Truman Seizes Nation's Oil Industry

The state of TIAH

August 29th, 2006

in 1945, President Truman orders the Navy to seize control of the petroleum industry in order to keep a dispute between oil workers and management from endangering the ending of the war. With the military in charge, oil flows smoothly through the armed forces and around America, as well, and the country is very pleased in the change. When former oil industry executives come to President Truman after the war's end and ask him to return control of the industry back to them, he flatly refuses, saying, “Oil is a matter of national security, and the way you gentlemen use it is endangering the country.” He signs an executive order nationalizing the industry, which sparks protests from some die-hard free marketeers, but few others. The government-run oil business proves so successful that Truman and the Congress are able to lower taxes, which seals the public's approval behind the deal. When oil becomes a little harder to acquire, the government begins experimenting with alternative fuels, and by 1971, the nation is freed from having to use foreign oil deposits at all; America's natural isolationism then takes over, and the great nation withdraws from world affairs to concentrate on its own people.

in 1968, at the contentious Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was killed just as he approached the podium to accept his nomination as the party's presidential candidate. With memories of Bobby Kennedy's assassination fresh in many minds, the Democrats in the convention hall were out for blood, and severely beat the young man who shot Humphrey. Amid the chaos, Senator Gene McCarthy strode to the podium and appealed for calm from the delegates. His soothing words brought the party back from the brink of chaos, and, as Humphrey's assassin was led from the hall, they called out for McCarthy to lead the party in the fall election. A hasty series of votes gave the Minnesotan Senator enough delegates to secure the nomination, and he accepted with a tearful speech at 4AM. When this was broadcast on most morning news shows, America saw a new man from the one who had been forced out of the running earlier on in the year. President Johnson, who had been negotiating a peace treaty in Vietnam, secured it just in time to hand McCarthy victory in November against Republican Richard Nixon. McCarthy's economic policies, a combination of liberal and libertarian ideas, proved less effective than Johnson's, but he shone in foreign policy, setting America firmly on the side of peace in all matters. He negotiated an end to the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis at the end of his second term in 1975, and will probably be remembered most fondly for the cessation of the Cold War under his administration, when the Soviet Union pledged its friendship with the US at the announcement of the joint American-Soviet Moon Base Mission. With the two great nations tied together by the space race, the hostilities of the past faded away, and the world looked forward to a new era at America's bicentennial.

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