Red Soil, White Oil: Petroleum and White Supremacy in the Progressive-Era United States

Abstract

“Red Soil, White Oil” explores how white settlers and federal officials in early-twentieth-century Indian Territory and Oklahoma erected a regime of petroleum extraction that undermined the property rights of Native Americans, encouraged dispossessive violence towards Indians and Black people, and situated oil as a source of modern energy that supposedly served industrial society best if it was controlled by white property owners and their representative governments. Oil abundance served as a means through which white landowners, businessmen, and government officials produced an extraction-based system of racial capitalism that relegated Indigenous, Black, and non-white mixed-race peoples to an inferior class of propertied citizenship. Whites insisted, through measures both legal and extralegal, that non-white peoples would squander petroleum resources or use oil wealth to undermine racial hierarchy, and that therefore oil land and royalties should be transferred or seized in the name of white civilization. These commitments to white supremacy and racial capitalism bled into petroleum’s labor regime, as oil companies reserved high-paying drilling work for white men. White oilmen also sought to build a resource-management state within Oklahoma’s borders that protected small-scale, “independent” oil producers from the domination of nefarious “outside” monopolies and the imposition of the federal government. Petroleum’s central role in the history of the twentieth-century American West and the broader United States grew out of the efforts of white oilmen and their allies to build market power and political strength through the tenets of racial supremacy and settler self-rule.