Thanks so much for coming. It seems particularly appropriate given the subject of todays lecture to encourage you to pretend as if you are in church and to move in, scoot in if you would, to give folks who are, not necessarily late arriving, but people who are fashionably on time room to sit. I should say that this answers an ageold question for me. Which is, if there is anything that can depress the turnout for a lecture, i think we have the answer. Which is no. It was raining cats and dogs a few minutes ago. And i wondered, will there be people there . And sure enough, here you are. I tip my cap to all of you, you are in for a treat this evening. My name is andy graybill. I am the director of the clement center. I would like to thank the many people who helped make this evening possible. Thanks to jeff, who directs the cph. Especially for those people who have coordinated all of the logistics. During my first semester at the clement center, we received an anonymous 500,000 gift in honor of the governor who had died earlier that year. The donor wanted to hear our ideas first about how we put those funds to use before they were transmitted. Naturally, i proposed that this money be applied to my mortgage. [laughter] he passed. The benefactor liked much more the idea that we use the money generated by this endowment to convert one of the junior postdoctoral fellowship lines to one that would support an invited senior scholar. Who would cost more and they are harder to pry away from their home institutions. With that settled, i turned to my associate director for suggestions about who we might target as the inaugural recipient of this senior fellowship. She immediately proposed darren dochuk, who was hard at work with what sounds like a fascinating book about oil, religion, and politics. Right up our alley given its southwestern focus. Because of other commitments, darren could only join us for the spring 2013 semester. But we loved having him with us in part because of his winning personality. You will get a taste of that in a moment, but especially so we could lay some claim to the book that resulted from the time that he spent here. It is a true pleasure to welcome him back to smu this evening having come full circle since he has finished that book. He grew up in alberta. Listen for the vowels. You will know what i mean. He will probably murder me for saying this, but he started his College Career as a scholarship volleyball player at George Mason University in fairfax, virginia. He decided that the mishigos of the d. C. Area was too much for him. I am making that up. But for some reason he returned home to his native canada. In vancouveris ba which he followed up with a phd from the university of notre dame. He started his teaching career in the midwest at purdue before a brief stint as a associate professor in humanities. Proving that you can go home again, darren moved to notre dame five years ago where he is an associate professor of history. His first book, published in 2011, won several major awards including the john h. Dunning prize from the american historical association, and one from the organization of american historians. A truly wonderful book. I have used it so many times in teaching in undergraduate and graduate classes that i have gotten free copies. Im not going to give them away to you, but i have free copies. I will leave it at that. He has coedited a volume that emerged at a symposium called sunbelt rising. The politics of space, place, and region, published in 2011. That was a big year for darren. His research has been supported by the American Council society, National Endowment for the humanities, the american philosophical society, and the rockefeller foundation. He is here tonight to discuss his latest book, anointed with oil how christianity and crude made modern america, published last year by basic books, to great acclaim. Following his lecture, he will be happy to take your questions and sign books which are available for purchase. Right outside and off to the left is a place where darren can sign them for you. So please join me in welcoming darren dochuk. [applause] mr. Dochuk thanks, andy. And thanks to jeff, rhonda, and to ruthann, and to the center for southwest studies as well as the center for president ial history for cosponsoring this event. As you heard, the support of smu over the years has been tremendous and i am grateful and it is nice to be back on campus in dallas even with this unusual weather. Something i am used to though, having spent a good part of my life in vancouver, british columbia. It is a privilege to be with you today, especially because we are on an oil patch. I spent a good amount of my time over the last few months talking to audiences on the oil patch , whether it is down in the southwest or in alberta, canada. Places it turns out where there is just a bit of oil and a bit of religion. So it tends to be a good conversation. And i am looking forward to that conversation later. It is also really special to be here quite simply because i spent so much time as a fellow, as andy just pointed out, really doing the first wave of research for this project. And during that productive four or five months here, i was able to pour through the papers here at smu. The petroleum pamphlet collection, which is just tremendous, but also do some quick trips to other archives around the state. Again, no surprise that texas looms so large in my story. But being introduced along the way to so many colorful characters. Someone who is a cross from Daniel Plainview to there will be blood to the apostle played by robert duval. Someone who is absolutely convinced that he could prophesy where oil existed and despite the efforts of geologists to thwart his advance, sure enough, came through in january 1901, predicting the site where it would erupt, putting texas on the map. Someone who saw himself as working with the favor and in favor of the divine. Or a geologist such as William Fletcher cummins, a geologist of a slightly different generation. This is a methodist circuit preacher who during his travels on horseback in the southeast portion of the state during the 1880s and 1890s, would look for oil. And sure enough, predict often where it was going to be. And then would move into mexico to serve as a geologist. Someone who combined his vocations as a cleric and a geologist. Or jake simmons, a very compelling figure, the most prominent africanamerican wildcat oilman who got rich in east texas in the 1930s and used his wealth to build an empire. But one that was also philanthropic, using his money to promote civil rights. He is also partially responsible for opening nigeria and ghana to Oil Exploration in the 1950s and 1960s. And others, like this very compelling figure, someone who wore her face on her sleeve as well. Very committed to a social gospel of human uplift and equality. It is she who, as you probably know or should know, would be responsible for taking down standard oil, forcing, really compelling the government to take apart the standard monopoly in 1911. This is all coming through her writing. Again, these are just a few of the characters that i got to know better at smu. Each individual saw oil as more than a material resource or commodity. To them, it was a gift of the divine and a vocational calling that transcended the base workings of business. Petroleum was their anointing by god and their call to uplift humanity. My goal in writing the book was to explore how it is that oil has long enraptured americans in such fashion, and how it has imprinted itself on the american soul with real, lasting, social and political consequences. For people certainly in the pulpits and pews, and also those beyond. Someone who recognized that oil was existential, even theological for americans, was president jimmy carter, his words were appropriate for opening this talk. In summer of 1979, carter delivered his infamous crisis of conscious speech, or his malaise speech. It was one of his most important addresses, as it came amid revolution in iran and a resultant Second Energy crisis. With dead seriousness, he pleaded for people to support his Energy Conservation agenda. But he also asked for more. As i was puttering to speak, he explained, i began to ask myself the same question that i now know has been troubling many of you. Why have we been not able to get together as a nation to resolve our Serious Energy problem . You can picture him slamming, gently, his fist on the desk. It is clear that the true problems of our nation are deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages. Deeper even than inflation or recession. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. In the days to come, he implored in conclusion, let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the american spirit. Those of you who are aware of carters career know that he spoke often on energy. In fact, he opened up his presidency in spring of 1977 with an energy program, at which time he said that kind of the fight for renewable energy, supplies, and new alternative sources amounted to the moral equivalent of war. And those who are aware of the 1979 crisis speech also know its evolution was uneven. Many of his advisers advised him against preaching and sermonizing to the people. They wanted him to show confidence. They wanted him to show that he had answers, not to draw them into a kind of despair over the moral or lack of moral fortitude of the nation at that time. But carter did not budge and went ahead anyway. And the main takeaways of the speech therefore were his alone. First, that the United States had confidence in itself and its global standing. An second, the crisis was not just energyrelated. It was a spiritual crisis as well. His speech pointed to a couple of my core questions. How did oil get grafted on to the soul of america and serve as a catalyst for its ambitions on a global stage, paving the way for what would be known as the American Century . And what happened and what did it mean for the nation when the confidence of an American Century fueled by big religion and big oil crumbled during the carter era . In an effort to address these and other queries related to the book, i want to offer a sample glimpse of a couple of facets of what i call a religious biography of oil. And im going to focus principally on the heart of the 20th century for the 1930s to the 1970s. I will begin by glancing at how some american powerbrokers, from the very beginning of the industry, envisioned the Petroleum Industry as essential to the rise of american political exceptionalism on an international stage, then i will cut to the local level, and move beyond altitude. And we will focus just on one, what might be familiar to one familiar oil patch which might be familiar to you, east texas in the 1930s. And i will finish by summarizing some of the political legacies of these crude awakenings in modern american. Petroleum achieved unprecedented status between the 1930s and 1970s, but it first captured on there because authority in the 19th century as the fuel and lubricant that would light cities. Spectacular in its arrival, democratic in its privileging of individual free labor, oil registered as modern americas lifeblood. Its discovery during the civil war and its role in setting the nations new economic course, its perceived Regenerative Properties for those on the civil war battlefield, as well as for a nation seeking healing. All of this underscored oils nature for a society on the rise. This is abundantly clear in the popular literature of the time. It is boilerplate for the american Petroleum Industry and also something that connected the property of oil and the materiality of it to religious allegory and dreams of american providence and destiny on an international stage. Everywhere it is to be met with, it lights the temples and mosques amid the ruins of babylon. It is the light of abrahams birthplace in damascus and burns in the grottos of nativity in bethlehem, and the cottage and the banks of the euphrates and the golden horn. It penetrated china and japan. It shed radiance over many a dark african waste. American petroleum is the true true cosmopolite. Omnipresent and omnipotent. Fulfilling its mission of lighting the whole universe. [laughter] bold, yes. Nothing cautious either about that. As much as u. S. Oil was mythologized or used as boilerplate, it also influenced godfearing individuals with real clout, whose shared vision of the future translated to real corporate structures and outcomes. Their efforts were evident in early generations in the oil industry, but they carried special weight as u. S. Influence spread globally in the 20th century. Two sons of missionaries serve as illustrations here. Consider the first picture above. This is henry luce, the famous publisher whose parents were missionaries in china, funded by the rockefellers. In february of 1941, luce used the pages of life magazine, which he owned, to beseech americans to recognize their status as protector of the free world and create the first American Century. The first great American Century, his term. Luce had tested this charge a month earlier in a talk at the American Petroleum institute. There, he praised oilmen for being the vanguards of americas expanded role. Having within you a dynamic spirit of freedom and enterprise and a genius for cooperation and organization, it follows inevitably that you did not stop at the frontier, for your sense of the roundness of the world, i salute you. Luce was especially enamored with Large Oil Corporations that were exploring for oil across the globe, and in the process, spreading modern technologies and knowhow. It was at this time that the seven sisters, as they would become known, derided as such, which included five u. S. Oil companies, gulf, texaco, standard new jersey or exxon, and standard new york mobile. This is the moment in which these companies were turning towards south america and the arabian peninsula, urged on by washington to discover new fields and secure americans hegemony before domestic reserves ran out. We have had several cycles of peak oil in the last 120 years. This is coming in the wake of fears of peak oil in the interwar period, anticipating what would come next as the Automobile Industry continued to expand in the postwar period. For luce, their corporate labors conjured a sense of limitless power, which, when harnessed by godfearing patriots, had the capacity to transform the world. He drew on metaphor to encourage his compatriots to use oil to fuel international advancement, with america at the head. Scholars have proved how the the nations the nations singular possession of petroleum served as the pillar of the American Century. But luce, the very architect of the term, suggested a religion of ecumenical outreach and Global Development be included as a twin column. A second individual does as well. William eddie, the son of presbyterian missionaries in the middle east, and in fact, his parents were among a generation of american missionaries that moved to beirut. There, they spread mission bases but also hospitals and schools, most famously American University in beirut. Beirut. Eddyed at princeton, went on to dartmouth. By the early 1940s, he was a man of protestant confidence to envisioned a new world constructed out of enchanting crude. 1940, while traveling, recruiting Financial Support for thechool, he lectured on power of god in the secular world, which implored laypeople to be the quote, shock troops of the church, and raise up each sector of the globe. You and i, he declared, you and i who believe in christendom are not doomed to weakness. We serve the only totalitarian king. We who follow christ need to cover ourselves with tolerance, reverence, and charity. And then wherever we walk, we shall find ourselves standing on holy ground. Within months, eddie was acting on this imperative. Serving as an officer for the office of strategic services. Eventually of course the cia, to survey arabia for subsurface crude, Gain Knowledge of its people and their faith in allah, and bring the u. S. Into union with this rising kingdom. Five years after claiming allegiance to a totalitarian and tolerant christianity, he oversaw a historic deal, pictured here before you, installing the u. S. In the region for good. Again, doing so truly committed to what he saw as a religious alliance, a moral alliance between a people who shared faith in monotheism and the book. His subsequent career testified to the potency of this liberal international vision. As a hired consultant for aramco, he promoted peace between western and saudi interests by way of mutual ambition and shared respect for the divine. Through aggressive proliferation of corporate promotion as well as practical instruction on how to live and labor in a land saturated with god and black gold, eddie not only wrapped aramco in a myth of capitalism and corporate benevolence, he also animated groundlevel operations on the drill sites and in the oil camps with the tenor of intercultural and ecumenical exchange. And one of the more, i think, fascinating lines of work that my research took me into was looking at the interior lives, the internal workings of aramco, especially in the 1940s through the 1960s. There, William Eddie and several other managers, many coming with missionary backgrounds, devised really a whole kind of institutional structure by which islam and protestantism and catholicism could kind of create a shared community, a shared knowledge of one another. For instance, they established the Arabian Affairs division and housed it with some of the of islam andars the world. This division was responsible for education and for creating a sense of internationalist ecumenical exchange. They also created secretively, because they were not allowed technically in this islamic country and this theocracy, morale groups with small groups of christian worship. And they did so of course, they called them morale groups because they could not call them what they really were, congregations and parishes. And again, its a system that proliferated