the manifold strands that made up the U.S. response to the oil shocks that began with the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and continued for the rest of the decade, assessing the internal debates over how the nation should respond to the unprecedented energy crisis—gas lines that stretched for miles, violent truckers’ strikes, and widespread shortages—against a multitude of public and private pressures. Perhaps more important than laying bare the complicated history of the energy crisis itself, however, Jacobs convincingly demonstrates its long-term consequences, most notably the way it pushed American politics to the right by replacing big-government New Dealism with small-government Reaganomics and inspired a new foreign policy course marked by a generally expanded national presence abroad and specifically new adventurism in the Persian Gulf.

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