A short film made in 1951 showed the failed uses of petroleum by “primitive” preindustrial societies to American audiences. Alongside Babylonians and Chinese were half-naked and feather-adorned Native Americans—actually, white men dressed as Indians—who used the precious substance as skin lubricant. Such unworldly crudeness was set against the exalted technological breakthroughs of modern industry, which had discovered the true value of oil as energy and thus gave proof of mankind’s “unconquerable urge to improve his lot” (133).
The film was jointly produced by the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Sinclair Refining Company. In its combination of the tropes of “resource primitivism” and “extractative supremacy,” as well as the close tie that it reveals between government and business, this piece of Technicolor propaganda encapsulates the unsettling larger story that Black tells about Interior and its foreign policy. Because the United States had harnessed the power of oil and other...