Introduction
A 1975 Wall Street Journal column begins with an unlikely anecdote describing how a group of California school children sent a package of letters and a check representing 1,334 pennies they’d collected to Rawleigh Warner Jr., then-chairman of Mobil Oil. This donation was made in response to a recent Mobil advertorial featuring a large illustration of Sesame Street’s Big Bird and entitled “Endangered Species” which highlighted the series’ vulnerability and dependence on private funding.Footnote 1 The article goes on to describe a typical letter from the group of students expressing, “Dear Mobil Oil: Most people are mad at you but we like you. Thank you for helping Big Bird Stay on TV. We are glad to help too.”Footnote 2 The students’ donation, the article argues, was significant not in terms of its monetary contribution but what it demonstrated about the success of Mobil’s public affairs program in redefining the company’s image as a socially conscious corporation working in the interest of the public good.
As this column demonstrates, the oil industry’s public relations programs, in addition to establishing and broadening the parameters of corporate “free speech,” denying climate science, and obstructing international regulatory measures which would limit the worst effects of a rapidly warming planet, were mobilized to endorse particular cultural values.Footnote 3 In the 1970s, in the midst of oil crises, environmental activism, and growing distrust in corporate power, the oil industry educated the public about its vital role in maintaining the stability of the economy and the “American way of life”—often represented through the family and, particularly, children.Footnote 4 Through “petro-pedagogical” programs, oil corporations intervened in public debates surrounding energy, economic redistribution, social programs, and education, aligning the interests of future generations with the interests of free market capitalism broadly and the oil industry specifically.Footnote 5 By bringing attention to the oil industry’s investments in children and families, particularly those racialized as “disadvantaged,” public relations programs performed an important function of deflection for the industry, most notably with regard to environmental regulations.Footnote 6 Ultimately, during this period, oil corporations drew on public relations and sponsorship activities to highlight children as the beneficiaries of the industry’s commitment to the future.
In this essay, I examine how the oil industry’s public relations activities in the 1970s contributed to “cultures of privatization,” particularly as they relate to children and the family as the primary symbols of social welfare. Scholars of neoliberalism and its intersections with family values have traced how neoliberalism ushered in conditions of austerity in which trust in the ability of government to promote social equality receded, with responsibility for well-being shifting from a role of the state to a role of the family.Footnote 7 This privatization of social responsibility is evident in oil industry framings of social welfare, including social and educational programs, as essentially dependent on the unrestricted growth and generosity of corporations. By examining how oil corporations’ public relations endeavors promoted an understanding of children’s futures as objects of private investment, this article contributes to the historiography of the oil industry and its participation in perpetuating environmental degradation, as well as historical and theoretical analyses of how neoliberal ideologies enforced the privatization of the family.Footnote 8 Caleb Wellum, moreover, has recently argued that energy history can meaningfully expand and revise understandings of the “dependence/independence” dualism, a “central binary in U.S. political and cultural history.”Footnote 9 Through the examination of oil corporations’ public relations programs, I argue, we can see how oil companies promoted a vision of public goods as dependent on private growth in a moment in which their power in American life was coming into question.
In this article, I focus on the assembled efforts of Mobil Oil in the 1970s as emblematic of the major oil corporations that dominated the oil industry as a whole.Footnote 10 Mobil Oil is significant in part due to the widespread attention paid to their public relations initiatives, including from other corporations which would embrace similar tactics, news outlets who were drawn into debates with Mobil over fairness in media, and government bodies that debated the growing role of corporate “speech” in policymaking.Footnote 11 During the 1970s, Mobil pioneered developments in advocacy advertising and educational sponsorship activities which were central to Mobil’s self-projection as a socially responsible participant in American society.Footnote 12 Mobil, as the most notably vocal oil major, acquired a reputation for speaking broadly in defense of the oil industry’s interests.Footnote 13 By analyzing Mobil’s public affairs activities during this period, I argue, the relationship between the oil industry and the construction of cultures of privatization becomes clear.
I begin with an examination of energy politics in the 1970s, examining the immense public debate over energy futures, environmental priorities, and the role of government in mediating the free market which was taken up by environmentalists, concerned citizens, everyday consumers, public officials, oil corporations, and the larger business community during this era. Shifting to the petro-pedagogical forms that became important sources of deflection in this period, I then examine Mobil Oil’s public relations program, focusing on the treatment of education and welfare in Mobil’s newspaper advertorial program and Mobil’s sponsorship of the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in the 1970s. I then move to a discussion of oil corporations’ production of industry-backed educational materials, which were widely used due to some of the very strains on public education that neoliberalism would exacerbate in the coming decades. Ultimately, I examine these petro-pedagogical forms to illustrate their participation in the construction of cultures of privatization which framed racialized projections of children’s futures as dependent on the oil industry.
Corporate Activism and Environmental (De)Regulation in the 1970s
During the 1970s, American dependence on fossil fuels was newly contested within mainstream political cultures. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, which sparked renewed environmentalist consciousness and mobilization, led to strident critiques of the oil industry’s neglect of the environment, transcending self-conscious environmentalists and reaching into the center of public life. Within the Santa Barbara Declaration of Environmental Rights, entered into the Congressional Record in 1970, activists affirmed, “We must develop the vision to see that in regard to the natural world private and corporate ownership should be so limited as to preserve the interest of society and the integrity of the environment.”Footnote 14 The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, likewise, demonstrated a widespread questioning of the relationship between the postwar political economic order and environmental degradation.Footnote 15 Responding to these mobilizations, the late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a transformation in policy approaches to regulating corporate “externalities.” Legislation including the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), amendments to the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act (1972), and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) signaled government’s willingness to regulate the practices of industry. Shortly thereafter, the 1973–4 oil crisis, and, later in the decade, the 1979 oil shock, generated widespread concern regarding the future scarcity of oil supplies and calls for greater exploration and deregulation that directly conflicted with the environmental protections established just a few years prior. The oil crises intersected with other long-term developments in American political economy, converging with a decline in economic growth, a rise of unemployment amidst deindustrialization, and inflation, as well as changes in political culture in which Americans reevaluated their relationship to government and the scope of its administration over public life. Within this climate, the increasingly embattled oil industry drew on technologies of public relations to align itself with the public interest, positioning itself as a benefactor of social welfare and government as a source of inefficiency and economic stagnation. In the process, the industry “retooled the notion of public interest in their image.”Footnote 16
From the perspective of the industry and its allies, the regulatory ethos of the New Deal, “tax-and-spend” tenets of post-WWII liberalism, and extension of social programs under the Great Society had resulted in the overextension of the federal government, which had impeded the otherwise effective functioning of the free market. In the early 1970s, oil corporations and trade associations warned that government regulations, including price controls, environmental standards, and the ban on the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline would stifle discovery and production, ultimately straining the domestic energy supply.Footnote 17 Business historian David Vogel describes how, unlike earlier precedents, regulatory policy from 1969 and onward throughout the 1970s enacted sweeping change across industries—including in environmental standards, occupational health and safety, consumer protections, and tax reform.Footnote 18 Representing a “kind of Great Society for the private economy,” this wider reach resulted in corporations becoming “conscious of their common or class interests.”Footnote 19 In response, the oil industry assembled to recast its role in American society through the projection of corporate social responsibility.
The oil industry’s efforts to project itself as socially responsible in the 1970s are grounded in longer historical roots. The “petro-pedagogical” projects of Mobil and the broader oil industry in the 1970s drew on earlier paradigms, including the flourishing of public relations—termed the birth of the “corporate soul”—in the postwar era.Footnote 20 The oil industry’s efforts are consistent with the longer trajectory of postwar “corporate liberalism” charted by Jennifer Delton, wherein social responsibility came to be understood by business leaders as central to ensuring conditions of long-term profitability, such that “doing the right thing” was viewed as economically advantageous.Footnote 21 By promoting private solutions to social problems, industry could supplant government interventions and forestall taxation.Footnote 22 Likewise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has argued that during the postwar period, business leaders increasingly endeavored to shape not just social and economic policies, but the “less obvious” domain of ideas and values, in an effort to remake Americans’ understandings of their relationships to corporations and to the state.Footnote 23 In order to accomplish this, corporations “constructed and sold a specific vision of the reciprocal relationship of businesses and citizens that stressed mutual rights and responsibilities.”Footnote 24 Sidelining alternate visions of economic redistribution, the oil industry advocated for limited regulation and maximal growth, projecting itself as a “good neighbor” which would, in return, acknowledge its responsibility to the public good.Footnote 25
This stance resonated with the wider efforts of the business community to reignite its promotion of free market ideals in the face of social movements’ rejection of corporate power and public officials’ embrace of new regulations during the 1970s. Emblematic of this reorientation toward offensive, rather than defensive, responses to industry’s critics, the 1971 “Powell Memorandum” translated a posture into a program of action. The memo, officially entitled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System” was written by corporate lawyer and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell to Eugene B. Snydor, education director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo attributed the unpopularity of business to attacks that were emerging from New Leftist antiwar activists, radicalized college students, and “respectable liberals and social reformers” like Ralph Nader, consumer protection advocate whose Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile alerted many readers to corporate irresponsibility, specifically within the auto industry. According to Powell, the efficacy of these critiques was the result of the American public’s ignorance of the capitalist system and the apathy of business to challenge these attacks.Footnote 26
Powell argued that business must counter the emerging commonsense that the free enterprise system operated only to serve itself, challenging the targeting of corporate tax incentives—described in media as “tax breaks,” “loop holes,” and “tax benefits”—as working solely “for the benefit of business.” Rather, he argued, “it is dismaying that many politicians make the same argument that tax measures of this kind benefit only ‘business’ without benefit to the poor. The fact that this is either political demagoguery or economic illiteracy, is of slight comfort. This setting of the ‘rich’ against the ‘poor’, of business against the people, is the cheapest and most dangerous kind of politics.”Footnote 27 In order to improve the public perception of business, Powell outlined a multi-step plan of action which included developing textbook evaluation, building up conservative interests on school boards, funding faculty positions at universities, and producing economics education materials.Footnote 28 He also pushed businesses to introduce paid advertisements which, rather than advocating specific products or supporting institutional images, would actively endeavor to “support the system.”Footnote 29 Such efforts, Powell argued, would enable the business community to recover lost ground in public authority, including in political arenas connected to consumerism and the environment.Footnote 30 While not directly referenced as an inspiration of the Mobil public affairs program or oil industry sponsorship practices, the memo illuminates key concerns of the business community in this era which align with Mobil’s and others in the industry’s efforts to deflect opprobrium through a defense of corporations’ societal role.Footnote 31 While resonant with wider business cultures advocating for free market ideologies and policy translations, the activities of the oil industry complemented the long-term constitution of oil, in particular, as integral to and synonymous with the postwar, privatized “American way of life” in a moment in which this equation was actively contested.Footnote 32
Over the course of the 1970s, many of the environmental policies installed at the beginning of the decade came under fire. American oil consumption doubled between 1950 and 1974, and by that point the U.S. had long been the world’s largest consumer of oil.Footnote 33 In 1973, OPEC price hikes and the Arab oil embargo resulted in a steep decline in the American oil supply.Footnote 34 As soon as the energy crisis became widely discussed and felt by American consumers, captured emblematically in images of snaking gas lines, oil industry groups responded to intensified scrutiny by framing recent environmental policy as the scapegoat.Footnote 35 Increasingly, environmentalist and conservationist calls for reimagining American consumption patterns came up against industry and political efforts to promote “energy independence,” which would cement the role of fossil fuels in America’s energy futures.
During the 1970s, the oil industry’s public relations campaigns intervened within a changing political terrain, as presidential administrations shifted between energy policies that required the conservation, or, alternately, the increased production and deregulation, of oil. On November 7, 1973, with the Watergate investigation already underway, Richard Nixon’s Federal Energy Administration introduced Project Independence, an initiative which endeavored to free the U.S. of reliance on foreign energy producers by 1980, encouraging both voluntary conservation measures at the level of the individual home and the development of alternative energy sources.Footnote 36 By November 16, 1973, Nixon authorized the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which had previously been restricted after fierce activism of Indigenous groups, environmentalists, and fishery unions and due to regulations imposed by Indigenous land claims and the National Environmental Policy Act.Footnote 37 Upon becoming president, Gerald Ford likewise used the recession and Project Independence to justify environmental deregulation, supporting the weakening of restrictions on offshore drilling, drilling on federal lands, and nuclear power.Footnote 38 Later, Jimmy Carter’s energy plan authorized the passage of the National Energy Act on October 15, 1978, absent the extensive conservation measures he had previously envisioned, as the legislation was reduced to weakened regulations on national gas and utility rate reform and tax incentives.Footnote 39 Ultimately, price controls would be eroded by Ronald Reagan, who ended them entirely under the first executive order of his presidency on January 28, 1981.Footnote 40 This measure was interpreted as signaling a shift in national oil policy, affirming the oil industry’s view that the narrowing of government intervention and liberation of market forces would more effectively resolve the energy problems of the 1970s and the future.Footnote 41 Amid the “oil gluts” of the 1980s, as prices fell and supplies rose, the earlier “conservation consensus” lost political traction.Footnote 42
Alongside the attenuation of previously established environmental legislation, social programs were framed by free market conservatives and many white middle-class consumers as incompatible with the new era of resource scarcity. Energy crises provided an alibi for the kinds of cuts conservatives already desired. While, materially, cuts to social programs would not take shape on a national level until the 1979 oil shock, in the early 1970s these shifts took place locally and discursively.Footnote 43 During the oil shortages caused by the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Carter would ultimately endorse the narrowing of social programs as a desired policy objective, undermining the New Deal compact and complying with social and market conservatives’ positioning of social programs as dispensable. In his 1980 budget proposal, Carter expanded foreign aid and defense spending while limiting the growth of domestic social programs, prompting the resistance of many in his own party.Footnote 44 As assessed by Senator Edward Kennedy, “the Administration’s budget asks the poor, the black, the sick, the young, the cities and the unemployed to bear a disproportionate share of the billions of dollars in reductions in Federal spending.”Footnote 45 Carter did, however, sign the Crude Oil Profit Tax into law on April 2, 1980, which would produce general revenue that could be directed toward the subsidy of energy costs for low-income families, offsetting some of the effects of cuts to unemployment and welfare benefits.Footnote 46 Yet despite Carter’s intentions, oil companies themselves came to see the tax as a small price paid in exchange for the scaling back of price controls, and, in the absence of a profits tax, the notoriously undertaxed oil industry would largely evade extensive regulatory consequences.Footnote 47
The public relations programs engineered by Mobil in the 1970s demonstrate how it attempted to shift the public perception of responsibility for the oil crises from unrestricted corporate power to government’s excessive interference in the free market. Mobil engineered a brand of “free private responsible enterprise” that affirmed its responsiveness to customers, worldwide environmental concerns, and “people’s aspirations for a better life.”Footnote 48 Through this framing, Mobil positioned itself as a social benefactor, more capable than government in ensuring the security of American economic futures and, ultimately, social welfare. By equating its own interests with those of children and future generations, Mobil naturalized its role in the continuity of the “American way of life.”Footnote 49
Advertorials: Privatizing the Public Good
In 1976, Herbert Schmertz, then-vice president of public affairs for the Mobil Corporation, reflected on the company’s effort to alter its public image amidst the changing political climate of the 1970s which, in Schmertz’s words, had authorized the scapegoating of oil corporations.Footnote 50 Beginning in the early part of the decade, Mobil Oil had developed a set of public relations tactics to counter the rising opposition it faced from the modern American environmental movement and what it viewed as an overly intrusive federal government.Footnote 51 One such mechanism was its weekly advertisements in The New York Times editorial section, beginning in mid-1971.Footnote 52 This form of promotion was, as Schmertz described, less an effort to promote a product than a “political campaign” focused on fundamental issues of American values around government and capitalism.Footnote 53 Its placement in the Times was intended to reach high level policy decision-makers.Footnote 54 In response to the success of the Times campaign, Mobil placed weekly advertisements in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, and the eastern edition of The Wall Street Journal.Footnote 55 Mobil also expanded its reach during periods of particularly intensive scrutiny: during the 1973–4 oil crisis, Mobil advertorials were published within 103 newspapers across the U.S.; in 1976, the company advertised in over a hundred papers as Congress deliberated over an ultimately unsuccessful antitrust bill that would require the break-up of oil corporation monopolies.Footnote 56 Mobil also experimented with additional modes of communicating with the public, including the weekly Observations column, which took on a conversational tone addressed to the average reader and was published in the Sunday newspaper supplements Parade and Family Weekend, and contributions to Reader’s Digest’s “Business Roundtable,” intended as a “mini course in economics” from the underrepresented perspective of big business.Footnote 57
Mobil’s advertorial program was controversial in its time. A 1976 Fortune magazine appraisal of the public affairs program, entitled “Public Relations Isn’t Kid-Gloves Stuff at Mobil” assessed that “few corporations, if any, can rival Mobil in the aggressiveness and consistency with which it speaks out in defense of its interests, the interests of the oil industry, and what it perceives to be the national interest.”Footnote 58 A 1979 Nation article titled “Operation Op-Ed: Mobil News That’s Fit to Print” argued “it is highly unlikely that any reasonably intelligent person can fail to see through the patina of Mobil’s enlightenment …Mobil’s ads preaching the doctrine of unlimited and unregulated economic growth as the best way of lifting up the poor…are poorly disguised arguments against conservation and environmental laws.”Footnote 59 However, Mobil itself saw the campaign differently. Measuring the impact of its public relations program over a period that included two energy crises and forceful environmental activism, Mobil’s leadership understood its initiative as successful. In 1980, Schmertz declared, “We have established a franchise for a particular kind of view and have developed a free market constituency that is growing.”Footnote 60 By 1982, Mobil’s in-house review of the “Evolution of the Mobil Public Affairs Program” concluded that its programming had “enabled the company to become part of the ‘collective unconsciousness’ of the nation.”Footnote 61
The political implications of these ads did not go unnoticed by policymakers. Within its campaign in the early 1970s, Mobil used its platform to actively defend the industry’s rate of profit, particularly as oil majors’ reports of record profits amid the 1973–4 oil crisis generated extensive media attention and public outcry.Footnote 62 In January 1974, the Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations held an inquiry into the profits and taxation of the oil industry.Footnote 63 The committee’s chairman, Senator Henry M. Jackson (D-WA) argued, “The American people want to know if this so-called energy crisis is only a pretext, a cover, to eliminate the major source of price competition—the independents—to raise prices, to repeal environmental laws and to force the adoption of new tax subsidies.”Footnote 64 The hearings were met with opposition from oil executives, with the president of Gulf Oil U.S.A. describing the hearings as “absolute nonsense” akin to a “criminal trial.”Footnote 65 The industry framed greater taxation as an obstacle to exploration and research, while politicians in favor of regulation protested the industry’s evasion of taxation. Of particular issue was the oil industry’s special status with regard to taxation, as oil companies avoided paying income taxes to the United States by deducting the taxes they paid to other nations and through the oil depletion allowance, a tax subsidy that allowed drillers to deduct a quarter of their revenues from their taxable income in order to incentivize new production projects.Footnote 66 The relationship of “private” enterprise to public subsidy generated by these tax policies is just one iteration of the “selective anti-statism” corporations consistently amplified during this period, denigrating the inefficacy of governmental power while relying on tax incentives and legislative exceptions.Footnote 67 Throughout the investigations, public interest organizations like Common Cause noted the pervasive issue of oil company contributions to political campaigns of members of the Senate Finance Committee as it considered whether to repeal industry tax breaks, highlighting the influence of industry pressure on energy and environmental policy.Footnote 68 Against party pressure, Ford would sign a tax bill into law just a year later that would finally do away with the depletion allowance, yet other forms of industry subsidy would remain intact.Footnote 69
Also in 1974, Senator Gary Hart (D-CO) led a hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce’s Subcommittee on Environment regarding oil and utility company’s advertisements. The hearing focused, in particular, on the question of whether corporations had qualified advertisements as institutional advertising, and therefore as tax-deductible business expenses, rather than political messages, which according to FTC regulations were not eligible for tax-exemption.Footnote 70 During this hearing, the Media Access Project, a public interest lobbying group, presented a set of documents correlating the timing of the publication of oil industry advertisements to particular legislative and de-regulatory initiatives in 1973–4. These connections included the oil industry’s efforts to legalize the previously banned Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, expand offshore drilling, eliminate price controls, and suspend emissions controls in order to conserve fuel.Footnote 71 In 1973, for example, a series of Mobil ads focused on “educating” the public about the oil crisis and urging oil conservation, typically featuring pen and ink illustrations of families carpooling, commuting on pogo sticks, and expounding upon the rewards of completing numerous errands in one trip.Footnote 72 Within these ads, Mobil appealed to families by repeatedly isolating “pollution-control equipment” in new car models as causes of energy inefficiency leading to the crisis.Footnote 73 Deflecting accusations that the industry was profiting excessively from oil crises, Mobil identified excessive government regulation as the cause of Americans’ economic instability and argued only the private market, rather than public institutions, could capably address the needs of the most vulnerable.
Alongside its efforts to shape energy policy, Mobil sought to position itself, and the free market more generally, as sponsors of the public good. In 1972, Mobil opined that the era of “free enterprise” had been replaced by “responsible enterprise,” in which big businesses would increasingly bear in mind the needs of society in addition to the needs of shareholders. Yet, this public beneficence, they noted, hinged on private accumulation, “because no company can be very responsive unless it is profitable: only a company that does well can do good.”Footnote 74 Moving beyond “pure image ads” to take positions on social issues, many of the advertorials produced in the 1970s focused on social welfare and education. In these ads, Mobil promoted its own investment, both conceptually and literally, in education and social programs with children at their center. In its view, due to the essential limits of government, public institutions were dependent on the private market for both capital and expertise.
A 1972 ad focuses on a work co-op program in a Manhattan high school called the High School Service Program. In text appearing alongside an illustration of two teenagers, one white and one Black, together conducting an oil change, Mobil describes the contrast between the typical educational failure of the school, where “attendance…is apt to be about 30 percent of the total enrollment,” and the Mobil service station program, which “averages 95 percent week in and week out.” As they describe, students in the program “do real work. They are paid good salaries. And they stay in school—with a new interest in math and reading, because they’ve begun to appreciate the importance of these subjects in the working world.” The ad ends with Mobil’s commitment, spurred by the support of the New York City Board of Education, to launch similar courses in additional cities, “So other kids can learn and earn. And drop in, not out.”Footnote 75 This ad speaks to a series of concerns of the 1970s that meet at the intersection of family and the economy, including the decline of American industrialism, the rise of unemployment, and anxieties regarding young people “dropping out” of normative, productive citizenship.Footnote 76 It also positions Mobil as more effectively supporting students’ economic opportunities than standard public education, presenting its investments as successful interventions in children’s futures.
Another ad from 1974 features a young Black woman positioned with a camera in a photo over the headline, “I’m determined to get where I want to go.” As the ad goes on to explain, “Janine will get where she wants to go. Because of her attitude. She’s eager to work. And to take advantage of the available opportunities. Like those provided by the businesses and foundations (Mobil Foundation among them) that fund the Jobs for Youth Summer Work Scholarship Program.”Footnote 77 Like the ad that featured the High School Service Program, this ad highlights the work ethic of young students who are eager to participate in a burgeoning economy, and whose opportunity to do so relies on Mobil’s generosity and, underlying it, continued growth and profitability. The ad represents Janine as embodying her own economic risk; it applauds her responsible entrepreneurialization of the self while praising private enterprise for sustaining the promise of equal opportunity in place of economic equality.Footnote 78 The emphasis on young people of color in many of these ads does important work eliding both the relationship between free market capitalism and economic injustice and papering over the disproportionate effects of fossil fuel-induced environmental racism on Black communities, then and now.
This framing of private enterprise as the solution to government inefficacy similarly accompanied Mobil’s approach to welfare. Mobil endeavored to position social programs—and the well-being of the poor—as dependent on the unimpeded success of the free market. While it never publically opposed welfare programs wholesale, Mobil argued that social programs for the poor were the province of corporate sponsorship rather than government. This approach aligned with a neoliberal emphasis on charitable giving rather than economic redistribution as a solution to structural forms of inequality, particularly as inequality maps onto race and gender. This is summed up in a 1972 advertorial: “Partly because of its ability to adapt—which is simply another word for responsive change—private business remains the most productive element in our society and on balance the best allocator of resources.”Footnote 79 In a 1975 “Business Roundtable” feature, Mobil argued for a “pay-the-piper principle,” suggesting that, in the context of the regulation of the oil industry, citizens failed to consider the economic costs of environmental regulations—“In the final analysis, the bill lands in your lap.” Yet, they contended, “somehow we seem to abandon this logic when we venture upon ‘social goals’—from poverty programs to health care to aid to education,” advocating for a more moderate approach, they argued, “in setting each new social goal, we, as the people who ultimately pay, must ask ourselves: Are the benefits worth the costs?”Footnote 80 Mobil reaffirmed this premise in a 1976 advertorial, contending, “The social programs our country has developed—Social Security, Medicare, Aid to Dependent Children, child nutrition and school lunches, housing for the elderly, to name a few—are among the best in the world despite their flaws and inefficiencies, which can be corrected. But if we as a people unduly inhibit economic growth in the private sector, the United States will not long be able to afford such programs on anything like the present scale. It is just that simple.”Footnote 81 The ad, however, is short on an explanation of exactly how Mobil’s uninhibited growth materially functions to benefit the social programs they reference. Less than a month later, an advertorial entitled “Social mobility or class warfare” similarly emphasized that restrictions of economic growth came at the greatest cost to the most marginalized:
If it becomes clear to everyone that the economic pie isn’t going to get appreciably bigger, every group will begin fighting for a larger piece of that static pie. Women, blacks and other racial minorities, and young people of all backgrounds will be the hardest hit. College graduates will find job-hunting even tougher. More and more of them will have to take jobs lower in the economic scale. This will further squeeze every minority and everybody else. Rising social strife can create a backlash against efforts toward cleaner air and water and toward the funding of health services and education…Economic growth is the last, best hope for the poor and for all the rest of us. Sheer distribution of income cannot do the job. We must create a steadily larger income pie.Footnote 82
In this zero-sum game, Mobil insisted its own profitability was essential to the security not just of the very environmental regulations it campaigned against, but also to the most vulnerable classes of Americans. Tying its own interests to those of children and marginalized groups, Mobil participated in constructions of cultures of privatization which saw deregulation and privatization as means of achieving, rather than undermining, social and economic equality.
Sponsoring Children’s Education on the “Petroleum Broadcasting Service”Footnote 83
The reinvigoration of Mobil’s Public Affairs Program in the 1970s expanded beyond print media to television. Television sponsorship became a prominent platform for private corporations seeking to address consumer constituencies in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 84 In early 1970, the Children’s Television Workshop, responsible for Sesame Street (1969-) and, later, The Electric Company (1971–7), recognized the need for business and industry support of educational public television. From the start, CTW founders argued that educational television suffered from structural limitations on its funding in both production and distribution, leaving it on unequal terms with commercial television.Footnote 85 The founders of CTW nonetheless insisted that Sesame Street could serve a vital social role of making early childhood education accessible and working to lift “disadvantaged” children out of poverty.Footnote 86 In comments before Senate hearings on the Public Broadcasting Act (S. 1242) in 1969, CTW Executive Director Joan Ganz Cooney expressed the potential of CTW programs to support young children’s learning gains in the years before formal education begins, a determination based on recent research which found that, “There is no ground for believing that a child’s academic fate is sealed by his seventh birthday…[However] In terms of sheer economy, it can be shown that the earlier the investment in systematic intellectual development is begun, the higher the rate of return.”Footnote 87 Cooney describes how CTW’s programming would act as a stopgap measure in the absence of state funded preschool:
Because these studies pointed to the fact that America may be literally squandering its most precious natural resources by ignoring the development of the intellectual capability of its young, a number of opinion leaders…began calling for formal schooling for all children at age four, at public expense. While the reaction was laudable, the economic realities of such a suggestion were—and are—fearsome. One estimate said it would cost nearly $3 billion to add the several million children to the school rolls—not including the cost of building classrooms to handle them.Footnote 88
It was in this context that the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and U.S. Office of Education moved to fund “a unique joint experiment to determine whether the medium of television…can be effective in teaching preschool children.”Footnote 89 As Heather Hendershot notes, although CTW founders never positioned Sesame Street as an alternative to broad-scale school reform, the limited cost of Sesame Street—which, its founders argued, could be financed for as little as a penny per child per day—appeared as a “comparatively cheap alternative to structural school reform.”Footnote 90 Initially planned as a two-year experiment, CTW had an initial budget of $8 million, “with participation on a 50-50 basis by public and private sources.Footnote 91 In March 1970, Bob Hatch, the program’s public relations account executive, sent letters to potential corporate backers, outlining the various forms of support required to enable the series to reach its intended audience, including billboard ads in inner-city neighborhoods, subsidy of utility bill and welfare check inserts, and grants to support utilization of Sesame Street among target demographics.Footnote 92 Such fundraising directives demonstrate key tensions in how Sesame Street envisioned its audience and purpose, often conflating poverty with Blackness and poor Black communities with inner-cities; Black community organizers like Dorothy Pitman Hughes, for example, criticized CTW’s professed efforts to alleviate Black poverty as a strategy to win grants and support.Footnote 93 By June 1970, Mobil Oil had stepped in as a corporate sponsor with “long range interest” in supporting CTW.Footnote 94
During this period, Mobil was most well-known for its sponsorship of PBS’s Masterpiece Theater, with primarily British and historical fiction series carrying a connotation of high culture to public television. This sponsorship has been identified by scholars as well as Mobil itself as core to the company’s public relations success in the 1970s and onward, with one scholar nicknaming the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the network of stations on which Masterpiece aired, the “Petroleum Broadcasting Service.”Footnote 95 Alongside this more famous sponsorship, in the 1970s, Sesame Street and The Electric Company became noted components of what one ad called “The Mobil Season,” a full line-up of Mobil-sponsored series and specials.Footnote 96 Sponsorship of CTW series in the early 1970s offered Mobil a different kind of visibility than its sponsorship of adult programming. Whereas Masterpiece Theater was intended to appeal to elite consumers, Sesame Street was designed with an explicit goal of equalizing opportunity to access to early childhood education. Sesame Street, which originated during an era of children’s television reform activism wherein groups such as Action for Children’s Television sought greater regulation of commercial television as degrading to children, gained an early reputation as an outlier in production and content.Footnote 97 The series promoted itself as the “first time that television has been used for some kind of socially useful purpose,” and was recognized as “epitomiz[ing] programming free of commercials.”Footnote 98 For Mobil, support for public television programming earned public favor that could be translated to political approval; as one PR official described, “These programs build enough acceptance to allow us to get tough on substantive issues.”Footnote 99 Critical public relations scholars Maria I. Espinoza and Melissa Aronczyk have noted that PBS’s status as public, noncommercial television transitively offered legitimacy to Mobil, such that Mobil’s voice could be “perceived as public and noncommercial.”Footnote 100 In its sponsorship of public television, therefore, Mobil avoided charges of commercialism and instead claimed to act as benefactor of the public good, an assertion that was bolstered by its explicit appeal to investing in “disadvantaged” children and their educational—and therefore, economic—futures.
Mobil’s relationship with CTW began with its underwriting of free copies of Sesame Street Magazine, a publication including games, cut-outs, and illustrated features that was intended to complement the series and reinforce children’s learning.Footnote 101 The magazine’s distribution was made free to a large disadvantaged population and by subscription to those who can afford it.Footnote 102 Mobil proposed distributing copies from its filling stations directly, noting that Mobil had more inner-city gas stations than any other oil company.Footnote 103 As a condition, they asked that CTW announce on the air where the publication could be obtained, with reference to Mobil stations, while making it clear that no purchase would be necessary.Footnote 104 In its promotion of the partnership to station owners, Mobil framed the magazine distribution as “a chance to perform an important community service at no cost to you or your neighbors” and an opportunity to “build good will at your station,” expounding, “Fifteen stations in the Watts area of Los Angeles are participating in the program. Your inner-city neighbors will appreciate that you are trying to help their children and will drive in for free copies.”Footnote 105 An ad announcing Mobil’s funding of the magazine with an illustration of two toddlers, one white and one Black, encouraged readers to pick up a copy and provided a list of distribution centers.Footnote 106 Next to its logo at the bottom of the page was a sign off in Sesame Street fashion—“Free Sesame Street Magazines are brought to you as a public service by the letters m, o, b, i, l.”Footnote 107
As announced at an October 1970 news release, Mobil’s grant of $250,000 would cover the cost of a total of five million giveaway copies of the four issues of the Magazine to be printed alongside the 1970–1 broadcast season; Mobil, in turn, would receive credit via a cover blurb for all of the English language giveaways of the first issue of the season.Footnote 108 According to CTW, the circulation of the first issue (2.4 million) would rank it 20th among the nation’s magazines were it a commercial publication and would make it the highest circulating children’s magazine.Footnote 109 In an accompanying statement from the founder and president of CTW, Joan Ganz Cooney remarked, “Mobil Oil…has demonstrated a sense of community concern and social awareness in the finest sense of those qualities…We also share and admire their optimism for the youth of America.”Footnote 110
Mobil’s sponsorship was praised beyond CTW’s leadership. In a letter addressed to Mobil, one writer from Olean, New York attested, “I have been a Mobil credit card holder for ten years and have always been pleased with your products and services. I just want to thank you for providing the funds that enabled the Sesame Street Magazine, to be distributed to kindergarteners in my community.”Footnote 111 Another letter, written on behalf of Robla Preschool in Sacramento, California, thanked Mobil for the magazine booklets, remarking, “We, in the field of education, appreciate receiving material of this nature from the private enterprise segment of our society.”Footnote 112 Alongside this praise, Mobil received letters from individual parents, public school librarians and teachers from across the country seeking copies.Footnote 113
While sponsoring the CTW, Mobil also ran attention-grabbing advertisements in the New York Times attesting to the need for private sponsorship of public educational programming. One ad, from 1971, features multiracial children donning graduation caps and gowns, alongside the headline, “After Sesame Street, what?”Footnote 114 The ad announced the introduction of The Electric Company, a literacy education series created by CTW for children who had aged out of Sesame Street. Another promotion ran under the headline, “Why America needs another Electric Company,” and described the program’s goal of tackling illiteracy as “generat[ing] a different kind of power.”Footnote 115
An ad running in 1974 featured the aforementioned image of an endangered Big Bird, described “financial pains” experienced by the CTW amidst substantial funding cuts.Footnote 116 The ad emphasized both the demonstrable needs of the workshop, which reached nine million children, and the responsibility of corporations to contribute. It then highlighted Mobil’s role in keeping Sesame Street and The Electric Company on the air, “So we are giving $100,000 to help keep the shows on the air. And we’re asking other corporations to lend a hand too. Put your money where the kids are. Help keep Big Bird on the big tube.”Footnote 117
Mobil’s sponsorship of CTW was not universally viewed as a disinterested contribution to the public good. In a Newsday editorial, for example, columnist Patrick Owens described the “Endangered Species” ad as arresting but contended that its message rang false, under the headline, “This Oil Company Needs Help; Send Money.”Footnote 118 Owens recounted a friend who reacted by writing to Mobil’s president, parodying the ad, “Big Car looks healthy enough, just ask any of the 9,000,000 kids who sit for hours in the back of their parents’ car; in lines, waiting to purchase gasoline. This time could be spent watching Sesame Street.”Footnote 119 Owens, separately, asked a Mobil publicist how much Mobil was spending to advertise its $100,000 gift to CTW. He learned that Mobil had spent $55,843 in promotion of the donation in Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, Time, The New York Times, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. The publicist, however, framed the campaign as an effort to encourage other corporations to make similar contributions. This rationale was echoed by Mobil’s chairman, Rawleigh Warner, Jr. in “An Open Letter to American Business,” which kept up the messaging that represented Big Bird and his friends as “endangered species” needing rescue. The letter asserted that “foundations and government money helped launch the shows through the Children’s Television Workshop, but their funds are designed to start projects like these, not sustain them.”Footnote 120 A similar letter drafted by Herbert Schmertz specified that the U.S. Office of Education had needed to cut its support to $3 million for the 1974–5 season.Footnote 121 Warner concluded with a call for other corporations to join Mobil in its funding support, signing off, as in the ad, with the call to “Put your money where the kids are.”Footnote 122
And, it seems, Children’s Television Workshop agreed with Mobil’s framing of its role. Joan Ganz Cooney, in a letter addressed to Schmertz, wrote to this effect, “I have been trying to reach you to tell you how grateful we are for the Mobil gift and ad campaign,” adding that IBM had inquired while General Telephone & Electric Corporation had already sent its own gift.Footnote 123 As Abby Whitaker describes, the 1974 CTW funding crisis significantly altered CTW’s reliance on government investment as it increasingly sought to balance its reputation for noncommercialism while depending on commercial partnerships.Footnote 124 Consequently, in 1974 CTW moved toward “neoliberal thinking as executives moved away from imagining Sesame Street as a public good that should be funded by the federal government, and prioritized thinking of itself as a self-supported nonprofit with Sesame Street being its most lucrative commodity.”Footnote 125 In this way, corporate backers contributed to CTW’s privatization while furnishing its reputation as supporting the public good.
Mobil’s relationship with CTW extended into the late 1970s, including its support for the initial series production of the Gilded Age social history Best of Families, which ran for one season in 1977.Footnote 126 Mobil agreed early on to financially back the first season, yet correspondence between Schmertz and CTW leaders demonstrates friction in their working relationship. In March 1977, Bob Hatch, then CTW’s Vice President for Public Affairs, described Mobil advertising support as “a problem and an opportunity at the same time,” explaining, “Mobil will doubtless do some advertising in a unilateral way and for their own corporate purposes.”Footnote 127 He then laid out Mobil’s approach to public relations as uncompromising, noting that Mobil had strict guidelines for the display of underwriters and insisted on writing its own ads.Footnote 128 Referring broadly to “the Mobil problem,” Hatch suggested that a pattern of disagreements and last minute revisions had made the partnership untenable, noting it would need to be managed by higher-ups thereafter.Footnote 129 These disagreements make clear the underlying tensions between Mobil and CTW; just as CTW staff recognized that Mobil’s contributions helped to keep CTW programming afloat, they understood how the partnership underwrote Mobil’s own reputational interests. Ultimately, Mobil’s public-facing alignment with Sesame Street and educational television for “disadvantaged children” enabled the company to present itself as invested in public goods as they became increasingly privatized.
“Petro-Pedagogy” in the ClassroomFootnote 130
A January 1973 Mobil advertorial opened with a set of questions: “You being gouged on prices? Just how much do leading U.S. manufacturing corporations make on each dollar of sales?” According to Mobil, “if you guess zero, you’ll be a lot closer than most people.” Like many of its communications in this period, this ad argued that Americans mistakenly misperceived the extent of the oil industry’s profits, in part due to a pervasive anti-business atmosphere. The solution to this perceived “widespread economic illiteracy,” they proposed, was education: “We teach young people everything from Latin grammar to Japanese flower-arranging, but virtually nothing about our own economic system. (The economic system that is, in fact, so productive that it has made possible the most widespread public education in the history of the world.) The result of this curricular anomaly is that teachers and their students tend to have the same lack of understanding.”Footnote 131
In this ad, Mobil portrays its public relations platform as a pedagogical tool to “explain to people just how well the system works,” yet also gestures more concretely to an already unfolding program of industry interventions in public education curricula.Footnote 132 As Elizabeth Fones-Wolf charts, corporate leaders endeavored to influence education beginning in the early 1940s, and increasingly after WWII, as part of a larger effort to influence cultural values.Footnote 133 Drawing on advertising tools, business leaders promoted the economic value of education as “akin to capital invested in a business enterprise.”Footnote 134 Frank W. Abrams of Standard Oil and the Committee for Economic Development, for example, regarded education as essentially linked to economic productivity and growth, contending, if “our hope of an advancing American economy involves reducing costs, increasing individual productivity, and devising better ways of doing things, we must consider that we have a major interest in helping American education.”Footnote 135
In support of this initiative, corporations developed teaching materials as a means of directly communicating with teachers and students.Footnote 136 The production and distribution of business-sponsored teaching materials, including booklets, films, lesson plans, and comic strips, proliferated during the postwar period.Footnote 137 Described in Public Relations Journal in 1957, industry-sponsored materials “came of age” in the postwar period.Footnote 138 Partnerships between industry and educational organizations, in particular the National Science Teachers Association, resulted in the production of standards for sponsored materials, which included the following tenets: “1. Keep ‘Advertising’ to a Minimum, 2. Avoid Unfair Slanting or Bias, 3. Plan Materials to Fit the Curriculum, 4. Keep Materials Easy to Read, and 5. Make Them Interesting.”Footnote 139 According to the article, science was identified as a particularly fertile terrain for partnerships due to the rapidity of new developments and the wide reach of the subject among students as schools increasingly encouraged careers in science and engineering.Footnote 140 Along these same lines, a New York Times article describing the trend in 1959 noted that “an estimated one in five major corporations” supplied teaching aids, viewing this distribution as “both a responsibility and an opportunity” to connect with future consumers and “build a favorable corporate image.”Footnote 141 As the distribution of sponsored materials grew, their use in classrooms became normalized as a means to supplement tight school budgets and keep curriculum up to date. By the late 1950s, a publication from the National Science Teachers Association contended “teachers and administrators have greater confidence in industry and in the motives behind industry’s offerings to schools.” Taking for granted that the materials were “to some extent motivated by self-interest,” business was increasingly understood to have “a real interest in the welfare of all the people.”Footnote 142
Responding to the anti-business climate intensified by environmentalists and consumer protection activists, industry-sponsored educational materials once again proliferated in the 1970s. In 1979, Sheila Harty, a researcher at the Ralph Nader-founded Center for Study of Responsive Law, published an analysis of what she termed “instructional advertising” in Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools. In it, Harty offered an explanation for why schools, particularly at this historical moment, were so susceptible to industry propaganda. As Harty described, this receptivity is built into education’s funding structure; with most of the annual educational budget going to salaries, utilities, and food services, teachers rely on free print and audio-visual materials to keep up with new curricular demands.Footnote 143 This was particularly true in subjects like nutrition, consumer economics, energy, and environmental science, which Harty characterized as “areas of vested interest for utilities, manufacturers, and other corporate enterprises.”Footnote 144 While companies could benefit from directly promoting products, Harty argued that materials often went “beyond the product,” to express political ideologies.Footnote 145
According to Harty, industry-sponsored energy education efforts often focused on elementary education, with materials including films, comic books, and cartoon graphics. Harty framed many of the materials, and the free market values they promoted, as a response to the Powell Memorandum. With this broader politicization of the business community as a backdrop, the fossil fuel and broader energy industry’s emphasis on educating students about free enterprise as much as energy in this period becomes more directly comprehensible. Harty noted that films and television series are especially useful to industries looking to reach students in the classroom due to the minimal evaluation of the educational integrity of the materials by comparison to textbooks.Footnote 146 An educational film called Solar Energy, one part of The Capitalist Energy Primer multi-media package, seemed initially to be supportive of solar energy, and included testimonials of solar energy users, before framing it as unreliable and expensive, an instance of “big hopes and dreams” that were neither practical nor rational.Footnote 147 Instead, the film proposed that the “future depends on a healthy economy today” which will come from “the oil and petroleum industry,” while “coal and nuclear power will prime the energy pump for the future until alternative energy sources are possible.”Footnote 148 Such materials supported the self-presentation of the oil industry as an engine of economic growth necessary to American progress and welfare.
Access to sponsored educational materials was facilitated through the publication of resources like the Educators Grade Guide to Free Teaching Aids series, published annually between 1955 through 1996.Footnote 149 The editors of the books framed the series as a source of cooperation between industry and education. Within the guides, industry materials were promoted alongside materials distributed by government and foundations. For example, in the first edition to include environmental education in 1970, the guide included materials from environmental organizations and government services—a pamphlet on air pollution from the National Wildlife Foundation, a conservation activity booklet from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and a series of texts entitled “The World Around You” from The Garden Club of America.Footnote 150 These texts were set alongside materials sponsored by oil corporations and industry associations, including a booklet entitled “Conserving Our Wildlife” from Standard Oil Company of California, a packet of charts and maps entitled “Oil Producing Industry in Your State” from the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and a booklet on environmental conservation efforts in the oil industry entitled “Protecting Our Resources” from the American Oil Company.Footnote 151 Such positioning framed the oil industry as a worthy participant in environmental education, as well as a socially conscious actor in environmental politics. Although it was not the sole source of sponsored materials, private industry possessed resources with which to overwhelm competing voices.Footnote 152
Other sponsored materials included a Union Oil Company of California booklet entitled “Petroleum and the Environment,” which used comics to highlight the role of the petroleum industry in combatting pollution; several American Petroleum Institute sponsored texts entitled “Facts About Oil,” “Earth Science and Energy,” and “Chemistry and Petroleum” which included how-to experiments and demonstrations; and Phillips Petroleum’s “The Magic World of Petrochemicals” booklet, which detailed the role of “modern magicians” (petrochemical scientists and engineers) in producing football helmets, toys, medicines, and “all those thousands of fabulous things that come out of this new world and make your own life more enjoyable.”Footnote 153 Some materials addressed the oil crises of the 1970s directly, such as Amoco Oil Company’s “Living With Energy” package including a twenty-six minute film, lesson plan, and activity sheets that promised to guide students through “the complex dimensions of the energy problem” to which there were no “easy, clearcut answers,” or a brochure telling the story of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline sponsored by Alyeska Pipeline Service Co.Footnote 154 In 1971, Phillips Petroleum Company, Standard Oil Company of California, and Shell Oil Company each individually produced booklets claiming to tell the “Story of Oil and Gas,” “The Story of Oil,” and “The Story of Petroleum,” respectively.Footnote 155 The booklet provided by Phillips, for example, presented the narrative as an “adventure tale” and positioned oil as having an inextricable role in American progress; as the promotional copy notes, “We should be glad that people went on this adventure, for both oil and gas have helped so much to give us our wonderful way of life.”Footnote 156 Such materials celebrated the oil industry’s essentially positive and seemingly fixed role in American life, contributing to a larger fossil fuel commonsense while making it relevant to young students.
As Americans experienced the second oil crisis of the decade, a renewed emphasis on “energy education” offered the fossil fuel industry a foothold in classrooms nationwide.Footnote 157 Amid the 1979 oil crisis, teachers were encouraged to prepare themselves to teach the new field of energy education. The New York Times reported in November 1979 that “more than 1.5 million energy-related booklets were distributed to teachers by the Department of Energy in the last 12 months,” as part of a “multimillion-dollar national effort.” According to Dr. Helenmarie Hofman, associate director of the Project for an Energy-Enriched Curriculum at the National Science Teachers Association, energy education was intended to “infuse” all areas of the existing curriculum. Hofman suggested that, despite existing demands on teachers, there remained interest in teaching the subject: “Teachers who’ve had to cope with Career Ed, Drug Ed and Sex Ed don’t need Energy Ed, too, but they do want to teach it.”Footnote 158 Another educator, assistant superintendent for instruction in a public school system, noted that in addition to this practical interest, the new emphasis on energy education was due in part to pressure from state-level Departments of Education and the Federal Department of Energy. In some cases, educational programs focused on reduction of school energy use, home conservation education, and renewable, and especially solar, energy projects. Others sought to empower students to learn about the legislative process in social studies classes, where lessons including “How an Energy Bill Becomes Law” enabled students to learn about the relationship of energy systems to democratic power.Footnote 159
Yet in other cases, the emergent field of energy education was shaped by oil industry interests and counter-environmental values. In 1980, a Joint Congressional Resolution initiated the founding of The National Energy Education Development Project, a fossil fuel industry-backed organization which, beginning in 1980, began providing free lesson plans and curricular materials. Alongside this initiative, Jimmy Carter designated March 21, 1980 as National Energy Education Day (NEED).Footnote 160 Among others, initial corporate underwriters included utility, petrochemical, and oil companies including Mobil Oil.Footnote 161 Upon its founding, NEED offered schools annual memberships for $25 per year that enabled access to a catalog of educational materials, focusing on classroom activity guides for teachers.Footnote 162 As part of the industry’s ongoing intervention in the education system, the initiative was intended not only to reach young students as future workers, but also to promote particular ideas about American economic and energy futures.Footnote 163 Oil industry interventions into public education such as these promoted the values of the private market, aligning the best interest of future generations to the objectives of capital.
Conclusion
During the 1970s, the oil industry positioned itself as a socially responsible member of society, promoting its investments in social welfare and the public good—emblematized through children and families—in order to resist government regulation and sustain its capacity for profit and growth. Presenting itself as aligned with the interests of “disadvantaged” children, Mobil and the oil industry more broadly participated in privatization and deregulation, thus aiding in ushering in the neoliberal politics of the family which would take hold in this period. The public relations and sponsorship activities undertaken by Mobil in the 1970s signal changes in political economy and its cultures to come in the following decades. In its 1982 report evaluating the efficacy of its public affairs program, Mobil described its intention to “increase our corporate giving in areas where the poor directly benefit, responding to the President’s [Ronald Reagan’s] appeal to business to help in areas where Federal aid has been reduced or eliminated. This will be a very selective process in which we will seek out the effective, the visible, and the imaginative.”Footnote 164 While promoting private investment in children’s futures as a replacement for state administered redistribution of wealth, Mobil and its industry counterparts developed three primary venues of address.
In news media, specifically its widely remarked upon advertorial program, Mobil commented on prominent social issues, including education and welfare, advocated for particular policy ends, including environmental and market deregulation, and promoted its investments in children’s economic futures. These ads often specifically instrumentalized images or reference to Black children and families, suggesting Mobil’s commitment to racial equality while undermining its material basis. Through its sponsorship of the Children’s Television Workshop, Mobil gained credibility as a caring corporation, encouraging private investment in public educational television and naturalizing the role of private corporations in public goods. And, finally, Mobil and other oil companies produced sponsored educational materials which became a crucial resource in public education. Geared especially toward energy education, environmental science, and economics, the oil industry benefited from existing frailties in the public education system, wherein sponsored educational materials became a practical tool for under-resourced schools and teachers. In addition to towing the industry line regarding environmental “externalities” and the lack of industry accountability, these resources aimed to influence future generations by shoring up support for free market values.
Together, these petro-pedagogical forms participated in undermining state projects of economic redistribution, obstructing environmental protections, and exacerbating the “disadvantaging” conditions of the very children the industry claimed to protect. Within this equation, the oil industry portrayed its fate as tied to that of future generations while obscuring the extent to which the futures of these same generations would be made more precarious by the very cultures of privatization the industry underwrote.
Open access
