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Energy and the Federal Government: Fossil Fuel Policies, 1900–1946. By John G. Clark. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. xxiii + 511 pp. Maps, illustrations, charts, tables, notes, and index. $39.95

With the publication of Energy and the Federal Government, John Clark has made a substantial contribution to the literature in the critical area of federal resource management and fossil fuel policies during the first half of the twentieth century. One might have wished only that the work treated the years after the Second World War as well, even if the research base would not have been as sound as for the pre-1946 years. This study is remarkable for the thoroughness of its research in the National Archives, presidential libraries, and private papers. It is likely that the completeness of the research and the detail in which the findings are presented will make this the standard reference work in the field, supplementing the existing work by Sam Schurr, Gerald Nash, and Alfred Eckes, among others. Clark treats systematically and lucidly the development of government policy in the area of oil, gas, and coal from the beginning of the main antitrust campaigns at the turn of the century through the immediate post-Second World War coal crises. Especially in the case of coal, the study provides a thorough and objective account of developments in the area of labor relations, which have been particularly volatile, outlines the general business conditions in each period, and traces the evolution of regulatory mechanisms. In common with previous commentators, Clark portrays the creation of coordinating and regulatory agencies during the First World War as especially promising, if policymakers in the postwar era had been able to sustain momentum rather than returning to a period of voluntarism in the 1920s and early 1930s. The lack of progress in the development of policy can be attributed in part to the ideological orientation of a series of Republican administrations, the failures of Congress to show more than limited initiative, and the business community's refusal to go beyond narrow self-interest. Ironically, as Clark illustrates so effectively, one of the few issues on which coal industry operators agreed was their opposition to government regulation. Promising as wartime policies may have been, nonetheless, Clark shows that agencies such as the United States Fuel Administration never threatened private-sector control and did not share the opposition to such practices as oil pooling and establishment of refinery quotas, which the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department attempted to undercut. Interagency conflicts may not have been the major reason for energy policies to emerge as more decisive, but they certainly played a part in peacetime and war, as much of the literature on the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Second World War suggests.