Troubled Oils

To the U.S. last week came a shock as profound as if the sun had suddenly gone into unexpected eclipse. In a third of the nation men & women of the great American automobile age awoke to find they could no longer buy gasoline. The automobiles in which they rode to work and pleasure, to school and market, were nearly as obsolete as a dinosaur.

The Office of Price Administration, the Office of the Petroleum Administrator, all the other Government agencies which are supposed to see that every U.S. citizen gets a reduced share of gasoline, but enough to carry on, had made an amazing discovery. Filling stations' tanks in the East were nearly empty. Out went an OPA order: in 17 Eastern States gasoline sales were stopped except to holders of commercial T cards, leaving about 7,000,000 other motorists high & dry.*

The result was three days of chaos. Then, as the filling-station tanks slowly filled again, OPA lifted the ban. Henceforth B and C cards were cut to three gallons a week instead of four, and it would be harder than ever to get these cards at all. But at least gasoline, infinitely more precious now than even Americans had realized, was being sold again.

Background for Drought. The Government announced that the immediate cause of last week's panic was the North African campaign. Ever since the war began, East Coast gasoline stocks have been low for lack of transportation from oil fields. (The pipeline was not yet finished.) Moreover last week was a week of 1) Christmas shopping; 2) great cold over the U.S., when it was even more important to ship fuel oil than gasoline in what transportation was at hand.

But administrative errors turned last week's drought into a national scandal, for the Government was caught as flat-footed as the people. Out of the hasty conferences between OPA and the ODT. between Petroleum Administrator Ickes and New York City's angry Mayor LaGuardia, emerged no solution, but some shocking facts about divided authority. Local rationing boards had been too liberal, had handed out more B and C cards than could be honored. Black markets in gasoline had drained away some of the supply (estimated up to 150,000 gallons a day).

Economic Czar James F. Byrnes, stung into action, promptly demanded that all Government agencies concerned in the jumble tell him what was wrong, how it could be corrected. The U.S. hoped he could untangle the threads. Citizens hardly needed Captain Eddie Rickenbacker's plea to accept rationing as a wartime sacrifice (see p. 11). They had a demonstration that rationing, properly handled, is only a matter of self-protection.

* Notable exceptions: 70 patrons of an Atlanta parking lot where an obliging Negro attendant beat the deadline by filling every tank to the brim, collected money and ration coupons afterward, earned undying gratitude and $35 in tips.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.